Guild Wars 2

If they are staying alive…they are contributing. Means less change of them doing something to mess up the stack/whatever the group is doing. Is it annoying? Sure but some of those skills are irritating to get spammed just because it’s a button to push.

Sure female armors and nice and all…if you want to run around half naked for 80% of them. There is playing to the male audience and then theres GW2 human female light armor. It bugs the kitten out of me that the winged armor skirt has half of it missing or the masquerade bottom looks like a diaper with a mullet. Pickings are more slim for female medium armors…either a kitten trenchcoat or your character is running around with parts out. I’d kill to have the male version of the winged bottom for my female characters…I love it on my asura.

I go through my pieces and all I can think is ‘Man I really would love A if only it didn’t have this kitten piece sticking out of it…why does it even have that???’ The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say its to sell outfits…make armor ugly and we buy outfits.

Mesmer – it’s a strange profession to get used to at first. You have to rely on clones and phantoms to get your damage done and when those skills are on cooldown it gets old. You don’t kill things particularly fast because of it. They have a great group utility to them but you will find that you are a buffing bot and a portal bringer to groups…so if you don’t enjoy that game play I’d say stay away. Groups aren’t bringing Mesmers for their damage

Ele – I’ve eaten the dirt more times on my Ele than any other profession. It’s made of wet tissue paper but hits like a semi-truck. Some days there is nothing more satisfying than equipping a staff and lava fonting/meteor storming things to death. With the other weapons, it’s going to be more of a finger dance that you have to play to learn. Working with 20 weapon skills at a time and trying to remember which ones are the useful ones at any given time can make your brain explode. Once you got them down though, it can be one of the more fun professions to watch and play.

Necro – This is my new ‘love’ profession. I finally got Reaper and it changes the Necro gameplay and is so much fun to use. I know a lot people are saying how faceroll it is and how much easier it is…because it really is, but Reaper Shroud is seriously the single most fun and entertaining thing I have found in this game. I enjoy the dance between being in shroud and finding the sweet spot to exit so I can get more life force to enter again but not run 100% out incase I need a quick clutch save. I have found it to be a ‘slow’ profession though, I was used to running around with a focus Mesmer or having Swiftness with a Weapon skill on an Ele…rather than having to equip a signet or Spectral Walk.

I’d say give them all a try if you have the account space. If you don’t, level them and then delete and start over with the next one. One is sure to ‘stick’ with you…

I’m working on The Bifrost but I don’t have much time to spend these days hunting gold down for The Legend (our first baby is expected mid Feb so lots to get done in real life). Not asking for The Legend itself, just some help with some gold in purchasing it off the TP. Every time I get close to having enough to buy it, it shoots up in price again

I’m on a NA server…so if anyone has any spare gold to throw at a poor lady trying to get her legendary made before a little one sucks away all of her gaming time, that would be amazing

Edit – Ok so I was just gifted The Legend…so count mine as complete. I’ll be digging through here to find someone to help now that I can afford to! Thank you again to the person who gifted it to you…you are awesome!

And it’s a little foolish to think that someone leveling their first character in game will be able to properly learn the dodge mechanics and how not to take damage when they are running around with a pack of minions taking the hits for them. Sure you can mow down most of the core content with them and think you are playing well but the minute you get into group work (which is what our end content mostly is these days) gonna get wrecked and hard. Being reliant on AI isn’t a good idea in this game at all, it’s not elitist at all to try to get that point across…it’s common sense

The problem I found with leveling with minions is you don’t actually learn how to be self sufficient. It’s a lesser version of the bearbow that happens. You don’t learn how to use your DS for anything but DPS so when you end up swapping them for a more basic Necro/Reaper build…you find yourself unable to cope with the higher level content. Why cripple your learning curve when you don’t plan on using them later? It makes for a more frustrating end content, especially if he has HoT.

I never touched minions, except for the elite Flesh Golem. I found them to be unreliable with their AI…I’d be standing there getting my butt kicked while they’d be off picking daisies for my funeral. I think they’ve improved the AI these days, but I still have left over hate from before. Leveling, I used mostly wells because running into a group of things, setting off a well bomb and then watching things melt in front of me was always fun. When they didn’t quite melt like they should, just enter Shroud and finish them off.

Reaper is well worth leveling to 80 and getting the hero points needed though! I was hesitant for so long bothering getting Reaper because I wasn’t much of a necro player. Got bored, got the HP for Reaper and holy kittens it’s awesome! It changes necro game play and the profession completely. Go from being ranged reliant and hoping your Life Blast will hit more than one target to charging into the middle of the fray and just beating the ever living crud out of everything.

Basically, don’t become reliant on the minions to kill everything for you. Have to learn how to be a proper punching bag in light armor first. When you get to the higher levels they aren’t that useful and then you find yourself having to deal with switching things out and you go back to having to learn how to play again, only now it’s against things that murder you a bit more quickly.

Xetu.7341:

I wish they wouldn’t be so stiff when running and would just act like they fixed the feather wings.

I hope not. This was the reason I bought the hawk wings, because they don’t behave like the black or white ones. I am not a fan of that drifty, swooshy, flowy, fabric-y looking animation that happens whenever your character moves the tiniest bit on the screen. I love the way the hawk wings move more naturally when you move on the screen and the way the feathers separate out and fall back into place, it’s much more elegant looking than previous ones.

Sweal.4659:

3000g for skin is pretty expensive O.o

Yes…but to some the particles and footfalls are well worth the investment. It gives some of the higher level full-ascended crowd something to accomplish in game that not only takes a long time but some effort beyond killing Teq and getting a surprise ascended box.

I for one always feel boring when on a profession that can’t use my Legendary and find myself missing being on my Thief because of those stupid rainbow hoofprints from Dreamer. Could I have like 3k gold right now? Sure…but you can bet I think my silly pink unicorns and hoofprints are worth every single copper I invested into the thing.

I have both a female human and a female Asura. Here’s what made my decision final to leave my human as a crafter…Tempest. Tempest turns the Ele profession into a ‘talky’ one and I cannot for the life of me stand the constant human chatter of getting the Overloads back. It drives me absolutely insane just listening to it. The Asura chatter on the other hand, for some reason amuses me, I find it far less irritating.

Also, Asura have the most fun Ele animations. They bounce and flip and dance through their skills, making them seem more magical.

How about they just fix our ‘condition’ weapon of SB to be of use again?

I love the way an Asura runs and holds their GS…like it’s no big deal. Try running around with a human female, she looks so weak…as if she can barely lift the thing, much less actually use it. The spinning animation looks silly when it comes from that low holding point. It’s like ‘Oh, this sword’s so heavy’ then when they go to use it suddenly it becomes weightless and they can easily just spin it place. At least the Asura ones makes sense! I love the physics behind the Asura movements.

Might be the only one who still loves Dreamer. Can’t pry my ponybow out of my hands…just wish another profession could get some use out of it. As odd as the new particle effects updates are (why keep updating a weapon that only Thieves seem to get much use out of I’ll never understand…I’m not a pvp-er so it really is no use to my Ranger in PvE stuff) I can still appreciate them. The new arm glow is neat and the flash of the unicorn when unsheathing it is awesome and I love the rainbow trail! The horse whiney doesn’t bother me at all like it does almost all of the rest of the community, it’s part of the charm.

Sure one of the GS or Incinerator or Bolt would have been more economical to make, as more professions get more use out of them…I just didn’t like those weapons. If I was going to invest that much time into making pixels, I was going to shoot pink unicorns! Never cared for any of the other Legendaries and not a fan of how the new ones are looking so far either.

If I had to choose again…I’d still have gotten my Dreamer. It’s the only legendary that I ever truly wanted and was willing to put all that pixel work into. Yeah a GS would have probably been more economical…seeing as they are trying to make all professions use the kitten things, but it can’t shoot a pink unicorn. I keep hoping they’ll let other professions be able to wield it one day, til then I mostly use it when I am doing solo stuff.

It doesn’t lend itself too much to the current meta with a Ranger, though if you have a Thief you will find more use out of the legendary. If they’d work on un-gutting the stupid Ranger SB skills it would help…they pretty much trashed the kitten out of it to make the LB look more attractive. Kept hoping the new updated skills would do something for the poor SB but it got ignored, like always.

Good luck and the Wiki, with it’s list of things you need, will be invaluable for crafting a legendary…especially now since you can craft the precursor. All I can recommend is dropping it into your favorites and get used to referring back to it

Don’t let everyone else try to talk you out of making the legendary you want to make. Do it because you like the skin/the particle effects/want to shoot a pink unicorn. If you make another legendary just because more professions can use it but you don’t really want it…it’s not worth the effort!

Well since my ranger is an Asura, mine tend to be BioExperiment A and BioExperiment B…no matter what pet I am using at the time.

Shortbow for my Mesmer…for the pure reason of having 3 other me’s murdering things with Unicorns.

It’s been a complaint for years now. It really should work more like how Wall o Reflect does…and not be so kitten unreliable at reflecting. It should either reflect with trait or not…not this half junk way we’ve got it now.

Zenith.7301:

I’m just plain addicted to inspiration, it’s gonna be so hard giving it up for chrono, I’m even tempted to give up dueling instead and go for Dom/Inspiration/Chrono.

I’m with you there…I love the Inspiration line so much, and the Dueling GM traits are really meh for the PvE that I do. Taking Harmonious mantras almost forces me to take Pain Mantra to get some use out of the trait. I don’t use Deceptive Evasion at all and I am never the one interrupting so Mistrust wouldn’t see any use. Not that the other Sword traits aren’t amazing…but it sucks being left with a GM trait you really don’t care too much about.

Hey Fry, we get it…you have no love for staff or the Chaos line. However, Fay is giving us a build that has a use for staff and that trait line that isn’t actually terrible. Why are you fighting it so badly? I’m not sure you actually understand what the build is for, with your arguments about phantoms attacking and using skills. This isn’t a phantom build, this is a shattering buff build. Phantom, clone…in the end it doesn’t matter because they are all shatter fodder almost immediately as soon as they are summoned.

Staff skills recharge at a seriously low cool-down rate and has the more reliable way of getting clones out. An 8 second clone summon (with the chance of being able to proc a Chaos armor to lower it even more), a 14.5 sec phantom…you really can’t get that kind of shatter fodder with something else except Scepter. Sure, Scepter is nice but what off hand can you pair that with for a secondary weapon slot that gives a decently timed phantom cool-down? You aren’t concerned with the low damage that Winds of Chaos is doing, you are concerned about getting that cool-down to as low as possible to keep pumping them out to F1-4 with. Makes me miss the old flat 20% reduction to staff skills we used to get. We all know that staff is a terrible power weapon but it’s not being used for that here. Staff also gives you the leap finisher and a reliable way of getting Chaos armor for protection (with the trait traited of course) and a nice AoE daze should you need it. It’s our utility weapon and I am more than pleased to finally find a build that has a use for it.

Have to stop thinking with the old way of doing things and find better solutions for the new toys we’ve been handed. Our damage doesn’t matter in the end and it’s sort of selfish of a Mesmer to try to increase their pitiful damage when they have ways of increasing the whole party’s with these new buffs. Who cares about increasing phantom’s damage when they are being shattered as soon they are created? That’s the point of this build. It looks nice to be able to move away from the normal Dom/Dueling lines and play with other toys with Chrono.

Sorry for the random babbling, I find this thread fascinating and I’ve been reading through it for a good day now. I love my staff and to finally have a build that uses it makes me so pleased.

There may be word yet…they didn’t show us all of the balance notes yet (the guys doing the show were a wasting time telling stories and jokes -.-). Have to wait til Tuesday to see if anything else gets tweaked…

Phloww.1048:

Nothing for scepter.

Just wanted to point out that the guys who were doing the stream kept wasting time…there should be more to the patch notes come Tuesday. We’ll see then I guess, super frustrating to be promised balance patch stuff and get story time from goofing off A-Net employees. We just want to know what’s going on…not hear jokes!

Whoa…Red Dev post super fast O.o

Sounds like an excellent quality of life change for Curtain and won’t make using the Signet of Inspiration so irritating to have equipped while running around.

Oh these are pretty good quality of life changes…nothing really got gutted this time. Nice damage boost on a weapon we all use and will be interested to see how the Curtain works if it stacks 12sec onto the timer or if it just refreshes it to 12. Never used PU much so meh…

Olcon.9506:

And then, to top it all off, the developer that designed this legitimately overpowered specialization outright declares the death of the berserker meta at the hands of the Druid, announces that he’s been reading and taking note of the ranger forum’s criticisms for probably the last year (!!!!), and says he can’t wait to put down a red thread and interact with you guys, and that further details about the future of the base ranger class will be discussed later on during the balance segment of the presentation.

I think this is most of the problem. People don’t think that the zerker meta will die when HoT releases. Then…the super squishies will run into the new jungle, get their zerker selfs mowed down and complain that it’s OP. I am quite happy to let our awful ZERK OR NOTHING meta die already.

Yep. Giving up my butterflies and purple for Wyverns and Dinosaurs. I enjoyed ranger before but being mocked for playing one wasn’t fun. Can’t wait for that next beta to give it a try.

I have never cheered out loud so much as I did as that stream went on. That’s a Dev who’s shown us that he’s been listening and reading and paying attention to what we have to say. Looking forward to his posts and seeing where this amazing elite spec is going to be taken.

I am amused with the amount of complaints going on here about being a heal-bot and not being able to PEW PEW away in a dungeon/raid/where ever. Guys…we HAD NO PLACE before…we were taken because no one else would fill a slot. Now we should have a slot and rightfully so. We won’t be the joke profession any more and I am thrilled with that! Some players enjoy playing a healing profession and now we get the option to. If you want to still run around with your bow and bear and pew pew your heart out go for it…but don’t try to spoil the new toys for the rest of us!

And then some of us would just like to grab and go…and not go through a headache of retrieving should it need group content or a kitten mesmer portal because we hate jumping puzzle kitten.

Dadnir.5038:

What they’ve done is so awesomly bad… I can’t even imagine it’s not an april fools joke…
I mean… 0 synergy with ranger mechanic, It give nothing but heal and bad controle, more knockback (if rangers weren’t already hated for knockback…), 0 damage…

Druid is depressive and disappointing…

Are you forgetting that we are getting a break bar and we will NEED more control to break it to be able to apply the Ice Bow stuns we all loves so much?

You complain about the ranger having too much reliance on pets and then you guys complain about too little. Can’t please some people…

All I know is I finally have my main…so happy I get to use my ranger again! Druid looks amazing and I have always loved being the ‘healer’ in games so I don’t mind that aspect of this. Zerk is obviously not going to work here…so should be interesting to see what the new Druid meta will be!

Also…Wyvern pet. Even if Druid sucked…that saves it for me

Not going to lie…I started squealing like a kid being given a whole kitten cake and freedom in a candy store. Those Wyverns…and that smoke Dino…and and and…oh HoT needs to come now!

I am pro-Sylvari but anti-Trahearne. I’d love nothing more than to be able to murder that glory hogging sapling.

Syntharia.8067:

Footfalls/auras from legendary weapons are also huge compared to your size :P

And when you spin in place, the footfalls continue as you turn…at least it happens with my Dreamer. When I have it equipped on my human, and spin her in place…I don’t get the hoofprints or the rainbows popping up. This is part of the reason why I made an Asura ranger and thief lol

oh I love my Asura ranger! I love the way she balances the GS across her back and how she runs with it equipped. No sissy ‘ugh, it’s so heeeavy’ like a female human does! And the sword animations are so much fun to watch. Also, having this tiny Asura run around with a big kitty by her side makes me happy for some reason…

bladex.9502:

But in a pug, I honestly would rather play it safe and ask for “meta” classes, because a bad ele does more damage than a bad ranger

Depends on how bad that ele is…if they spend more time down than up, that damage they are supposed to be to great at giving is almost nothing (with the exception of the lava font they drop sometimes if they took the right trait). Terrible ele are never a good addition to a PUG group, squishy almost always dropping…I’d rather have the ranger than that mess.

I’m a fan of Entropy…but I like the purple glowy bit to it. Got one stored away, waiting for the time my engi can use it.

Edit – Just noticed Genesis, so pretty! Might have to pick it up too. Never had a reason to look through the hammer skins really…

I’m a PvE player…so my experiences come from that side of the game. That being said, Ele is a fun profession if you take the time to learn the weapon sets and the various weapon skills that go with them. I was running mine for a long time, but in the end…I got tired of being the Ice Bow dispenser. In PvE, that’s all you are to a group…you bring the one utility they want and you better bring it. Staff ele is the current meta for PvE dungeon stuff and I never found it to be that exciting…you drop the Ice Bow and camp fire the rest of the time. Guess I just got disenchanted with the profession so I moved on…might go back later after some time. With all that being said, the dagger/focus or dagger/dagger was extremely fun to use.

There is a fuel component to the gyros it seems…so they are probably getting a resource bar that they will probably have to deal with for those things.

Bran.7425:

amazingly bad, or amazing and nerfed into the ground three days later.

I know…I can’t claim to be naive about the whole situation. I am fully expecting my ranger to be handed a pile of kitten and told I better like it because that’s all she’s getting.

Less time for the more vocally disappointed community to voice their disappointments with sub-par content. Of course, this prediction could be completely false and Druid could be amazing…but I am not holding my breath. Only so many times you can get your profession slapped with nerfs and a whole community full of hate because of poor initial design before you just start hoping they fix those huge flaws. But then again, I am responding to a Necro…you know all about that

Anyways my questions are, what is so bad about longbow in dungeons if the player is skilled and knows what they are doing?

So here’s the deal, longbow is used for the start of a fight. If you have the Quick Draw trait, you get in combat with your melee weapon, swap weapons, use LB2 (Quick Draw will lower it’s cooldown), use LB5, use LB2 and swap to melee when you can. You don’t usually go back to LB as the boss/mob you are killing in a group is usually dead by then. Personally, I prefer to use the Greatsword and Sword/Axe rather than the Longbow so I don’t get the idiots from groups yelling at me because they assume I use/spam LB4. Also, GS3 helps me to move quicker through a dungeon. No matter how you look at it, LB can be a good tool for dungeon work but there are other options.

How is the dps low if you have room to go backwards?

You never move away from the stack, some bosses have mechanics that end up changing because you moved from the stack. Also, if you drop…it’s harder for your group to ress you. You don’t want to be that ranger standing in the back because your LB works best at far range. You want to be in melee range with your group so you can get the buffs and the various aid from them.

Why is short bow only conditions? Can you not build it for better damage?

Shortbow used to be amazing. No one used LB over SB, the SB had an incredible attack speed to make up for it’s other short comings. Because they seemed to want everyone to use LB (guessing someone has a love affair with the idea of a LB ranger), they had to make the SB a less attractive option. They nerfed not only the attack speed but also made it have a much shorter range with no ability to increase it. It’s useless to use with anything but an Asura Moment of Clarity PvP build really.

Would an axe/axe build be good for anything? Its seemed incredibly fun.

Axe is a lovely off hand weapon but the main hand version lacks what a sword can give you. Most of us pretend like Axe main hand doesn’t exist.

What about the other melee types? Can they be just as effective?

The only other melee weapons are Sword and Greatsword and I think most of us have already mentioned that those are your best options.

Ryou.2398:

So longbow is bad for soloing to? How can great sword be better? Just use max range hit them while they run up to you then melee… This is really odd guys.

I won’t call a longbow bad for soloing persay…but if that’s the only way you end up playing your ranger you will find the dungeons and other group content to be very frustrating. Some longbow skills are meant to be used as needed, LB skills 1, 2 and 5 spam away if you can…but the other two don’t get used to them being off cooldown. You will always do more damage with an AA or the Skill 2 than you will with a 3 or 4. 3 is for when you need a quick break/stealth and skill 4 is for knockback. Please, for the love of ALL rangers do not spam skill 4. Do not get used to spamming skill 4, just leave it on cooldown unless you need to get a vet or something to move away from you. On your own, it’s a useful tool for getting things out of your face but in a group, it will quickly get you kicked and more people will continue to hate on rangers for that one skill.

Basically, for general play if you must run around with a longbow (some people love the archer look)…you use skills 2 and 5, weapon swap to your melee weapon and finish the fight once they get close enough to you. It’s good for pulling mobs if you don’t want to approach in the open world (seriously, some areas are super awful to run into screaming Leroy Jenkins with a melee weapon).

Yes, the ranger here is a bit like Aragorn from LoTR, only we have a slow-in-the-head companion following us around who likes to step into red circles occasionally.

Rashagar.8349:

I’m surprised to hear that it’s the 3rd least played profession, they seem to be everywhere in wvw sometimes (mostly late at night).

You are more likely to see a ranger running around in WvW because of our superior range to other professions and skill 2 on a longbow can easily be a death sentence there. Also, there are pets in the WvW maps…so they might just be trying to find their wolf or red salamander

Wish they’d realize that if they dropped the price of keys more would be bought. Sadly, this company fails to see the value of a lot of little transactions vs the few large ones. I’d happily buy keys but not at the crazy steep price of 125 per key. No way, not for the little return and the chance of getting nothing but junk.

Karl McLain.5604:

Ricochet in its previous implementation is not slated to return at this time.
When the trait system was condensed, the standard was set in that each weapon set could only have one trait. Being that a player might want to receive increased damage from pistols, but not necessarily inherit the RNG bounce attacks from the secondary trait, this secondary trait was cut.
I will say though that pistols are something we’ll be looking to improve, being as they feel under-tuned at the moment.

-Karl

So did shortbow just disappear from the trait radar? There is one trait in the WHOLE game that deals with this weapon and it’s on a Ranger -.-

Sorry I know this is a pistols thread but I still feel like Sb got shafted. I know it’s a popular weapon to use but so are daggers and they got a whole rework.

I’d love to replace my longbow with a 1200+ ranged staff, so long as it isn’t given a Point Blank Shot like skill for me to get blamed for using. Not a fan of how the melee staff was implemented for the Thief so I really hope this one isn’t like that.

Ryou.2398:

What do you mean inferior? In any rpg game melee should always hit harder then ranged because of risk/reward and my mesmer and ele do great at ranged.

Heh sorry, I meant with Dungeons and Fractals…I tend to come thinking from that point of view. Longbow in open world is great and by all means, use it to make things pass by quicker! Though, as you go through the open world, don’t only rely on that range. Get used to being in the faces of enemies and learning when to dodge. This is especially important for sword, as the 1 autoattack will lock you into place and you cannot dodge until the chain is finished (so even if you have it unset to autoattack, as you spam the 1 key you can still easily lock yourself into the chain).

As I map complete on one of my rangers, I usually have my Shortbow (this is only because I have the legendary and I like seeing my stupid rainbow hoofprints lol) and either sword/axe or greatsword. I do find though that by replacing the bow with greatsword and only using melee while running hearts and stuff, I get around faster. GS3, swoop, is an amazing map completion tool! I’d rather replace the bow than the sword, as sword gives me two evades and is way more useful to me when I’ve already GS3 into combat than a bow would be.

If you are in a guild, get the commendations to buy the accessories instead of spending the ectos. They cost 12 commendations and 5 gold…much cheaper than 50 ectos, if your guild does missions

Well in GW2, ranged combat is inferior to melee combat…so bringing a ranged Bow into a dungeon fight is usually useless compared to standing in the stack and attacking melee. The closer you get to a target with a Longbow, the less effective it is. You don’t want to be that ranged-always ranger standing in back not getting buffs and potentially messing up the stack. Shortbow is just awful with how they neutered it down into junk. It used to attack super fast and had a longer range but they killed it to make the Longbow more tempting for people to use. Sad day for those of us who loved Shortbow

Dionosio.5168:

My mains are ranger and thief… I’m kind of… sad…

These feels…I know them well, my mains are these two as well :/ I just wanted to use my stupid legendary and those are the only two professions that can use it.

Hoping Forge is neat so I can get back on my Engineer for a bit to forget about that Daredevil junk /sigh