Guild Wars 2

I’ve hit a point where I expect anything that’s not carried by warriors to be nerfed. Bring it! I’ll dust off my warrior, lay my face on the keyboard and win.

garethh.3518:

stale.9785:

Trappers shouldn’t have to compensate for craptastic trait setup with gear alone – the traits ought to compliment the utilities they govern.

Trap rangers aren’t having trouble making up for ‘craptastic traits’
My trap ranger runs beautifully in tournies and I am one of the top tier rangers in the game atm.

The real issue is though, your changes in these regards wouldn’t open up more builds.
Moving empathetic bond to the beastmaster tree would only force the vast majority of rangers to be 30 beastmasters. Empathetic bond is the only trait cleansing for rangers and trait cleansing is easily the best cleansing.

Your fix doesn’t fix the problem but force allot of competent PvP’ers from one build to another.
(I hope your starting to see where one of the real problems with the trait setup is)

Sorry man, I give 0 consideration to 5 on 5 pvp. Why would I? Most of the playerbase will never enter that format, and it’s every single other aspect of the game where rangers need help.

I’ve read enough of the other class forums to understand that some form of BM/Trap bunker spec is our shining point in the game – but again, if most of us aren’t going to play it, why on earth would I care?

EDIT: Unless I’m really missing some factor about critical damage, it does absolutely nothing to increase your condition damage. As far as I know, conditions don’t benefit at all from critical chance/+crit damage.

Daecollo.9578:

stale.9785:

Daecollo.9578:

stale.9785:

Daecollo.9578:

Ethics.4519:

Anet refuses to nerf warriors, only continually buff them. People know they are safe when playing warrior =)

Not true, warriors have recieved some of the biggest non-direct nerfs in the game so far.

Once you lose 40% of warrior damage for 45 seconds out of every 60, your range damage goes from strongest to pitiful, and they reduce you to one build, then nerf it to the ground, warriors have a basis to complain about nerfs. Till then, enjoy how good they’ve got it.

Rangers have higher DPS then we do, if you take account there pets. Perhaps they should lower there DPS as well?

dude, what rock are you hiding under – with pets, rangers get normal damage. since the pets are generally dead or wandering about not attacking what rangers are targetting, their dps is 40% less than anybody elses.

If you’re complaining about the glassier pets (cats and birds) remember that to get the pets to hit that hard, they traited 30 into beast mastery, and 0 into their power spec. So the pet may be hitting for good numbers, but the ranger is doing no damage themselves.

This is not a good tradeoff when you consider that in wvw and dungeons, pets are dead most of the time.

Bad rangers pets are dead, good rangers must manage there pets.
You’ve just described why your not doing good damage, letting old faithful die

Bad ranger’s pets are dead, good rangers manage their pets, right up till they get smoked by AoE or the AI sends them off to aggro something well outside range.

Either that, or every ranger ever to post on the forums is bad.

Galrond.5972:

Just curious, but what about a trait option for: 20% crit chance increase when using staff?

Exchange it with the current staff trait and make the fields 20% bigger by default, also the fire trait for longer fire field duration should be applied to all fields and buffed to like 50-100% longer.

Fire:
Lava tomb should work like Necro skills. So the duration should start as soon as something walks into it.

Earth:
Turn eruption into 2 spells. At first it is a cripple field for 10-15 seconds. (field, not crippleduration) While it is active the skills turns into an ability to manually trigger the explosion.

Unsteady ground should be a circle around the player like guardian hammer 5.

Shockwave should be like a ranger trap instead of a projectile.

Air:
Make the AA faster. THAT IS LIGHTNING! It’s supposed to be instant hit.
Remove the cast time from Air 2.
Turn Air 3 into a Copy of Mesmer GS 5.

Water:
2 should fall faster.
Replacce 3 with a low cooldown direct damage projectile, which causes vulnerability and chill.

I had that for the earth skill, and everyone who’s used to playing support started crying about their ability to trigger healing fields. The idea to cast the field first, and then the trigger was met with so much disapproval I gave it up.

Everything else you posted is actually in my original post, aside from changing water 3. (If they’re neutering water field healing, and they are, I see no reason not to change the water skills to all be either CC or offense based.)

Daecollo.9578:

stale.9785:

Daecollo.9578:

Ethics.4519:

Anet refuses to nerf warriors, only continually buff them. People know they are safe when playing warrior =)

Not true, warriors have recieved some of the biggest non-direct nerfs in the game so far.

Once you lose 40% of warrior damage for 45 seconds out of every 60, your range damage goes from strongest to pitiful, and they reduce you to one build, then nerf it to the ground, warriors have a basis to complain about nerfs. Till then, enjoy how good they’ve got it.

Rangers have higher DPS then we do, if you take account there pets. Perhaps they should lower there DPS as well?

dude, what rock are you hiding under – with pets, rangers get normal damage. since the pets are generally dead or wandering about not attacking what rangers are targetting, their dps is 40% less than anybody elses.

If you’re complaining about the glassier pets (cats and birds) remember that to get the pets to hit that hard, they traited 30 into beast mastery, and 0 into their power spec. So the pet may be hitting for good numbers, but the ranger is doing no damage themselves.

This is not a good tradeoff when you consider that in wvw and dungeons, pets are dead most of the time.

garethh.3518:

stale.9785:

Skirmishing:

Swap Trapper’s Expertise with Martial Mastery. Move Trap Potency to Wilderness Survival (Grandmaster Trait) and replace with “Master Skirmisher:” Critical hits while in melee range deal 10% more damage.

Wilderness Survival:

Trap Potency has been moved here, under my suggestions – move Empathic Bond to Beast Mastery, and remove Instinctual Bond.

That doesn’t help balance at all.
Switching around trait lines because they seem to fit the stats/theme more is a terrible way to balance.

Everything else seems pretty mediocre short of the pet dmg change. It’d let them balance ranger raw power based dmg more, since they don’t have such massive innate pet dmg to compensate for in small skirmishes.

Thosee trait swaps were purely about the stats – having high crit for a condition based tra kitten illy, ditto high condition damage on weapons that benefit more from pure damage.

My goal is to allow for rangers who don’t want to worry about the pet basically ignore it, while still have BM builds be strong. Trappers shouldn’t have to compensate for craptastic trait setup with gear alone – the traits ought to compliment the utilities they govern.

Spirits are self explanatory – as they are, nobody runs them, because random AoE just wiped all your utility.

Don’t know if my reasoning helps any, but there it is.

With the upcoming nerfs, we need range options more than ever – bumping this for more feedback, and to keep people thinking of what staves should have been.

Well, the thread title lied, what we REALLY need is to be able to perma-stow pets, and we won’t get it, I give you instead, my proposed ranger fixes.

Pet Fix:

Change the Ranger/Pet damage ratio from it’s current 60:40 to a baseline of 90:10. Then, make the pet stat increase for investment into Beast Mastery scale higher.

After all, if you’re investing heavily into Beast Mastery, you’re giving up raw damage or survivability from the traits you didn’t spec into.

Longbow:

Make Long Range Shot damage static across it’s whole range.

Speed up the longbow arrow flight by 100%, and reduce the channel time on Rapid Fire and Barrage.

Traits:

Marksmanship:

Change Piercing Arrows to be the minor master trait, and put opening strike into one of the Beast Mastery trait slots. (I’d suggest compassion training, myself).

Make Signet of the Beastmaster the default function of signets, and replace it with “Crippling Arrows” – critical hits with bows have a 50% chance to cause cripple for 5 seconds. (10 second cooldown)

Skirmishing:

Swap Trapper’s Expertise with Martial Mastery. Move Trap Potency to Wilderness Survival (Grandmaster Trait) and replace with “Master Skirmisher:” Critical hits while in melee range deal 10% more damage.

Wilderness Survival:

Trap Potency has been moved here, under my suggestions – move Empathic Bond to Beast Mastery, and remove Instinctual Bond.

Nature Magic:

Make spirits invulnerable and remove their internal cooldown. Change Vigorous Spirits to “Spirits grant vigor for 10s to allies in range. (30 second internal cooldown)”

Zaviel.1245:

stale.9785:

If we’re tanky, our damage peaks at 2500 on a crit. If we’re DPS, then we’re hitting, but we’re dying fast.

I hope you enjoy that 2500 crit in tank gear. When I go bunker on my engi the most I can hope for are 800s.

Being fair, it’s not full on tank gear – it’s knights gear, zerker trinkets, zerker weapons, and then traited purely for survival.

Only reason my crits are that high is the crit chance/+ crit damage. My regular damage is pitiful, and I don’t have kits/grenades etc to raise it.

I gave the largest number because the fellow I was responding to believes guardians are unkillable tanks that deal imba damage. Giving him the highest numbers we can achieve, so he can see how sad they are compared to, say, warrior damage.

EDIT: and food – take away the food, and I don’t crit much at all. Then my attack peaks at about 1k. rawr.

The Spiral King.2483:

Huck.1405:

stale.9785:

No constructive input, other than for the OP – trust me, you’ll drop the LB as soon as you try any wvwvw. If you can’t connect, your DPS is 0. (only way to hit with LB in wvwvw is the same as hitting with ele staff in wvwvw – you hope the opponent is AFK.)

Wait, what? Cant connect with a longbow in WvW? You obviously aint used a longbow with a Ranger in WvW if you believe that. A Longbow is my Ranger’s primary weap in WvW and I do very well with it as do other Rangers I know who use them. So don’t tell outright lies on here because you make it look as if longbows consistently miss the target and they don’t.

I hit with my LB a lot too. Exclusively when I’m in a zerg, at the back, shooting targets that don’t even know I exist. It’s kind of hard to miss them to be honest. I assume he’s talking about scenarios where you’re actually playing against someone else, and not just laying barrage and pot shots down on whatever draws your attention.

That is what i’m talking about. If your opponent knows you’re there, sidestepping once – ONCE negates all the bow’s damage. Barrage is a single dodge roll to safety, and arrow flight from the longbow makes it unreliable.

There’s a reason that WvW rangers pretty much universally rock the SB/GS combo.

LB desperately needs attention – long range shot should be static damage across it’s range

The channelled skills (rapid fire and barrage) need their channel time reduced.

Arrow flight time needs to be faster – about twice what it is now.

As things stand, I can close on a longbow ranger, and not get tagged once, simply by zig-zagging in. We’re not talking huge zags either – just tapping A,D,A,D while you close will do it.

Huck: my ranger is the only char I regularly take into WvW. He’s kitten I accept that. I don’t want to play bunker, so I try to skirmish. (If I wanted to bunker, I wouldn’t have shelved my ele when I figured out that staff got killed after beta.) If you’re hitting with LB in wvwvw, you’re firing into a zerg, or the opponent is ignoring you and taking out someone who’s posing a danger.

Durzlla.6295:

jkctmc.8754:

stale.9785:

The AI from GW1 was, in every possible aspect, better than GW2. I have no clue why they changed it, but they should (if possible) recycle the code from GW1.

Pets hit, pretty much anything you aimed at, they would get to and connect. Minions would hit, almost without fail.

I would sacrifice a goat on Anet’s front lawn to get the flag system and AI from GW1 for this game. Heck, I’d go as high as two goats and a bull.

I don’t understand how pets are worse in GW2, than they were in GW1.

They aren’t… In GW1 pets are notorious for closing the gap and just standing there for like 10 seconds going, “Herpadurp what was I supposed to be doing again?” Granted minion AI was better (from my experience) in GW1 and pets could attack while moving (when they decided to actually work while moving).

I mained a ranger in GW1, and believe me, pets were far more reliable. Granted, in pvp they were insta gibbed, same as now – but for general PvE, the pet was a godsend. Pathing wasn’t an issue, and if you actually called the target, the pet never failed to attack it.

Minions were the same – if you made the effort to call the target, you didn’t have a group of minions milling about looking at the sky – they fell upon your target in a group of undead damage.

Spirits need to be made like banners – constant effect, and invulnerable.

Minion of Vey.4398:

LordByron.8369:

stale.9785:

naphack.9346:

Anyone here ever considered the fact, the change to condition removal does NOTHING to break D/D in any way, while it completely DESTROYS any AoE regen builds?
Glad, I don’t play an ele.
Just look at it from this angle: You throw out a random AoE Regen boon.
It will remove 1 RANDOM condition from a RANDOM target out of the RANDOMLY selected 5 who get the regen. Then it will be on 5 seconds cooldown.

Hf, staff users, hf users of elemental attunement. You can no longer reliably take conditions off allies.

Maybe they’ll finally be forced to restore the staff to where it was in Beta, so that we can do some damage with it. After all, if they’re gutting our support role, the staff becomes… decorative?

do you remember why was it nerfed?

Complaints…

People still complain about meteor shower if you follow the forum….

Nothing is more terrifying in WvW than bunker eles casting meteors for 1100 damage that miss 80% of the time.

Sometimes things get crazy and the same person gets hit TWICE, IN THE SAME CASTING. Sure it’s rare, but I’ve seen it happen! I think!. Can you imagine how sick it’d be if you got a whole bunch of eles casting it? They might have to move and use a HEAL.

Lolling hard right now – and remember, even if you go full offensive, you’re hitting for that amazing 2200-3500! And you may hit once! Twice would, of course, be OP…

Grevender.9235:

boons are a mechanic of the whole game, not something exclusive to the Elementalist. This means is developers task to brainstorm and find ways to BALANCE all classes against all classes and every other possible situation in PvE and PvP.

Ah, but we know this isn’t true – balance is considered exclusively based upon 5v5. Even then, warriors tend to get the better end of the deal than the other classes.

Also, boons are pretty much the province of ele’s and guardians, since for everyone else, they’re optional – neither ele’s nor guardian’s get a choice, absolutely everything you do puts boons on you.

I’m against boon hate (boon stripping is ok, punishing class mechanics is just wrong.)

How would thieves feel if we did more damage to them based on how much initiative they could hold? Or if rangers took more damage whenever they had an animal companion?

That’s the treatment ele’s and guardians are catching right now.

I’m hoping when the patch notes go up, there’s buffs to offset the various nerf-bats, but I don’t really believe it.

Grevender.9235:

naphack.9346:

Well, people still got the Nuker mage archetype from other games in mind, while ele does not even get close to such a facemelt value.

nonetheless it should be like that, specially when wielding a staff…

Especially because this is how ele’s worked in GW1 – huge damage numbers, but incredibly fragile. Or great toughness, but truly niche build. Melee is your enemy, when you use tissue paper for armour.

randomfightfan.4091:

trait for symbols, that aoe will be bigger, last long enough so it’s just finishing when the next one is getting put down, and the field it has gives even more boon. It is perma protection. Sorry you didn’t know how to achieve it until now. Even if you don’t consider hammer to be perma protection after that you still have multiple utilities and traits that give protection (like protection on aiges or block or w/e it is) and other weapon skills like shield 4. All that coupled with your bajillion blocks, you have no right to say you don’t have access to way too much defensive boons.

All the focus on how OP the boons are, when they’re in the game to put us on a semi-level playing field with the other soldier class – the one that has a higher base HP than we can get with armour and traiting. We have to use boons responsively, and now we’re going to be punished for same. (Someone who spams their boons mindlessly isn’t a challenge – they’re dead.)

it’s not punishment, it’s making it so other professions actually CAN counter boon heavy professions. Before, things like warrior, thief, and ranger would just get stomped b/c they didn’t have the tools

You’d also be 500x tankier with that 10k hp than a bunker thief or a dps necro who has 20k hp. Despite having such low hp, guardian is the most naturally tanky class just b/c of the class mechanic. Thank goodness for these new counterplay options. I was tired of seeing guardians casually rolling around in wvw and never dying even when being chased by 3 or 4 people.

I snipped a bunch of the quoted text, because we’re both into walls of text, it seems…

Dude, it’s painfully obvious you don’t play guardian, and that you hate them. If you were to trait heavily into hammer/symbol, you’d toss out a bunch of team healing, and still get, best case, 50% uptime of protection.

You’d also do kitten all for damage. And that’s the mantra of the game, isn’t it? Burst! DPS over all!

Retaliation itself doesn’t do a whole lot of damage either – and what it does do comes firmly under L2P. You see they have retal? Don’t unleash hundred blades. Same for confusion (which is getting cried about far too much.)

If you’re dense enough to attack through something that’ll cause you damage, you deserve to die.

With the AH build – which is most of what you face in game, retaliation give you a max of 419 damage per attack against you. We have four easy sources, and four ways to trait it – one of which gets used in a standard AH build. So you’re facing a max of 10 seconds out of 48 of retaliation. For 10 seconds, we’re someone you don’t want to attack. (it’s generally 5, since you should be using “Stand Your Ground” instead of “Save Yourselves!” but i’m giving you the longer number to make it as OP as possible… )

Somehow, people seem to think we’ve got all our shouts, consecrations, and meditations out at once, whilst being traited to 30 in each line. It doesn’t work that way.

If we’re tanky, our damage peaks at 2500 on a crit. If we’re DPS, then we’re hitting, but we’re dying fast.

In a zerg, right now, I normally won’t die, I grant you – but I’m not the beast killing everything either. What I’m doing is making it possible for my team to kill things, without having to worry about being insta-gibbed by the folks who can truly put out damage. Also, do to my tankiness, I can tag a bunch of folks and stay relatively solid. If I’m dense enough to go head to head with someone, I’ve got to hope they’re set up glass cannon, or I won’t make the kill.

Also note, that scenario where 3-4 people are chasing a guardian? They may not be killing the gaurd, but they most certainly aren’t being killed either. Most likely, those 3-4 are uplevelled and not doing optimum damage either. Guardians aren’t these immortal tanks that people seem to think we are – we’re tough to kill, and boost the team – that’s it.

Daecollo.9578:

Ethics.4519:

Anet refuses to nerf warriors, only continually buff them. People know they are safe when playing warrior =)

Not true, warriors have recieved some of the biggest non-direct nerfs in the game so far.

Once you lose 40% of warrior damage for 45 seconds out of every 60, your range damage goes from strongest to pitiful, and they reduce you to one build, then nerf it to the ground, warriors have a basis to complain about nerfs. Till then, enjoy how good they’ve got it.

LordByron.8369:

stale.9785:

naphack.9346:

Anyone here ever considered the fact, the change to condition removal does NOTHING to break D/D in any way, while it completely DESTROYS any AoE regen builds?
Glad, I don’t play an ele.
Just look at it from this angle: You throw out a random AoE Regen boon.
It will remove 1 RANDOM condition from a RANDOM target out of the RANDOMLY selected 5 who get the regen. Then it will be on 5 seconds cooldown.

Hf, staff users, hf users of elemental attunement. You can no longer reliably take conditions off allies.

Maybe they’ll finally be forced to restore the staff to where it was in Beta, so that we can do some damage with it. After all, if they’re gutting our support role, the staff becomes… decorative?

do you remember why was it nerfed?

Complaints…

People still complain about meteor shower if you follow the forum….

Only because people somehow think that ele AoE is different from the other red circles somehow. Staff does diddly for damage, the CC is the least effective of the various classes, and people are still worried about it.

The 5 man limit, plus the way AoE procs, makes muddy terrain a far better CC than anything the ele can drop – ditto for guardian consecrations. Staff really wasn’t that beastly in beta – it’s just that sheople are too stupid to move out of the giant red circle of death.

EDIT: giant red circle of death, of course, being about 1k-2k damage. scary stuff, that.

PistolWhip.2697:

Dare I say they only complain about it because experienced players have such an easy time with them. The key i think here is that warrior attacks are so easily telegraphed and countered. QQ is on every Forum.

Thief, Guardian, Ele etc…

I think its just player mentality in general.

And to be fair what solo pve content isn’t default easy anyway? Aside from the skill point in queensdale where that bandit kicks people in the kitten >:(

Play staff ele in PvE, and discover that as soon as you leave the noob area, you need an ally – or to swap weapons to S/D.

Beyond that, the other profession forums are generally complaining about the broken bits of their own classes – the warriors tend to be the ones with the whole “ZOMG, I got beaten by X, and I’m a warrior! That’s not right! Nerf them!”

The exception being the thief forum, where they detail for other classes how to live with the most broken mechanic ever to be introduced to an MMO. (And it still amounts to “drop all your AoE on your feet, and swing wildly, hoping the thief went AFK right after attacking you.”)

also, pretty sure we had that ^ exact conversation over on the ele forums, where everyone is concerned that the nerf that’s supposed to hurt the d/d is actually going to destroy every other playstyle, and only slow down the d/d.

naphack.9346:

Anyone here ever considered the fact, the change to condition removal does NOTHING to break D/D in any way, while it completely DESTROYS any AoE regen builds?
Glad, I don’t play an ele.
Just look at it from this angle: You throw out a random AoE Regen boon.
It will remove 1 RANDOM condition from a RANDOM target out of the RANDOMLY selected 5 who get the regen. Then it will be on 5 seconds cooldown.

Hf, staff users, hf users of elemental attunement. You can no longer reliably take conditions off allies.

Maybe they’ll finally be forced to restore the staff to where it was in Beta, so that we can do some damage with it. After all, if they’re gutting our support role, the staff becomes… decorative?

multani.1452:

As a thief, I feel bad for the D/D ele as well. It wasn’t hard to fight one of you as it was just challenging. I only hope that ANET doesn’t just nerf your D/D spec and also buffs other specs like focus and staff.

I don’t see that happening, since Anet is of the firm belief that damage should be from melee only. At the end of Beta, staff took a 60% drop in damage/recharge, and hasn’t recovered one bit.

The idea of a fragile, low health, low armour caster nuking it up from the backlines makes sense to everyone except for the devs.

(I encourage you to try this yourself, btw. A staff ele, even specced full ’zerker so they can get 1 shotted by any ranged class, does sub-par damage compared to any class other than ranger. Rangers being screwed from the get-go because of the pet deal.)

Balancing to the 5v5 game mode is incredibly silly, since in GW1 pvp counted for a minute part of the player base, and I don’t expect it’s changed much for GW2. I know nobody in my guild does any 5v5, nor does anyone I’ve ever spoken to in game. Willing to bet, anyone who does play the S/TPvP are already on the forums, screaming about perceived “imbalance”.

Mepheles.2087:

Sorry, New here I was wondering where I could see Gw2 patch notes? I know there is an announcement forum, but I can’t seem to find anything.

The patch goes live on the 30th – Anet will post the notes sometime after the patch goes live. (Currently they put them up between 20 minutes to 6 hours afterward.)

Current speculation comes from the State of the Game webcast they do. They drop teasers about upcoming changes, and we work from there.

The upshot is that all the moaning (myself included) is typically overdone. Also, we’ve learned (the hard way) that the classes that get the most favourable treatment continue to get it.

Patch notes will be in the announcement section, and shortly thereafter, at the guild wars 2 wiki site.

Aza.2105:

DiogoSilva.7089:

In GW1, dervishes and elementalists weren’t told they had to be enchantment oriented, they were forced into it too. And it worked perfectly fine. In GW2, guardians are the dervishes ( and paragons/ “monks”) of the game. And in GW2, boons are extremely strong.

I can understand that people who are used to overpowered professions, are afraid that there will exist more means to counter them. But that’s how the game should have been since the beginning. You have to understand that playing with an overpowered, hard to counter profession was not meant to be the norm, but is a side effect to lack of balancing in that department.

No, you had the CHOICE to run enchantments. Skills weren’t placed on your bar that FORCED you to do it! Its true that enchantments were probably a optimal choice for derv and ele but they weren’t forced on your hotbar. You choose how to build your character! Again, big difference.

80% of guardians skills provide boons! Perhaps even more. There are three weapons that do not provide boons: Scepter (broken), 1h sword (broken) and torch (not worth using). Then three out of four signets do not provide boons.

Make a guardian build that doesn’t use boons in some way, you can’t!

This is why I compared it to punishing rangers for having pets (as though the pet wasn’t punishment enough…) We have 0 choice but to run boons.

PistolWhip.2697:

I have to disagree Stale. I honestly don’t know why people assume warriors are the strongest in pve content. I must argue Guardians are far stronger and can monopolize pve alone. I main a guardian of sorts right now, and my guild runs full guardian teams to face roll even dungeons like Arah, because we can tank bosses with so much healing and boons. Me rolling along heals allies around me for near 1k kitten it.

Therefore I’d argue that although warrior is next best, Guardian is far superior in a pve setting of any hard difficulty, it is after all, the only class required for higher level fractals.

The assumption for warriors being strongest is simply because they can SOLO content that other classes require groups to deal with. Taken as an individual, the guardian is far weaker than the warrior – in a group, we shine, because our utility is far more useful than most warriors. Also, playing 4 classes (ele, ranger, warrior, guardian) the warrior forum is full, end to end, of people whining because they can’t just faceroll every aspect of the game. The other professions tend to focus on the broken aspects of their classes.

Typical ranger forum post is asking how to deal with the broken pet mechanic.

Typical ele forum post is complaining about D/D being the only spec that’s worthwhile, and the impending nerf.

Guardians, well, we’ve started beefing about boon hate coming, but that’s about it.

The warrior forum is full of “A mesmer beat me, that’s not fair, nerf it!” “How do I kill a guardian? It’s OP, nerf it!” “Thieves can burst better than me, it’s OP, nerf it!”

After 8 months of slogging through it, I’ve become rather callous towards my fellow warriors. On the whole, they won’t be happy till they have a “press 1 and win the game” button.

Best HP, best sustained damage, second best burst, and only real weakness is snares, and they complain about being the underpowered class of the game. It makes me want to cry.

randomfightfan.4091:

I don’t know what you mean by rangers (they are obscenely strong in pvp but not wvw or pve if that’s what you’re getting at) but I felt I had to include warriors b/c they have no access to protection and their best access to retaliation is pretty junk. Get it AFTER you get crit… against a condition necro or something, you won’t be getting too many ret procs… and even then, not like it’ll be doing much, if anything. Compare that to a guardian where they can get near perma protection and retaliation and almost every other boon with hardly even trying. This patch will make it where average warriors are actually competitive in average pvp situations instead of the warrior needing to be godlike in order to beat average players (personal opinion ofc).

Remember though, warriors still don’t have a way to take away that retaliation or protection you’re always carrying. You’ll still be taking 33% less damage even if you are eating say 15% more from that certain traited warrior.

Take a ranger into wvw, or a dungeon, and tell me they’re good. All this focus on pvp, when it’s such a small chunk of the game.

Rangers, by default, lose 40% of their dps, because a) it can’t be controlled. b) it dies, regularly. In any venue aside from 5 man pvp, rangers are the kitten class.

For the rest? Seriously, roll the other classes. Near perma regen and protection? Regen I’ll grant you, because our class mechanic grants it. Protection? Well, there’s save yourselves! there’s hold the line!, and, um… oh, yeah, one part of the hammer cycle, and a shield skill. Near perma… right.

All the focus on how OP the boons are, when they’re in the game to put us on a semi-level playing field with the other soldier class – the one that has a higher base HP than we can get with armour and traiting. We have to use boons responsively, and now we’re going to be punished for same. (Someone who spams their boons mindlessly isn’t a challenge – they’re dead.)

Think somehow people assume guardians trait into bunker spec to troll people. This isn’t true. Guardians trait as bunker because it’s the only way we stay competitive.

Were I to try to roll a DPS based, zerker style guardian, I’d have decent damage, but I’d have 10k hp. Also, I’d have virtually no escape function, and, well, I’d spend my life facedown on the dirt.

Everyone in the thread who’s complaining about how easy it is to shut down a warrior? Don’t roll pure ‘zerker stuff, and it’s less of a problem. Snares, blind, and… ? Oh, yeah, that’s it.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Boon hate is not a silly concept. It worked perfectly fine in GW1, and it needed a boost in GW2.

People are saying they would prefer boon stripping over the “more damage per boon” trait. Why? It seems, to me, that boon stripping is stronger than +3% damage per boon. Because the new warrior’s trait won’t remove boons. It won’t remove aegis, it won’t remove protection, it won’t remove vigor, it won’t remove stability, etc. Boon professions will still be able to dodge more often, to protect against stuns (and thus against warrior’s bursts), and generally regenerate their health. Each boon is, generally, far more worth than a 3% damage reduction. So, ultimately, this new tait will give warriors a higher chance to burst down a boon profession, but said profession can still counter the warrior by… using the effects of the boons.

Also, giving everyone and their mommas boon removal would be annoying. It would be annoying, because each time you would add a boon to yourself, chances are, you would lose it from a random soccer mom. It’s good that devs are adding more ways to fight against boons, that do not solely rely on stripping their effects. It adds more diversity to the combat system. With this new trait, a boon profession is going to be boon-countered while still reaping the benefit from boons. It’s going to lead to different kinds of duels than boon stripping (which is also getting buffed).

I could live with boon stripping far more easily than with outright damage based upon boons.

Worst case, assume someone’s stripped all my boons after I’ve popped every shout, and all my virtues. OK, so suddenly I’m standing there with 15k hp, being thumped, and best case I can restore my protection after 28-45 seconds. It’s time to die, or run away. Cost of doing business.

Having anything that targets my core mechanic, on the otherhand, is wrong. Just by existing, without using any skills, a guardian generates two boons every 40 seconds. As soon as we start using their weapons, we’re tossing boons onto the group, nothing we can do to control that – it’s inherent in our weapon design.

Adding something I’ve got to watch for because it makes me vulnerable? Not a big deal. Adding something that actively punishes me just for playing a class? That sucks.

Let’s say thieves got something that allowed them to do 3% more damage to anyone with an adrenal meter. Every warrior on the boards would be screaming their heads off about how unfair it is.

PvE = player vs environment – this is 80% of the game. The campaign, if you will.

PvP = player vs player. – this is accessed through the mists (the crossed swords on the user interface). 5 man teams, where class balance should matter.

wvw/W3/wvwvw = world vs world vs world. this is accessed through the little castle icon in the user interface. This setting allows for large groups (zergs) to face one another.

dungeons are dungeons – ascalon catacombs, twilight arbor, arah, etc.

The griping I have going on is that warriors continually whine about being outclassed in a pvp setting. Since in every other setting of the game (at least 80% of the playable content) they’re the strongest available class, this strikes me as a bit childish.

Really like this.

Sil.4560:

WvW is debatable because it’s very dependent on situation.

Anyway, no, I wouldn’t agree with that. There’s something that games should strive for called balance. Having a class excellent in some modes but horrible in others isn’t balanced. I’d rather see an effort to make every class equally viable no matter what mode of play it is.

That would be ideal – but then there’s 5 classes that desperately need more attention than warriors do. Mesmers are in a good place, game wide. Guardians are in a good place too. Warriors are easy mode for the entire game, aside from PvP. The other 5 classes need attention far more than warriors.

(The main reason I’m so anti-warrior is that they cry far more than any two other classes combined. The eternal cry of the uber-powerful warrior about being underpowered is beyond grating.)

randomfightfan.4091:

ever think that maybe there’s a reason why boon hate was put in place… guardians and eles were doing far too much with all the boons they could get and now we have something (something minor) to counter that. As it is, guardian is the only class that can barely move and never attack yet still manage to kill their opponent. Things like perma protection/retal along with spammable block was too strong that it needed something designed to break it. Instead of complaining that the most op class for tanking got a slight nerf, you should be thanking anet for not nerfing your class to the level of other classes like rangers, necros, thieves, and warriors. Seriously, none of your complaints have any solid merit.

tldr ~ Both guardian and ele needed to be nerfed b/c they were FAR too strong as bunkers and dealing far too much damage without even having to try (guardian more so). Boon hate is warranted

See, i was with you till you included warrior with the rangers. warriors do double the damage of other classes. rangers are stupidly broken, to the point they’re unwelcome in most settings.

I still hate the idea of boon hate – but purely because it attacks my classes CORE MECHANIC. To put it in warrior terms, say I got to do extra damage based upon you having weapon skills. Unfair, right? Because you can’t avoid having weapon skills.

That’s where guardians are sitting right now – being punished for something we can’t opt not to use.

Almost everything guardians do grants boons – including our core mechanic of virtues – they auto-spawn boons, and there’s nothing at all we can do to prevent it.

Sil.4560:

rofl, I forgot all about the banners. Probably because it wasn’t very special. I guess it made PvE killing a fraction faster though.

Anyway, quality over quantity, please. You’re going to bring up things like Rampage? Really? Pin Down was a good buff though, I agree. Or at least it would be if our condition damage was really worth a kitten in more situations. I’ve mostly got in mind things that will help me fight other players. PvE, absolutely, we’re in an excellent spot. Otherwise…no.

Also dungeons and WvW. Warrior is king. So, PvE, dungeons and wvwvw. 90% of the playable game? Not being faceroll easy in pvp is the price you pay for being the best class everywhere else.

Katai.6240:

How is this different from skills like Corrupt Boon, Arcane Thievery, Well of Corruption, and all those other skills that punish the user for having boons?

These skills have been around since launch, but it’s only a problem when Warriors have something to counter boons?

Because, unlike the classes that carry the skills you mention, warriors have the highest direct damage potential in the game. An unblockable killshot that got MORE powerful because my profession mechanic automatically gives me regen and aegis? Fun, yeah.

Ensign.2189:

It’s not like people are suddenly going to start running Warriors because there’s a new trait giving them a bit more damage against bunkers. As if that was their problem.

No, they’re getting bonus damage against boons (which any guardian will have at least 2 up all the time, they’re standard.) and 3 unblockable attacks. Since one notoriously powerful attack has been known to crit for 24k, this is a problem. Making it unblockable, and adding damage for the boons that should be protecting us? It’s beyond a joke.

Aenaos.8160:

I got both a lvl 80 Guardian and a lvl 80 Warrior and I still believe that the warrior
is the better class.But..I never tried to WvW or sPvP in full zerker gear.
I save that for PvE only.
If warriors expect that they can now use their full zerker gear in WvW
and sPvP and get away with it because of boon hate mechanic,they are
in for a rude awakening.I believe a lot of the whining that led to this
boon hate came from Warriors that a.were going against def Guardians
in melee combat with zerker gear and b.made poor use of their long bow.
Guardians still have tons of retaliation,and more inc damage means more
outgoing retaliation,so good luck with the boon hate if you are not adequately
def specked and careless.
Bad warriors will still get facerolled by any decent Guardian 1 on 1.

This is exactly it.

I have a warrior, ranger, ele and guardian, all 80. Of them, the ranger is hands down the weakest (outside of PvP, where he’s a bunker, because it’s all that works there) and the warrior is, far and away, the most powerful.

Ele, outside of the D/D spec, is a joke. (OP spec is bad, but destroying cantrips and kitten boons wasn’t the way to fix it.)

I’d say the guardian was closest to balanced. Toughness and boons mitigating pitiful HP and lack of heavy offense.

March:

Kick skill: Now lunges toward the target slightly, extending the range.

Rampage skill:
The Kick skill now lunges towards the target slightly, extending the range.

Players can now use the Throw Boulder skill while moving.

Banner of Defense skill: Increased toughness and vitality granted to allies from 90 at level 80 to 170.

Banner of Discipline skill: Increased precision granted to allies from 90 at level 80 to 170.

Banner of Strength skill: Increased power and condition damage granted to allies from 90 at level 80 to 170.

Banner of Tactics skill: Increased healing granted to allies from 90 at level 80 to 170.

Bladetrail skill: Can no longer be fired at enemies behind the player.

February:

Impale: This ability’s cooldown has been reduced to 15 seconds.

Pin Down: This ability now applies bleeding to targets that it hits.

Players wielding Banner of Defense, Discipline, Strength, and Tactics will now strike up to three targets with their Stab ability.

Smoldering Arrow: This ability is now a full projectile finisher.

I could post everything from the wiki, but if you look yourself, warriors have recieved buffs at a rate of 4 buffs for each nerf.

Compare that to, say, ele’s, who’ve gotten virtually nothing but nerfs since BETA, for crying out loud, when staff got gutted.

Or rangers, who still have to contend with 40% of their DPS either being completely unreliable or non-existant.

Warriors are in a good place, and are steadily getting better. The “OP” builds other classes have are niche builds, generally PvP in nature, which means they affect a small fraction of the games content.

Outside of PvP, rangers are trash, if you’re not a D/D, ele’s are trash. Necromancers have been ignored since release… shall I go on?

Mirta.5029:

foofad.5162:

Why punish people using boons? Because bunker guardians and eles are too good and warriors need the help because they’re terrible in spvp. Maybe down the line it’ll be split between PvE-WvW and spvp, but for now I think it’s a good change.

just curious, did you try other classes in Spvp? Because I seem to be the only one on the forums finding it easy to play a warrior in Spvp O_O

Not the only one. I’ve said it before – the majority of warriors won’t be happy till we have a “Press this to win” button. Having the best HP, burst, and ranged damage isn’t enough.

Another month, another buff to warriors and thieves, another bout of not fixing glaring bugs. Oh, and another grab at our wallets via the gem shop.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game, but all the time and money (time IS money) wasted on temporary crap would have been better used fixing the things wrong with the game.

It has the potential to be amazing, but what we got was half kitten

Torqueblue.1945:

You do realize that Guardians aren’t the only ones that are gonna suffer from this right? Then again most players don’t really care too much for engineers.

Sadly, I agree. I don’t give a toss about engineers, because flamethrower has such a horrible flicker to it I avoid them whenever possible.

Ele’s catch it nearly as hard, with the attunement dancing, but for guardian’s, it’s the classes core mechanic, and what makes up for us having 8000HP less than the other soldier class…

wllalele.9427:

There are 2 soldier classes. Guardian has lots of protection, blocks etc. And what we have? High health pool… I don’t wanna be as tanky as guardian is, but c’mon, warrior in gw2 is like thief without stealth. We should have lots of regeneration and be in some way immune to cc because we are soldier class! We are supposed to be in the frontline!

Thief without stealth? Second best burst damage in game, absolute best HP and sustained damage, best ranged damage, and you’re complaining? The only valid complaint would be the lack of gap closers, and I only include that because Rush still seems to be broken. Ranged KD, cripple, and mobile whirling blades of death aren’t enough, it seems.

Lore wise, the warriors are the one’s who don’t trust magic or mysticism, so losing regen there makes sense. We can trait to deal with CC (or use warhorn offhand…).

We’re the ideal frontline members. Guardians are our companions. They get by with barely 2/3 our HP, but make up for it through their class mechanic (boons, boons out the wazoo). The boons help you, as well, unless you’re trying to Leeroy your way into a zerg.

I sometimes think that the bulk of the forums won’t be happy till each class gets a “Press this button to win game” skill.

haviz.1340:

I actually wrote 60% first time but then went back and edited because I didn’t want to exaggerate.

Not an exaggeration – staff damage is pitiful. Anet is addicted to the idea that damage should only happen at melee range, which sucks balls for anyone who wanted to roll a staff wielding mage.

The whole reason D/D is so common is because ele’s really have no other good spec if they want to deal damage. (I run S/D in pve, which does insane damage, but I wouldn’t use it against humans for that purpose.)

In contrast, thieves still have the flat out highest burst in the game (not counting hundred blades – you stand in that, you deserve to die.) Add to that a truly broken mechanic, and, I’m sorry, but thieves don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of who’s being hit harder by the devs.

I see, you want to roll berserker gear, but heal like a bunker. Gotcha.

No.

haviz.1340:

Devildoc.6721:

But at least it’s not as bad as 15-50% damage nerfs that we got on thief skills.

Before launch ele damage was nerfed by averagely 40% with cooldowns being increased as well.

If you look at the staff numbers, they mostly come closer to 60%. We went from kings of AoE and ranged battle to “better run up and poke him, then heal, heal, heal, poke!”

killahmayne.9518

Hadn’t considered the depth of traiting for boon hate. I grant, it won’t come up much outside of PvP (which I don’t play, so I don’t care). Still, targeting the mechanic that guardians can’t avoid using which exists purely to make up for our kitten poor HP, is just evil.

For the rest of your post, well, play guardian for a while, in addition to your warrior. I have both, and I have nearly the same time on both (1200 hours guardian vs ~900 warrior.) The guardian has GS with staff as swap, warrior slings axe/mace or axe/warhorn and a rifle.

Damage from the warrior is generally speaking double what I manage on the guardian. The warrior has a fairly balanced mix of knights armour and zerker trinkets, rocking banners. Guardian has the obvious AH build (also kights arour and zerker trinkets).

The difference in survivability is simply that on guardian, I’ve got to be constantly aware of everything I’m doing, or I’m toast. The warrior has 8000HP more, with the same armour rating, and massively more power, because I don’t have to trait as a bunker to survive. (Actually, a lot of that “power” comes as extra crit, but the same net effect – far, far higher damage numbers.) The difference being, on the warrior either I’ve stomped what I’m facing flat, or I’m dead. The guardian, I’m popping my utilities madly as they come off cooldown, dodging in and out, and hopping to whittle away whatever I’m facing down.

Next, same as everyone, you bring up boons, but specify retaliation – the damage from it is pitiful. If they were complaining about Protection, I’d almost understand. It’s a short lived boon, that comes from the hammer chain, mace skill, or a shout. So you only find it in tanky builds. The other boons, aside from swiftness (“retreat”) only last for 3-10 seconds. They’re more in the lines of giving an extra dodge than they are “facerolling”. Pop the wrong boon? Guardian is toast. Pop the wrong utility on my warrior? I’ve got a banner, and my damage or defense went up.

If all the whining on the forums was about the warriors shortcomings in PvP, I never would have posted. I only piped up because we’ve managed to be whinier than the rangers and ele’s combined, when we have far less call to be. For dungeons, general PvE and WvW, we’re easy mode.

Yeah, the broken traits need attention (soon, please?) but could we please stop acting like we’re the bottom of the barrel, when we’re not?

Blur.3465:

I do not wish to argue with personal tastes here, but I would just like to express my opinion.
I dislike skimpy armor in every way…
1. The character loses all dignity and is nothing but a ’’figure’’ to look at and feast your eyes upon.
2. I dislike it especially on females…they lose morale and certainly all respect. I like how some medium and heavy armors are well-covered for them, but most of light armor is totally open. It’s better to imagine what’s under that armor…in my opinion.
3. Like said above, better-looking armors are needed. I wanted a nice long dress for my female Sylvari…and the only one I like is the Carrion Acolyte, Nightmare and Orrian armor…so these are just three choices I like…the rest are quite open…yes, the design is nice, but it all looks too provocative and like lingerie.
4. What Tera did with female armors is embarrassing…they are worse than succubus…and I would hate to see anything similar to this in GW2…I know I do not have to wear that, but seeing characters running around like that would make me sick.
5. If that would happen, I would also want to see more male characters in some armored underwear and nothing else… -.-
I like to see when games hold onto some morale…skimpy armor just makes me lose respect for it and players who actually have their characters dressed that way. No offence intended…like stated above, I am just expressing my opinion about this.

You have a right to your opinion. You do not have the right to insist others cater to that opinion.

simplest solution is to adjust the base merchant value – NOT the TP value, but the base merch value, to reflect the current TP price of the mats involved. Not only would you always be guaranteed a return of your investment, but the TP prices would be (necessarily) higher than the merch price.

challenge mission, a la GW1

Adding secondaries would also make balancing insane – and they’ve always been inept at that. (I’d argue they were better in GW1 than they currently are though.)

BlackBeard.2873:

Dingle.2743:

I imagine that the intended role for D/D on ele was “DPS supported by mobility”, but the majority of D/D builds have turned that into “Bunker supported by mobility”.

If you look at the skills it’s fairly obvious that S/F was supposed to be our bunker weapon set (every single Focus skill has defensive usages; Scepter has less but still 2 blinds and Rock Barrier, area denial and ranged attacks); unfortunately avoidance/healing trumps damage reduction and as a result players are using D/D for bunker.

ANet are trying to push us towards using the weapons how they intended them to be used, which seems to just be revealing that D/D isn’t good at its intended purpose and is in fact better at S/F’s purpose than S/F is; whether the changes will make S/F actually the better bunker option I can’t say.

So then why are they nerfing the D/D mobility rather than the healing. If they want D/D to be inferior bunkers, then they should cut down on the bunker-ability (primarily the healing). Instead they are forcing D/D into being slow bunkers as you don’t have mobility to trade-off healing for.

This, a million freaking times. Kill dagger heals, and leave cantrips alone. But, we’re going to get stomped. My ele can join the ranger on the shelf (staff and s/d are going to suffer more than D/D from the nerf.) – warrior goes from being my main alt to my main. Always wanted to win by faceroll.

Chaosky.5276:

stale.9785:

EDIT: question? The common thought is that you can’t hit anyone in PvP with scepter attacks. If more are running this, that can’t be true, eh?

It’s more that Water Trident, Rock Barrier, and the two blinds provide a good deal of defense. Dragon’s Tooth doesn’t hit (unless you use Signet of Earth or you manage to follow up with Earthquake or something), Phoenix doesn’t hit at range, and so on.

stale.9785:

From what I’ve read on the forums, the “balancers” are only 2 people, who play Thief and Warrior. We’re getting about what one would expect from that.

Interesting perspective, seeing as those classes are generally considered to be at the bottom of the barrel in SPvP.

Ah, but SPvP is a minutely small – as in, very, very few people – sample of the playerbase. In every other venue, warrior is king. In wvw, thieves should still only die if they’re not paying attention.

Look at the SotG updates that we know about – Thief; Revealed is getting reduced, more boon hate is being added, and nothing is being done to address the stupidly high damage/movement/stealth deal they have.

Warriors; have the highest damage, HP, and armour available in game, and now they’re being given unblockable attacks and boon hate, along with rifle being in every way superior to a ranger’s longbow, banners being far superior to spirits… I could go on, but I shouldn’t have to. Roll a warrior, and discover it’s easy mode for every aspect of the game aside from PvP.