Gotejjeken.1267

It's balanced. Simply, Raids are more difficult so take a shorter amount of time, WvW you can afk wall run / cap home camp every 5 min and get it in a longer time. Nothing to see here.

No need to get angsty, I'm not the one who quoted first... Anyway, not dismissing anything, just reminding what Druid is currently good at and that's support through immob and stalling. This goes for both PvP and WvW. What is should do is a different story entirely. Untamed for instance should be a bruiser, but Hammer is unworkable atm and its best build revolves around either axe or LB + GS depending on mode.

Just says 'reworks'--watch 300s become 250s!

No? That's extremely oversimplified and might as well be balancing off the wiki. For instance, pet swapping CD is one thing that's in BM but as far as augmenting pet swapping, other tratilines do this as well (see: Marksmanship in current PvP meta). Same thing with augmenting the pets themselves...yes, BM gives stats, but NM gives boon sharing which in many ways is far more important. I'm sure similar arguments apply to the other professions; thought I'd just add Ranger ones since that is what I main. Essentially locking a class out of a cherry picked traitline will do nothing to make the elite specs less reliant on Core, because they have always simply been enhancements to Core (or should be). In an ideal world, the elites are sidegrades if you will.

Because BM for Ranger isn't really a traitline that majorly enhances anything besides soulbeast stats. I could make an Untamed build that uses Marks/NM/Untamed and still have a role with fervent force CD reduction and spirits. Basically, Ranger may be the worst example for this as effectiveness is spread across every traitline we have.

What gets me is there are literally so many active defenses in this game and very few people seem to know what they are, or how to use them.

My Druid doesn't use beastmastery? I actually read the OP like 3 times and still have no idea what the hell it is getting at. You literally have to use a core traitline (two actually) with any specialization line. Cherry picking what you think is the line that defines the 'core' class is larp'ing at best.

Wait, I think I'm understanding now--are we saying even when unleashed the pets would still use their normal attacks? So, say Smokescale, would do smoke assault and it's KD attack if it was in unleashed / green state? That is 100% a bug, just like spirits pulsing around the ranger instead of the actual spirit. For pets it'd never last like this, because 2/3 modes are competitive, and Smokescale for instance would have two teleports while unleashed (the F1 and Smoke Assault)--no one is standing for that. I think this is where the community disconnect is coming from, as Untamed was not designed as a PvE or LI spec. The unleashed pet skills are not meant to be spammed, and the pet should only be auto-attacking during unleashed state to stop it from double dipping on its normal functions (because like hammer, when you unleash ranger any auto the pet used would be on CD).

I only find mechs that are a liability if on my team or absolutely destroy my teammates if on enemy team....

Saddest part is I'm guessing most the top 100 run with statics anyway due to how the matcher works. Pure Solo Q none of you make it out of gold lol

Yeah, that's sadly called Specter. Ranger either has disruptive (Untamed, Core Valk, etc.) or healer--but the 'healer' part of that isn't good enough to hold on a mid-fight. So, you either heal on side node or just support in other ways (tank, annoyance through celestial shadow, immob); I just find the latter 'support' more useful as the healing tools right now are redundant at best and a drag on the team at worst.

Why would they not want to be sidenode though? You really think Druid would compete for mid-support? With historically low stability access? You in fact a few posts above cited all the reasons why Druid makes awful traditional support. Also went way back to June and see zero posts from you in the PvP sub--so not sure we should even be having this discussion?

Probably agree to disagree about 'any' ranger spec stalling a sidenode as in gold 2 (atm) all non-druid ranger's I see are using lb/gs power variants that last a whole 10 seconds before getting downed or running. The axe druids however...

Untamed is only really reliant on FF in instanced PvE. Nearing Gold 2 Solo Q in PvP with Untamed and not having too much issue, and roaming WvW is similar. Zerg fights obviously no ranger spec is made for.

Support isn't just healing.

For PvP, found you can still stall on sidenodes pretty well if you aren't focused down by 1vX scenario. Not exactly 'support' but tanky enough to still help out the team.

I'm not sure if I'm happier people are off the 'Dolyak Stance is broken!' wagon and onto this one or annoyed at these types of topics which post a bunch of crap and not have any tradeoff in mind. Especially since I can '25k open world solo champs' with a power soulbeast and use 100% less buttons to do so. Fervent Force is not broken because ranger has few good disables. To bring more disables you ruin your bar or have to run spirits and ruin your already awful damage. Really the last sentence tells me everything though--where exactly is Mechanist broken at the moment outside nuking players that shouldn't be in competitive or pulling big numbers on easy bosses? That is to say a LOT of things are more broken than Mechanist at the moment lol.

There were not enough other plat players to match you against at the time. Not fair for the silver's either because obviously you as a pro gaming god are way too much for them. in your infinite pro gaming wisdom, you consider researching population and how the matchmaker works before salting up the forum...

Maybe, but also, they want to sell Untamed. No reason to apply auto-attack functionality to core, druid, or soulbeast because untamed is the one with full pet control and the one that needs auto setting. Also, adding the auto to the unleashed skills is just more confusing than it's worth IMO. They aren't meant to be spammed off CD in 2/3 game modes, so adding auto to them just reinforces and already bad way to use them. i don't buy this has anything to do with Mechanist at all. Untamed needed the auto attack to begin with so pet DPS didn't fall behind core, this has nothing to do with any power creep Mechanist may be seeing. I also don't want Untamed to be Mechanist or even follow that path in the slightest, as Mechanist is an awful class in both sPvP and WvW, and only holds on in PvE because of the LI rifle build. So, complaining about Mechanist or comparing it to Untamed seems pointless.

It is about 'that match' because that's the match you are most commonly going to run into if just doing solo Q. I can see your 'git gud' take if there was any personal skill metric involved--there isn't, other than ability to hard carry a team of randoms? Even if we assume hard carrying is a skill, and we take those statistics at face value, I argue 20% is far too high to be under personal control. I had a match with 77% of the team kills, top rank in offense and defense, and we still lost 500 - 430. One would say 'well that's normal, losing happens'--but this is losing while hard carrying an entire team. Problem is, there is little to stave off the rank loss from that, went down 12 or so points instead of maybe 5 that would be reasonable for losing while doing essentially everything. Anyway, 'everybody' is not gold (I'm top silver 3 as placed gold 1 but can't win enough to stay there); would wager even spread of population between silver and gold with some outliers in bronze and plat, and no one obviously in legendary.

This does make sense, if you put in the work I guess eventually you'd climb as you could tip the scales in the favor of a mediocre team. Teams like I just got though where one person afk's the first 4 min of a match because their cat 'unplugged the HDMI' are just unsavable (we lost 400-500) and there seems to be more of these than not, so climbing without dodging such people is difficult...

It's the 'core power necro with 200 ping' that makes this less than believable. Also, I'm inclined to believe match dodging is involved at some point, because as someone else mentioned it's difficult/impossible to carry a low skill team and the matcher will put you with them to try and enforce balance. BTW, qualifiers like 'very doable' need some sort of backing metric. Otherwise, it's the 'my friend' thing again, just a statement with no evidence.

I also have some great desert lakefront property to sell you. Let me guess, no video evidence of this exists, right? Just 'my friend' anecdotes?

I think yes and no here. Yes, if specter is on a competent team you are going to have one hell of a time trying to win against that. If not on a competent team or a team that doesn't know what support is? You're going to have a hell of a time trying to win yourself. EDIT: Realizing above seems kind of obvious without a bit more context. Essentially what I mean is specter on its own cannot hard carry like other 'big players' can. Mechanist can hard carry at lower rank and bladesworn at higher, but specter needs a partner or its useless.

This right here I think is the main issue for PvP from someone new to it. I started PvP this past weekend and was fully expecting unranked to be people that had no idea what they were doing, whether that be decade achievement only people, new steam accounts, new accounts in general. Oh boy was I wrong, and to put it very shortly--ranked couldn't come fast enough. Now the games are actually fun. Unranked is a nightmare and I dare say either needs to go or they need to have it be sub-bronze only players. If you play well enough to place, then you go to ranked. If someone wants to test builds or something they have arenas for that--unranked should be the newbiest of newbs.