Guild Wars 2

I’d be completely fine with pets contributing a substantial amount of our DPS if they weren’t so ineffective at attacking moving targets.

Harhar. I never said it was a great build, just an interesting one. Support guardian will out support and outlast this any day, but I didn’t find it horrible.

I think they should let us wear PVP gear cosmetically outside PVP as well. That way you’re still defined as a PVPer. You only really get to look how you want to in the mists, since you’re color is defined in matches.

I just started a necro today, but after doing some basic testing I can definitely say that the condition duration increasing traits Hemophilia and Lingering Curse do work. Its not reflected in the tooltip, but it definitely extends the duration of bleeds.

I have my standard scepter bleed attack up to 11 seconds in duration through runes and traits.

Change the color of health bars for enemies in the downed state. That way it would be easier to tell at a glance when an enemy is down rather than it looking like they went to full again.

…not the full condition.

This is just an idea, but with how many condition removal abilities there are in PVP, it can be incredibly frustrating to have your conditions wiped if you’re a heavy condition user.

It makes investing in improved condition duration builds not worth it when you realize your stacks or duration can be wiped out so quickly.

My idea would be for condition removal to remove condition duration time for burns, poisons, ect… and wipe portions of stacks for intensity stacking conditions.

The amount of time or number of stacks wiped could be increased based on your healing power. Some adjustments would have to be made to certain condition removal abilities, but an all or nothing approach doesn’t seem to be working for condition heavy builds.

I fully expect to get flamed for this post since people hate having conditions on them. But I say this playing as a guardian main and then switching to my necro. Its too easy to drop conditions.

In tournies I generally see players talk or say GG. Not so in random matches, lots of taunting, “ur bad” “lol noob” and the like.

Question Jon: if you’re shooting for more build diversity for many professions, does that mean we can expect to see a lot of trait revisions and changes in the future after bugs are worked out?

I like the trait system, but I feel that many traits could be more effective, interesting, or consolidated in some cases.

Some other interesting ideas and facts:

If you take the Vigorous Renewal trait, which grants 5 seconds of vigor on heal, it will give you vigor on every application of regeneration from Healing Spring, so you can have perma vigor as long as the spring is down and you are on top of it. Dwanya runes work similarly, so you can apply additional group regen every 10 seconds.

It also grants the vigor to allies, so you can keep your entire team buffed with vigor, regen and cleansing for a short time when your heal is down.

Another trick I’ve picked up is using your spirit of nature’s active right before you drop to downstate. You will be revived as soon as you go down by the time it lands the active.

My guess is because the symbol on the third strike is pretty strong. Its too slow though. Really easy to read most hammer attacks and dodge because of the big wind ups.

Well thought out. I don’t feel safe using my elite anymore under fire. The heal spam and protection isn’t enough to keep me up even with my heavy healing and toughness build. Pacifism nerf was particularly bad since it was hit with the double wammy of increased cast time and decreased effectiveness. The big heal is too hard to use without the pacifism. Your best shot is just hoping that they blew their interrupt on interrupting passifism and trying to heal. Most of the time you’re just wasting your time by letting them beat on you until someone interrupts and kills you while you’re a sitting duck. I think they should take the big heal cast down to 4 seconds to compensate for the lost Pacifism daze up time.

I pretty much just heal spam and buff and maybe attempt the daze at the end of its duration for now.

yeah switch first in combat, then barrage. You should be good then.

Tywnnvlad.9405:

welp even out of combat I dont get the buff. I get the buff

You’re not supposed to get the buff out of combat. This was because before you could switch pets as frequently as you want out of combat, but they changed it recently because of an exploit so its the same cooldown on switching both in and out of combat.

The Spiral King.2483:

We should just have unconditional bleed on the shortbow. A bunch of other classes do on their auto attacks, and if the shortbow is our condition weapon, give us akittendefault condition spammer. I can’t think of another class that has to deal with this flanking crap as much as Rangers, and with no additional reward.

Actually the reward is a more powerful bleed than what engineers get on their pistol auto attack. Not to mention a trait that increases flanking damage.

It might be because you’re already in the middle of a channeled cast when you switch. It probably won’t affect your speed mid cast until you use the next ability. If you switch before casting barrage you should be fine.

VakarisJ.5619:

I wonder which canine you used, because out of them, hyena has the weakest attack, but can call in it’s relatives to help.

It seems to me, the tables have turned upside-down. Without the criticals, results are completely different then with criticals, causing one to believe that they were, in fact, the reason for a skill that gives a 4second boost looking better then one that gives 15s. While you justify the feline statistics via “more attack opportunities” that’s exactly the thing that destabilizes your charts – more critical unpredictability. If your pet would have 50% crit, then your results would be 50% accurate, even with multiple tries.

While Zephyr causes you to speed up as well, you can easily get affected by Sic ‘Em too, by getting a trait. Maybe that doesn’t make it viable in your build, but this game’s made so that no build would be a bad build.

About unshakable, I think he was either referring to old data, or the buff is unwritten, just like some other bonuses from other skills/abilities. Might want to look into that one.

Signets are meant for the use of their passive, being granted highly-situational active effects, that I, personally, never use. It’s no exception regarding this signet. One can surely think of times where you’d want your pet to have that stability and durability.
If you’d change this, you might as well change necro’s Signet of Undeath, which generates a mere 1% lifeforce every 3 seconds while you’re in combat mode and has an active effect that rallies 3 downed (not defeated) allies in a small area, with a 180s (3 minute) cooldown.

The testing was with the drakehound. Yes the criticals were the main reason for the increased performance across the board compared to the hound. Traits that give increased crit damage by 30%, bleed damage on normal crits, and the feline’s basic attack that provides vulnerability on hits are going to push the effectiveness of the feline over the hound by a pretty substantial margin in terms of DPS. The point isn’t to look at the difference in performance between different pet families though, its to look at how the utility boosts affect their performance. Critical chance doesn’t matter, it could be any size, as long as its consistent between testing and you’re getting a large enough sample size to get an average to account for some runs that might have more or less crits than others. I don’t know how to explain it any better. The only thing worth noting between the hound and feline is that zephyr benefited the feline more in relation to the other utilities.

In any case its nitpicking details when you should be looking at the big picture. The utility boosts to pet damage don’t provide a good enough boost to warrant using over other more effective utilities. This is mainly because while the boosts themselves might seem good on paper, pets are still only attacking at the rate of maybe once every 2 seconds or so.

As for signets, I don’t know about you but I find myself using the active abilities on my guardian much more often. Both because their active abilities are useful, (knockdown and damage enemy, retaliation and weakness to all nearby allies and enemies, revive an ally,) but their cooldowns are all pretty short so you can get access to the passive faster (with the exception of revive ally which is understandably long, but well worth having).

I’d rather have a trait that can benefit pvp players as well. Anything that benefits you on kills isn’t going to help much because kills aren’t as frequent in PVP and you or your pet are much more likely to die and lose all the stacks.

VakarisJ.5619:

spoodigity.4321:

How is my testing questionable? I specifically used a powerful pet because I wanted to give Sic ‘Em a fair chance. I let it kill the target 10 times with each buff and then took the average to account for crits. The range wasn’t more than 1-2 seconds. Canine would probably not kill them as fast even though they have more power.

Criticals are highly unpredictable, you’d need to try a hundred times and even then there would be a chance that you’d either never get any or crit every hit. While those are extremes, they’re very possible. By using a different pet you’d reliably get less criticals, resulting in less of a chance that your calculations could get derailed by pure chance.
In short – just use a few other pets to confirm the results.

spoodigity.4321:

I really don’t know what you mean by Sic ’EM being “unshakable”.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unshakable

When you invest in Beast Mastery combined with the natural precision a cat has, its going to have a high crit rate. Criticals are predictable when you’re keeping a consistent crit rate. You’re looking at average damage, so 10 tries is good enough to get a good approximate of how it preforms on average. The results would be similar if I did it 100 times. I can do the same thing with a power based pet and it will take longer for the kills across the board because of the traits Rending Attacks and Pet Prowess not affecting them as much:

Here’s a canine with the exact same traits, 10 times each buff solo:

No buffs: 22.4 seconds
Sic ’Em: 18.7 seconds
Wild Signet: 20 seconds
Zephyr: 19.3 seconds

Sic ’Em slightly outperformed Zephyr with the canine simply because with the feline Zephyr provided more attack opportunities, which means more vulnerability applications and chances to crit, which means more bleed stacking through the Rending Attacks trait. Zephyr of course still affects the ranger as well so its a better choice by far.

As for Sic ‘Em, it doesn’t say anything about providing the “Unshakable” buff you linked. Was he just using that as an adjective or describing an actual game mechanic? All Sic ’Em does is increase damage output and movement speed like the tooltip says.

Wild Signet providing stability or damage reduction to pet honestly doesn’t entice me. I want utilities to help me, the ranger. I am more concerned about my well being than my pet’s. Going 2 minutes without the regen passive isn’t worth the small benefit you provide to your pet.

Durzlla.6295:

@spoodigity

As for the Sic’Em the whole thing behind it is it lasts longer, and it makes your pet unshakeable, THAT is the reasoning for it, it’s a pressure skill not a burst skill (kinda like signet), sure you can throw that pet around and CC em but they’ll be determined to get to your target and maul their face off until that duration fades away, it also allows them to stay on their target with relative ease seeing as how they become faster then the target even if they have swiftness, the ONLY way your target can escape is if they have that thief signet of movement speed + a swiftness boon, and even then it’s not by much!!

I really don’t know what you mean by Sic ‘EM being “unshakable”. I’ve noticed no difference in the pet’s AI when using it. You command a pet to attack a target and it will do so until you say otherwise.

Speed boosts on pets don’t make much of a difference on their effectiveness at attacking moving targets because they still have to stop every time they attack.

Without speed boosts

With speed boosts

Notice how often the pet misses its attacks because it has to stop in its tracks every time it attacks. The speed boost helps it catch back up after stopping a bit, but it doesn’t do anything about the attack animation that lets the enemy move out of range before it lands.

This is just on a training golem that changes directions to let it get in more hits, its much worse in actual PVP since enemies are more mobile and the pet has to contend with CC.

VakarisJ.5619:

Durzlla.6295:

2) Signet of the hunt buffs you AND your pets movement, and it’s more noticeable for your pet then it is for you, and it DOES stack with swiftness, as do all other movement boosters

False, only the highest speed boost is applied. I know this very well, because on my thief, I have a +25% speed signet. I’ve a friend warrior who uses warhorn swiftness to speed up traveling. Without the warhorn, I’m considerably faster then him, with warhorn’s swiftness, we both run at equal speed – warhorn gives +33% speed and thus overwrites the signet’s passive.

spoodigity.4321:

This is using a lynx. No f2 abilities on a heavy training golem in the mists. Traited for high pet damage including Rending Attacks and Pet’s Prowess. I let the pet solo with different buffs to see how long it took to kill the golem over an average of 10 times per buff.

1. No Buffs: 16.1 seconds
2. Sic ’Em: 15.3 seconds Cooldown: 1 minute
3. Wild Signet: 14.7 seconds Cooldown: 2 minutes
4. Quickening Zephyr: 14.2 seconds Cooldown: 1 minute

Lynx, like other cat-pets has high precision, resulting in high critical chance, making your results highly questionable. Aside from the great precision, it has crappy power. Try using a canine or a lizard.

How is my testing questionable? I specifically used a powerful pet because I wanted to give Sic ‘Em a fair chance. I let it kill the target 10 times with each buff and then took the average to account for crits. The range wasn’t more than 1-2 seconds. Canine would probably not kill them as fast even though they have more power.

I didn’t notice any changes to pet AI after patch. Pets still stop in their tracks on every attack and F2 abilities don’t seem any different. Maybe it was more subtle changes.

Anyone notice any difference?

Prime.9450:

So the “druidness” of such ranger is all about standing still Spirit of Nature (killable in seconds, coz not traited).

Also there are nothing new in such build – stack toughness’n’vitality I’ll say. That is it. Everything else is individual.

No your survivability comes mostly from your regen healing. The Spirit of Nature has more HP than your standard spirit and will heal itself too while its up. It doesn’t die unless being focused or you plant it in the middle of a big group fight.

Here’s the build I use:

http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#Mcom0zm0oNngooNvgo9MxfpcRbcVs

You could shuffle some traits around and still get the toughness you want and pick up Dwayna. Bark Skin is awesome, you should consider picking it up.

Edit: fixed link, don’t know why other one wouldn’t work.

Stone only gives you like 35 toughness and won’t help you unless traited. Waste of a utility unless traited.

Hylox.9746:

i think rangers need better elite skills…. the only real good one i have is mistfire wolf for dmg and “rampage as one” for a speed buff to run…. the super elite skills suck

All things considered I think our elites are pretty good. I don’t have any issues with their effectiveness.

I’ve used a very similar build. Its pretty tanky but you’re still very susceptible to condition damage.

For that reason a tank guardian (which I also play) will outlast your build under heavy fire since they can cleanse multiple conditions through traits, shouts and runes. Its not a bad build since it does some pretty good group healing though.

I might consider using the Dwanya rune set instead of guardian though.

Edit: I forgot that Healing Spring removes conditions. That would definitely help if you can stay in its diameter. Guards still have access to higher toughness and more protection boons though.

I used to hate it, but eventually grew to accept it.

I feel that it works, but I’m not totally sold on it in its current form. I could go either way at this point.

When I have the game minimized I occasionally hear what can best be described as a gavel sound. Kind of sounds like a pop.

Usually sitting afk in the mists when I hear it.

I don’t think there is a crit cap, but you want to strike somewhat of a balance between power and crit to get the most out of it. I’m guessing there is some kind of sweet spot, but math isn’t my strongest suit.

What’s sad is that they replaced the trait that gave us Zephyr at 25% health with this. Its too difficult to reliably utilize this trait.

The ranger does indeed have quite a few lackluster and oddly thought out traits. Some are situational and that’s fine, but others aren’t even worth using for the benefit they give. I’ll list off some of the offenders:

Companion’s Might- Gives might to your pet on crit. Sounds great til you realize the might is only a 1 second duration. Pets attack once every 2 seconds, so you’re lucky if the boon is up when it attacks. Not long enough to get any stacks going either.

It should last 5 seconds. Guardians have a might on crit trait that affects all nearby allies including themselves and it lasts 5 seconds.

Moment of Clarity- Gives an attack of opportunity for you and your pet on interrupt. Besides being kind of vague, it can be hard to intentionally perform an interrupt on an enemy with the exception of a few abilities because cast times are generally short and difficult to recognize in the heat of battle. I believe this would be a great trait if there were a more reliable way to use it.

Some consolidation of Spirit traits would be nice. Possibly making them mobile by default. You really just can’t pick anything else in the line if you want to use spirits because the traits are necessary for them to be effective.

Nature’s Protection – Certainly not a bad trait, but the damage threshold of
20% is a bit high especially if you happen to have a larger health pool accompanied by toughness. I’d maybe consider dropping it down to 15% to trigger.

Speed Training – Only reduces cooldown of pet abilities by 10%. Not much of a noticeable increase at all. Weapon cooldown reduction traits are usually set at 20%, why can’t pets have 20% as well?

Master’s Bond – Great for PVE, but it goes against our core mechanic of pet swapping. Two of the minor traits in the same line encourage you to pet swap frequently, but you’ll lose all your stacks if you change pets. Can’t obtain high stacks in PVP either because of frequent pet deaths and much less kill opportunities. Should change it to something that benefits all play styles and still lets you swap pets.

Various pet family specific traits – I’m not a fan of these not because most of them aren’t useful, but because they encourage you to only use one type of pet to get the most out of them.

My solution would be to make the mid minor trait unlock a family specific trait for each pet. That way you would have all the functionality of the current individual pet specific traits, but you could use two different types and still get the benefit from their family specific trait. The unlockable trait could be viewed from the pet interface. This would also free up a good portion of the BM trait line for other more interesting trait decisions.

The grand master trait selection in BM is a bit lackluster for their supposed grand master status.

Speno.1874:

Utility :
Lightening reflexes is bugged 50 percent of the time you will break a stun but not evade backwards. Instead you stand right where you were and get continue to get pounded on.

This is because you’re affected by immobilize probably which is a condition, not a stun. I think it should break it though.

It’s not a well thought out mechanic. It completely discourages pet swapping which is a core mechanic of the profession. Not to mention the minor traits in the line are encouraging you to swap as well. You can’t stack it in pvp either because pets are more likely to die and kills are less frequent than pve. They should consider changing it to a in combat buff that stacks on hits similar to what bm hunters got in wow so it can benefit all rangers and still open the option to swap pets.

May or may not be a bug but the shout Guard gives pet 10 seconds of stealth but the stealth breaks as soon as it attacks.

There was one in beta but they took it out. Would have made a nice utility skill but I guess they don’t want us too similar to thieves.

Its pretty bursty. I don’t think it should be removed, but rather toned down slightly like reducing speed boost to 50-75% increase and extending its duration slightly to compensate.

Hot join pvp should have have smaller team sizes similar to tournies. I’m not surprised people think its too chaotic or insta die when the map is so crowded. Tournies are much more fun and strategic. Even taking it down to 7 or 6 per team would help.

There’s definitely room for improvement in our utilities. It would be nice if one of our shouts filled this role or our movement speed signet offered more speed out of combat.

I’ve had problems using search and rescue as well. It does have some potential, but it’s a pain when your pet doesn’t respond correctly and you end up having to stop and do it yourself.

This is a bit nickpicky but in PVP it can become quite annoying. Every single hit on a player releases a flurry of grunts and ouchy noises. When you have multiple attacks from multiple sources it sounds really weird hearing the same grunts multiple times a second. Particularly bad are the sylvari females who sound like yappy dogs when they get hit repeatedly. Maybe some more diversity in the sounds they make and less sounds allowed per second would help.

I’ve also noticed that many of the necromancer attacks tend to be kind of loud and obnoxious compared to other combat sounds. I can’t give you specific attacks since I don’t play one, but you can hear them in this quick video I made about something else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccHupZ-j_wk&feature=plcp

Vendors seem to do their little quips every time a player interacts with them. I’d much rather hear it only when I interact with them. I don’t need to hear the same lines over and over while I’m looking through the goods as other players come up to them.

I remember reading that the devs were actually discussing doing this in one of the BWE when I read the forums here. I guess it didn’t pan out.

It does this because Immobilize is considered a condition and not a stun. I think its pretty lame too. As soon as I can’t move my first instinct is to go to my break stun ability.

A is in my opinion the biggest problem of the class right now. We’re missing out on 1000s of damage per fight simply because our pet is pausing before each attack and missing moving targets. Should be a priority fix in my opinion.

Durzlla.6295:

I use search and rescue…and signets…. you’re not putting them in a very good light, so i’m assuming you don’t know how good they actually are….

1) The passive for Wild signet is indeed not bad. You don’t have me convinced in the slightest about the active ability though. All those things you listed are good, but they only affect your pet unless traited. I’ve done testing which I will get to concerning damage, but its not much of a boost. When you use it you’re regenless for 2 minutes anyways just for giving your pet a small burst in effectiveness. Active abilities should make giving up your passive worthwhile. Not the case with this one.

2) I’ve tested this one as well, and you very well could be right. The problem is only a 10% boost in speed makes it hard to notice if it stacks with other speed boosts. Heck buffing it up to 15% would help. Lord knows thieves don’t have any problems moving around a map quickly if they are specialized for it. The active ability can be good is some situations like the one you mentioned, but it totally depends on the pet you use. It can be easy for the pet to waste it on a regular attack too with how wonky F2 abilities are right now.

3) Spirits WOULD be great if they only bumped up their health. You have to keep them near you and the group to get their short ranged benefit. Chances are they will be getting hit when you are. They die in seconds of summoning them when I’m fighting in a group in PVP even when I do my best to keep them out of the majority of the chaos. That’s with the double health trait as well.

4) I’ll taking zephyr over sic ‘em any day of the week. Its no contest. If you can’t go 4 seconds without using a heal, then that’s your problem. Sic ’Em deals a trivial amount more damage. Let me give you some testing results:

This is using a lynx. No f2 abilities on a heavy training golem in the mists. Traited for high pet damage including Rending Attacks and Pet’s Prowess. I let the pet solo with different buffs to see how long it took to kill the golem over an average of 10 times per buff.

1. No Buffs: 16.1 seconds
2. Sic ’Em: 15.3 seconds Cooldown: 1 minute
3. Wild Signet: 14.7 seconds Cooldown: 2 minutes
4. Quickening Zephyr: 14.2 seconds Cooldown: 1 minute

Quickening Zephyr beats it on several levels. 1. Its burst damage so its a lot of damage in a short amount of time. 2. That is only the pet attacking, the player gets it as well which accounts for a lot more damage. Wild Signet Out performs Sic ’ Em as well, but then again its a 2 minute cooldown. In any case shaving a second or so off the time it takes for the pet to kill a golem is not worth a utility slot. The passive is the only reason to take it.

5. I will admit that the stealth is pretty cool. I didn’t know that they updated it. Last I checked it just camped your pet in a small area without the stealth. I’ll have to test this one a bit further to see how it makes a difference in survivability before judging.

Edit: Some quick testing revealed that the stealth only lasts for about 10 seconds and breaks as soon as it attacks. It doesn’t let the pet attack while stealthed at all. The protection lasts about 10 seconds as well. Whats the point of stealth if it only lasts 10 seconds and breaks as soon as the pet attacks? Not worth it.

Maybe some of you disagree with me, that’s fine. But I’ve been playing around with other professions, and their utility skills seem much more well rounded and useful than what we’re presented. Nothing that some tweaks and mechanic changes couldn’t fix though.

Also I know how2play, thanks.

About the particularly troublesome ones:

Lynx or other pouncing cats: goes through a short crouching animation before pouncing. Not that long, but the target can often have already moved from its location by the time it actually executes the pounce attack.

Jungle Stalker roar takes about 3 seconds being stationary before the roar goes off. Same with dog howls. I think moa’s screeches work ok.

Those are the main ones I use. I’m sure others would like to contribute.

Also one of the biggest problems with the ranger class and pets is that they are stationary on every attack. This makes attacking moving targets very difficult and is particularly a problem in PVP. Please see this quick video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccHupZ-j_wk

Notice that the pet is frequently missing attacks on this mobile training dummy. Are there any plans to address this attack animation issue and let pets attack and move at the same time? My pet is missing too many attacks to be an effective partner in PVP.

Edit: Here’s another video with the pet both traited for movement speed and given the swiftness boon so you know its not a movement speed issue either: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVjCGsg3LpE

You could turn your computer volume up and turn all the sound options down besides the UI sounds.

From my post on reddit about the issue:

“I think it’s an animation problem. Most of the f2 abilities go through this long animation sequence before the ability triggers. I’m thinking if the pet is already in an attack animation when you hit f2, it wont register. Also I have issues where if you hit the ability multiple times it will interrupt itself and the ability will lock out for a short time.

They really need to rework pet attack mechanics. My pet has a very rough time landing hits on moving targets because it stops to go through an attack animation every time it swipes and the target has already moved out of range before the attack lands."

Sic ‘Em isn’t ever a good option. You get more damage out of sharpening stone or quickening zephyr, even if you’re a pet person.

Rangers still take the good utilities, having other good options isn’t going to make them overpowered, just give more build diversity.

Spirits should be mobile by default. Anyone that takes a spirit utility will get this trait anyways.