Gotejjeken.1267

Let's not also overlook the fact the streamer (i.e. the one benefiting from this through views) would not transfer to EU with own funds or would not finance said transfer to NA. So I can see why hobo would be a bit steamed here.

Yeah after watching that I think Fastcar has definitely been training Trevor lol. Anyway, I have two issues with it: Hobo showing up with a tanky SB build with a single hittable CC skill (prelude lash) was never going to kill this Druid. It doesn't mean this Druid is unkillable or good, it means that you'd essentially need to build for CC so he can't just run like that. The wager was never 'until someone gets bored', there were only time limits in place to stop the running fiesta or it was implied it'd be a loss. Also I see no switching of builds allowed here, because I think Trevor knows what I said above is correct, and if Hobo would have switched to a more CC oriented build he'd be done. If anything this has proved that MH axe indeed is awful, and inevitably someone is going to go try this celestial build thinking it's good when this 'fight' was about as engineered into a favorable situation as one could get (including 1984 levels of double speak).

Builds tweaks / discussion aside, this captures the essence I think. Essentially for us rangers to do the damage people complain about we cannot run any defensive traitline (WS/NM). If we do run WS/NM then the sustain of practically any other spec is equal or better so nothing is accomplished. So there IS skill play in 'pew pew'ing' from range, because you have to know positioning very, very well or you are useless. The problem is even if you have the best positioning in the world there is that one scrapper or guardian firing off every defensive stat in the game and running right by without a care in the world. Then (this is a PUG problem) your group goes chasing them and none of them have the damage to take out the sustain so you get nothing done.

Wait, you want all these nonsensical changes because of some terribad backline Elementalist casting meteor shower? This is why we can't have nice things. I swear, I don't know what scares awful players more, ancient seeds or longbow. I can tell you good players don't care about either of these things and they don't do anything outside of picking off stragglers. I wonder if it's the stragglers that always come to the forums? I mean, in the past day while roaming I've fought a berserker who stayed in my immobs for all of 1/4 of a second, a scrapper who is literally immune to the immobs and on top throws up projectile blocks with superspeed, and if that goes wrong just goes into mini-mode and becomes immune to literally everything, and a reaper who if I dare pull out LB would just port to me and destroy. Anyway, the 'inverted damage' on LB is the best--sure let's not fix shortbow (which is meant to be close range and also suffers from projectile blocking issues), let's essentially make longbow a melee weapon (lol) because people can't seem to find the dodge key or a line of sight. Trust me, you don't need inverted anything, if you are squishy I'm killing you regardless with GS. Unless you want to 'invert' that too and I could throw it again, would be great. Also, are you saying pets improve damage options more than past years? I hope not or you need to go read some patch notes, it's walls of text like this that got pets neutered to window pane licking CC devices. In the 'days of old' you'd be dead in about 30 seconds while standing on a wall from a stealth attack via jaguar. So I think what you really mean is 'pets are ignored above because they suck so much I have nothing to complain about' 😂

If you are getting rek'd by a condi SB just wait until you meet a good reaper....

lol, I was actually thinking Trevor was a Fastcar alt for a while until I heard him talk Anyway, I hope this match happens, Tink Tink definitely the real hero here

Pure irony considering a Twitch streamer started this thread.

I feel like this argument is pretty specific to classes that were built to CC without a second thought about how broken both CC and damage at once is. We can have this, but I want a tradeoff that if I'm at range it cannot be blocked; can just say 'use your gap closers' when the complaints roll in. Because essentially, oppressive melee classes benefit from adding damage back to CC more than anyone else. The forums are all about counterplay, so what is the counterplay for being hit with a CC that does massive damage? Using my stunbreak or anti-CC skill right? Well you'd use that anyway without the damage because the point of the CC is to setup burst, why should it have additional bonuses? The reason all this worked before is simply the game was different. The original devs had ideas for how the original mechanics would work, and they did work pretty well. There were far less 'do everything' classes and buttons so you could have things like damage on CC as it was really just warriors that had this back in the day because their whole thing is being close. Now EVERYTHING seems to CC in some way and every class has additional damage that makes balancing pretty impossible. The only argument I can see for returning CC is to help mitigate some of the barrier spam many classes rely on. Feel like reason it is so oppressive is there are a lot of skills that used to damage and do not now, leading to builds that have huge barrier uptime that is very hard to counter. Though that is probably getting into an entirely different discussion...

Sounds like OP needs to transfer to EU for some content for the Twitch channel...

Essentially, but OP lost in the other topic in the actual Ranger forums so posted here 🤣

What does any of this have to do with people macro'ing to stay in the game while they are afk?

Well time to theorycraft some nike ranger builds... Forget alliances, Anet need to rename the mode 'world of running' cause that's all that is going to be happening now.

Wat: Game Update Notes: June 8, 2021 - Game Update Notes - Guild Wars 2 Forums Unless you meant in intensity?

Where is the 'high tier' gameplay then? No explanation about running from the 2v1? Because if you can't 2v1 with the build in 'middle tier' gameplay then what good is it if you are inviting 'high tier' opponents to a 'money match'? Also, it is doubtful anyone is going to take some superfluous '1k gold' bet so you can get traffic for your fledgling Twitch channel. Unless we get some better content of you winning 1v1's against 'high tier' players or winning 2v1's there really is no other conclusion than Celestial Druid is a meme.

Using 'PvP' generally: Duels should only be requestable in PvP areas, and have some mechanic like 'followers' where you can send a duel request and the opposing party can just ignore it indefinitely. Can of worms but, mounts should really be removed from all PvP content. I don't even know if they are in sPvP (I hope not) but they make WvW a bit of a joke with the provided mobility and CC immunity. EDIT: I also remember when people were vehemently against mounts because they didn't want GW2 to 'become WoW'. Mostly years ago on the old forums that are long gone so hard to prove now, but mounts were definitely not wanted by a large section of the playerbase.

Trait / skill rework is pretty simple: Baseline pet stat increases from BM Add something to make commands work like shouts did to open up alternate playstyles outside of WS Add some sustain to Druid (at least on Glyph of Stars) Add boon support or something to NM to make it fit with the current state of the game The other stuff I can't agree with. Some random objections: Soulbeast has plenty of stability with Dolyak Stance, not sure why you'd need more Skirmishing is most definitely not just used for power builds--it lynchpins condi bleed builds The WS 'rework' does nothing to get people away from it Making Druid a healbot does absolutely zero to get people to use it Taking away Soulbeast stats in exchange for longer stances on merge/unmerge is a pretty big nerf--no one is going to randomly merge or unmerge for some crappy temporary stat boost (that can be stripped / corrupted) Making dagger into sword 2.0 isn't really doing anything; if anything dagger should be almost pure condi because ranger lacks that (and the offhand is pure condi) Not sure why you'd want to remove piercing from SB as poison volley pierces by default--we don't need more LOS stupidity by making the 'splinters' hit random walls and things around targets

I don't think the topic creator is coming back...

Also note the above is just my critique on things; to head any blowback off, since I'm not a dueler, here is a rather unedited comparison vid of a druid spec that I run that I believe would be better than running celestial: One day I'll figure out how to edit a proper roaming video...

Aren't you one of the people who thinks pet downstate is OP? As far as this topic...not sure where to start honestly. I guess I'll start with: The necro fight at around 23:00 mark tells me why you most likely shouldn't be challenging people to 1k gold duels. I get the necro out zoned you because axe is just a bad weapon all around, but if you are super tanky and can never die--why run from the 1v2? The other player was a DH, Druid eats DH alive because of ancient seeds / immob. So you essentially have one VERY immobile class in necro and one pretty immobile class in DH and you still got out of dodge instead of just kiting them to death? I'm guessing the reason for fleeing is you have zero CC skills on your bar or your pets (I get Jacaranda has an immob but it's not great) and are running druid...all you should be running is CC. If you have no CC skills you have no way to actually do a 1v2 because you can't lock someone down and focus on another person--all you can do is well, run. On the topic of SB, all I have to say is that example at 28:00 is....wow. The person was LB #2'ing you from like 3 feet away , I'm surprised they weren't running bear and / or running macros just to automate their fighting. They did counter-immob you which is kind of ironic... Anyway, this is essentially where the topic falls apart and ends, because if you are challenging non-80 IQ power soulbeasts who have actual damage and run LB to a duel on your no-CC axe wielding celestial druid...I don't even know what to say. You'd be dead before the ship even sank.

Well, just never, EVER enter The Bitter Cold. I don't have motion issues of any kind and that area is just insane with the amount of blowing snow and snow creatures lol

Truthfully, there is no saving or redesigning the ranger, because all of the great ideas have been reworked or nerfed. Druid is literally the prime example here, the initial idea was beautiful and made perfect sense with the nature theme, alternative to pet in the form of CA, and overall group utility in heals and immobilizes. What happened? Nerfed into a pretty much one trick pony (Immob machine). Soulbeast made less sense thematically as it was born because of the pet being a liability, so was more of a 'here you can merge now go away' type deal. Still it had good options and group potential but what happened? Nerfed into guess what, a one trick pony (Sic' Em ganker). Core itself had a ton of potential which is why we have 50 some pets, but the game design and other class balance changed so wildly that it is simply unusable now in practically all content. I also understand the desire to get rid of the pet or make it just a visual thing, but if that happens then I personally will be much less inclined to play anymore. Reason is, if the pet is reduced to a visual novelty then the class itself is pointless, because then any other class can do everything a ranger can do with its own unique identity intact, so might as well just remove the ranger.

It absolutely is not a red herring, otherwise half of ranger's damage output wouldn't be centered on the pet. The pet literally IS the ranger (and literally LITERALLY in the case of soulbeast merge). I think this is where people get confused with ranger...the pet isn't just an expendable class mechanic; like calling turrets, clones, or minions 'pets' and then attempting to apply this back to ranger is a gross simplification. Therefore it's not a 'bug', it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the class operates. But feel free to keep attempting to prove this 'bug' based on 'other classes'. At most we've discovered in this overly long topic that there are missing UI elements for those somehow unaware they can command the pet during downstate (because surely no one would try without an appropriate icon telling them it is possible). Everything else is just banter, because pet access in downstate makes perfect sense even down to theme (unless we want to start arguing rangers go mute while downed as well and cannot issue commands).

Are you sure about this? The fact the ranger has identical pet mechanics in downstate as in not means that you have to tamper with the swap and F2 altogether to disable them. Tampering with the swap and F2 likely means breaking some other aspect of the pet due to how it is interwoven with other AI behaviors. You act like anet has the most modular code ever when it's been proven over the past nine years they can't change a single thing without breaking three others. Just see the latest issue with breaking llama interaction by re-enabling living story quests...it's all over the game. So yeah, it'd be far easier to add some UI elements to downstate rather than try to manipulate an entire structure to please the what, three people concerned about this? I mean it might be a newsflash but they don't care about adding UI elements like this because there are far bigger fish to fry.

No offense, but I'm not sure you do either. I bet you didn't realize that ranger pets are tied to the general creature AI of the game right? So doing anything with them is extremely difficult? Whereas UI coding is literally the easiest form of coding? Anyway, the answer is essentially this:

Which it will be unless the player playing the druid is bad. If a druid blows all their CC skills after Ancient Seeds procs and this isn't a vastly outnumbered fight (because if it is you've probably lost anyway), you simply target them and CC them back; they will have no means of escape, and likely fall back to camping staff (free down) or blowing CA which is pretty easy to counter. Anyway, if we're going down the rabbit hole of 'chaining things is bad' then we have to look at a lot of other places, starting with thieves and stealth and engi/tempest in group boons. As in 'stealth should be only for escaping or initial surprise, nothing else' and 'boons should get weaker the more players they are spread to' kind of thing. As a tldr; I don't see a reason to nitpick on druid when soulbeast performs far, far better in less skilled hands. If you are getting rekt by Ancient Seeds you definitely are not downing (let alone catching) a decent soulbeast. It has FAR more utility and burst potential. I'm also coming at this as someone who has spent countless hours roaming and group play using a druid build as described in the OP. If anything it needs left mostly alone and some more stability added, because if someone knows how to CC (which a staggering amount of people don't looking at keep lords and break bars) it becomes a very uphill / almost unwinnable battle. As some final thoughts, watch any good druid roaming montage, it's mostly kiting around with staff over LARGE distances, because you can't hold a point worth anything. This leads to like 3-5 minute solo fights and nothing in group play other than stalling or distracting people long enough for the real damage to arrive.