Gotejjeken.1267

I think they really just need to restructure how the mode works again. The auto updating structures ruined a lot of things as it took player activity out of it. Then RBL just came along and destroyed any semblance of logic because towers no longer matter for keeps, the BL is huge to limit fights, etc. etc. At a basic level, defending should have a purpose, and attacking should have a purpose. Unfortunately that requires probably a complete overhaul of the mode because they've strayed way, way from that.

So you post something like this, something that is clearly against using supply for defense purposes (i.e. siege) and you also think there cannot possibly be spies or trolls that use all the supply for no reason? I do have to laugh at WvW being a 'PvP format'--it uses PvE stats, food buffs, etc. (so it's unbalanced as you can get), is mostly played by random people that are not grouped and not in any comms, and is clearly built around gaining and holding objectives. Contrast that with actual PvP which is played by small comped groups, is about holding nodes / fighting, and has a strict set of usable stats. If anything, WvW is a PvE format with ability to attack other players. Anyway, at the core of it, taking supply from keeps for any offensive maneuver is incorrect--that's what camps are for. You can argue that taking supply from towers is fine as there is little reason to protect most of them, but never from keeps.

Yeah that's why I think I agree with Bigo and mode specification is important. As I can see Druid not being used in open world PvE but in WvW I'd strongly disagree with those assessments for staff; but again WvW is way more about control than damage. Ex: 1. Exists to build CA form and heal you, can also heal allies 2. Never use this 3. The most important skill as it is both a kite and a blast heal 4. Very important skill as it is a long root from range 5. Very important skill as it can be used as a blast heal or cause projectiles to heal you (i.e. rapid fire) Anyway, I suggest looking closer at some of the things if you are talking strictly theme. In avatar form alone you have things like seed of life which is a direct nature reference, and again have rooting skills throughout the spec that summon literal vines (staff 4, ancient seeds, etc.). Considering HoT is entirely about vines and jungles (when the spec was introduced), Druid is definitely the spec that makes the most thematic sense out of all of them. Also, nature isn't just plants--celestial bodies (i.e. the moon) make up nature as well. So celestial avatar and such channel astral / cosmic facets which you really can't get more nature than that.

This is straying pretty far from the topic at this point, but what would you balance PvE around if not speed clearing? Completing high end fractals and raids are the endgame content for PvE, and completing fast is literally the name of the game in PvE for everything. This is why you have karma trains and heart point trains and worldboss trains---because the aim is to knock them out as fast as possible to farm rewards as fast as possible. Any other take and I'd just think you are being facetious or possibly uninformed. To work this back around to the actual topic at hand, do you think LB is good for any of that? What use does a person standing at 1500 and using barrage or rapid fire do for anything PvE wise other than roleplay? I mean with that amount of posts surely you've been around long enough to remember bearbow in PvE? And why it is memorable in that bots used longbow to tag things and the bear because it was the tankiest pet so they could just auto farm on maps? If there have been no revisions since then to the bow skills themselves, then wouldn't logically it still only be good in PvE for selfish reasons? Is that really a weapon design worth keeping for almost a decade? I think that's the real question.

Why would you want a weapon to have sub-par performance in any game mode? So your players get used to a weapon they like and try a different mode and all of a sudden it's sub-par so they are either forced to switch or stop playing? That doesn't seem like great marketing. The rest is just balancing debate type questions. You know who top tier players / teams are through data; in competitive it's win / loss related, and in PvE it's all about speed clearing. You use the data itself to know if a weapon is underperforming.

This is highly dependent on how good the person using it is at the class. If they are a top tier player then if they aren't getting good performance, it is absolutely a reason to change the 'something'. Anyway, I think we've proved that LB is effective but one-dimensional; that is, very niche in most game modes (ganking in WvW, open world in PvE, and not really used in PvP).

Also since I've 'never fought a good ranger 1v1' here is a set of duels, one lose and one win: This particular soulbeast had far more pressure from using axe than LB would ever give; they did use GS to great effect as well. In fact, on the particular druid build I run LB is pretty meaningless since I can nullify the burst with staff 5 and barrage doesn't do very much in a 1v1--the only chance they'd have is trying to outrange but that would turn into your typical 'kite battle'--either they kite enough to hit a good burst or two, or I LoS enough and get them anyway. Also to reiterate, I'm not agreeing with the topic creator that LB needs damage buffs, I'm trying to prove a point that LB is effective but also very limited to surprise and +1 situations. You can find better weapons for pretty much any other scenario (as seen here in the duel). In that regard, LB could use a rework to fit better with the current state of things and get the 'pew pew' stigma out of people's minds. Also to cover the PvE base...does anyone actually run LB in high end content (i.e. raids)? I would think it wouldn't be very effective there since the pressure is super limited. I see it used all the time in open world but I don't think that's a good indicator of literally anything.

I don't even know what this means. So if LB is only good for PvE then the solution is to avoid using it in competitive modes? That is...some interesting take right there. You can literally say this about most any class, you realize this right? You can't touch a good staff mirage.... You can't touch a good daredevil... etc. I also don't know what untouchable rangers you know...care to share any with actual YT footage of never losing?

An immob setup with 'ranged control'...please, grace us with some videos of this? Because if someone is playing 'ranged control' immob, it'd be far better just to play what LB is actually good at and run ranged spiking. Sure they cover all the gaps. Which is why most soulbeasts are spec'd for tanking and or running. The ones that aren't always run in groups...I wonder why? See, just have to refer to my first point of 'the forums will justify LB being OP no matter what'.

So this is something I have a lot of experience with, and longbow is not a weapon you use at all in an immob setup. For Druid, Shortbow is the bow of choice, and SB I don't personally run because I find the immob capability much less (no ancient seeds, far, far less CC access, etc. etc.)--but on the SB's I have been immob'd by, they always seem to run axe and GS, and immob usually happens with entangle. Anyway, to boil this topic down, we have two sides. We have the side of people saying LB is one-dimensional (in various ways) and the side of people arguing against this for either thematic or other reasons. The other reasons being what you will find the longer you are on these forums--people innately thing LB and pets are OP. No matter what, and they will make ANY reason to justify this. I've stated my issues with and potential fix for LB earlier in this topic, so won't repeat that. But I will repeat ranger Longbow is extremely one-dimensional and relies solely on rapid fire for ganking and barrage for tagging (in any gamemode). It's a boring design that is super easy to counterplay and has little justification to exist in the current state of the game.

A couple of my issues: - Don't like losing attack/guard functionality under any circumstance; I know not a lot of people seem to do this, but desynch play is actually very useful in competitive modes (command pet to attack something, you attack something else). "Return to me" has never been super important because normally by time you hit it your pet is dead anyway, and it is much safer to swap or merge to prevent this. I get the new version of F1 basically does this with marking but it is more confusing to me since it splits the functionality out into two places instead of one. Might as well just have the current F1 be able to mark downed allies and the pet go rez them. - I don't think they will ever implement swapping while in beastmode, because the entire 'tradeoff' limiting that was aimed at beastmode. Even if you limit the CD's of the beast abilities, you can still get powerful effects by unmerge--for instance, swoop for a gap closer into smokescale's dark field; or swoop as an escape into porcines forage for boons / stealth. Essentially, anet seemingly does not want the choice here to have flexibility in beastmode at all, and wants this choice prior to combat. - Not being able to merge with your pet when it is down on soulbeast leaves a huge possibility open for it to just die by random AoE and you not being able to enter beastmode. That essentially kills the entire spec. - The CA rework I think would end with everyone using healing / conceal anyway--at least in competitive modes. No amount of damage is going to replace the escape functionality that celestial shadow provides, or the healing / condition removal of seed of life / lunar impact. In short, if they would just rework the beastmastery line (to effectively use commands) and the WS line (to get some of our cleanse options out of it) and pet F2s to be more inline with today's game then mostly everything else will work as intended. The elite specs pretty much work fine as-is, with any glaring flaws being centered around the pet which they have stated they can't fix. As a last thought, as far as stowing and whatnot goes, the ability to have an 'empty merge' while on core and druid would be nice. Basically you merge with your pet and that's it--this already actually happens a LOT on soulbeast as a bug if you have your pet merged and jump into water. If you then switch builds it is possible to have a perma stowed pet (I've done this by doing the SB bug then switching to Druid for instance); the only way to un-stow it for me was to either map change or log out / in.

Syphon skills work exactly like that though, the healing you gain is inverse to the damage the other player is receiving... I'm not sure how else that would work really, healing is a positive addition to HP and damage a negative one, so they are pretty much literal opposites. Anyway, if any supervisor / lord NPC can scale via how many players are in an area then they should be able to apply that to everything else. They already have means to show large scale battles (OJs) so they can obviously tell how many players are in a given area. At most you'd need one other indicator between 'not popping OJs' and 'popping OJs' to indicate medium sized battles (20 players total or something). And considering the amount of particle effects and other 'fluff' flying about, I'm pretty sure performance wouldn't be an issue if something like that were added, or at least not an issue they haven't worked around with every other aspect of a large scale gamemode like WvW.

I mean, Druid literally is about as 'nature' as you get. Every staff skill is nature themed, it has a ton of literal root abilities (ancient seeds being the most notable) and you can turn into a literal nature spirit every 10s or so. I'd agree Soulbeast lost that theme completely, it was purely about player complaints and their inability to fix pets. So that's why the green cloud, because it's the only 'nature' theme they could muster with the merging thing (aside from the stance animations).

This is why GW terms make no sense to me compared to every other definition. That chart for all intents and purposes is a chart showing what skills 'burst' the highest, which of course are mostly single hit skills like frost trap and worldly impact. But they label it 'DPS' which usually determines how much damage is done over a prolonged period of time, not 'damage in a single second'. Because DPS = 'damage in a single second' falls apart immediately with something like OWP, you don't use that with burst skills like worldly impact because it only hits once, and even if it doubles the damage you do from that one instance it won't match to a channeled skill like rapid fire. Regardless, the fact that PBS is even on the list for a high ranking burst is absurd, and likely the reason they just made all CC's 0 damage in competitive modes as they are literally appearing on 'DPS' charts when they are emergency CC skills. Having those skills do damage just muddies the water even more then it obviously already is.

Longbow is extremely one dimensional, but I don't think it needs a damage increase. If barrage is troubling you, equip something that gives you quickness. The only thing I'd like to see is hunter's shot give stealth regardless of if the arrow actually hits. There's too many defenses in the game now to render it useless in most situations (and I don't call hitting ambient creatures nearby a 'fix') .

You said it yourself, they already do it with keep lord scaling and all over the place in PvE with champions and such. It's a simple scaling coefficient, nothing more. They also already do this when multiple people rez, it rezzes 'faster', or uses a higher coefficient. This would just do the inverse, it starts low and at a certain threshold it kicks up.

So removing rally, enforcing 1:1 rezzing, and reducing speed/hp is less complicated than just scaling rez speed based on number of players present? Ok then...

This makes sense, or at least scale the rez speed depending on group size in the area (not sure if this one is possible though). So if you are 1v2 then the rez speed is very slow to give balance to the solo person--but if it's like 50 v 50 then almost normal because you'll probably have siege and a ton of cleave going on making rezzing very dangerous. Because the problem for me is if the rezzer has active or passive defenses to begin with, then it becomes near impossible to stop the rez because you can't interrupt it. This really only applies for me in pretty small scale (less than 10).

What techniques would those be? The siege loving servers will literally siege up towers and sit in them like a day job. There is no incentive to leave as they are all mithril and diamond ranks so they don't need pips.

Gotta disagree here with rangers not being welcome in engame content, as spotter rangers were absolutely a thing in dungeon runs. I seem to remember a few of the spirits being highly requested as well (unless I'm only remembering GW1 where spirit ranger was king).

Healing nerfs absolutely broke Druid, because the immob portion of the spec is still intact, and is the only reason why people run it at all. There was a period after HoT where Druid was wanted in most groups because of the large amount of healing it brought. The main reason spirits don't see play now isn't because they die easily, its because the buffs they give are stuck in 2012-2013. They were never updated and lost all competitive use when they became immobile. I fail to see how any of this contradicts they need to either buff stances to full duration or buff druid group healing and make spirits useful.

Druid doesn't need a 'rework' it worked fine before it was nerfed. It used to have a place there prior to the healing nerfs, and rise of PoF specs that completely invalidated it. Sprit ranger also used to have a large place in group content when spirits could move. I don't see how changing up weapons is going to help the awful traits that ranger has. Very few are group oriented, and most center around the pet which as many have mentioned is about as anti-group as you can get with its squishiness, inability to stealth, and boon stealing. In fact, the melee weapons we do have access to have seen constant changes/nerfs. Greatsword attack chain evade comes to mind, crippling throw being removed, sword losing the ability to stick to target, revamping the sword entirely so we lose access to important on-demand evades (i.e. serpent strike) etc. etc. So the solutions would be to either buff stances to full duration or buff spirits again. If the new spec has any interplay with spirits and grants access to something like wells then I believe ranger could be useful once again.

Only have two things: 1. Purity of Purpose converts condis and not just removes them, making it doubly problematic as full bear stance share would be; even with the nerf it's leagues above stances 2. Everyone always advocates to buff druid when it was buffed around launch and look what happened. It's a never ending wheel with ranger, a spec will be working, people complain, it gets nerfed, we rangers ask for compensation, forums say buff the spec they nerfed....

All this is great except if you run into power builds it heals for practically nothing. Essentially your entire argument is hinging on an overtuned suggestion and specific scenarios. Even at current time, Bear stance lasts for 3 seconds on allies if shared, and absolutely no one is going to notice the extra 1.2k healing or whatever it is if it cleansed constantly. You can puke out that kind of healing by spamming 1 on engi medkit--a topic which you are dancing around. Anyway, tell me, when is the last time you noticed stance ranger in a group or were requested to bring one for group content? Since stance ranger (according to your argument) is perfectly capable of replacing other support classes in a group (because remember not being wanted in a group is a stigma). Screenshot or video evidence would be nice. Because if we take the overtuning out (the combining of stance effects) and just pump up stances to full duration on allies, there is no conceivable way you can prove that is anyway OP given the current state of the game.

This isn't biased at all...