Guild Wars 2

Oh and your ‘in regards to ranger survivability’.
Yeah don’t…
Your fighting 2 bad spike dps setup enemies that have no idea how to spike.
Ranger’s don’t have all around bad survivability, its just based on dodging which gets progressively worse and worse as fights get larger.
In small small engagements, if played well, rangers have excellent survivability but as it goes up to like a v2 or more… if the enemies are decent… it just starts getting much worse.
Oh and combat, at least that people base balance calls like that on, tend to be based on ‘fighting on a BO’ which tends to give far less room to kite around with sword.

Welcome to the world of recorded PvP
You’ve got allot to learn but everyone starts somewhere.

I’ll start with the build.
What you’re running just isn’t ‘in’ atm.
The only part I likeis the Lightning Relflexes, fantastic kiting stunbreak.
Other than that… sword/torch is decent, I can see that playing well enough, but really if you want to go condition dmg grab traps too, the kiting from sword works wonderfully with them (throw down traps, kite around with hornets sting, let the condi’s tick out ) oh and think about using axe mainhand instead (more a preference though).
I’ve actually, in the 2 canine CCs manage to get people to 10% with a dozen bleeds still up on them running an axe/dagger shortbow trap build.
It’s a mean setup.
Also you have an outrageous amount of vitality for a ranger, if you want to keep it that way, you might as well use healing spring. Troll ungent heals for 8.8k but that’s like 35% of your life, healing spring is at 25%, its not that big of a loss yet you get some more good condition removal.

Traits.
You are not running 5 points in beastmastery? you have to run 5 points in beastmastery ><
It gives you 2 seconds of quickening zephyr on petswap, absolutely brutal for stomps and rezzes, decent for anything else. On that note, warriors, you can stomp them while standing behind your pet and since its a projectile it will hit your pet instead of you, do it it gets them stomped the first time every time.
Also, if you didn’t, seriously consider putting 30 points into wilderness survival, it gives the best cleanse in game atm. Empathetic bond passively fully cleanses you every 10s.
Yes.
Single handedly ruins enemy condition dmg.

Pets, bear is next to worthless (from a competitive viewpoint) canines are fantastic, spiders are decent if you have a few hardhitting attacks (like quickness, sword and good power/crit or axe mainhand and good condition dmg) otherwise the immobilizes don’t help much and you might as well drop them for a canine (CC and a fantastic F2) or bird (best pet dmg in PvP since it hits moving enemies). Oh and felines… go to the mists and time how long it takes for a feline to kill a golem, then do it with a canine… the feline only does 15~% more dmg than the canine… the canine has almost twice the toughness and 3k more life and better abilities… it’s depressing.

Anyways, just was hoping to get you thinking, best of luck!!

Arrys.7145:

Well vitality doesn’t leverage very well in builds other than potentially 10% to power. Healing on the other hand does leverage with traits and skills and utilities.

Ignoring that leveraging in an analysis of a specific build would be wrong.

Those traits/sigils/runes are going towards empathetic bond (far, far better defensively) and more offense to keep the spec as a threat.
Both are more important than more self healing at that point (at least imo).
A spec with only a pet to do any dmg, at least with pets how they are, is just asking for issues and annoyances all day.

Psychrome.9281:

i am surprised at the belief about troll ungent… the 3 second block from counter attack which can also be a interrupt+knockback for solid damage is really really to good to pass up. swoop can be used as a gap closer or an escape without the irritation of monarchs leap and the maneuvering required to make it an escape. …

also the bugginess of serpents strike…

Serpent’s strike is for the evade not dmg, so its bugginess doesn’t really matter much (imo).
I’ve never liked GS, but yeah if you do, good for you

Using troll ungent at the start of a fight is just asking for overhealing. If you know who you are fighting and what they are doing and/or can keep good pressure on them (so they have to dps back) it’d be fine to do that.
But you do need the full 10~k healing from it and the 5s regen or else you are wasting health.
Especially on a class with allot of evades/dodge. Most of the time dodging a high dps attack is far better than taking and letting troll ungent heal it off.

It does heal for more than healing spring or heal as one, but yeah it is at a large downside, you actually start to see that bonus healing about 7~ seconds after using the skill so have to be alive for those 7 more seconds to actually net more health (which is the downside).

Sebyos.4089:

Here’s the problem : some classes auto attack and reapply bleeds really fast, but here’s what you have to do to remove then conditions.

- Take precious time to cast skills which means not attacking while being shot with auto attacks that will reapply the bleeds right as your cast ends anyway
- Landing the condition transfers while not being able to constitantely dodge the auto attacks that reapply conditions
- Suffer when you are out of skills because of the lengthy cooldowns while the attack simply has to auto attack without cooldown problems
- Use traits the remove conditions with lengthy cooldowns while traits for Bleed duration are of course permanent.

All of this goes pretty much the same way the post of Eatthisshoes did 2-3 days ago. Basically, it’s way too easy to do offense in this game comparing to defense on which the burden is put.

Auto attack bleeds aren’t great.
They tend to be mediocre bleeds tagged on to a half direct dmg attack.
They don’t net much more dmg than straight power auto attacks do.
Then you are leaving half or more of your dmg as preventable, so your spike is entirely prevantable even after it lands.
That and just because someone has a bleed on them doesn’t mean they have to be cleansed…

Take shortbow.
It has a 3s bleed tagged on to a 300~ dmg auto attack.
If you land it and the bleed that’s 600 dmg a hit.
If you have no condition dmg and do that same spammable…
It hits for 450~ dmg a hit.
If you put those lost points in condition dmg into power or crit instead…
Your back up to around 600 dmg a spammable…

Your spammable attacks don’t apply enough condition dmg to force people to cleanse it or lose….
On the contrary its actually rather mediocre condition dmg and only bonus condition duration, QZ, pets, traps, geomancy sigils and axe or dagger offhand make up for it.

Rukh.1562:

ranger has the less survivability than all of the proffessions
thief has the highest damage

and you think rangers are OP against thieves?

That is the most shallow (and so misleading) way of looking at combat I’ve seen in ages.
Ranger’s get their survivability from dodging/kiting and a typically powerful heal skill.
Short of the basilisk venom -> mug spike, rangers are golden against thieves, especially since that dancing dagger nerf.

Arrys.7145:

It will with dwayna runes and a 12 second regen. Still well below 2 minutes to get ahead of 8k extra health. Pn the other hand I didn’t include an additional 13 seconds of the 30 BM heal at 133 hps which would also occur in the first 25 seconds.

This build will give you over 8k more in the first 25 seconds than the build you linked. It with a dwayna proc at second 1 could do it much earlier than that.

Not that I don’t agree it would be nice if healing power was stronger not bandaided with a 30 point BM trait.

I was comparing the bonus healing from healing power to vitality.
You are comparing the bonus healing from healing power + traits + runes just to vitality.
That won’t really get very far.

The 30 BM gives only your pet 125 health + 6% of healing power every 3s.
That’s terrible.
Like a 1/3 regen proc that scales half as well. Only on your pet.

Psychrome.9281:

but if my math and thinking are correct soldiers beats steady damage clerics beats burst.

Its a matter of number of heal skills you get off.
The higher the enemies dps is, the shorter you live so less time you have to use your healing abilities.
For you to get your worth out of the clerics amulet you have to be below full health, and so getting that extra healing from regen, that extra healing from the signet and on troll ungent, for a full minute.
If they are able to kill you before that, then you lost value.
Looking at enemy dps isn’t really a great way to go about it, quite simply the higher it is, the faster you die so less heals you get off so less healing power gives you health.

You should really think about running sword mainhand though, if you want to be really tanky, it’s about the best evasive kiting weapon in game
You can unclick the enemy after hornet’s sting then monarchs leap away again to keep stalling out for your pet/self-healing if you have to. That and the on weapon evade (serpent’s strike and stalker’s strike) can be used while immobilized making you nigh impossible to spike short of being CC’d (even then Lightning Reflexes and the wolf’s aoe fear* has your back).

But yeah the changes shouldn’t lose you survivability, having sword/dagger over greatsword alone should net you a fair deal, so does empathetic bond. They should make up for the lost healing power if you play sword well enough
But on the plus side you gain a pretty nasty spike that you pretty much always have up (pet swap gives 2s of QZ, the utility gives 4s of it, you and your pet attack twice as fast, both of you deal good dmg).

If you ran the cleric’s amulet on that sort of setup instead of knights you’d be extremely tanky, dodge heavy self healing is typically a good enough 1v1 or possibly 1v2 bunker sort of deal.
-* at best you want to start an encounter with some other pet up that isn’t the wolf, then if you get in trouble and need a fear in roughly 1~ second… you can swap pets to it (even while CC’d) and click its F2, it’ll pound it out doubly fast from the QZ on pet swap and run any dmg spike away

(as a sidenote though, what you were seeing with your numbers is the reason some people aren’t a fan of troll ungent. It heals for ridiculous amounts, especially with that regen proc. The thing is you have to let your health go almost to half to just get the full effect of the heal… then if someone interrupts it… you can be in deep, deep trouble. By the time you get the heal off again you don’t get the full health upfront which leaves you completely susceptible to a quick killing blow)

Kerishan.8460:

They should fix channeled skill stop channel if target go in stealth.

Why? so stealth is a counter to even more things?
It doesn’t have to be an end all be all to incoming dmg…

Balance is complicated.
People are being payed at least the upper end of tens of thousands a year to do nothing but that.
They should have answers.
Plain and simple.

khadorian.6417:

I pretty much only wvw/pvp with mesmer, any “minmaxer saying its not too wonderful is simply wrong”, its a fantastic sigil for pvp and I can see it work on ranger too, im using undead runes for my build though.

*best for that spec
Sure though, saying fuzzy words that everything is great so people feel more secure about their decisions and preferences is cool. If that’s all he wanted I made it clear I wasn’t really aiming for it so he didn’t really have to respond.
I was just aiming for an honest, more objective effectiveness of it for anyone actually here for that sort of thing :/

100.
At least in SPvP, heavy condition specs tend to have at or over 100 bleed dmg a tick.

Psychrome.9281:

the purpose of this build is to keep my pet alive and on target, with this build i basically tank for my pet, i control my target and the pet does the damage.

And my point is that from a min/max point of view the way your spec does it could be updated to work together much better.

Anyways the details, if you care for allot of reading.
30 points in beastmastery, its your call, I have tested the pet health regen (150~ every 3s) and it just wasn’t close to worthwhile, especially for a tier 3 trait, and every other trait in the tree short of the 5 point just isn’t good (imo).

You can easily focus on a pet without putting a ton of points in beastmastery, its really easy actually. Having your pet do 5-10~% more dmg because of the extra stat buffs the tree gives is cool, having your pet land 30% more hits is even better
Sigils of hydromancy do wonders for that and self survivability to boot.
Dagger offhand with its 6s cripple does wonders for helping your pet land its stuff and nothing buys time like on weapon evades (serpent’s strike, stalker’s strike)

More on point though, you are utterly reliant on the pet then. Having a pet that does decent->good dmg is nice, but if you make yourself little->none of a threat in the mean time, you are utterly reliant on a pet and if it dies and puts the swap on that minute CD, then dies again… you are utterly useless.
The 150~ health every 3 seconds from a third tier trait won’t save a pet.

I wouldn’t actually go for 2 birds if I were you, they are nice dmg but so killable and give nothing but nice dmg. Having at least 1 canine gives allot to spec, at least if you have some dmg in and of yourself.
The build I proposed gives you a good source of dmg threw 2.2k power, QZ and QZ on petswap, both of which effect the pet, buffing his dmg too. It keeps the enemy needing to focus on you yet threw crippling/chilling and then kiting/evading keeps the pet beating on them.
:)

I personally don’t like greatsword but that’s just because I tend to look at weapons a bit differently just than a combination of a few individually nifty abilities. Again, my opinion though. And yeah using berserker with greatsword is bad, you have to run one handed sword and a ranged weapon for the other set, kiting and evading is your survivability then… greatsword just doesn’t deliver.

The idea for dwayna is nifty, I like it, I’m just saying from a numeric point of view it isn’t quite there, but the gap isn’t that large so personal preference is all up to you.

Psychrome.9281:

i think what some people dont understand with this build is that my pet does the damage, not me

oh and in regards to empathic bond while it may be the best cleanse in the game it is so counterproductive to the build that it wouldn’t fit at all, why would i want to get rid of my one actual source of damage.

Oh I do understand, that just doesn’t change a hard critique of its effectiveness.

I’ve ran empathetic bond and protect me in next to every build I do and rarely ever have a pet croak on me, if you are taking enough condition dmg that it puts a large dent in a pets lifebar… a pet you can swap away and watch the condi’s go poof, you should be happy to let him take it
I run 2 canines the vast majority of the time, but yeah i don’t really hunt out all that many fights larger than 2v2~s either.

Arrys.7145:

technically if you just count the heal from the SOTW and NH that equals = 133 and 138(from memory) per second or 271 HPS.

Add in regen for 12 seconds from the dwayna armor at 288 HPS every 30 seconds .

Plus around 115 HPS over the duration of a TU.

Dwayna Rune regen = 12X288= 3456
Utility + trait heal = 12X271= 3252
and
Added healing to TU =12 X 115= 1380

8008 extra healing in the first 25 seconds.

Basically in fights longer than 25 seconds this build starts to pull ahead on total HP at the expense of damage from the ranger.

You mathed wrong.
You aren’t counting the bonus healing from heal power. You are counting the total extra healing.
Yes, a spec can heal 8k extra health every 25~s.
No, 800 heal power will not give you 8k more healing every 25s.

Signet of the wild had its bonus healing from healing power terribly nerfed a while ago (I think its at roughly 7% of healing power bonus a sec) which is 56~ extra health a second. and healing skills tend to give roughly the healing power in bonus health. That means troll ungent gives about 800 more health every 25s. Having 800 healing power makes regen tick for 100 more health, if you get 6~ seconds of regen from the heal skill every 25s, thats 700 more health. If you get the 13~ seconds of regen from the random proc every 45~s, the total is roughly 7k bonus health every 50 seconds.

Or 8k in roughly a minute.
So if encounters tend to last more than a minute, then healing power beats out vitality.

The interesting thing I actually saw was that healing power buffs your pets health regen from the signet roughly 4 times more than the players, which is kind of cool.

There are paid tournies and free tournies.
If you want qualifying points, which are the only form of ranking atm, you have to win paid tournaments. That means you either need a kitten good premade or a kittenton of time to farm free tournies for paid tourny tickets or money to buy them and some dogged people to play with.

Quite frankly, its a better place to be than having to pay to be ranked, but by kitten small margin.

Zzod.5791:

You….only…play…free….tournaments…You are not qualified to make any qualitative judgement on what is good or effective. An average win of 70% in free tournaments is FAR from good. Let me know when you queue for paid, so I can skull kitten you and your team into submission…Oh, and our necro is going to use plague form.

You didn’t notice that from his reasoning?
He looked at flaming raw blinds per 180s as his main and only hate against it…
That is quite obviously the worst, since it’s the most shallow, way to look at PvP…

Ranger’s have no special ability to do so.
Either you were in group with the guy so it did that bug were he could see you even in stealth, or you just were kittening up your invisibilities.

At best trap rangers can throw stuff on the ground and if you walk in it while in stealth you take some condi dmg… but that is quite literally the best of it.

Against decent players it is mediocre.
You can dodge the ability (terribly obvious animation), any teleport hard counters the elite, any ability with an evade counters it, any distortion, block, invuln counters it, any stealth counters it, and to boot the vines don’t have all that much health.
Its a nifty skill in a few situations, but I really just can’t see it ever being better than an aoe rez, at least short of the enemy really screwing up.

Meh.

You have 1 cleanse on a defensive? setup.
You went 30 into beastmastery which is a waste.
You went 10 into nature magic which is a waste.
You have healing power*.
You are using cleric’s amulet and runes of dwayna which means your weapons do mediocre->bad dmg.
You are using sigil of rage on this build. And the nullification is equally puzzling.
To wrap it all up you grabbed greatsword…

*healing power doesn’t scale healing very well. It will probably take you 1+ minutes in combat to make up that 798 healing power into 8k life (what would be 798 vitality).

Nifty ideas, just doesn’t really perform to wonderfully, at least form a min/max point of view. I would go 30 into wilderness survival for empathetic bond (best cleanse in game), grab possibly a raven pet (canines are better at supporting your dmg than being dps engines), drop greatsword for sword/dagger or something of the likes, grab better runes, get soldier’s amulet or if you’re fealing balsy go for berserker, and call it a day.
Roughly something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fMEQNAsYVjAVV2JWSWoWCgli90r9gTJxkf4wvgDmUJA;TwAA1CtomxMjYG7MuZkzsAZ8xhkJIA
Ultimately it comes down to what you enjoy though so best of luck

Raven’s hit moving targets.
Canines have fantastic CC, it takes some micro’ing (click ‘come to me’ if it isn’t going to hit) and occasionally setting up (snares typically) to make sure the enemy is in range though (just a heads up).

I haven’t found any other type of pet I’ve liked.

Echo.2087:

“I have this super secret build that nobody has ever found, ever.”

Sure you do buddy.

Trap ranger (pretty easy to figure the spec out) or possibly some power one handed-sword offshoot that has good evading/self-healing and CC pets to whittle people down with dps bursts in between kiting.

That or there is always the ‘bird spike’. Pretty mediocre imo, but it works allright if you are good at it, the bird lands 5-10~k F2’s on people. Nasty spec since so few people thing rangers have anything worth dodging, nonetheless the pet.

Those are all that’s viable but trap rangers are FANTASTIC at 1v1s if you know how to play it well so what he’s saying is perfectly reasonable.

Greiger.7092:

people might find some surprisingly effective builds if they are just willing to spend less time complaining about how garbage rangers are and experiment a little

They are garbage.
Especially in TPvP.
I’m rank 39 and have played ranger for about 90% of it.

In SPvP you can get away with anything if you play well enough (even though rangers typically get much worse as fights get larger), and then deuling, dueling isn’t a feature yet so usually is very tough to find decent people to fight. Rangers are good at that, but that’s tragically what I would call ‘the best of it’.
Which brings us back to tournies…
Rangers have bad group synergy with others and every viable spec tends to get worse as fights get larger making them a lil bit short of worthwhile at their very best…

Edit:btw if its that spirit build you posted a month~ ago… then just don’t even go there… spirits are terrible, utterly terrible.. from what I’ve heard they have a 10~s internal CD in between procs which would make them next to useless when they aren’t dead.

Payneful.7934:

There’s a problem with this. 1v1 in this game is not balanced at all. Two builds will rise above all others: Mesmer condi build, and d/d ele. These are the two best 1v1 builds in the game, and most builds don’t even come close to killing them.

Yeah the game isn’t balanced at all for it, but my ranger actually has beat every d/d ele I’ve seen. S/d is a bit more challanging since they ironically out ranged dps me by a wee bit.

Condi mesmers are annoying, one of the few people I’ve gone under 1:1 against played a sword-torch/staff condi mesmer, an utter pain to fight, I had to land a well timed pet CC or lose after constantly beating up his phantasms with traps/pet… if the fight has to be on BO they lose a good deal of their advantage though since they can’t kite near as far away.

:)
Rangers are exceptional at 1v1s, it just doesn’t translate over too well into tournies since their survivability is based on dodging (worse as fights get larger) and, at least in my case, protect me (pet eats all your dmg for 6~ seconds) which is also worse as fights get larger since the pet only has so much health… that combined with mediocre synergy with others just isn’t worthwhile.

Kwak.4810:

I still don’t get whats wrong with the ranger.
Seems fine for hot-join Pvp and early leveling.
I mean I can solo r30-35 ppl easly as a ranger.

Yes.
But some people don’t want to play the 2~ viable specs out there atm.
Even then allot of people aren’t good at dodge rolling, rangers need well timed dodging. That and the class is progressively worse as fights get larger… it makes pugging threw SPvP tend to be a bit of a challenge compared to other classes.

Kasama.8941:

I really don’t get why people want Capture The Flag in Guild Wars 2. It would just turn into a control vs. stability/stealth game. You either get stunned and killed, or you have a Guardian/Thief/Mesmer that uses stability/stealth AoE to get past opponents. Of curse, you could remove all abilities from players holding the flag, but certain profession would still have advantages over others, when it comes to things like swiftness and stealth.

Games usually don’t allow stealth, and sometimes not even teleports while holding the flag.

Capture the flag probably isn’t a good game mode for this game, just because of the grotesque amount of movement skills in it…
That and with the game not even close to balanced for any sort of team engagement… its tough to really pick another mode to develop.

Kurow.6973:

That simply means you’re bad. Sorry, but that’s the harsh truth. You even admitted yourself that you didn’t get your skill off. Perhaps you need better reaction time…or, if it’s your lag, a better internet connection… a thief cannot 3 shot you in sPvP….
I fail to see the logic in this post…. Sounds like you just want attentio… trying to achieve it through a form of threat/guilt…
This game has no monthly subscriptions…did you know that? If you don’t like it, easiest solution is to leave….
…or perhaps, they’re not stupid enough to take everyone’s advice and push out rash changes just to TRY please EVERYONE… I’m glad they’re not just rushing to update EVERYTHING, EVERYONE is suggesting…

People complain on public forums?
When people talk about a game on a public channel, one of the things that tends to come up are what you liked/didn’t like… i mean, you should know allot about why people complain from those near paragraphs you threw out about those darn blasted complainers…

Sure people can leave a game, but they can also post on forums… not having to pay a monthly fee doesn’t mean you can’t be disappointed in and/or angry at a game…

Anyways…
Ranger is allot about dodgeing, but that just makes the thief spike more deadly… ironically.
Basilisk venom and mug make an instant 900 range 1.5s stun, oh and, you know, just 5~k dmg on the side.
Without SoR or LR or ‘protect me’ on spec and off CD, you pretty much die in those 1.5s.

Oh and the good part, GW2 itself. You said Anet shouldn’t listen to everyone’s complaints about everything… but developers also shouldn’t release a game that is quite obviously still in the early beta stages…
Commerce is a 2 way street…

I’m glad you’re enjoying the game, it still has a number of people who enjoy what was dished out
I would have preferred Anet developing/perfecting their ideas for another year and coming up with truly great PvP (since they oddly decided to completely reinvent a system which takes tons of time, especially with their slow and careful attitude towards working threw balance), but yeah that’s just me. Glad to hear there is one less person waiting for the big next MMO.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Phira has it right. Once we have the key features we need for the core of the game, we’ll look at doing other game types.

Can you say anything less vague about it?
:)

Changing core mechanics was something for roughly a year ago.
Odds say nothing is going to change short of number tweaks and small ability buffs.
At least for a long time.

Jason Segel.2908:

Panther Chameleon.8465:

So, a 40k hp bonus while perma blinding and crippling a team is bad. Got it.

You can already perma chill and cripple with grasping hands, chill blains, and switching weapons. plague form = 20 pulses of blindness every 180 seconds.

deathly swarm + well of darkness = 25 pulses of blindness every 180 seconds.
having 40k hp doesnt matter because u cant heal while you are in it

hahahah…
You are portraying yourself as probably the worst person ever to look into balance.
If all you see are raw blinds/180s against target golems, oh and “gaining 15~k life but can’t click your heal skill” as a net loss…
Just stop before you people start yelling at you.

I’m not saying its a great skill, I honestly am not sure if it is a lil OP or UP… just your way of portraying numbers… is very… political, I’ll leave it at that.

Jason Segel.2908:

You are taking a huge 3 minute cooldown to deal 4700 damage and survive. i am dealing 37000+ damage and most of it is aoe direct damage + condi damage over a 20 second period. yes u only can get 6 pulses of blindness right away. but the whole point is to utilize the 6 pulses to deal all of your best moves while they are blinded. thus causing you to still be at full health while you already dealt them over 9k damage.

Why not both?
I’m not surprised, strictly offensively in certain situations, that multiple? utilities and a few high dmg attacks are better than an elite.
Go talk to any warrior.

Jason Segel.2908:

use your other abilities which are actually better and deal 15 times as much damage.

Wow, that makes so much sense… until you remember about the whole CD deal, and how plague form gives you a bunch of life and you can move around while in it…

Panther Chameleon.8465:

So, a 40k hp bonus while perma blinding and crippling a team is bad. Got it.

yeeup, aoe moving pulsing blind…

JaceTheAce.9875:

The real issue is that Anet seems so focused on buffing clsses that are already strong enough as is and yet classes like the ranger and elementalist are still weak as hell for DPS.

Elementalists aren’t bad dps.
I’ve actually heard some people have been doing work with them in tournies lately.

Rangers, the main problem is that next to every spec isn’t viable, one or 2 are, but that’s a far cry from many…

Jacobin.8509:

still pretty much in an early beta stage

Yes.
I wouldn’t have minded waiting another year for a game that would actually be worth PvP’ing in.
Ever since WAR died, I haven’t really gotten pulled into another MMO’s PvP and was really hoping to change that with GW2…

Syeria.4812:

Here’s a hint, your posting history is just two clicks away. It doesn’t take long to see the utter lack of “support” you’ve offered.

Being a fan of a game… is completely determined by how much you post on the official forums?
Do you seriously believe that???

Durzlla.6295:

if they get behind your drake during that time all that was forfeit

And that’s the bug the guy I quoted wanted removed.
Which would make it exactly what I said.

Indoles.1467:

Also, you trapper rangers. Please stop. One trap at most, never 2 or 3. You need SoR more than you know in ranger’s current state to even be viable for PvP.

Nope.
SoR is mediocre.
Being able to evade while immobilized and a full cleanse every 10s (empathetic bond) deals with conditions very nicely.

2 Traps is perfectly fine, some people push 3 with RaO and one handed sword, but I’ve never been much for it.

Dware.4259:

I find it hilarious a Ranger is a DPS class…

It can pull good condition dmg.
That or sword evade/power specs tend to work well enough if you have a good mind for enemy animations.

Dante Dragonhand.2538:

Yea, I was testing with friend and I would use rampage as 1 and signet of the wild and get 25 stacks of might, pop his f2, and watch it crit for 3k+ each bolt to do well over 20k , he went from 100-0 in seconds.

A 600 range, not dodge friendly (since it’d be like dodging unload?) 5→10~k attack (unbuffed) is a bit much.

Respect is earned… respecting someone just because they have control of something you like is nothing but an attempt to manipulate the word for what seems could be your own gains…

Aaaanyways, nothing Anet has done so far (in relation to PvP) has been worthy of respect…
They’ve been oddly silent about balancing to classes and the few tidbits they’ve given have been terribly misleading…
I mean, they released a game advertised for competitive PvP, yet left it leaps and bounds from being able to support it at launch and months from launch… even look at this last update, their main claims were to tone down spike dps and fix the ranger. Tons of people were phyced for that… but wait they somehow saw that best done by killing thief s/d while leaving the d/d spike spec entirely intact, oh and buffing ranger underwater combat…

Nothing in that is worthy of respect.
WTF with all these house analogies… if a landlord continually beats you up, answer me this, if he constantly says he will help you, leaving you sitting out on the porch for a few hours with paintbrushes and no paint, giving only vague reassurances that he will be there to help soon… for months… how the kitten does that have anything to do with respect?
Sure you can move out, but how does that make what he is doing any less kitten’ish

There is accountability, just like you are accountable to pay Anet for their game they are accountable to deliver on what they said that game entails….
Or, well, yeah, people leave.
And this game goes into that endless cycle of hype->disappointments->dead that every game short of WoW, LoL, exc. has… they have time because of the lack of monthly fee, but still they are losing players that will be extremely tough to get back… the whole group of people I knew who were heavily into PvP played GW2 for 1~ month before moving on and, for the most part, dumping MMOs for the time being… GW2 is just terribly, lacking, atm for that to be the case…

Lord Drakoz.4702:

There is still a good faithful community around GW2 PvP NA/EU – We have teams that are still serious about competition, but I totally understand why are the fans/players so frustrated at this point, hang in there and lets give ANET an opportunity to get things rolling!

The NA competitive scene is a joke.
There are a half dozen, being very generous, serious premades.

That is tragic.
Honestly though, the ladder system and a good SPvP maps and whatnot would have helped that a fair deal, but the PvP itself… the roamer/bunker deal… the ability setup… it just seems lacking. I can’t think of any other way to describe it, WAR, Rift, those games were far more entertaining, the more group based dynamic (the game was setup more for team fights instead of just small scale roaming*), in a number of situations better setup, versatile, more thought provoking abilities… it grabbed my attention off the bat and kept me playing for months.

GW2 doesn’t have that.
It seems entirely focused on TPvP. This conquest is a TPvP map, mediocre->terrible for pugging. The group dynamic of the encounter is near entirely threw voice chat, coordinating who goes where… and to boot you have to spec in synergy (since innately there is little to none between classes). That is just a bad PvP setup, at least when me, my brother and friends just started talking about MMOs, thats what we kept coming back to something along those lines.
So much potential with dodge rolling, actual projectile speed and combo’s… but just nothing more…

*-playing MMOs is about fighting with people, basing a game on small preplanned (for synergy) combat is just terrible to pug in.

For tournies its not that bad.
For this sort of pug PvP its absolutely terrible. The worst mode imaginable.

Shukran.4851:

dota 2 is dota1 full HD why? because dota1 players wanted it to be that way.

gw1 players came to gw2 because of the previous game. sadly gw2 is not gw1 full HD and a lot of players are disappointed about it. and a lot of gw1 playerbase would like to play again gw1 GvG.

it is only a anet fault. nothing more, nothing less.

There are few to any hardcore PvP’ers in GW2 atm…
There are only kittening 3~ hardcore premades…
A game near 3 months after release, made to be an e-sport.. yet in all of NA there are only roughly 3 kittening hardcore premades…
The game has allot more wrong with it than just not being an updated version of GW1. They tried to make a whole new system, reinvent the wheel if you will, and just got completely backlogged in kitten to handle… released way too early if you ask me… the whole PvP setup/system still needs allot of working out.

I know a few people who played GW1 PvP religiously… yet can’t say the same about this game… those people actually rarely even touch GW2… at best for the PvE…

Not basing combat on anything but spec… class balance must be perfect…
The game doesn’t give much kitten for positioning, it doesn’t give much kitten for how much you work with other people (small/random encounter sizes, terrible synergy between classes unless you pre-spec for it).

When near everything is based on the spec itself… yeah balance is pretty important, but GW2 shoved themselves into that ditch all on their own, so I would have expected them to have actually worked hard to work threw it (which they haven’t).

LoL didn’t add buttons that would form only rotations, they added everything to be near completely strategic.
The best you could use the ability, the better you were.

GW2 is sadly lacking in that department.
(spike dps and bunkers, the majority of the meta… both involve, for the mast majority of play, pretty static rotations/specs)
Same thing with positioning, it means so much less in GW2…
To boot it isn’t even a team game unless you decide to pull together a higher up premade.

To put it simply, the majority of GW2’s learning curve is in learning other classes abilities/animations and has a terrible SPvP/tourny setup…
The majority of LoL’s learning curve is learning to actually use them to your advantage and actually has well developed balance (when talking to my brother, he actually didn’t call any but a few classes bad.. everything was ‘oh kitten watch out for this’ and there are 100~ characters) and pug que and whatnot.

If you are new, short of a trap ranger, ranger is a tough class to play.
GS/longbow can work, but typically only if you go with the pet spike to boot (raven pet).

Longbow’s projectile speed tends to be pretty crippling, there might be a bug where you can interupt the volley and it will still hitting the area though.
Anyways best o luck!

PvP or PvE?

canines are utterly solid in PvP if played well.

Not that I’ve ever noticied.

Rangers still have one or 2 viable builds.
It was the exact same state they were prepatch.

That’s why people are QQ’ing.

Yes you can play another build, yes you will be at a disadvantage.
People don’t seem to want that to be the case though.

That is a really mediocre build.

Going 30 in beastmastery is just a no-no.
The regen was terrible when I tested it out.

Basing near all your dmg on pets, grabbing squishy pets, then taking protect me… generally isn’t a good idea.

That involves allot of fixing and actual control of actual attacks, possibly “stay” and “go here” commands.
At least that’s the only way I’d find maining a pet for dmg more than just “go AI go I’m here lol kiting waiting for you to bring me home!”

Carnagh.1687:

You’re either happy relying upon a pet or you’re not. If you insist on direct comparisons with other classes weapons you’re going to be consistently disappointed. I mean it in the kindest possible way when I say, if this fundamental aspect of the Ranger causes you problems, you need to change class.

Lol.
I’m rank 39 and have played in a few top tier tourny groups a month~ back.
I’ve taken my canines threw hell and back, deuled for days, won a number of them just because I set up their bro’ly knockdowns, well timed fears/imobs, used them as a projectile shields, mark proccing dummies oh and ran protect me and empathetic bond to boot.
That’s about as much as you can competitively rely on a pet.

All that said, directly comparing a ranger weapon to a non and coming out horribly lacking isn’t a good place to be with the game as it is.
If you look at the next line, I clearly state it lacks a punch, enough defense or even good mobility…

Having a weapon that is worse in pretty much every respects to another classes is more than a pet typically can make up for… since, you know, they do have horrible accuracy issues and are randomly irresponsive in their commands. Pets aren’t something to be utterly rellied on to make a spec, so short of you fighting someone who doesn’t know about dodging the bird spike, or eats canine CC’s for days… pets don’t actually make up all that much ground….

nerva.7940:

cat will give you overall more consistent dps than the bird

It won’t.

It seems you don’t know the perk or bird pets…
They are the only melee pet that can hit moving targets, guaranteed.
That means they don’t suffer from the 50%~ miss rate other melee pets do, so do FAR more consistent, and just more dmg in the vast majority of encounters.
(you, know unless you are fighting a target dummy, but since when was a melee ranger’s tough matchup against someone who stands still?)

You speak as if your words carry weight.
Everyone complains about their class on the forums, srry.
Only 2 people actually balance them though and I doubt they spend time reading threw random ranger threads about auto attack adjustments they already settled on…

People have done graphs, I’m sure Anet has too, of players and what class they play and what rank they are.
The ranger population is already extremely, extremely small at the higher end.
It now probably disappeared.
That speaks a million times louder than this topic ever will.
(for better and worse)