Guild Wars 2

You cannot beat a half decent D/P thief as a powermancer. You must play a terror condi build to have any chance, and even then they can just wait out your cooldowns and keep resetting.

Necro power spec is a team spec. It’s not a duel spec and you’ll only beat bad people with it because quite frankly you don’t have the burst other classes have nor the invulnerabilities/blocks to foil spike while staying offensive. Everytime you go into DS your damage drops significantly because your only really good DPS ability is an autoattack.

The class is only really good for roaming.

An ele or engineer will do the job of GC aoe much better than you will, while bringing better group utility.

At least you get to laugh at people when you roam. They nerfed ele escape for no reason, but your godly Swoop and Monarch’s Leap still have the same really low cooldowns so you can run from anybody.

Berserker longbow/shortbow is not too bad for zergs— it’s just that other classes do better, and even then a huge portion of your damage is dead in any zerg environment, and when in tower defense not even your ranged pets are smart enough to hit players below.

Who cares, it’s not like a guardian or ele can’t continually wipe entire slabs of conditions off them most of the time.

I could use corrupt boon on an ele and all he needs to do is hop onb water attunement and his boons are back up in less than 10 secs.

You don’t need a DPS team. I joined on my BM bunker ranger, and we had a necro plus 2 guardians and a warrior. So, the group was fairly DPS light.

The group dungeon is a complete pushover.

Went in for the first time. The traps weren’t even dangerous. All I did alongside the guardians and warriors is run him over random traps without much coordination while the necro deactivated traps. Then we just sat there hacking at the golem.

Reading the Dulfy guide you’d get the impression that there would be more complexity to the fight, so I’m wondering if his attacks are bugged, because at no point in the first encounter, which was new for all of us, were we ever in danger of dying.

At least my pet didn’t die, because for a change there wasn’t aoe that can destroy players in seconds for my pets to kitten all over.

stale.9785:

Nope – the only time the longbow worked properly was in Beta. It took a nerf (not nearly as badly as the ele staff, but still significant) at release.

Bring back the Beta longbow! No tiers to Long Range Shot, and it’s activation time was accurate to the tooltip. (The tooltip simply said “Shoot an arrow at a long range” and the range was 1200.)

While you’re at it, return the staff to Beta levels for ele (most recharge times were shorter, and the damage was significantly higher.)

Yeah, what WvW needs is more staff elementalists in zergs.

The problem with the staff isn’t the damage or cooldowns — the problem is that it needs a tier 2 arcana trait for the fields to even hit once or twice any person with a brain, so what they should do, and the same goes for necro marks and ranger traps is to make the traits for increasing these abilities’ range baseline.

Also, Eruption takes too kitten long to land, as do Dragon Tooth, Shatter Stone, and Ice Spike. You simply cannot land an eruption on a person unless you cast it on yourself while you’re being melee’d or you time a root on top of an eruption correctly.

Try to do fractal 48 and have a phantasm live more than one attack. Shatter builds get the full benefit from the phantasm hit — they just shatter it for more damage since not doing so means the phantasm is dying anyways, so you might as well milk the most out of it.

Retalitation singlehandedly makes Ranger longbow horrible in WvW.

In a single barrage you are losing about 40% of your health, and since it’s a cast time and the aoe channels by itself after a short cast you will get hit by multiple counts of retaliation and can’t do anything about losing nearly half your health.

A channel that long and obvious is not spike. Ever.

The other damage you’re doing is called axe skill #2 and torch #4 — anything else is paltry and the pet IS the ranger’s damage.

Ricochet (axe auto) hits for 197 damage on a BM bunker on shaman ele. The mainhand sword hits for 200-250 damage per attack.

I don’t think people realize how bad the damage is on a ranger himself outside pets or traps. It’s the very reason berserker builds for rangers or knight builds for rangers simply aren’t run.

A bunker ele can do competitive damage to a BM bunker and yet all their damage cleaves, and they offer far greater utility to their team.

lupercaleb.6041:

Zenith.7301:

lupercaleb.6041:

how does it even detect when it has a player’s attention? when it’s being targeted?

Jzaku.9765:

Jzaku.9765:

This is hilarious seeing how beastmater ranger is one of the most OP specs in the game right now.

AOE DAMAGE TOO STRONG!

So my jaguar hits for 4k crit on a glass cannon spec while I wear soldier amulet… So does an ele with burning speed or even higher with fire grab or churning earth. Not to mention, all those skills are also aoe while the pet’s is just 1 target.

ever used a river drake?

If you get hit by the river drake’s 2 second windup tail swipe, you are a MORON.

The drake literally winds his tail back and roots himself in place before doing it, and because the drake has kitten poor precisions like wolves and any pet that isn’t a raven or cat, at best their autoattacks regularly hit for 800-900 damage noncrit.

tail swipe is not restricted to the river drake, and it hits 5 targets for about 2000 damage with a 1.25 cast time

i’m talking about lightning breath; it hits 15 times for about 900 damage each

also their auto-attack cleaves

Tail swipe is restricted to any drake. In any pet it has a telltale animation and people know that as soon as you switch the drake in, its AI will tell it to use it.

Lightning Breath is still a projectile channel, which you can dodge through or reflect like any channel or projectile, and it bounces — it doesn’t cleave.

The supposedly hardhitting drake autoattack cleave is 800 damage per autoattack, or basically half of what a bunker ele does with lightninglash.

The only pets that do any sort of spiky, hardhitting damage are the raven and the jaguar. The raven in turn has horrible sustained DPS and the jaguar has serious uptime issues due to its attack range on a moving target.

P.S. It’s 5 projectiles for Lightning Breath. The only time it may hit someone 15 times is when there are 15 people bunched around. And guess what? BM bunkers don’t do team fights to begin with — most of their encounters are 1v1’s or 1v2 until help arrives.

Phantasm build is useless in pve why the hell would you use one unless you bring a conjure hammer elementalist and just cast phantasms while meleeing with lightning hammer.

lupercaleb.6041:

how does it even detect when it has a player’s attention? when it’s being targeted?

Jzaku.9765:

Jzaku.9765:

This is hilarious seeing how beastmater ranger is one of the most OP specs in the game right now.

AOE DAMAGE TOO STRONG!

So my jaguar hits for 4k crit on a glass cannon spec while I wear soldier amulet… So does an ele with burning speed or even higher with fire grab or churning earth. Not to mention, all those skills are also aoe while the pet’s is just 1 target.

ever used a river drake?

If you get hit by the river drake’s 2 second windup tail swipe, you are a MORON.

The drake literally winds his tail back and roots himself in place before doing it, and because the drake has kitten poor precisions like wolves and any pet that isn’t a raven or cat, at best their autoattacks regularly hit for 800-900 damage noncrit.

You can nerf bunkers when thief and mesmer burst go DIAF. You want to know why everybody runs bunkers? Because otherwise comes a thief or mesmer and proceeds to 3-shot them.

At least s/d ele has high cd’s on his burst sequences, but thief and mesmer can burst so ridiculously often and negate any offensive on themselves several times over with all the teleports and target drops and invulnerabilities/stealth/blind.

You can add warrior to the list if they could have uptime on someone — these 3 classes will break anyone not stacking toughness and healing power pretty fast.

The HGH engineers is also bordering on ridiculous.

Too many classes can frontload too much damage for balanced builds to ever be viable.

Jzaku.9765:

This is hilarious seeing how beastmater ranger is one of the most OP specs in the game right now.

Here’s a little secret — every single ranger spec relies on the pet, not only those BM bunkers you’re kitten ed about losing to in a 1v1.

It’s rarely bugged out on me.

Scepter autoattack is so terrible anyways, that any damage you gain from a nonbuggy phantasm is more than eclipsed by the decreased sustained damage from autoattack.

My Spatial Surge in berserker without might stacking can easily crit for 3-3.6k. It also hits multiple opponents whereas the scepter only hits a single opponent on its autoattack, and the scepter channel has a horrid windup that makes its seemingly good damage actually pretty low DPS wise.

Greatsword phantasm is also your only aoe burst phantasm. You can bring in a iwarden but quite honestly it dies more often than not before it can even finish half of the channel in any difficult dungeon/fractal level. Every other phantasm is single target, and single target is inferior to cleaving always since you spend the most time killing trash in fractals.

Disable it in pvp. For one, it’s useless in wvw — the zerg aoe will hit it regardless of how it positions.

I can’t count the amount of times the kitten pet has wasted time trying to get behind a player instead of just hitting them when he gets to them.

Don’t even compare guardians to necros. ALL their weapons are viable for competent builds. They use greatsword and hammer builds just as well as staff. The one remotely close to necro levels is mainhand sword — but by and far guardian weapons do SO much more than necro weapons in general do.

MM necro with axe is a joke — axe itself as a weapon is a joke.

Mesmers don’t always run sw/focus — they can run pistol just as well, ocassionally offhand sword if they like it.

It’s not just about how many variations people have, but the efficacy of those variations. Take mesmer staff and greatsword, for example. Staff may be optimal for most mesmers, but even in teamfights a greatsword mesmer can shine just as well.

I also disagree heavily with consume conditions being the best heal in game. It’s a 25 sec cd heal with medium healing. It does not compare to healing spring or ether renewal/signet of restoration, or Hide In Shadows (which offers various types of usage for offensive or defensive purposes), or the currently buffed engineer turret. The fact that some of these heals do not remove conditions is moot because said classes have many other ways to remove conditions not tied to one specific weapon and a single healing slot.

Pandabro.8743:

Actually I feel like necros have quite a diverse amount of builds.

The problem is that none of them offer anything that is comparable to what other professions can bring.

How many of these “diverse” builds don’t use the staff or consume conditions as a heal?

There are 2 evils to the necromancer currently inhibiting his build options:

1- Staff
2- Condition Removal

A necromancer can’t run without a staff, simply because it’s his only AoE weapon. It’s also his only ranged weapon outside a condition build ( a shoddy one at that, with likely the worst autoattack in the game after ranger’s mainhand axe; necromancer axe has a paltry 600 range and a horrid autoattack with little aoe options and no life force generation).

The staff has everything the other weapons do not. A blast finisher paired with their condition removal. An aoe chill and poison, the only other source of fear the necro has, and most importantly the aoe to cope with thieves and mesmers. It’s also the second fastest life force generator after dagger auto with soul marks. The staff baseline is very poor since the marks need to be traited for greater marks, soul marks, and perhaps cooldown reduction (the cd’s on marks are fairly outrageous despite them being the main damage of the weapon).

The staff’s autoattack as per Jon Peters is justified because it pierces, but what use is piercing when people can sidestep the projectile and said projectile is so slow and hits for so little thakitten ’s not a weapon you can stay on for sustained damage once the marks are exhausted? Despite several mediocre qualities to the weapon, it’s the least mediocre weapon the class has. When you’ve got axe and focus (with its long cast times) and scepter’s horrid life force generation to contend with, it’s not hard for the staff to outshine these other weapons.

Then comes the problem of condition removal. It may seem like the necromancer has great condition removal, but it is actually much inferior to classes like the ranger and elementalist and thief by FAR. You’ve got 3 sources of condition removal — one from a 25 sec cd transfer on staff, one from a 25 sec cd heal, and a transfer from offhand dagger at the projectile speed of a snail that anyone can see coming and either kite or dodge (the transfer only works if it hits). You can get one condition removal for shrouded removal.

With the exception of shrouded removal, all these sources completely suppress the hope for build variety on the necromancer. Condition removal is critical in any aspect of the game, and yet your only non-weapon/heal source of condition removal is once every 10 seconds on death shroud from a trait. People will never use the minion heal (too long a cast time and wait with activation time once the minion is destroyed for the next heal), or the well heal (too long a cooldown, kittenty healing total for a 40 sec cd) when neither have condition removal and both are too inconvenient/inefficient to use.

Nobody will use focus or forego the staff when your only condition removals are tied to a staff and offhand dagger. You’ve simply not introduced any effective alternatives.

Moreover, Consume Conditions may seem great, but consider thakittens effectiveness is based on how many conditions you’ve had ticking on you. Burning alone for more than a second or two on a condition spec will outdamage any extra healing you got from the conditions consumed. Elementalists proactively cleanse, and so they have more effective HP/longevity. With the exception of putrid mark, the same can be said of deathly swarm — assuming for some miraculous reason it hits someone with its stupidly slow projectile, it’s about 2 seconds of conditions ticking on you before they are transferred.

There’s just no competition — the class is pigeonholed into the less crappy of their weapons, even if something like the staff is horrendous sustained damage due to the garbage autoattack, and it’s particularly bad for power builds, but you need to use it anyways because what are you going to offer your team if you don’t bring marks for team fights.

The 3% life force per hit wouldn’t come close to outhealing the spike going in. Against most power based classes at beast your death shroud will last you 3 seconds. I know against a D/P thief my death shroud’s gone in under 2 seconds.

vicious.5683:

JonathanSharp.7094:

This month will be focused on bug fixes, with balance coming in later patches!

OMG I’m soooo excited!!!
We have to wait another couple of months to see any changes!!

…

Necros need some love next patch, whatever to send us a message. That message being: “we are working in the right direction to bring necros on par with other classes”

You’ll feel what pve necros and rangers have been feeling for quite a while. They’d rather make the deficient classes better at a glacial pace than risk overbuffing a class and have to clean the mess.

Just play something else for a couple of months till the class actually starts being useful as something besides boon stripping and epidemic. At least in tpvp you don’t need to worry about leveling or purchasing new gear sets.

I’m just curious why they’re scared of overbuffing the necro yet the High Overlords of PvE known as warriors have gotten nothing but buffs in all aspects of the game, including those aspects of the game they are supreme in.

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

It’s not about the speed. Staff gives you a free short cd stun/root escape, an ethereal field to combo on for a second chaos armor, lower cd on illusions on a skill that doesn’t need to hit to spawn a clone, and it’s your real kiting tool…..

You are using a garbage weapon for 1v1 engagement whose bulk of damage relies on a target not closing distance and offers you no real defensive options when they have stability up.

But use your GS — I’m sure many opponents will thank you for using it over the staff

Considering i havent lost a 1v1 i feel i dont need to use staff (a defensive and lower dps weapon) over my GS. Maybe you need to position yourself better.

I’m sure that’s the case /pat

It’s not about the speed. Staff gives you a free short cd stun/root escape, an ethereal field to combo on for a second chaos armor, lower cd on illusions on a skill that doesn’t need to hit to spawn a clone, and it’s your real kiting tool…..

You are using a garbage weapon for 1v1 engagement whose bulk of damage relies on a target not closing distance and offers you no real defensive options when they have stability up.

But use your GS — I’m sure many opponents will thank you for using it over the staff

Only if you take the trait in dueling for sword skill cd reduction…. that trait also happens to be competing with fury on phantasm summon trait. If you take 20 into dueling you’re skimping either on illusions or domination.

Funny to receive a retort from a guy using a greatsword on his mesmer for a roaming build.

Why are you letting him get up 3 phantasmal swordsmen? It’s a 16 sec cd. You dodge its leap, and likely have 12 seconds to work with to kill it before he can summon the next one.

If that sworsman is hitting you for 4k on a bunker apothecary spec the mesmer is in glass cannon gear.

Look at Redguard’s Intigo or Amadeus in the engineer forums for some duels against mesmers. One thing they particularly do right is eliminate the illusions while the mesmer kites instead of trying to tunnel the mesmer.

You can’t have staff and s/p+s/s at the same time.

Really, just test the signet+ hp trait against normal mobs in frostgorge and see how many hits they take. They’re still really squishy, and most importantly those phantasms are all your damage unless you’re a rabid/condi build if you’re really sporting staff (and if you go s/s+s/p you have no range whatsoever). The staff hits like a wet noodle without condi gear.

I don’t think you’ll ever want to engage a BM ranger as a phantasm mesmer in melee. Melee is actually what a BM wants you to do as the pet will hit you much easier when you’re trying to melee than when you’re kiting in range.

If you take Decoy over Blink you have no tool to catch a ranger that wants to kite you — Illusionary Leap is 600 range and to anyone who has a mesmer of their own it’s a very obvious telegraphed skill chain. Monarch’s Leap alone will take a ranger well over 900 range from you and staff projectiles and the illusionary warlock’s projectile can simply be walked out of without needing to dodge at greater ranges.

Phantasm mesmers work well because many people don’t play mesmer and don’t know the spec kittenter is the spec that is viable in most of the content whereas phantasm is purely a 1v1 build. Once people know where the damage distribution and delivery is on a build, they will counter it well just like people learned to kite BM bunkers pets in spvp rather effectively.

peter.9024:

Zenith.7301:

Eurantien.4632:

Kite the pet. Kite the pet and you win. DO NOT fight on point. Just get your phantasms up and land all your shatters.

Phantasm mesmer does destroy BM as well.

Phantasm mesmers have a chance to win, just like engineers, but if the ranger is any good he too can kite the phantasms and send his pet to swipe them down and the mesmer’s dps drops to zero for a good 10-15 seconds.

Mesmers are pretty rough if you let them surround you with clones, but if you kite said clones as well their damage drops by a lot and your pet can wittle the phantasms down and then go to the mesmer.

Engineer by far is the ranger’s worst match up because he can do a lot of his pistol condition damage from range and have permaswiftness up to kite your pet while spamming boons on himself.

Instinct tells most BM rangers to go close quarters to shotgun their splitblade and melee cripple opponents, but against these two classes you’ll get blown up (you’re making it very easy for a glue shot into a supply crate drop and getting destroyed by their following condition bomb) if you try that, so you just want to kite as well with monarch’s leap, bait their dodges with throw torch/splitblade, and hope to land a winter’s bite/crippling talon once they’ve dodged your first 2 ranged attacks so the pet can get to them and pressure.

Phantasm mesmer will win most of the time:
- he can put up phantasms much faster then your pet will chew threw them
- swordsman and duelists are very hard to kite even with the high endurance regen and evade skills. This is especially true if the attacks are not synchronized
- Chaos storm and chaos armor messes up your pet really hard
- blurred frenzy helps mitigate a lot of the burst
- Defender / nullfield

- Nope. A phantasm even with the HP signet+inspiration HP trait (which this build doesn’t even use) still dies in 2-3 hits to a Frostgorge Sound alpine regular wolf. Test it yourself. It takes at best 2-3 seconds to kill a phantasm in between your pet and your autoattack, and his phantasm summoning time at the very least is 16 seconds.

- You cannot use swordsman or duelist at the same time, and with the duelist you can actually sidestrafe and mitigate a lot of the hits without even needing to dodge. The swordsman’s single hit every 4 seconds is a leap, and you’ll have recharged with vigor your endurance just fine.

This brings me to my greater point, which is that people’s mistakes is letting those phantasms ramp up. That’s when you get overwhelmed, when you get them stacked up instead of immediately reacting to them.

- Chaos Storm and Armor do very little besides give him 4 secs of protection and maybe an aoe daze field largely RNG based. They are both also on pretty large cooldowns. Play a mesmer yourself and see how “great” these skills are. The damage is negligible, and the conditions are unreliably applied.

- Defender, Null Field, and he’ll either will have to take Blink or Decoy. Defender still occupies an illusion slot and gladly comes to die in your bonfire skill pretty quickly.

Null Field untraited is a 45 sec cd. If you can’t pressure conditions in between a 36-45 sec cd, you are doing something wrong.

Eurantien.4632:

Kite the pet. Kite the pet and you win. DO NOT fight on point. Just get your phantasms up and land all your shatters.

Phantasm mesmer does destroy BM as well.

Phantasm mesmers have a chance to win, just like engineers, but if the ranger is any good he too can kite the phantasms and send his pet to swipe them down and the mesmer’s dps drops to zero for a good 10-15 seconds.

Mesmers are pretty rough if you let them surround you with clones, but if you kite said clones as well their damage drops by a lot and your pet can wittle the phantasms down and then go to the mesmer.

Engineer by far is the ranger’s worst match up because he can do a lot of his pistol condition damage from range and have permaswiftness up to kite your pet while spamming boons on himself.

Instinct tells most BM rangers to go close quarters to shotgun their splitblade and melee cripple opponents, but against these two classes you’ll get blown up (you’re making it very easy for a glue shot into a supply crate drop and getting destroyed by their following condition bomb) if you try that, so you just want to kite as well with monarch’s leap, bait their dodges with throw torch/splitblade, and hope to land a winter’s bite/crippling talon once they’ve dodged your first 2 ranged attacks so the pet can get to them and pressure.

Ranger shortbow can be 900 range when its arrows bounce like the thief and he gets proper aoe.

People have tried to kick me, but I often win my spot in pugs by playing the sympathy card to the leader (“Don’t kick me yet! I’m berserker geared!”) as soon as I join.

The main discrimination you’ll face is on the LFG postings for zerker warriors. Either warriors or guardians. Once you join the group you’ll rarely be kicked if you clarify from the beginning you are going on a porperly berserker specced ranger.

Rangers will get a lot of flak occasionally because you still have so many rangers running useless bears in a dungeon (they do so little damage you may as well stow them — a few stacks of bleeding outdamage those bears) and a longbow on a crappy build.

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

That’s why they have split designs. They just did it with WvW and PvE confusion/retal. The idea that the GS would be made bad for PvP is a complete strawman.

Even then I don’t think an autoattack damage increase to match mainhand sword would make the weapon OP in PvP. There are a lot of more OP weaponsets in existence in PvP.

Because 1 weapon is OP it doesn’t warrant making another weapon as OP.

#2. If GS Auto Attack matched Sword then GS would be doing more DPS since Maul is a DPS increase. Yes splitting weapon skills would be the right thing to do but GS does not need a DPS increase. Its like saying you need to increase Mesmer Staff to match GS. One is a defensive weapon and the other is an offensive weapon.

….No. Mesmer staff is a condition weapon (it’s an offensive weapon, just a different type of offense), and the only viable condition weapon mesmers have. It has defensive functions, just like GS has defensive functions for your team with an aoe cripple and knockback, and aoe boon strip (tkaing that might off an engi or stability off the people that are beating your face in so you can peel them).

And what use is a niche if the value of that niche is low? Great, GS is a defensive weapon that’s used scarcely by anybody in PvE or spvp outside bunker clerics. Maul would not make it do more damage, just like HB does not make the warrior GS do more damage than their mainhand axe (which actually does more damage).

What people are asking for is that when they are using the sum of the skills on that weapon that it do similar damage to mainhand sword instead of a 10%+ drop in DPS.

Maul does would make it do more damage then spamming #1, just like HB makes GS do more damage then #1. And no Axe warriors don’t do more damage then GS warriors. Between HB/WW and Forceful GS an Axe/Mace warrior will never beat them even with a battle sigil. But anyways thats moot since any good warrior does a GS burst HB+WW then swap to Axe/Mace for 5 seconds.

Why do you want GS to do as much as sword when sword already does that much damage? Why have 2 weapons that do the same thing.

Nope, you really don’t get it. HB/WW is used to BURST during time warp. The axe will ALWAYS outsustained the greatsword no matter what over long periods of time.

Maul will not make it do better DPS because obviously you’d balance the auto upgrades with Maul in mind. You would just increase the GS auto to fill that ~11% DPS gap.

I know you don’t give a kitten about pve, but other people do. And a weapon being “different” doesn’t mean it’s good in pve. The offhand axe is “different” but not in a good way.

The reason the GS needs to match the DPS in pve of a mainhand sword is that otherwise nobody will use it. Get it through that head of yours — nobody in pve needs that built in evade. All you need in pve is to tunnel the most damage you can and time your dodges right.

The weapons wouldn’t be the same anyways. I’ve already explained the mainhand sword could offer the warhorn for group boons and a nice ranged attack in skill 4, while the greatsword would offer projectile reflection that’s nice for fights like lupicus and a daze.

Warrior Axe will NEVER beat GS because of forceful Greatsword Trait. But anyways this isn’t the warrior forums.

Not every weapon needs to be useable in PvE. Im well aware no one really needs a built in evade in PvE because PvE is already easy mode. Who cares if no one ever uses GS for PvE DPS. The class does not need multiple high dps weapon options to be useful.

If all people do is PvE, and they only got a single set of viable weapons, it gets old pretty fast.

I’d like to see how fun it would be for you going around in pvp and the only optimal weapons you could use were the shortbow and longbow. It would get old really quick.

It’s ok to have a bit of a gap if in exchange you get something useful due to that gap. However, the gap between greatsword and sword is not trivial, and the built in evade is hardly a good trade off as it’s not useful at all in a pve setting. So, either add other pve relevant utility to justify the gap, or just buff the kitten weapon in pve because some other people would like to put their legendaries to use.

Spec phantasm mesmer. Keep moving so the ranger’s pet can’t hit you. Spam your stealth utilities to keep the pet re.t;arded.

Dodge throw torch and their winter’s bite (frost axe), and stay at a distance so their splitblade will never hit you for more than a stack of bleeding or two. The BM bunker ranger needs to get close to deal the brunt of his condition burst. If you can keep kiting him and the pet and applying steady pressure and conditions he’ll eventually be worn out.

The BM bunker ranger has few condition removal options, several of which are passive and leave them open to smart condition stacking. Bait their condition transfer passives with a few trash initial conditions, and when conditions have been cleared twice then load them up with stacks. This will either force them to pop signet of renewal (60 sec cd) or their spring heal (a lot of the run Troll Unguent so their condi removal will be pretty crappy after signet of renewal wipe).

Burst specs don’t work too well against this ranger because he’s loaded on toughness and evades. Unless he makes some serious mistakes no burst build will scratch him. You need either high sustained ranged pressure or strong condi builds.

This is why trapper rangers, phantasm mesmers, and engineers form good counters against this spec.

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

That’s why they have split designs. They just did it with WvW and PvE confusion/retal. The idea that the GS would be made bad for PvP is a complete strawman.

Even then I don’t think an autoattack damage increase to match mainhand sword would make the weapon OP in PvP. There are a lot of more OP weaponsets in existence in PvP.

Because 1 weapon is OP it doesn’t warrant making another weapon as OP.

#2. If GS Auto Attack matched Sword then GS would be doing more DPS since Maul is a DPS increase. Yes splitting weapon skills would be the right thing to do but GS does not need a DPS increase. Its like saying you need to increase Mesmer Staff to match GS. One is a defensive weapon and the other is an offensive weapon.

….No. Mesmer staff is a condition weapon (it’s an offensive weapon, just a different type of offense), and the only viable condition weapon mesmers have. It has defensive functions, just like GS has defensive functions for your team with an aoe cripple and knockback, and aoe boon strip (tkaing that might off an engi or stability off the people that are beating your face in so you can peel them).

And what use is a niche if the value of that niche is low? Great, GS is a defensive weapon that’s used scarcely by anybody in PvE or spvp outside bunker clerics. Maul would not make it do more damage, just like HB does not make the warrior GS do more damage than their mainhand axe (which actually does more damage).

What people are asking for is that when they are using the sum of the skills on that weapon that it do similar damage to mainhand sword instead of a 10%+ drop in DPS.

Maul does would make it do more damage then spamming #1, just like HB makes GS do more damage then #1. And no Axe warriors don’t do more damage then GS warriors. Between HB/WW and Forceful GS an Axe/Mace warrior will never beat them even with a battle sigil. But anyways thats moot since any good warrior does a GS burst HB+WW then swap to Axe/Mace for 5 seconds.

Why do you want GS to do as much as sword when sword already does that much damage? Why have 2 weapons that do the same thing.

Nope, you really don’t get it. HB/WW is used to BURST during time warp. The axe will ALWAYS outsustained the greatsword no matter what over long periods of time.

Maul will not make it do better DPS because obviously you’d balance the auto upgrades with Maul in mind. You would just increase the GS auto to fill that ~11% DPS gap.

I know you don’t give a kitten about pve, but other people do. And a weapon being “different” doesn’t mean it’s good in pve. The offhand axe is “different” but not in a good way.

The reason the GS needs to match the DPS in pve of a mainhand sword is that otherwise nobody will use it. Get it through that head of yours — nobody in pve needs that built in evade. All you need in pve is to tunnel the most damage you can and time your dodges right.

The weapons wouldn’t be the same anyways. I’ve already explained the mainhand sword could offer the warhorn for group boons and a nice ranged attack in skill 4, while the greatsword would offer projectile reflection that’s nice for fights like lupicus and a daze.

lLobo.7960:

Puandro.3245:

Why do you want GS to do as much as sword when sword already does that much damage? Why have 2 weapons that do the same thing.

Because some people think the game should work as they want it, so they can min-max their min-max’ing.

Like you don’t. Keep believing that.

I prefer cleric over knight if you’re going with a power build for pvp. For pve, knight is obviously better.

The way the ranger’s designed you’ll need some form of regen to compensate for the lack of teleports or immunities or immediate burst. The ranger is more of a backloaded character so stats that let you ramp up your damage by staying alive are better.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Xsorus.2507:

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Bailey.6892:

Daecollo.9578:

Since all signets are getting buffed, I think Signet of the Wild should get double its healing as well, otherwise it will never find a slot compared to the other options.

It would be a joke if they did not improve the passive healing. Although that tends to be the competency levle of anet..a joke.

It will be overpowered for regen builds if they improve the passive healing. I’m waiting for this to get a buff and then a quick nerf as soon as ANet realized rangers can stack 700+ regen/sec without help from guardian rejuvenation and elementalist soothing mist.

Point of interest, i can do 700+ regen on my Thief.

Shadow Rejuvenation from the Shadow Arts line is very nasty with Healing Power, with 800 Healing Power I outheal my Ranger with 1100 Healing power easily.

Yeah it’s pretty good regens on thief, but that’s only while you’re stealthed. You can do this with ranger at all times, even while attacking.

Well, stealth doesn’t stop you from attacking. Whatever you lost from sustained attack you more than make up with a backstab crit or a mini unload on mainhand pistol stealth opener.

And TBH it’s pretty shoddy design when an aspect of the class is held back because of the single build that can abuse it.

Increase the baseline, and then nerf the runes increasing regen duration and procs of regen.

Other builds should get some good use of the signet without having to invest heavily into healing power or using runes of dwayna and 10 in NM+30 BM and troll Unguent.

Skills should start universally good, and traits/runes make them better. Not start crap and only become great with heavy gear/trait investment.

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

That’s why they have split designs. They just did it with WvW and PvE confusion/retal. The idea that the GS would be made bad for PvP is a complete strawman.

Even then I don’t think an autoattack damage increase to match mainhand sword would make the weapon OP in PvP. There are a lot of more OP weaponsets in existence in PvP.

Because 1 weapon is OP it doesn’t warrant making another weapon as OP.

#2. If GS Auto Attack matched Sword then GS would be doing more DPS since Maul is a DPS increase. Yes splitting weapon skills would be the right thing to do but GS does not need a DPS increase. Its like saying you need to increase Mesmer Staff to match GS. One is a defensive weapon and the other is an offensive weapon.

….No. Mesmer staff is a condition weapon (it’s an offensive weapon, just a different type of offense), and the only viable condition weapon mesmers have. It has defensive functions, just like GS has defensive functions for your team with an aoe cripple and knockback, and aoe boon strip (tkaing that might off an engi or stability off the people that are beating your face in so you can peel them).

And what use is a niche if the value of that niche is low? Great, GS is a defensive weapon that’s used scarcely by anybody in PvE or spvp outside bunker clerics. Maul would not make it do more damage, just like HB does not make the warrior GS do more damage than their mainhand axe (which actually does more damage).

What people are asking for is that when they are using the sum of the skills on that weapon that it do similar damage to mainhand sword instead of a 10%+ drop in DPS.

That’s why they have split designs. They just did it with WvW and PvE confusion/retal. The idea that the GS would be made bad for PvP is a complete strawman.

Even then I don’t think an autoattack damage increase to match mainhand sword would make the weapon OP in PvP. There are a lot of more OP weaponsets in existence in PvP.

P.S. Warrior outdpses anything regardless of crit damage. It’s their base numbers and easy access to boons and debuffs relevant to damage dealing (outside HGH engineer, no other class can stack might and vulnerability by itself so efficiently) that puts them over the top.

Test your warrior with knight gear against any other class on knight gear. No berserker gear, and the warrior will still vastly outdamage most classes simply because his weapons have high base damage, their attacks cleave and are on a very low cd, and their traits give them several % damage boosts and increased crit chance.

And with the latest patch banners are easily the most powerful PvE damage increase utility outside Time Warp (because apparently warriors needed buffs in PvE).

Who needs that built in evade in PvE? Last I checked warriors and thieves and mesmers and conjure hammer eles do just fine without a built in evade into their autoattack. That built in evade on a chain is just flavor in the current design of the game — it makes little difference if you’re playing optimized PvE.

PvE is usually dodging a few key attacks and reflecting the rest with the trivial splash damage outhealed either by shouts or the guardian or ele. They could take that evade out in the pve version of the skill and I would not miss it, because I do just fine without it when I play mainhand sword.

Do you roam? If not, why do you need 5 sec DS fury? The d/d eles in your team and warriors will keep you with perma fury.

20% more damage against targets below 50% health is a lot more useful as is that extra power you’re getting if you want to maximize your offense.

Yeah, but it’s necessary in pve because defensive weapons are useless in pve. To go defensive in pve all you need is vigor and dodge your way into range and/or drop a reflection field.

If the autoattack doesn’t get increased, berserk builds that are used in pve will simply opt out of the weapon for mainhand sword.

At least until they fix the game overvaluing damage output in pve (part of what I love about spvp, where condi builds and bunker builds also get to shine).

zone.1073:

Make rangers’ pets scale directly off of the rangers’ stats. That way, glassy rangers have strong, glassy pets, and tanky rangers do not, which encourages them to get utility/survivable pets instead.

Right now, why use tanky pets when you can use pets that crit for 6k even for bunker rangers? More diversity in pet choices. More logical game mechanics (bunkers critting for 6-8k is awkward balance). Done and done.

You can nerf the damage of my bunker ranger’s pets when his Ricochet (axe auto) stops hitting for 197 damage because all ranger attacks by default do half or less of the damage of other classes.

You can nerf bunker ranger pet damage when we get some team utility. Last I checked, the guardian and ele bring myriad boons, healing, CC, and with retal guardians actually grant the group a lot of damage and bunker eles can run hybrid bunker and not only do burst and sustained, but unlike the bunker ranger their damage is all AoE.

All my BM bunker brings is 1v1 ability. He brings nothing else that another class can’t do better. He’s got crap sustained damage, his damage is single target, he’s only gor 1 CC with aoe wolf fear on a long cd and a stupid ai that does it whenever it feels like (and a base 1.5 sec cast time).

Puandro.3245:

Zenith.7301:

And in how many scenarios can you run that setup, and with how many builds besides Cleric?

Greatsword is a great weapon as a defensive weapon for any Power Build.

Do you use Power?
Do you want a defensive weapon?

Take GS. GS has advantages even Sword + Dagger dont have. Swoop and #4 being 2 of them. GS is only useless if you are running condi.

If I run pve, I don’t use GS, period. My optimal melee is s/h, and my optimal ranged weapon is shortbow in berserker gear.

In spvp, I don’t use GS. I use shortbow+s/offhand.

The only place I might ever use greatsword is WvW for the projectile block and swoop mobility. Otherwise, swoop isn’t anything special in other formats if you use your monarch’s leap properly.

It’s got good utility skills like #4 and swoop, but the other downsides don’t make up for being overshadowed by mainhand sword or shortbow one way or another.

And I say this as a person who has loved the idea of the greatsword even since beta (when it was ridiculously OP and then they broke it with nerfs).

If they raised the autoattack more to match mainhand sword and spiced up a bit Maul, I’d use it a lot more, or even as my main weapon on my berserker builds. That way you’d trade GS as the more bursty offensive control/cc weapon with built in evade autoattacks, while mainhand sword is the weapon with more versatility (can customize with offhand choices, has more utility conditions) and active evades.

The problem is that so long as condi engineer builds exist current condi removal cannot be nerfed or hgh engineers become even stronger than they are (and they’re pretty near OP at the moment in damage output relative to survivability).

Bleeding is weak as a condition relative to burning, requiring too much ramp up to start doing damage. But if they buff bleeding, the engineer has bleeding as well so he too is buffed and the necromancer will ultimately always be outclassed.

I think they just need to tone down the ample access to conditions engineers have and then reduce condition removal. Or at the very least the cooldowns on condi application for engineers needs to be increased if necromancers are to start competing.

It’s funny how they supposedly rolled out necromancer as the master of conditions, but engineers ended up being the actual condition overlords. Sort of how like mesmers completely changed from gw1 being a cc based class to just a spike gib class with team mobility. Warriors and engineers and guardians have much better cc than mesmers.

A lot of classes turned out completely different from what people were expecting them to be based on previous descriptions.

And in how many scenarios can you run that setup, and with how many builds besides Cleric?

Sword/torch or sword dagger still achieves what maul supposedly does better. It brings in condition damage through the offhand weapons+poisoning that better works against longevity based builds over a weapon with just a bleed and inferior sustained damage due to the poor auto.

Greatsword is a weapon you need to stack berserker with to see offensive benefits (maul burst crits), otherwise it’s just a mobility weapon with projectile block.

Greatsword’s auto is too bad damage wise, and curiously they’ve insisted putting bleeding on a power weapon with maul instead of something like 8-10 stacks of vulnerability or proccing fury instead of the bleed.

The 3 stack of bleeds in particular with the GS are negligible on a power build and the GS will never be used as a condition weapon because 4 of the 5 skills are power based.

Next should be engineer duels ;p

Those kittens imo with phantasm mesmer are the BM bunker’s hardest matchup by far.

You can still dodge just fine you just have to predict better because the dodge will have a slight delay — just press the button earlier.

You can use berserker s/h anywhere. If you position properly and bring the right group comp then there should be no issues with the content. Especially if you brought a guardian.

Underwater is a joke anyways and my jellyfish didn’t die before the patch anywhere. Might as well use the pet I like down there because unlike land absurd aoe is not plentiful.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Puandro.3245:

Chopps.5047:

Zenith, why troll? You know I play dungeons and wvw only. You can’t even get apothecary in spvp, I don’t know why you keep derailing this thread.

Apothecary is called Shaman in sPvP.

Eh… it’s close but not quite the same. Shaman in sPvP has the major traits switched. Shaman is toughness major while Apothecary is healing major. I’d use the toughness major if possible in WvW if they had it, but unfortunately it’s restricted to sPvP ;(

On the bright side. the extra healing power is better with the myriad condi builds running wvw as of late, at least on my servers.

I’ve come across a LOT more engineers and staff condi mesmers, and the toughness is useless against them (and even with 2170 toughness instead of the 2.3k you can get in spvp burst specs can’t touch you — wvw thieves might as well get lost because even with stealth spam assuming I’m not feeling like dropping the trap on them I’ll just heal back up, and I carry spirit for those times where you want a self rez).

My pet with agility training is still getting kited to kingdom come, though. I’m gonna start testing ranged pets to see if their projectiles can land on moving opponents because against anyone competent these melee pets are useless and always trailing behind, so I might as well squeeze as much damage as I can from a pet that CAN hit someone more often than every 5-6 seconds.

I also can’t make up my mind on which runes I prefer to run, Undead or Dwayna….