July 10th Patch

Yay, we can now use traps under water.

I don't really get the point of underwater combat in this game. I never do it unless I'm forced to.

Ranger

Soulbeasts were not performing quite where we wanted them to be, so we're eliminating the difference between bonuses granted to ranger pets and rangers on a few traits in the Beastmastery line. A few ranger pets were continuing to overperform, so those have had their power knocked down. Lastly, after some significant revisiting, a few additional skills have also been added to underwater play.

• Poison Volley: Reduced the baseline duration of the poison inflicted by this skill from 5 seconds to 4 seconds and from 7 seconds to 6 seconds when behind or flanking the enemy.
• Worldly Impact: Improved the casting time of this skill from 1 second to 0.75 seconds and slightly reduced its aftercast.
• "Guard!": This skill can now be used underwater. Fixed a bug that caused the voice over for this skill to trigger less frequently than that of the ranger's other shout skills.
• Spike Trap: This skill can now be used underwater. The underwater version now stuns enemies instead of launching them.
• Flame Trap: This skill can now be used underwater.
• Frost Trap: This skill can now be used underwater.
• Farsighted: This trait now affects all ranger weapon skills instead of only weapon skills that fire projectiles.
• Pack Alpha: This trait now grants the full 150 attribute increase to each primary attribute, up from 80, to a merged soulbeast at level 80.
• Pet's Prowess: This trait now grants the full 300 ferocity increase and 30% movement speed increase, up from 150 and 25% respectively, to a merged soulbeast at level 80.
• Iboga—Consuming Bite: Reduced the base damage of this skill by 33%. Reduced the damage per condition by 40%.
• Smokescale— Bite: The damage of this skill has been reduced by 30%.
• Smokescale—Smoke Assault: The damage of this skill has been reduced by 20%.

Nerf S M OMEGALUL K E S C A L E memes actually came trueFor what purpose? Its only "overperforming" because other pets underperform in general...I'm happy with the other stat increases, I guess - it might edge PvE Soulbeast further into the meta and make PvP's a bit more reliable. However, I'm kind of worried about Worldly Impact being even more nuts with its scaling and a slightly faster cast.

Only good things were Farsighted (the name makes no sense now, but idgaf), Pack Alpha and Pet's Prowess. Will it be enough to push power SBeast for Instanced content ? I will let the experts do the calculations.

Zero changes to other pets. Nerf the useful pets, gives nothing back to useless pets.

Still no Splitblade un-split and those UW Traps (UW Fractals, that's it). LOL. Mesmer will still be SSS rank in PvP.

Idk what I expected after last 3 patches but they managed to disappoint again somehow. I didn't hope for buffs, I just hoped something would CHANGE instead of allowing traps underwater and nerfing the 1 pet that was good instead of REWORKING 45 trashpets. Cmmon.

except Juvenile lynx has good damage though, i didnt use iboga much anyway

Soulbeast got some buffs, but Core ranger nor Druid didnt get anything really.

More hot garbage labeled as "balance".

I wasn't expecting much but I really had hoped they would have done better than this.

They really can't give us love without nerfing something can they?

@Krispera.5087 said:Only good things were Farsighted (the name makes no sense now, but idgaf)Damage still depends on the range, so.. Some sense.

The shortbow nerf is more of a fix as camping shortbow was basically doing the same dps as rotating between dagger/torch and shortbow. That change alone however just nerfs a mediocre damage dealer. They should have given the damage back on torch or dagger skills to compensate.

I wish they would just redo the minor traits in marksmanship instead of giving it more passive damage % modifiers to traits where it doesn't make sense. Something as simple as swapping effects on Precise Strikes and Remorseless. The minor trait which everyone would get would cause opening strike to reset in combat when gaining fury, applying cripple and vuln. The GM trait would make opening strikes auto crit and deal more damage (better yet, you deal increased damage for x seconds after opening strikes).

It certainly looks like marksmanship/beastmastery/soulbeast will be the way to go for pve power dps, with marks taken just for passive 20% damage. sword/axe + greatsword. It was currently around ~29k, these buffs probably put it around ~32-33k I would guess.

Thank the Six I decided to go after howler instead of the legy dagger. Why are they intent on ignoring do daggers? They even took it out of the garbage pvp preset builds which shows they know it's trash tier in PvP.

On another note will farsighted finally push power ranger into the meta?

And can't wait to test out the world impact improvement.

And honestly im really shocked they buffed the beast mastery line it was already nuts. Since they're really leaning into power beast maybe dagger should be made a power weapon

I don't get the nerf to poison volley. Condition-Soulbeast is already weak enough. So much for diversity.

@Raizel.8175 said:I don't get the nerf to poison volley. Condition-Soulbeast is already weak enough. So much for diversity.

Apparently it was making dagger look bad. So, rather than making dagger not total crap, they just nerfed SB in classic anet fashion.

WHY WON'T THEY UNSPLIT AXE!?!

On the plus side that's not the most baffling change in this patch or even for Ranger.

@Substance E.4852 said:

@Raizel.8175 said:I don't get the nerf to poison volley. Condition-Soulbeast is already weak enough. So much for diversity.

@Substance E.4852 said:

@Raizel.8175 said:I don't get the nerf to poison volley. Condition-Soulbeast is already weak enough. So much for diversity.

Sure, really fun that I'm always getting told that I wont ever see fractal CMs or raid-bosses like Dhuum. Really fun.

Smokescale nerf hurts a bit. Its my go to pet for WvW. However, to me it was not sustained damage, only a burst beast.

Oboga? I've seen very few run it outside of PvE, so for me no sense there.

Trap usage underwater: I never got into the traps for ranger. Traps work very well on my berserker DH but I could never find the right niche for my ranger, especially in WvW.

This wasn't a bad balance/nerf, but it didn't do much to improve anything either.

Balancing/reworking 50 meh pets (giving players more options) or nerfing the 1 everyone uses? Hhmmm

I literally just started to get into using my condi shortbow ranger with a full viper set, and I was really excited to try to go for the legendary dreamer, but now I'm not sure... I'll have to wait to see how bad it really is. :(

So I not able to check right now, so I am sorry if it is just missing from the change notes, but it seems odd all the traps now work under water except the Viper's Nest.I mean sure vipers are mainly not aquatic.... but I mean we could just call it like Sea Snake Nest.Or if the visual effect is an issue, could we just call it Poison Cloud Trap and reuse any of the myriad of the Green cloud like effect that exist under water.

Still no reason to come back I see.

@Ighanis.8265 said:So I not able to check right now, so I am sorry if it is just missing from the change notes, but it seems odd all the traps now work under water except the Viper's Nest.I mean sure vipers are mainly not aquatic.... but I mean we could just call it like Sea Snake Nest.Or if the visual effect is an issue, could we just call it Poison Cloud Trap and reuse any of the myriad of the Green cloud like effect that exist under water.

I wonder how derpy spike trap will look.

Dreaming with Power Soulbeast as Meta PVE may become true, finally! Can't stand the condi build and tired of playing druid healing.

guess ill go out back and shoot my condi ranger main now :/