Guild Wars 2

Spirit is easily used for roaming/duels. Its cooldown, however, is really really long for its benefit imo.

It’s like a crappy elite warrior banner with a 2 sec activation rez (which is actually longer because you need to cast the spirit summon as well) with a fairly short range and a 400ish tick heal.

But it’s the best we’ve got imo in terms of elite for roaming/skirmishes. Entangle does nothing in team fights with the amount of cleave there is, and RaO is a pretty selfish elite with only modest benefits.

Many devs concentrate on gimmicks for a long time until they realize it doesn’t work, or the overhaul to make it work takes more than a year as it was for poor elementalists in GW1 HM’s.

Conditions as mitigation will never match boons. And neither will death shroud if all it is is a damage sponge while you still cannot recover your HP pool and it just wears down. Stalling does nothing good if Death Shroud costs you so much offensively.

Zelulose.8695:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, but you won’t be killing anyone as there is a fine line between being able to make a push for the kill before someone’s heal recharges and not being able to.

They can nerf pet damage all they want. As long as My conditions stay It won’t matter.

As long as condition clears stay in teamfights you won’t matter either.

And for 1v1 your conditions will do crap against condition removal thieves, elementalists, or guardians for that matter.

Shar.3402:

considering D/D spec (0/10/0/30/30) and S/D spec (0/20/0/20/30), considering off-hand skills are the same for both sets, you’re left with the 1-3 skills

S/D got much higher burst (hurl + switch to air + lightning strike) than D/D (burning speed is the only real burst spell that weaponset has), and it’s so much easier to land/harder to dodge (it’s instant)
Dragon tooth is also great in team fights in small points like Niflhel’s Keep or Kyhlo’s Clocktower, you can’t dodge forever you know? and you can still rely on your team mates for CC…it’s a team game after all
Also, you can’t really run with double arcane as a D/D (you can afford maybe to run with arcane wave and 2 cantrips, mist form and lightning flash), you die too fast in competitive play, so that’s ~2k more burst for S/D ele.
It’s also easier to fight mesmers and bm rangers as S/D ele, since you can fight them at range.

D/D aurashare double arcane elementalists died when they nerfed evasive arcana, vigor/regen on cantrips and fixed zephir’s boon fury/swiftness duration, deal with it.

Also, S/D is so much better at bunkering (trident >>>>> cone of cold every day, plus you get +250 toughness from scepter earth 2, and you get 2 blinds…)

S/D is superior to D/D, period (and both are superior to staff in tPvP, but that’s a given). But, by all means, keep playing with the now inferior weapon set, I’m sure all those elementalists in good teams are just crazy for playing S/D now, and hot-join heroes are the real pros.

You forgot the part where those scepter eles crumble if anyone so much as sneezes at them. They’re either in valkyrie or zerker to get that burst, the cooldowns for the burst sequence is way longer than thief or mesmer, and they rely on being babysat or peeled from to do their damage.

Most of them have no more than 15k HP, a D/P thief will pretty much 4-shot them.

Yeah, but you won’t be killing anyone as there is a fine line between being able to make a push for the kill before someone’s heal recharges and not being able to.

You can stall, but so can they. It’s why guardian bunkers are not very good at killing people. They may be immortal but they also tickle.

The three classes I can’t kill if they don’t want to die are ele, guardian, and especially D/P thief. The guardian can’t really duel you, but he’s perfectly able to kite you away with swiftness and dodging your only 2 snares if not outright cleansing them.

I hear a lot about P/D thief but P/D thieves can’t kill you. A D/P thief can pretty much chain BP>HS to cleanse conditions and reset the fight. Bad thieves use Basilisk — good ones pop guild at opportune times.

I can die to a good, patient D/P thief if I don’t quickly react to their guild summon and kite away and regen back up.

The fact is, he will never die to me because any time he gets close to 50% hp he wipes himself clear of conditions with stealth condi removal trait with BP>HS (they can blast on it multiple times).

Yeah, he can’t kill me if I don’t want to die, and if he presses too much and gets careless he dies.

The difference is that he’s got actual burst unlike me, and he can kill anyone else and there’s nothing I can do about it due to stealth stomping while putting a BP on top of the victim.

This D/P and I had a duel, pretty stalemate. If anyone came in, I would stop and let him kill them. I then also tried interfering out of curiosity, and it did nothing. Even if I got a terget back up he could repeatedly spam stealth into a backstab and get them back down until I was out of tools to prevent a stomp.

The only way to survive against D/P is to be a good bunker or be another class that can burst him down just as quickly.

Mammoth.1975:

Ricochet is one of the top dps DD ranged autos in the game. Complaining about it being low damage casts the rest of your post in a dubious light.

So you claim. For being the top DD ranged axe mainhand sure is absent in dungeon groups, which value optimal DPS over all things.

They are not going to separate it. And quite frankly even if it did it would be an end to any sort of ranger representation in spvp because if the BM ranger is going to do similar damage to other bunkers, then why the hell would you bring one over a guardian or ele bunker?

The pet IS the ranger. There are no berserker rangers in spvp, no knight geared rangers — there are only trap rangers with rabid stats and the rest are healing power build bunkers because the ranger doesn’t have enough damage to play a fragile build, so he must win by sustained damage. You decrease that sustained damage, and there’s no point to the class anymore as the supposed tradeoff to not having the burst of other classes is having high sustained damage and survivability in turn. If our sustained damage will be made similar to other classes but we don’t bring burst or team utility, we are no longer desired for a spot over other classes with actual utility and killing power.

They do not tank. You try tanking 3 people at a time. It’s damage mitigation, not just recovery. You do not have ample access to stability. You do not have constant, easy access to condition removal (BM bunker removal is passive removal with a 60 sec cd active removal). You don’t have aegis or blind. You don’t have high prot uptime.

If 2 or more GC specs decide to spike you, you’ll be forced to retreat. A guardian can eat shatters — a phantasm mesmer cannot.

Beastmasters don’t tank, and neither do Phantasm mesmers. Beastmasters rely entirely on evasion for holding a point.

And we do have a strong standing tank. It’s called a guardian. And they can tank whoever they want.

The thing is, damage/berserker builds for rangers use BM because the pet is such a huge proportion of their damage, and outside the 10% with full endurance and flanking damage bonuses from the other lines, no other line gives the ranger as much a damage boost as investing into BM does.

Even in full berserker the pet is easily 40-50% my damage.

And all pets except jaguar and to a lesser extent raven do horrendous damage combined with the ranger relative to the warriors/thieves they’re competing against for dungeon spots.

Moas, pigs, dogs, and especially the ranged pets do really bad damage for how much damage we give up on our weapons.

It wasn’t the forums writing about BM. Zoose brought up BM pets as well in the podcast.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

I don’t like that everyone wants Necro to be so mobile. I want us to be strong and standing firm. Seems like Gibbly wants us to become Mesmers.

Still, I am confident about where Necro will be.

Gibbly knows what tools work in the end. If we don’t get avoidance and instead become sheer tanks, we’ll always be in the binary of either underpowered and unable to tank teams, or overpowered and able to tank teams which means we’ll be eating people 1v1 and people will cry for nerfs.

Stice.5204:

Zenith.7301:

Travel time is pretty important to PvE — consider doing DE’s or world completion on your ele now vs. before; this change added a couple of hours to your world completion time. It used to be 15 sec cd, then it got increased to 20, and then it went up to 40 for travel purposes. Meanwhile my ranger retains his Swoop, which does the same thing on a shorter cooldown, and he can add Monarch’s Leap and LR to gain even more distance traveled than the ele ever could.

Ok, you’re probably right there. I doubt Anet considers world completion time to be a serious balance issue because it’s not very difficult, it’s going to be very time consuming regardless and it’s something most players do solo.

Comparing specific skills between different classes is misleading, though. The difference between an elementalist and a ranger is a lot more than the cooldown on their mobility skills.

I don’t see a meaningful difference in disengagement.

If I want to escape a 40 man zerg on my ranger, I will. Just like my ele or thief.

The ele needed nerfs to cantrips and condition clears, not mobility. And in turn for that nerf in cantrips its base defense or at least defenses for speccing into the other lines need to go up because NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY despite the train of nerfs they’ve received still skips 20 points in arcana or water.

Because not speccing 20 into arcana or water means you die in a couple of hits regardless of your gearing. You don’t have the easily repeatable, instant spike of mesmers or thieves, and you have all the frailty if you don’t spec for cantrips.

Try playing an ele without cantrips or 20 arcana/water for a while and get back to me.

Shar.3402:

Zenith.7301:

Just so you know, on BM bunker, once those conditions are cleansed as they usually are, the entirety of the ranger’s damage is on the pet.

If you’re taking damage from the pet, that damage needs to be transferred to the ranger, because at the moment someone with regen and offheals like the ele will completely outheal any damage you do yourself as a ranger regardless of what you do.

Rangers have no way to deal with boons, and their condition application is on splitblade at point blank range (no range) and slow projectiles like throw torch and crippling talon. Their autoattacks do not inflic conditions, and Ricochet is bar none the worst auto in the game damage wise.

I also hope that if you’re going to take their only good use, which is a bunker with damage, you better give them the team utility guardians and eles have. If you remove the damage, there is no incentive whatsoever to take a BM bunker over an ele.

P.S. My pets don’t reliably hit people when they don’t have to sit on a point like WvW, and they certainly are not sustainable in WvW zergs. And a damage nerf to pets will drive the ranger into worse of a state than they already are in PvE where nobody wants them.

as a bunker ele (with shaman’s amulet, like ranger bm for an accurate comparison), my auto-attack hits for 250
as a bunker guardian, my auto-attacks hit for 250
and so on…

all these classes don’t have a pet hitting for 1k damage

see the problem?

Bullcrap.

I’ll film Lightning Whip doing far more damage than that. I’ll film 3k Burning Speeds and Dragon Tooths, let alone Firegrab.

I’ll film my Whirling Wrath doing double what my Maul will ever do.

I have an ele and guardian don’t even try these lies on me.

No pet hits for 1k noncrit damage. Not the jaguar, not the raven. The highest power pet, canines, noncrit autos deal 850 damage with 30 BM noncrit. Jaguars hit 700 noncrit.

And the pet can stop doing those numbers when rangers get burst of their own and their glass cannon specs don’t hit maul crits for a measly 4-5k while mesmers and thieves are hitting for 12k crits.

I don’t know what the weakness change will do except randomize more our defenses.

They are lowering the proc chance already from weakness. It means that you may get the damage mitigation when you need it, or you may not.

Meanwhile protection ALWAYS provides that damage reduction when you need it — it’s not a dice roll and only 2 classes and one thief build can remove it while pretty much every class can wipe conditions clear 2-3 times at least. Our weakness can only be applied every 10 seconds in melee range with a trait, every 25 seconds with offhand dagger, or 25%of the time we crit.

How is that even comparable to the damage reduction of protection? And how will death shroud absorption help when the main weakness of death shroud is that you lose all pressure potential while you are in it so your opponent can tunnel you without fear of retaliation.

Bas.7406:

Zenith.7301:

RtL got nerfed in PvE as well when there was no need for it. Or Arcane Wave’s cooldown in beta.

This la-la land where balance changes for one format don’t affect the other is more the exception than the rule.

RTL was nerfed for wvwvw, where it was needed. The only place you would need it in open world pve or Dungeons it doesn’t matter if it was nerfed. It had no bearing on those situations. In wvwvw and pvp rtl had to be nerfed. Reminder, it wasn’t nerfed if you actually hit a target. If you dont’ hit someone you get 40 second cd. This is a good change.

Travel time is pretty important to PvE — consider doing DE’s or world completion on your ele now vs. before; this change added a couple of hours to your world completion time. It used to be 15 sec cd, then it got increased to 20, and then it went up to 40 for travel purposes. Meanwhile my ranger retains his Swoop, which does the same thing on a shorter cooldown, and he can add Monarch’s Leap and LR to gain even more distance traveled than the ele ever could.

And RtL wasn’t nerfed for WvW, let’s be real here. An ele can still disengage just fine with it in WvW, which is what people were complaining about. RtL was nerfed because tpvp people cried that eles could travel between points too well.

It will come down globally, or how do you propose pet damage be cut down only for BM bunkers but not for the rest?

Marksman is a garbage tree until 30 major trait, Skirmishing is only good up to 20, WS is pretty bad at 10 but starts getting great at 15+, and NM is only good for bunkers with 20 points at most.

BM is only there mostly for the shorter pet swap and the pet stats — the traits are uniformly bad — some less bad than others but still bad nonetheless with the exception of vigor for bird switch and bleeding for jaguars/drakes.

But somehow we got a single spec that is apex 1v1 and it upsets people. You never hear complaints about Guardians despite the fact that they are the most broken class in the game, being the backbone of any team in any format — they are second only in demand to warriors in PvE, the best WvW class by far, and the undisputed center bunker and team fight utility king.

But because they don’t dominate duels people don’t complain.

RtL got nerfed in PvE as well when there was no need for it. Or Arcane Wave’s cooldown in beta.

This la-la land where balance changes for one format don’t affect the other is more the exception than the rule.

Mesmer and necro can strip Stability.

Also, RaO has a cast time that can be interrupted by CC.

RaO’s only nonstrippable buff is the might on attack for you and pet. It’s partly why RaO is not much used in tournaments while it sees some use in WvW roaming, because against organized teams your stability will get removed and you’ll have a weak elite slot left.

Bas.7406:

The ranger wasn’t commented on because SOTG is a PVP related venue, and right now outside of a Longbow power build or traps being really viable there are rangers on just about every team, and the BM ranger is incredibly powerful. It’s a bit crazy that you can send the drake to the center point and still be able to back cap, because the drake is kind of like a player all by himself.

Because of the issues that Necromancers and Warriors currently face in the tournaments, and it was very evident in the last tournament that when those two classes are focused they go down regardless of spec. This isn’t true of the ranger, and so they spent an extended time on the two classes that are poorly represented and really weak in the current state of tournament play.

While you have two viable builds, the Warrior and Necro have zero, Guardians have 2, Mesmers have 1 maybe 2, Elementalist have 2, and in fact I think everyone has 2 except the two classes they spent the most time talking about.

So you are currently in the same state as every other profession in terms of pvp and tournament play.

You are not backcapping anything without a pet. That is a lie.

You will not beat or move any player out of a point by yourself without the pet. The pet is basically 60-70% of your damage as a BM bunker.

Puandro.3245:

This announcement doesnt surprise me at all. Expect a nerf to the spec with no other specs opening up. Ele 2.0 Train here we come.

Or mesmer for that matter. RtL did NOTHING to nerf Ele bunker, and the changes did not touch glyphs that nobody use or conjures, or the focus. Nobody still specs for fire or much of earth in pvp.

They nerfed confusion and nobody uses the scepter or torch offhand.

They nerfed the engineer confusion builds so toolkit is back to only being good for the shield and maybe on a power spec a prybar spike, but the main kits used are still grenade and bombs, with elixir gun particularly being marginalized.

They said they didn’t want to give spectral armor stability for fear of making it mandatory as a utility, despite the fact that nobody uses that ridiculous utility because all it is is a whopping 90 sec cd for 6 secs of protection.

Their “whack a mole” stance has borne nothing but decrease in build options. They still nerf more builds into obsolescence than they lift builds into viability.

Just so you know, on BM bunker, once those conditions are cleansed as they usually are, the entirety of the ranger’s damage is on the pet.

If you’re taking damage from the pet, that damage needs to be transferred to the ranger, because at the moment someone with regen and offheals like the ele will completely outheal any damage you do yourself as a ranger regardless of what you do.

Rangers have no way to deal with boons, and their condition application is on splitblade at point blank range (no range) and slow projectiles like throw torch and crippling talon. Their autoattacks do not inflic conditions, and Ricochet is bar none the worst auto in the game damage wise.

I also hope that if you’re going to take their only good use, which is a bunker with damage, you better give them the team utility guardians and eles have. If you remove the damage, there is no incentive whatsoever to take a BM bunker over an ele.

P.S. My pets don’t reliably hit people when they don’t have to sit on a point like WvW, and they certainly are not sustainable in WvW zergs. And a damage nerf to pets will drive the ranger into worse of a state than they already are in PvE where nobody wants them.

Manekk.6981:

Zenith.7301:

Don’t run longbow for duels. A s/d thief cannot be successfully kited if he’s any good. He’ll be in your face pretty often, and thus the value of your longbow is greatly diminished.

2 things about this thief:

- His main damage comes from the autoattack and the 2nd chain of his Flanking Strike (the stab attack after he evades).
- He can stunlock pretty well if you don’t bring stability and don’t position well to not give him your sides or back for his long kitten daze sneak attack.

Never wait to heal when you’re low against a s/d thief. They’ll stunlock your heal attempts and finish you off with the auto.

Basically, take the evade attack, and save the dodges for the stab and the final chain of his autoattack (also a stab). In other words, save your dodges for his stabbing animations, not his slashing ones (the stab part of his auto chain inflics weakness, which will cripple your endurance regen).

Having stability will just feed it to him no? sounds like you don’t want to have any boons at all to me, also I hate good thieves.

If you follow what I told him and dodge his larcenous strike (the stab part after flanking strike’s evade) he wastes initiative and DOES NOT steal your boon.

S/D only steals boons if they land Larcenous Strike. They don’t steal any other way unless it’s via steal trait.

Reliable? Since when? With the melee archetype change my pet actually hits less now in wvw since it tries to get behind an opponent before hitting many times.

Yeah both s/d and greatsword are better weaponsets against him since you can counterpressurehim and negate his damage.

S/D thieves don’t burst — they have really high sustained damage and mobility in exchange.

The only builds that can really realiably kill these thieves are phantasm mesmer and P/D thief because both of those bring the spike needed to constantly force him into the defensive, and both of these classes do their spike without needing to land CC to hit with it.

With the amount of condition removal in pvp, this will change nothing.

For PvE, weakness changes will do nothing as conditions like weakness have very, very short durations against bosses. So the lack of vigor will continue to hurt necromancers at least in one game type.

More importantly, they are basing the necromancer survival on a source (conditions) that is currently very easy to remove.

Yup, BM bunker QQ.

Nevermind that that build and to a lesser extent trapper were our only viable builds.

So when my conditions keep getting cleared by guardians or eles or engineers on a team fight my pressure can drop literally to 0 after a nerf to a pet that can only hit one target at a time and struggles to hit a target while being kited or mindlessly walking over a frost field.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This will be just dandy for PvE rangers who already were competing for group spots against warriors and thieves.

Don’t run longbow for duels. A s/d thief cannot be successfully kited if he’s any good. He’ll be in your face pretty often, and thus the value of your longbow is greatly diminished.

2 things about this thief:

- His main damage comes from the autoattack and the 2nd chain of his Flanking Strike (the stab attack after he evades).
- He can stunlock pretty well if you don’t bring stability and don’t position well to not give him your sides or back for his long kitten daze sneak attack.

Never wait to heal when you’re low against a s/d thief. They’ll stunlock your heal attempts and finish you off with the auto.

Basically, take the evade attack, and save the dodges for the stab and the final chain of his autoattack (also a stab). In other words, save your dodges for his stabbing animations, not his slashing ones (the stab part of his auto chain inflics weakness, which will cripple your endurance regen).

Dredgehaunt Cliffs. It’s one of the least popular dungeons, but if you log on early enough you’ll find groups.

Once you decide to try I can offer you a few tips on skipping for one of the paths that will drastically shorten the run.

If you are EU I run the dungeon a couple of times and can show you some runs. It’s not too bad — just really gimmicky and PuG’s don’t do well with gimmicky.

Well, it’s not like you have many options if you run triple signet BM bunker. And quite frankly on BM bunker I haven’t used LR over Signet of Renewal for a good while, so WK does absolutely nothing for the spec.

You could try a build with SoS, SoW, and Sharpen Stone for some extra pressure when someone is trying to kite you and all you got is axe auto, with 10 in skirmishing for 30% pet speed. But then it’s still sort of a crappy trait choice because you’re only benefitting a single skill with the trait, and by sacrificing pet crit bonus you’re trading off damage still for a very marginal gain.

The only other options in that tier are expertise training, which is just a piddly damage increase to jaguar bleed stacks, or Shared Anguish, which screws your pet’s uptime on target for a stunbreak.

Thieves get vigor to stack with feline grace, it’d be nice if vigor also stacked with our trait. Or they could beef up expertise training to give our condi damage bonus to the pet and Shared Anguish to not CC the pet. Healer’s Celerity is just bad, and Soften The Fall is there for WvW/JP purposes.

With healing spring however, it’s pretty high vigor uptime, and the value of this trait is also that you give vigor to allies with that heal.

I feel neither this trait or Dwayna runes are well served by TU heal.

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Zenith.7301:

I just don’t understand why those “On opponent death” traits still exist after all the beta feedback explaining the nature of those traits means their uptime is minimal.

This is another example of why we NEED separated balance for sPvP/PvE+WvW.
In PvE and WvW those kind of traits are good enough but in sPvP are almost useless.

Nope, still garbage in PvE. Those traits do nothing in boss fights.

P/P has a 900 range if he stands in a BP all you need to do is a monarch’s leap and leap again to be out of range and force him to move. Your pet can still be chasing him while you’re outranging him.

And besides, he referenced a D/D thief, which is a completely inferior spec to D/P in every way.

Xsorus.2507:

Blankverse.4927:

Aeri.5738:

I have 0 problems with thiefs.
Maybe you are doing something horribly wrong.
Try some defense, lighting reflexes etc. pp.

I only use powerbuilds, but against thies entangle is super fun because you can hit them stealthed ;-)

Entangle is a lottery. Most thieves will evade or get rid of the immobilize while in stealth. I have 26k hp, lots of armour etc. but … no wait, i tell you how i kill 95% of rangers as a thief and you tell me how to counter that as a ranger, ok?

1. Unload (= 4-5k dmg)
2. Unload (= 4-5k dmg)
3. Stealth with blinding powder
4. Sneak attack (=3-4k dmg +conditions)
5. Unload (= 4-5k dmg)
6. Black powder (4 sec blindess)
7. Unload (= 4-5k dmg)
8. Stealth with Hide in Shadows (if needed)
9. Sneak attack (= 3-4k dmg +conditions)
10. Unload ….
in most cases this is it. If needed repeat 8-10 once again.

Yes, a ranger can use lighting reflexes to run away, but he won’t kill me as long as i keep spamming black powder.
Really, i love playing ranger and hate thives, but no ranger even was close to winning when i used this tactic in 1vs1.

P.S. What ranger sits on black powder? Blind from projectiles is hardly frequent, and it’s the pet that will be chewing this thief’s face.

Rofl…..Were these rangers using bears by chance?

Not to mention black powder costs 6 initiative and unload costs additional initiative on top of it all.

Any ranger knows against a pistol variant thief to eat the autos and save the dodges for either unload, cnd or the sneak attack.

So after his little attempt at unload spam I can guarantee you after dodging the 2 unloads with prot on dodge to top it off, the thief’s offense will drop to zero for a good while.

Unload burst thieves only work on GC builds. Any bunker worth his salt will be able to weather the spike chain with a few well timed dodges and then the thief can’t do anything.

Condition mesmers don’t work because clones don’t scale from condition relevant stats, and most importantly the random nature of application (specifically the useless vulnerability that doesn’t affect conditions, and a power based phantasm on a condition weapon like staff). It’s too much ramp up to keep up with the condition clear of several builds.

There’s only one real condition weapon, the staff, since the scepter is absolute garbage with a single condition application skill, and the offhand torch has both absurdly long cd’s on condi application and the torch phantasm is just bad.

Most importantly, the scepter/torch combo suffers from what necros suffer — when a weapon set that is a condition set focuses solely on one or two conditions, it is useless against the rampant condition clear of many builds. It’s why engineers are the king of conditions — because their weaponsets all include a variety of conditions to cover their ample access to burning — by far the most potent condition of the bunch.

Minions tickle and have cerebral palsy; what are you talking about? The only minion that hits for anything is the golem, and half the time I use it on my necro it just sits there and stares at the opponent when it’s not too busy chasing after people I’ve long since disengaged from.

I’m still farming the runes just out of curiosity, however. Dwayna/Undead runes are dirt cheap, so it never hurts to try.

Most BM bunkers I know from tpvp don’t run more than 20 in BM. The healing from natural healing is actually pretty marginal when you could get prot on being crit for better anti spike measures or sharing boons with the pet. Or you could get those points and put them in skirmishing.

I also have some hesitation with forge runes because it’s a whopping 60 sec cd triggered randomly when you might actually not need it. Most fights I get in are protracted and resets happen often, in which case you only get some extra toughness most of the time and that’s it.

I run either Dwayna runes or the undead runes for more offensive variants. If I were to give up undead runes I’d easily be giving up around 300 condi damage stat, and quite frankly the only tradeoff that justifies it is Dwayna runes’ survivability boost.

Most of the builds that give my BM bunker problems are condition builds anyways like good engineers or trapper rangers, so the prot from forge is only really useful against mesmers and thieves — and I don’t suffer against the meta specs of those two classes.

I just don’t find a 60 sec ICD too attractive.

I love Healing Spring — it’s a very underrated heal vs. TU. If you’re fighting any build with conditions, its effective healing is much better than TU, and most importantly as a bunker build with renewing vigor for each HS heal tick you get a ton of extra dodges.

I wish poison volley for shortbow was made better and both shortbow and axe auto applied bleeding baseline. Giving the axe auto a bleed would make it a much better aoe condi weapon and give the abysmal autoattack some bite for condi specs.

Shiyo.3578:

This game is so easy, yet we have complete elitist jerks who ruin the game by wanting to run 3 ZERKER WARRIOR GUARDIAN MESMER ONLY, and want to exploit/skip/take every shortcut possible.

Everytime I make a dungeon group on gw2lfg, I put no shortcuts, no exploiting, and no skipping. Why play the game if you’re going to skip all of it? Why play a game if you only play for the reward, and not the journey? Neglecting certain classes like THF and ranger is also crazy. You do not need a certain class set up to do any content in this game besides maybe 50+ fractals, which are 0.001% of the games content.

Stop being elitist jerks and play the game for fun, not for loot in a game where you can’t even get better item stats because exotics is the best gear, and ascended is purely time-gated meaning hardcore farming COF speedruns and trying to make infinite money and have more gold than everyone doesn’t make you stronger at all.

Seriously, there are no stat upgrades at the end of the dungeon, there is no drops with character progression(besides cosmetics) that you are getting from the end of the dungeon. Why do you need to clear it as fast as possible and farm it? Enjoy the kitten game.

If the only way you can have fun is being an elitist jerk, trying to tryhard everything with flavor of the month class comps, and make everything easier/faster by skipping 95% of the content and making the content as easy as possible you should probably play a different game. This game does not cater to people like you, and this game is as anti-elitist as you can possibly be.

Cosmetics are more important than stats for many people.

Even in WoW I would bet you there would be in uproar if the next tier set was the same look but just better stats. People play for cosmetics, not stats.

That thief was horrible. And not because he lost to you sometimes. He simply did not know how to use stealth to his advantage.

Bunkers exist not only to hold point, but to survive against thieves and mesmers and engineer levels of damage.

Berserker rangers and necros and guardians and engineers suffer because mesmers and thieves and condition bunkers neutralize them pretty well. All of these don’t have the spike levels of the former, and they don’t have the mobility/escape/immunities that allow the former to also stay offensive in GC builds.

TLDR; If you don’t like bunker or traps, play an alt until they patch the class. I’m sure you’d find thief players who want to play bunkers or necromancers that want effective power builds or mesmer bunker builds, but in the current state of the game very few classes have the luxury of many working build options.

Deniara Devious.3948:

While I agree staff elementalist is not that viable in tpvp, but staff eles are very common and good in WvWvW.

I really Arenanet wouldn’t buff staff elementalists so that the changes would also affect WvWvW, since this would make them overpowered in WvWvW.

So far almost every skill “balance” decision has been made based on tpvp, even though anybody can see that WvWvW and spvp/tpvp are completely different game modes. Tpvp is mostly about holding and contesting points, while WvWvW has much larger scale battles, much more big open field fights, groups of tightly packed enemies (perfect for large AoE tagging), siege war and moving around a bigger map. So far there has been very little split between WvWvW and tpvp.

The only reason staff works in wvw is because the current wvw playstyle is a zergfest. If skirmishes would be more prominent you’d see staff in decline.

I just don’t understand why those “On opponent death” traits still exist after all the beta feedback explaining the nature of those traits means their uptime is minimal.

Just another way in which staff ele is much better than longbow ranger.

Meteor Shower doesn’t suffer as much from retal and packs a far harder punch.

Don’t take it personally though. Grenade engineers kill themselves with retal on a zerg as well — retal from guardians is just too good and the current WvW group pvp meta is to pack lots of guardians for retal/burning/CC trains.

katniss.6735:

Why are people stating pve when clearly my targets are players in WvW?
The link to this post was in the Elementalist sub-forums. I wasn’t specifically talking about spvp at all, but in WvW. I have no earth or water in my staff spec. If I get downed, I rally instantly. Every single time.

1- You’re not fighting idiotic zergs in tpvp that stand in aoe.
2- You’re not fighting upscaled players that you can hit for 8k meteors.
3 Your petty little channel still gets outdone by a simple burning speed>circle of fire, and if you even want to pump it up a fire grab as well.

Staff does pretty terrible sustained damage on a target player, and it brings no burst. Its use is basically the chill field, the stun field, and the line root. Everything else the other weapons do better.

I think people really underestimate how bad the loss of pressure is with the staff. If you can’t pressure opponents well by yourself, you are an easy target to shut down. Counterburst/conditionbombing is an important aspect in the classes that are faring well now. If you can constantly be put on the defensive without being able by yourself to do the same to your opponent, that’s a big disadvantage.

Amins.3710:

Zenith.7301:

Guardian has aoe group stability, prot, regen, condition clear, sanctuary, aegis, an instant chunk of group heal with virtue, symbols granting the group fields for retaliation. Empower gives the group healing and easy stacks of might on top of healing and ground control, without needing to occupy a utility slot. They also do deceptive damage because when specced their burning and retal will eat you up pretty quickly. They have group blinds.

I love people who state every spec into 1 and assume they can do it all at the same time…

Those 30/30/30/30/30 specs are SOOO OP, especially when they get a 6th utility slot.

Staff, utilities, 0/0/30/30/10. Most of what’s listed there came from utilities and weapons, not traits btw. You can use either greatsword or hammer as the 2ndary, the condition clear alone is from purity and the signet heal and purging flames, and stand your ground and hold the line. If you take hammer just switch hold the line for sanctuary.

Ranger is only a good roamer when there aren’t blobs about. The difference between a roamer ranger and a roamer thief is that the roamer thief can kill targets faster before anyone intervenes. The ranger is usually the better 1v1 spec with a few exceptions (good p/d, d/p with condi removal trait thieves are just as good).

But lately I’ve found that there are too many 40+ man blobs all over the map for slower killing builds to be effective (and so this also affects p/d thieves and duel specced guardians).

So I suggest people run 3-5 mans, where BM bunker is still surprisingly effective and a good rezzer if you bring spirit elite alongside petswap rezzing and wolf aoe fear. As soon as an encounter starts going beyond 10 people, pets start becoming ineffective and by extension so does the ranger.

Had a good bunch of fun today where 2 other people and I wiped out over 12 people in a camp as they came coming back again. BM bunkers do best in skirmishes, although you could pull off a trapper ranger just as well.

Really, the limiting factor is that the class revolves around the pet to do the killing. So just participate in activities where the pet gets to shine.

Even with all its flaws and frustrating design decisions the class can be a lot of fun.

Play a thief or mesmer for solo queue.

BM bunker ranger or engineer, while good 1v1 classes in tournies, are not good for random hotjoins since people zerg and both the engineer and BM bunker take longer to kill.