Guild Wars 2

glock.6590:

You forgot shadow arts thief.

There’s a reason he didn’t put anything for thief. He most likely is one and believes 9.5k backstabs out of stealth and shadow arts in general is working as intended.

Taunt is an instant cast and not tied to the actual f2 skill, of course it can’t be predicted and evaded ALTHOUGH if you evade at the beginning just before the pet hits you , it does evade the taunt – which has been tested although it does go through blocks and invulns. The taunt happens at the start of the f2 skill… Now if you’re proposing instants should be able to be predicted and evaded which you can right now and can with taunt currently, then we need to look at every instant cast in the game and just put a cast time on it right?… I’m with you on it going through invulns though. It should be unblockable as well so that should stay.

Longbow is not skill based at all in team fights in pvp , the entire weapon set works off of 2 skills. 2 and 4 and then it’s auto attacking while they’re on cooldown. You get no benefit of going stealth in a team fight other than to stay alive for a few more seconds because thief will train you and you’ll just get focused coming out of it which leaves the auto attack and barrage. Barrage is an alright skill in that it provides a relatively long soft cc but the damage is utterly dissapointing and provides next to no cleave value compared to other classes and let’s be honest – any skill that requires you to stand in place for a >2 second channel makes you a sitting duck for focus especially with ranger – reason why it works for warrior is because the cleave dmg is insane from gs #2. Therefore, you’re reduced really down to 2 skills, Rapid fire and a knockback. Very simplistic weapon-set due to this. You spend your entire time in that weapon-set pressing 2 buttons and then getting focused afterwards against good teams considering one map only truly favors power longbow ranger (Legacy). How is that considered skill-based?

Also, valkyrie for ranger is crap, the amount of dmg now from this patch makes running any form of toughness/vit next to useless because the sacrifice of dmg is too great with no precision and I understand the build concept you’re referring to and honestly generating fury to get one crit from a maul with a low dmg coefficient is so situational it’s beyond pointless as most of your dmg in power ranger comes from auto attacks in longbow anyway as rapid fire has much lower damage and then you’ll spend your entire time auto attacking for 900 dmg with valkyrie as 24%-30% crit chance is very low for the build idea andddd if you’re running greatsword in a team fight against good players, you’ll just get focused and melted anyway as once signet of stone is popped and finished, it’s really just over for you.

Can we please get some boon stripping and port abilities and unique team viability and for god’s sake make longbow LESS one-dimensional and simplistic and make it more skill-based? Ranger has such simplistic weapons that are so one-dimensional and just don’t provide any wow factor to them at all that it makes me cringe. These are the reasons this class has next to no skill ceiling at all. GS is probably the best weapon we have in terms of this but the dmg coefficients are so low that running a zerker amulet on ranger is equal to any other class running soldier’s amulet.

This will help ranger alot in top tier PvP.

Puck.9612:

Don’t play PvE
WvW- worse off than before. We took some small nerfs , received some neat new tricks, but most of the other classes are in a much better place than before so they have passed us up
PvP- about the same, still fun to play, solid in 1v1’s, but they still didn’t do anything to address our weaknesses that keep us from being viable for high level PvP (lack of boon stripping and ports).

+1 on PvP , EXACTLY what I’ve been thinking. Lack of boon strip, port abilities and unique team viability. This in a nutshell is what ranger lacks for high tier PvP.

I don’t think they’re necessarily worse, we got buffs.. But a couple things to point out from nerfs we also received: Vigor uptime, huge for us – ranger relies on this for survival.

An important thing to note about PvP meta and it’s shaping is burst dmg is MUCHHHH higher across the board for all classes which makes zerker ranger not as good.

Burn dmg will be nerfed so yes, there are some gimmick builds running around primarily based around burn dmg stacking and dealing unreal damage but this won’t last long. It will be nerfed for sure, but burst dmg I imagine will be the same which is absolutely fine it just lowers the viability of power ranger… Once ranger pops stone signet and then is focused, it’s over ESPECIALLY against good teams who know ranger.

Really, I thought bark skin would be 50% dmg reduction and not 33% which would make it good for the burst builds now, because dmg is insane right now between thief / warrior / mesmer and engi. The nature magic GM protective ward i think it is that gives weakness and protection aoe is pretty good but the radius is really low, needs to be bumped up a bit – it is decent for thief’s opening burst and warrior melee burst I’ve found but other than that, it’s really not that good at all. There’s alot of other things.

The ranger weapons themselves are very simplistic and provide no ‘wow’ factor or great cleave at all which is why he ranger doesn’t really have a high skill ceiling. Cleave is essential for power builds in PvP and ranger just doesn’t have any at the moment as well. The longbow is ALRIGHT, but easily countered by sitting on you (thieves) and blinding you (thieves). Right now, all it takes is to put pressure on you while you’re in longbow and you lose your edge having to fight the thief that is on you which is what most good teams will do and you are literally out of the fight, where as more tanky classes who run the same power builds (with more dmg also, keep in mind GS and longbow have much lower damage coefficients than any other class) have more depth to them . Also , AOE in PvP is huge therefore pets die very quickly even with the 50% dmg reduction from barkskin which is only at >90% anyway I believe.

I just think they’re in the same spot because everyone else got really good buffs and adjustments to their builds. I’m speaking primarily from a PvP standpoint.

Spirits were the reason ranger was good, primarily sun spirit/stone spirit and the elite… But with those nerfed into the ground, you really won’t see ranger in any top tier tournaments for a long time until they get some unique team viability.

EDIT: I’m dumb and realized after i wrote all of this out that the OP was referring to only PvE. My bad lol , but oh well I’m keeping it here anyway. :P

Yea this definitely needs to be re-implemented. Please anet!

+1 Durzlla’s post … Really just make it baseline.

I will say , sun spirit is pretty OP at the moment in team situations , it melts targets who are focused in 4v4/5v5’s BUTTTTTTT the issue with this is burning will DEFINITELY be nerfed so really just have fun with it while it lasts, once burning is nerfed, sun spirit will be again be next to useless because spirits are pretty bad now.

Really the same in terms of position in top tier competitive PvP. Yes, they got buffed … But other classes got buffed alot more which basically puts them in the same spot. Rangers lack a unique usefulness to top tier team play because most of what they can do can already be accomplished by other classes that provide much more to the team… It’s really the reason you don’t see them being used at all after the spirit nerf. Power builds do ALRIGHT in legacy but once focused (usually by a thief) then you put their edge out of play because they need to focus on the thief now, etc… Really condi builds are dead for ranger because cele ele exists and thief is ridiculous counter to condi ranger and power ranger just gets focused instantly in a team fight so really , pretty much the same. Rangers I would say are even at the bottom now and necros are higher due to getting some viable build openings.

Of course, it’s too early to tell right now with all of the builds, rangers could play into some specific compositions but just from my experience so far in top tier it’s about the same. Hopefully druid may be able to bring some uniqueness in terms of team play to the table.

mistsim.2748:

blitzkrieg.2451:

When I talk about top tier, I’m talking about going against championship winners of the PvP tourney,

why do you talk about that which you’ve little clue about? stop throwing names around and living vicariously through others, and do some investigation.

I practice with top teams just about everyday lol… We test builds out regularly as it’s necessary to do that. I’m not throwing names out or living vicariously through anybody… I just happen to know good players and we practice together. Is there a problem with that? I don’t even know Phanta personally, but we do inner scrims all the time for practice because it’s easier to setup than finding each other in ranked arena.

“traps are for team fights, not “dueling phanta or whoever the kitten else”. the frost trap can pretty much shut down a fight in your favour, stacking up to 9s of chill if people don’t have condi cleanses; poison trap is probably ideal for killing bunkers. the aoe is huge so if they wanna keep the cap, they have to stay on the fields.”

I laughed at this, your thinking of pvp is so very beginner and one-dimensional it makes me cringe. Have you EVER fought against a top tier team before? A poison trap destroys bunkers? What on earth are you talking about, it’s one condition which will get cleansed so quickly , within 2 seconds of it going on cooldown it will get cleansed.

‘Stay on the point and eat a poison trap’ …. Many classes can deliver poison on a node and be much more effective than ranger, poison on a node is largely irrelevant anyway as it will get cleansed quickly, and as a trap ranger against a good team you will get focused because if you’re running both of those traps that means you have up to 1 stun break and good teams will know that and focus you the entire fight, seeing as you can no longer throw them you would then have to be on the point to drop them so you would essentially need to be in the node fight which you would die very easily from being focused without any good defensive utilities… Btw, engi has poison grenade barrage and does same poison , engi has more team utility , more cleave dmg than a poison trap and is also unblockable. Again, useless trap.

Guardians cleanse that very quickly also as do eles and necros and warriors if they were to run the shout build (it’s dead now but whatever) , and a good guardian will take off poison before using shelter and since the trap has an arming time now you can’t just drop it while he’s using shelter to apply poison right before the heal goes off because it takes too long – we tested it already. Also, spike trap can’t be dropped fast enough to even INTERRUPT a bunker’s heal so that skill is utterly pointless as well which would be the only good reason to use the spike trap as an ele can just aoe knockdown in earth anyway as well as a warrior’s rampage, but much more effective classes in top tier pvp and have the same abilities… There’s even many more reasons why they’re bad to list out but really, I think you should hopefully get the point by now.

mistsim.2748:

traps are for team fights, not “dueling phanta or whoever the kitten else”. the frost trap can pretty much shut down a fight in your favour, stacking up to 9s of chill if people don’t have condi cleanses; poison trap is probably ideal for killing bunkers. the aoe is huge so if they wanna keep the cap, they have to stay on the fields.

they have to be careful when buffing traps because they can get out of hand quickly, at least in conquest. spike trap probably needs to have a 25-30s CD traited, and cast time for laying down a trap needs a slightly lower CD, maybe 0.25s. otherwise theyre fine. ranger is very survivable with rabid gear, slotting 1-2 traps. Id say the trapper’s “role” is to kill bunkers and put immense condi pressure on a point.

the other change that would bolster traps is reverting bonfire range to 240, which would then make it possible to not slot the fire trap and go utility with frost or poison.

Didn’t duel phanta… Did inner scrims in a private arena with abjured. Traps are bad against top tier players, not enough impact to use as a utility skill. Ranger isn’t all that great in top tier anyway, but traps are just bad. When I talk about top tier, I’m talking about going against championship winners of the PvP tourney, not people in hotjoin or unranked arena… I know you haven’t played against players of this caliber yet on a daily basis like I have but once you realize how bad ranger is on this level you will.

Eurantien is really the only ranger I’ve seen who plays in the same league as the abjured and to be honest he has the same opinions because he knows , he’s played against top tiers constantly and consistently… ranger is just bad against top tier competitive pvp players. I know it’s hard for you to grasp that and understand it because you’re so delusional about the class itself that it’s really painful to even watch.

But yes, against top tier players who are the best of their class, ranger is easily telegraphed , easy to understand and traps do NOTHING to provide innovative play against them. It’s just a simple fact… Why would you run a trap ranger for frost, burning or a knockdown when a celestial ele gets all of this AND has 20x the team support and damage and survivability? This alone answers your question in why traps would simply not be good for top tier play.

I know people hate seeing the truth and will probably hate me for posting this but it’s honestly the truth. I really only scrim / rank against top tier players and also duel top known players of their class and it’s not a matter of l2p , it’s a problem with the skill ceiling and weapon abilities of the class itself. Ranger can’t go burst because there is none, ranger can’t go condi because against good players and a good team comp they get removed so quickly. You can’t hold a point with bunker ranger anymore because cele ele will destroy you especially now with the damage the way it is. In team fights you literally provide NOTHING an ele or warrior already doesn’t provide.

Simply put, ranger has NO spot in top tier competitive play which is why you won’t see one being used and traps do nothing to help that. They’re like I said “They’re not great but I like the playstyle” skills, but they’re not top tier or innovative at all. They’re dumbed down even moreso from the last patch because you can’t even throw them anymore, which they sucked even then. There’s a reason you haven’t seen a trap build since the BEGINNING OF THE GAME in an official tournament match (Paradigm anybody?).

So yea, traps are bad AGAINST GOOD PLAYERS, against bads you can run right over them which gives the illusion that they’re good. Most players in the ranger forums have never even seen an inner scrim between 2 top teams or had a chance to duel against truly good players so when they beat somebody in wvw or hotjoin or unranked they think their trap build is god’s next greatest gift to the GW2 ranger community and sprawl to the forums to express themselves on how traps are good because they beat a couple nobodies in a random arena or wvw. But in reality, against truly good players they’re just kitten.

Tragic Positive.9356:

blitzkrieg.2451:

The only useful trap is spike, pairing with an interrupt build.

GS (2 potential interrupts) / Shortbow (#5) / Taunt on pet f2 / Spike Trap / Nightmare runes .. Paired with quick draw puts your concussion shot untraited from 25 seconds to 7-8 seconds… Allows for alot of interrupts.

Other than that, traps are utter kitten.

Poison and Flame traps are both viable in PvE.

And Ice Trap is pretty viable on power builds now. It deals considerable damage.

So you’re saying you would take Ice trap over

Lightning Reflexes, Renewal Signet, Stone Signet and lose stun breaks and defensive utilities that you would need for a power build? Because you kind of need those for a viable power build. Atleast from a PvP perspective who scrims good players constantly like Phanta, Noscoc, etc…. Traps will never be viable on that tier of gameplay, ever. Not before the patch, not after the patch. Traps are just a ‘well, they’re not great, but i enjoy the playstyle’ thing and it ends at that. Which is fine, if you like the style of play traps bring then so be it, but they are FAR from viable.

Ehecatl.9172:

Having been playing a lot with Beastly Warden on my BM ranger I can say that it looks like taunt is going to be a major counter to stealth. If it’s an AoE effect that doesn’t need a target, like Beastly Warden, and the thief is caught in the radius they’ll start attacking whatever taunted them, breaking stealth.

Between taunt, reveal, and a strong channel skill a ranger has a fair few tools to counter thieves if they choose to take them. If more professions get access to AoE or otherwise targetless taunt that could be the counterplay we need.

Easily countered by blind, which thief has alot of access to now. Taunt isn’t THAT great against a good player but I see what you mean.

Sebrent.3625:

Shortbow … your pet taunts … you have at their flank.
Trap … they stand in it because they are taunted by your pet.
Longbow … they aren’t countering your rapid fire because of the taunt.

It’s another CC … so many good uses.

Yea man… Actually I’ve been fooling with an asura interrupt build for WvW

Shortbow: Interrupt on #5
Longbow / GS: Interrupts from both choose whatever you like but prob GS and has 2 potential CC’s with #4/#5
Taunt on pet f2
Nightmare runes : #6 fears
Spike Trap: Knockdown and unblockable
Technobabble

Coupled with quick draw for a 7/8 second concussion shot on weapon swap (insane nice) and a lower block cd / interrupt cd on GS.

Out of all of them though the taunt is the best due to the way it works in general. Very nice skill overall.

It’s alot of fun chaining CC on players

You’re not seeing just how good this skill is..

Thieves: you can use f2 in an aoe and make the thief target AND attack the pet to put him out of stealth
Warriors: When they go for a killshot you can use your pet f2 to taunt the pet and divert that dmg to your pet and then swap
Mesmer: same with thief after they mass invis / or pop torch invis (or decoy)

Not only does it interrupt, but it physically makes them target the pet which can hurt play for the other person in combat.

This is from a PvP perspective, I really don’t see it being that useful at all in PVE though.

They’re not any source of dmg, and definitely not enough to justify using up utility slots especially since you can’t throw them… Even being able to throw the traps, they were still bad… Now there’s really no point at all to use any other trap except maybe spike.

Super situational too and relies on playing against melee only specs that need to be on you now , a class that can kite (mesmer for example) will not be affected by your traps at all because you have to be on them in order to do anything to them.

A rare, but good situation against a guardian could be using spike trap on their shelter heal because of the unblockable aspect but again, you need to be on them to do this and it has added time dropping the trap too now.

The only useful trap is spike, pairing with an interrupt build.

GS (2 potential interrupts) / Shortbow (#5) / Taunt on pet f2 / Spike Trap / Nightmare runes .. Paired with quick draw puts your concussion shot untraited from 25 seconds to 7-8 seconds… Allows for alot of interrupts.

Other than that, traps are utter kitten.

Another thing to point out, use taunt for thieves in stealth if you’re going into beastmastery, it makes them attack the pet and puts them out of stealth and it’s good against many classes for diverting burst from you. I can’t stress how well it works. Taunt is a very useful thing to have, and is very good for active play.

My current setup is

Marks / BM / Wilderness Survival… amulets I’ve been trying: Marauder, Sentinel’s, Valkyrie. All pretty good amulets with some tradeoffs between dmg and health. Sentinel’s is actually really good with remorseless because of the toughness and health it offers.

I use raven / white raven as bird pets.

This is obviously for PVP … In WvW you’ll have alot more options in terms of gear and more dmg overall because of that and food.

Run the valkyrie amulet with wurm rune (26.6k hp / 1,150 ferocity) with gs/longbow and sigil of intelligence on GS with remorseless and SOTF .. with the fury generation you’re getting tons of crits … it hits like a truck and massive HP .. build around that base and you should have a good power build.

Also run bird pets … Their f2 + your GS or longbow burst is insane…. It’s really a huge amount of dmg w/ remorseless up. Make sure to run taunt so you’re interrupting them as well.

I’m not sure how i like idea of transforming into anything, given how badly norn transforms are and rampage isn’t all that great with pathing either (thankfully it has huge aoe so it makes up for it though).. From a pvp perspective it could be very bad, but they could recode it for druids , IF that is indeed what they’re getting but we’ll have to see. I hope it’s good!

mistsim.2748:

Wuselknusel.4082:

Then you don’t seem to play against very experienced opponents.

been playing against/with caed, phanta, etc. all day. I think im in the right general bracket?

Bullkitten… You are not killing phantaram or any top tier player with traps unless MAYBE he’s running fresh air zerker which isn’t viable at all anyway and he doesn’t use in tourneys or serious play… Please just stop right now. You’re beginning to make yourself look like a fool.

As someone who knows phantaram and half of the abjured as well as radioactive and GF when they were alive (and practiced with regularly) I can guarantee you , you are not killing anybody on that team in 1on1s or team play with traps. Sorry man. Stop bullkittenting.

Traps are worse now, spirits are worse now … Traps will never be truly good as long as they take up all of your utility slots… Needs to work like engi kits work, would make it much more viable, and much more fun.

45 second cooldown untraited that isn’t effective against good players and takes up a utility slot. once again, and time and time again it has been said … traps aren’t good because they take up too many utility slots… they need to work like engi kits, otherwise they will NEVER be used in top tier competitive gameplay or against anyone who has a brain. it’s really that simple. traps will never be good because they don’t provide enough impact for taking up a utility slot when you can just get the same condi app from running specific weapon sets and get useful defensive utilities.

Staff ele isn’t that good in any game mode now. no dmg and you’d be playing a bunker role in supporting allies, again, goes back to what i was saying their core traits alone make them good support options, not the elite spec alone. this is why it would be bad design.. you would give us an elite spec that does half of what the core trait systems ele already does, and does better as you would need to use staff in order for it to work, you would prob lose dps. also no condi removal , which ele has group wide removal packed into their trait lines which also allows them to be good at staff ele (it’s really meant as a counter to condi builds and area denial) , ranger has only personal condi removal and it’s rng within a 10 second window or you can run all survival skills (all personal , selfish skills that benefit no team) and run SoTF. them designing to be LIKE anything that currently exists will be just dumb. it needs to be unique for it to work , or else people will just be staff eles/support guardians.

in order to survive as a ranger, and this has always been the case is to run completely selfish utilities just to keep the ranger alive in combat whereas most classes get groupwide defensive utilities to help keep themselves and their team alive. that’s one unfortunate flaw in the ranger’s design entirely and still will remain after the trait changes. there actually will be even more pigeon holing because now both condi removal options ranger has (outside of generosity, which again is still personal removal) will be GM’s in one defensive trait line, which also only consists of personal/selfish survival utility. Ranger will never be a good option for teams in terms of support for this reason, but dmg roles can exist.

healing spring can be used , and aoe shouts can be used, but again… staff ele does healing fields better, on less cooldowns and warriors have much better shouts and celestial dmg options with those shouts unlike ranger, which loses an incredible amount of dps going celestial as part of our dmg is slotted into the pets , which die in most group situations quickly, especially hard hitting pets like birds. canines are much better for this but still, also die really quickly fighting in groups.

really… ultimately, id like to see pets reworked in terms of AI , and better support options and traps reworked entirely (have them work like a kit , where you can hit one ‘trap kit’ and your trap options come up) so you can run utilities with traps and not be forced to run no defensive utilities jus to use traps , or if that’s not possible then you need to rework them so there’s more of a threat to walking on the traps to compensate for loss of defensive utilities. this is why engineers are so good with kits, traps should really work the same way, for all classes not just rangers (thieves/dragonhunters).

anyway, i’m curious to see how they do staff… will it be control + power , condi + control? how will this pan out? im hoping control + power but could be condi.

I hope it doesn’t resemble either staff guardian or staff ele because it needs to be unique… If it resembles either of those, then you would just go with guardian or ele. I’m pretty sure they would keep this in mind when creating the elite spec, but then looking at the record of what they’ve done with the ranger class since the beginning of game I wouldn’t hold it past them.

No, I want staff druid to be so unique not resemble any existing class that can do everything better. Staff ele has much more to it’s core trait system that would make it a much better alternative if you had to compare, same with guardian. If they make it to be just like those 2 , then there’s no point making it to begin with.

Delete post Delete post Delete post Delete post Delete post Delete post Delete post

i think the reveal coming out of stealth was intentional and they just didnt mention in the patch notes or ‘forgot’ because shadow refuge now works and it was bugged after this patch 5 minutes ago.

im pretty sure that was intended. the reveal out of shadow refuge was bugged. they’ll probably announce this.

theyve already acknowledged it as ab ug on twitter and working on it

I would be fine with mantras, but not the insanely long cast times of those mantras like mesmer has. That cast time is so bad it makes them not even worth playing with.

Will still get wrecked by thieves, but the elite does look decent.

Biggest counters I see are blind spam thieves ( still , always has been a problem)

and

Interrupt mesmers while in GS , they will simply kitten necros with the new changes theyre getting to interruption skills.

Ranger traits got moved from minor to GM traits before. It’s not odd, it’s just really good for what it is… Think about the other trait lines you can go into now with more points to spend… Just because you lose the 20% dmg by having to choose Fresh air over Bolt doesn’t mean the destruction of fresh air eles… They’ll still be really good.

Curunen.8729:

blitzkrieg.2451:

Curunen.8729:

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

One thing to note though is that only 2 classes at the moment in pvp that are able to fill multiple roles in top tier is elementalist and warrior and have multiple viable builds for those roles.

Every other class though suffers the same as mesmer. That’s an issue moreso with the pvp conquest system and balance rather the limitation of mesmer.

If you play guardian, engi, necro, ranger, thief, mesmer – you may be able to adjust traits a little bit here and there, but your role will always be the same and for the most part the utilities will usually be the same which is essentially the same as having only one build that works in reality. This is also why only a few builds work for those classes in top tier (with ranger and mesmer being exceptions, they really only have 1 viable build in top tier – spirit and shatter). This is, again an issue with the nature of gw2 pvp that will never be changed.

Fair enough, it is a core problem with gw2 pvp structure.

I have not played all the classes to a good skill level, so my judgement on builds available is not through experience but just going by things I’ve read/watched and fought against – in my mind I thought engi, ranger and thief at least had the choice of different weapon sets and build specifics – some obviously better than others but still viable – compared to mesmer with fixed weapon choice, fixed trait choice, fixed gear choice, and largely fixed utility choice.

I don’t know enough about necro to comment on that, being the only class I have not played, although I am aware it is in a bad position in the pvp game state.

Yea true, I think in terms of build mesmer is the only one that literally needs to run the same utilities and same exact traits for tPvP viability, I’d say the closest is ranger but even ranger can switch up their utilities and still be semi-viable including weapon sets (you can run short bow sword dagger or you can run axe/d sword/t , those are really the 2 combinations that work best). Every other class though may have to run the same meta builds around their role, but they atleast have some more flexibility around traits to accomodate a playstyle within that role and diff utilities with some minor exceptions (warrior – zerker stance, necro corrupt boon, etc). Mesmer literally has none atm.

Fay.2357:

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Agreed, shortbow on thief allows them to assault another point and be back to help a mid fight in a matter of 5-10 seconds with sstep and #5 shortbow if necessary. It also allows them to decap while nobody is there quickly and efficiently and get out quickly and efficiently if in the event one of their players makes it back and gets an edge on you. Thieves are the best point assaulters in the game due to that mobility.

Because initiative system exists and #5 exists on the shortbow for thief, and im not even including the areas where you can blink to spots you would have to go all the way around on a normal class, it will always be the best mobile point assaulter. Yea you have blink on mesmer, but to be honest that’s used more defensively in combat and reserved for that than exploiting it for mobility in terms of point assaulting.

Mesmer needs to actually commit to a specific event whether point assaulting or team fights unless they have portal rdy, which goes on a high cooldown after used so it’s a one time thing and probably better used once you’ve actually gotten a point anyway with a portal alrdy setup at far / home to help defend home or assault far.

Curunen.8729:

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

One thing to note though is that only 2 classes at the moment in pvp that are able to fill multiple roles in top tier is elementalist and warrior and have multiple viable builds for those roles.

Every other class though suffers the same as mesmer. That’s an issue moreso with the pvp conquest system and balance rather the limitation of mesmer.

If you play guardian, engi, necro, ranger, thief, mesmer – you may be able to adjust traits a little bit here and there, but your role will always be the same and for the most part the utilities will usually be the same which is essentially the same as having only one build that works in reality. This is also why only a few builds work for those classes in top tier (with ranger and mesmer being exceptions, they really only have 1 viable build in top tier – spirit and shatter). This is, again an issue with the nature of gw2 pvp that will never be changed.

Eurantien.4632:

Regardless of top tier or not mesmers and necros have a lot more they bring to the table than a ranger does atm. Necro counters everything in the meta atm. War, engi, ele, guard are all < necro because of the skills they have, mainly corrupt boon and the amount of damage they can do through a fear chain. As for mesmer, they aren’t easy to play, neither is power ranger atm but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. When compared to ranger in PvP then ranger has no utility for a team regardless of tier, while mesmer brings portal and it’s elite which are both potentially huge utilities for a team.

As it stands:
Tier 1: Engi, Ele, War
Tier 2: Guard, Necro, Thief
Tier 3: Mesmer, Ranger

Couldn’t agree more. There needs to be some insight from devs on what they plan to do regarding these kinds of issues. I just don’t see it happening anytime soon though no matter what is proposed and they could very well make things worse with each change. I hardly play the game anymore, only to get on a little bit and pve from time to time now when I’m really bored and have nothing else to do… I’ve pretty much given up top tier tpvp with my ranger a long time ago until they fix things and add some more depth to power builds and trap builds.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I always thought a good spirit or trap ranger makes a good bunker. Not as well as guardian/warrior but still does a decent job. Anyone want to enlighten me :O?

Currently mesmer tPvP meta (GS/Staff) is more about boon strip/damage from range. Portal is good for getting around but I find mesmer having hard time in hold points alone. Or we could discard point capture and play PU to harrass people and bring number advantage. Both seems to be very niche roles and limited options.

Traps ranger is nothing close to a bunker and is not viable at all, hasn’t been for a long time , i think probably a year now.

Spirit ranger is decent at bunkering a point, but it’s more a team role spec than anything and is getting replaced more by warrior and d/d ele with celestial , much tankier and more dmg and more boon support (ele) and team support overall. Besides, the only rsn spirit ranger is brought now is because of the elite which can be interrupted, so there’s really no point anymore because good teams know to interrupt the res except the on death res, which is unreliable because it relies on them killing it after you’ve used your active, which they’ll probably target down the spirit elite first in a team battle anyway so it all becomes irrelevant.

Ranger is just not viable anymore.

Mesmer is almost more viable right now than ranger is, and it’s not THAT viable either but it has a few good roles but i’d say theyre pretty much the same because they both only fill 1 niche role for their team in their own respective way, mainly portal plays with a team that knows good rotation with portal and can play to it and boon stripping to completely annihilate a mid battle with guardian / d/d ele (which is in the meta, so mesmers roles became more essential with this celestial patch). Mesmer is much more viable now because of that, might is what makes d/d ele strong in battles and boon sustain , if it’s constantly getting stripped. It takes them out of the equation. Necros would be able to but they don’t have the escapes/invis sustain that mesmers have (another reason why you see only 1 necro in the voting panel too).

I’d say at this point in the game , simply because celestial d/d ele – warrior and guardian are in the meta pretty heavily , mesmers role became much more useful. Eliminating boons from those very 3 classes destroys them in a group setting.

Also, setting up burst on a target with ~20 vuln is easy to do with mesmer. Helseth does this alot in group encounters with sizer (thief)/rom(warrior). Apply a -20% dmg mitigation and immediately the thief went from a less dmg acro thief to basically a thief with 30 in crit strikes in terms of damage , also rom’s eviscerates hit for a considerable more amount of dmg once this is applied. They do this alot in team plays.

It’s how you play your mesmer’s advantages. They can’t bunk points of course not, but they dominate in team fights if played correctly and they can allow for great portal play rotations if played right.

Pretty much in TOP TIER tPvP the tier goes like this:

Tier 1: Engi, Ele, War
Tier 2: Guard, Necro, Thief
Tier 3: Mesmer, Ranger

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Players with half a brain can easily circumvent your maneuvers and your backstab becomes a face stab, or worse.

lol.

This makes me laugh because Thieves don’t walk around the target to get the backstab, the target exposes their back for the Thief every time. Players like you who “maneuvers” when a Thief goes in stealth thinking that we’re going behind you exposes your back every time which make you the perfect target for backstabs. All the Thief to do is stealth, then wait for target to “maneuver” thinking they’re so clever by turning around, then backstab. lawl.

This pretty much, most smart thieves just wait for you to open yourself up for the backstab.

DeWolfe.2174:

I’m feeling it too OP. On my condi thief build, since it has very poor burst and no cleeve, Short bow and specifically Cluster Bomb was the only thing I really had for multi-target damage. Especially when trying to fight off PU Mesmers.

This and the horrid decision to remove the ability to mug and stealth on steal really diminishes my thief. This is my one and only fully ascended character. Being Condi, it was always worthless everywhere but, in WvW. Now it’s not really worth taking in there either.

The question though is was CB supposed to be doing 3×3 AoE? Certainly each individual bomb should have it’s own AoE radius and at least hit 3 targets each. Otherwise they should be little heat seeking missiles then. Oh, and CB’s movement speed should be seriously increased as well.

Wait, you’re having trouble with mesmers on thief?

Know their cooldowns, and take out phantasms, avoid pistol stun, continually apply poison (and condition strings if youre condi, which mesmer should literally be the easiest class for you to face as a p/d condi thief )

Also, don’t use shortbow anywhere besides PvP .. it’s only good for teleporting and applying group combat burst from distance and poison field for downed enemies while your team cleaves.

Please learn2play

Id say zombify/noscoc, they both stream and are insanely good necros although noscoc doesnt stream as much

zombify: http://www.twitch.tv/thezombify
noscoc: http://www.twitch.tv/noscoc

carrion much better id think, look at Noscoc and how he plays with it. it’s very effective.

Rym.1469:

Signet of Renewal is a stunbreak, together with Shared Anguish

Yes I should have quoted the 1st build that was running 3 traps when I wrote that message.

I would argue better pets and better power options and some more group build options besides spirits. Right now, if you go power. You’re not REALLY power, more so what a hybrid would be with other classes except you don’t have the survivability that comes with being a hybrid that other classes get going hybrid example: d/d ele, celestial engi, celestial warrior.

The reason is the dmg coefficients on weapons being lowered coupled with the traits that just don’t synergize completely for power builds are only detrimental really to power setups and you just don’t see it as a ranger UNTIL you run power.

If you go FULL ON power , meaning no survivability at all power then yes, you do alot more damage, but if somebody sneezes on you , you will die (this is where being good with positioning especially in a tPvP sense comes into a play, but even then there’s only so many spots on the map and rangers get no blinks/teleportation like other zerker counterparts) but you have literally nothing in condi removal and barely anything that you can count with direct dmg mitigation like other classes that go full power get except maybe shatter mesmer (protect me ,stone signet, which isnt BAD , but it’s still 2 utility slots , thankfully protect me is a stun break though), but then again, compare shatter mesmer power burst with longbow power burst and you’ll see the glaring problems in a comparison of balls to the wall power build setups.

We sacrifice more to do much less dmg than every class that sacrifices to get dmg that makes a much more impact without any group utility while other classes get burst impact and most of the time even coupled with OR have the option to have group support except possibly our renewal signet if you chose to run that however doing so with signet of the beastmaster would almost instantly kill you unless you did it in conjunction with a guardians cleanse but then if a guardian has to cleanse you after, what’s the point of aoe condition removal in the first place then – hence it would then probably just be selfish as you would never push the active meaning you would probably take something like lightning reflexes instead.

Our only truly traited condition removal lies in 2 highly defensive trees, one of those condi removal options being completely passive something which I hate to begin with , especially something that’s important and should almost always be actively handled with like conditions. Survival of the fittest isn’t bad though, I feel like that’s probably the only good new GM trait we got in that patch, it’s just 30 deep in a vit/boon duration tree meaning you sacrifice yet again, power for little condi removal which wouldn’t effect us if our dmg coefficients didn’t suck.

Alot of our group-wide traits exist mostly within our beastmaster line. A line that only promotes builds in which are selfish and aoe factors in this trait line have no synergy at all with running a team build. (AOE Vigor, which can be handled by horn warriors anyway, not saying any would run such an offhand in tPvP , but you see that ALOT in WvW).

To me, besides pets which they did do an alright job of fixing (f2 still doesn’t work in most cases but it’s better than what it used to be which is saying alot, pathing still isn’t GREAT and pets don’t do enough IMPACT dmg except canine knockdowns – there needs to be more impact damage existence that can compare to canine knockdowns, it’s good and reminds players why rangers have a pet when they get knocked down and to possibly look for that animation later on while they’re fighting a ranger. I feel like this is the presence most pets should have whether it be a support presence or an offensive presence… As of right now I think the only other pet with a similar presence is the immobilization on spiders and maybe the burst on raven (used to be atleast before nerf to dmg). Also needing to be looked at is the group-wide build options being opened up besides just running spirits which gets old but also power build survivability options. Opening up group-wide build options with actives to help the group as opposed to all passive or mostly passive builds, but active/high skill ceiling build setups as well.

I just don’t know how to approach it and it seems like no matter what gets proposed it will most likely get ignored anyway, unfortunately.

Eh, Niah is alright, after watching him play there’s been many many mistakes made by the ranger, not saying he’s bad but he’s not the best and he has a team of really good players to carry the downsides – but I guess that’s the point of a team right? Besides, I think there’s only 3 rangers now that still play in top tier being Niah, Eurantien, Nnight? Shame though that almost every ranger that used to be really good no longer plays now (Tany,Vyndetta, Folly, Genyen, there’s many many more)..

Niah has run spirits ever since he ran non-spirits in that 1st ToL because non-spirits is simply not viable and anything but spirits are very selfish specs.

Those selfish specs, good for back point, but then you’re forced to sit on a back point because you provide nothing but condi harassment in a team fight and one groupwide condi clear if you’re running renewal.

Those trap builds are decent (and have been around a while, oh how I remember when this was the best spec for ranger ^^ ) but the build lacks one important feature… Stun breaks. Honestly, I’d drop frost trap – no point to use it, long cooldown with such a low amount of chill, use lightning reflexes instead and get some vigor uptime in there as well as a stun break / immobilization removal. Like against alot of classes, you need atleast one stun break to win especially with a trap build otherwise they’ll just abuse that fact that you have none once they realize you run trip traps (good players will notice it too). The traited stun break isn’t enough and is on a high cooldown as it is, but it’s good to have too.

This with a 0 0 6 4 4 might stacking build is good… Your rune bird gets burn procs as well if you run sun spirit. It’s really good ^^

Curunen.8729:

@blitzkrieg – I’m confused – if you’re not bothered at the state of the class at the moment, then why go to all the effort of arguing with pretty much everyone in this forum about it – rather than let complainers complain and you just get on and play?

Seems you’re more bothered about people complaining than they are about the state of the class.

When you hang out with good mesmers all the time who do extraordinary things (coincidentally, the very same mesmers who never come to the forums to complain) and are among some of the best in the entire game, then come to the forums and see nothing but a bunch of bads whine about petty nerfs. It gets frustrating to watch so I try to educate them, but you can’t make people better with words on a forum, they have to do it themselves. Roll each class, learn all the cooldowns and understand the positioning and the many ways you can counter and get countered by other classes. Most of these mesmers want kitten handed to them, that’s not how it works though. You have to duel top tier players consistently / play in high level tpvp consistently to truly understand your potential. Most of these kids just run around in gank groups in wvw fighting uplevel garbage and noobs who depend on stats and play against noobs and never really learn how to counter the meta builds that exist in the game then come here and whine about everything another class has and what they don’t have then wonder why the state of the game is in shambles. It’s hard to cater to noobs and good players at the same time, both want 2 separate things.

One wants to be casual and have it easy – the majority who come to the forums and complain about other classes and nerfs that really don’t effect high level gameplay.
One wants it to be technical high level gameplay – the people who really never show their face on the forums and adapt to whatever occurs still consistenly dominating in top tier pvp.

There’s a reason why supcutie and helseth , 2 of the best mesmers in the game and also chosen for nomination at gamescon never talk about kitten like this on the forums, because they’re good, and there’s many other top tier mesmers like them that literally never talk on the forums because it’s pointless – why would they? It’s filled with garbage. They’ll release a guide in hopes that the masses get better at the class but no, they all just ignore it and then move on to the next forum to complain about the next thing wrong with the game. It’s just dumb, and it’s a horrible trend in this game , not just with mesmer but with almost every class.

I’ve wasted enough of my time anyway, im done with this thread because it’s just filled with bads who whine about every little thing and go on and on and on about what they don’t have compared to other classes.

you probably won’t win against a good ranger or thief who knows your telegraphs. good rangers who understand staff ele , even condi specced can easily take you down or at the very least stalemate with you. thieves who understand the windows of opportunity against a staff ele will know when to drop down your hp and what to avoid at the same time. its really tough against good ones.