Gotejjeken.1267

Also, even if this were 1.5k - 2k damage a hit you have to literally be soaking up damage and be in melee(ish) range to do it. Meanwhile, a power soulbeast on longbow can do this (and up to a whole lot more depending on how glass you want to go) with barrage at 1500 range. But really, this proves people will find literally anything to complain about regarding ranger. Like, think about it--if this topic is accurate, for maximum effect you have to be STANDING in the enemy bomb and hope to down a few people. Who signs up for this? 😂

I usually run with a build that has ZERO sustain and not even I want pulls removed. In my experience, if you get pulled you (in order from most to least likely): Are standing on a wall, far, FAR too close to the edge Are running in a straight line Are standing in the back of a group trying not to be noticed (but they can smell your lack of confidence) Are being focused because you are a threat

Yeah gonna call BS on this unless someone provides a vid.

I mean, is it though? I've never stepped foot in sPvP but from the leagues and stuff I watched (early on when it was supposed to be a thing like on Twitch) it does seem all about rotating between points to get the most strategic advantage. No one like goes off and duels 1v1 for the hell of it like in WvW (that would be seemingly very counterproductive lol). Since sPvP lost nearly all of its audience I would say if it IS about the fights it doesn't have a good way of showing that.

Please tell me you do not call these 'roaming'--if so, are you a Fastcar alt?

You don't roam do you?

A build doesn't make someone good--a zergling can run a 'roaming build' all they want and still not be any good. Zerglings don't roam anyway, if there is no tag they afk at spawn (recapping the nearest camp every 4 min) until one shows up. I hate to say it but I feel no remorse for part of the group losing 'bags'--roamer's never get bags because we don't see another living person unless a 'roaming group' comes by that we have to fight 1vX or we hover around a structure that has zergs fighting over it. Even worse is WXP, as I've been playing WvW myself for almost 9 years and and up until the last 4 months only hit rank 500 because all I did was roam.

This isn't my experience. I've supported a random commander plenty of times by doing just that--protecting against enemy gankers means those who are lagging behind the tag can get back to it without getting downed. Can also stall objectives super easily and / or be a distraction long enough for reinforcements to show up. I also tend to get invited to squads a lot if I'm not running with a guild, so that has to count for something. Essentially, underestimating the flanking game is a bad idea, because it undermines people's need to chase things. That urge alone can unravel some of the better groups if you do it well enough. Double down on people think "ranger = free bag" and you have struck gold when they can't down you and waste too much time trying to do so instead of focusing. From my understanding, Ranger isn't wanted in traditional zerg vs. zerg as it's too easy in a way. You don't need to flank a lot of times or do anything fancy as it's all about boons and sustain, so just get a bunch of feints until one ball runs over the other.

This will most likely get moved, but I use Apothecary and Staff. Your main drivers of CA are going to be regen and TU ticks.

Just make the timer longer on cap so that a single person can take the ruins if they wanted to. That way even if you are the only roamer on you can still take back your BL's bloodlust.

I don't run SB at all for the aforementioned reasons of it being too one-dimensional for anyone's liking; thus the reason for this topic existing in the first place.

Staff isn't melee lol. MH dagger may be the biggest abomination of a weapon we have; I think he means more like the old days of Sword/Warhorn and Axe/Axe, or Sword / Axe and Axe / Warhorn (both 'partial' melee but not involving arrow spam) or Sword / Warhorn + GS (actual melee). When pets didn't suck and could draw some aggro (and live for more than 5 seconds) so that ranger could get in close and do a lot of damage.

The fact that almost all of them use Sic Em, OWP, RF 'burst' which is GREAT for unaware ganking but horrible for literally everything else. Seriously, most Soulbeasts I see spend more time running than doing anything useful. Like not running to kite, just plain running not to die. Outside of that, you get the 'wall rangers' that will try to be useful by picking off a single target or using barrage behind a door, but they get run over as soon as the door/wall comes down. All that said, I've found great success as playing roamer/scout/flanker. I don't use longbow or greatsword though.

Taking traps severely hampers your damage / survival ability--someone linked paper roll above, I suggest everyone go and review his stuff for what I'm talking about. Essentially adding the other conditions in to a druid build stretches it too thin since both ancient seeds and entangle are bleed based. So naturally you are going to want to add sharpening stone in with that and need lighting reflexes for your stunbreak / immob remove...so you have room for pretty much one trap--and none of them are really that good--so it's best just to take really anything else, especially survival because you will be clearing conditions as well. I mean specifically looking at traps, spike trap is pretty laughable in general and you don't need more CC when you play druid, venom trap is pointless if you are running shortbow as you have all the poison you will need (not to mention potential extra from WS traits), and frost trap is in the same vein of the chill isn't going to do too much for you (if you really want it, just take axe instead of shortbow). That leaves flame trap which is fine for a trap, but still bad--it had its time a few years ago when traps were throwable and the trapper runes could be abused. The heal trap itself is debatable, I don't personally use it as it has some very weird mechanics and you can still be condi overloaded fast while standing in it--so I just take TU. I think the reason paper roll himself uses the heal trap now is mostly content related, as this bleed druid build has been around for a long while and I can imagine it getting stale if you are trying to run a YT channel.

Right, the reason I ignored those is poison damage is laughable (even with the 2-3 traits you can take to help) and burning access really only exists on torch which is a pretty bad weapon in general. Those two will also fare better on Soulbeast where you can get some damage / duration stats from the pet and also have access to other covers like confusion and such (through Iboga). Druid is literally a bleed build or nothing. As mentioned before this lynchpins on Trailblazer's and Ancient Seeds along with survivability from WS and damaging from Skirmishing.

IMO, KDR in WvW is idiotic. It just promotes a set of very bad behaviors--the top two being ganking and running meme builds. You also have the people that never leave structures and thus never die but can get many kills through siege or 'door warfare'. I agree with promoting guild prestige though. There needs to be more to recognize guilds that do a lot for their servers.

Really when we say 'condi' druid we're talking about bleeds because that's the only (damaging) condition that ranger in general has access to. I mention that as bleeds are hit or miss--most people in WvW are terrible and ancient seeds seems 'OP' to them so you can get fairly high stacks of bleeds fairly quickly. This is what you will find on most roaming montages and YT, but the reality is a bit different than that. Running a condi druid myself for the past 4 or so months I can say that against competent players it has pretty big weaknesses. The only thing really saving it is that Trailblazer's armor is so powerful, but the druid skills themselves need a lot of skill to use properly. In a nutshell the pet is useless without taking BM, but if you take BM you have very limited clear options as you HAVE to take skirmishing. You also are limited on what pets actually do anything, and some of them are straight up bugged (ex: electric wyvern's F2 has a high chance of doing jack). In addition, anyone who knows what CC is (thankfully most of WvW players do not) will wreck you, as you have zero source of sustain, and most likely one method for getting out of bad situations (lightning reflexes). You'd think they'd add some sustain on entering or exiting CA but nope--you do that at the wrong time and you're going to waste it as someone will just CC you and force you to leave it / stealth. Finally, against anything with high cleanse and / or a lot of barrier, reflect, etc. access you are going to either lose or stalemate a high percentage of time. You could say this is a natural hard counter but so many classes have access to massive cleanse / escapes that it becomes more of a major build weakness than an isolated thing.

Ranger definitely has a lot of problems, not sure any of them are fixable though. Since launch the biggest problem is the pet, but they can't fix that without someone complaining, so it remains mostly useless. Really, if you want an example of how hopeless this is, look at Soulbeast--it was specifically made to take away the pet and then hit AGAIN with taking pet swap in combat away, because reasons. The weapons and traitlines all have never really been updated either. Specifically about traitlines, like what even is beastmastery anymore? None of the traits do anything, and you can't even take the line for shouts because they randomly changed that to something else that has zero synergy with any runes ("commands"), and didn't compensate. There is currently zero balancing effort as well. We can blame it on all the resources going to the expansion, but seriously what even was this last patch? It tells me that Ranger at this point in time is too broken to fix.

It'd be neat, but don't want a changing of the guard at Anet to result in a random permaban if they decide to adopt a no tolerance policy for DPS meters at any point.

I think I understand, the editing team must also be the team that is responsible for skill balance.

Ok wait, you want to remove Ancient Seeds...but apply Ancient Seeds when using Vine Surge? The thing that hits 3 targets, can be used with no CC needed, and that can be used very quickly with Staff trait + Quick Draw? You also want Jacaranda to use Vine Surge and trap 3 targets when you can't even avoid the single, VERY slow moving projectile? Yeah that definitely sounds like it wouldn't cause massive crying on forums. Ever. In addition, you want to remove Entangle as a survival skill and put it on a spirit--with what recompense? Firstly, Entangle almost never works to begin with in WvW, it's a literal condi clear and it's an Elite. Second, If you put it on the spirit you are removing an Elite, like literally we'd now have no survival Elite. All of this is kind of funny since your avatar is a Deadeye...and thieves are the one class that is literally unable to be CC'd let alone immob'd unless they blow all of their escape abilities. So I'm not sure where all this vitriol about Ancient Seeds is coming from, especially since every Ranger I meet in WvW is running Soulbeast anyway (something that also cannot be immob'd really at all).

So Ranger Commands?

Certain classes I can see it, like Scourge with a bunch of minions. In general, I've noticed condi doesn't use many boons unless they are traveling with a support. I do think that high toughness is far less of a problem than high protection and other boon uptime though; this could be rectified if they gave more classes boon strip.

Oh, yeah to match our Moas...

Ah, my bad...didn't realize they changed that as I haven't ran signet of the hunt in years (or any signet for that matter).