Guild Wars 2

Stop by anytime, I’m going to try to consistently stream whenever I play Ranger and will have a schedule of when to expect me live.
I’ve linked a bunch of other ranger streams in my info and all of my builds.
This isn’t meant to be “super serious,” I just wanted to try streaming and having some fun with it, so stop by, I’ll be playing PvP and WvW.

Feedback or anything would be appreciated: http://www.twitch.tv/itsjroh

If there are any other streamers that main streamer and aren’t Gladomer, let me know so I can check out their streams and see if I can add them to my list. I don’t have Glad added because he’s already a popular streamer and I don’t feel any desire to really promote him because of that, and also he multiclasses on stream often enough that I wouldn’t add him under the ranger section anyhow.

Edit: Going live again tonight with a few suggestions for stream quality and gameplay being tested. Time is going to be around 8 EST.

It’s because at any given time, half the community thinks rangers are OP (because to them anything that hits them outside of an arms reach is OP), and has no idea what they are talking about, while the other half of the community thinks rangers are garbage tier and a hindrance to have on any sort of team, and don’t know what they are talking about.

The key thing here is that between both sides of the generalized community, none of them know what they are talking about.

Probably only a subgroup of experienced rangers (most of the vocal people here on the forums, for instance) have ANY sort of idea how the class works and what the class needs, and the LITERAL rest of the community either thinks we only press 1 and 2 or that we don’t even matter enough to figure out if we DO take any sort of other actions other than that assumed statement.

So at the end of the day, what can you really do? Be a good enough player to earn peoples respect and show them why they should respect you on ANY class you want to play. If playing a ranger still matters to people beyond that aspect of how you play, then they honestly just aren’t worth worrying about, because to them, they will always have some sort of ranger bias, whether its too weak, or its to strong and they want it to be weak again (in their eyes on both of those of course).

The truth is, right now, the only thing we are lacking is some very slight quality of life group utility and some additional AoE options. If people think we need any more than that, it isn’t because we actually do, but its because other classes have been overtuned by ANet and need to by nerfed instead of what ANet keeps on doing, which is forcing power creep into the game (and in some regards ruining aspects of gameplay in the process).

So the tl;dr is probably something like: haters gonna hate, but they only hate us cuz they ainus (I know what it’s supposed to be and how to spell, I’m making a reference while expressing my actual opinion of those people).

Interesting.

I’ve been playing with Settler’s and Balthazar Runes myself, with dual canines and I’ve unfortunately been using Wilderness Knowledge with Troll Unguent, Flame Trap, Viper’s Nest, and Lightning Reflexes, with of course Entangle as the elite.

I absolutely think that Healing Spring is the more viable heal and would probably run the build with Poison Master in the most optimal situation, but until they fix Healing Spring not healing the pet, I have a really hard time enjoying having it slotted on my bar.

Besides that I’ve also been opting to go for Nature Magic over Beastmastery. I love the new BM to death, but I’ve been finding that I just don’t need the taunt on the the build and prefer picking up the extra cleansing capability from Evasive Purity and really enjoy the extra weakness condition and protection.

I think that in the long run, the Carrion/Scavenger combination will be the go to preferred combination, but with the classes being the way they are right now, I have been preferring to just counterbuild defensively against all of the high damage classes as opposed to building the higher damaging route.

Seeing as how my build is basically listed in your alternatives though, I probably didn’t really need to make this post (other than to give the thread visibility).

Dirame.8521:

jcbroe.4329:

Against the meta, I would honestly say that a well played LB/GS works better.

There’s a reason why there isn’t a single notable person running full condi in PvP (the closest are cele eles and necros).

WvW might be different though with the foods and weapon types (are people still using givers for more condi duration?) and etc.

Just because “notable people” don’t run a particular combination does not mean that combination sucks. It may just mean they are too busy being enamored by a different combination.
I can tell you, I’ve seen more condi builds beat Eles than Power builds. My word may no stand for much as I’m not a notable person but as Eles are the most OP thing running around right now, I wouldn’t take that lightly.

Notable people was a way of saying “the competitive teams that run the game at top tier and where the metagame is existent and matters.”

With perfect play, a D/D ele shouldn’t be dying in ANY 1v1 situation unless they are moa’d.

“Notable people” are the players that are going to be player as close to perfect play as possible, and where some other build might be able to beat some random hotjoin ele, you’re going to have to outnumber or use a game changing elite on any ele worth their salt to actually kill them, regardless of what build you run.

You took my response out of context though, because if you had scrolled up just a little farther, you would see where I said that condi builds aren’t bad (they are actually very strong), and that they are just weak against the meta.

I would love to see a video of taunt behaving in this manner, because being that this is a forum and all, I just honestly don’t take your word for it.

Not that I’m calling you a liar, I just haven’t personally been able to recreate the behavior of Taunt going through blocks or invulns, and have been able to successfully block taunts from other rangers and evade them.

Video proof would make your point indisputable and I would agree with you, since it was already supposed to have been fixed, and if it isn’t, it needs to be.

StickerHappy.8052:

Windborne notes only provides 5 seconds of regen instead of 12.

I can confirm this bug. It’s working with Clarion Bond but not with the actual warhorn weapon itself.

Against the meta, I would honestly say that a well played LB/GS works better.

There’s a reason why there isn’t a single notable person running full condi in PvP (the closest are cele eles and necros).

WvW might be different though with the foods and weapon types (are people still using givers for more condi duration?) and etc.

Puck.9612:

jcbroe.4329:

It honestly depends what you’re better with.

I personally give GS the slight edge in dueling scenarios against most things, but only because smart players will realize you have Sword/Dagger (or whatever) swap set and try to “force” you into it and then reset knowing that all you can really do in that set is evade and autoattack, which can make the build lose a lot of pressure/threat (GS tends to make people feel “unsafe” and waste cooldowns when you swap to GS).

Sword/Dagger on the other hand makes certain matchups infinitely easier. In general, other LB rangers and Shatter mesmers become much more simple because you can use your evades and time them to completely counter their damage, and really anything that has telegraphs or “predictable” sustained damage.

At the end of the day though, the weapons are functionally different enough that I’d have to say that the neither option is more optimal than the other. They both have strengths and weaknesses, and really, whichever set you perform better with and whichever set you feel matches you better is what you should go with.

That’s funny, I always found GS to be much stronger against other longbow rangers. The block completely counters their rapid fire and swoop gives you a nice evade and gap closer.

Don’t get me wrong, sword/x definitely works, I just think GS makes the job a little easier.

I mean, I personally think that GS is a better weapon for anything other than PvE DPS lol.

I just wanted to list some anecdotes where I’ve seen things work. It’s ultimately up the the user to decide.

Interestingly enough, even though the sword has a learning curve with it’s autoattack, overall, I think that GS has a higher skill ceiling and potential, which makes it ultimately more fun for me personally to use.

Archon.6480:

I love condition builds (mostly the fiery kind), but the reason I use crusader instead?

Two words: Diamond Skin

….And, the endless supply of them (in PvP)

That and bunker Guards, Cele Signet Necros, cele eles (without Diamond Skin), and even to some extent still, inspiration mesmers.

Just to name a few others lol.

It honestly depends what you’re better with.

I personally give GS the slight edge in dueling scenarios against most things, but only because smart players will realize you have Sword/Dagger (or whatever) swap set and try to “force” you into it and then reset knowing that all you can really do in that set is evade and autoattack, which can make the build lose a lot of pressure/threat (GS tends to make people feel “unsafe” and waste cooldowns when you swap to GS).

Sword/Dagger on the other hand makes certain matchups infinitely easier. In general, other LB rangers and Shatter mesmers become much more simple because you can use your evades and time them to completely counter their damage, and really anything that has telegraphs or “predictable” sustained damage.

At the end of the day though, the weapons are functionally different enough that I’d have to say that the neither option is more optimal than the other. They both have strengths and weaknesses, and really, whichever set you perform better with and whichever set you feel matches you better is what you should go with.

Durzlla.6295:

LughLongArm.5460:

Lazze.9870:

LughLongArm.5460:

When SB 1200 ranger ever on the table? The distance for off had skills is a fix, they used to have it while traited and now the trait doesnt exist, it was supposed to become base, same as LB 1500 range. Its not the case with SB.

People are just refering to how they nerfed shortbow from 1200 range to make it more distinct to longbow back in the day.

Which, as you say, isn’t really relevant at all. There are other ways to improve it.

Ya, the nerf was like 100 years ago , I dont even feel it needs the 1200 range and I use SB as my main weapon(not sure what it needs, kinda like it as it is).

I don’t use SB as my main weapon, but I do like it as is for the most part, but there is SOMETHING missing from the weapon, but I just can’t figure out what it is…

It’s that the SB is completely autoattack oriented. Forget the fact that pressing the cooldown skills doesn’t or didn’t increase the damage output of the shortbow in any way (this was prepatch, post patch the 5 stacks of poison might have a slight DPS increase, but still), but they don’t even do anything interesting lol.

It lacks potency AND functionality, whereas most of the other weaponsets in the game either have both or are only lacking in one of those categories.

It’s because condi is bad against all of the common builds/professions.
Ele has insane removal.
Shout bunker guardian is a thing again.
Warrior builds managed to pick up some cleansing (at least shoutbow is dead) on their meta build.
Thieves got all of their old meta builds options for free in a single build, cleansing included.
Mantra mesmers have great removal as well.

Necro, while not considered “meta” so to speak also outright hardcounters condi builds.

Not to mention at least half of those mentioned are AoE removals. And coordination only makes all of those cleansing options stronger, which weakens condi builds considerably.

As a matter of fact, none of this information is exclusive to ranger. NO class has pure condition build this meta. Ele and necro are both running cele and that’s as close as it gets, and more because survival is more optimal with cele on those builds.

Caedmon.6798:

penelopehannibal.8947:

Ranger hate is bandwagon hate. People only hate rangers because it’s some sort of fashion to do so. One person complains about a ranger using Longbow 4 against an enemy they were in the middle of melee about – and the whole crowd followed them with pitchforks.

The same argument the OP has said about rangers can probably be said about most classes, as I’ve heard people saying Necromancers and Mesmers and Guardians are the easiest to play too in various map chat conversations, though there doesn’t seem to be an abhorrent hate following those classes like there is against the ranger.

No,that is what You personally think why people dislike rangers.I dislike them for their 1500- 1700 range pew pewe dmg comparable to landing a full 100b but without the need to even land an opener first to make a connect,its just stand and Pew Pew Pew Pew .It’;s quite kittening ridiculous if you ask me,Any fight they will join,you either have to bail or focus the ranger straight away.It’s too easy to land a powerfull burst with a ranger from 15 – 1700 range.

Lock a ranger into place while using rapid fire,no free movement so he has to think about when to actually use it instead of blindly pewpewing,and any movement after will cancel it immediately.

Lol you literally just complained that because you can’t ignore it and have to change target priorities, you don’t like it.

That’s some high level play and balance right there.

Kreed.2768:

jcbroe.4329:

Literally the only difference is I take Natural over Wilting in BM,

Isn’t Natural Healing kind of bleh with its current bugged state of giving 189hp every 3 seconds instead of 125 every 1 second?

Honestly in retrospect, thinking about it right now, I don’t know why I don’t just run 2 handed training lol.

Conceptually its because it would make the pet tankier. I didn’t actually know that it was bugged (or how ANet even managed to bug it -.-) so that’s on me. Never actually bothered to pay attention to it, just figured “same trait, different day.”

Thanks for making me aware. I probably already should have been but I’m not honestly taking the state of the game too seriously right now (fun fact, double longbow with quickdraw in the Silverwastes means barrage on a permanent 9 second cooldown, so PvE tag everything lol).

I know why Hiro (talgo) runs wilting though, its his pet choice and lack of ICDs, and I should probably be doing the same.

Edit to respond to edit: Yeah, the casting that goes on with ranger has always been facepalm worthy. I hate DPS too, although they wormed their way into being a competitive event manager, because they aren’t exactly respectful or even well versed at the game. But yeah, Hiro got called a Bearbow and then a flood of unintelligible misinformation proceeded to spew forth from the casters mouth, and normally that would be me just writing it off as “this guys an idiot” and that would be the end of it, except the entire “top PvP” community doesn’t have a clue about rangers and what they do. Every popular streamer, Chaith, Phanta, etc, zero idea. Phanta actually has a ranger he copied the suboptimal Metabattle page onto and played for a few seconds before going “ranger is terrible, I don’t know how to do this” and swapped to ele.

It is very frustrating, while also motivating in a very rage oriented sort of way, for the fommunity to be this way about ANY class, let alone a person’s main.

Ah, I use BW for guaranteeing damage on my own, and I’d say it becomes even more invaluable with a premade team on VoIP where you can call out Taunted targets. Its essentially rangers version of the Guardian Ring (or in a more general sense, its why people were taking Guardians in the last meta).

Fun note by the way, if the Search and Rescue is available from the trait, you can do neat tricks like getting the trait to activate to rez an ally then cancel your own rez and continue doing damage, secure a stomp, or begin a rotation, or etc.

Just a fun, creative little way to utilize the trait hahaha.

Sube Dai.8496:

It’s the best gm I’ll never take

Nm line would have been good in the old meta but now we need all the offensive ones

Depends on how you play. Ranger typically plays like a roaming +1’er and target focus damager. Marksmanship is arguably better than Skirmishing with Clarion and Moment of Clarity but the GMs are all pretty poor and you’d probably end up with Lead the Wind for consistency over Remorseless (you’d get more mileage out of Lead the Wind), and Skirmishing really only has Spotter and the 10% crit chance increase while flanking.
Quickdraw has so much wasted potential on a power build that camps weaponsets that it “feels” wasteful to take outside of duels.

I mean, none of those options are all that gamechanging for me personally. However, the defensive options eliminate common threats from insta-killing and evens the playing field enough for you to have the upper hand, while Beastly Warden making people eat full Rapid Fires and the lockdown alone are easily the best option for damage builds currently available.

Just my 2 cents though.

Chokolata.1870:

Hahaha , he is playing my build… hahahaha awesome

We were discussing this, but same lol.

Literally the only difference is I take Natural over Wilting in BM, but I have a bad habit of cancel casting my F2s since Eurantien talked about the way it works (not that he’s the first to find it for whoever would like to make that stake, you get full credit lol but I heard it from Eura first).

I swapped my Drakehound to Owl though (I run owl/wolf now) so I’m trying to be better hahaha.

I feel like we were just talking about this though lol, nice to see 3 of us came to the same build conclusion.

Guys, while I understand that it was nice to perma-maintain fury on pet swapping and can totally understand why you’re upset that it changed; Clarion Bond, in every form they previewed the skill, had an internal cooldown of 30 seconds. The only QoL change I would address is adding a visual proc to it the way Engineers get on their toolkit traits when they have procs (the new speedy kits, dodge recharges toolbelt trait) or even like our QuickDraw trait, to show when Clarion Bond is available, and the oversight on this… Irks me, but yeah.

So, moving on to address the topic, Windborne Notes allows you to basically maintain those boons through simple petswapping and counting a few numbers (depends on how much boon duration you have).

In certain setups, more PvP oriented than PvE, you have the trait and Clarion Bond, the minor for boon duration, and you can take Travelers Runes that are more than beneficial for this setup for the boons and bountiful hunter, and you can maintain a decent enough in its own right damage bonus on yourself and the pet, especially from fury, from just swapping pets. Not to mention you’re more than likely taking protective ward, and the third line can be player choice, but as mentioned, Oakheart Salve is basically permanently passively protecting you at this point with all the different regen sources.

Particularly, the build I just mentioned is more useful in WvW where in PvP people tend to go for (and understandably so) more offensive boosting options like Beastly Warden and etc, but that will more than likely change once ANet hopefully figuring out insta-gibbing anything with less than 2.6k toughness, and leaving everything with more health at 20% is imbalanced and gamebreaking as far as mechanics go.

But anyhow, yeah, the only criticism I can relate to, as other have mentioned, is that Warhorn is just a subpar weapon, and the fact that you’re, in almost every way, better off taking Windborne Notes and Clarion Bond before you take Warhorn in ANY build should be an indicator of the type of rework warhorn needs, because you literally are better off dedicating 2 specialization lines to a combo than just taking the weapon, which is… Sad. We’ll just go with sad and hope that it’s universally understood what I’m conveying.

Ehecatl.9172:

Pretty sure Anet already said the druid was designed heavily around the staff weapon, unlike other elite specializations. A transformation would replace all the staff skills entirely, so that doesn’t seem likely to me.

Not to mention that turning into animals doesn’t fit the Guild Wars druids thematically.

From what I’ve read about GW1 druids, although there isn’t much to go off of, Druids became highly attuned with Nature. When I personally think “attuned to nature,” I think of the ability to create forests and manipulate the natural elements and creatures. You can entangle foes in roots you’ve grown and plant seeds on them that grow and suck the life out of them and sap them of energy, you can create environments (like quicksand and frozen ground) to hamper enemies, and call forth MANY animals of the wild to make an army to attack enemies.

So yes, I’d be inclined to agree that it will be more like a caster and less like a shapeshifter.

Why is there this “come at me bro” 1v1 challenge going on? That has no ability to highlight what the ranger is weak at (team utility) at all.

We lack (or have weaker than a different classes):

• instant lockdown
• AoE damage
• enemy boon ripping/manipulation
• ally boon sharing
• out of combat mobility
• team healing/cleansing

So what if ranger builds can 1v1 and deal damage, nobody that I’ve seen worth listening to is disputing that. But that doesn’t matter when you are looking to optimize a team comp and ranger can’t compete as well as other classes in any of those categories and doesn’t significantly deal more damage than those other classes either.

Dueling and the ability to duel doesn’t do ANYTHING to fix that. Congratulations, you can duel well on a ranger. Your team just died in a teamfight though because you couldn’t rotate there quick enough, rip boons off of bunker targets, lockdown high priority targets for kills, or improve your teams output in any meaningful way other than just doing damage, which is something that every class can do anyhow.

A good player is a good player, and on any class, a good player can push wins in solo queued unranked matches regardless of what they play. But premade vs premade? Rangers are not optimal class choices, and against any team worth their salt, a ranger is currently handicapping their team compared to what can be picked in its place.

Duels have no weight against that fact.

@Wuselknusel;

The only answer I can really give you is that the entire game used to be more balanced, and the introduction of continuous power creep has never fallen in favor of Rangers over other classes, which has just increased the disparity between the classes.

I still think the class has enjoyed amazing, much needed improvements.

I’ve just never seen why a person would take a power ranger over a shatter mesmer when looking to optimize team comps for PvP. Actually, interestingly enough, Engineers were hurt enough by their trait reorganization and reduction to grenade kits range that I think now, more than ever, that condi-rangers could push for the top spot at condition builds.

The bad part about that is that conditions are still considered overall weak in the meta with all of the removal :/

Once offhand training gets fixed in the next patch (whenever that is), I’ll only be waiting on Healing Spring fixes to optimize the build.

Besides all of that though, I’m pretty sure the general line of thinking is that we’re just going to have to stick it out until the next big, meaningful patch, which…. Probably won’t be until the expansion.

As for how I am? I’m super frustrated with ANet and their information trickle. We should be at the point where all of the elite specialization blog posts have been made already and we are just waiting on live streams to show off the changes in action. The longer they wait with information sharing, the less time there is to gather feedback, and the more chance there is that HoT is an even larger, buggier, imbalanced mess than what it should be (this is inevitable with any MMO expansion).
It’s a very poor way to handle it on their part, and ANet is really working against themselves at this point. I wake up in the morning, check the blog posts and reddit, and go “oh, no new information or information I care about” and don’t typically worry about GW2 for the rest of the day. I shouldn’t be so happy to see datamines either, but hey, I’m seeing something and that’s more than ANet is giving us!

More than anything though, I got my hopes up lol. Last weekend was my birthday and I got excited by the idea I might wake up to a Druid teaser on Monday, only to find that Elementalist, the class least in need of improvements or specializations, is getting announced.

I understand patience and all, but I kind of feel like Ranger deserves a whole month of blog posts detailing why half of the utilities and traits we have are awful, what design decisions led them to make them awful and the awful decision to design the pet mechanic the way it’s designed when literally every forum goer we’ve seen has a better idea, and what they are doing in the future to correct all of their terrible decisions and designs and how Druid is taking a step in the right direction, with then of course our reveal mixed in there.

I’ve also felt this way about the class since GW2 launched lol. It isn’t a new thing and I don’t feel I’ve ever hid it, I’ve just always made the best of it because I’ve been a ranger main since prophecies. But I would probably redesign the class from the ground up, given the opportunity. I miss my interrupt ranger, my stances, and my preparations, and I miss dancing in and out of the enemy back line harassing caster, shutting down skills, and focusing down targets when I need to, all while being harder to kill and versatile with condition removal and self healing so that monks generally didn’t need to waste heals on me.
GW2 for me took away everything that made ranger unique and left me with a generic bow and a pet stapled on, poorly implemented pet that had never been there, and I’ll always be bitter about it unless/until ANet reveals something to me similar or better.

bugged second page.

I’m not sure if you’re aware (I’m honestly not, I’m using the statement as a literal and not to represent hyperbole) but the ranger has been “dead” in competitive play since pretty much the celestial meta.

Now, that isn’t to say that good builds didn’t exist, and good players didn’t exist, and that sentiment still holds true even right now. But the ranger class isn’t being help back by itself, as a matter of fact, most of the changes are, and will be overwhelmingly positive for the class when the bugs finally get addressed.

The thing is, Ranger doesn’t really bring much to a team right now OUTSIDE of damage, and that will always be the forefront of the problem. Mesmers have insane “slipperiness” with incredible “get out of jail free” cards and can take portal for amazing team plays and moa for shutting down bunker targets and rampage warriors on top of their damage.

There is never a circumstance in this game I could imagine, both then, and now, where you would ever want to take a power based ranger over a mesmer or thief.

Condi ranger on the other hand is strong, but will always have weaker output than other classes, and because of the lack of targeted AoE, the build gets heavily pushed towards sidenodes/1v1s where the other classes can do both small scale fights and larger teamfights with the same build effectively.

Really, our weak utility skill selection is a huge part of the problem, and our biggest competitors, Mesmers and Engineers (don’t really seeing other classes performing within the scope these two do, and while people would also be tempted to cite thief, thief will always have the niche mobility that nothing in the game can match or compete with), overall just have the better tools (although even Engineers are considered pretty bottom barrel tier at the moment, and guess what rangers and engineer share in common? If you guess design dev, you’d be correct).

We are just in desperate need of some cleave/AoE, and the ability to do something other than damage (or damage while bringing suboptimal utilities compared to another class who can bring more optimal options that do more things while doing similar/same/more damage).

Substance E.4852:

jcbroe.4329:

If I have to deal with BS transformations that will never be worthwhile in any sort of meaningful setting other than to the people who want to RP like it’s WoW instead of just playing WoW, I’m driving cross country to have a word with ANet and I will personally oversee the firing of whoever came up with the dumbkitten idea to implement Druid, or who cares what it’s called, ANY Ranger change like this.

You seem pretty convinced that Ranger will be getting an actually good “wow, that really fills a role we needed!” specialization unlike the three we’ve already seen.

What precisely in the last three years has led you to believe that they will be putting extra special attention into the Druid?

The best we can hope for is for it to not be complete and total crap.

Mesmers are getting a 25% movement speed minor trait as well as more team support and AoE options. Reaper is getting an actual melee damage weapon and the ability to lock down targets with soft CC while getting a much needed PvE damage boost. Guardian is getting a reliable 1200 range weapon that actually has decent enough damage to be used outside of autoing world bosses and more active ways to utilize their virtues in combat that make their virtues less like “special signets” than they are now.
From what we can already see with Tempest, elementalist are getting a better ability to be able to play on the frontline, and somehow their everything is getting even more ability to do everything.

Every single one of these changes is a change that has been highly requested, in some form, by these communities of players.

I therefore think it’s reasonable to expect that, based on the fact that rangers have been requesting a change to our mechanic to make it more responsive/versatile/micromanage-able, or to not be tied to the current implementation of “pet sidekick” at all, as well as more team/group support options and more AoE/cleave, that it is very reasonable to expect any of these line items to be addressed.

Now, if ANet can somehow make that happen with transformations, fine, I’ll have to deal with how they implement it and will have to tolerate peoples excitement being a kitten furry while other classes can manipulate time and death, hunt and kill dragons, and wield and call forth the power of storms.

But, if it isn’t evident by the way I presented that information, it would be nice to actually get something “cool” or that would have a “significant weight” to it, and considering how a transforming nature kitten furry who can turn into the animal they pet wouldn’t be ANYBODIES choice for a tactical squad journeying into unknown territory to hunt and kill an elder dragon (and that’s just the lore and story aspect of the game) when you have an expert at hunting dragons, a time manipulator, a person wielding and calling down storms on their enemies, and a literal death wielder, and that’s only half of the classes, it would be nice to have an actual interesting, intuitive, and powerful alteration to the class through the elite specialization (also the Revenant is channeling some of the most powerful lore figures of all time, I might add, to aid in the fight, and really, would you rather have a shiro reincarnation on your side of a kittening furry).

xDudisx.5914:

nacario.9417:

xDudisx.5914:

If you observe the patch notes from the last 2 years, you will see ranger is one of the class which got the most buffs.

Just to list a few:

-longbow dmg buff
-GS dmg buff
-reduce dc on shouts
-entangle reduced cd to 60s
-reduce the cd on signets
-warhorn cd reduction
-axe might on autoatck
-countless trait buffs
-etc…

So you went through all the countless patch notes the last two years in detail to come up with that conclusion

I play this game since 2013. During that time I’ve read pretty much all class balance patch notes.

Yes, ranger is one class has been getting constant buffs, patch after patch. Compare the today’s ranger with the 2.5 years ago ranger. Now look at classes like thief, ele, guard, that are always getting nerfs….

lolwut?

Okay…. Ranger 2-3 years ago, Trap builds, BM builds, spirit builds, had a place on every team, just like thief, ele, guard.

After the respective claim of a “constant buff, constant nerf” cycle, ranger, since the cele meta started, has been considered bottom tier and a liability to have on any team, while the “constantly nerfed classes” have been even more desired/required for a team to be competitive, with metagames even being shaped around their existence in certain instances.

So….. the ranger got buffed down to the bottom, not optimal, not viable tier, while Guards, thieves, and eles got nerfed up to the highest tiers. Makes sense.

Durzlla.6295:

jcbroe.4329:

No, just no.

If anything, the ranger needs to become LESS associated with animals as they approach the realm of becoming MORE magic based.

If I have to deal with BS transformations that will never be worthwhile in any sort of meaningful setting other than to the people who want to RP like it’s WoW instead of just playing WoW, I’m driving cross country to have a word with ANet and I will personally oversee the firing of whoever came up with the dumbkitten idea to implement Druid, or who cares what it’s called, ANY Ranger change like this.

I’ve tried to remain unbiased and stay optimistic about HoT, even though every week that it isn’t a reveal week and ESPECIALLY every week that goes by without Druid or Release Date info, I get tested a little bit more, but this, this less-than-fecal-matter-worthy implementation of Druid is my line in the sand.

I don’t see why transformations couldn’t just work like kits that also changed your appearance. Then they actually would be brought as long as they’re useful as a skill as a whole (like any engi Kit).

Not to mention an EXTREMELY common theme of nature magic as a whole (what Druid would obviously be using) is shape shifting, things dealing with animals, and things dealing with plants. I mean elements are also a common trend but a lot of people seem to think that won’t happen due to it stepping on the toes of the elementalist.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we get transformations at all, the elite and heal could very easily be a magical plant theme (Oakheart elite, Aloe Seed heal) and animal based utilities that could bring a lot of variety and potentially support as a whole

The problem is that baseline ranger is already pretty much a “typical druid” anyhow. It has an animal companion, animal themed attacks, and the ability to “summon nature” through spirits.

Druid is already so close to existence that a few transformations might be “cool” for some people but unless we get a “mesmer transformation” will never help push into the areas of the game we lack in and be optimal in any sort of team comp.

I’ve also come up with many, many iterations of how “animal kits” would work, and not a single one plays nicely with the current pet and how the traits work with it, unless our entire mechanic remains unchanged (very, very, very poor implementation).

If ANet wanted to go with transformations, they need to entirely replace the mechanic and work like Revenant, where we “channel” the aspect of a pet/pet family, and even then, it would either be limiting or not play nice in some way with the current utilities.

Also as cited, it overlaps so much with Norn transformations that it almost comes off as lazy.

If anything, I’d picture ANet moving away from the “animal healer dude” archetype and push the class more towards “forest warden brown wizard.” Magic dealing with growth of plants and alteration of the environment (datamined placeholder images show Frozen Soil and other such named GW1 named skills as icon placeholders), ability to be an “animal master” and communicate and work with all animals and not just a singularly bonded animal, and the ability to create potions/elixirs and have natural resistances and magical spells to heal and relieve “ailments.”

The thing is, transformations would be a cop out and I will put all my money on them lacking the intuitive design, complexity, and effectiveness that the class needs to hold a candle up to the other classes.

It’s on the bug forum and as such isn’t visible in the Ranger subforum, so I’m quoting this here so that people can see what is being addressed in the next round of patching for us (whenever that is).

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

I’ve hit some of these compiled issues (like the 150 pet stats, some offhand range items and some pet traits not working while downed) and those should be getting addressed soon-ish.

We are working heavily on HoT and trying to get to these issues whenever time allows.

Soilder.3607:

jcbroe.4329:

No, just no.

If anything, the ranger needs to become LESS associated with animals as they approach the realm of becoming MORE magic based.

If I have to deal with BS transformations that will never be worthwhile in any sort of meaningful setting other than to the people who want to RP like it’s WoW instead of just playing WoW, I’m driving cross country to have a word with ANet and I will personally oversee the firing of whoever came up with the dumbkitten idea to implement Druid, or who cares what it’s called, ANY Ranger change like this.

I’ve tried to remain unbiased and stay optimistic about HoT, even though every week that it isn’t a reveal week and ESPECIALLY every week that goes by without Druid or Release Date info, I get tested a little bit more, but this, this less-than-fecal-matter-worthy implementation of Druid is my line in the sand.

Quite strong feelings. Now imagine if we all had such a passion for important things, like poor people.

Strong words to express resolved feelings.

And this is a videogame forum, not a political and social philosophies forum. I have feelings and opinions outside of the realm of videogames and not a single one of them would lack any of the same passion shown here. Seeing as how this isn’t the place to discuss those things though…. yeah lol.

No, just no.

If anything, the ranger needs to become LESS associated with animals as they approach the realm of becoming MORE magic based.

If I have to deal with BS transformations that will never be worthwhile in any sort of meaningful setting other than to the people who want to RP like it’s WoW instead of just playing WoW, I’m driving cross country to have a word with ANet and I will personally oversee the firing of whoever came up with the dumbkitten idea to implement Druid, or who cares what it’s called, ANY Ranger change like this.

I’ve tried to remain unbiased and stay optimistic about HoT, even though every week that it isn’t a reveal week and ESPECIALLY every week that goes by without Druid or Release Date info, I get tested a little bit more, but this, this less-than-fecal-matter-worthy implementation of Druid is my line in the sand.

mistsim.2748:

I don’t mind the pets right now. I feel the worst offenders are the useless GM’s and extremely weak weapon sets. even our utilities and elites, other than spirits, are quite good.

at this point ive basically lost faith in the devs. too much incompetence, team too small, and lack of understanding of top level gameplay have made me give up on this game, until im proven otherwise by the devs. and surprise, surprise – still no balance patch a month after a major patch, and we’re forced to play garbage. kitten like this makes me look forward to Overwatch. when that’s out, im outta here. and ive stuck through the thick and thin for 3 years.

More than anything, I just think that the lack of release date is killer right now.

Like, I understand that the marketing team and devs and all have probably realized that if they give us the release date now (or what they would deem too soon), the game will be a graveyard until the expac (because lets be honest, the game is super stagnant with no endgame goals left for anybody that isn’t a new player where balance doesn’t matter, and an imbalanced cluster kitten with bugs and regardless of it being an uphill battle with the 3 underpowered tier classes; Ranger/Engi/Necro, the game is mechanically awful to participate in as any class right now).

I’ve literally gone from practicing my pvp builds and skills and playing hours on end to just farming the silverwastes and intoxicated WvW with my guild, and this obnoxious golem rush thing has killed one of those things for me this week, so I’m playing my Xbox one until next week when they might actual reveal something I care about and I can actually play part of the game again maybe if I want to.

But yeah, I’ve been looking for the next thing to move on to as well. I want Skyforge to be my next MMO but I get such mixed responses from the people in the beta and nothing ever seems positive that I hear about it (but seriously look up Skyforge Archer, it will make you super jealous of any sort of bow wielding class, unless you are more of a pet-styled player, in which case I forget the name of the class but they have one in Skyforge that will almost create extreme jealousy as well lol).

Dunno…. ANet for me has been dropping the ball every day we go without a release date or a progress report, and one more reveal hiatus will be enough for the community rage to potentially overflow.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

jcbroe.4329:

…To cite an example, in GW1, pets ended up getting something like a baseline 50% movement speed increase…

It was a 20% base run speed, so with maximum speed boost of 33%, they could move 53% faster than a player with no speed boosts. They also got a +33% outgoing damage increase and -33% incoming damage decrease in PvE.

Same thing needs to happen here imo, but even more base run speed because of all the movement/teleport skills.

Thanks for the correction.

I was too lazy to look it up and still didn’t use pets anyhow lol.

@Fluffball;

I’ve been gathering ideas and having an inner debate about when to do another bullet list of things to address to the devs, but my decision has always ended up being to wait for the druid reveal.

So far the reveals have emphasized other classes specific capabilities while providing new options for gameplay to do things they previously couldn’t.

So if I make a list and it has the generic ideas of like… AoE cleave and boon manipulation on it (aid allies/punish enemies), there is the chance that Druid brings exactly that to the table.

So I’m saving the depth of my criticisms and ideas until we can look at the whole picture lol.

@everyone/everything else;

I’ve had a few of those sorts pet ideas myself. An autoattackless pet that has “stances” or “modes” you can put them in to generate actions when you perform actions for example. Or even a “summoned” pet that can be specialized more as a mechanic for things like upkeep or something I’ll coin “summoning prowess” (mechanics like halving the duration of the pet uptime and either doubling its damage or having 2 pets instead of one).

Regardless, without changing the existing mechanic, I’ve always thought that, especially for player versus player modes, the pet either needs an AI improvement or a serious baseline performance increase, or the rangers damage performance needs to be less tied to the pet, while the pet becomes more of an “added utility benefit” effect, although the side effect of that would be pet families becoming even less effective options while canines become even more apex predator options.

To cite an example, in GW1, pets ended up getting something like a baseline 50% movement speed increase and like a 66% AoE damage cleave resistance to try to push them to be chosen more often as options. And that was outside of the realm of skills that were used on top of those improvements to increase pet speed and damage resistance.

For GW2, not touching anything else, I think pets would at minimum need to perform actions (aka attack) 25-33% faster than they currently do at baseline, at least for their cooldown-less skills.

Not that pets are a bad mechanic, GW2 ranger pets are just really poorly implemented (pretty sure they are just inherited open world monsters with a custom skillset and controllable targetting, with slightly altered AI for F2s and pathing).

Sina.9208:

God no! Roy hates the ranger class.

Out of all of the visible Devs, Roy is the only Dev that even takes Ranger discussion seriously as well as trying to have conversations with some sort of depth about reveals/changes. He even gasp enjoys aspects of the class and gameplay.

People like Jon Peters (is is sadly a design lead with his mentality) and Grouch (who isn’t a Dev but perpetuates stigmas), as seen by that link to the livestream earlier in the thread, turn ranger into the butt of all jokes and JP, as a design lead, made the more than joking comments about how he wants to just skip covering the class (and really, why does that make you a good design lead?).

Regardless, it doesn’t really matter if Roy dislikes the class. As a matter of fact, most of us here only want to love the class, but hate it’s actual implementation.

A lead designer that doesn’t like a class can be a very good thing anyhow, because that means they have ideas and ways they would change it to make it more likable. Personally, Ranger has always and will always be my main, but I absolutely hate the class myself and would redesign it from the ground up and have it by ten times better at a minimum.

The problem is whichever dev thinks that ranger is in an okay enough spot that big changes are out of the question. If that’s the person leading Ranger class design, then some serious reshuffling on who is managing what project needs to occur, because that person is no longer (and the history speaks for itself) doing an acceptable job. They either need to step it up or hand off the class design to somebody who can.

I mean, I have my CompSci degree, and I’ll even work on a volunteer basis; so ANet can take me up on my offer to redesign the class for them at any time

Chokolata.1870:

@JC:

There is a very real reason that Ranger is neglected. No high level team plays one. The last time Ranger was usable in high level was the spirit build, but that was almost 2 years ago. Like really, no one cares about Ranger. It is all about Ele, Thief and Mesmer. Perhaps a Guardian and a Warrior. You saw what they even did to Engi in PvP, how they made him far worse then before.

I would be perfectly happy if they just fixed the bugs. Trap rework actually made Traps worse, Spirit rework made them worthless and we have 2.5 usable shouts. Like I said, there is simply very little to no top level feed back on Ranger.

I understand. Also, realistically speaking the actual competitive community is only like 20 people deep between NA and EU combined, so I would really hope that the devs would be smart enough to gather that there isnt enough of a sample size of a population there and that PvP itself needs serious help lol.

Don’t quote me on this, but if I were to mention that engi and ranger share the same designer, would that add any sort of perspective to the underlying message I’m trying to convey without creating a personal attack (which honestly isn’t the intention)?

I went back through the livestream by the way. The original MDG being discussed that the devs though was GM worthy was:
While under the 50% threshold, gain 3 stacks of might of 6 seconds every 3 seconds.

With runes and/or the NM line, the trait would have been able to stack 9-12 stacks of might and maintain that, which even though I don’t agree that’s GM worthy still, it was a good/strong adept, and would be better than what the trait became as a GM.

Here’s the blunt truth; your guys cynicism and how you think others should feel about the class (to treat it as dead to you and to stop caring) has nothing to do with the point of this thread/topic.

Not that I myself don’t sympathize with those feelings; but that those feelings shouldn’t equate to no longer trying to communicate feedback. It should be the opposite; empowering. With the devs “coming out of the woodwork” for all of the great changes other classes are getting, now more than ever I personally am moved to remind whoever our lead design dev is the position that we are in.

And if you’re so jaded that you’re going to spend your time trying to shut down threads that are trying to get a message across that we can all agree with, even those of you with no hope, then it might be time to just take a necessary hiatus. I do it myself when I get too jaded, and it’s a very refreshing experience.

So please, I don’t mind that you’re expressing that you feel this way at all, but don’t use those feelings to reason why the rest of us shouldn’t care and/or stop providing feedback.
Because that’s the whole point of this thread; that our feedback has never been implemented in a meaningful way and either our Dev or whoever put the death grip on the original batch of changes they showed off during that livestream needs to throw out their past approach with rangers and get on the track that is being given to most every other class.

If you guys don’t think anything will come from this, fine. But the last message any dev for any game should ever be sent is that there community is apathetic and doesn’t care, so they can be apathetic and not care.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Holland.9351:

The same Roy that agreed to move Most Dangerous Game to grandmaster on livestream?

To be fair, Roy just agreed and was not the one to make the call to move it to Grandmaster status. Most Dangerous Game being originally placed in the Adept tier of Skirmishing shows that Kui (probably) knew that it was not a powerful trait to begin with.

I also wanted to point out that the trait they talked about in that stream was 3 stacks of might for 6 seconds on a 3 second interval. Under 50% health, with Strength (or whatever might based) runes, that would have easily maintained 9 to maybe even 12 stacks of might once the interval proc’d a few times.

A whole lot of the stuff from that stream was gutted. Signets were resetting Remorseless with Brutal Seals, Light on your Feet was activated while moving, Strider’s Defense increased swords Damage by 10%, Keen Edge (sharpening stone activated on opponents health threshold) was still worked into Wilderness Knowledge, Peak Strength (10% more damage above the threshold of health) was a master in Wilderness Survival, Regen on Windborne Notes was the same duration as the rest of the boons given by the Warhorn.
And all of that was just what the obvious differences were.

I’m not sure why all of these things were gutted either. Important damage modifiers were lost and cool effects got overnerfed or removed before hitting the live servers.

Still, Most Dangerous Game in that livestreams iteration was a much, much better trait than what made it to live.

Let’s also remember that even if the ideas weren’t directly his, he was also the one who brought us the “baseline signets affect the ranger” announcement and was probably the most excitied a dev has ever been about ranger when showing off Rapid Fire with a halved cast time.

While it’s absolutely important for the dev team to withhold some level of transparency so that nobody gets singled out as an individual and attacked, I can’t be the only one who see’s Roy as the person who brings fun design to class to improve gameplay quality, which is something that’s been severely lacking on the ranger change spectrum.

I have no intention of trying to “rain on” anybody’s “parade” or ruin their day, but even from the most casual (a word in this being used to describe a person who has not taken the time to become familiar with the intimate concepts/effects of the game) perspective, there is an extreme difference in design quality as far as “what can I do on and with this character” that is immediately evident, before we even start to discuss balance details.

I’m just asking for the same quality and care be put into ranger/druid design that has clearly been put into classes by people like Roy who also simultaneously communicate visibly and gather feedback and implement changes based on feedback, which, while the communication part may be rare, is not a singular case with just one dev (see Robert Gee).

I’m not trying to create an attack or anything at all; just offering up the criticism that whatever the previous approach has been for ranger has never been significant, and that a page needs to be taken out of these other guys design “notebook” with whatever the old ranger philosophy is being scrapped and forgotten if the class is to ever make progress on the fronts of “fun” and “competitive value.”

Seriously, title says it all.

But for the record, Roy has been the one that has announced every single change that has ever done rangers any sort of justice.

So, while it’s obvious that Revenant is of course going to have the biggest spotlight with it being the expac exclusive class, with Roy being the lead designer, it’s clear that an intuitive design with a well-rounded toolkit and smart, fun combat flow are all focuses and that feedback is both heard and acted upon.

All I’m saying is that it would be nice to have that sort of development and developer when it comes to the ranger/druid.

If it isn’t Roy, then I really just hope this plea gets out to whoever is the lead on Ranger so that they understand that while the old efforts have been appreciated, there is a very revamped looking GW2 around the corner and the community would like the tools to have fun and be competitive with Ranger/Druid in that game; because it’s very apparent that we comparatively will never get the opportunity to play a ranger like that in this iteration of the game.

That is all.

Sincerely,
Pretty much every Ranger.

I’m not going to say not to do anything or even that you shouldn’t or that it’s pointless.

What I will say is that the current state of the game is going to be comparatively short lived, so that while it is a fun way to spend your time theorycrafting and optimizing and perfecting; don’t get too set on making any sort of definitive ideas/conclusions just yet unless you don’t mind the potential uprooting of everything (or just some of the things) you come up with.

That’s honestly why I’ve been staying away from doing so myself. The expansion is becoming more and more tangible, and the reality is that the biggest changes are going to happen either at launch, or about as close as imaginable approaching launch, aka the next “feature patch” which has been mentioned in passing a few times on red posts.

So my advice is to just get into the game, get comfortable with the class and your class knowledge, and get your head into the theorycrafting process, but be extremely open-minded about how the game is in flux and preparing for another batch of massive changes.

The way I like to think about it right now is that the existing classes are all playing a little less than 5/6ths of their class (missing a whole trait line plus a new weapon), and we don’t even know what sort of other things will get changed beyond that (but you can bet on changes).

I’d just like to make mention that the only place I’ve seen Rapid Fire realistically hit for any of the numbers being mention is at PvE Tequatl, and you have to be hitting multiple hitboxes to achieve that 99% of the fight.

In PvP, a full Rapid Fire channel realistically does 6-8k damage. As a matter of fact, the only thing that pushes it to be anywhere close to strong is the fire/air double procs that boost the damage up by 2k on each end of the range I listed.

Signet boosts would muliply that damage range by 1.5, but that doesn’t make Rapid Fire too strong, it makes the modifier the thing to look to alter.

An honest evaluation would be that damage with thief/mesmer is competitive, but the way in which it occurs is not. Mesmer/Thief can burst instantly from stealth and have tools to be able to lockdown the target to guarantee damage. Ranger has to “pew pew” in the open for a longer period of time with less instant damage and hope the target isn’t smart enough to Line of Sight or dodge.

That’s actually what makes Beastly Warden so strong; it’s our first strong tool for locking a target in place to burst them. However, even though we have strong tools, we don’t comparatively have strong tools.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

In GW1, our PvP builds had certain things and the trends were quite common, these are the ones I used all the time there.

We have nothing like these builds here and those traits would help us get back to a good place imo, toolbox and utility, pressure etc. All with good evasion and mobility. Sigh.

The Magebane build would be better off going R/Mo like most/every other build, and you don’t have the GvG version of Melandru’s Shot, only the HA version

I agree with the point of your thread by the way.

The people that disagree with the thread seem to only evaluate ranger at the level of damage dealing. Their brain goes. “Ranger… Does damage. They do damage well enough. Don’t really know what the pet does but it has to help, and the damage is fine. No changes needed.”

They never stop to think that pure damage with inferior mobility and inferior in every way team utiility is a poor place for a class to be in, because they never get passed the damage part of the thought process and don’t care to educate themselves to form an unbiased opinion.

Yeah, I don’t mean my responses to make me out to an apologist, by any means, because I’m just as frustrated as the next person, I just blame different people lol.

I think that ANet handles patching and community interaction poorly. What should be done differently? For starters:

• A weekly “what’s new at ANet” blog post, boiling down to basically telling the fommunity what the main development focus of the week has been. Just telling people what’s being worked on in the immediate scope would give a layer of needed transparency (literally everything ANet tells us at this point is a “reveal,” because we are in the dark about everything) to create a stronger relationship between the developers and the community (and so people can’t keep making the toxic and vitrolic claims of how ANet is lazy and doesn’t care or do anything)

• Bring back the old system of blog posting the set in stone balance changes a month or even two before they happen with the devs concisely describing thought processes powering the changes, and give the community a chance to give feedback to the devs before the changes go live. There is a ton of balance issues that should just never ever make it to any live servers that do, and as much as you want to blame the devs, they must hhave the worst feedback gathering team/system, and simply building a communication bridge with the community could fix that.

Like… If we had this sort of communication, we could just save each other time. The player community would spend less time arguing and speculating, and the devs could spend less time designing or trying to implement horribly awful traits (Most Dangerous Game) or gamebreakingly broken traits/mechanics (Prismatic Understanding).
Win/win.

Chokolata.1870:

@jcbroe:

What you have said about the inability to implement ideas goes for pretty much any business or company. Having said that, I do not think that it can apply in this scenario however.

As we have seen, A-net is not adverse to making rather big changes as far as specialization and balance changes go. Mesmer, Engineer, Guardian, Necromancer and even Elementalist changes can be called anything but conservative. However, in the case of Ranger they just did not bother.

I am of the opinion that in the case of Ranger something else is afoot. It is not a conspiracy or anything like that, it is just that no one really wants to bother fixing something that can not be fixed. And many things that really could be fixed are brushed off by the standard it is not in our design philosophy for class XYZ, and in this case Ranger

Prime examples:

We need more F abilities to better control the pet – Said it was to complicated for new players, but with the latest patch Thieves and Engineers got another F button. Mesmers will get a new one with the Chronomancer

Permanent stow – Said that the pet was meant to always be out even if it completely ruins the experience for an entire team, ex. skipping in TA and pets activating blossoms. Just having the ability to force stow it even if its at a damage loss for the ranger would go a long way in increasing the reliability of the mechanic.

Single target sustained damage – Anyone remember this golden sentence? How Ranger is designed to be a sustained single target damage class? In a game that absolutely does not support it, with very poor innate defenses and zero bunker busting capacity or boon removal.

Ranger + pet = total other class damage – Damage tied to an AI that even got nerfed a while back for doing too much damage, even though it simply can not hit moving targets.

Think of the whole situation like this, it has fallen to the Ranger to be that one piece of the game that no one actually bothers with. It is sad for us Ranger players but it is what it is.

You’re right, and my opinion of the situation is summed up in my statements to Mohagi.

Sadly enough, every single one of the things you mentioned were nonexistant in GW1. Rangers weren’t forced to take pets, weapon skills, and even bows had decent cleave abilities (splinter barrage anyone?), and of course an entire set of pet skills, with active skills, enhancing skills, and complimentary effects between pet and player existed, with even an evolution system that specialized what unique way your pet interacted with combat (damage increased, health increased, etc).

I actually played interrupt ranger for a few years so long ago isn’t even relevant for most people, but it was an extremely high skill way to play the game competitively.

So seeing all these backward steps and my main profession dumbed all the way down to what it is has been one of my most frustrating experiences in gaming so far, and I don’t understand why ANet essentially ruined my favorite class of any game I’ve ever played.

So yeah, my experience has been ruined ever since they designed ranger in this game the way they did, before launch was ever even finalized lol.

Still, I blame the designers more than the balancers. If we had somebody like Robert Gee who had actually crafted this extensive class beginning all the way in GW1 and adapted, reinvented, and pushed for improvements the way it is evident that Robet Gee does, I don’t think the ranger community would be arguing itself out of a developmental pitfall to begin with.

Mesmer was my “second main” in GW1 though, and I can honestly say GW2 has left me little reason not to enjoy mesmer. Ranger…. Well, I enjoy what I can lol.

Adding on to the people making the minor trait Steady Focus argument, it HAS always bothered me that alpha training exists and isn’t just rolled into the base Opening Strike trait.

@Mohagi;

It’s pretty indisputable that most of of could probably design better overall traits and a better trait system.
I blame the design devs more than the balance devs though. Coming from my long history of playing GW1, ranger for me in GW2 is dumbed down, lacks most of its original nuance and playstyle customization, and is unrecognizable in the worst kind of way.

I simply had to accept that GW2 at this point is probaby the only suitable game in its genre/sub-genre, and that this ANet team is better at marketing than designing fun, intuitive, and meaningful gameplay.

I just wish my main class wasn’t a shadow of its former self, and as you highlighted, that that people working on the class were more competent at comprehending how the class plays, or even the concept of what a good trait is.

@Puck;

You’re right, I mean, all I can do is speculate. I just prefer to think of it as the industry standards of higher up business decision red tape nonsense dictating patch release periods and how much the dev team is actually allowed to change (aka the balance team could probably make the game entirely different within a single week given free reign) over the assumption that the team is lazy/incompetent/dragging their heels for no reason.

I personally am a CompSci major and prospective hire in the programming industry, but am already jaded by situations like what this one potentially is where you could be the hardest working, most devoted, passionate dev and have massive amounts of changes you could easily make right at your fingertips that would improve the player experience a ton, but your boss tells you that you can’t make any of them because “it doesn’t fit with the current vision of the game to make those changes” or “we aren’t ready to see things like that be changed in the game just yet” or etc.

BUT, because you are the dev and not the shot caller, not only are you thrown into limbo with all of your ideas, but you have to take the blunt force of a community of players calling you lazy and incompetent, and even though you agree with them and want to make those changes, you literally have no way to.

Rambling aside and ultimate point being; I totally agree that someone or some people somewhere are being inefficient and incompetent and the game is suffering lol. I just personally don’t want to place blame on who it is. My general opinion of most programmers I come across and including myself is that left to our own devices, we would probably over-do the amount of things we touch and program because its a love/addiction that carries with it “just one more thing” driving feeling, so I don’t generally throw them under the bus first lol.

Gotejjeken.1267:

So I’m seeing for the top 1% of players (Abjured), Ranger may be outclassed. Also in obvious broken edge cases (shatter mesmer), Ranger is outclassed.

The general consensus seems to be what I thought, that Ranger itself is rather balanced, just slightly off. Which is problematic as it means Anet will take eons do do anything to correct it.

Pretty much exactly this.

Especially because they will decide forever between distributing power creep to other classes or nerfing the overbuffed classes, and then will be too timid to make any sort of actual, meaningful change for anybody else because of “not wanting to kneejerk” or “don’t want to make too many changes that won’t have the time to settle if they are all introduced at once.”

Nicknobreak.7543:

I will concede that rangers are in a better place than they were previously, but I will also argue that all the progress this class has gained is far and beyond overshadowed by the immense improvements other classes received thereby negating any semblance of balance that there once was.

Rangers may be decent roamers, only behind thieves, mesmers, elementalists, and medi guardians, but 5th place isn’t bad if you consider that “top tier”

Okay, and I’ll concede, that’s a fair position to have right now, and you’re by no means wrong.

We are absolutely comparatively weaker than other classes right now, for sure.

I just don’t think we should treat the last patch as a balance patch. It was a system revamp in preparation for the expansion that universally overpowered a lot of things that nobody should really expect to stay the same (there is no way PU/Mantra shatter mesmer is going to stay the way it is, for starters).

While we of course have to make comparisons in order to evaluate game wide balance, the game is in a transitional period waiting for the expansion to drop and “complete” the classes and the balance patch to drop to balance the issues that were introduced with the core patch, which then the devs will shift primary focus to watching/balancing the new elite specs.

But I agree it is very frustrating that the game will more than likely be left in its current state of imbalance until the expansion drops. We are essentially QA and gathering metrics for ANet so they can balance on their own timeline while we have to play a very frustrating, imbalanced, broken game.

I can understand it from a development perspective, but it really does hurt the relationship with the playerbase, especially the PvP oriented players, when the game gets left “in working order” while we wait on the devs to finish the expansion and roll out the balances on their time as opposed to having a bigger team to roll out more frequent updates so that the “health” of the game can constantly be improved.

Sorry if I came off rude, I’m frustrated in general with both ANet letting the game be like this and the playerbase as a whole for not staying as positive and being as understanding as I give them credit for (not that I’m saying the frustration isn’t justified).

Ranger doesn’t really have any problems dealing damage or avoiding damage that I’m aware of.

As a matter of fact, the class itself was buffed, and only when you start to make cross-class comparisons does anything seem imbalanced….

….which brings me to the point that this was not a balance patch. AT ALL. This was ANet updating their system for the new system and mechanics that are going to be introduced in the expansion. It was a REVAMP. Balancing will happen with the expansion.

So that’s my first point.

My second point is this: comparing ranger to things that were broken with the patch like Grenadier and mesmer burst or guardian burn combos and then saying “we’re weak because we didn’t get that” isn’t the way to balance a game. All of the these things that people are comparing the ranger to are going to change. Grenadier was already fixed, and Mesmer will not be retaining its current status. Making balance arguments and comparing to the MOST broken, obviously going to be changed mechanics in the game is just…. I don’t have words to describe how incompetent you would be at balancing anything.

So, now that all of that is out of the way, yes, agreed with the sentiment of the OP.

Now, do I agree with the choice ANet has made to essentially revamp everything then leave the game in shambles and make slow, ineffectual shave balances up until the expansion release? Not particularly, but I understand the decision. It hurts the community, especially the already small competitive community the most when the game is left imbalanced, but with the expansion and the time schedule people are working with, it would be seriously difficult to make sure the expansion launch goes smoothly AND smooth out the issues that the “expansion prep” patch created.

It’s easier as a dev thing to make sure the game is stable, albeit imbalanced, after the core patch, then work any big fixes into the expansion release, while slowly shaving the game as time allows to make those changes up until the expansion drop. It avoids making ALL of the changes at once and having twice as many variables to balance. This way, the devs can drop the balance patch for the core system at expansion time, then shave what needs to be shaved with the elite specializations afterwards without having to worry about the rest of the balance.

BUT, being on here and seeing so many people just bawling their eyes out is super frustrating to me because it’s extremely premature to be doing so. We’re literally playing less than 5/6 of the intended final product of the game’s classes right now.

tl;dr: Just…. wait until the expansion drops, people who are insistent on making a million threads about how imbalanced the game is…. because ANet knows the game is imbalanced right now; this was a REVAMP, not a balance patch.

Fluffball.8307:

jcbroe.4329:

As others have said Canines, but I saw Eura mention it first, because the Taunt is instant, you can F2 then cancel cast it with F3 before the full animation goes off and save your pets actual F2 effect for when you want/need it, but still get off the effects of both Beastly Warden and Go For the Eyes.

I made a thread about doing that minutes after the patch went live. Not that I need the credit for my self esteem or anything… not sure why that would even be brought up…

Hahaha sorry I read it on Eura’s first so I just credited where I saw it

I stayed off the forums for a few days after the patch…. realized afterwards I should have given it a few weeks instead lol.