Gotejjeken.1267

So, since they are looking at profession changes lately, how about we get some updated casting times for ranger? Practically all of our healing skills are easily interruptible, along with soul beast pet skills like spiritual reprieve. Spirits also take forever to use their actives, so have to cast those well in advance and outplay your enemy or you're just going to get interrupted out of it and the spirit destroyed. Some weapon skills also have long aftercast times (i.e. sword); but this topic is mostly about the annoyance of a majority of our utilities being interruptible without any recourse (as we have little access to stability).

You may not notice it with turtle as turtle doesn't really do much to begin with--and by that, I mean its attack is slow moving, so it's the least offensive of the four. You'll probably notice it the most with tiger as that one is most critical to get moving and it just...doesn't.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you don't play WvW do you? Permastealth is/was HUGE for hiding in structures to then port your allies back in and bypass any need of siege. This means high level structures (i.e. T3) flip extremely fast with few people if the thief isn't found. They actually buffed deadeye a lot with removing the stealth aspects--you're just going to have to learn what the dodge key is now I guess.

Stealth maybe, but Deadeye is insane now---very, very hard to lockdown or hit. It's like a super ranged Daredevil.

Maybe; actually the last point applies in WvW (and kind of where I was going with my entire post)--because you can basically spam all the skills on a Sic' Em ranger and still destroy people. Even in PvE though with Sic' Em and the 10-12 skill rotation you mentioned, you don't have to utilize a form like Druid or switch states like Untamed as you stay perma-merged the entire time (as 'pet skill' I'm assuming is the moa one while merged). So that already takes a mechanic out of it and lowers your skill floor. But regardless, I just worry about them using the terminology 'skill floor' and 'skill ceiling' when one of the main dev is pushing for 1-2 button LI builds as the future.

*sigh* Anet is going to look at this vid and be like 'welp that's it, balance done' or 'omg it has all boons too strong, nerf'. Missing the point it's a backward facing, stationary, standard golem. Actually...maybe that's how they internally test things, would explain a lot....

Guessing logic for this is...offhand torch and warhorn aren't power weapons (condi and support), and OH axe needs nothing except an overhaul for #4 which is out of scope for the hotfix. I do wish these changes applied to WvW, but seems some internal micromanagement is happening between PvE and WvW atm as OWP remains same in WvW but no weapon buffs that are seen in PvE. Guessing it gives them two different scenarios to test and we'll probably get a third coming out of those two and on and on.

Yeah, I think they have it backward...the 'Sic Em' Soulbeast' was and is a low skill floor. You fire off Sic' Em, OWP, then either LB #2 or Axe #5 (with various pre-setups possible like immob first); that's it. So, they actually nerfed a low skill floor as a high skill floor and then buffed weapon coefficients to make more sustained damage useful, which certainly takes more skill then the 3 button Sic' Em deal. I'm thinking and hoping that's badly worded and that the idea is for ranger to get away from the Sic' Em meta, and eventually fit into the high skill ceiling that untamed was designed for. As the only thing obfuscating right now is Soulbeast itself, it's too easy to play for too high value. That blocks all other specs (including core) which take more micromanagement to get the same thing. So if they take it back to core and buff the weapons a bit it at least spreads out the love to the other specs through osmosis, but the skill floor discussion is entirely off base for me.

Butterfly effect. Remove quick and alac, need to hit superspeed. We'd be back to a slower game but still have all the defensive boons. And might. Which would be the next target for reducing or removing since it gives like what +750 power/condi at 25? So, they hit might. Then you have the same game, but slower, and nothing dies because the only thing left is defense. That won't be good enough though as now we all run condi bunkers and someone goes after Trailblazer / expertise...and the big wheel at the anet offices keeps on turnin'...

Would be great, but they won't even add stability to Glyph of Stars let alone a spirit elite. They could have done something with it though--the fact it's the only unchanged one (outside of the stab removal) is kind of funny in a bad way.

Yet another montage ganking a bunch of scrubs 🥱.

Ya the problem is those are all subjective--the community may have evidence for your claims, but it won't translate to a patch. Critical issues are just that, game breaking or otherwise issues that cause big problems. So yeah, 'critical issues' is a fancy term for 'bug' in the dev world.

That follow-up is probably just for fixing bugs. Rest of it definitely staying until Oct. - Nov., they made that pretty clear...

It's a bad as Sic' Em soulbeast--need to blow an entire bar to do one thing well.

Yes it reduces it. EDIT: So as example, you can get some nice CD recduction through storm sprits daze and whatnot.

I don't really want to be pigeonholed into using WH or a spirit to get fury uptime. That means you are pigenholed into NM, which is generally bad outside boonbeast. The spotter nerf is bad not because of the precision loss, but because of the fury replacement not pulsing the same way. Essentially the problem is they replaced an adjustable crit amount with a hard one via a boon. So you have to lower the time threshold; if they left spotter as-is they could have just either increased the precision (say from 100- to 200 or ~5% to ~10%) or reduced it depending on what they are going for. But it sounds like you are going to pulse 3s of Fury every 9s, which makes it worthless for sharing and only somewhat useful for an automatic Fury source on entering combat. I'm guessing they did it this way as they have always been afraid of a bunch of ranger's getting together like Voltron and destroying people (same logic follows for why they nerfed OWP in PvE).

I like your enthusiasm OP...but when mentioning 'crystal balls' just be sure to remember that someone had to link a reddit post on the official GW2 forums just to prove their point. That should be all you need to know about ideas for anything, but especially ranger. You can also go read on reddit how ranger pet AI is a 'black box' they won't open; so the only reason for these changes is because of mechanist. They haven't had a dedicated ranger dev for a very long time--and now devs are even more broken into what classes they play / like, so we're definitley not seeing huge (or any) ranger-specific changes for the foreseeable future.

I think the green borders are just more people being fed up than contrarian.

The amount of green border posts here is amazing. Hopefully they read them.

To me, GW2 isn't like the difficult games you mentioned. Soulsbornes have a lot of different bosses that require precise timing or you either die, overlevel yourself, or bring a bunch of friends. FPS and to an extend Cuphead are twitch type games--not a ton of twitch reflex used for GW2 (as you should be using keyboard for mostly everything). To me, GW2 is more like the RTS of old, where you had to keep in mind rotations and strategy. In GW2 you don't need an Excel sheet to figure out ~90% of things (i.e. outside of things like DPS rotations), but there should be some element of reward for having high skill. Speaking of RTS, it's the reason they lost favor because newer C&C / Starcraft / etc. made things easier and more accessible...and you don't see them anymore today. Could apply same logic for fighting games too. Look what riot there was from Street Fighter 4 to Street Fighter 5--change the mechanics randomly 'for the better' and your playerbase either revolts or just leaves.

I feel bad for a lot of people that weren't around when balance had thought and meaning (pre-HoT and shortly after). Since PoF it's been a huge mess, and one that seemingly isn't changing anytime soon. As far as 'canceling' the patch; there's a lot of reasons they can't do that, and the foremost to me would be timelines. They put man hours into these changes (for better or worse), and not putting them out means wasted time and money...never going to happen. We'd have better luck iteration patches fixing things but those haven't happened in years and years.

Can someone look into this? To replicate, swap to any EoD pet (Tiger, Pheonix, Wallow, or Turtle) and watch...they do not respond for 3-5 seconds. This is making them unusable.

Wat. An immediate example is literally the smokescale opener does more DPS / utility on its own than you ever would trying to micromanage it 😂. There are certain skills that make no sense to try to manage or time better than AI would by itself. That's just factual with how the design is, an always has been--because pets haven't changed since 2012 and back then F2 was all you had, the other skills were optimized to happen on their own. Pet control/choice is an illusion in a lot of cases here. Perma uptime by investing in Nature Magic, which is a direct DPS loss on all but boonbeast that can reap 25 might stacks constantly. Aren't you forgetting the whole lynchpin of soulbeast damage outside burst is due to furious strength? Add something like that to untamed and watch what happens. Also, untamed bringing nothing else worthwhile to the table is a bit of a stretch, I already gave examples of solo'ing pretty much anything in PvE with untamed. Far easier and only slightly slower than if I go all out damage soulbeast. Based on what exactly? Spirit untamed is an easy thing to see, and if you can't maybe you are complaining too much and should be theorycrafting more? 🥱

Because it's comforting (and scary) to know that the community knows more about balancing than the people actually balancing....

Oh I'm ready to theorycraft an even better bunker...