Spoken like a true PvP guy who doesn’t have mobs’ attacks hitting him for 7k+ damage.
The sword needs to work so dodge and serpent strike/stalker strike can be activated mid animation.
pve is only 1/3 of the game.. sword works fine in 2/3. There is no need to change sword. PvE is so easy, you can use any weapon and do fine.
sword doesn’t work in WVW either, so that’s 2/3rds of the game the weapon in broken in. And since we’re talking about sPVP, that’s really only 1/10th of the game anyway, and a decent proportion of us don’t think it works well there either.
It’s the only weapon in the entire game where you lose control of your character for ~40% of the time while executing the #1 chain.
You lose control of your character whether you turn auto-attack off or not. It’s not arguable, it’s clearly broken.
The only reason sword sees any use at all in PVP is the evades, and some people have been willing to work around the brokenness. By not attacking. That’s not a solution.
Everyone stands to benefit from sword #1 not causing loss of character control during auto-attack, it’s just that some are afraid of change.
Choosing the Pet class and complaining about a pet being there…. seriously?
If the pet is under performing/limiting the ‘pet class’ then there will be complaints about it. They poorly implement the pet system and the it is currently too much work to fix so where does that leave the profession?
This. If you make a pet class where the pet is crap, you have every right to complain about it.
You have the right to complain, but you shouldn’t complain abut the fact that the pet class has to use a pet, but about the implementation of said pet.
All i say is that if you do not even want to use a pet you should not pick the class that is designed around a pet (again it’s of no interest whether it’s good or bad at that Point). You can complain about the viability of the pet but you shouldn’t complain about the existence of a Pet when you choose to Play the pet class
Anet has ha years to fix the pets, at this point I think people can complain about whatever they want.
Exactly. If you can’t make the pet not suck after 2.5 years then i think they ought to try making the pet a utility skill and buff/nerf appropriately. The replacement class mechanic could be something based on flanking & evading for example.
Choosing the Pet class and complaining about a pet being there…. seriously?
If the pet is under performing/limiting the ‘pet class’ then there will be complaints about it. They poorly implement the pet system and the it is currently too much work to fix so where does that leave the profession?
This. If you make a pet class where the pet is crap, you have every right to complain about it. In GW2, the implementation is so bad that some people would rather have nothing rather than a weak pet. If you’re going to leave a major part of the class as crap, then IMO at least make it optional.
I play ranger in Australia. Only have middling issues with latency. Sure, it has its problems but I somehow get by…in PVE only
I couldn’t care less about PVE – it plays itself, and in PVP, sword just isn’t viable for me. Losing control of my character is #1 on the list of things i definitely want NOT to happen.
kitten , turning off auto-attack is not the solution. you still self-root/lose control of your character during the 3rd skill in the chain.
The loss of control is even worse when playing with high network latency, eg: playing from Australia.
When playing from australia, using sword, with or without auto-attack enabled, my character is close to unplayable. The controls are so unresponsive I might as well be watching a youtube clip of someone else playing my character.
It’s totally kittened and it kittens me right off that this piece of kitten coding/design was allowed to pass QA, let along the fact that kitten all has been done to improve the situation in 2.5 years.
Conjures are the worst designed utilities in the game, bar none. Giving up 20 skills, plus a utility slot, for 5 mediocre skills is the worst tradeoff ever.
Not to mention the mechanics of summoning/picking up/using are also awful.
To someone who said elementalists can not live without triple cantrips, I say it’s also equally rare to see mesmers without blink and decoy, warriors without shouts or stance, thieves without shadowstep and signets, or engi without grenades and toolkit, ranger without lightning reflex and all that jazz.
This. Skill/utility balance in this game is fricken awful. I’m still yet to find anything that comes close to water/arcane/cantrips. In 2.5 years, the crap skills/traits are just just as crap, the situation has not improved.
The reason why water/arcane/cantrips is always the best choice is that the basic design of the class is flawed — the base defense is too low, which guarantees that survivability traits/utilities remain king.
i’m currently running all celestial accessories with a mix of knights/zerker together with GS and staff, and the mantra healing and phantasm regen traits. I feel like it’s pretty effective – nice AOE spike damage and nearly spammable 3K AOE heals… i like it.
If you have piercing arrows, then you will get stealth off of the first target hit, and then revealed on the second. If not, then it was most likely dodged, blocked or you were blinded.
The no.4 sucks as well. It’s pretty sad, considering I absolutely love both abilities, but only purely because of their animations.
Path of Scars doesn’t suck at all. You can pull off some great combos with the pull, the damage is good and it piercies.
Wouldn’t mind Whirling Defense getting some love, tho. Even the baseline radius of the skill is underwhelming.
You do realize you’re replying to a 2yo post right XD ?
That’s the sad part about all this — 2 years and there are basic weapon skills that are still near-universally regarded as terrible. The balancing in this game is truly pathetic.
Some traits are ridiculsly underpowered for a 2 years game..
This. The degree of apathy around fixing 2yo bugs and balancing weak skills/traits is pretty astonishing. It’s like they don’t give a kitten about anything but BLTC garbage.
Hornet Sting is fine how it is. Works great in combat and isn’t very hard to get use to going forward with on both leaps.
In practise you can only go forward on both leaps when escaping or closing a large gap, in that it takes valuable time to stop, turn, then leap backward. the last thing i want to be doing when charging into an opposing force is to stop, turn, backward leap, then turn, select appropriate target, leap forwards.
um, rapid fire does the same damage it did at release. The only change is it does it in half the time, making it twice as easy to dodge.
I agree that LB is probably finally at the right level but overall, ranger still needs buff to compete with the prevailing GWEN meta.
Specifically in WVW:
pets are more of a liability than a benefit. easily the worst thing about the class.
traps need more range, one can’t make a competitive WVW build with current traits and only 600 range. range needs to increase or traits need to move/compress.
shout range is too small to be effective, especially when the amount of healing is fairly low as well.
spirits are worthless because they melt in a microsecond
The best thing i could recommend as an improvement to SD would be to add a straight 20% chance to avoid AOE on top of the 20% projectile immunity. That might make it worth the investment.
There is nothing that Arena.Net can do to fix this unfortunately as it feels perfectly fine for me. This can only be resolved by getting in touch with your local government official to try and promote faster/cheaper internet access within Australia.
Not true at all, the issue is that the current implementation of the AA requires an extra server roundtrip in order to work out whether the leap connects with its target and then to leap you to that position.
It’s a badly conceived and implemented design, I know this because up until last year I was a snr server dev for a major mmo, and I can verify the behaviour by artificially inducing higher latency.
95% of respondants think pets need to optional, removed or improved.
44% think pets should be optional or removed entirely.
the top pet complaints in order:
# inability to land attacks/too slow/bad AI (62%)
# pets die too easily and/or need innate defenses (51%)
# poor controls (31%) and lack of depth/traits/customisability (30%) about even.
So while this data is not bulletproof (by messing with cookies, you could vote multiple times), it does seem to indicate a clear consensus, which is consistent with the recurring theme of the crappiness of pets in the ranger forum.
The real question is, will Anet ever try to fix pets or make them optional? The druid in the HOT trailer had a pet but it’s not too late to change this?
No i’m not talking about the #1. I think it’s flat-out broken, but then I play from Australia and the extra latency seems to make my character feel uncontrollable when using sword. I hope it gets fixed.
To me, sword could also be improved a lot by rearranging the skills slightly.
the #2 ought to be the leap forwards
the #3 ought to be the leap backwards
serpent’s strike (the evasive roll currently on #3) ought to chain off the #2 forward leap.
if the above changes were made, there wouldn’t really need to be the root/leap on the #1.
Do you use the grandmaster skirmishing trait called Strider’s Defense?
No.
Why or why not?
No.wouldn’t consider using it. 20% is very low, and it only works vs projectiles while swinging a melee weapon. Too narrowly defined to be useful I think. Not sure i would choose it if it were a skirmishing adept trait.
Eg the 3pt trait in the toughness tree that gives protection on dodge is much stronger than this GM trait.
its not a bug , it does hit>jump cleave>leap the reason it roots you is A Game Animation/combat machanic you cant just turn it off to spam you have to control it properly unlike other AA melee attack most of them really are just spam 111
Anet have acknowledged it’s something they want to fix.
This is a huge issue for me, since I’m a perfectionist and I don’t feel I’m contributing to dungeon runs unless I’m doing optimal damage.
Also the obligatory 17% is not a trivial DPS increase.
17% (where is the evidence for this btw?) is pretty slight when you consider things like 1 2second dodge roll in a 30 sec boss fight results in a ~7% DPS loss, and the evade on the auto of GS means you’re less likely to need to dodge roll when using a GS.
Furthermore, 17% more DPS on 1 char in a 30sec boss fight saves 1second.
As I said above though. People focus on the very slight DPS difference when boss fights are only a small fraction of the time required to complete an instance, and this is where GS’s higher ground speed likely results in faster D completion times, and that’s before you even factor in higher DPS uptime due to GS auto-attack evade.
Just use GS. People like to focus on how sword does slightly higher static DPS but then ignore the fact that actual boss fights are only a small % of the time running a D. GS gets you around faster. Use GS.
An autoattack that makes you lose control of your character is a bug, simple as that. Playing from Australia with high latency makes it feel like my character is out of control most of the time.
GS also has better burst, cleave, travel speed, and provides a reliable interrupt. When you consider travelling through the dungeon takes generally longer than actually fighting bosses, GS wins out overall.
Tried S/D and D/D with both IP and AR, but the amount of healing is still way too small to be a viable choice in WVW vs single or multiple targets. Which left my thief playing exactly like I would without the trait, which was disappointing.
Needs to be doubled again, possibly with a 1sec CD to limit.
Whatever it is, i’m guessing it’s going to be some kind of melee/medium range caster, as D/D is point-bank/melee range and long range is pretty well covered.
How would one buff crappy pets? Take bear for example as its the most loved to hate. It seems the entire thing with it is to be a tank, however that doesn’t work against other players who just avoid it.
Remember, ‘more damage’ isn’t the option Anet looks at. They already nerfed pet output badly once, so its not like crappy pets can just be buffed in the damage department.
Which leads me to believe some pets are just unfixable.
There are many other things that can be improved that are not just damage bumps. Eg: the notion of a pet family-specific buff or “aspect”, eg: what if the “bear aspect” allowed 15% of incoming damage to the ranger to be re-directed to the pet? That’s one way to make tank pets relevant across both PVE and PVP.
There’s a ton more that could be done along the lines of species-specific perks.
For instance, why shouldn’t birds be able to attack enemies on walls? Or spiders be able to path directly up wall geometry. It’s not like these things aren’t particularly hard to implement or anything, they just haven’t seen fit to do it.
Feline pets ought to be innately faster than other pets, because, well that’s what they do.
Bears ought to hit like a truck, but be slower to compensate.
one has to remember that Anet’s business model relies on microtransactions, and this requires keeping people playing, so they can’t price it too high, or large numbers of players simply won’t buy it and their recurring income will plummet.
the other big thing is WOW is a lot like apple – their brand is so strong they can charge prices well in excess of industry standard and their fan(boi)-base will pay it anyway.
the real competitor to GW2 IMO are all the other F2P games out there that make GW2 already look rather expensive, eg: LOL, TF2 etc continue to provide completely free content years after release.
As a WVW/PVP-only player, I have to say i’ve been pretty kitten disappointed by the scarcity of WVW/PVP content, and even of the small amount of content that was added, most of it I didn’t care about anyway.
The other thing is that there are plenty of things in the base game that are still crappy – loads of traits, skills and utilities that have been universally criticised for a long time.
I’d like to see every existing trait/skill/utility brought up to an acceptable level before I hand over more $$ for an expansion which will have it’s own share of problems… that will another 2+ years to (partially, or if at all) address.
$20 seems like the sweet spot for the expac. I’d rather pay more and get a quality product that is properly maintained instead of shoving it out the door and then forgetting about everything but churning out more gem-store content.
Of course I will buy it. I don’t understand people who think 30$+ for an expansion is expensive. WoW:WoD is 44.95$ and that game has a freaking sub fee on top.
$30 buys a lot of game these days…
One might (cynically) argue that all/almost all of the included content should have been made available over the course of the last 2 years as part of the core game and the only reason this is an expac is that player numbers are spiralling into the toilet and it’s time to squeeze the remaining players for more $$$ before spamming them with more dubious quality LS content whose sole purpose is to promote the gem store.
I’m still pretty kittened off with the level of apathy shown toward fixing major game bugs like ranger sword #1 loss of character control as well as the close to zero level of effort invested into making all existing skills/traits equally appealing. They seem a lot more interested in shipping units not delivering the level of care and attention to detail a quality game requires.
Anet’s apparent lack of interest in player issues like game balance & build variety definitely doesn’t help either.
I’m reading forums for around a year.
So far, around 90% of player issues are “cba to learn” issues.
When you can post vids of your spirit weap guardian, trap thief, glyph ele, siphon necro, glamour mesmer team owning it up in high-level PVP, i’ll agree with you.
At the end of the day it’s been >2 years and there’s still tons of traits and skills that are universally recognised as kitten. Anet has 300 employees, it’s not like they’re short of resources to tweak these skills/traits, they just don’t give a kitten.
Exactly. Building maps the size of the BGs is not super time-consuming, the problem is that Anet are anally-retentive about trying to get it just right before it goes it, which means maps get made and re-made a number of times. It’s the build-test iteration cycle that takes all the time.
It’s not a particularly satisfying experience for players as there are no changes for a long, long time, but mostly because the maps Anet produce end up feeling rather contrived and overengineered, as every siege location has already been pre-determined and tested, and there is no real discovery factor or strategy evolution.
IMO, maps should be treated like classes and released in more of a rough state and tweaked on a semi-regular basis over time.
The real kicker is that the skill would still be crap even if you could move.
Not to mention:
sword #1 still roots the user. quite frankly it’s pathetic this bug is still there 2 years after release.
traps still only 600 range – half the range of necro marks even after taking a GM and master trait.
pets are still kitten
sword one isn’t a bug its intented.
i wouldnt be using traps offensively
pets are good and bad anet already stated they are a double edged sword if used correctly they can be very useful.
ps enough of the nay saying.
“intended”…
Anet have already admitted sword #1 loss of control is a bug.
In WVW, 600 range makes traps very impractical, eg: 600 range is not enough to throw onto the ground from a tower/keep, are almost identical to necro marks in power and effect yet marks are 1200 range untraited. Ranger traps require a GM and master trait + 2-3 utility slots and are still inferior.
Agree that traps are fine in sPVP but they are kitten in WVW.
