Deax.1572

The only thing i'd wish to see for a ranger is to reduce the pet downtime from 60 to 30 seconds. 15 seconds on swap - double that if it goes down. 60 is too punishing in pvp and especially in wvw where it tends to die in 3 seconds. This is another reason why Soulbeast is awesome to play, it gives a work around.

This is a buff for Soulbeast, return of the glory days. Owl for sustain and mobility and Smokescale for utility and damage. for WvW that is, for pvp....well meh, maybe it'll have an easier time dealing with Willy benders. I'm also very happy they finaly changed Shared Anguish since that trait has been garbage for years.

Honestly, It was so bad I'll go Core Ranger before I use the 3rd Elite spec. I'll stick with Soulbeast, thank you. WvW roaming - LoL, go Soulbeast or Core Ranger, Untamed is garbage. WvW group play - oh look, my pet is dead 90% of the time and i can't control it, fun times! WvW zerg play - *kicked from squad* PvP - *looks at what classes are in my team* Oh god.... we have dead weight in our team. *loses game to enemy bot team* Ranked PvP - *Gets angry whispers* Tournament PvP - *kicked from party* PvE fractals - (T4 + CM) *asked to leave the party or swap to something useful* PvE Raids - *kicked from squad* 9 billion LI isn't worth anything when your spec is useless. PvE open world - VIABLE woohoo!!!! 10/10 amazing spec - IGN. Edit: And i thought Druid was bad, only viable in PvE Raids and nowhere else, really. But god kitten Anet! You've done it! You've made a spec (currently) only viable in open world PvE content, it's so bad it will never hold a candle to literally anything else.

If you were on EU i'd take you up on your offer. I see flaws in your gameplay. Would be interesting to see what happens.

Medium armor main here. (play all 3 classes, but Ranger most)Warrior is bad, but at least it does have a few builds that work. Mes is just the worst right now. Both Elite specs gutted. I liked chrono the way it was, it wasn't op, it felt like it was in a good place (wvw and pve wise), it could be beat, but no haha f*ck you, gutted. Mirage needed changes, but this change was just nuclear. Give them the doubld dodge back and nerf endurance regen or mirror duration.

1 rev isn't a big issue, but 2 revs....well good luck doing anything when they both push far and just glue themselves to their target. I couldn't imagine pvp being even less enjoyable but the madlads did it, gg Anet.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Power builds and power in general is FRONT loaded - meaning you do your big hits with no build up. Whereas Condi builds are BACK loaded - meaning you have to build up your damage. Because of this power builds are far better at bursting quickly, especially so if the boss has burst phases and currently Power Soulbeast is very good at it if you chain your skills correctly. 60k/s dps and higher is very doable as your opening burst, condi builds cannot achieve same numbers.Here's a Power Soulbeast burst (3 soulbeasts actually) in action against a lvl 99 Challenge Mode fractal boss with phases. There's a video on the power rotation with a LB:

No offense, but this is a learn-to-play issue. PoF and HoT expansion mobs and their respective living story maps are stronger than core game. That said as i posed in another place you could try my build. For open world/story content http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlZwuYRsHmJWsX7P9R8G-zRIYRUxXKNlAhVAZGB9GCqNL/usB-e Idea is to camp beast mode and cap crit chance to 100% with cheap food. I haven't had issues, but then again i've been playing for a long time.Alternatively a user named "Paper Roll" on youtube has a tanky condi build http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAUh/lFUwe6Zf9tu62ZoWaPlv/UgsAnfF-zRRYcKBjaiOPyQLFGIFVVeIGmI+nCBtHESdc3SFfD-e he's generally a advocate for condition damage, i don't agree with everything he said, but to each their own.If you'd like to learn more here's the vid.

Open world: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlZwuYRsHmJWsX7P9R8G-zRIYRUxXKNlAhVAZGB9GCqNL/usB-e Longbow is fine, this is the build i use for Open World. I camp beast mode and never un-merge, the cheap food caps crit chance to 100%.WvW: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlFw6YRsHmJeSXrvzRkG-zRJYiRF/RkpKQjzSELbA-e - note this is a baseline build, you can adjust stat mix, pets, utilities, weapons as you see fit.Have fun.

Ranger has many builds for all game modes. Both condi and power.The only place where we're (still) not wanted is organized WvW large scale zergs for many reasons. For Group PvE You have Power, Condi and even a Hybrid version. Also Druid for healing/support.Power: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAgeFlZw2YgsLmJWuX7P/R8G-zRIYR0xXG1mCVUB2OLRssB-eCondi: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POABg+djlZwkYWsPmJW6O3P3JkC-zRJYmRP/YEPF6UB+mFePrA-eHybrid (Combined dps ~40% power/ ~60% condi): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POFBcihflZwAZSsPmJW6X/P/RcE-zRJYmRPfZEXKUZFI+HJI2DvltOrA-eHybrid build in dps test/additional info in description below: Druid: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwEY6MsMBmCDhlwIxSVyrZVyxyB-zRRYQBJoG1c9lR1pQ6VgvzifbWA-eFor Open World i can suggest my personal two builds that i run, i mostly run the power version.Personal Condi variant: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAV4fnE8Cd8il8CO8Cs8iFDBLv62dDvNdgUXVjJAM6KdTIF-jByBQBxUJ4FuIAMd/BA8AA2nuhFq+jFOCAbU5HpAMTZF-ePersonal Power variant: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlZwuYRsHmJWsX7P9R8G-zRIYRUxXKNlAhVAZGB9GCqNL/usB-e For PvP i can't comment as i rarely pvp but when i do i run a power build. Note i do not play ranked, have not played it since i got my leggy back piece.Power: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAMxflFw6YgsHGKeSXXP7BkA-z5IeKZKE6WEkwCokJgGGAAnother core ranger version is available from Metabattle: https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Ranger_-_Power_SurvivalCan't comment on condi, i've seen some, but i don't know the build so someone else might help with that. For WvW i run a plethora of builds. Mostly of what i feel like at the current time. I am a roamer though so for the most part my builds are selfish and not group oriented.I will leave armor stat combinations out of it as you can run the classic full Marauder + Durability runes setup and adjust the tanky-nes or glassy-nes as you see fit to your playstyle.WvW Sic' Em Soulbeast: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlFUw6qbgBuneGameSXrv7UmuAHgE-eWvW Core Ranger: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlZUw6qbhBOv8GaoOePpr1UgsAvnG-eWvW Boon Beast: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlFUw6qbRFtneGaoeaTmvzUgsgHUE-eWvW Long Range Marksman: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlZkx6qbg5tneGamO0X7P9UKAyp9G-eWvW Long Range Skirmisher: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POgAMFlRkx6qbg5tnemZmWsX7P9UKwBI/G-eWvW Pull Beast: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAweNlFUw6qbgBuneGameSXXP7UgUipLA-ePets, armor and even weapon sets can be adjusted to your liking.I do not play condi or druid in wvw, but i've seen some nasty setups that generate a lot of immobilize.WvW Condi Druid: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAUxjlFw6YesF2JWKPpt6RMH-e have experimented with this setup and while it is somewhat fun it lacks any form of stability to really be good. It is quite annoying due to the sheer amount of immobilize it can dish out. Hope this helps you to find something you'd want to play. Don't be dismayed by people criticizing Ranger, it does have shortcomings, some builds work better in certain situations than others but despite everything it is in the best state it has been since launch.

Ranged, Rogue play style has always been my thing. Gw2 is really meh atm, but when i do occasionally log on to play WvW i'll roam like i always have. I'm not interested in hugging the commander, never have really. Tried some support Boon beast, but scrapper is simply superior in a group setting. Instead i'll pick off targets i can pick off (mostly yummy squishy necros and other rangers/thieves), annoy the enemy squad, deny camp caps, cause small scale mayhem and scout if needed. I want to do my own thing, i want to kill people that doesn't involve a large scale Condi-Tank-Heal f*ck fest.That and my CPU is outdated and it's not fun playing this poorly optimized game at large scale fights with 15 fps.

New weapon type: Spear / Glaive.

I would have hanged the Soul Beast so that it doesn't have pets at all and instead swaps to "Beast spirits" you could select 2 spirits just like pets to swap to. You'd be permanently in beast mode, but get stat buff and access to pet skills. Think of it as revenant, but with Beast spirits changing your "attunement" from Stout to Ferocious and changing the F1,2,3 skills. In small scale fights not having smoke scales field and utility would be nerf, but it would feel more unique and not just "you're a ranger, but you merge with pets"And druid needs a change too. Pets under their control need to become celestial when avatar is active giving them some sort of ability, something like "Your pets are weaker, but while in celestial avatar form your pet applies X to allies or heals nearby allies by X amount for X duration or does X to foes and has 40% reduced damage/condi taken." Something that makes your pets as well as you ACTUALLY support people and not be a weak, useless CC bot and nothing more.

It's not 5 times the healing, but 3. No need to inflate the numbers. Base healing from Rugged Growth with 0 healing power in WvW is 403 not the intended 155. The 600hp/s from Rugged growth is achieved with 400 healing power and Earth Runes which give toughness, protection duration and the (6) is Increased Outgoing Healing by 10%.My damage with this setup is low, im not bursty. Sic' Em full Marauder Soulbeasts are the same as before in terms of fighting one. But yes Rugged Growth is bugged, you can all test it for yourselves.

There's no way that can be tr-- -- holy fudge monkeys! Yeah, I already reported this bug, hopefully they'll fix it. I've already come across Soulbeasts with my Sic' Em variant that I couldn't kill and they couldn't kill me too, but they were more likely to kill me because they could out-sustain me.It's pretty nuts right now. S++ tier dueler because of this and everything doing less damage.

Rugged Growth base healing is higher in wvw than pve or pvp.In Pve it's 259In PvP it's the intended 155 - 175In WvW it's 403This is obviously not the intended behaviour for Rugged Growth.Instead of receiving the nerf the supposed result was added on top of the existing value.My boonbeast with 400 healing power and increased outgoing healing by 10% runes scales that to 600 heal from Rugged Growth, add in near 200 from regeneration and in small scale fights i regen roughly 800 hp a second. In duels/roaming i'm extremely hard to kill and often would end the fight with near full health bar.

Title.As a veteran who mostly wvw's 95% of my guild and guilds of friends have moved on since with every patch gw2 is morphing into something none of us enjoy.But why do you still play? Brainstorm.

If you think that soulbeast is useless in WvW, you simply haven't got a clue how to play one properly.Melee CC boon strip soulbeast absolutely wrecks people both in 1v1, small scale and in blob fights while being borderline unkillable.People think soulbeast is bad in WvW cause 95% of the people either play pew or boon beast with it. Built and played right it puts many "meta" classes to shame inside zergs. It's a self sufficient monster that chews through people that don't even know what hit them. It's pretty much impossible to build ranger for high damage that "chews through people" and for survivability in a group setting The only place this works is small scale or 1v1 where our single target skills, active evades, and boon spam shine. Single target damage is worthless in a zerg, evades are only good for re positioning in long confrontations, and boonbeast stops existing when rip/corrupts are flying at you from 12 different scourges LotP needs to give at least base duration to allies and WK needs to extend the condition removal bonus to allies as well It's the only way we'll be even remotely appealing without major overhauls to our weapon skills or how druid works You're not playing it right then, sorry.You haven't addressed any points made by anyone. "you're not playing it right" is a half arsed excuse about as useful as saying fish are better swimmers. http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/Use this site, post your build and the reasons for why you went this way and how you achieve your so called "putting the meta to shame" results.Can you do that? No, of course not.Well then you're full of poopy, sorry.

If you think that soulbeast is useless in WvW, you simply haven't got a clue how to play one properly.Melee CC boon strip soulbeast absolutely wrecks people both in 1v1, small scale and in blob fights while being borderline unkillable.People think soulbeast is bad in WvW cause 95% of the people either play pew or boon beast with it. Built and played right it puts many "meta" classes to shame inside zergs. It's a self sufficient monster that chews through people that don't even know what hit them. Zergs don't want soulbeasts for a reason. I for one always thought Leader of the pack needed to give allies more than 50% of the stance, that would certainly bump up the usefulness of having a soulbeast.Post a build then, let's see it. Or is it a creation of your imagination.

I for one can't wait for them to finally put that nail in the Soul Beast coffin so that wvw becomes less enjoyable for many and even less people play it. Losing a second pet will hurt build diversity. A useless wvw class is becoming more useless? Heck yeah! Just now i was battling a support firebrand and some spellbreaker and they couldn't kill me in a camp. Kite around and they do heck all, just wait till guards respawn and that's going to be even more so when everyone becomes even more tanky. What the hell is this game becoming, seriously. Forget small scale battles, zerging is where it's at it seems. I've seen a couple of devs pop up in wvw and none of them were on anything other than scourge, rev or guard. Sorry for sounding overly negative, but when was it the last time you read something related to gw2 and it got you excited? Last time was probably when PoF was announced.We'll see what the "balance" brings, but i'm staying pessimistic. It's the best approach these days, you're either right or pleasantly surprised. An optimist is just disappointed every time.

Been running this for a good while now.http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQhrlNwAZXsNmJeUXnvSA-zRJYiRN/p0kIoNFQmChKkAK+iEGbg3SVKbA-eYou can replace smoke screen by anything you want. Mercy is a good pick for extra stun break, mark reset for boon-steal and initiative.I recently started playing smoke screen and have to say it's quite good. Unblockable blind-pulse field, projectile block, It's good against other deadeyes and rangers, it's good for safe-stomping downed or ressing allies. You can spam dagger 2 for stealth in it and it has only 25s cd instead of 60s that shadow refuge has. It has a lot more utility than it seems at first, if you utilize it properly.With full marauders while you're using rifle and have fury you're capped at 100% crit chance. Fireworks rune is great for that extra boon generation every 20s while in combat and the 25% movement speed does come in handy every now and then.You can swap it out for Rage rune if you so choose. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQhrlNwAZXsNmJeUXnvSA-zRJYiRNfp0UE0WBkZIURC42FJM2AvlqU2A-eAnd Durability rune for a more defensive rune. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PawAQhrlNwAZXsNmJeUXnvSA-zRJYiRN/p0kIoNFQmChKkAa8iEGbg3SVKbA-eSigils are up to you, Rage sigil for more quickness is not too bad, extra 3s of quickness on opener. Sigil of Cleansing on secondary weapon set is a good option too for those sweet 3 condi clears on weapon swap.Edit: Leeching venoms with sigil of air is a solid 1,3k extra damage on most enemies, leeching venoms has a bit more utility. It is a little extra dps, heal and impairs sustain setups with poison, even tho the condi by itself doesn't do damage it still applies -33% healing from all sources. It allows going toe-to-toe with heal warriors a bit easier as they will be poisoned most of the time hurting their insane sustain.Flickering shadows is a solid pick as well, probably superior to leeching venoms in a more group oriented fight.Both are good picks for power or condi builds.Edit2: From my experience a tiny bit of toughness doesn't help that much, if you go for it then aim at 2,5k armor at least. But that impacts your damage quite a bit. Going for "+10% Damage Reduction" food/traits would be far better, furthermore "Protection" boon is king. What you would waste 500 stat points getting that one boon does it for you, with that being said thief does not have any way to generate protection reliably. Also "Damage Reduction" is multiplicative not additive so keep in mind diminishing returns.

I like this idea. And i agree with your last point completely. I wanted to love deadeye, but the clunky-nes of kneeling makes it so crap and un-fun to use. A class that is otherwise quite fluid all of a sudden becomes stiff as a bag of potatoes. It's one of those ideas that sound great in theory but doesn't transition well into practice.

I have a old demonstration vid for the open world condi setup i cooked up for someone. It was tailored with condition damage, some sustain and survivability in mind. I won't go into specifics as that would end up being a wooden-potatoes style video in text format a.k.a a wall of text. But i can elaborate if you'd be interested.Condition damage by itself is rather weak, what you need to do is be able to apply it quickly and a lot of it and make sure they stick around for as long as possible within the constraints of your build, but by gw2 design most skills that do condi damage and/or apply damage condis are generally weak direct-damage wise and that makes hybrid builds sub-optimal. Don't get me wrong, they're great in open world (something like full celestial) being able to sustain quite well both damage and health, but they all suffer from being mediocre in damage at best.Power wise it's cheaper to just go full berserker with axe/axe and GS or whatever/axe and GS and then just adapt depending on what you wanna do from there.I've tried hybrid builds and they're somewhat fun-ish in competitive scenes. In PvE it just won't do if we're talking group content. After a while of playing your defenses come from situational awareness and adaptability rather than relying on stats etc. so you end up going as much power as you can handle. In fractals i'll quite often bring a Dolyak Stance with Stance Share trait, it's a bit of a dps loss, but everyone in close proximity gets stability and damage reduction for just a bit, has prevented some pugs from eating a hefty cc and going down.

Firstly you have to decide with either going condition or power route. As of right now there is no reason to go hybrid because it doesn't yield the best results due to stats being too stretched.Secondly Anything-main-hand and Axe-offhand with Greatsword is probably the meta weapon sets for most pve related stuff. Dual Axe and Daggers as weapon sets is sub-optimal.I'm running this power setup in general PvE (Fractals, dungeons): http://gw2skills.net/editor/?POwAceFlRw6YRsHmJO0W6P1R8G-zRIYR0xXG1mCVUB2eRCj9wbJilN-eI made a build for someone wanting to do Open world with a Condi setup a while ago you can have a look at it and see if it appeals: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAV4fnE8Cd8il8CO8Cs8iFDBLv62dDvNdgUXVjJAM6KdTIF-jByBQBxUJ4FuIAMd/BA8AA2nuhFq+jFOCAbU5HpAMTZF-eRegarding pets, Power setup camps on Rock Gazelle And Condi variant goes with Lynx or Iboga.

Quite true and yet "over-performing" seems to be more subjective. Problem is that gw2 since its release never was balanced and never will be. You leave a weak build around and when everything else gets nerfed all of a sudden that build is strong in contrast to everything else at that point.Tried deadeye post-patch. Yeah it's fun. Clunky and awkward to use, to kneel and not be able to comfortably get out of it, but fun and the damage is there. Tried Ranger after and i've noticed people going after me more often, but i can still handle them. Nothing drastic has changed. Warrior still cocky as ever. Still landed a 9k+ Maul in marauders gear. Damage is there but it's not as great, never was either honestly unless you go glassy, which i don't do personally.Principle stays the same: Open, bait cooldowns, avoid Rampage/bursts, kite and look for openers, when in melee or lb skills on cd swap to gs, cc when possible with a follow up maul/worldly impact, focus squishies or high priority targets. etc.