[Guild Wars 2]

General Discussion
541

Okay so the patch notes are out…
Jon Peters posted this on the forums…

“Hi Anders, I’m totally not here so skip this post and read on…
We made the improvements we had time to test. There are still more ranger improvements but when our time is limited we have to focus on things we know we can fix. Signets and shouts are still on the docket, and I suspect some of each of these will get some love in the next time around. As you can see a lot changed in this build for every profession and we have to test these changes as well.
I do still believe ranger is the profession in most need of improvement after this patch and we will continue to make those improvements. If we could fix everything at one time we would, but the reality is there are a limited # of hours to make changes.
I see a lot of talk about ranger weapons, but I don’t think that is the real problem. I think sword and longbow are both good weapons, which is why the changes take longer. The problems are deeper, in pets ability to hit moving targets, trait lines with not enough viable choices and skills that are often too specialized to really compliment the weapon builds. These aren’t things we can change overnight. The change to Greatsword block was in fact a very difficult change, but we made it because we knew it was the right thing to do.
There are >500 skills in this game, 480 traits, and 2 designers working on this. Even then often we are bottle necked by other issues. I’m not going to say we are not working on these things, nor can I say there are things we could have changed but just ran out of time on, but this was a patch that contained ranger improvements and it will not be the last one that does so. Maybe you want more than honesty but that is what I currently have to offer.
Jon”

There are >500 skills in this game, 480 traits, and 2 designers working on this.
Excuse me, are you fucking telling me that you have TWO people working on ALL EIGHT CLASSES for a fucking MMO?

542

I heard that they only main like a warrior, thief, guardian and mesmer lol. I remember seeing a pic of the warrior guy from anet and he was a sig warrior in pvp :rofl: .

Evasive arcana got busted up pretty bad. It seems like staff ele can’t bunker anymore which is weird because it seems guardians are relatively untouched. It messes up the staff eles who support in pve so I dunno how they thought this was a good idea if it was a direct pvp nerf. In a way it was really funny comboing constantly.

543

I’m really liking the change to Leeching Venoms, it’s an incredible lifesteal buff for me. Combined with Risidual Venom, I get 6 strikes of venom (using Spider Venom) which used to give me about 119 lifesteal per strike for a max of 714hp return, now, I’m getting 355 per strike for a total of 2130hp return and considering I use venom during a pistol stealth attack, it’s like getting another healing skill, this is awesome.

C&D I’m not too concerned with the damage reduction, it was never envisioned as a main source of damage for me, simply a tool to keep out of sight of my enemy - the above buff will do more for me than the original damage of C&D would have done.

544

Link to the thread please, I want to see the shitstorm unfold.

545

Figures as Ranger is the first character I picked, started myself out with a gimp character.

546

Anyone play Mesmer? Has the changes in Phantasms stopped you from being able to throw illusions behind keep gates etc in WvW now?

547

Scorpion Wire range increased from 900 to 1200.

my favorite thing to do in wvw just got better

548

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/professions/ranger/General-Patch-Discussion-merged/page/3
All the way at the end of the page.

This sounds fun as hell to be honest, mind linking me the a/the build? My thief is only 26 and I hadn’t considered a lifesteal build but I can totally dig this.

549

Yeah, this is what I use - http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mckMzc0z0MMxvMMMxvMx0GG0mRboscR

I wear full carrion gear + weapons (P/D), use 2x rune of krait, afflicted and centaur for the increased bleed duration, I also use a superior sigial of restoration on dagger and a sigil of agony for more increased bleed duration. I use food to boost condition damage and duration further and I’m considering swapping out the superior sigil of restoration for the condition stack sigil or bloodlust, the latter will give me another scale increase in lifesteal as well as power. You won’t do impressive numbers for direct damage like GC backstab thieves, but you will melt your opponents with condition damage - I do around 2k a tick with stacked conditions - you’ll down a GC thief with a single stealth shot- have massive survivability, laugh in the face of enemy condition damage and can win many 5v1s and in some occassions more. I love this build.

EDIT:
My secondary is a shortbow, mainly it’s used for running and I tossed in a superior sigil of energy for 50% endurance gain when I swap to it, which when retreating is worth it’s weight in gold for that extra dodge, otherwise I use it to smoke out thieves who just dropped into refuge with cluster bomb spam.

550

Anyone wanna run FOM later? It’s a different instance when I went in different times. Very interesting. No zerging from wp if you wipe you have to restart from a checkpoint, which makes team rezzing really important. I had to just 4 man the ascalonian war path with the hammer god thing at the end with 1 lvl 35 guardian just now and it took a while on difficulty 1. Some of the fights have annoying gimmicks but probably would be a lot bearable if we had 5 people.

551

So how do you guys feel about the gear treadmill shitstorm that has been unleashed? :rofl:

552

I was on difficulty 1 for FotM and we finished 2 mini-dungeons. We had our only guardian dc part-way through the second dungeon part and in the third part (Searing Ascalon) some of my armor broke. When I used one of my repair canisters and my game crashed. I couldn’t rejoin with my teammates so I was like “Fuck this.”

So I’ve been playing LoL for the remaining duration of the Lost Shores event.

553

I just started playing this shit. Its pretty dope.

Here is a video of me playing…[media=youtube]jYhFPddlH8Q[/media]

Some of ya’ll should help a brotha out…Drizzt.1689.

554

I’ll help you, drop the dual pistols.

I’ll add you, I can certainly show you some things with thief.

I’m really not too bothered to be honest, it’s not like Ascended are the most easily accessable items and they won’t be as remotely commonplace as exotics for a while yet. I hope that the amount of tokens increases the harder the difficulty becomes on FotM, because 5 tokens a pop is going to take a rather long time to get even 1 ascended ring, let alone anything else they release in the future. If anything, I’m disappointed that JC gets no love, I really did think that we might have gotten recipes for rings. Oh well.

I have enough materials to make a few of the backpieces, mainly because I bought them a long while back when they were dirt cheap (vicious fangs were copper, now they’re 15 silver each) with the intention of making a Legendary and I have a ton of ectos broken down, the problem is, none of the new backpieces have the stats that I want (power, condition + vit) so I’m a little disappointed and not sure I even want one.

555

I guess I dont really need Help, just…well, help. Im getting along ok solo, I dont even see a need to really group up yet. But shit like crafting and stuff…wtf is going on there? I have all these crafting matts but have no idea what to do with them.

556

How does this build work in PVE? Currently, level 63 and bored as shit of the leaping death blossom build.

557

The reason I said drop P/P is because whilst it’s fun to play around with, there are no viable builds for it and you lose any survivability tools being in that weapon slot which forces you into stealth utility skills - which imo are a waste of a slot. If I can give a quick tip, get into the habit of using C&D on your enemies, you can attack and stealth at the same time (keep your eye on the revealed timer before repeating though), one thing you can do is hit C&D then immediately hit steal for an instant teleport strike and stealth on your enemy, you’re then free to use your stealth attack on them. C&D is awesome, I even use it when travelling through Orr and I don’t feel like fighting a thousand mobs on the way - run to an enemy, hit C&D then keep running :smiley:

For the record, I hate the LDB spam method, it’s what made me move away from D/D completely. The above build is more of a solo build than anything because nothing slotted in is beneficial to a group, but in PVE this still works fine, I can solo champions with relative ease because of the method of P/D play - it’s all about keeping out of sight, manuevering and then striking. I’ve used this a lot in dungeons but I’ll slot in refuge (instead of Devourer Venom) simply so when people go down I can save their asses, but i’m usually the one who will be keeping the boss/champ busy while people take out the adds. Sometimes I’ll also swap Devourer Venom for Grasping Vines if I’m fighting something particularly tough, then I can anchor it for 7 seconds.

You just won’t see huge numbers from direct damage becuase your condiiton is doing the work, but you can still drop things extremelly fast simply because of the conditions and 55% extra bleed duration and those numbers just fly off. When you activate a poison to use the benefit of health steal, it takes a sizable chunk from your enemy. eg in a PvP/WvW environment, I can usually bring down a backstab crit thief in a single stealth shot because they have nothing to soak up my condition damage. EDIT: Also, whilst it might sound crazy, sometimes, more mobs can help you, simply because there’s more opportunity to C&D a weaker enemy if you’re fighting a champ that’s riskier to get close to, also in a PvP/WvW environment, I’ll use enemy Thieve’s Guild and mesmer illusions to my advantage by C&Ding off of them before going for the real target, it also really fucks up other thieves who pop Guild then drop into stealth thinking they can gank you - suprises the fuck out of them too and really tells those who can use thief well and those who are relying on stealth cheese and burst over situational awareness. Also, if you’re smart about it, you can let thieves harmlessly dagger storm away wasting their elite before unloading on them as they drop out of it.

I’ve recently been playing around with different foods, I’ve been using Orrian Truffle stew, which may not sound great on paper (100% chance to gain might on dodge + 40% endurance regen), but with the superior sigial of energy on my shortbow, I can get up to 4 consecutive dodges which has seriously upped my survivability and completely outweighed the benefit power + condition or condition + vit food gave me.

558

The lost shores event basically dropped exotics, a 20 slot box, and an accessory that pretty much had some of every stat. The event took like 2 and a half hours to due and the fucking enemies do not render in time like at all. Seeing literally 30 people drop because they ran forward too fast into 3 champion karka because the game didn’t render them was ridiculous. I went fro a range setup during the whole event because those mobs just sprayed aoe everywhere and basically if anyone got dropped in front of the champs, they probably were toast and gonna get revived after 15 minutes when the fight was over.

I’m not too worried about the ascended gear, I am disappointed in how Anet is balancing the game though. The whole evasive arcana nerf really got rid of a whole subset of a playstyle. Even though the bunker really did need a nerf (which is weird since guardians did get some they are still very beefy) it also really hurt support and might stack eles. It also was really fun to do since unlike supports in other mmos, you constantly need to be mobile and combo with yourself and your allies to really heal or buff them. I think what was originally intended was that blast finishers were suppose to be on a 10 second cd for each attunement but it seems that they just got rid of it entirely. It’s like say you found out about a mechanic in fighting games like jump canceling then someone decided to patch it out instead of doing something like limit it to only certain moves.

Also many of the fixes in the patch notes were tool tip “fixes” such as saying that some spells were suppose to only last as half as long as the tool tip said which makes people feel short changed. Though what did disappoint me the most since I don’t really play staff was that magnetic grasp and ride the lightning are still bugged even though they said they fixed it so you can still die just using them. I think a huge problem also stems from the fact that the 2 man team they have did not test all the changes, which leaves half the classes without proper testing. Many of the stuff that was found to be broken (they also broke dragon tooth as a blast finisher, even though they just want to change it’s location and some traits still do not work) could have been tested in less than 10 minutes.

559

Yeah, my group of friends learned fast to wait at the back and let the more eager people rush forward only to get blown up by invisible enemies, sometimes it was pretty funny to just see 15-20 explode and suddenly get downed. I really liked parts of that event, like having to push the Ancient Karka to the nest with steam vents, rock slides etc becuase it felt like a monster movie, but the seemingly endless waves of reinforcements got really boring really fast. I think almost everyone at the event got the 200 Karka for the monthly and if they didn’t have it before, they certainly have the Combat Healer title now XD. Have to admit, I was slightly disappointed when the Ancient Karka leapt from the Lava and then died, I thought we’d have to knock it down again.

560

I used to do glass cannon on P/P Thief and it was very very bad, at best my 3 would hit for 5~6k. Very little utility brought to the team as well.

My tanky warrior does maybe half of that with Mace 1, but in exchange she’s also extremely hard to kill.

If you want to be a ranged powerhouse with zero utility you should’ve probably rolled Ranger.