Guild Wars 2

I think if you look at the soulbeast abilities of alpine wolf and smokescale alone, you will see an opening of opportunity to increase skill ceiling on the class when used right… That is just 2 pets , there will be many more combos and stat combos for mixing and matching in weeks when we get to test them in real time.

Alpine Wolf’s ability is insane nice , coupled with Smokescale could be good combo

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6szbmy/dps_benchmarks_power_mesmer_305k309k_power/

Barnabus Stinson.1409:

Why is wrong to want the Power based Spec to actually be decent with power, why are people hostile to the idea of a power reaper being buffed even a little?

Because people like Noscoc who were actually good with the necro and showed what power necro can do. Most complain, he won top tier gameplay tournaments with it while people complained. Big difference.

Most people are just bad at necro and don’t know it’s role in positional team play

This is mostly a PvP perspective of course, PvE it doesn’t matter what you run, mobs will melt either way … The only people who care about DPS are elitists like qtfy , you’re most likely not on this level and probably wouldn’t be even with a meta class like condi ranger or condi ele so it’s irrelevant. I’ve seen people do entire raid zones with just p/p thieves , PvE is braindead.

“I cannot kill anyone with ele”

“I run mender’s”

I think you answered yourself.

Marauder’s if you want to kill people and learn to play fresh air

Game Developers,

Can you please make this a cancellable skill? If you try to cancel currently it locks you in place and simply does the skill. I think having this as a cancellable ability would add some better play into it.

SrebX.6498:

Guys, Im honestly not sure what to run or what to do. I’m not even sure if Warrior is still worth running considering the recent gutting we got
This is not a complaint thread, I’m just looking any word regarding how should we slot our traits, our utilities, whats the benchmarks? Is it even still worth running a Warrior?
Im asking the hardcore PvErs who immediately test things and give guidance- Whats your take on the new meta?

cPS build

Yea , probably a master trait .. Interesting what looks to be passive damage additions to attacks?

Unfortunately the new trait scales too good, by that I mean it will most definitely get nerfed… With mender’s you’re healing over 600+ hp/s alone with just this trait which wouldn’t include the SoR passive and regeneration boon – you can get basically near base troll ungeant healing per second with that … I know there’s a pre-requisite in activating it but still , it will most likely get nerfed due to people complaining about the bunkery aspect of it.

I don’t want it to be nerfed because we lack stability now in a lot of areas , but with Dolyak Stance possible pairing with RaO soon I fear this will end up becoming rather broken with specific combinations.

I can only imagine since soulbeast related stuff is obviously added in this last patch for demo purposes that there is massive conflicts with the pets between when youre a soulbeast and when youre a core/hot ranger. There’s obviously a massive code issue going on so they’re most likely working on it but it’s taking longer than expected for them to fix it. It’s the only possible explanation I can think of.

Ritualist Essence.9285:

Expiatus.4210:

Ritualist Essence.9285:

Its a great buff to Power Rangers:
Rangers can now get 500 ferocity with any weapons or +680 with Axe equipped by using 2 traits + 1 passive signet. 1 trait gives 250 ferocity when you gain fury & fury now does 30%+ crit chance. Signet of the wild passive gives +180 ferocity & stack this with +250 ferocity from Axe offhand trait & its quite nice.
They can generate might just fine, new trait gives you might based on enemy health %, another trait now gives you might when ur pet does a crit hit. I tested it, in 2 seconds I had 9 stacks of might already from those two traits.

Just want to publicly thank you for pointing this out. I set up my ranger all zerk and the above and did Silverwastes just to try it out. It was fun commonly hitting with sword for up to 4K and Path of Scars for 5K. Long bow hit hard also but not as much was sword/axe due to traits.

It was fun though to just melt through stuff.

Ur welcome, Sword/Axe has been alot of fun since the patch, fun to be hitting like a truck with Ranger. I went with Zerker gear too, only my trinkets are ascended & will definately get a ascended zerker armor set for my Ranger soon.
For power ranger i’m currently using the core specs of beast/wild/marks, not sure which one i’ll swap for Soulbeast

These #’s higher than viper condi now?

Gambino.2109:

ZhouX.8742:

No offense but WvW and PvP have dwindled down to such a small population now. PvE is unfortunately most likely the biggest of the 3 now by far with raiding being a bit portion of it. If there wasn’t a cap it would be by far the biggest portion of the game , but it is so it’s not as big as it could actually be (obviously for good reason but just saying).

There should definitely be splits between pve and wvw/pvp , note I said wvw/pvp – wvw should not be lumped into PvE at all since it’s not true PvE.

Raiding is a small portion off pve, less and less people raid each week with the lfg now filled with people selling raids or opening instances..

By far much larger than PvP and WvW now , the ONLY reason and the ONLY reason WvW is even more populated AT THE MOMENT is the backpiece and the sublime chest piece , once people get that it will decline literally back to what it was.

PvP the same, as you have noticed already almost all of the top players have quit (even banned for match fixing) , PvP is in a horrible state and probably will not be revived.

PoF is there only hope at an attempt at reviving both WvW / PvP but since it looks like those game modes will go for the most part unchanged, I don’t think so.

PvE is by far the largest portion of the game , we’re not talking just raids here when balancing PvE but fractals, meta runs , raids. Raids still is a large portion of why people in PvE even log on still (legendary armor, ascended , skins etc).

Prophet.1584:

haven’t posted in here for a while but the amount of negativity is deafening. I get that some people’s builds got changed with this since the use of some utilities changed but all in all this was a great patch. Power ranger got buffed, condi ranger didn’t get nerfed and healing druid didn’t get nerfed.

Condi druid was in the top group in regards to dps already. power ranger should move up the pve chart and druid is still druid, no one got anything that would take our place.

pvp/wvw builds are going to have to change but that should have been obvious when they mentioned trait/skill changes to force people to choose more defensive stats if they want to be defensive and vice versa. I extended a 5v15 in wvw last night on my druid without being in healing gear. my group still lost but we took out most of the enemy group.

Rangers have always had to adapt to anets changes, this is one of the few times those changes weren’t flat out nerfs and SoulBeast is going to be a further buff to all builds.

On paper yes, MAYBE, but there is so many technicalities due to functionality that could render SoulBeast not actually good mainly regarding pet status during transformation (transform while pet is dead? if you cant this would essentially make you useless as a SoulBeast in most WvW aspects since pets die far too quickly in this game mode) and pet mechanics in general, how you cast soulbeast abilities , transformation times, everything. Until you’ve played the class I wouldn’t be quick to judge whether it will be great or bad for the class as a whole.

As for PvE, there’s raid groups doing bosses with all p/p thieves. I highly doubt the quality of adjustments from any of these nerfs/buffs would make ranger drop out of the meta anytime soon. Raiding is braindead simple and only elitists would conform to trying to top dps charts (like qtfy for example) because that is what they like to do. Ranger condi is fine and will still be taken over power ranger because it’s the same or even more dps with a much lower skill entry to jump into as a PvE player.

As for WvW, well it’s WvW – the player base isn’t that great in terms of gauging a build’s true effectiveness in PvP oriented gameplay .. In the realm of top tier gameplay rangers took a minor hit but it’s still way too early to tell especially since pets are essentially right now because they’re bugged , you can’t really truly test much right now.

“pvp/wvw builds are going to have to change but that should have been obvious when they mentioned trait/skill changes to force people to choose more defensive stats if they want to be defensive and vice versa. " – Well, that’s common sense right? Most of this is based around amulet changes anyway. None of that changed. Power will still be mender’s / paladin ammy variants – these changes do no open up new amulets for PvP builds but they do offer different ways you can play IN those amulets.

However, for condi variants ,maybe although you’d most likely be running Sage over anything in the condi list.

I personally think the changes are overall good for the most part by the way.

I semi have a feeling either it’s a massive broken issue with pets in general in conjunction with SoulBeast’s programming or they intended it to be like this for SoulBeast and didn’t mention it in the patch notes.

Obviously, I’m leaning toward the former but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the latter either.

I just hope it gets fixed soon

No offense but WvW and PvP have dwindled down to such a small population now. PvE is unfortunately most likely the biggest of the 3 now by far with raiding being a bit portion of it. If there wasn’t a cap it would be by far the biggest portion of the game , but it is so it’s not as big as it could actually be (obviously for good reason but just saying).

There should definitely be splits between pve and wvw/pvp , note I said wvw/pvp – wvw should not be lumped into PvE at all since it’s not true PvE.

the 3am champion

They pretty much won’t do any adjusting until after PoF lands with new elites and metas are decided after that. Obvious cash grab to nerf a lot of classes for unknown reasons right before the expansion to force people into buying PoF.

kittenty move honestly

I want to stay optimistic about this given the fact that we don’t entirely know truly how Soulbeast is going to work overall, so this change might be very well in reflection of that.

With that said though, it’s not really a true -% in condi duration unfortunately. On paper it looks that way but if you were to give your pet movement conditions in any way you basically just screwed your other half of dps while also only getting -%. This would work obviously with weakness too so you can get the idea there.

We have a GM trait , yes, a GM trait that now potentially hinders your performance – I could see this being moved down to master in compensation of the change from flat condition removal , but I just highly think this is no way worthy of a GM trait anymore with that change considering.

Again, with Soulbeast around the corner I am being very optimistic in that they are doing this for a reason , it seems you will most likely be taking something along the lines of WS , BM / Soulbeast with WK since you will have little condi removal outside of slotting Dolyak Stance (let’s be honest the only reliable condi denial in our new lineup , but ill have to relook over the utilities again to confirm this) or Trooper runes.

phokus.8934:

The spirit weapons are very easy to side step. For downed players it provides good cleave (sword) but with how often players are moving, it fails to hit more than it would compared to ToF.

Of course, they just used pathing of ranger pets with spirit weapons aka most horrible hit on movement

Sword is surprisingly really good in terms of dmg

I filed an in-game report, hopefully they can come up with a fix today.

pvp empathic is 80/20 , pve is 50/50

This is insane how this has not been fixed yet, you can’t play ranger atm because the pets don’t respond for up to 5 seconds after swapping to them.

The other bad thing as well as they did next to nothing to actually remove condi from the game to make these nerfs justifiable. Had they removed sources of condi from the game in the form of utilities and abilities then I wouldn’t be as mad about those changes, but literally almost nothing was done to condi based builds across all game platforms.

Yes, they reduced food but PvP doesn’t use food so essentially no condi changes happened there and after testing already, while there is a noticeable duration decrease it’s actually not much at all if you have trailblazer’s.

Really, from this patch across the board condi will be much stronger

ranger never really benefitted from celestial the biggest offenders were: ele, warrior and engi rifle – they were broken and overused. this was when s/d existed as well.

now with druid it could be different but not really, what made celestial so good was for hybrids with good power coefficients and condition dmg output with 25 might could output high condition damage on top of it and the amazing bunker that came with it…

with druid staff you have no conditions and the only pair off you could put with staff would be something like sword/warhorn or sword/dagger both of which are not condi heavy at all and provide mechanic sustain (evades) over any condition you would expect from it.

maybe a druid condi hybrid , but then you kind of lose the point of using celestial since if you use strict condi weapons, you have no power output.

druid/ranger has always suffered from this lack of hybrid synergy so celestial never worked in spvp (obviously you might be able to mix and match to achieve something in WvW)

condi will , again, do nothing but bring a handful of classes back to the top again and you’ll literally fall into the same hole you were in years ago only with HoT builds it was just be that much worse.

“i dont even wanna talk about endure pain getting nerfed heavily while signet of stone has an active AND a passive effect AND a full kittening 6 (!) seconds invuln to dmg….”

This is sort of highlights your lack of knowledge on signets for the ranger class and how they work. You are not invulnerable in Stone signet’s active and the passive is garbage. Condition is a form of damage and control effects, which stone signet does not protect against. There’s many ways to simply bypass this signet, and it is mostly used as a panic method to help revive or escape massive burst damage. The obvious counter to that is , again, condition damage.

Well, yes … Druid CAN trait specifically for condi removal much like any other class can. It’s not new that you can situate all of your traits to be pro-condition removal , the part you don’t realize is that druid might be the biggest class to take a massive sacrifice in offensive prowess and team support by doing so.

We all know selfishly traiting for only a specific defensive in one specific facet of the game will not work for yourself or your teammates. It’s super selfish and you get no trade off speccing for only condi clear. Druidic Clarity is a fine balance between the 2.

Also, your point is moot because DC, while it is good it is also one of the easiest setups for yourself in the game. There is a risk going into DC half-hazardly against condi heavy classes as they can just condi burst you right after going into DC and it nulled that “broken ass op” condi removal that just procced.

In short, I would learn counters before asking to screw over other classes.

Thief is in a good spot, I would suggest seeing players like Sindrenerr play to build a good foundational base on how thief works in PvP.

how much money did they give you to create this thread

Crinn.7864:

ZhouX.8742:

except necro is in close to every top tier team and is meta despite bad necro players wanting to acknowledge the truth and continually call their class bad

Except no necro build uses any of the things that where buffed.

Also as for necros in 5s. I suggest you do some research on why necro is used in 5s, and the comp and rotation requirements of using that necro. If you do you might realize why the necro community’s complaints still have merits.

I understand the usage of necro and also why it is in the current meta… Ele and necro (both meta class combinations also) are some of the best , if not THE BEST duo you can bring onto a team when played by good players and alone could carry team fights alone for cap coverage.

Every class has roles , if you haven’t understood that about PvP yet I would suggest first by learning that first. Thief would never sit on a point alone and try to keep cap for example, necro shouldn’t either – most do , then die, then come to forums and complain without actually knowing their role in PvP.

Most people of every class, want everything and to be able to play the game how they think it should be , but this doesn’t change the essential roles a class is given and should be played.

Also, about 90% of the classes got buffs to non-meta weapons and some received nerfs/buffs (thief nerf to condi builds, buff to power meta build etc) … Rifle for warrior, axe for ranger, etc. – most of them were attempts (albeit horrible) to bring those weapons to PvP but it’s not enough of course.

Rev is pretty good when played by good players, but a majority of people on the forums aren’t so you’ll get a lot of complaining

except necro is in close to every top tier team and is meta despite bad necro players wanting to acknowledge the truth and continually call their class bad

Oh god , come on man … It’s not that big of a change , quit trying to make it out like it is.

Jesus christ

Heibi.4251:

I think a nice idea to stop all of this bickering would be to have a chance for skirmish tickets to drop from players and lords of towers, keeps and Stonemist. 1-5 tickets, like badges of honor.

But to those complaining about reward tied to rank – simply capping camps will not rank you up very fast. You need to run with the commanders and learn what is really done in WvW. Learn about building siege, getting supplies, staying alive, builds for WvW, and how fun it can actually be to be in WvW. You’ll actually stop worrying about the pips while you play. And before you know it you’ll have played long enough to get the new shinies.

On a side note – many commanders want people in TS or Discord with them. They advertise it. You don’t need to talk(mute your microphone), just listen to the commander and you will know what is going on and won’t be left behind.(Don’t bring up not wanting to hear bad language and the like, that isn’t what I’m discussing. There’s a whole thread dedicated to that already). Join a guild that does WvW – they will gladly help you get outfitted and tell you the most effective builds.

Yes, running to 2 objectives and hitting the interact button.. So tough!!! WvW so hard guys! Stop trying to make this deeper than what it actually is , WvW is easy as hell.

SpeedFiend.4521:

Fifth.8169:

A persons WVW rank should not be used for pip acquisition. The rewarding of pips should be fair and equally rewarding to all participants.

+1 Bronze WvW Rank (150-619)
+2 Silver WvW Rank (620-1394)
+3 Gold WvW Rank (1395-2544)
+4 Platinum WvW Rank (2545-4094)
+5 Mithril WvW Rank (4095-6444)
+6 Diamond WvW Rank (6445-9999)
+7 Max WvW Rank (10000)

This is extremely wrong and the most unfair component in the reward system in all of GW2. If this is the case I should be recieving more pips in pvp based on my rank and more gold and rares in pve based on my AP. Extremely discriminating this is . Please make it an avg amount of pips given to all players all remove this entirely. It is immoral and discriminates against new players. Whoever did this needs to give me an explanation. A very good one of why your choosing to discriminate other players.

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This user makes a stronger argument ; Posted for visibility-

saerni.2584:

The main issue isn’t that higher ranks earn rewards faster. The issue is that, at the lower end, the total time to complete the reward track for an average player is too much even for extensive playtimes. Getting high rank should be a marginal increase in speed. In contrast right now higher rank is significantly involved in whether a player has to play 10, 20, or 40 hours in a week.

Looking at my pip gain in silver—between 33% and 50% of my total pips are due to my rank. If I was in gold I would be earning over 50% of my pips from my rank. I also play a fair bit on outnumbered maps because I solo and group roam more often than not to support my team. The largest pip gains are outnumbered (largest share of pips earned) followed by slightly less pips from rank.

The problem is multiplicative. I get 2 pips per tick at silver. In the time a bronze player earns 60, I earn 120. Gold earns 180. Platinum earns 240.

The reward track assumes players will earn “enough” pips at a certain playtime per day.

3 pips per tick is 40.27 hours
5 pips per tick is 24.16 hours
7 pips per tick is 16.9 hours
9 pips per tick is 13.42 hours

Roughly 10 hours of WvW per week to max out rewards seems reasonable. Maybe even up to 15. So in the 8-10 pips per tick range. Say you average 2 for skirmish position, 1 for loyalty, 2 for rank and 2 on average for being outnumbered sometimes. If even a middle ranked player can’t max out the rewards in a reasonable period of time there is a problem.

Not all players should max out the reward track each week. But low rank players need to see middle rank players maxing out rewards within a reasonable time as a incentive to rank up. It is hardly good motivation to tell a new player “if you just get 2000 ranks you can maybe max out the rewards in a week if you play 8 hours.”

I also think it is poor manners to tell other players how they need to suck it up when the higher ranked players can get full rewards merely playing 8 hours and everyone else has to play two to three times as long. There is a legitimate problem here.

But you do get more gold and rares in PVE for having more AP – it’s called account gold and magic find.

Yes and you can get ascended and precursors in rank up chests already as well as reward tracks which basically give you free obsidian shards and mystic clovers without ever having to step foot in PvE , also completing various “zones” by getting their skins without ever stepping foot in their zones as well as obtaining their currency (Bitterfrost, Doric)…

Yes , but the horrible scaled magic find and the 2% gold bonus is insane , gasp!

I agree with most people here you have to grind for what you want, so I’m sort of against being just handed over some ascended stuff , really because WvW’s playerbase is literally JUST ABOVE the AI of PvE mobs but comparing like this is just stupid because you’ve been getting many rewards simply for farming towers (karma farming also btw) over and over which is what WvW became just after the 1st 6 months of it’s existence when the competitive players deserted it after realizing it’s inconsistencies and horrid balancing and lack of rewards (since people here were referring to entitlement).

After that though, WvW has since become just a glorified Crown Pavilion farm where “PvPers” can talk about “PvErs” (when in reality most WvWers PvE also , most have 186 masteries and raid frequently and do their dailies and fractals so this is just such a silly topic to begin with) in a lower fashion when the reality is WvW’s playerbase , again , is literally just above the threshold of AI based PvE mobs.

doesnt even matter, wvw is literally as easy if not easier than pve anyway … just farm the pips and get your rewards and stop crying

the kids that play wvw are near braindead and with the random dodge rolling and 1 pushes you’ll most likely farm it over time very easily

then you can leave and go back to pve

I think isn’t that big of a deal as most (most, not all) were not afk and regularly talked during the farming process.

I think the issue lies more in prohibition of a specific gameplay that a utility set was literally designed to do.

You have to look at the utility set of turrets… The purpose of the set IS specifically what the engineers were doing and this can be done ANYWHERE there is a viable spot to do so.

If you prohibit this type of gameplay, then you must literally get rid of the utility set entirely or re-work it’s purpose because that is it’s entire purpose.

The objective of turret gameplay isn’t to deploy a turret in a location to kill 2-3 mobs in a matter of 5-10 seconds, move (mind you exploding your turrets give you a massive cooldown) only to have a cooldown upon going to the next set of mobs. It’s to set a form of perimeter defense around something specifically to defend against things from entering and/or to kill things repeatedly in a specific area. Even in PvP turrets the gameplay was structured this way to stay in one location on conquest point and wait for enemies to come and kill them/defend the objective and bunker a point.

I think fundamentally this is an issue not so much with farming , as everyone is looking at but prohibiting a type of game play that was added by Anet themselves into a utility set for a class specifically to what they are prohibiting.

With necro minions it’s a bit different as minions move with you , same with guardian spirits but with engineer farming like this, this was what the utility set was designed for.

This is more a lack of vision and an error on Gw2 engineering as opposed to the players utilizing it.

I believe it had something to do with using tonics to keep max initiative up while in fights

Electric Wyvern —> Creampie Master

Why? dunno

Nath.3918:

OGDeadHead.8326:

Trevor Boyer.6524:

It needs to only proc immob.
It doesn’t need to proc binding roots.

Sounds legit for a GM trait…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Momentary_Pacification

I don’t know, you tell me….

I think you’re proving the point in defense of Ancient Seeds as to why if you make it a simple immob, you make it absolutely useless as a GM trait with no use in virtually any scenario in top tier PvP play. Nobody runs this for that reason alone.

What you would be suggesting is precisely that because one of your traits is garbage, you would like our trait to be garbage as well even disregarding the fact they cover 2 entirely different playstyles in Salvation vs Wilderness Survival.

Again, making it JUST an immob , I would suggest it going into a master trait line and having a new GM entirely in it’s place because it simply would not be worth in it’s current state with just an immob proc.

What they will most likely do IF they do a change would be to make it just an immob proc and bleeds, but lower the ICD of it by 5 seconds or so. No more roots, but it will be a higher chance of immob on you. This is how they usually balance.

For PvE without question

For PvP, it depends on your playstyle and how you like to play entirely in PvP / WvW

I personally like the style of ranger, is it always viable in PvP / WvW throughout the course of Gw2 history, not always but it’s definitely fun.

As for roles, again this comes down to how you like to play. Power and condi are played very differently and I would say power relies much more heavily on positional play than condi.

Power is more invis heavy and again relies on position for defense

Condi is generally more tanky due to the stat combinations and evasion uptime from the common weapon sets (axe/dagger sword/torch).

You could try some hybrid variants, maybe celestial with something , but I’ve found the weapons just don’t synergize with this outside of staff / sword dagger.

Already been nerfed multiple times but either way most classes intelligently get out of this anyway except maybe necro, which if a necro isn’t running with a team without aoe condi clear then, gg team anyway since as you know , condi meta is already picking up pace and even in range necro completely counters the condi roots aspect of it so im not even sure this will be that viable considering most rangers may start running condi sets and rely on an auto attack from a pet or somebody else to proc it for them – in which case it’s too unreliable as a GM trait.

Also, most group burst wipes the roots away instantly.

It’s not as powerful as you think when regarding top tier play, maybe in hot join though but I think that’s the problem with balancing in general.

In raids and PvE this wouldn’t matter much as you’re saving dodges for important attacks. For this to be effective you would need to spam dodges and be behind, which isn’t bad , but it risks your survivability when an important attack or need to get out of an AoE comes into play.

For PvP … Yeaaaaaaaa … Might work in form of group play in PvP but definitely nothing mid to top tier or against organized teams. Staff / Sword / X is still and will be meta for a long time – just too much use out of any other weapon set at the moment.

WvW … Lol , shortbow in WvW – good luck with that. Chances are you’ll be in a squad which won’t matter much what weapon set you’re running anyway and you’ll find yourself pushing forward most of those times which makes it irrelevant…

Roaming , good luck fighting against a person decent and needing to dodge just to get a bonus off on flanking them. 2 things you most likely will not be doing unless you land a roots on them and they have no condi clear left which is almost 0% of the time except maybe necro classes.

—

Way too situational, way too risky to burn dodges to get the effect AND be flanking… Just too much risk vs reward .. Maybe if it was a higher % it would be taken.

Of course you wouldn’t mention pulmonary impact w/ ID and sigil of absorption with no ICD

“Power DH is about as good as Berserk War, aka, Trash tier…”

“War’s Axe does stupid damages.”

So, what did warrior get then?

It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even necessarily look at what ranger got in terms of buffs / nerfs now as I know most of it is a nerf.

It’s that I now look at all of the other classes and based on the nerfs or buffs they received, I then know if my ranger is more or less viable without even needing to look at our patch notes to make an assessment , this is how bad our balance patches have gotten.

—

I think for PvE condi roles, it helps a lot of course.. Shortbow still will not be anything in WvW / PvP and it seems that is what they’re trying to do but it’s not bad for PvE and I like using my ranger in PvE.

—

Smokescale has been nerfed so much with not one buff compensation on other pets in regards to actual skill play. I don’t mind it being nerfed when I say that, but I do mind getting nothing of value out of the other pets for those nerfs to actually mean something. It would be different if it was a scenario of ‘We nerfed X but made Y , Z more viable to perform in light of X that was performing well over the others’ but no , it’s just a flat nerf with no compensation to bring other pets up to par.

I think overall, it’s not too bad given that a lot of other classes got shaved and they’re slowly trying to reduce the burst / passive skill gameplay but just feel , like always, they are not approaching ranger balance the right way in terms of PvP.

It has so much potential to be a higher skill cap class with the weapon ideas and pet abilities , but they just keep it locked down so much and very 1-dimensional.

Nikkinella.8254:

Good tips, but it doesn’t change the fact that reapers are overtuned right now in wvw. Reapers, Chronos and zerkers are all in the same boat now as far as high reward and low effort go. They all do need to be tuned down a bit. I’m not saying you’re wrong, on the contrary, I agree with you. But they are overtuned right now and do need some shaving. The risk/reward factor is way off for all 3 of those classes right now as far as small scale fighting goes. Druids are borderline, but i’d say its mostly their pets that need to be changed. Shouldnt be able to build tanky and have a bursty pet.

No offense, but if you can’t avoid bristleback burst with the amount of evasion and blocks and invulns and most importantly the amount of reflects in this game nowadays then you need to adjust how you play in general and understand you are most likely a bad player.

Literally 2 pets, in which case smokescale doesn’t even have burst … Want to know burst?

~1700 toughness warriors w/ + toughness on cc trait dealing 7-8k arc dividers and 400+ hp regen a tick and 90% resistance uptime and an immense amount of gap closers, that’s burst with high tank and high mobility. All of which druid would not come close to even with a high concentration + power build.

I think with druid you’re mistaking boon availability (not even exclusive to druid either) uptime with being “tank”. The 2 are not the same, and is important to note when considering balance.

To even compare bristleback burst, which is on a high delay from the moment of hitting f2 and needs to actually be setup properly to work well to the amount of burst in this game by thieves, chrono marauder, warriors is unbelievably foolish – no matter HOW much tank you have.

Also, your idea of “high tank builds” is such a one dimensional way in thinking in this day and age in Gw2 as well. Evasion uptime , unvulns and blocks have pretty much replaced most “tank builds” and have the ability to push out massive damage in the same tune since HoT and elite specs came out.

I think the only 2 true tank builds would be druid tank build (no dmg output, not even with bristleback , sorry) and the minstrel ele support tank build – both of which do no damage at all.

I do agree overall with berserker , chrono being broken especially