Guild Wars 2

Ranger

• Improved the effect chance on ranger spirits to 35% base and 50% when traited.
• Beastmastery minor traits now use the correct icon.
• Splinter Shot: This skill’s damage is increased by 150%, and its bleeding duration is increased from 3 seconds to 4 seconds.
• Counterattack: The blocking portion of this skill can now be used while moving. Ranged attacks will not trigger the second half of the skill.
• Protecting Screech: This skill now states the correct duration of 4 seconds.
• Call of the Wild: The Wilderness Survival trait Off-Hand Training now applies to this skill.
• Throw Torch: The speed of the projectile has been increased.
• Maul: This skill’s damage has been increased by 40%.
• Sun Spirit: The tooltip for this skill now displays the proper burning time of 3 seconds.
• Whirling Defense: This skill was updated so that it interacts better with combo fields.
• Splinter Shot: This skill is now a small projectile combo finisher.
• Coral Shot: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.
• Feeding Frenzy: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.
• Mercy Shot: This skill is now a projectile combo finisher.

Rangers everywhere rejoice!

Honestly, this is exactly what I expected.

They do this in NA primetime regularly.

I have 2 chars with full exotic. I like to WvW and I hate dungeons. I’m probably done after this new patch comes out.

For PvE, anything is viable. For WvW. No.

The stat difference is not minuscule at all. The increase in MF on the sample item is huge. Replace MF with +crit damage and you’r talking +30-40 damage across all of your armor and trinkets, which is an insanely large increase in power.

And since when is 8% on other stats small anyway? That amounts to something like +150 to your main stats. Not to mention ascended weapons will have higher base damage than normal weapons, making them mandatory as well.

The new gear is perhaps the right direct for the PvE side of the game, but its the wrong direction for WvW. It is now clear that WvW should have its own dedicated gear like SPvP.

People are underestimating how large a power increase this armor could give. If the +% magic find is replaced by +% crit damage on every armor piece, you’re talking something like +40% crit damage for getting the new armor in every slot. These new items will mandatory for high level WvW.

The difference between warriors and thieves: thieves can perma invis land their burst without you seeing them coming and easily escape. Warriors have to take risks to get into range and 100b is much easier to avoid.

Mesmers excel at 1v1. My suggestion is run away and get backup, because you will never beat a decent mesmer with a ranger. Mesmers are especially hard for rangers because confusion absolutely destroys the shortbow, they have projectile reflection and rangers don’t have good AOE or burst to get rid of clones and phantasms quickly.

I just dropped 40g for full exotics on my warrior last night. This makes me very, very sad.

Ranger is pretty decent. Needs a little work and probably won’t ever be top tier, but its not bad. I like to play classes that are not overpowered.

@ florence.1674

Do you even have a warrior? They aren’t that good honestly.

Any build can work, but some are more efficient than others. Shortbow with piercing shots is one of the most efficient leveling tools we have. Line the enemies up, target the last one in the line, take em down. I offhand a greatsword for close range aoe damage and tankyness. Fire trap to apply burning/aoe damage. QZ for more damage.

BillyGoatsGruff.4695:

the match up is a little unbalanced after TC got a huge server transfer from HoD. CD is very aggressive and held well last week. We will see who will win.

TC hasn’t gotten any significant transfers of players since launch. We just have a lot of players who are hitting level 80 and starting to get interested in WvW.

@arminius.5270

I’m glad you found it somewhat useful. I was hoping not to be too long-winded, but since there seems to be some interest I’ll provide a little few more thoughts.

@ Ahrounmoon.9148

I always use quickening zephyr and signet of stone for WvW. Even with the SB nerf QZ is our best source of burst damage and it still works quite well with sword or greatsword. The third utility skill I change based on what I feel like using or what I’m doing: signet of the wild for wall/zerg fighting at range, protect me or lightning reflexes for small groups and solo roaming.

I prefer greatsword as a secondary weapon over sword for a couple of reasons. First, you don’t get rooted in place when you auto attack and the damage is about the same. Second, the auto attack chain on GS provides a fair amount of evasion which lets you avoid 30-40% of damage in melee. With QZ, the amount of evasion seems to increase substantially. Third, swoop is very useful for getting in and out of combat. I believe it is the shortest cooldown movement skill of 1000+ range in the game. Finally, greatsword has a block skill. Block skills are easy to overlook as being bad because they are very situational, but it can be a godsend if you know a thief is about to attack you from stealth or you are about get hit by a strong NPC. Other than that, I find sword 2 and 3 to be quite awkward and inconsistent.

For my elite I use rampage as one unless I feel like jumping off a tower to root some people at a gate. Both root and rampage are good, but 20 seconds of stability without having to transform into something weird is amazingly useful and too many enemies can escape roots without breaking them.

As for pets, I prefer dog model pets (wolf or fern hound) and the raven for WvW. Dogs have good damage, a good knockdown, decent tankyness and decent F2 skills. The raven’s F2 is the highest damage skill for any pet and it blinds.

In my opinion, Vitality is overrated and should not be a focus for rangers. As long as you have decent condition removal (we have healing spring, which is amazing, and several other solid options) the main purpose of Vit is to survive a large burst of damage at the start of a fight. Once a fight starts and you lose your initial HP advantage, vit does nothing. Toughness increases the value of each hit point you have, so the more healing you get during a fight, the more valuable toughness becomes. Vit is best for classes that have low natural HP. Since rangers have medium natural HP,the ability to stay at range most of the time to avoid big damage and signet of stone/protect me to help survive huge bursts, Vit is less valuable for us.

People will tell you different things, but I can share my thoughts as a SB ranger with about 3000 WvW kills.

SB is often thought of as a condition weapon because it can apply bleeding, but it is more powerful as a direct damage weapon for WvW. The direct damage on SB is fairly low for each shot, but it shoots very fast so it ends up doing much more direct damage than the longbow. Condition damage is not viable as a primary source of damage for a ranger in WvW because you need flank to apply bleeds and condition removals abound.

Stat allocation depends somewhat on your secondary weapon and what you want to do in WvW. If you want to use SB/LB build and only fight at long range, a full glass cannon build of power , prec and crit damage works pretty well. Just don’t expect to live too long if you are jumped by a thief or get focused by a zerg.

If you want to use any of the ranger’s melee weapons, have a chance against thieves and have better overall survivability, I recommend a build of toughness, power, precision and crit damage.

I personally use SB and GS, full knight’s gear, knight’s/berserker trinkets, berserker jewels, runes of ranger and a 30/25/15/0/0 trait allocation. 30 points in power with signet of stone is required for WvW rangers imo. This skill has saved me more times than I can count. Despite its long cooldown, I much prefer signet of stone to “protect me” since you can’t count on your pet to be alive in WvW and popping “protect me” when getting hit by a lot of enemies kills your pet in 1 second, making it next to useless when you need it most.

The commander icon should be purchased with badges of honor, if anything, instead of gold. Gold lets any fool pay real $$$ to become a commander even if he is a complete WvW novice. Obviously Anet structured it like this so that they can sell gems and make money, but it is not good for the WvW community.

Zarthias.3501:

So has anybody else ran into the super bad cheating thief on TC? He is currently on tc’s map down in the south end. He’s in serenity of the moon. Speed hacks + exploiting stealth somehow. He has hardly any hp. he just runs around with dual daggers being immortal because you can’t hit him, and if you do, he speed zips out of combat to get hp then comes back 2 seconds later full again. It’s really pathetic.

Sounds like normal thief activity. Sadly. At least you are a thief so you can abuse broken stealth and op mobility as well.

Dogs and raven are the strongest choices imo.

Jaguar is far from the worst. Stealth is actually the best cat skill in many situations, since it activates almost instantly and protects your pet.

Pig type pets and moas are fairly poor. Pig F2s are too cumbersome to use well in combat and they have low damage. The moas without buffs for F2s are quite bad as well.

I enjoy the borderlands more than EB and so do many other players and its not due to orbs. The removal of orbs is the best thing that could have happened to WvW aside from removing server transfers. Orbs have made extremely unbalanced and lopsided matches week after week, discouraging servers with fewer players from even attempting to play WvW.

The Orb buffs where insane. I’m very pleased Anet finally decided to can them and put teams on even footing.

While I don’t disagree that spawn camping is a valid strategy, its counterproductive for having a fun WvW matchup when one team is so far ahead.

A lot of casuals play on TC and don’t necessarily know much about WvW, like that there are side entrances for leaving starting areas. New players do indeed need to L2P, when they get discouraged immediately upon trying a new thing, they are more likely to quit out stick with PvE than stay around long enough to learn anything.

Arekai.5698:

90% of my posts get removed because i tell people how bad the ranger class is.
Many others get their posts deleted to.
If it’s about ranger beeing broken, or the upcoming patch that will flop, they delete your post.

This. I made a post in the thread about speculating on the patch, in which I speculated that the patch would probably focus on buffing some of the worst ranger skills to a level where they are less bad, but still not viable. For some reason, speculating in a thread about speculation is grounds for removing your post.

@ ghostchipz.2341

Mainly high server population and better than average off-hours population.

Other contributing factors:

Casual zergs that will follow commanders, some of whom are reasonably component.

Players seem to maintain morale longer than those on other servers when they aren’t doing well.

Yes, Sanctum of Rall owns everything.

SoR and TC simply have very different cores of players that do WvW. SoR is full of hardcore WvW players that are well organized, at level 80, best equip, etc. TC players are mostly casuals that do a mixture of PvE and WvW. They are not well organized and many are not level 80s with good equip. This puts TC at a big disadvantage when facing top tier servers right from the start.

When it comes down to it TC players WvW for fun. Top tier WvW servers WvW to win. The problem is WvW isn’t fun when there’s huge imbalances in player numbers and orbs, which is eroding interest in WvW.

@ neoxide.7320

SB isn’t flavor of the month. Nothing about ranger is flavor of the month. Thieves and mesmers are the flavor of the month. SB is just the best weap we have out of several lackluster options.

Obed.7629:

Score update: here’s a 695 notched!

Nobody cares about your all-green orb score updates. Stop spamming the thread with them. Any of us can log in or check http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA if we want to know the scores.

As other posters have stated, burst damage is part of the problem, but not the main problem.

The main problem is that thieves always have the element of surprise and can escape/avoid damage easily if their burst fails and things go bad. I don’t know how Anet managed to give 1 class the best burst dps, arguably the best defensive skills and the best mobility in the game.

Can’t find a decent fight or skirmish anywhere. This is worst week of WvW since release.

If you are stacking condition damage and crit chance, you should consider superior sigil of earth.

If they just switched orb and out-manned buffs or got rid of combat stat boosts entirely, I’d be happy. Overranked servers to due transfers is a stickier issue. Orb buffs are an easy an obvious fix that everyone seems to support. I’m not sure why Anet hasn’t addressed it already.

Score update: no reason to play WvW this week.

Shortbow/GS is the best build I’ve found for WvW. Pretty much any weapon set works ok for PvE.

@ Shishi.6729

You don’t need an orb in a keep to have motivation to defend it. And karma/gold/exp/magic find buffs could provide just as much incentive to defend them as the current buffs.

Orb buffs are gamebreakingly op when you have a matchup that is already this unbalanced. TC and ET will not see an orb this week.

Calae.1738:

fishergrip.4082:

Orb buffs need to stop giving buffs to combat stats. Its absurdly bad design to give the winning team even more strength.

That’s small potatoes at this point. The flying and wall hacking are much bigger issues.

Hacking may be worse, but its hardly small potatoes. It is terrible for WvW balance.

Superior sigil of air is the best single target dps boost for your build. It gives more than +5% damage increase if you have a decent crit rate, power and attack speed. Its basically 1k-1.5k extra damage every 5-6 seconds.

Orb buffs need to stop giving buffs to combat stats. Its absurdly bad design to give the winning team even more strength.

Depends somewhat on preference, but pets with solid damage and useful CC seem to be the best.

Dogs are a good choice as they have solid damage, a good knockdown and average tankyness. Fear from the wolf can be used to keep enemies from reviving friends and finishing allies.

The raven is the best pet for damage, since his active can do two hits for 2-3k and it blinds. I prefer birds to cats since they have better actives (activate much quicker), cast swiftness and are a bit more sturdy.

In my opinion, defense/buff oriented pets are not particularly useful for WvW. Pet buff actives take too long to activate and don’t last long enough to make them very useful. Using a low damage pet like a bear just for “protect me” isn’t worth the lack of damage. Signet of stone with “actives affect you” is far more reliable and lets your pet continue to dps while you are both invulnerable. The dps of bears, boars and moas is just too poor to make them worth using.

Spiders and devourers don’t have good damage either, although range can be useful in certain situations. Immobilize and F2 effects for spiders are good, but lack of dps and slow attack speed are too big a con.

Basically, you want pets you can swap to that come out and hit really hard/have strong CC as soon as they come out. This means wolves and raven (other birds are ok, but less damage on actives.).

Dragonbrand was a spawn-camping zerg the first time we faced them on TC. I feel like many players on TC harbor a general dislike for Dragonbrand because of that.

I think we can all agree that Blackgate is the true evil zerg server now.

Petition to Anet: stop allowing free server transfers.

Free server xFers and Anet’s failure to account for the massive shifts in server power that they cause lead to these unbalanced match-ups. It takes too long for newly powered up servers like Blackgate to rise up and for servers with mass exoduses like HoD and Dragonbrand to fall.

Superior sigil of air is the best sigil for single target dps, fire for aoe dps.

Eles are powerful in the right hands and poor in unskilled hands. Rangers are “meh” in skilled hands and poor in unskilled hands.

Following up on my earlier post about weapon/utility changes, Rangers could also use some trait improvements. Many other classes get very powerful traits (10% greatsword damage, 50% bleed duration, chance to burn on crit, etc) and rangers are mostly left with traits that try and fail to make up for poor utilities and damage. Pet/spirit traits are mostly worthless outside pve. Most of the top tier traits for rangers are bad or broken. Pretty much the only ones that are good are x2 trap effect duration, signet actives affect you and transfer conditions to pets. Its sad that the signet actives affect you trait is one of the ranger’s best traits, since signet actives should work on rangers by default.

The ranger just needs some weapon, utilty and trait tweaks/buffs to make more builds viable.

My thoughts on tweaks that would help balance the class:

Weapons:

-Shortbow- Fix it so QZ applies the proper amount of haste again. Otherwise its more or less fine.

-Longbow- Needs a damage buff on auto attack and rapid fire. The knockdown and barrage are pretty good as is. An attack speed reduction could also work.

-Sword- Fix auto attack chain so it doesn’t totally destroy your mobility. Make moves 2-3 execute faster/less clunky.

-Axe- Increase auto attack damage if only 1 enemy is targeted. Increase attack speed on split axe slightly. Increase damage on boomerng axe. Make whirling axe reflect projectiles.

-Greatsword- Slightly increase damage on main auto attack chain. Increase execution speed or damage of 2nd attack. As it stands now the 2nd attack reduces your dps and does not have the benefit of evasion so it is never worth using. Swoop is pretty good as is although maybe a slight damage boost.

-Torch/Horn are ok.

-Dagger- stalker’s strike needs higher direct damage. Several stacks of bleeding would probably help more poison, which we already get on sword, traps, pets etc.

Utilities:

-Signets need better passives and shorter cooldowns.

-Sick em and guard need to be replaced with skills that are useful, such as shouts that affect the ranger himself/allies with buffs, condition removal etc.

-Spirits need a rework to make them viable. More HP, better activation chance, lower internal cooldown, quicker activation time on actives.

-Spike and viper traps could use a damage boost and all traps could use increased default activation and effecive radius. The radius is smaller than many weapons skills, smaller than necro wells, thief caltrops etc.

While I don’t think rangers are “fine” since several weapons are lacking and some of the utilities could be buffed/changed, this is actually pretty accurate.

They need to end free server transfers. WvW guilds keep transferring and messing up the rankings.

Rage of signet is an amazing elite. With that single skill you can approach 100% fury, swiftness and might uptime.