Gotejjeken.1267

At a higher level, seems like a lot of non-changes here. Anyway, minor tangent time...it has never been apparent to me why they periodically shuffle numbers on OH dagger without fixing the major issue that is dagger #4 range has been nerfed for what nearly 8 years now? For those uninitiated, was this trait: Off-Hand Training - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W) Let's look at the other off-hands since this trait: Bonfire: Radius = 240 (equal without OH Training) Whirling Defense: Reflect Radius = 180 (equal without OH Training) Call of The Wild: Radius = 900 (better than with OH Training) But yet, nothing with Stalker's Strike. They literally reduce the CD of it, but the CD isn't the problem here, it's the pitiful range in today's game where everyone has Sonic the Hedgehog movement ability.

It was a nonsense change to make it appear as if something was done. At least that's what I'm hoping, because if this was the small change to drive the big, I don't even want to know what an Untamed rework looks like.

I've seen the word ranger about 4 times in 9 pages--that tells me a LOT, and while I'm glad for no nerfs I have to lol at the changes. It's the most passive-aggressive changeset I've seen in a while--'we're gonna nerf FF by 25% in PvE but here's some rando buffs to OH weapons no one uses in PvP and WvW!'. Apparently though, the devs forgot they were supposed to actually meaningfully change untamed prior to nerfing FF, instead of just straight nerfing a spec with an insane rotation set 'for reasons'. At least we're safe from ziplines now--remember when touching water would unmerge you? 😂

I get it, not that I like the '360 no-scope, oneshot or nothing' balance, but I get the reasoning. My counter to that is, if it doesn't matter than why not just leave it? If we're saying the 5 seconds is excess between fights, then they still shouldn't be changing it. I have a feeling, someone, somewhere downed a dev a few times in a fight with it, and they kicked it up 5s to match their typical balancing increment. It's just a really weird change, along the lines of the Sharpening Stone 'non-change' in leaving it without 20% reduction even though no one anywhere really seems to use it in common/meta builds (at least in competitive).

To clarify, it was the '20 to 25 seconds is nothing, but up to 40 seconds would be' type logic that made me draw the comparison, as anet is doing the same thing in a less 'git gud noob' type tone that was being used there. The point is most games when balancing shave fractions of seconds or at most seconds off something, not 5-10s of seconds that GW2 balance always is for 'reasons'.

It's literally a 25% CD reduction nerf--'basically the same' would be say 5%, leading to something off the wall in 21 second CD. Your 'quick maths' do demonstrate a problem with their balancing, as they literally make it 25 seconds for no reason other than it is a 'nice number'. That's not even balance at this point, it's arbitrary dart throwing. Which isn't even getting to the fact that we need more unblockables, not less. We have things like reflection as a counter and had things like retaliation, but they eschew all of that in the name of the basest form of defense...block (with invuln being right up there serving practically the same mindless purpose) Also, before we'd go the route of they nerfed the CD because 'longbow pew pew from 1500', we'd also have to remember maps are like 10 feet wide and can be crossed in all of 3 seconds by practically any class. With this in mind, range is no longer a factor here as chasedown potential is through the roof. The scrapper changes are again just random dart throwing as nothing was done about the actual issue in grenade oneshots. You know, those prohibited oneshots only meme teleburst Untamed's got to use...

I'm not the confused reaction, but I can say for the first time on these forums I am actually confused at a response 😂.

I think it depends on how you play it. One could argue that it was practically the only support when it was designed, but unlike say firebrand, it wasn't designed to run minstrel and support forever. All of the Druid tools are given duelist ability, right down to staff which is the best kiting weapon ranger has. To that vein I'd agree CA is terrible for support and great for dueling as you can get in/out of it fairly quickly. Staying in CA for a long time is a death sentence for sure. But yeah, whatever direction they want to go with it, they need to fix the pet interaction. Knowing how they balance though, if they fix the pet to live longer they will make the spec pure support, which I'd personally be done with the game at that point as its been my goto competitive spec forever.

If you are roaming in WvW or doing sPvP then you need something that can kite. Doesn't matter what way you do this as long as you learn the skill, because positioning can practically win you any fight. Also be mindful on both Druid and Untamed (and core if you really want to be hipster) your pet is your biggest liability. Any opponent that knows what they are doing is just going to target the pet, and if they succeed you've lost a big utility/CC source.

No thanks. Avatar form, staff, spirits, and pets are too clunky to make a proper support; they need to just double down on enhancing the dueling capabilities. Bringing sharpening stone CD down (and entangle in PvE), reducing CA form to 10s in PvP and making Glyph of Stars match other skills of this type (it needs to pulse / heal allies way faster) are pretty much all they need to do with Druid at this point. Druid (much like Untamed) isn't really a PvE spec, as both were designed with competitive in mind. I'd personally rather we keep it that way and keep Soulbeast for PvE usage. In that light, at least Druid is pretty fine in competitive right now, and would be pretty much set with the above changes.

They did, was Irinieo who dev'd Druid, the staple pet that is smokescale, and I think quite a bit of Soulbeast. Yeah, agree; I remember also complaining about Wallow not being Deadly last year at launch--makes no sense to be anything but Deadly considering it's F2 is condi/poison. Agree too about the pets in general... Wallow F2 just applies poison and not anything else, when it should apply at least torment and probably slow or something. It should also be deadly, as mentioned above. Tiger's Phase Pounce is...I think it may be worse than Red Wyvern fire field and that's saying a LOT. The Aegis is nice, but has to be timed super well because the roar is slow; the tiger is also a cat so it is glass cannon for no real gain. Turtles bubble is good but the turtle is useless otherwise. Slam can be an ok CC--the Untamed controlled one, because the turtle uses it so moronically it never hits if left to the AI. Speaking of slam, it NEEDS to replace snap on soulbeast merge, full stop. Pheonix is...lmao. The most glass cannon pet ever, an F2 that takes 40 years to use and hits nothing, and utterly useless otherwise. Oh, it also has Dash to add salt to the wound--as Dash is a 1s detonate to make sure it hits nothing and isn't even a CC...despite us literally having E. Wyvern that has identical skills in terms of buffet/dash (even though it goes thru things with its dash like a crackhead). There never will be competency around balancing ranger pets, at least not in the near future. I know this because of the Tail Swipe nerf, which was only usable on meme builds (teleburst untamed). Oh, that and nerfing Iboga because it did too good of numbers on the PvE golem. They touched nothing else.

My point was cele promotes boon spam which they balance around. But to your point, the problem lies between--with minstrel and zerk you have to at least choose what you are (support vs. dps), where cele has both, but again won't be touched because they seem to be adamant about keeping roaming revolving around support/dps combined monsters.

I've never seen a person ragdoll so hard... Usually if you point blank shot someone they will fly, but not like that... Something with the tower? Or just the right timing? Either way I can't stop laughing how sudden it was 😂

Since you are the first person to mentioned Untamed in this topic, I'm curious--what's an Untamed build that comes even close to the Harbinger build being discussed? Also, as said in another topic--anet ignores smallscale for WvW. As soon as most learn this the better.

When will everyone learn they don't balance WvW around smallscale? Yes, these classes are broken in WvW smallscale, and yes if they have support, they can be nigh unkillable even if they faceroll on the keyboard. Anet. Doesn't. Care. At best you can hop in to WvW, grief some people, and leave. That's roaming now. They won't touch cele because largescale is all boon ball and cele promotes this; they aren't going to disrupt their own meta (however bad it is) for small scale of all things. Look, for a quick example of how much smallscale matters--if an enemy takes north camp on alpine it is to their distinct advantage because of all the guard CC spam at spawn door + ability to build all kinds of siege in the camp. If an enemy takes north camp on desert, it is only slightly less advantageous because no guard CC spam, but friendlies also have to walk 3 miles to get there, and the enemy has THE HIGH GROUND. If you're wondering why this example matters, it's because even structurally smallscale is ignored. Literally everything favors attacker, and everything favors larger numbers.

I can definitely see the line of reasoning, the only thing I'd argue is that clouds are essentially blobs (just unorganized). For NA, even though Mag 'roams' they still do it at a 10:1 advantage. Not that this doesn't fall under alliances for alleviating the problem, but that it currently still is a blob vs. lack of blob problem and exacerbated by the fact they only balance around blobs by prioritizing attacking over all else.

I have NEVER seen an anet dev roaming or defending, or havoc. They literally do one thing, hide behind a blob. If you look at the balancing, blob vs. blob IS the only balance, they care less about small scale / dueling. So, anet itself drives WvW down one path, blob vs. blob. They don't care where this takes place, as long as it does. Which means nerfing defending into the ground as can't have a meaningful blob vs. blob with walls in the way. Problem for their ideals is population balance. A lot of times you don't get blob vs. blob because one side has no players to form a blob. This is ignored with the balance direction (both profession and rewards balance), and thus we rightfully get complaint topics. Anyway, I'd also love public tact pull callouts but they won't as they are afraid of people getting flamed. Obviously, they care less about taking care of trolls which is why all the exploits, hacks, etc. still exist 10 years on.

Yeah...how they thought it'd be a good idea to remove defense credit off repairing without compensation is beyond me. As long as afk-trebbing is a thing, defense repair credit should be a thing. I don't care if people are farming repairing, need to fix the root of why they can even farm it in the first place. I mean, regardless of farming potential, repairing IS defense, and should give defense credit. Anyway, not sure where new guy is taking WvW, but I don't like it (and haven't actually played WvW in close to 2 weeks). The past few QoL changes were just bad, if you can even call them that.

I agree, think we've debated all we can at this point--but I am listening to your points: 🙃

Yeah, Empathic Bond is trash--and as an aside, I also call it Empathetic Bond even after learning the true name, because it's the same thing and who the hell says Empathic in sentences anyway....but I digress. Merging with Invigorating would be fine, give a burst heal and a cleanse and also get NM cleanse away from being tied to dodge rolling of all things, which is...so bad. Empathic should give defensive boons like stab on swap, and then have Shared Anguish give Aegis under some condition, like whoever gets CC (player or pet) gets 1-2s of Aegis with like a 20s ICD. Or since pets are so bad anyway both of you could get Aegis after a CC.

Not sure I'd agree with this, as we've already had nerfs on Druidic Clairity and other cleanse tools such as Sharpening Stone (yes, leaving the CD reduction untouched is a nerf). CA down to 10s really does nothing but give some extra stealth access as ancient seeds triggers every 20s in sPvP anyway, and you are typically only using CA form for either group triggering ancient seeds (through CA #3) or kiting (with Celestial Shadow). I've had some modicum of success with support builds in PvP based around staff and sw/torch with glyph of stars and such. The problem is you need a team to listen and 90% of them don't in soloq so I'd inevitably just run the condi/immob node bunker / duelist / stall machine.

Speaking of making up your mind..OP linked a build that uses longbow and opening strike/remorseless, which you are here arguing against. As mentioned, a few times now, I personally think Marks works way better on Untamed because of the natural defenses and CC capabilities (where MoC and Remorseless would actually shine). I don't know what else to say here...we even have Eura saying OP build is 'viable but maybe not as good as some other stuff' which to me means unless you already have the skills to play practically anything you may want to reconsider (at a high level not randos in silver/low gold). Finally... Like I said--not that it matters but you keep throwing 'clueless' around--I've played Druid at a consistent ~1480 and 60% winrate soloq last season. Personally, I rarely ever saw soulbeasts at this level, only teleburst untamed and other condi/bunker druids. When I did see soulbeasts, they were usually condi, but if I did see high damage bursts like this, they were about as much threat as a roaming thief (less than a DE though); that is, annoying, but nothing that can't be bunkered off the point or ignored for the most part. Anyway, to recap as my final on this, I think marks can be a lot better, and really only generally viable on Untamed. For it to be viable on Soulbeast like Eura implies above, it is my opinion you better also have either a high skill or be playing against people that you'd beat on really anything else anyway.

I don't really care about what others think of my ranger knowlege, if they are curious they can come find me in-game / YT me , whatever. I stand by 'big burst' is a gimmick that is easily played around with any defense (hate bubble, reflect, etc.). Anyway, you've already shown a build played by Eurantien that doesn't use marks and admitted what we're even talking about here is 'off meta' anyway. My last tldr; on this is I don't think marks is good on slb. Which is actually a direct answer to the topic title.

Just to be clear... This is called moving the goal posts--my initial post was pointing out marks on a slb is probably a bad idea; you replied and moved the goal posts to 'WS isn't needed you can just run all glass and skirm' (as no one is disputing BM is mandatory for slb), which doesn't disprove that marks isn't optimal on a slb. To me, losing coni clear / fury access, stab on pet swap, and either extra condi clear with lesser muddy or regen with oakheart is a bad tradeoff for 25% dmg modifier. It's also my thought they need to rework marks away from opening strike which is a bad gimmick that hasn't been relevant in forever. My original post also indicated marks can work much better on untamed, because untamed has more defensive capabilities than soulbeast--so you could do marks/bm or marks/skirm depending on if you take gs or not. Untamed is also one time I wouldn't take WS because of all the natural defenses Untamed has and the fact you can get cleansing unleash and such to cover condi clears. The tdlr; is my opinion is that marks is about as hard to work into a build as nature magic is. It'll have niche uses (like aforementioned Untamed example), but I linked the meta battle / hardstuck builds to show that in general you'll want the defense from WS even if you are trying to shoehorn roamer into the ranger kit (feel that roamer is more thief and ranger is more duelist but that's a whole other debate).

You still keep disputing me, then link me a build 'played in legendary' that doesn't even utilize Marks...thanks for proving the point? I have all the sPvP titles I need or want (solo Q'ing immob druid of all things last season at avg 1480ish); just trying to give decent advice, and 'play marks on slb' is not it.