Gotejjeken.1267

Wait, isn't that why Mechanist exists? 😃

Not sure we agree on much, but I agree 100% with this. At this rate, they might as well make Drizzlewood Coast a PvP area.

Yes, it's pretty easy to discern the intent of Mag without even text quotes. The only fighting when they outnumber and still throwing siege tells you that, no words needed. In general though, anet proved this last patch they are on a hot path to just toxic k-train land. It was probably easier just to give up balancing WvW altogether and attempt to cover it with 8g then actually fixing the root cause. And no, the root cause isn't Mag, they are just enabled by it. The cause being rampant ignoring of boonballs, rampant ignoring of smallscale balance, and buffing offense so t3 keep caps only take 3 minutes instead of 4.

As a ranger, 9/10 thieves are free bags. The last 1/10 either outskills or runs. Also, how are people dying to thief on cele harb or willbender? Or spellbreaker? Or condi virt? Or any elementalist build? Like, I think a lot of this boils down to either get better at your class/build if you are roaming away from a group or stop roaming away from a group. I see so, so many people play 'chase the thief' then die, for literally zero gain. Just like in PvP where it's bad to just be randomly fighting behind a tree off-node, its bad in WvW to be fighting randomly behind a tree away from any meaningful objective (unless you're dueling).

Probably buggy. Healing Spring is only meant to trigger it if it is walked over, however spirits can't walk (anymore). Healing Spring - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W) The target also has to be less than 100%, which will explain point 1, because a spirit inside the trap won't trigger it if it goes lower than 100 as it didn't cross threshold. Point 2 you'd have to isolate, but guessing it may be something else triggering the trap, especially if its within trigger radius. Then cultivated synergy should kick in and heal the spirit. Point 3 is probably a bug playing on the spirit physically crossing the threshold of the trap.

I think this is where the problem lies with me, as by balancing around meta for ranger they are ruining the class as a whole by putting it into meme builds (one shot slb, teleburst untamed) and hardlining druid into a support/non-damaging role. Which is annoying as something like elementalist continues to happily be multi-purpose with no reigning in or tradeoffs of any kind. So yes, either the sharpening stone nerf or just the omission of it is a big problem for me as it shows they are still indeed mostly balancing from golem numbers in PvE and memes in PvP/WvW.

Which still logically makes no sense as they reduced Entangle. So now all they did was create an annoying 1s gap between lesser muddy terrain activating and troll unguent for GvG builds? I think they care about GvG less than they do roamers, and I'm not sure I've ever been muddy terrain'd in a zerg (it's pretty slow, 5 cap, and easy to see/dodge). Just another balance decision that makes no sense to those of us who actually play their game.

For PvE I don't look too much into builds as you can sleep through even T4 fractals and still get top DPS. For WvW / PvP I'd wager I'm among the top 5-10 Druids remaining, nearly Solo Q'ing into plat, so yeah, I've looked into a few builds. They mentioned immob druid on two streams in a row now, and specifically on the last as a reason why Muddy Terrain isn't getting CD reduction in WvW. They know about it.

There is zero chance poison master is a better skill than reduced CD sharpening stone alone, let alone with entangle. That's a massive amount of bleed loss compared to a trait that essentially does nothing, because poison damage is bad to begin with. I mean, poison shouldn't even do damage in a balanced world as its purpose is heal denial. So, I'd rather we not rally around random nerfs to bleed skills in the name of poison of all condis, which is a literal utility like chill. I assure you these bleed nerfs were targted at bleed/immob druid, because bleed has best synergy there. They want druid to be pigeonholed into healing, so they are stealth nerfing the one viable offensive build. Which makes me wonder which dev I or the remaining 3 bleed/immob druids in the game killed to warrant this 🤨....

You realize you're in the PvP forum right? A 1v1 with a thief should be on or near a node and as mentioned they can't capture/decap a node while in stealth. This means they must fight you out of stealth, making them not a threat unless you are focused (i.e. you are in an Xv1 situation). Seriously, mid g3 and constantly fighting plat players now and never have I gone 'man that thief is OP'. Fighting two catas at once however...

Video please.

Can we see the games where you went 1400 => 1500? I'm willing to bet they are not all close sweaty salt fests that you clamor for and instead look very much like the first game you showed on that 'Is PvP rigged?!?!' stream but with you on the winning end...

If you don't get CC'd out of UT first. Having a cast time means it has an animation, and if it has an animation its easy to CC someone out of it if they don't have stability or some other defensive mechanism going. I wouldn't tele in and GS 5 right away though as you lose your maul refresh this way---it's a beginner mistake. Not that there aren't times where this could be viable, it's just bad general-purpose advice. Untamed is still too difficult for most people to play correctly. They didn't touch FF for this reason, as the rest of the kit is as about as brutal as condi druid to use (efficiently). If you miss your setup CC's its very hard to recover as you do not have the kiting power of a soulbeast. None of this means the changes were great for Ranger. Most impactful one is probably SoH, but rest of it is either a nerf (UT, and indirectly sharpening stone), a mixed bag of nonsense (stances and dagger) or blanket 'because we did it for everyone else' changes (WS CD changes).

The sharpening stone change is going to hurt a lot. Bleed/immob druid is already super off meta and with this change it may not be possible to play in even high gold anymore. Which is the ironic part, as right now I can easily hold a sidenode in g3 with Druid. Nothing can really get me off except a 2v1 and can outright kill most things that aren't super bunker ele/spellbreaker/mes. But the kicker is its all skill based, as need good positioning to pull this off. I'd consider that balanced and if anything, underpowered compared to the amount of cleanse/invuln/barrier/etc. spam flying around. But yes, the devs seem incredibly ignorant of anything that isn't ele or guardian. Ranger itself has been in a slow state of decline since Irenio left.

Shadow Meld change is along the lines of the Bladesworn one where they replaced stability with protection. In that, it's bad and going to make the spec a lot harder to play. They could have just nerfed the ammo count to 1 and gotten the same effect; you can still remove revealed but can't spam shadow meld. It'd make it more difficult to play DE but not impossible like removing reveal removal functionality altogether does. Another fun fact, Shadow Meld is now worse as an Elite than Blinding Powder is as a utility skill. As now Shadow Meld just stealths you like BP does but that's it. No stability, less stealth duration, no AoE blindness, and no stunbreak.

Also, just rewatched the stream to see if I missed sharpening stone there (it isn't on the slides), however the dev reasoning around Empathic Bond is actually ridiculous. CmC says he doesn't want too much value in birds, when merged bird F2 is 12s CD. You can literally trait evasive purity 2 condi clear for 10s--which is better value. Essentially if you stay merged and camp bird (taking swap out of the equation here) you are getting 4 condi clear every 24s, vs 4 condi clear every 20s with evasive purity. Now, if you unmerge and use Hawk or Eagle that's 4 condi clear every 12 seconds--which while seemingly powerful is also something I'd place squarely in the meme category. Birds unmerged are super squishy making nigh useless because they also have no CC abilities. You also have to camp a bird to get that, and you won't be camping the bird as they die in like 3 hits. The tldr; to solve all this, they could have just made the ICD 10s to match evasive purity, but they pull a figure of 20s ICD out of literally nowhere (logically that is; I get its 20s to be lazy and match untraited pet swap)

Yeah, the balancing on these seems overcomplicated for the end result. You'd think Entangle would be more potent in competitive than PvE, but they nerf the CD in PvE; and you'd think Muddy Terrain would only ever be taken in sPvP, but they randomly nerf its CD in WvW. How about we just apply the CD reduction across the board to the survival skills, as the nerf to the Elite itself is enough. As if you dissect it, you can get the condi clear now with Empathetic Bond without blowing your utility skills just to get condi clear, and you can get Fury from practically anywhere so it's useless to blow a utility skill for that. The main problem to all this is, I get they are attempting to pigeonhole Druid into pure support role but aren't addressing the serious glaring issues of lack of stability access and the literal pet being a hinderance in group fights.

Sharpening Stone needs the CD reduction treatment or you are going to nuke bleed druid in competitive modes. You will also hurt condition ranger as a whole a lot because bleed is practically the only condition ranger outputs consistently.

This is actually a good point and something I didn't notice earlier. Thought it was just Muddy Terrain, but if they don't add the CD reduction to sharpening stone that will be a huge nerf to bleed druid. Sharpening Stone is literally the lynchpin of the build.

Will have to see about the Empathetic Bond range--if its X radius of pet it will be still useless, if it's just some baseline removal it still won't be as good as WK but at least better than it is now. Still can't figure out why they made the ICD 20s and 'refreshing' on pet swap instead of just tying it to the swap CD =X. They mentioned Druid roamer in WvW in the stream and just now noticed it--when they nerfed it last time with the change to Druidic Clairity; but they think people actually use Muddy Terrain--the tldr; is they clearly have no idea how immob druid works. Finally, the changes to Signet of Hunt means power untamed is going to be a bit of a nightmare now. I think that change is way more impactful than adding a minor cast time to UT, when they could have just made it ground targetable (which would have baked in the cast time because you have to target and made it way more useable outside memes). Other misc thoughts are WH changes are a straight buff and good to see, and stance changes are so all over the place so as not to be really meaningful. Do appreciate the update of Deadly archetype tho as that thing is kitten rn.

February 12th? Might want to change title to the actual date of February 14th.

I watched this one, it looks like a normal g2/low g3 game to me. At the end of it you end up with 4/5 of you with two top stats each, showing pretty much equal participation. In fact, at the beginning it looks pretty close, the difference I think is you attempting to hold far on a +1 build instead of ganking people, which then kind of snowballed into what looks like the team giving up. Would have to see team chat to confirm this though. Not only that, it's a friggin' THREE ranger comp (plus a bonus thief!) vs. a two cata + mes comp--you weren't winning that unless the opposing team was like silver to your high gold. Not that win trading can't / isn't happening, but it surely wasn't happening in this match no matter how much tin foil hattery is going on. I also noticed you rocketed up to 1500ish since this video, so your luck must have turned around!

Popeye's wings are nowhere near 'ghost pepper'. If GW2 were to institute these, they'd have to be labeled as 'feast of marketing ploy'

I haven't really seen any rangers in general at g3 or higher this season. Of those I did see, I think they played soulbeast to untamed 2:1. I guess both can be powerful though, but at current time if I was going to play something other than Druid, I'd roll a double melee Untamed. That way you still have point presence and decent mobility between double hammer leaping and gs #3. I've tried soulbeast and while yeah it can burst like no other, it usually also falls apart when SoloQ as you can't carry a team with it. It's kind of hard to make a well rounded soulbeast, it seems the current balancing and outlook for the spec is just roamer and nothing else.

I didn't really see any last week (I'm on Darkhaven and we were T1 matched with Mag). Of course, I don't play on EBG so maybe they are all 'roaming' there? Which would be odd since they usually take it over and make it entirely green, so not sure what roaming is actually going on...