Guild Wars 2

mistsim.2748:

personally, id prefer to have the on-demand might stacks and extra burst. I know u wanted the smoke field for your opener, but try to see the bright side – good for might-stacking (theyre practically giving us easy access to 25 stacks), and for on-demand burst. if your smokescale has 25 stacks (very easy), he hits for 8k.

we can still use the smoke tactically when the pet drops it. almost always, he’ll drop it right after u cast Smoke Assault. so it’s still kind of on-demand. again I know ure highly biased because u wanted to have it for your “team’s” opener, but you’ll just have to use the thief. or maybe this change is wrecking your guys’ comp? either way, the change is overall better for the profession.

again, I’m asking the devs (voting) to leave the smokescale as it is now. I will say that you also have to be a little bit more sensitive toward the ranger community. you keep taking things away from people, without buffing other aspecs and fixing our bugs. this is making for a ton of extremely unhappy customers…so just be careful here.

No.

The access to smoke WAS the best thing for the professions viability, as it gave us a reliable way to access smoke fields (an incredibly small club).

Having the smoke on an auto is absolutely terrible because it will interfere with other crucial fields being placed on a target (i.e water fields). This means that people are gonna hate on Rangers who bring Smokescale pets to fights (PVE/PVP/WvW).

This change annihilates the Smokescale. Despite its damage, it will interfere with group play significantly.

The damage nerf was totally justified. The switch on the skills? Absolutely the WRONG decision.

Lazze.9870:

Why the kitten would I want a smokefield randomly put down on the ground, possibly interfering with other combo fields, instead of having an on demand smokefield from my F2?

THIS. Seriously, this needs to be reverted ASAP.

Having the Smoke on auto makes no sense. Why would I want my pet to randomly put a smoke field down, that it will have to stand in to not take damage? It has no tactical use to me.

This will destroy so many of my plans :’(.

YES, OH MY DAYS. SWITCH THE SMOKE BACK TO F2!!!! The damage was never what I wanted from the pet anyway. That control over the smoke fields was SO kitten useful.

Here is the most likely reason for these strange undocumented changes:

They used the programming for Berserker for the live release, for some reason, and forgot to change some stuff.

- The resource dissipates outside of combat
- It now lasts 15s

There are other hints hidden in traits, such as Druidic Clarity becoming a stun-break.

As for the slow AF gain… well, let’s just put that down to under-tuning.

Here’s the location of the Smokescale in the Tangled Depths map:

!http://i.imgur.com/jaXk0O7.jpg!
!http://imgur.com/V2o7DRv.jpg!
!http://imgur.com/3qSLY4w.jpg!

The spawn seems a little irregular, but give it a few mins and they’ll appear

Donari.5237:

aB EXT.1287:

As a WvW focused player, this is completely unacceptable. The unlocking is totally random and will take a LOT of ranks to unlock everything for each of my many alts that I play frequently. You could easily spend weeks on one elite spec, only to have it be unusable because you don’t have the correct traits unlocked. This coupled with the removal of rank consumables makes this absolutely horrible.

This will increase the toxicity of WvW so much, as you can easily waste an entire day fighting against a server that simply will not let go of any objectives.

I think you misunderstood. You’re not getting random traits unlocked, you’re getting random PvE hero challenges unlocked without having to enter PvE zones. You can spend the points gained on any traits you wish.

Ahh okay, if that’s the case then I retract my objection. While the rank grind won’t be fun, at least I will have control over it. Thanks!

As a WvW focused player with many alts that I regularly play, I don’t consider this to be acceptable. This will also likely increase the toxicity of WvW, as you can easily waste an entire day fighting against a server that simply will not let go of any objectives.

EDIT: Misunderstood something.

It’s understandable that you may not like the direction that the ranger is taking. That is ALWAYS an issue with new expansions in MMOs; things need to change in order to keep the game feeling diverse, and there’s no guarantee that it will change in a way that you like.

However, giving yourself over to sensationalism doesn’t really help you or the direction of the class. Despite the fact that the druid is focused on healing, it adds a new dynamic to rangers in PvP scenarios, and if ANET has their way, will add a new dynamic to the true end-game PvE (raids). Ranger damage is still good, in all areas of the game; Pets are being worked on as we speak, having already received non-targeted damage resilience.

I primarily play sPvP and organised WvW and I have no immediate intention of playing a +healing druid. I will be playing it for the extra utility it provides via. AOE dazes (you can almost permanently daze a group for the duration of CA), AOE superspeed + stealth, extra CC (Ancient Seeds) and group health sustain. The staff also provides some awesome utility via immob, 1200 range mist form/blink and a projectile block. I am not short of QQ, by any means, but this elite spec really got me excited about the game again.

Druid is unlikely to be in high demand for current PvE content, and that’s okay, it is a zerk fest. It has been stated many times that the elite specs were intended to provide an alternate style of play (though I’d agree that some may feel like a straight upgrade at a glance), and Druids are looking to be very attractive for content that is actually challenging by modern MMO standards.

In short, try to keep in mind that just because the class didn’t evolve in a way you wanted, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty more people who are happy with its progress. If you think the Revenant will work better for your needs then play that instead.

That is your choice to make.

PLEASE nerf the Gun Flame damage, or limit it to 2 (maybe 3) targets. It is absolutely game-breaking in WvW, in both zerg and organised guild play. The ability to pop off instant 6-15k AOE damage (depending on if you hit train or casters) 3 times in short succession, with no way to avoid it (Signet of Might) aside from psychic dodge is completely broken in a large scale setting. It is already under ban-hammer consideration in accordance with GvG honor rules (sharing the Hall of Shame with things such as Venom Share).

As fun as it is to play, as a long term DPS warrior fan, I will be abandoning ship if this goes live and actively campaigning for its removal (for whatever good that’ll actually do). It is way too strong in its current state.

Hey man, look. I also main ranger, and I play organised WvW almost exclusively. The reason you’re getting so much backlash is because you attempted to assert your opinion as fact. You’re going about this wrong, man.

Rangers do NOT offer the same AOE damage and utility as eles, and they do NOT do as much AOE spike damage as necros. This is a fact. That is why they are more desirable in bulk, and are in demand. You’re not looking at the big picture here.

^This does NOT mean that rangers are useless. Rangers fulfill a niche role, and are fantastic to include in zergs, but they are not as useful in large quantities because they are primarily single target assassins with sprinklings of CC.

Don’t fight people on the wrong front. Accept what your class excels at and promote that instead if you want to lift the ignorance of commoners, and want the ranger to gain more widespread love.

Is Ranger a great addition to an organised WvW zerg/guild? Absolutely, yes. Is it a superstar, or close to it? Not really.

There’s one big reason that more and more guilds (including ‘top’ tier ones) have started to use at least 1 ranger and that is their superior ranged pressure, which excels in the current pirate-ship meta.

When you run with a skilled ranger in a GvG setting, you effectively remove any ‘safe-zones’ for enemy casters; there is nowhere for them to hide inside the fight outside of stealth (and even that won’t save them if the ranger starts a rapid fire before they are concealed). A skilled ranger will use clever positioning to protect themselves from enemy gankers, using friendly casters and stealth to drop enemy targeting and make them an unappealing choice to jump. They have the mobility to re-position effectively and the range to pick off, pressure or straight up murder targets from unreachable range.

Builds will vary, but it is very effective to run full zerk LB/GS if you have the awareness and skill to pull it off.

Is it currently an attractive choice to pick over a GWEN profession in PuG zerging? Nope. Does it fill a very specific role well, when played properly? Definitely. When played smart, a ranger is a very valuable asset; when played badly or ineffectively it is dead weight.

TL;DR – Git gud or go GWEN.

The druid allows you the option of healing. This game does not need dedicated healers and trying to build to do so is a waste of your, and your party/zergs time.

I have had a LOT of success with the druid so far, despite the several bugs right now. Even going full zerk with the druid is totally viable, as it allows you to lock down targets extremely effectively, as well as offering some sustain via. some strong healing when you really need it.

It may not work the way you wanted, which sucks for you I’m sure. However, your bait of a title is simply not accurate in any way. The only person you have convinced is yourself due to your bias.

Hi Irenio!

Played around with a couple of builds in various PvP scenarios tonight, and here are my thoughts:

- The healing in Avatar form is great. Even as full zerker you have very impressive health sustain. I’d even suggest bring down the base heal and bringing up the scaling, to make running +healing more rewarding.
- Some more damage on the Avatar skills would be nice. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but I don’t like the idea of having to drop ALL of the life resource that I’ve built just so I can go back to doing any form of reliable damage. Having the Life Seed (#2) do damage on explosion, Lunar Impact (#3) doing some sort of AOE damage, and/or the Tidal Surge (#4) skill also doing pulsing dmg like Irenio suggested in the stream would go a long way. Again, it doesn’t need to be a lot (or even all of the skills mentioned), just enough to make going into druid form more meaningful apart from only spam healing. #5 is nice, but it requires some setting up to land on half-decent players, which isn’t good considering it’s the only skill that currently does any damage at all.
- Moment of Clarity + Lunar Impact (CA #3) is kinda cheesy for PvE and PVP. 6s Daze on kitten CD, with a 1s cast. Even more broken than Technobabble!
- Staff damage needs to come up a little bit. We get that it was designed with support in mind, but that doesn’t mean it can’t at least have some respectable damage. I think it would be okay for the staff to be a ‘sustained’ damage weapon, as we already have GS and LB for power bursts.
- Staff #3 needs tuning. The cast time is always the same regardless of how far you go, which is troublesome.
- Any chance of evade frames making it into staff #3? It can be shut down relatively easily. Since rangers do not have any short CD stun-breaks, or reliable access to instant cast stability, you can literally find yourself running up against a wall (or line).
- Rangers/druids really need a shorter CD stun-break to bring them in line with many of the other classes. Some already had low CD breaks, and others got them with the elite specs. Maybe put one on one of the shorter CD glyphs? If we can’t get that, can we at least have one on SotW? That thing really needs to be instant.
- I really like the traits we have currently, great job! I’ve already found several different ways to use them effectively.

ALSO (bug reports):

-Please fix Quick Draw not working with Staff skills! I don’t know if this is intentional, as the wording of the trait does say ‘ranger’ weapon skills.
- Please allow us to use the new pets in sPvP!
- Please fix damage not filling the CA resource bar!
- CA resource generation seems very inconsistent between skills that actually generate it.

Thuggernaut.1250:

aB EXT.1287:

https://youtu.be/rG9-7XynxhY

Anet pls.

Gun Flame is completely broken in pretty much any situation with more than 2 targets (that are close together).

Gunflame is no more powerful than a traited Orbital Strike.

This is gonna sound pretty obnoxious, but I see no evidence of that being true. Gun Flame is superior in damage, the cooldowns are miles apart and the blast on OS is irrelevant if you’re using it offensively in ZvZ.

https://youtu.be/rG9-7XynxhY

Anet pls.

Gun Flame is completely broken in pretty much any situation with more than 2 targets (that are close together).

https://youtu.be/rG9-7XynxhY

I’ll just leave this here…

https://youtu.be/rG9-7XynxhY

I’m just gonna leave this here…

I’m also using something very similar, albeit with a few minor changes, and having a lot of success in every game mode (except that challenging PvE content that I hear GW2 has but have never actually seen). Extremely potent in 1v1, roaming and zerg play. It may not be ‘meta’ in sPVP but it is still very good.

Not trying to ‘out’ you in any way here, just giving you a response to each of your points:

Ranger pets – AI isn’t great but they are far from useless. Aside from soaking some ranged attacks and creating some breathing time, they have excellent F2 skills that can change the tide of a fight. If you manage them well they should survive anything outside of a WvW zerg fight.
Longbow DPS – Seriously OP outside of PVE. Every single ability on this weapon is strong.
Sword auto attack – True, it is very annoying to use and I avoid it at all costs.
Healing Spring – Good for trap rangers and is far from being the main source of condi cleanse for rangers (who are in a very good spot atm regarding that).
Lead the Wind – Incredible when fighting multiple opponents. Even if you don’t intend to hit more than one target it will almost always ensure that you hit your intended target with CC/Stealth shots when firing through a group.
Clarion Bond – Yeah don’t use this pls, it’s bad.
Zephyr’s Speed – Incredible now that it also has a mobility component in the form of super speed.
Strength of the Pack – Still strong as it allows you to ignore hard CC for a very long period of time. Rangers have enough stun breaks.

Please try to refrain from making such statements about things that you don’t use in your build due to w/e trait synergy you lack in what you use. A lot of what you said here is simply sensationalized and doesn’t apply to every one else who is using those things to great success.

Also, RE: WvW…

Power rangers are now extremely effective in open field fights and GvG. Go full zerker with runes of Vampirism to avoid focus party 1 shots if you don’t see it coming and deal out steady caster pressure, as well as assisting or actively participating in gank fights. Entangle is absolutely brutal if your positioning is good enough to use it effectively.

I’m sure there are builds for this but I’m happy to link my own if people would like that.

Man… I REALLY hate to be ‘that’ guy but with the exception of PVE it sounds like you have a L2P issue here.

Ranger, if played well, has no counter in the current state of the game (apart from a very well played PU Condi mesmer). Power ranger is in the best state it has ever been in for WvW and 1v1 PVP.

A lot of people seem to be struggling with thieves and mesmers 1v1, which is understandable. Stealth gives those classes the right of engagement, however, with a calm head you can mitigate a lot of their damage and retaliate brutally. In both cases, I highly recommend running the Quick Draw trait so that you can double your defensive attacks while you wait for them to open. In either case you NEED to bind a ‘sheath weapon’ key somewhere convenient so that you don’t kill yourself.

Thieves: Start in LB and get in combat asap if you can, waiting 2-3 seconds for their stealth buff to start running out. Switch to GS and use #4 to block. If they are stupid enough to attack you during this time they will regret it and eat a 4-7k Counter attack. If they wait it out then use #3 to evade and gain distance, by which time your #4 will be back up due to Quick Draw. The thief has now lost the right to engage effectively. If the thief re-stacks stealth (they will be very low on initiative in the second situation) then follow the same process as above but space out your defensive skills a bit more. You can also weave in dodge evades in either scenario. Keep in mind that you have your own access to stealth in LB and can punish thieves for trying to re-stealth with LB #4 when they drop Black Powder. If you don’t have LB #4 up then you can track them in stealth by using LB #2 just before they disappear in their BP. If you find yourself in a position where the thief is in stealth and you’ve got no defensive abilities ready then you need to use your pet skills (wolf/hound) to buy yourself time. The key to beating thieves is not panic pushing your skills.

Mesmer: Depending on whether or not they run PU for extra stealth this can be very difficult, but very do-able. Beating mesmers largely comes down to timing your blocks/dodges/evades/immunity to nullify their shatter damage and being aware enough to see the reflect visuals and stop attacking via your weapon sheath keybind mentioned above. 90% of shatters are not instant. In order for a mesmer to instantly 100% shatter you out of stealth they need to set up invisibility for their clones via Mass Invisibility and this usually happens after kittenually long period of stealth. The same rules apply during enemy stealth as with the thief; use your blocks/evades/invuln to avoid or soak damage after you see the tell tale phantasms/clones pop out of stealth before the player. You have enough access to these things to use the next available skill if you’re wrong. The main advantages you have vs. a mesmer are your stealth tracking rapid fire, your mass defensive chains and the fact that you can stealth off their clones with LB #3 (try to time this for 2/3 seconds after they go into stealth or use it to re-position if they are going ham in the open). You need to be ready to go full offensive after every shatter you avoid/soak. Don’t be discouraged if you die to an instant 100% shatter out of stealth… maybe ANet will fix that one day but don’t keep your hopes up. Like I said, there is usually a split second tell for when a shatter is incoming.

Ranger is, without a doubt, in the best position it has ever been in for ‘cookie cutter’ builds (for PvP purposes). The trait synergy is top-notch in my experience.

Eurantien.4632:

You’re good, but your pet control isn’t. Work on that!

Yeah a few of the fights had poor pet management, largely due to the fact that I was so focused on not dying or I spaced out and had my pet on passive without realizing and acting accordingly. I like to think those examples are an exception though, as even this video has several good uses of F2 skills. In time I’ll hopefully fix that all together. It’s actually the main thing I’m working on at the moment, now that I’m feeling pretty comfortable with the actual ranger abilities.

Wow, thank you all! I’m glad you enjoyed the video

To address a couple of points above regarding…

Movement speed: In a roaming situation it can definitely be a little rough, especially if you aren’t in combat yet and are being chased by a group (in which case I suggest you waypoint or use it as a chance to train your sneaky skills). The ranger hate is real and they will chase you to the edges of the map and back if they can. Despite that, however, you get almost permanent swiftness from your first minor trait in skirmishing while in combat, so that’s not really an issue. If you’re worried about falling behind you can just switch in SotH until you catch up like Justine said.

Double Air Sigils on LB: Yep, this does actually work! Despite the fact that major has a slightly longer ICD, it does the same damage as superior (which is more than Fire) and does not share a proc CD with its sibling. If the stars align (which they often do with such a high crit rate) you can proc both within a short time frame quite frequently. This is hell for anyone unlucky enough to be struck by you from range and can make your Barrage do significant damage to a target.

Full Zerker: Like a few people have said above, full zerker is the way to go IMO. In the current game state, you can be one shot (or close to it) by several classes regardless of whether you’re zerker or almost full PVT. Conditions are also super rude and ignore everything but vitality. I would prefer to kill someone before they kill me, using my defensive options to minimize enemy damage as I wail on them (several of the defensive abilities rangers have also have an offensive element i.e. Counter Attack). Thieves can be a problem, but if you rotate your defensive skills effectively then you should be able to kill them before you’re in a bad place.

Eyy folks,

Just finished uploading a little vidya that I gon did this week. Had some pretty nice scraps on the borderlands and put together a montage for my channel. Although this definitely isn’t an ideal time to be comparing classes, I’ve been aching to make some new content for a while and decided to throw something up this weekend. I’d love for you to have a look!

https://youtu.be/a__RDVogOO8

The build is in the description for anyone interested

Cheeeeeeeeers!

HatSimulator.9362:

1. Dueled a mesmer with full buffs, food and tools while he had none
2. dueled a ranger with full buffs food and tools with 25 stacks of whatever
3. fought only 2 sorta tanky eles. The rest were rangers, thieves, and the same mesmer
4. most of this wasnt roaming, it was outweighed duels.

cool build I guess, but I don’t see it working against anyone with armor or brains to capitalize on wasted dodges

and wtf was that engi doing? lol

Mostly fair observations. It does bother me that for some reason a fair amount of people were running without buffs that day. That being said, I personally don’t think I would have lost any of those fights had I not had more stacks than the opponent. I’m going to run without a stacking weapon next time I venture out for fights anyway. I have no argument with you on the weighted appearance of the video. I actually wasn’t really expecting to get so many fights that day (it’s usually super boring during daylight or super ganky in the evening), hence why I decided to make a montage.

That being said, I feel that the build is actually pretty well rounded. You have the potential to have constant high pressure due to your versatility, while retaining high HPS from adrenal health + signet, not to mention you’re pretty kitten tanky. If I were to improve (i.e waste less dodges) then it would be even more effective. The only hard counters I’ve encountered so far are condi PU mesmers and terror necros.

Hopefully I’ll get some 1vX fights this week to mix in (which is what you seem to be implying roaming actually is?) and see how it shapes up.

Going to look at possible revisions before I think about posting the build.

EDIT: Also, that engie was clearly either new or in full panic mode. Rifle totally counters bombs. Did all my melee damage with zerk stance active then gtfo. Poor dude(ette).

Hi guis!

So I came back to GW2 last month and made the decision to switch my main to Warrior. I decided to try something a little different and go for an enduring/durable rifle build. I’m absolutely loving Warrior these days, and hope to keep improving with time. I was very fortunate to get so many 1v1’s in one day (though I’d probably omit some clips if I had even more to choose from).

Anyhoo, here’s a montage I made from yesterdays roaming footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOOT5zB4cpg

Hope you like it and junk!

Valar Morghulis.7049:

Need moar BOMBS!

j/k nice build will have to try it out, thanks for posting oh and awesome intro song lol

Thanks mate! I actually have a cleave bomb build too. I’ll post a new video some time soon’ish.

edit//: Here’s an older vid of it from my guilds channel – http://youtu.be/os0mNtJPO3c

Hey folks,

Just finished putting this video together today. This is a montage of my latest WvW zerg build. My guild has wanted me to keep these builds under lock and key for a while now (I’m aware of how pretentious that sounds), but with the potential for big meta changes in the April 15th patch, I decided that I really wanted to share this with everyone that I can!

This footage was captured over two days this past week, so it’s not all golden. It demonstrates the build pretty well though, imo. I’ve learnt a lot about how I can improve just from watching it back.

http://youtu.be/sgjkAE9kmGI

Build is in the video description.

Hope you enjoy it <3

what kind of rotation would you recommend using for this build? i’m guessing there’s some sort of priority system?

Like the new areas, hate the stat buff

I personally don’t recommend going pure zerker (by that I mean zerker gear + deadly arts traits). You’re squishy as hell and you don’t bring enough to the team.

I’m currently running a 0/30/15/25/0 build, wearing full zerker, which works fantastically level 1-79:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAoaVlcmSPncy9E+5Ex2jeuTeyfwp9MuqVB

You get the same 10% damage bonus as you would running DA traits, without the useless (imo) slot choices. You’re gonna be dodging… a lot. All you really lose is the 250 power, which isn’t game breaking. What is game breaking is dying all the time because you wanted some extra digits on your crits.

Why 15 points in SA you might ask? Well, the 10 point slot bonus’ are amazing, seriously. You have the choice between 3 really fantastic options; IV (turns all your stealth abilities/combos into condition removal), V (OOC – allows you to stealth your team infinitely with BP + weapon swap SB blasts – seriously, people LOVE that kitten), and III (just in case your team needs a little extra regen). I advise switching between these (mostly IV and V) depending on what you’re expecting. The extra 5 points are for the previously mentioned perma stealth.

Quick Recovery and the Infiltrators Signet allow you more blasts over time with your SB, and allow SA V to grant perma stealth to the group (again, gotta be OOC to pull off those weapon swaps).

As with most builds, swapping weapons to be fight appropriate is key. If you know you can get up in melee range safely, S/P is the way to go for groups – D/P for single target. Blinds are your most valuable asset to the team, but know when you can safely get in and when you need to haul kitten out of there. Making sure your team is aware of the OPness that is blind is very important, keeping mobs grouped on your fields as much as possible. If the mobs aren’t stacked then you’re asking for a slap in the face.

Give it a try, personally I’ve found it hard to go back after using this build.

Personally, I recommend a 0/30/15/25/0 build. This is what I currently use for level 40-79. The only important traits are Executioner for CS, and Quick Recovery in Acro.

I switch between S/P and D/P depending on the fight ahead, with SB as the weapon swap (always). The trait slot in shadow arts can be changed between Shadows Embrace (turning all your stealth skills/utilities into condition removal) or Infusion of Shadow for perma stealthing your team through mobs they wanna skip using BP + weapon swap Cluster spam.

S/P will allow you to mitigate a LOT team of damage if your group pulls correctly (grouping them up for you), while dishing out really nice cone AOE damage. D/P is better for boss fights that you know you can get up close on safely. Shadows Embrace will give you a condition cleanse when you HS into BP. That means you get a Backstab + a cleanse.

Try it out, I find it’s by far the most useful builds I’ve run in PVE. Goes over well with the troops.

Hey there all,

I’m having a REALLY weird freeze/crash atm after re-installing the game. Every so often (at completely random intervals, sometimes I can go hours or minutes without it happening) my computer will just completely lock up. Audio will distort/stutter, my mouse and keyboard will become completely unresponsive, as will the OS to any kind of peripheral input. However, the game is STILL running as normal, I just lose control of my character. People are moving around as normal while I run into walls due to having an unresponsive keyboard. If I press the power button on my PC it will switch to the ‘force quitting applications’ screen, but the keyboard and mouse still do nothing so I have to do a hard restart. It’s basically a complete computer lock, except that everything is technically running as normal (with the exception of sound).

Some important things to note:
It’s not specific to certain areas of the game
My computer pretty much never crashes
I’ve tried it with and without Teamspeak 3 running
I’ve tried it with sound forced off through the .exe -nosound method
I’ve been monitoring my temps, and everything is normal
This has ONLY been happening since doing a fresh install of the game two days ago

Specs:
Win7 Ultimate 64bit
i7 3820 @ 4ghz cpu
GTX 560 gpu (not OC’d)
8gigs of RAM (not OC’d)
Any ideas?