Guild Wars 2

Traps are fine in skirmishing.

You don’t benifit greatly from the critical hit and precession but who gives a kitten???

Balancing a spec isn’t about making every single buff you get from your trait points the best of ideals…. its about making specs even in capabilities.

Moving traps to wilderness survival would stop you from being able to get empathetic bond in the same spec. Congrats, with all of your attempts at making the spec ‘fit better’ you have destroyed it… leaving only beastmaster rangers in PvP.

PS. Don’t call out devs, doubly so for general/bad-fixes for obvious/minor/not-even problems in a game with SO MANY game breaking issues…

If they really wanted trait flexibility they should have added in innate cleansing to each class.

Right now the majority of the best specs just chase down the best way to cleanse from traits and leave utilities to fill the rest of the gaps in what the class needs. Its an utterly terrible setup…

Something like 5-15 point minor traits are the main source of cleansing, so every spec gets at least a base form of condition removal to be occasionally expanded upon by major traits and utilities.

Luthan.5236:

Would be interesting to see ArenaNet then choose 1 of the map ideas sent by a player and make them into a game map.

Ehh.
That won’t get the game very far…

Making a new sort of map for a game is something that needs ALLOT of testing and fiddlng aruond, something an understaffed dev team can’t really spare time for. The best and odds say only hope for a new well done map is threw the release of player made custom map making.

The 20 water, 10 earth and 30~ arcane and dagger offhand are just too necessary for the class atm.
They’d have to fix that situation first before really going anywhere else.
(knowing anet they will just nerf kitten instead of fixing the class, ending with the currently too powerful spec just being mediocre instead of a more well rounded class in terms of speccing)

I’m honestly surprised these are the same people that made GW1.
An utterly terrible show by them when it comes to PvP.

@mjharrison
I don’t hate downed state, just the situation the Anet devs are in, from financing and their own silly mistakes they don’t seem to have what it takes to introduce anything to the MMO genre in a greatly functioning fashion.

I hate how you have terrible, unreliable control over the pet’s abilities more.
But their pathing is a close second.

People have been complaining about this stuff since beta. Probably was one of the biggest beta complaints about ranger next to projectile speed, every other game lets you control your pets attacks…. but GW2… every other decent game doesn’t have trash pathing… but GW2…

Its been around long enough that I doubt they are going to dedicate anyone to change it. I guess its their lazy form of balancing… instead of tweaking numbers on pet abilities to be balanced, they just let their activations be random/spastic so innately mediocre no matter what special stuff the abilities do (short of just straight up dmg, which is why the felines and birds are pretty much the only pets run short of the wolf). In MMOs, having a pet that can’t coordinate with your teams spike… a pet that gets eaten by miscilaneos aoes… is just straight up bad in team situations.

Zenith.7301:

If they would just buff the wimpy greatsword autoattack, GS wouldn’t need so much propping up by gear.

They have to balance the pet too.
At the moment there is no reason to not grab an offensive pet short of going ‘semi offensive’ with a canine for its fantastic CCs.

That is the problem.
If dps pets actually were a loss for the ranger, meaning if more defensive pets gave better control/survivability, then letting the weapon itself deal more dmg would be fine.

The devs would have to make pets more controllable though for that to really work well, so its probably never going to happen and greatsword probably won’t be worth going really offensive on.

Custom map making.

And suddenly….

ITS ALIVE.

GW2 won’t be an inescapably mediocre game (not to sound cruel).
But yeah, the game really needs something that the devs seem to slow and worried about failure to give.

My guess would be no.
If Anet wanted warriors to not suck in a timely manner they would have threw in a few quick fixes for the class in the same patch as the quickness nerf. By not they haven’t even acknowledged that there is a problem with the class. So of course it’ll take time for the devs to realize that a problem exists and start posting about a ‘massive warrior patch coming soon’… which, if the past holds any relevance to the future, will inevitably be inexplicably delayed 2, 3, 4 months and then in the end be just an underwater combat and signets buff.

In all seriousness though there will probably be a small buff for the class next patch, or everyone else will get nerfed, and more small, small buffs to come, to the point warriors are just decent in 2, 3 months time.
I wouldn’t put any hopes on an extremely competitive class in the near future though.

GW2 construction kit!!!
20~ bucks to tweak all you want and setup custom servers with custom maps.
:D

It’d be the best patch ever and might actually keep instanced PvP from dieing.

If custom arena’s aren’t “knock your socks off” revolutionary for this game.
It’s dead.

Kind of the bottom line, their priority list only matters so much.
At some point they have to release something WELL MADE that largely changes current instanced PvP, they literally have to to do make custom arenas glorious,
if it took a year~ to just get around to making leaderboards + custom arenas… they are going to have literally no one left playing instanced PvP by the time they get around to their next addition. This seems to be their only shot at making GW2 anything but a massive show of “what not to do” when making a PvP focused MMO.

It is a nice lil deadline though at least, finally something that will just nail or carry GW2s fate, something besides the words “soon” from a dev to base my hopes of this game on.

Recently.1043:

This game is not balanced around large numbers in pvp, it has to be small numbers.

Why? its simple, lack of dedicated healers.

A game could have fine large scale fighting without people with no other role but to focus heal someone else.

Gw2 has many, many other problems (mainly caused by their blind focus on conquest) that kind of kill larger group fighting being to great.

Luthan.5236:

I like the sPvP without dedicated healers. Only WvW is somehow boring I think… always liked that RvR from Warhammer Online where you had real healers and could rez the dead players outside defending and they where rezzed into the keep. That was fun.

That’s actually why when they first started talking about downed state I thought you’d be able to move around in it.
The game would be something like 30-40~ second resapawn timers but you could crawl or whatnot your way out of fights while in the downed state to get a chance at getting back up. With much less if any out of combat bonus health regen of course.

It’d make WvW more than just a massive melee hating roaming pew pew warband.

Aaanyways… yeah, WAR was a good game.
Not the best mechanics or instances or anything, but it still was insanely entertaining game.

Phadde.7362:

XGhoul.7426:

There are no dedicated healers
/thread

Dedicated healers is actually bad.

It can be.
But so can a lack there of, it really only comes down to how well the game pulls it off.

GW2 didn’t do it that well.
WoW didn’t do it well.

I see more potential in having the most common healers be part dps/utility versus not. But that’s just me and just because I like more dynamic gameplay.

Jax.5261:

No, I don’t think this development team could’ve handled it correctly, I don’t mean any offense but seriously there’s no chance that they would have done it well.

Building off of GW1 would have easily been their best bet.
They had a working PvP model that people adored, one that was only lacking in ‘new player friendliness’…

Redoing the entire MMO scene from scratch without first sitting down and saying “how are we going to for sure make good money off this” was kitten of them.
What Anet did is kitten
They set out to reinvent a genre with a limited budget, with the only hope of more money being rushing out a pretty mindblowing game… one that could be continually financed by pretty constant large tournaments.
kitten
Even more so since the game they released couldn’t have taken off even if it was ‘all that and a bag of chips’ because they didn’t even release the necessary tools for somewhat competitive PvP…

At very least they could have planned on releasing some extremely custom servers on release to fall back on, you know, for in case they did kitten up iin some way. It’d be a place where they let players do some tweaks in balance and make maps so that they have something to charge a bit of money (since they seem to hate charging for skins), something that would for sure keep a good sized population around, but more importantly have a stream of (FREE!!!!) new ideas on how to improve their game, you know, in case they aren’t the gods of game making they seem to think they are…

But nope… they made like every mistake possible and have a failed game for it.
I honestly don’t see GW2 coming back from this.
They don’t seem to plan on making custom arenas be terribly custom and their casual matchmaking and SPvP es still utter garbage pretty much a year after release.

Its too bad, many of their in beta plans for the game were pretty amazing.
The no dedicated heals, all classes just being different means to similar roles. A more Moba take on the MMO genre with their conquest. Dodge rolling. Thieves not being spike dps and the game being in general more latency friendly.

Bailey.6892:

Hello Robert,
It is nothing personal, although a lot if not the majority of the ranger comunity is frustrated.

Every forum acts frustrated, its nothing special or unexpected, if anything it seems a bit nicer around here.

AlexRD.7914:

Aside from venom, what is unavoidable about the thief?

?
Am i missing something?
Steal and stealth openers???
Those two things the most relevant thief specs spec around atm.

Acandis.3250:

• Hotjoins & Custom Arenas
  Hotjoins as they now exist need to disappear from this game. There is no point in having 8v8 servers when the main competitive attraction of this game is a 5v5 game.

No, the problem isn’t that competitive PvP is different… but that SPvP sucks.
The way SPvP es setup is just utterly terrible since it leads to chaotic zerging, something that not only isn’t fun, but also this game just isn’t at all balanced for.

The whole SPvP system atm is my biggest problem with the game.
If they released the game with it fixed up so it wasn’t such a kittenhole there would still be a pretty large population (not because GW2 is great but because there isn’t much competition in the MMO PvP market atm).
Scrapping what they have for a normal Queing system is probably a good play for them.
Getting a better casual map seems to be the next most important thing.

Sure, playing the game with a focus on capture points competitively can work, but for casual players… this style of map just sucks with no sort of voicechat and the kittenty visible map. LoL and Dota 2 at least have designated lanes where people are matched up against someone and constantly working towards a goal, you can see on the map where enemies are and can get pings about warnings. GW2 maps tell you nothing, you have to hope someone specced to be a bunker to spend minutes at a time doing nothing on a base or your at a terrible disadvantage, pug combat is extremely hectic and involves little if any teamwork short of throwing your kitten at the same target and rezzing… they got rid of the trinity for rezzing and spike dps/bunkers which is kitten #8230; GW2’s base combat mechanics are good, everything else just isn’t at all made to hold the attention of a large audience.

Soooo much needs to be done for this game to get a decent population again.
I am just worried about whether or not Anet can get through it before another big MMO comes out and takes the last of the people clinging to this game away.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

Double stacking battles with 5 second weapon swap does not work I believe. I mean having one on each weapon set. But I will check.

The point was, there are better sigils since the might on crit one is utterly terrible on the mace/shield weapon set.
Geomancy, fire, 5% dmg, exc.

D/P is already a preposterously good spec because of its ability to stall out fights and wear people down.

I don’t really think it needs to be more unkillable.

Zinwrath.2049:

how long has it been since you played?…
You kinda lost me at that.

Yet I don’t really feel like I’ve lost anything noteworthy.

And a good day to you.

The ‘30% chance for might on crit’….
You have to hit 18 times at 60% crit chance in the time you have the weapon out to make it worth one, half duration, sigil of battle…

It’s rarely ever, RARELY EVER, worth even considering.
At best if you land a full flurry somewhat consistently, it could be worthwhile, but flurry… with people being able to turn while imobilized, its lost allot of its worth… people will just turn around and typically give as good if not better than they take since the bleeds are not only not that strong, but they are also cleansable… and flurry does pretty mediocre physical dmg….

AlexRD.7914:

First of, a dev can’t keep a blind eye to all other professions just because he likes the rangers. Second, he is right. The thief is in a good place right now

Its a class where all the best specs are based on unavoidable dmg in a game based on active defense.
THAT’S BAD DESIGN.

They said out of the get-go that they were going to avoid that because of latancy and balance issues, they were pointedly calling it a thief instead of assassin to better illustrate the goal…
It was a good goal too, I don’t know why they didn’t stick with it, just making stealth a short mobility/CC/condi deal instead of just raw dps and resetting fights.

3v3 deathmatch could be interesting in this game.
I’m sure if there was a que for it it would get ALLOT of interest.

SPvP just needs help…
8 guys grouped up and fighting 8 others is chaos and hell in this game, meaning its probably best for the game to stray from only straightup deathmatch.
It’s why I’m dying for players to get their hands on ways to remake maps, it’d give more of a chance for a good, at very least casual, mode that fits this game’s style of play to come around. Something more constantly engaging than conquest (it becomes zergy because of this) yet not based on large group on group engagements (the graphics and class balance isn’t close to made for it).
—————————
Off the top of my head, capture the flag could work with some tweaking to the flag carrier (not making stuff useless while bringing a flag back, just not as good, for example: cutting teleport distances in half or a third on abilities instead of making them unusable). A big thing is that the map has to be more open in general than the orb one… so guardian CC walls and whatnot don’t make it nigh impossible to keep on the guy.

That or a sort of conquest, one with a more linear, more castle like capture point setup. The points would have better defenses the more you push into the other teams turf.

If only ‘Glyph of Elemental Power’ wasn’t kitten…
If the internal CD was bumped down to 4~ seconds instead of 7 it could be worthwhile… running a d/f spec and focusing on auto attack dmg works a dozen times better if the target is somewhat consistently crippled/chilled (300 range on the spammable so can stay out of melee, and if they don’t move much it always fully hits) and this is the ability designed specifically to give a means to that… but only allowing at BEST 2~ seconds of chill every 7~ seconds… ugh its just far, far from worth it. If it was 2 in 4~ so if you were constantly hitting a guy he would be chilled half the time, sure, that’d be solid, but not 28~% of the time in an ideal situation… that’s just terrible.

Yeah, currently I’m tweaking it a bit for chilling, I threw on 2 signets (healing and air or water) while putting 30 in earth, 20 fire, 10 air and 10 arcane to give all the signet buffs (fire armor, protection, swift/fury) along with the consistent 220~ health a cast and one condition removed every 10s. It kinda kills the specs cleansing so I replaced mist form with cleansing fire and tossed the fire axe for the frost bow. The bow actually gives great group utility, its aoe can hit like a truck if targeted on a point, its #3 is a 8+s chill that deals good dmg, the #2 is a combo finisher with each of the 5~ shots, and its #5 is a ranged 5?s stun… seems like it could be interesting.

http://tiny.cc/3k7qvw

DiogoSilva.7089:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Lukrath.6982:

so…. does tht mean hes gonna buff signets?

MAYYYYYYYYYYYYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I hope that a signet buff is not restricted only to warriors. :P

Mechanically, signets have great potential for fun gameplay.

Yes.
Signets need a wee bit more though.
Like eles have to go 20-30 water for cleansing since they have TERRIBLE cleansing utilities and no other cleansing traits and low health… that pretty much cuts out any chance at being able to invest any noteworthy trait points into signets (fire shield, protection, fury/swiftness)…

Yeah, I’ve got another few months left in me, its more just how there are no other, even alright, PvP games out atm short of LoL and DOTA to really draw my attention (I just haven’t gotten tooo into a MOBA in a while).
Wildstar does look great though, everyone I’ve talked to has only said good things about it.

S/TPvP.

I typically play a ranger but figured I’d fiddle around with an ele since it looks like a wonderfully entertaining class underneath the one or 2 token specs I see and so was wondering what people have been doing in those regards.
I guess I’ll start with the lil ele contraption I threw together and have been playing around with over the past few days.

http://tiny.cc/hfapvw

Personally, I like the idea of auras, how fire aura can give you 4+ stacks of might along with fury, swiftness, protection (from traits) and throws up some burn dmg to boot.
That and I always see focus offhand as a scarcely used weapon, occasionally only matched with the token heal/cantrip setup for an even more unkillable ele. To avoid the run of the mill I decided to focus on fire, focus gives a few fire fields which is nice, the only thing is that the only leap on an ele weapon is in earth… and that’s a wee bit of a problem with a more offensive d/f since earth is such mainly a large ‘Oh kitten’ button.
So I grabbed a conjure weapon
The lava axe is actually pretty cool, it can combo for some good dmg (2-4k crits with the leap), the explosive toss hits for a good amount of aoe dmg, the weapon has a pretty decent ranged spammable and of course a nice 15s CD evade/escape… it fit what the d/f spec needed so well I kinda had to throw it in. To boot you stack might with ‘pyromancers puissance’ while using a conjure weapon if you are in fire attunement while wielding it. All around it seemed like a fitting choice.

The spec works off a strong dagger spammable, constant protection, quickly stacking might, decent utility and couple hard hitting attacks. It’s by no means the group ‘do it all’ ele that is infesting the meta, but it still seems like a competent, very entertaining build style for an ele.

When it came to the specific choices for traits, I really like 20 in arcane for the vigor and 10 in air for ‘auras give swift/fury’ (without that it drops the specs dmg by like 15~%), but at the moment I figured it was worth the loss since it’d open up a sigil slot for sigil of battle instead of energy because the vigor on crit from arcane takes care of endurance regen. I grabbed mist form over armor of earth because of the choice in heal skills, I grabbed ‘glyph of the elementals’ over ‘fiery greatsword’ since it’s a bit better choice in small fights. And of course the runes are all for boon duration since the spec is pretty protection/might reliant.
As an extremely personal touch, I threw on sigil of doom for a pretty constant poison on the target since this isn’t a spec to end a fight extremely quickly. The thousand~ dmg every ten seconds from poison along with the few thousand it can cut from heal skills made it seem pretty worthwhile especially with the few random cover conditions eles kinda just put on some one out of coincidence.

jcbroe.4329:

Personally, I think against evenly skilled players, the necro has the “easier” time in the fight, which is largely influenced by the health pool, the condition removal heal, and the condition transfer options.

Death shroud is almost more of a weakness than strength for most necro specs against at very least, my ranger.
I can stack up conditions against the guy to hell and back while they are in it, forcing them to have to either land a putrid mark or heal skill or die… nothing a well timed interrupt or dodge roll can’t deal with.

The main thing is just know the empathetic bond timer and to instant death shroud fear the heal skill if the guy is weak.
Empathetic bond removes 3 conditions every 10s, so if you stack up your kitten at the 9s mark it just goes poof, but if you do right after the tick, unless they are running one signet, they pretty much have to eat the conditions.

@Kordos

Yeah it would take a big step by Anet to set it up, but the point still stands that that is the only way I see, so far, that will make custom arenas play a big part in the gaming world of GW2.

Small tweaks in a token conquest map will only do so much for the game, like dueling and deathmatch might take off, but the game is in no way balanced for deathmatch and certain specs will be blatantly OP in it, like the more eles the exponential better… all mesmers makes a free win against pugs… HGH grenade engis are gods of dps…. it’d just be chaos and that won’t help GW2, like at all…

Class banning is bad.
It is only a certain spec or 2 ever in a class that is ‘OP’ in conquest, so banning a whole entire class full of other entertaining stuff just because of that one spec…. it’s way too extreme of a way to deal with the problem, it’d just cause massive shifts in the game to try to fix small problems… it could help, but I would only consider it as a very last resort.

Maybe if on top of a decent pug PvP mode they wanted to add the possibility for a gimmick server, like banning everything but hammer warriors or something like that, sure, but they need a good casual PvP setup first.

What Anet has listed so far as options really won’t make custom arena’s mean much.
They basically have been advertised, so far, as SPvP servers you can pay for so you can scrimmage… in a game without any serious PvP. You can mildly tweak respawn times… in a game with much larger problems… I mean at best you can keep dueling servers in check, but how many people are going to pay money for that… how is that going to make this game notably better???

If they get really creative with the options they may be able to turn it into something decent, but in all seriousness the only way I can see to make it great is for there to be custom map making.
It’d bring the game back to life. The game’s combat mechanics are solid, the only gamebreaking problem for most people is conquest and how ill designed the casual 8v8 SPvP is… its something at the moment I don’t see “on/off” capture points fixing.

The only other issue is balance, and if Anet is really cool, they could ease into allowing some custom balancing in private lobbies.
They can even charge for the GW2 construction kit for all I care, as long as it gets out there so this game can start taking the leaping strides forward it so needs.
The competitive scene will only thrive from this casual shenanigans, it needs a player base to support it and casual players aren’t going to wait years for SPvP to not be terrible, along with large edits in pug level balancing. Every change players make in these private servers, every change that catches on enough that people go out of their way to look for it is like a free beta scene playing out, one Anet can pick and choose what they like from and put in the actual game build itself, getting DOZENS of times more efficiency out of their smaller but decent dev team.

Working slow and steady is fine, but not when the game is in need of so many things… there is only so much time till another MMO comes out and NO ONE instanced PvPs in this game anymore. The population is already staggeringly low and there isn’t even any good competition in terms of PvP MMOs…

KensaiZen.3740:

Who wouldve thought. A how can i deal with a ranger post. Rangers are so broken its impossible!!!!

Ok joking aside. Kill his pet. If he is rubbish at pet management his pet will die easily. This will take pressure off you. You should have enough hp to survive long enough to do it.

However, if you rely on wells for damage you are already at a disadvantage. A good ranger will never stay inside one. You may have to tweak your build a little.

O.o
Seriosly??

You want a necro who is struggling to deal 20k dmg to a player to try to run threw 2-3 pet lifebars!
and then kill the ranger???

I mean if the guy is a dedicated tank that deals no dmg short of the pet… sure… but a trap ranger… dodge roll the spike trap, face him during shortbow attacks, if its a feline pet, catch it in dark path or a chill or in a well and kite/mess it up, if its a canine watch out for the howls and leaps.

AlexRD.7914:

What? 60 seconds? Are you sure? If it’s that high then its even worse than garbage.

For a tier one trait??
Its no ‘armor of earth’ but you still have to be able to see the use in a free 5 bleed stacks at the start of the vast majority of fights.

speedlight.3745:

I tested. It has icd. I cant tell wats the icd since i didnt time it. But it triggers once the icd is over, as long as u r lesser than 75%.

From what I’ve seen while using it, this is right.
I have kitten health regen and have seen it proccing in the middle of fights.

Lux.7169:

Supposedly the more matches you play the less you fluctuate. I hardly find that to be the case at all, though, since 1 loss can literally tank me 500 places. I realize that # of matches played isn’t a safeguard to tanking your rating but I would think that after having done 700+ tourneys 1 loss (even against complete noobs) shouldn’t lose me 500 ranks considering anything can happen in a given match, especially flukes like someone dc’ing at the beginning of a match.

I just don’t appreciate how temperamental the current system is, other than that I think it’s a solid indicator of team performance. Unfortunately it’s set up like a random arenas that you can enter with a team. Creates a highly biased system towards teams when a lot of solo queuer’s would rather the stable environment it provides as opposed to the fickleness of hotjoins.

It has to fluctuate.
Without that people would be forced to either que premade all the time or give up ever wanting to have a decent rank.
I personally find it entertaining running my rank from 180~ to 50 as I get a good premade going. Allot more entertaining that way than having to spend days upon days grinding out of how the whole a few solo Q matches put my rank in…

That goes doubly so if the ladder ranking is what the MMR is based off of, premades quickly gain rank so end up fighting better people/groups… when you pug you start getting matched down after a few losses as it ‘realizes’ you aren’t group queing anymore… it’s extremely crude but kinda works.

You do realize… that the grind… isn’t for gear… its for skins….
You’re complaining about having to spend a long time to be able to just look different while PvP’ing….

There’s no downside to a nigh neverending rank system if the only reward is cosmetic.

jcbroe.4329:

It didn’t, it was just reassurance that I didn’t screw my numbers up somewhere.

And yeah you’re right, I was only factoring in autoattacks, not the skill variants. That being said though, Engis and warriors can’t stack bleeds as high as rangers on autoattack, can they? I honestly wouldn’t know. But I thought rangers already had a higher maintainable bleed stack (minus the warriors sword, but melee is supposed to be stronger in GW2 from how I interpret some of the things devs said).

There’s really no denying that with the right setup, engi pistols (single or double) are better at condition output through traits and variety though.

Also, I’m curious, am I talking to the same Garethh from the Guru forums or no?

Engi’s can get good condi stacks from grenades alone, burning is 6~ stacks of bleed worth of dmg, that along with the 2-3 from the minor trait procs along with 2-6 from shrapnel grenade…. its a good deal of condition dmg.
Their pistol is decent for it, the confusion and poison are nice, not great but nice since its auto attack is slow only throws out like a 2s bleed…

Rangers have traps and pets (good noncondition dmg even on a condition spec). I’ve gotten up to 22 bleed stacks from my ranger in one 4~ ability spike during a pet CC, so I would think rangers still the better raw condition dmg class by a good deal (short of confusion), but that doesn’t mean that sharpened edge trait is at all worthwhile.

And yeah, same guy

8 is fine if it involves full team on team clashes.
Zergy is only bad when one team is really outnumbered in the fights.

But yeah, anything seems fun at this point, with how stale GW2 is coming to be…
Just custom map making would make a WORLD of difference in this game.

Apolo.5942:

I think it would actually be more useful if Anet acknowledged the dreadful state of pvp in general and why it failed so hard.

Then release custom map making and balancing tools along with a way to rate maps/tweaks, then GTFO.
It’d take at most half a year and there will be dozens of well made versions of GW2 PvP that are far more entertaining than anything Anet will ever tweak this game’s into.
People will come back, real tourny PvP might happen and most importantly the game’s PvP won’t be dead in a years~ time.

Anet can start throwing in cool looking gear and charge for it, possibly a one time 10~ dollar fee to be able to get the constructions sets, and of course later start cherry pick the changes they want because they have the largest sort of public test servers out there, build their own decent tourny setup and actually have a competitive PvP game they are making money off of.
win/win

redslion.9675:

Worst thing that can happen:

Maybe we should be able to see the enemies our allies are fighting against: this way we would be able to know how bad is a fight before diciding whether to join it or not. Something all premades with voice chat can do.

A better map would solve all the problems.
Being more clear, being able to easily ping and put an arrow to where you are heading allong with it showing enemy players would do wonders.
Right now it is terrible, your own players are in like a light green circle or something like that that is an utter pain to spot off the fly… and that’s it.
Being able to customize UI would be cool too… to enlarge the map itself, maybe move it to a different corner.

Yih.4950:

…My pet takes an arrow for me, but somehow I still get cut. Please don’t respond by saying a lot of things in this game don’t make sense.

Then don’t say stuff like that.
This is an MMO, you can get literally slashed threw with a greatsword and get nothing more than a scratch if the guy isn’t wearing the right jewelry of all things. You see stuff like that on a, quite literally, second by second basis.
It’s an MMO, it doesn’t make sense

And endure pain…. ugh I hate the idea of a nigh uncounterable invuln for 6~ seconds. That’s not only crazy powerful but also one of the worst types of mechanics to put into PvP… one with extremely narrow counters… it stops people from being able to adapt to the situation and actually use the tools they have in their spec TO DO kitten.
Without that PvP becomes as silly as WoW’s…

On topic though, protect me, I’d like it to take conditions, I actually run it on my tourny setup, I’d more like a massive CD drop though (like to a 15~ second since the main crux of the skill is still having your pet alive and well, it’d make it more versatile and would make more tanky pets much more viable)

jcbroe.4329:

Not sure why people seem to think it isn’t a good trait, because if it was anything higher than a 1s bleed, with the shortbows autoattack speed it would actually be pretty OP.

Not even close.
Engineers and warriors both have better versions as 5 point minor traits.
Warriors is a 3s bleed 30% of the time and I believe engi’s is the same.
Better trait.
Minor slot.
Engi’s have nades which can hit 3~ times a second blowing shortbow’s auto’attack out of the water and then some.
Engi’s also get a major trait that causes 30% chance for a 2s… BURN… on crit…
Yeah…
Better in literally every way and then some.

Sharpened edges doesn’t compare.
Yeah it, a third of the time, adds a 100~ dmg tick to an attack even when you can’t get flanking with the shortbow spammable. No that isn’t a wonderful thing.

And I honestly am not sure where you are going with the math behind it proccing back to back, yea that is the chance it happens, but where does that fit into condition dmg verse duration?

Ponidis The Psycho.8612:

GW1 has some astonishing pvp. It shouldn’t be that hard to introduce something like Hall of Heroes or at least Team Arenas. Game mechanics are excellent in GW2, but as a hardcore PvP player in GW1, I am expecting more.

But that takes time, and time is money, and Anet is silly so decided to forget about making money with PvP…

The game was destined to flounder.

jcbroe.4329:

I mean, I was only commenting on the context of cleansing and DPS, not DoT. It’s the difference between condition burst and pressure.

Let me actually post something that damage is better for; Sharpened Edges

Sharpened edges is terrible for one.
(not as a trait, but as a notable source of dmg, it ends up being like a 5~% dmg bump in most precision/condi setups)
For two, it is a 1s bleed so no amount of reachable condition duration in TPvP will ever make it reach 2s. So by default, no matter what condition dmg did, it would still be better for it.

awge.3852:

The most important thing about ranger that everyone needs to understand is that they are easily the most complex class to master.

I only PvP.
And in PvP… no.
HgH engies, mesmer, a thief spec or 2, a necro spec or 2, elementalist*

*-so much potential in the class, it is a joke to be a good elementalist, it is an art to be a great one.

Indeed the ranger is a random in some regards because of the pet, but don’t confuse trying to master randomness (which is impossible, giving the illusion of more of a skill cap to reach) with mastering things you can actually control.
(I live and die by my pet, just so you know, I try to work every ounce I can out of those CC’ing machines of canines I run, I’m in the top 50~ atm and pug half the time)

jcbroe.4329:

Some math:
rangers base bleed is 3s. With the rune choice and sigil choice you used, I get bleeds doing 426 damage every 4+3/4s (the 3/4s doesn’t tick, so I’m doing damage per bleed). So, per second, that comes to 106.5 bleed damage, and the game doesn’t seem to have a consistent rounding mechanism, meaning that sometimes they will tick for 106, others 107.

With runes of the undead in the same setup, your auto attack bleed only ticks for 3s, but it ticks for 118 per bleed.

Meaning that as long as you are consistently applying bleeds, you are going to be doing more DPS with the runes of the undead. Albeit, it isn’t much, but you will see the damage output increase from all the conditions you apply as well, where as currently the only focus is bleeds. Meaning the poison will also do more damage, so as long as you are applying that consistently, the damage would overall be greater.

Its a 33% bump in dmg threw duration verse a 10% bump in dmg threw condition dmg.
Duration definitely nets more raw dmg, there is no question there, you will get up more stacks on a guy at one time netting more condition dmg/sec, the only thing is cleansing can hurt your spec more. The bonus dmg to non-bleed conditions is pretty much negligible on his spec since his only attack in those regards is a poison volley.

When it comes to shortbow, people don’t tend to waste much cleansing on shortbow spammable attacks so the difference between 3 and 4s of bleeding is only good.
When it comes to sigil of geomancy and maul and sharpening stone… it’s a bit up in the air; against thieves, mesmers and if well timed against other setups it will net you allot of dmg, but yeah it is on the fence against most other classes. Especially if you don’t have that many conditions.

I still do run condition duration, just because completely kittening up most non-ele non-HGHengi players day is pretty cool.

Atroras.9481:

For sharpening stone, it’s more of adding on to bleeds.
I feel that extra pet condition damage synergies better with the build. If its not competitive, maybe I would suggest vigorous renewal? O.o but that would be a defensive trait right? And thus even less competitive lols. Would you suggest anything else?

30% pet dmg on crit would definitely be helpful, as long as the pets catch up on the enemies… Which they fall behind on if they can’t catch them as effectively with the 30% movement increase actually.

Natural healing (according to wiki) heals 133 every 2s in combat.

Greatsword is here simply because I prefer it over sword =) I love the defensive utilities it brings and the swoop or block wins over sword in my opinion. =) so.. It’s not really meant to be competitive haha.

I use felines exclusively mainly because of the trait Rending Attacks..

As I explained, signet of the wild helps with surviving on the field, and it’s a plus point because I don’t need to care about it =P would you suggest anything else to replace it?

Sorry if I sound defensive haha, but these are choices I make because I felt it makes sense. Lols. That said, if you dislike this build maybe it’s not for you, or maybe you can give some suggestions to make it better? =)

Pet condition dmg, the idea of it is not bad, a buff to it surely, if any build, would help yours. The thing is the actually effectiveness of the buff… how much it actually buffs the pets condition dmg by, is rather small…

In server hotjoin, the 30% movement speed is pretty necessary. In tournies you can get away without it if you play well.

Natural healing, as a minor trait at 15~ or 25 points… it could be considerable going for… but as a tier 3 major…. no way in hell.

In a 30s fight, saying everything else in your build is working flawlessly, signet of the wild would only heal for 1.8~k, which is roughly 10-15s of regeneration or a leap threw a water field. A utility slot for that amount of healing doesn’t tend to be worthwhile when you don’t even have regen up most of the time or you aren’t a SUPER defensive/evasive build looking to scrounge out a bit more survivability.

You’re in a tough situation though, focusing on condition dmg with greatsword and shortbow is a hard place to theorycraft. If you want to stay on that path I would seriously require having geomancy on both sets of weapons, the extra bleeds are pretty much necessary. Sharpening stone… ugh I would drop 10 points in beastmastery, put them in marksmen for the sharpening stone proc at 75%, drop signet of the wild for lightning reflexes if you are comfortable with your dodging skills (the vigor and stun break evade is clutch), then the last slot, its really up to you I would put muddy terrain since its wonderful in TPvP, it ensures that your pet can sit on the guy, gives you an immobilize to set up your own attacks (landing a maul is like getting most of a sharpening stone proc) and your allies. It’s a pretty nifty ability.

If you want the build to scrap a lil bit of the playstyle, I would drop the focus on condition dmg and run a more power setup, keep the good pet dmg but also decent power based dmg of your own with greatsword.

bhagwad.4281:

garethh.3518:

You had a rank 1 and 3, a 3v5 won’t really ever turn out well for you while pugging.

No matter how outmatched, I like to put up a good fight. By not communicating we ruined whatever little chance we had in the first place.

I would refuse to lay down and die even if every other person on the team was r1.

Sure, who doesn’t like to put up a good fight.
But this a clear case of failed matchmaking, for the most part irrelevant from your pre-game plan QQ.

Yes working out a general strat is nice in a pug match, no it is not necessary most of the time to have a good game (at least that I have noticed).

Sigil of agony does nothing for shortbow because of how the game rounds condition duration.
Sharpening stone isn’t competitive.
Extra pet condition dmg isn’t competitive.
30% more pet dmg on crit in TPvP is better than 30% faster.
Last I checked ‘natural healing’ in the beastmaster tree ticked for less than regen every 2-3s.
Greatsword with rabid isn’t competitive.
A bird tends to be better than lynx (a little more towards preferance though).
Signet of the wild is great in really tanky more healing power specced setups.
Yours is missing a few things to really fit in that place.

hornet’s sting is never only for the sake of dps.
It’s for the combo finisher.
1.2~k health or fire armor, both are pretty worthwhile most of the time.

Raw numbers mean little in PvP.
In terms of those… warriors probably still take the cake threw greatsword, even the frenzy nerfed version. Its pretty easy to get to 15+ stacks of might on a warrior greatsword setup, from there the deeps just roll out.

The thing is, its everything else that needs to be taken into account, like how consistent the dmg is, what type and how bursty.
Consistent dmg is notably worse than spike.
Backstab thieves aren’t known for their 20s parses, but their 2-3 second jokingly easy to land KOs.

Luriyu.6873:

exactly… i kitten off thieves quite a bit with a trap set up and duel dogs. high amounts of evasions and such. just hit your stun break when you get basalisk poisoned and and then eat them up while their constantly being stunned, knocked downed or rooted…other than pistol c/d thieves that is because c/d is the hard counter to any pet…

True story.
I rarely ever come by a thief I can’t solo with some pet trickery along with well played splitblades and traps.
I’ve gotten up to 22 bleed stacks on a guy all on my lonesome during canine CC and a doubled up spike trap.

jkctmc.8754:

TheComet.6471:

Because thieves love to run away from a fight

You call it running, I call it strategic retreating, or better yet, strategic positioning. <grins>

I call it winning.
You can’t win if you can’t play and you can’t play if you’re dead.

But somewhat on topic, my ranger kittens up thieves all day.
I run a heavy condition trap spec and with well timed evades/traps and pet shenanigans I can seriously give, at very least spike dps thieves, a run for their money even when I’m at 1/3 health.