Gotejjeken.1267

Yes, condis do nothing which is why I could probably wreck most of you on a condi Druid and stalemate the others. All using passives and easy to reapply condis like bleed. I'm not singling out Druid here either, it's really just what I play--I've seen the same happen with burn guards or in the past with torment and confusion prior to those getting nerfs. Anyway, it's just honesty--condis are way easier method to go than power. Even if your top burst damage is lower, you have far greater sustain, health, armor, etc. Maybe less pronounced in PvP because of the amulets, but in other modes like WvW it's a no-brainer on which is the easier path. Also the fact we're using cleansing sigils as a prop to argue for the current state of conditions says a lot. Remove those, then what? Oh right, you absolutely obliterate power builds as they all now have to build a ton of cleanses in, whereas a lot of condi builds get that free through conversion or other mechanics.

Mainhand dagger, the Soulbeast weapon. For WvW, until you get warclaw you can stay close to other warclaws for a buff--or just equip bird and greastsword and you're moving 2400 units at a time on a very low CD. Bird also has built in area swiftness, both when it is out and when you are merged with it--so you are pretty much at permanent 33% move bonus.

Guess it depends; you can do Nature Magic and Skirmishing if you want more of a boon build or stick with Beastmastery and Skirmishing for the stat buffs. If you opt out of Beastmastery you can spam swiftness (Warhorn, Bird, Skirmish weapon swap trait) and still move around pretty well. If you take Nature Magic you'll have near perma swiftness if you invest enough into boon duration. So as a tldr; what I'd recommend is going Skirmishing and Nature Magic, take MH dagger for quickness and take fresh reinforcement and go with a cele boon build. Other weapon can be whatever you want--Axe/Wh is probably the 'best' choice for stacking might and boons but a lot of things can work.

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I'd use what you know from Paper Roll and apply it to Soulbeast. That is, find pets that are good at kiting and use greatsword as your "staff" for defense. Think the reason you may struggle converting over is the condition druid is just very good at most things. This is independent of stats too for me, as you can run Apothecary or whatever instead of Trailblazer and still get great survivability. It's more of a mindset, and just the fact Druid has way better kiting options than your out of the box LB/GS soulbeast does. I will say I found once I broke away from LB/GS and learned how soulbeast works, I rarely ever go back to condition druid outside of dueling or needing to stalemate something for a ridiculous amount of time (camp, tower, etc.). Most people run a lot of cleanse and as time goes on the build is becoming less effective IMO (and also the reason Paper Roll montages are like 14 min for one fight sometimes). So you can start with something like Nature Magic or Celestial Soulbeast and learn, then settle into your actual power build. Building that right you can get 100% crit uptime with a lot of power, ferocity and other things, because it then boils down to kiting mechanics and what you are personally comfortable with using (ex: for pets, smokescale is often cited as 'best', but is not end-all-be-all or really even that good outside ganking).

I find it interesting you dismiss rapid fire but then proceed to use Smokescale as your argument. Which still complains about the LB/GS variety of ranger--the one that should be easy to counter by now as it's all 95% of the ranger population has played for like 5 years. So, at this point I'm not sure how much exposure you have to ranger either.

Stop playing core. Sincerely, A Veteran Ranger Player

Hate to be a downer here, but from that first nc clip basically it's just being intelligent vs a bunch of pew pew bots. No one got close or pressured, so of course he can win by attrition. There's also a thief in there ganking which is non-trivial addition. The warrior forums might be with me on this one after some of my other less than popular opinions; but, if you'd actually fix warrior this montage wouldn't exist. Even in current game if you get a good melee ranger or thief this doesn't happen--because from all I understand counter-pressure and kiting is the bane of this nade engi build.

For WvW I'd either go all power or all condi--seems like you want condi, so then just go all Trailblazer. Playing celestial in WvW is tricky because what I found is you really need to craft a build that relies around poison and do most condi damage that way, while using power as kind of a secondary. Thats because outside of poision and bleed, ranger's actual condi damage options are lacking; and if you are using condition damage as your secondary source you might as well ignore it entirely and use poison as just a heal denial. Anyway, celestial just gets kind of messy and falls short of just going for a single focus. Those focuses will be either immob + bleed, or power and nuking people.

So no necro builds, no mesmer builds (outside of the 'non-favorable' condi mirage), only one or two ele builds... Sounds to me like the usual struggles of any class against overtuned things in WvW (aforementioned scrapper, rene/herald, some thief builds, etc.). Listing LB soulbeast is weird too, because LB should be a counter to warrior, so hopefully you'd struggle with beating that; any soulbeast would say the same about reflect or block heavy specs. Even at the end you admit warrior isn't that horrible in what will amount to 90%+ playtime in WvW (unless you specifically look for duels) as there are very few 1v1 encounters in the wild there. You also agree with me that druid is an extremely close match, which is good because druid is also another spec the forums complain incessantly about and isn't OP really at all, but merely balanced. It's the good players that make it seem OP to certain groups of people. Essentially, I'm sticking with the opinion to tune down the egregious classes and not messed with the very few that are actually balanced around good players, warrior being one of them.

I feel like we're talking like very few classes that are overtuned. For WvW, outside of support, it'd probably be nade engi and possibly a few various herald builds? I mean, maybe a fresh air or something can keep up as well, but it's really a small list. I can post a pair of duels against a spellbreaker, the first I barely won and the second we stalemated for 5 minutes (or it felt like). I was even using immob Druid too, which is quoted in this topic as one of the specs that 'wrecks warrior'. If said warrior had damage on CC I'd have stood no chance, because it's bad enough trying to avoid it with limited access to stab and stealth, let alone be getting hit for 3-4k a CC. What'd I'd like to see is a 'counter montage', essentially Warriors getting owned by something and having no chance at beating it. For me it'd be in PvE or WvW, as PvP is a different animal and I have little idea there.

Bruh: Imagine if CC had dmg on top of that? I think the warrior community is actually struggling with the fact of being in a good place while there are other specs/classes/builds that are overtuned. The solution is to tune those other things, not 'buff' warrior.

Sorry, not going to sell me on that one. Only reason you don't see more warriors (at least in WvW) is comps favor guardians and barley anyone roams. The ones that do roam prove that warrior is actually in a pretty good place as it is; crazy CC, high mobility, heavy armor, gap closers, and great damage. I seriously need to know a matchup that warrior loses against.

If we're putting dmg back on CC we really need to turn down some of warrior's defenses as compensation. Or limit the amount of CC that can come out of one class, because a good warrior can put a ridiculous amount out in a very short time, along with having nikes that only thieves can think about keeping up with.

I'm a roaming ranger

I agree with no buffs or nerfs but rather a design towards balance. The problem of GW2 is it flies in the face of any role-based game, because any class can fill mostly any role. If a class can fill a role better it is because they have been given a skill or trait, not because of the actual class mechanic in most cases. Not sure this is a fixable issue without redesigning the game. From my experience I've noticed most 'balance' issues are L2P issues--standing in red circles, standing by lich form and getting nuked, blowing dodges randomly to get hit by CC, ignoring learning about all five pets that people use, not knowing what kiting is, etc. etc. Any remaining issues can be boiled down to the balance team being stretched thin. Having 300s CD for years on some skills plainly shows this. Not even targeted either, just a broad stroke of 'every passive'. So, as example you get things like the Rangers passive that transferred a disable to the pet being 300s CD when it wasn't really egregious or even worked properly in most cases. Really these passives need reworked, but time and finances say make them unusable is the quickest way to fix them. In short, we can talk about the cosmos all we want but GW2's flow is way different than most games where it is much more about tactics than it is skill usage. A player that knows tactics and terrain can win a vast majority of time without paying any attention to the opposing skills being used, because skills aren't countering skills in almost all cases. Rather it's tactics countering tactics.

Sadly, it's what the forums does. Speaking from WvW standpoint... From my limited exposure to playing engi and somewhat greater exposure to fighting the grenade variety in WvW, I think all we need is some rings to tell where the grenades will be. If really want to mitigate stealth then just make the rings appear slightly before explosion happens--even if engi is in stealth--I dunno, quarter second explosion delay if that's possible. I mean, if it's the damage that bothers everyone, how many of you get owned by the keep lords that use Call to Arms which will do 10k+ and isn't exactly easy to spot if there are a group of people there? Should we nerf keep lords now too? I guess I just personally don't find engineers that dangerous in general. Most classes can be dangerous in group settings, and there are classes with a lot more evasions and stealth access that are far more difficult to deal with than engi, at least IMO.

Wait, what on the core ranger kit is OP in terms of condition stacking and / or damage modifier stacking? Genuinely curious actually, especially if we are just sticking to the core lines of MM/BM/NM/Sk/WS.

'Declining' based on what? Also, I'm not sure if you were born in 2003, but we weren't reading IGN articles back then, we were reading GamePro magazines... Besides, it's a weak troll attempt anyway you cut it. Obviously the take on WvW wasn't working so we switched topics to 'lulz this game is dead', and that isn't working either. It's obvious the content has slowed a lot in the past two years, but that's mostly due to company shakeups and the pandemic (incase you missed it). As a slight aside, I have no idea why but it seems the most abrasive people are attached to Thief avatars >_<. Anyway, come back in six months after EoD and make your 'lulz this game is dead' topics. Or just go on Twitter and ratio people...whatever makes you happy.

I'm not sure when Twitch and YouTube view metrics became the standard for how a game is actually doing. You'd need to pull financials for that. Again, I'm not sure how much of this 'relevance' matters anyway. The more 'relevance' you get, the more of a toxic community you build, because people are naturally like this. Just this topic alone proves that as you are in a WvW subforum for a game and we're talking about 'view metrics' which has zero to do with the actual topic of 'Remove boons or WvW WILL die'.

500-600 viewers on what? Twitch? There's at least 1k concurrent viewers over the top 4 streams right now...so unsure where your numbers come from. Not that Twitch matters for GW2 as it isn't promoted there, nor are there any personalities like Asmon that have neckbeard armies to keep decades old games going (i.e. WoW). To your points about boons, sorry that you have never discovered corrupts or strips. If anything, the only egregious boons right now are superspeed and perhaps quickness as they do alter gameplay in ways that the existing combat mechanics struggle to keep up with. Also speaking from a purely NA roaming standpoint, while roaming is 'dead' it isn't because of boons, it is because of claim buff and warclaws. It's just too easy to defend now. So yeah, WvW has problems but the combat engine and most boons are not the primary issues here. Bringing up other games as comparison also isn't new, it just makes you look like a walking Raid Shadow Legends ad.

Celesstial can work, yes. I'd do dagger /X; I think all options are viable (torch if you want burn, dagger for #4, and axe if you run prelude lash and want to wreck with whirling defense) and axe / warhorn though, and run nature magic That way you can build 25 stacks of might pretty instantly by using axe then merging with pet. Nature magic will also give you WH cooldowns and AoE weakness and whatnot. Something like BM/NM/SB with all cele stats and above weapons. Should have pratically perma boon uptime on things like fury and might (thanks to copious amounts of quickness via dagger) while also having ridiculous uptime on protection and still doing good damage. I'd stay away from WS unless you are trying an actual condition build though. As the defense options are overrated compared to NM--because bear stance pretty much replaces having to blow survival skills to cleanse. So that just leaves the condition and poison options in WS, which I find don't work well for hybrid.

It's because there are too many pets to balance around. They fixed this somewhat with soulbeast merge skills as there are only so many of them; but the original idea of having unique F2s for most pets is a big issue. It worked better when the game was slower and less boon spammy, but now its just outdated and shows. I personally don't think the attack/return mechanic should be touched at all--it needs to be two separate buttons. Having the ability to micromanage the other auto skills the pet uses is fine, but it should just do its normal rotation unless interrupted. This is a big problem with the untamed as having to position the pet AND now do its job by hitting attacks when we want is too much. In short, the direction Untamed is going in is a good one, we do need control of all aspects. Just make the usual ones auto-castable and interruptible. That's it for the pet mechanics. Then just fix up the traitlines to fit within todays game and increase the leash range a little bit (especially since pets now have projectile hate and whatnot).

Was wondering this as well. If we can make the argument that a 'cat' skin is ok on a 'dog', then I'd like to petition they add a Kitsune skin for Warclaw.

I mean, we can each put up some videos to illustrate our points if you want? I have many gigs worth of roaming on ranger, and many recent videos with the build I mentioned above. For clarity, not running immobbeast as Druid is far superior for that; but like general roaming can still be done pretty easily by a lone soulbeast. Not saying that Warclaw and super speed spam didn't make things way, way harder...but even something like double melee can work thanks to the abundance of gap closers the Soulbeast has. I will agree about stance share though, they need to buff that--sadly with Untamed coming out that's not happening lol