Guild Wars 2

I think sigils of battle or energy would compliment your build better, and as might gives power and condition damage, you still wouldn’t be specced towards any of them. I also reworked the traits a bit. If you really didn’t make this build as a joke 14 points in all trait lines just to be spread out is a waste. I think this would work better. I was also thinking about making an all around build. My idea was to make a build that has power, condition and pet damage as well. I personally would’ve called it Trinity build. I was thinking that if someone can deal with one of your damage sources you still have 2 decent ones you can count on, but in practice I think most skilled pvp players will be able to deal with 2-3 of your damage sources if your stats are so spread out. You also won’t have a role in PvP, which focuses on 5 people teams. Its like playing with 4.25 players.

IIRC on SOTG the bottom right guy actually mentioned rangers and John Sharp said they will clear up the ai before they introduce any changes to the control mechanincs. I think thats bad news as clearing up the AI could take 1 months or 5 years. The next changes will be more skill/trait notes actually. Enough time to level up another prof if you’re tired of ranger.

In my experience you’ll need more power and access to posion to bring them down if you want to go the power route. I’d swap frost trap for viper’s nest for the poison. Shortbow might not be the best choice even though it has more survivability than longbow, but your damage won’t do much harm in a healing bunker. If you already have ascended rabid weapons like your build suggests you could get rabid armor for karma and try with a trap build, or some other condi build. Mixing knight with rabid is not the best idea imo.

Here’s the youtube link, here’s the twitch link.

We need him on the podcast.

Being resilient is fine, but this is how ANet looks at rangers trying just about everything to work this class.

Leuca.5732:

nagymbear.5280:

How is there a problem with the flow between the skills on GS?

Let’s address each skill on the weapon.

1. Chain has very little damage and it’s slow to boot. This means it cannot capitalize on the vulnerability provided by Maul and provides nothing that would discourage your enemy from facerolling in your direction. Anet focused on the evade over its damage functionality and kitten GS as soon as they nerfed it during beta. I’m not saying it was balanced during beta, but it’s in a sad state now.

2. Maul is a very slow, very telegraphed skill with no notable functions besides damage, and even then it has to crit to be noticed. Its vulnerability stacking would have potential if it had more of them and they lasted a bit longer; as it is the only skill this really has synergy with is Hilt Bash.

3. This is honestly probably the best skill GS has right now; I don’t have much to complain about here besides possibly damage because it has clean animation/execution and has a great recharge+a finisher.

4. This skill could have been great, but both of its second functions are too slow and too clunky to be effective in higher level play, and neither does significant damage to punish your foes for bad positioning/actions. The counter doesn’t put them in a good position to Hilt Bash, nor does it put enough distance between you and your target, and it’s too vulnerable to skills like Whirlwind Attack, that go right through you and pretty much dodge the counter. (which is slow enough to side step anyway if you have swiftness up and are already moving as you trigger it) The throw doesn’t do enough to really have much impact since the damage is negligible and the throw can be intercepted by something else really easily due to its speed.

5. Another skill that could have turned out really well, but fails due to no damage, clunky animation that has no gap closing ability yet is still affected by slows, and a buff to your pet that can’t even stack with signets/traits. This has marginal synergy with maul because of the stun, even though it doesn’t really increase its damage, but it’s too slow to combo well off of Swoop.

All of these issues compound upon each other in combat.

1. The autoattack chain has decent damge, provides 33% evades at melee range and does decent damage. Its a lot more than what the other ranger weapon auto attacks do, and even better than some of the auto attacks other profs have.

2. The telegraphed animation is necessary as it deals high damage on a single attack. Of course you need crits for that, just like on every other damage skill.

3. Swoop does better damage than the auto attack, its not maul, but I don’t think it needs to be.

4. The damage on Crippling throw is higher than the auto attack. I wouldn’t call it insignificant or negligable. It probably won’t 1shot anyone, if that’s what you mean.

5. Hilt bash is an interrupt with a range of 300. It works well with moment of clarity as demonstrated from time to time by others on this forum.

You want the greatsword to be an uber weapon, its a good weapon and doesn’t need improvement to every skill on it. As for landing hits in high level play, I am sure that most weapon skills of most profession is harder to land in high level play.

How is there a problem with the flow between the skills on GS?

Nice vid. I used to run around with superior runes of geomancy just like you… but than it bugged out a lot of times so I switched to earth. Never thought of running signets with a condi build. How is that working out?

I remember Xeph in a dark living room sitting on the floor not buying devs bs. I didn’t watch the SOTG more than once though. Other than the last part I didn’t have that impression to be honest.

Substance E.4852:

nagymbear.5280:

Lets be honest there was one dev that took his time to approach the ranger community and look at the way we spoke to him… I wouldn’t want to communicate with the ranger community either.

Ya, except this isn’t a charity. They are being paid, with our money no less, to do a job that they haven’t been doing very well. Add in the times that they have given us the run around or just flat lied to us and there is no reason to expect us to not be a little irritable.

Hell, the community here is perfectly fine with having a real, honest discussion like adults; too bad Rob was the only one who didn’t regurgitate vague prepared statements and even when he did talk like a real human being his attitude was that the Ranger is A okay and just fine where it’s at. That’s not something that people who get constantly maligned in PvE and WvW want to hear even if he wasn’t directly involved in class balance at all.

A game development company is not obliged to talk to the community just because you bought their product. Robert Hrouda was not obliged to talk to us about the ranger as a class, he is a Dungeon Dev (that may have come out wrong) and actually asked about what rangers think about the ranger in dungeons. Would it be nice, yes. Is the community mature enough to handle such conversations, no. He may have said that ranger is fine, but put that in contrast with the majority of the ranger threads where people claim ANet hates rangers, they kill them with every patch, they are broken, etc…

The biggest hit on GS is maul. I don’t think its a good idea to put the vulnerability on it. Maybe they should put vulnerability on swoop and give maul a blast finisher.

As for more pet controllability I think its pretty basic and very reasonable to have control over a mechanic that is so integral to the class. Regardless what ANet thinks about the skills involved with controling our pets.

Lets be honest there was one dev that took his time to approach the ranger community and look at the way we spoke to him… I wouldn’t want to communicate with the ranger community either.

Rampager set is pertty glassy. I believe Xsorus had a rampager build for zerging, search the forums for it if it isn’t in the build thread.

1. Reverse the vulnerability change on GS#2, it just doesn’t make sense, and the bleed was nice.
2. Introduce a better pet UI where we can see boons/conditions
3. Introduce an advanced pet control system so people who take rangers seriously (I’m sure there is at least one) can have control over our forced mechanic.
4. Give blast finisher to GS#2 so rangers can contribute more in zergs
5. Introduce a better mechanic for pig F2, where it works like thief steal, or at least the foraged item spawns in your hand, with an option to drop it to the ground.

So condi spam necros and warriors get another month… hmmm.

I agree with you on that, it seemed like something that ANet wanted to get over with, and was handled as such. But to be frank I don’t remeber the other guys mentioning anything ranger related either. Ranger is probably a non issue for a while in pvp, so no major changes coming I guess. I don’t think that has anything to do with Battosai though. What interests me more is why there was no SoTG for 2 months. Prolly due to summer, but still…

Levetty.1279:

What happened to that guy who just listed a bunch of questions instead of talking to the guy like the other class reps and then laughed at his own Power Ranger joke while nobody else did?

Some poeple are better at self presentation than others, but there is no denying that Battosai is experienced when it comes to rangers, and its not like he is a politician that owes anything to you anyway.

9/10, looking good… for a plant

I find it strange to bring necors and guardians into the thread. AoE skills should hit 5 targets, end of story. I hate that people try to derail this thread, when someone took the time to test this, and drew everyones attention to it, as we didn’t even notice this. The fact that we have aoe skills (not many to begin with) that only hit 3 enemies… it just amazes me. Get your kitten together ANET!

It doesn’t sound like its intended. But what really gets me is…. how did you test LR only hitting 3 guys?

I think signet of the wild active will only affect the first hit on your rapid fire, not the whole channel. I didn’t come across any build description since Remorseless was fixed, but I’d imagine with valkyrie gear it will be nice. I didn’t play power builds but I think mixing some valkyrie in couldn’t hurt, as you will have well over 50% crit chance anyways.

What exactly do you have in mind? Do you want your wingman to be support/damage, power/condition? I’d imagine that a banner warrior with longbow and apothecary gear would be nice for some might stacking, and regen, but others will surely dismiss that as there are classes that do it better. I think its mostly up to what your wingman is confortable with. From there you can make it work, and have fun.

If you like axe/torch, use sword/dagger in the other hand and – or axe/dagger, sword/torch so you have evade on both sets – go all condition damage, and use fire trap, and spike trap. While leveling I found its not that much useful to invest in toughness and precision. And get a minor sigil of corruption for one of your weapons. If you max out your condition damage (or power) you will go through mobs like a knife through butter.

Lorelei.3918:

Lightning Reflexes would be perfect if it broke immobilize and stun. No need to mess with CD.

It does break stun. It should remove movement impairing conditions as well, I agree. And I don’t think you need a cd reduction either.

Fomby.4295:

Berserker builds do not have the access to the survivability necessary for high sustained damage. Especially when compared to the 0/30/30/10/0 Theif, where you can spec for huge crits from stealth, long stealth duration, great AoE damage on weapon swap, good condition removal, and probably more. NONSENSE I TELL YOU.

While this is true berserker is not about sustained damage, its about burst spikes. Its just that rangers have to work much harder for it (its basically “dat maul build”). And berserker thieves don’t have sustained damage either. Its short bursts, but they do have better tools to save their kitten , I agree with that.

Fomby.4295:

nagymbear.5280:

FrownyClown.8402:

idk why we shouldnt be able to have a burst. “Because you are ranged” is a bs excuse when scepter ele’s have it and it really only buys us an extra 2 seconds to do mediocre damage.

As Robert Hrouda said ranger is about sustained damage and staying alive. That is how the ranger was designed. And then there are burst classes like mesmers, warriors, thieves, eles, condi engies, condi necros… I’m pretty sure there are burst guards as well, I just didn’t come across that many.

Which would be fine and dandy IF we had those tools to stay alive. We have a few right now, but not enough.

The ranger does have tools to stay alive, they just force the ranger into specific builds. Just like most damage dealing warrior builds take greatsword and most thief builds use stealth. Our main source of defense comes from evades, dodges, regen. And if you use all of them in one build, you’re near invincible.

FrownyClown.8402:

idk why we shouldnt be able to have a burst. “Because you are ranged” is a bs excuse when scepter ele’s have it and it really only buys us an extra 2 seconds to do mediocre damage.

As Robert Hrouda said ranger is about sustained damage and staying alive. That is how the ranger was designed. And then there are burst classes like mesmers, warriors, thieves, eles, condi engies, condi necros… I’m pretty sure there are burst guards as well, I just didn’t come across that many.

Filterkat.2143:

This build is a bit of a 1 trick pony, in the sense that, once you blow your combo, you have to wait for all the cooldowns to do it again, and it takes about 30 seconds to recharge… but it is a lot of fun watching theives melt with this build.

This is the reason not many run a build like this. LR won’t keep you alive for 30 secs with rabid gear, and there are a lot of ways to get rid of 1 condition quickly. Trappers are strong as condi builds because they can constantly apply poison and burning as well. There have been bleed builds around for a while, and Xsorus also experimented with the new Sharpened edges trait so we already new you could stack 25 bleed stacks, no offense.

Also want to add, that I have tried longbow with condi builds and it just doesn’t work so well for me. I’ve popped a sup earth sigil in my rabid lonbgow and it was a bit lackluster as a condi weapon to be honest.

swinsk.6410:

You need condi removal to beat condi thieves. How is that not obvious?

Either use your #2 skill or drop your shortbow for d/p and get shadows embrace from shadow arts line.

I run full berserker and scholars with 0/30/30/10/0 and have never had a problem with condi thieves. I stealth just as much ad they bleed and I regen more hp than they deal. I backstab for 8k even with thier tanky condi gear.

Why do you automatically make the assumption that I’m dumb? If you would’ve read what I wrote you already new that I know about condi clear but I don’t have much of it. Sword #2 is 4 initiative, pw is 5, so either I use my pw which doesn’t down that guy cause he is not a glass cannon, and than I have limited uses of #2, or I use #2 more often, and then I need to auto attack him with sword. But he is using dodge on caltrops, so he can apply a lot of cripple and bleeds that way. And the fact that you never had problem with condi thieves doesn’t help me in the slightest. I wish people would stop using that comment, cause it never ever helped anyone ever. I also wrote why I don’t run a d/p backstab build. Actually I was looking for some help from s/p wvw thieves but there aren’t many. I only came across this 1 condi thief, so its not the end of the world, just wanted some fresh perspective from others.

Travlane.5948:

poison sharing? i could see this being usefull but outside of the poinson sharring its like….not going to be much production. you have 49 people in your zerg. the 50th you have a choice of venom share or another necro…which would you choose.

Well I don’t want to split hairs, but if we’re talking about 49 guys already in the zerg 1 more won’t have a huge inpact on the zerg. So you might as well bring one more thief.

Anelyn.4593:

Make a P/S engineer. Rejoice beating any non S/D thief \o/

I won’t change class because I ran into a bloody bleeding thief.

Travlane.5948:

its a “thing” or “term” players made up. has 0 to do with the game. so basically thieves suck at the game. logic. its amazing

What is your definition of the game? Roaming is not only part of wvw its pretty important too. Just look at the stats, points coming from yaks/sentries/camps make up 25% of a server’s points. Thieves have some very special advantage by being able to stay invisible for longer periods of time, which results in mesmer sweaps. I’m not saying it slows the game down, but it does add an element to it. And to say that thieves are useless otherwise is just not true. There are other classes that contribute in other ways, which people find more convenient. Its human nature. I’m positive that if people took the time, effort to utilise what thieves have to offer they could be very useful in wvw. A thief can hide a party for 10 sec, share poisons with them which then results in 5 people’s attacks adding poison/immobilize/stun out of stealth. That could be useful, but people choose to just run with guards and elementalist, cause thats easier.

He prolly means that if a Jaguar would get its stats from a full zerker ranger, then you could hit your opponent with a 23k maul, and your kitty goes boom as well.

What I meant was that our pets are balanced against players that played the game a bit, while they can be almost useless against experienced players (at least when it comes to damage). I’m not a game designer but I’m not sure there is much scaling between the pets current ability to hit moving targets, and actually hitting while moving. So if they make our pets hit moving targets consistently they will be a homing missile. And while people are wasting cooldowns (be it weapon skills or utilities) trying to kill/kite the pet, the ranger can deal with something else (or them for that matter). That would be too powerful. On the other hand an experienced player can kite your pet all day long. So thats a tough cookie.

Well I want to give it a couple more tries before I put him down on my arch nemesis list. If it won’t work with shortbow, than I’ll just run next time. I hate stealth and the reliance of certain thief builds on it. That is why I run s/p sb. I find that you can deal nice damage even with pistolwhip, and I find it riskier than a perma stealth build because of my limited access to stealth (basically SR, HiS and Steal). I think its the s/p s/d type of gameplay that would fit the thief well, with their defense mainly coming from evade or blind/interrupt. And even s/p seems cheesy against certain builds. I was fighting a power build BM ranger last week, none of us managed to down the other. But at least I didn’t make sleep/no/shrug emotes while he was struggling to even hit me (pet included) while I just sat in my smoke field.

I know its not a full evade, but PW has a cast time, and I’ll need some teleport to land it, so it will take some timing. I was rather thinking about kiting him with SB actually. That way I can apply poison as well, so maybe he will has less heal.

Shared anguish is great for stomping in a 1v1 situation as well.

Yeah I know. But I’ll just need to start nailing that pw timing if I want to beat them, because of the evade on deathblossom, or I will start relying on autoattack. But then there is cripple from the caltrops. Meh… I’m used to being kicked around on my ranger, as I wasn’t running the op regen ranger build. Thief just felt so good until Today.

Banal Hem.1635:

Chopps.5047. This thread isn’t dead. And you cant answer the question. Why is it that only Rangers can be “disarmed” and loose 30% of their damage with the killing of a forced game mechanic?

Answer that and this thread is dead.

I’m not complaining about damage or lack of spike.

I’m not whining about being beaten by some other class.

I’m talking about a forced game mechanic. Pets and their unusually inability to be the weapon they must have been designed to be.

/facepalm yourself boo boo.

Please look at Paundros first ranger vid and tell me with a straight face that you want to run around with a BM ranger with masters bond and a jaguar that consistently hits moving targets. Pets aren’t ok, and you need cc for them to land their attacks whether you like it or not. Its a very thin line to walk. If they would hit moving targets all the time they would become invincible flesh torpedos. While rangers would become almost invincible tanks in the right hands. It would result in even more pet damge nerf after just 1 month where everyone would pick up their BM ranger in pvp again.

Thx, I have healing in stealth but with my main source of damage being s/p my burst comes from pw, which is quite initiative heavy to land, so I cannot just spam infiltrator strike. I’ll just accept that I should stay away from these thieves until I come across some uber counter for them. I guess it would be maybe conditions, but I have a ranger for that.

Hey guys, just ran into this thief, he was using dodge (with caltrop) and deathblossom. He prolly used apothecary/settler gear, as he wasn’t glass. I’m running s/p, sb with kinght/berzerker gear. Apart from trying to kite him with sb what else can I try. Or should I just infiltrator strike, pw repeatadly? 123 bleeds hurt a lot, and I only have so much condy removal/initiative. Based on our builds he’s prolly the worst I could have come across. Any input is most welcome.

What gear are you using, its not included in the build. Is it a mix of knights/soldiers/cleric?

Nice art you made man. Although everyone going for 4k armor is not the solution, just sayin’.

I’d recommend vit/power gear. The more power you can have without dying the better. GS has nice defence through the evade and the block. Just don’t try to facetank groups with it. Both GS and LB are power based weapons. If you have a bit of an experience with the mobs, and don’t die to them often, just go full power.

The Charrzooka with condi build is quite good actially, nice aoe burn. Its a bit gimmicky though. Some say that the Charr barrage elite is good with a power build, but I find that it hits a bit random. It also has a painfully short range.

Thedarkdot.2793:

Bad mesmer sweep/luck and a patient mesmer?

Not every time people get into a keep it means they’re cheating.
Hard to know sadly if noone’s there to see it.

I didn’t accuse anybody. The fact that a fellow RoF player is lecturing me on this forum shows what kind of a state the server’s wvw “community” is in. Btw we are talking about inner bay. We had a zerg inside for quite a while, me included. I will be hard convince that there was a patient mesmer inside inner I can tell you that much. I doubt DZ will come forward and talk about it, and I won’t accuse the whole server with hacking. It could’ve been someone who glitched inside the gate, and they took advantage of it, I don’t know. That is why I’m wondering how they did it.

ilr.9675:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

As for Ranger DPS not matching thief burst… yeah, that’s pretty obvious – I don’t think I’m rocking some boat by saying that. I accept that trade-off of lacking burst potential for having a better toolbox of things I can do to survive while outputting consistent DPS.

You really have to think when you read stuff like this…. like “Didn’t he KNOW 3 months ago that perma stealth would be possible?” …And really, nothing trumps it for raw survival these days… especially when it also removes conditions

We are still picking on Robert? Really? He’s a dungeon designer dev, and has nothing to do with thieves, or ranger balance for that matter. He was kind enough to forward our comments to the dev team, but like he said, he doesn’t have a say in the matter.

I’m running 0/30/30/0/10 for long reach. Don’t want damage on steal to tell where I’m at.

I’m wondering how the DZ zerg got into RoF Bay and Garri inner while there were no gates/walls down.

Yeah S/P is nice but I run it with shortbow with knights armor, everything else berserker. I think its fun.