Maekrix Waere.2087

At least we'd get Barrows Gloves out of it, then.

After the update it appears Oaken Cudgel (Ranger Mace 3) no longer benefits from the quickness boon.

I was talking main-hands. And main-hand mace is Vigor, Protection, Healing and Regen for a subgroup. It's a 1-stop shop for a bunch of defensive boons and is gonna be heal druid's new best friend. Also, as a fun side-bonus, if ANet fixes the Nature's Strength reset to work with a 20-second rotation, Quick Draw M/WH is gonna be 4 blast finishers within a 10 second weapon swap for pumping boons/water fields/Karakosa heals. If you bump up the power scaling then you make the condi build better, since most condi DPS run Viper's, so would also gain the bonus from higher power numbers. So even if you didn't personally use main-hand axe for it's intended purpose, buffing it's power scaling could have made the condi build too good. Yes, I have definitely gotten the impression from posts in this thread that not everyone likes new build opportunities.

Perhaps this is a self-selection thing. To me, the idea that discourse in MMO communities is not dominated by efficiency and optimization is simply ridiculous. It feels like you're just lying to my face to win an online arguement. But I guess everyone surrounds themselves with what they consider normal. As much as it is entirely against every experience I have had in these MMO spaces, I'm willing to accept that, for you, this is the case. I don't believe it's representative, but I'm not gonna waste more time on this particular he-said-he-said. Are you joking? Karakosa and Midnight King are relics you can plan an entire build around. Also, summoning crows on an elite skill is the exact kind of design of many of the new relics. Which one? Honest question. Axe and Dagger are condi. Mace is going to be support. That leaves Sword as the only option for a main-hand Power weapon.

I agree. I love me a weird gimmick build in open world and the like. But let's not pretend a gimmick build being fun makes it good. Enjoy them and love them for what they are, but meta builds are meta for a reason. Yeah, we could have a discussion all about how and why players value speed and efficiency over everything else. We could talk about if those are the right values to have or if they do more harm to the gaming landscape than they do good. But that's kinda beyond the scope of this discussion about the changes to Ranger Sword. At the end of the day, the MMO community in aggregate has chosen to value speed and efficiency of clearing content above most other things. (I'm certain an exception exists somewhere but it would still be an exception.) And those values can be measured in DPS. Intentions change. A video game is a living document that shifts and alters over time alongside and in reaction to it's player base. And let's not harken back to ye olde GW2 as this hallowed time that we have fallen from. As many problems as I may have with current GW2, it's a far cry from when you had kitten like the entire necromancer class being an insta-kick from dungeon groups. I agree in spirit with a lot of your complaints. I do think that the boon system is holding the game back in a lot of ways. I wish they'd take a step back and ask if they truly want Quickness, Alacrity, 25 Might, Fury, Prot, and Regen to be these 100% uptime things. I do wish they'd take a look back at implementing more unique buffs instead of everything just being a boon. I miss Spotter, Assassin's Presence, Banners, Grace of the Land, and so many more being those unique buffs. But I also acknowledge the problems they created. Playerbases follow what optimizers theorize. I don't want the one ranger in the squad to be forced to run Spotter or else be kicked from groups. Because you *know* that that would be a common occurrence. I don't want the one warrior to be forced to run 2 or 3 banners plus EA or else be kicked. The rev to be forced to run AP. Engineers forced to run Pinpoint. And in that context, I get it. I get why they've sanded down all the unique buffs into just giving boons. Nowadays, if you get a Boonheal and a BoonDPS in each subgroup and they both keep up their expected boons noone really cares what classes they are. It's a really complicated situation and I feel for the designers even as I do hope they walk some of it back. As for the Runes/Relics and such I do kind of agree. I certainly agreed on release, but admit that the newest release has a couple actually interesting relics in it. Midnight King and Karakosa relics are honestly kind of exciting to me and I really hope we get more relics in that vein. Relics that make me take a step back and look back through every single build option to see if I can make a build that utilizes them to the maximum. Even Nourys as a Relic is more interesting than most of the old rune sets ever were. On the other hand, yeah. I miss being able to cheese Belcher's Bluff with Dolyak Runes. I missed the idea of forming a silly gimmick team in WvW using Snowfall runes and fall damage traits to do dive bombs off the ramparts of SMC. A lot has been lost over the years, and a lot of it was a lot of fun... but being fun didn't make them all good.

The evade I was talking about is on GS 3. I admit I did forget about wisp having the evade removed. Wisp is still an incredible defensive tool, though, and my overall point about these weapons still stands.

It doesn't. I'm only speaking of it in that context. Someone else in this thread, though, did say that it is much better now in WvW/sPvP as well and I admit to being much more inclined to believe them than I am you. Also, Ranger has plenty of defensive weapons. We have Greatsword with it's evade and several seconds of blocking. Staff with it's healing, evade, and projectile destruction. Off-hand dagger has an evade. Off-hand mace is coming out with barrier and condi cleanse. Sword even still has evade frames on it's 3 and has two leaps to make distance so it's not like it's defensive utility is entirely gone, either.

I mean, in PvE, at least, it was only viable in the same respect as Soldier's stats are viable in PvE. Yeah, you could clear content with it, but let's not pretend that it was a serious option.* Even if we set aside the damage numbers (because they could have been changed), the manner of mobility on sword was inherently at odds with the nature of PvE in this game. Like it or not; wish it was different or not; stacking for boons and heals is the way GW2 PvE has worked since before HoT and is the style of play that the game is currently being designed around. In this design space, Ranger Sword was inherently flawed as a PvE weapon because both the 3 and the first part of the 2 inherently pulled you out of the stack; quite a big sticking point. I'd even go so far as to argue that the fact no other weapon in the game is designed in a similar way just goes to show exactly how flawed it was. Stuff that works well gets reused and iterated upon. * = And there's nothing wrong with that. IMO, one of the most beautiful parts of GW2's design is how free the player is to experiment with attribute and trait combos to find a build that they jive with.

It is objectively not useless. Hell, it's meta now in many builds. And, yeah, there's a conversation that could be had there; about what we should value and if making something into a meta weapon is a good thing or not. But you can't just deny reality and expect to be taken seriously.

I admit it's bizarre reading this thread. I've been an active player since before HoT and in all that time I don't think I ever met a single person in-game who thought that Ranger sword was even a decent PvE weapon. Before this thread I have only ever heard people talk about it having been garbage in PvE, with even main-hand axe always being the better power weapon. It's damage was weak and the nature of it's mobility was an active detriment in dungeons and fractals; no matter if we were stacking in a corner to LoS some dungeon mobs or staying on top of our Phalanx Strength Warrior so we all had might. Since then, things have become even more about stacking than they were back then, and PvE sword only became worse and worse. New sword fixes both of these problems and, as someone who has been waiting since LS3 for an even decent power main-hand to pair with off-hand axe, I am very appreciative of it. I have always thought of Ranger sword as "Ah, a tool for the competitive players." And if you're a WvW or sPvP player who used sword a ton, then I do truly feel for you. I don't sPvP and I never used sword in WvW, so I can't feel what you feel but I know losing tools always sucks. And, as bad as it used to be, if you enjoyed it in PvE before the changes, then I'm sorry for your loss, too. I hope you find a new weapon that can bring you that joy. Regardless, however, I sincerely hope that ANet never changes sword back to what it was.

Okay, yeah, I'd agree with that.

The only thing in the game even remotely like what you are suggesting is Dragon Trigger, which is a highly self-contained move/stance that an entire elite spec is built around. The idea of basically remaking the Sword 3 that we have right now to have a new move that you throw out and then it basically puts you in a mini-dragon trigger where you're locked out of every single other skill on the weapon until you pick one of three more special new moves just isn't realistic. Yes, I think sword 3 needs to be changed, but we need to be reasonable, here. You're asking for four new moves! That's not refinement, that's an entirely new weapon.

But even that wouldn't really work because the timeout starts when Big Mode ends, not when the reset happens. If you swap over to the other weapon set with a couple seconds left on Big Mode, then if you swap back on cooldown you'll still have a couple second left on the timeout when you get back to mace. Maybe you could make the timeout start when the reset triggers (extend it to 20s) and then it gets removed if you swap weapons? That way you keep the current timeout duration if you're camping mace(s), but now you're allowed to work the reset seamlessly into a standard rotation. Edit: Thinking back on it, I don't think the weapon swap thing would actually work. If you just swapped from, say, M/M to M/A then it would still be activatable more often than intended.

I mean that's probably the intention, but if you have quickness on and you're not using both maces at the same time then going through the refreshed skills probably only takes a couple seconds. You swap to other weapon set with multiple seconds left on Big Mode and go through that weapon's skills as normal and then swap back to mace with ~7 seconds left on the timeout. You go through mace skills while timed out, and you can finally build up stacks again with ~3 seconds left before swapping again and now you have the reset and Big Mode offset by several stacks every time it happens. It's just a mess to manage in a rotation unless you're deliberately delaying your weapon swaps by a massive margin, planning a rotation around minutes long rotation periods where you take that reset offset into account, or if your weapon swap is Celestial avatar and you ride out the whole 15 seconds, in which case it's... definitely less messy but still probably offsetting you a little bit. To me this all results in a setup which discourages quick weapon swapping, and which is why I'd rather the timeout still let you build stacks but be unable to reach 6 to activate the mechanic. At that point it fits cleanly into a weapon swap on cooldown rotation.

I do really want to like Nature's Strength, but the cooldown where you're not allowed to gain stacks just sours the whole thing for me. I just can't work it into a smooth weapon swap on cooldown rotation. It takes time to build the stacks, then you have the effect for 5 seconds and then 15 seconds where you can't build stacks at all. I wish it was that the cooldown was 15 seconds where you could still build stacks, but you couldn't get more than 5 stacks. That way you can't grow and skill reset more than once every 20 seconds, but you could still build up to 5 stacks during that time, letting you cleanly fit the mechanic into a 20s rotation. Totally agree with removing the mechanic from the offhand, too.