Guild Wars 2

lol. Just lol. Can you swap your stats on your warrior rabbit armor when you realise those stats are dumb?. Also, noone talks about “destroying zerkers”. They want to adjust zerker gear, so you aren’t forced to run zerker everywhere and all the time.

None of them. Keep your expectations small so you don’t get dissapointed.

Orpheal.8263:

I doubt hard, that anything like what Chris proposed will be heard by the most people, once the official CDI Thread is tommorrow or friday there…

I myself have too many things up my mind, to be hold back by a nonsensical 150 word limit. Classes are a extreme complex topic, you can’t talk about them and make poroposals on just 150 words… Unneccessary World Limiots lead only into way more unneccessary circumventions of the limit.

People need to make examples to describe better and easier things, especially when its related to Skills, Traits and other Class Mechanics about which we WILL definetely talk here significantly, because I absolutely think, that the Ranger is among the Thief the class, which needs a complete redesign in regard of their Skills, Traits and especially class specific mechanics.

That’s why we have the CDI Format Proposal. Constitute your concerns and give some helpfull suggestions related to the format. If everyone starts to post walls of text we wont get any attention.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Oh, and I want to add to my last post:

Everybody can simply roll over their buttons and play a class well enough, but when you start to get to the higher tiers that doesn’t fly as much. You need to time your stuns/condis/stability/heals/etc. if you want to “play with the big boys.”

I know that there are some specs right now that are particularly spammy, though. We’re hoping that some of the changes we make in the feature build will help with a lot of that. One step at a time!

That’s exactly the point!
Our pet behaves like rolling over buttons all the time and no matter how much you will tweak the AI, it will never become as skillfull as the player and that’s the reason why the pet oughtn’t be burdened with dealing our damage.

I just hope that we’ve made clear that the pet is indeed promoting the beastmaster playstyle, but criples all other playstyles.

Permastowing Pets
This suggestion goes in line with my previous suggestions, which I will sum up shortly:

• Shift the damagemodel from Ranger: 70%, Pet: 30% to Ranger: 100%, Pet: Additional damage (10%)
• The pet should serve the prupose to support his master through CC and Support rather than through damage
• Investing Points into Beastmastery will shift some power back to the pet

Function:

• Stowing your pet should give you no bonuses
• You should be able to stow your pet while in fight
• You oughn’t be able to fetch your pet while in fight

Impact:

• I don’t want people to exploit the stow function to bypass all kinds of AoEs
• You can stow your pet but you have to be responisble for the impact of doing so

Abrilete.1439:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Abrilete.1439:

Regarding the 30% DPS lost becasuse our pets never hit…
It’s been tested by several players that the “30% faster pets trait” (Agility Training) helps a lot improving pet’s DPS.

Giving our pets that speed increase by default, and also increasing the range for their mele attacks, could be an easy-to-implement patch until ANet decides to fix pet’s AI.

Doesn’t make the pet any better.

At least, they would hit more consistently against moving targets (be it players or NPC’s). ANet has said many times that they don’t plan to fix pet’s AI soon, so until then (if they ever do, and I don’t think so) we must find ways to make them work within current constraints.

Delete them. If they can’t fix them I want them deleted.

Thighum.7295:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Permastowing Pets
This suggestion goes in line with my previous suggestions, which I will sum up shortly:

• Shift the damagemodel from Ranger: 70%, Pet: 30% to Ranger: 100%, Pet: Additional damage (10%)

I disagree here. 100% + 10% = 110% not 100%. We shouldn’t be asking to be balanced around doing 110% of what other classes do, but 100%; anything more is just asking to be op.

That is correct and it wouldn’t be OP at all.
Let’s take the warrior as example. Without his F1 skill, he deals 100% damage and that’s the 100% I’m reffering to. But the warrior can use his F1 and can hit for over 10k every 10 seconds. Furthermore, he can also use traits to get up to 15% more damage if his adrenaline is full.

The ranger on the other hand can’t boost his power. Also the pet wont hit all the time vs. smart enemies. Last but not least, I’m not suggesting a boonshare between pet and ranger. So if the ranger buffs himself, only the 100% will get buffed, not 110%, unlike the warrior, who will buff his whole 115% damage.

Prysin.8542:

Akisame.9508:

Allie Murdock.8152:

I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but I want you to understand exactly what that suggestion means. It would mean completely rebalancing the Ranger.

The Ranger is designed to have a pet. If the pet was taken away or didn’t do damage, then it wouldn’t be a Ranger anymore. Does that make sense?

The only reason Rangers lose damage is because the AI is not currently what it ought to be. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we should completely redesign the Ranger and get rid of the pet.

Hi Allie, and thank you for your replies.

—i wrote a very long post—

You are misunderstanding the conscept of other professions; If they do not use their mechanics, they will not be able to achieve 100% potential. Saying a warrior can do 115% is absurd, because the rapid bursts is what produces those “15%”. Without bursts, a warrior’s damage is quite mediocre unless you built it to gain damage from some other mechanic, such as banner-buffs.
If you look at a warriors weapons, and the burst options, you see that certain weapons have lower base damage then you may expect, related directly to the damage that the burst can do. Axe mainhand is a good example of this. Its AA has lower damage then weapons of equal damage stats but since eviscerate does so much damage it makes up for the loss.

The point still stands: If the warrior ignores his F skills, including traits and passives, he will still turn out as good damagedealer.
If the ranger ignores his F skills, he will turn out losing 30% of his damage.
Furthermore, if the warrior utilizing his F skills, he will deal very high damage.
If the ranger wants to utilize his F skills, he is not necessarily getting his 30% damage back. there are so much things that could go wrong.
The ranger is on a disadvantage because his pet isn’t reliable.
If the warrior hits F1, he will get the effect he expected to get. If a ranger hits F1, the pet can still be kited, killed, blocked, or is simply not able to attack.

I was always wondering about the “Your pet gains X boons on crit hit”. Why do I want to trait for my pet getting boons (30% of my damage) if other classes getting those boons for themselfes (100% of their damage).

Prysin.8542:

Right, so you say that the crybaby OP should not listen to me, but rather you tell him ranger sucks, is flawed, elite sucks, cannot do condition builds either….

I…. am confused now….

Telling someone to reroll just because he has a different (and reasonable) opinion is not a convincing method to deal with people. So no, if your only statement is to reroll already, he shouldn’t listen to you.

SkiTz.4590:

I pray this is a joke and devs don’t even bother looking at this

Name of a pet has absolutely no impact on gameplay what so ever.

You honest to god believe people will use more pets if the nicknaming system was revamped? dear lord

Please, this is the Ranger CDI, regarding all aspects of the ranger.
I do agree that there are more important things to discuss but this doesn’t mean his idea is stupid or should be ignored.

WatchTheShow.7203:

Tempus.9540:

Allie Murdock.8152:

To those asking how far we would redesign…

PvE Hat on
Out of interest, would you redesign it so Ranger’s long range weapons were nearer the DPS of other classes melee weapons. Across all classes we have that ranged weapons are much, much lower than the melee weapons (with the possible exception of Ele) which had lead to a complete melee dominant PvE Meta – bring melee or go home. If you say that you wouldn’t redesign it in this way, half of the posters here can go home now – bows are a big draw (HoHoHo) to the class, but if they are going to be suboptimal/unwanted for Dungeons, none of the changes to the Ranger will matter if we don’t get to play the archetype we’ve envisioned.

This, this, this, so much this. Is it possible for PvE bows to become just as strong as melee weapons? We already have bosses that have ranged AOE and can range one-shot hits, and mobs with defiance, making it impossible to kite, would it be reasonable to bring ranged weapons up to par with melee weapons? “Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows.” This is what I want.

I’m +1ing the kitten out of this idea.

To clear the air about pets, lets collate:
What’s positive about the pet:

• Ranger can split focus on two targets
• Harder to kite
• Adaptive utility (F2)
• Wide choice between melee/ranged, offensive/defensive pets
• Pet stats are independent of gear the ranger is wearing (Offensive pet while defensive gear, …)
• Aggrotank in solo PvE

What’s negative about the pet:

• AI too simple (Can’t hit multiple targets, can’t evade, can’t follow the ranger, unreliable in every aspect)
• If the damage is split (Ranger 70%, Pet 30%), the ranger will never deal as much damage as if the ranger has 100% of the damage.
• Pet stats are independent of gear the ranger is wearing (Pet stats wont get increased by higher-tier gear)
• Lots of traits that either boost the ranger or the pet, less traits which boost both parts
• Offers no benefit to certain playstyles
• Huge loss if pet dies (Shouts wont work, traits wont work, potential damageloss on weapons)

Feel free to enhance this list.

Chrispy.5641:

I don’t want my pets to be there just to deal damage. I want them there to be able to support me in a fight, especially if I am running a full glass cannon build with no survivability. I would like for my pet to be able to provide me with some amount of survival and utility, not just be a mindless NPC drone that only deals damage.

Right now it’s the other way round. There are countless traits where your pet gains X if you do Y. This is what bothers me the most: I don’t want to play support for my pet; I am the one who should get supported.

TriggerSad.2597:

If we see dueling, we better not see it in the more populated areas of Major Cities. I already had to deal with the people that spammed their horns as if they were honking a vuvuzela at the 2010 World Cup… I don’t want to have to deal with people blasting all their skills on cooldown because they want to show off how “pro” they are.

I’m all for dueling, and I will admit that I’d love to see the stadium in the Black Citadel be converted into a 1v1 battle arena similar to how the Queen’s Gauntlet worked with bosses. Now that would be awesome.

Oh, I would like to see 1v1 in towns. With the lvl100 townguard joining the fight, stombing both duelists.

Yoh.8469:

I believe that the core problem with pets is that they are design to be Always On.

The greatest underlying problem of the problem you’ve described is that the pet is reponsible for 30% of our damage. It has to be always on. Otherwise we would lose damage. Ofcourse, there should also be a stow option, so you don’t run into problems like we do with scarlets hologram. But the biggest problem for me is the mindset behind the current pet. It is designed as damagedealer, as huge part of our damage. This implies that the pet is always on. I think I don’t have to give examples where this becomes an issue.

If the pet would only offer additional stuff to the ranger, he wouldn’t have such a huge loss if he has to turn the pet off for a while.

Nike.2631:

I’m disappointed that one of the few responses we have seen amounts to an Open Admission that they’ve had their fingers in their ears about Ranger concerns since approximately forever.

In addititon to that I will sum up my philosophy about the ranger:
When I created my ranger back in the first days of GW2, I was expecting an archer.
I am dissapointed because the ranger is the only class who suffers from its unique skill, the pets. Furthermore the ranged combat is in a very bad spot in GW2. These are the main reasons why I am not satified with the current ranger class.
My goal is to make the pets optional and increase the effectiveness of ranged combat.

PvE

Weapon updates

The most weapons of the ranger aren’t really satisfying damagewise. The sword reaches the highest dps by far. However the sword gets hindered by its clunky playstyle. My suggestions aim towards smoothing the gameplay of the sword and strenghen the other weapons.

Detailed version:

General suggestion

• Increase damage of the most weaponskills by 3% – 10% (exept sword, greatsword #2)
• Give ranged weapons a damagebonus if they hit their target from above
• All skills who are currently rooting you while channeling should be changed, so you can slowly move while channeling

CrossFire.8037:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Abrilete.1439:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Abrilete.1439:

Regarding the 30% DPS lost becasuse our pets never hit…
It’s been tested by several players that the “30% faster pets trait” (Agility Training) helps a lot improving pet’s DPS.

Giving our pets that speed increase by default, and also increasing the range for their mele attacks, could be an easy-to-implement patch until ANet decides to fix pet’s AI.

Doesn’t make the pet any better.

At least, they would hit more consistently against moving targets (be it players or NPC’s). ANet has said many times that they don’t plan to fix pet’s AI soon, so until then (if they ever do, and I don’t think so) we must find ways to make them work within current constraints.

Delete them. If they can’t fix them I want them deleted.

But but…rangers are the pet class…even though the pet mechanic is broken, unreliable and an actual hindrance in most game modes, the pets must stay because we need a pet class! /anet

It’s pathetic at this point. If you want to stick with pets, either fix them or allow them to become an option through a beast-master trait.

Minor Trait: “You get a pet.”

Fext.3614:

RoyalPredator.9163:

Bow is not a sniper rifle… its more like a “DMR”.
I would rage delete my account if the autoattack ROF gets even slower O.o

Yeah. You are right. However how many ppl including devs know what DMR means? Everybory knows what is a “sniper rifle”, though.

About the autoattack ROF, well I care more about the dps. That signet of fire would likely proc less often, thats right.

The longbow should atleast have one “sniping” skill. I am thinking of a channeled skill with very long range (~3000), high damage, which would further increased by opening strike and the target beeing out of combat and a cripple to close the distance afterwards.

For me the ranger is either the guy who defends a fortress (where we currently suck at), or the guy who sneaks up on enemies to get a clean shot on them (this “gamestyle” is already implemented through Opening Strike. Yet, the effect is way too weak.)

Another cool looking medium armor.
I found those paintings here: http://yamao.deviantart.com/

Ohoni.6057:

If you don’t want a pet out all the time, then you should pick a class that isn’t a Ranger. If you would like to have a pet out all the time, but find that this isn’t ideal because they die too often, or confuse agro in parties, or other such reasons, then the solution is to fix those problems.

I’ve created my ranger expecting an archer. Yet the bows are pretty weak and useless in any coordinated group. Furthermore I’ve gotten a pet which I don’t care about, since I wanted to play an archer. So my damage gets not only reduced because of my pet has to attack the enemy as well, but gets nullified if my pet dies to its dump AI.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Addressing either how the split works or how often the pet can be on “active time” would be preferable to an option to just remove it.

I’m in favor of the first suggestion but yeah, you’re right.

The only thing about the first suggestion is it still runs along that line of “I can safely ignore the pet” other players do already. Either that or they stomp on it so it goes away since it dies so fast, problem solved.

So in the first suggestion, if we take raw damage off the pet and move it to the ranger, then there has to be something put there to replace that.

And I’d rather the uptime be improved, since that has the added effect of not making it easy to “pound on the pet til it goes away for 60”.

I think the pet should be loaded with either defensive support for the ranger and party or offensive support by debuffing the enemy or CCing him.
Furthermore, pet could apply vulnerability (if traited for), so they can’t be completely ignored.
The survivability aspect has to be encountered with an AI overhaul.
The first step to do this would be in my mind to switch the control over the pet to the clients. Right now the pet functions like this: Player hits Button > Client puts a request > server calculates > server responds: “Your request is the 3rd in the actionqueue”
If the control would be on the clientside, you could override actions and the overall reaction speed would be higher.

Moshari.8570:

Whichever team is in charge of Fractals I think is the least talkative of the teams. Either that or they are just afraid to talk. I was joking with a friend a few weeks back that it feels like a conspiracy. Even in the developer livestream around that time Izzy was asked about fractals and began to talk about the Fractured update and suddenly the feed was cut. They made a joke that Scarlet cut the feed…and when the livestream resumed the next day, they ignored the question about fractals. Izzy never did finish what he was saying.

There was someone in the back room going “NO! THEY CAN’T TALK ABOUT FRACTALS! CUT THE LINE!! CUT THE LINE!!”

I would like to see whats going on there on ANet’s side. Seems like they haven’t the manpower to do anything.
Let’s just compare:
The game will be soon 1 year and a half old and the balance is still messed up. They added 2 new maps to the game, southsun cove and EotM, they added ZERO new full armor sets or weapon skins outside the gemshop, zero or faltering response to most of the topics discussed on the forums (this gets even worse on the non-english forums), no progression in PvE (temporary content is no progression) and just minor QoL updates.
Either ANet isn’t interested in improving their game or they simply don’t have the manpower to even realise the problems.
You can say about LoL what you want, but their devs are thousand times more active than the GW2 devs and that makes me sad.

SkiTz.4590:

This CDI is absolutely pointless when no devs are going to jump in and relay their thoughts on all this… already 8 pages worth of viable suggestions and not a single person on anet staff bothers to give feedback….

that tells me 2 things.
1 – they don’t give a kitten about rangers (we already know this to be true because of their utter disregard for class mechanics)
2 – No one at anet even plays rangers – probably also true when I saw on of the devs live stream talk about rangers and he basically said majority of this class doesn’t make any sense and has very little synergy.

Honestly, someone from anet staff please tell me how many hours they have played on a ranger?? does ANYONE on this dev team even know whats going?

This thread is threehundretmotherfartingfifty posts long and its been out for not even 24h! Keep ur poop together, there is just one person (Allie) mentoring this thread.

You don’t have to nerf the damage, you don’t have to nerf the cooldowns, you don’t have to remove traits. Just add the little “feature”: Enemies who are already stunned can’t be stunned as long as the prior stun persists.

Fancy Fool.1743:

I have to wonder if people are serious about some of these suggestions or if it’s just an emotional reaction. You can’t suggest good design on an emotional, upset premise. You have to think about logistics and the developer’s core goal with the design. I think the problem Allie faces is that the OP didn’t draw the line solidly enough to curb posts born of bitterness and resentment instead of clear-headed design.

Having a CDR Ranger Balance thread chuck full of emotional outcries doesn’t help the Ranger profession, guys. The best way to have got results from this was to simply suggest great, REASONABLE design changes or buffs. Or playing the ball in the court they want and talking more about what you want from the pet AI instead of trying to kick it aside. There are many no-pet suggestion threads you could have gone to respectfully.

Please, this is no emotional uprise, atleast for the most part. The AI is broken and it will stay broken. There are many good suggestions about how to bypass the AI.
Fact is, that the AI will never be as potent, that the damage of the ranger will be
on a competitve level. An AI can serve many purposes. Dealing mandatory damage is none of those.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Also, you guys can’t see this due to the limitations of formatting on our forums, but a lot of these points were made by many of you guys. As such, they are much more emphasized in the email threads and discussions we have internally.

First, thank you for your summary. What I think got missed in the pile was the idea that pet damage should be rebalanced so that they no longer draw 30% of our damage from us in the first place. All other classes core mechanics add to base damage where as rangers loose almost a third of our player damage in order to have an AI run around with us. If our pets hit every time and are never dead, we just get to 100% base damage of every other class capping us at 100% a warrior hits 115% with his/her core mechanic.

This does not take into account the loss of gear stats on the pet which is significant.

I’m not saying this isn’t possible, but I want you to understand exactly what that suggestion means. It would mean completely rebalancing the Ranger.

The Ranger is designed to have a pet. If the pet was taken away or didn’t do damage, then it wouldn’t be a Ranger anymore. Does that make sense?

The only reason Rangers lose damage is because the AI is not currently what it ought to be. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we should completely redesign the Ranger and get rid of the pet.

Think of it this way: You’re building a house and a 2×4 breaks while you’re trying to screw it in to something. Do you scrap the house and completely rebuild it because that one piece broke, or do you grab a new 2×4 and use that instead? Which do you think would be more efficient?

What I’ve been seeing a lot of is that you guys don’t necessarily dislike pets. What you dislike is how they act and how they are controlled. It seems to me that these are feelings that have been built up over time, and have culminated into “pets have to go” because you guys haven’t seen the improvements that should be made to pets to make them desirable. I certainly don’t blame you for getting to this point, but I do want to know the core of the problem before we start talking about rebalancing an entire class.

We don’t want the pet to deal no damage. We want the pet to deal additional damage. Right now the main purpose of the pet is to deal damage. The advantages an AI could offer are (nearly) completely unused. The pet is just doing what we could do better: Dealing damage. Instead the pet could help you CCing the enemy, buffing the party or dealing with a second target.

Your example isn’t really helping. You’ve tried to build a skyscraper upon a foundation meant to carry a single-family home. Your example implies that the pet is just a small part of the ranger yet you define the ranger as pet-centric class and the ranger is forced to use his pet every time.

But think of it this way: If you have a child and a robot. Do you want the robot to take care of your child while you’re cleaning your house or do you want the robot to clean your house while you’re taking care of your child?

Ofcourse, that would mean you have to change many things. But most of those things would have to be changed anyways in order to be effective.
I’m sorry if you’ve expected to just tweak some numbers but that’s not how this gonna work.

Don’t get me wrong, this game is based on a wonderful concept, but there are some parts who didn’t turn out functioning. The pet, the whole pet at its current state, is one of those things. It works, yes, but it doesn’t work well. That’s the reason why the ranger gets hindered and he will be getting hindered if you can’t get rid of the definition of the pet as damagedealer. The pet, an AI, will never be as good at dealing damage as the ranger, the player is. That’s the reason why the ranger is worse than other classes. But the pet can so much more than just dealing mandatory damage. And that’s the direction I want the pet to be evolved.

Vox Hollow.2736:

What you fail grasp is what do you even gain out of having the pet out at all times besides flavor? Is there any mechanical advantage to that?

It’s kind of like;
There needs to be one.

Designing around the pathing problems and pet health as an endlessly awkward concept really pales in comparison to the notion there isn’t an easily understood reason this mechanic exists at all.

If this CDI accomplishes nothing else; a pet without any skills at all should still be something you want to have around.

That’s exactly the point. The current pets have no advatages, exept taking aggro from the ranger and the horribly slow and non-instant F2 skill.
The pets main purpose is to deal damage. Dealing damage is what the ranger already does. There is no advantage in using a pet.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Dos.7052:

please support chinese font input in eu/us clients ( both simplified and traditional), since there is no “asian servers” , there are many players from taiwan, Hongkong and mainland of china even Chinese students aboard play at eu/us server, but gw2 dosen’t support chinese input (both simplified and traditional) quite well.

it is not a difficult issue, please support chinese language input so more player will benefit from the change.

thank you very much.

American is the official language of GW2.

There is no language called American. lol.

Yoh.8469:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

Yoh.8469:

I believe that the core problem with pets is that they are design to be Always On.

The greatest underlying problem of the problem you’ve described is that the pet is reponsible for 30% of our damage. It has to be always on. Otherwise we would lose damage. Ofcourse, there should also be a stow option, so you don’t run into problems like we do with scarlets hologram. But the biggest problem for me is the mindset behind the current pet. It is designed as damagedealer, as huge part of our damage. This implies that the pet is always on. I think I don’t have to give examples where this becomes an issue.

If the pet would only offer additional stuff to the ranger, he wouldn’t have such a huge loss if he has to turn the pet off for a while.

The Ranger pet is no more damage potential for the Ranger as Illusions are for the Mesmer. The only real difference, besides being always on, is that pet’s can’t deal their damage reliably where illusions can.
And part of the reason they can’t deal damage reliably is because they are designed to be always on.

The pet has no damage potential; and it oughtn’t.

It’s because Illusions aren’t expected to survive.

That’s the problem with your idea. So pets oughtn’t survive either?
That’s not how the ranger works. You’re not spamming your illusions until the enemy is dead, not caring about the pet at all. The ranger should use the pet to get an advantage and he should lose this advantage if the pet dies.
If I want to play with illusions, I pick a mesmer.

Serbaayuu.3051:

Allie Murdock.8152:

1. General QoL changes.
   1. When the pet is stowed, the Ranger should gain “aspect of the <pet name>” effect which provides unique buffs based on the pet family and specific pet.

Please don’t do this. When I make my build and play the game, I want to select a pet and work alongside it to succeed. I don’t want to select a static buff that’s just going to sit there.

And no, it will not be “optional”. I foresee a future where rangers who use pets instead of the Aspect Of the _ will get auto-kicked from most elitist parties.

Despite this isn’t the perfect way to go in my opinion too, there are some things to keep in mind.

1. If this aspect will be better or worse than the pet depends on the balancing
2. We get kicked out of elitist parties anyways

I really like the idea they had when making these changes. But once again, they came out over the top. There are lvl30 traits which have as requirement to explore lvl80 zones. WTF?

Allie Murdock.8152:

Nike.2631:

Allie Murdock.8152:

I get the biggest issue seems to revolve around pets. I’ve also seen a couple others (utilities not being viable unless spec’d into them, burst vs sustain, traps, spirit clutter, etc.).

I get frustrated by the simple lack of synergy between skills. When you play a condi-necro and can dance through your buttons to put a bleed on the target & yourself with utility, then use your off-hand to move your bleed to them, then use a utility to copy all those bleed to all enemies in the area while putting conditions on yourself, then use your heal to cleanse those conditions and gain bonus healing for doing so… you know that playing those out of order or having to respond to changing circumstances will affect your performance.

Compared to that, ranger gameplay is just dull. You occasionally can stack up a few ‘on next hit’ buffs to pump a single maul, but their weapon skills and utilities mostly feel like oatmeal. There is no difference in what happens if I cast my traps in different orders. there’s no combos, no special order or special timing for many, many Ranger skills.

As a general statement there are also far too many ranger traits that reduce cooldown and nothing else – in other professions we’ve seen a steady march towards combing the 20% cooldown with a secondary flavorful effect. Rangers have good effects but they are spread out across too many traits. A little combining or making certain effcts default behavior of the class would go a long way towards injecting not just raw power, but some cool into a class that sorely needs it.

I don’t think anybody questions that some classes, or should I say specs, are easier to play than others.

I do think the ones that are easier to play shouldn’t be so rewarding, though. It’s hard to balance that correctly in our game right now, though.

I’ll make a note to bring up the trait discrepancies.

I think the biggest flaw of the current ranger traitsystem is:
1. Traits regarding the pet are scattered all over our traitlines which reduces the possibility to build a build which doesn’t rely heavily on the pet.
2. The traits can be divided in “promotes pet” or in “promotes ranger”. If we want to trait for a beastmaster spec, we should be able to promote both us and our pet.
I also want to add Nike’s proposals regarding the traits since he summed up the whole mess quite nicely.

Gotejjeken.1267:

Revert […] shortbow range change[…]

I don’t think the shortbow range should be reverted to 1200 simply because it’s stupid that the longbow and the shortbow share the same range.
However I think the trait “Eagle Eye” should also apply to the shortbow, so you would get your 1200 range if traited and a 5% damage buff.

However, do I remember correctly that shortbow #3 used to give vigor upon hitting a target a while ago?

VOLKON.1290:

Darker nights would be nice. However I wonder how that would effect WvW…

Therefore add a slider, so noone has to use it if he don’t want to.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Yes, like I said about the sustained vs burst, it’s not necessarily fully functional in the game. This is one of those things that we would have to balance with bringing other classes down a bit as far as damage output. Burst damage needs to have risk involved, and we know that right now many classes don’t have that associated risk.

I don’t like this approach. From a ranger point of view, it would probably take too long to nerf all other classes. From the point of view of all other classes, you will get alot of hatred and I can understand them. Most classes doing fine IMO. Ranger is the one class who lacks of competitive damage. From an overall point of view I’m also agaist this approach. You may not believe it but any sort of grinding, dungeonpaths in particular, is not funny and you’re happy if you’re faster. Toning down every source of damage will just slow down the gameplay.

Xaylin.1860:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

4. No other classmechanic sets yourself on a disadvantage to justify itself.
5. The pet will never be a reliable damagesource. Therefore, make it additional.

I quote your post because I highly disagree.

First, people need to give up on the ‘Give me 100% damage and make the pet additional’ demand. It is not going to happen as long as the Ranger is the assigned pet class. It is a design decision ANet made if you like it or not. You will have to get over it. Repeating related demands does not contribute anything constructive and productive.

That being said, I already pointed out earlier that there are several other class mechanics which come with disadvantages if you like to admit it or not. Your fourth statement is just not true.

Especially Mesmers are in a very similar situation as Rangers are when it comes to baseline damage and pets. While their class mechanic are Shatters they are linked to Clones and Phantasms. This means that Mesmers as well have a comparibly low baseline damage when excluding the Illusions/Shatters. However, the Mesmer class also shows that an AI heavy class mechanic can work. While an AI is unlikely to reach human capabilities any time soon it still can be reliable. I therefore also disagree with your fifth statement.

I will give you 3 good reasons why you are wrong:

1. Other classes are losing damage if they decide to not use their classmechanic.
   The ranger on the other hand is the only class who still loses damage most times if he decides to play with his pet.
   As Example:
   1. Pets are useless while defending/attacking a fortress in WvW
   2. Pets are useless for the most open-world-bosses
2. Pets can’t be stowed. This is as simple as huge of a problem. Just take the Hologram encounter as example. Engi turrets, Mesmer clones, Necro minions and Ranger pets can ruin your attempt to get the achievement. Yet all classes can choose to not use their AI’s. The ranger is the only one who can’t.
3. So what has to be done, so that the pet is no more a dps loss?
   1. It has to hit the target as soon as you start hitting
   2. It has to stay ontop of the enemy all the time
   3. It mustn’t die
      If you do so, you would’ve created a unique dot. So why don’t give the ranger the damage outright?

Furthermore, I don’t think you’ve understand the meaning of additional. It doesn’t mean that you could play without your pet, I doesn’t mean that the ranger wont be the pet class anymore. It just means that the mandatory damage will be on the ranger and the pet could be focussed more around providing utility and support.

Atleast stop arguing with the mesmer please. There is a reason why only shatterbuilds are viable.
(Hint: Because the illusions are eating up too much damage)
And there are not only mesmers out there.
Warriors aren’t hurt if they don’t use their adrenaline, Engis aren’t hurt if they don’t use their additional skills, Not even Necros are hurt if they don’t use their DS. They lose additional damage, but not more. Same with Guardians. Not even Thiefs lose anythings if they don’t steal.

Leamas.5803:

Simple solution…block the guys who are griefing chat…or report them.

This thread was supposed to show how broken the megaservers are since no event ever fails. So you can’t do the events like freeing a temple to get the chest at the end.

Swagg.9236:

Chrispy.5641:

In every thread before this, people accused Swagg of being a warrior lover. Now reading this thread, people are finally realizing its not the case. Its kind of funny….

It’s just that everyone reads their own profession’s changes and ignores the rest of them. The whole game needs changes, and most people cry and wail without even grasping the full context of the baseline rules that go into fleshing out a game like Guild Wars 2.

You are not fleshing out GW2. Guild Wars 2 is already fleshed out since 1 year and a half. While not everything is perfect, it works (somehow). You on the other hand want to change the whole gameplay. You are fleshing out your own game, but please, let the devs do their job and you can give some suggestions or feedback.

Swagg.9236:

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

You are not fleshing out GW2. Guild Wars 2 is already fleshed out since 1 year and a half. While not everything is perfect, it works (somehow).

“Somehow working” isn’t exactly stellar. That’s why I’m here.

xXxOrcaxXx.9328:

You on the other hand want to change the whole gameplay. You are fleshing out your own game

GW2 is the square peg that ANet is trying to fit into the circle slot. GW2 is a strange, unique game that doesn’t necessarily play like a traditional MMO. Despite this, ANet has chosen to introduce mechanics into GW2 that clearly belong in a more traditional MMO with things like dedicated healers; or just ignore some obvious boundary rules when it comes to designing combat without a dedicated healer/damage-mitigation class present.

I’m here to help shave the edges off of the square peg.

From your perspective it’s a square peg. For me, it’s a rather fun game to play, which needs polish but no overhaul. You are fleshing out a whole new game based on your opinion that this game is unbalanced from scratch while I do think this game is basically in a good state.

PvE

Pet update

This aspect is crucial for a class, which relies on it’s pet to deal max. damage.

If ArenaNet manages to switch the AI engine to the client,
I would like to see this happen:

If you’ve played FF12, you may remember the gambitsystem.
Thats exactly how I want to control my pet.
For those who don’t know what I mean:
The gambits where an easy and fast way to “programm” the AI of your characters.
They are arranged according to their hierarchy.

As example: The first instruction (gambit) will be executed as long as the requirement is given (e.g. “retreat when below 20% HP”). If the requirement is not given, the second instruction will be executed as long as its requirement is given (e.g. “attack nearest foe”). So you can not only control how your pet will behave in certain situations but also remap your F1-F3 keys.

However, if ArenaNet can’t fix the AI issues,
the damage component of the pet should be removed. I want to play an archer, I don’t care about the pet that much.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

well, i believe this is working as intended. not broken or overpowered.
i.e. this is warriors’ specialty.

since day 1, warrior have the most access to personal stability, but only if they equipped those utility skills. or elite.

balanced stance 8 seconds
dolyak signet 8 seconds
rampage 20 seconds

that is all.
boon duration and sure footed may increase a bit.

yeah i think they are fine.

and boons can be removed, stripped, etc.

“Since day 1” isn’t an argument in any means. Never was, never will be.

Xuro.5861:

2) You donate 20 silver per round, you earn about 1 ~ 2 gold per round so don’t be cheap.

10 bags in a gold chest. Each bag gives between 1 – 2 silver. Where do I get the rest exactly?

Swagg.9236:

Then we’re down to opinions.

I at least exclude the word “think” from my statements and have fundamental rules written out regarding how GW2 combat is optimized.

Ok. To put it simple, just for you:
I do want to play ArenaNet’s game. I do not want to play your game.
Those people, hundreds of programmers, designers and others, where sitting there, for I don’t even know how long they developed GW2, and tried to figure out a balance, which they thought would turn out healthy. And now you come along and try to convince us, that you can deliver the ultimate balanced game.
I don’t think so. At the end all ends up in opinions, that’s the reason why this game gets called unbalaced. Because the majority of players thinks differently about this game as the devs do.

I want to express my support for this.