Sirius.4510

Nothing here I would outright complain about. Couple of missed opportunities though: Similarly to how Firebrand had busted tome activations (hence the addition of a cooldown), Facet of Nature has the same problem. It's really easy to screw up your quickness output on quick herald because it instantly deactivates itself on activation. The introduction of a short cooldown on it would fix this. When is the Untamed rework (Fervent Force) going to happen? It's still in the state where it theoretically works in PvE, except against half the bosses in the game in practice because getting FF to trigger consistently is a pain. It's not really in a good state, so it feels like a good time to rip off the band-aid and just rebuild it.

I remember that talk, but I'm not sure it was ever true. People routinely brought it up to explain why Cantha would never happen; clearly, they were wrong. Either the demographic eventually got less sensitive, or they got ignored in favor of making other fans happy (I would have expected an outcry somewhere in that case though), or it was never really that controversial in the first place. Closer to original topic: Thinking about why I don't spend that much time in Cantha (Arborstone excluded) at the moment... I imagine if the EoD dailies were worth doing, that would change. I still have a bunch of map achievements on my "to-do" list but haven't yet gotten around to them due to being busy with festivals, strikes, raids etc - will probably spend more time there when I get to it. The other thing is the metas... they do rank decently on profitability (https://fast.farming-community.eu/open-world/meta), but they're all a pretty big time investment compared to their competitors. That and there's no handy inventory item like there is for AB/TD, so I don't think about them as much...

I think it's a workload issue. Producing a large quantity of decent-quality strategy guide material takes a lot of person-hours. When you have a community willing to do that work for you (wiki editors), it takes a lot to justify that. That said, having that material available in-game is a better experience for players. Whether that better experience is a big enough deal to justify the expense... well, I'm not as optimistic about that one. I suspect the most damaging example of "you need to go out of the game to do this" is the community / LFG side of things. It's tough to get going on small group content without finding the right community on Discord, and the game doesn't even point you in the right direction - LFG just gives you the impression people barely play that content. If they haven't sorted that out, I don't expect a "wiki substitute" anytime soon.

Current patch record holders don't seem to use Sylvan Hound, including on fast (~1 minute) encounters, e.g. Gw2 Wingman (nevermindcreations.de) Gw2 Wingman (nevermindcreations.de) They are generally either using SotP or nothing at all. Nothing at all could obviously be beaten by something that does some damage though. Although being at the mercy of the AI for positioning on Bears causes enough problems with stacking that you might actually be better off bringing nothing (pretty sure pets don't cleave.) As always, if you can find ways to break DPS records in something by bringing Sylvan Hound, post a log/video somewhere, I'm sure people would be interested. It may also convince ANet to pay more attention to the state of Ranger elites, the power ones are really not very good 😄 For non-burst encounters, obviously Sylvan Hound makes no sense due to the long cooldown. In those situations condi untamed is the best performing option, where Entangle is the top play.

There are plenty of easy metas in GW2 already - it's OK to have one that's a challenge. Especially since completing the DE meta successfully is no longer required for major content. The time commitment does keep me from running DE as much as I used to, though.

Accessibility is becoming a big deal in games lately, and does seem like the sort of thing ArenaNet would be inclined to support, so re-evaluating issues like these that affect a significant proportion of the game's audience does seem to be a good idea. I recognize, though, that the amount of "visual spam" in some combat events kind of paints them into a corner - it's not always easy to see important signals even for those of us without any form of colorblindness. It may make sense to tackle both issues together. Audio cues are definitely a good tool that has been used elsewhere, but they may not be sufficient for hearing-impaired players.

I believe that is the joke. 🙂 I'm half-inclined to support the OP's idea, mostly because I'd be quite entertained to see what it would look like on a charr. (I don't think ANet is going to go for literal catgirls though, sorry.)

I wish I had this luck. 3 wins (1 close, and that game was actually the worst for toxicity), 7 losses (none close). Pretty much had me convinced PvP was a dumpster fire and not worth my time. The one thing I did learn from this thread, though, is that unranked was paradoxically a mistake and I should have picked ranked instead. (Edit: Never mind, I can't, I'm not rank 20 yet. So... yeah.)

Yeah, you do have to go looking for non-meta stuff. Power hammer untamed looks like it isn't bad but it's about 1-2k dps less for a much harder rotation; the video I found on YouTube manages 34.8k, and the player in question had to turn off autoattacks to get there (and is by no means a noob, I've seen them in the leaderboards on Wingman quite a bit). Meanwhile I've hit 35.5k on greatsword soulbeast, and Umbra has a 36.4k video... and that doesn't require even close to a 100 APM rotation to do it...

There is a place in the game for high-difficulty, high-reward builds but I think the Untamed in its current incarnation takes it too far. If only 1-2% of Ranger players can play it well enough that they wouldn't perform better just running Soulbeast, it's getting awfully close to the "does this spec really need to exist?" threshold.

Almost nobody makes serious attempts at clearing HT CM, that said. If you are serious about it, this becomes a consideration. But I don't know whether Rangers feature in minmaxed HT CM comps anyway. They get used for sure, but what I've been hearing suggests there might be better options. And yeah, regarding the benchmark stuff, if Sylvan Hound were really that good it would actually get used by the pros for benchmarks. It doesn't, most likely because you can use it a grand total of once before the golem is dead, and OWP (as bad as it is now) pops 3 times in the fight so you just get more out of it.

Going to need a source for this because I don't believe it for a second.

I imagine this would happen pretty fast if one of two things happened: Steam reduced its fees drastically (say 15% or 12%) The EC or FTC declared that Steam is not allowed to prevent companies from offering discounts for going directly to them for in-game purchases instead of doing it through Steam

I'm not really sold on the Druid stability stuff. Yes, it gives a reason to take a glyph, and yes, we have room to drop a spirit and still maintain alacrity, but it's a stability source that may not be there when you need it, because it relies on having Celestial Avatar available. In most group content, you're expected to use CA fairly liberally - especially if you're needed to apply might - and not hold it back for emergencies like that. Heal Mech doesn't have this problem. (Nor does it need to sacrifice a utility slot to get access to stability!) I think it is a good idea to make glyphs worth taking, but unless you want to throw out the CA/non-CA element, it probably needs to be easier and more reliable to get access to the right "side of the card" when you need it... perhaps by allowing you to switch into CA even when the gauge isn't full? And then the other glyphs probably need revisiting to ensure they have enough utility to justify taking them over just another spirit. I guess they can have situational uses, e.g. Tides is already used on Soulless Horror among other things - but there are 2-3 that are pretty much ignored.

Having A/D mapped to strafing is the most logical way to do it and arguably the change should have happened years ago, but now is better than never. Obviously, accidentally breaking existing players' controls is not what should have happened. Unsure how that one slipped past QA. I did notice that I saw no impact from the change so it's possible the repro rate is low enough that it didn't happen to them?

You might be surprised - Bond of Faith is not cancelled by no-fly zones, so as long as you can find somewhere to fire it off from, and have good enough aim to hit the end of the jumping puzzle, you can cheese almost all of them. Including the Aetherblade one (though that has a special level of trickiness because the top of the airship is obscured by a no-collide wall!).

I think the easiest way to make quick soulbeast a thing without doing both that and alac, is to tie it to stances the same way alac was tied to spirits - if there's a trait that makes stance share give quick, but only enough that you need 2-3 stances to do it, then you can't get full uptime of both quick and alac simultaneously (and would trash your dps if you tried anyway).

In raids/high end strikes/fractals, people do care what you bring, and spiritbeast isn't going to cut it. As Beddo pointed out other alac dps options are just better - higher DPS and less of a nuisance to upkeep.

Personally, if there isn't a good reason not to precast (e.g. Voice/Claw strike), I do pre-cast / heal spirits, and sit there silently fuming about that one guy who always takes 30 seconds longer than everyone else to decide he's ready.

It does take a while to finish this achievement (I'm still working on it myself), but you do eventually learn where the things are, and after dealing with the disaster that is Realm-Portal Spiker I can't help but feel that it's really not that bad. My standards might be too low, though.

As I understand it you can build an alac dps spec with Untamed, as a matter of fact, by abusing the Fervent Force trait to get spirit active skills to recharge faster. I don't know what the most efficient build for that is, but wouldn't be surprised if it winds up being axe/axe instead of hammer.

I have a feeling main hand axe will either get adjusted, or main hand sword/dagger will get further adjusted, because, well, axe is just a lot stronger than the other two now. Splitblade feels like a shotgun. But, in the meantime, it's a viable pdps spec. I still think OWP is kind of unsatisfying in its current incarnation, and I would appreciate being able to take other elites for different (e.g. condi) builds, but Thursday's fixes were enough that I can still focus on Ranger if I want to. (and... yeah I'm aware there exists a powerful Untamed build that uses Entangle for its elite, but I'm not sure if I can actually pull it off or whether it works outside the golem room)

You'd think, but the OWP nerf applied to PvE only (or at least that's what the patch notes said; I confess I haven't played WvW in the last week so they could be wrong for all I know). Yeah, given the deprecation of burst damage (which sword was supposedly better at) I'm not sure it'll have much of a place; but dagger offhand is at least used for condition builds. I don't think that changed with this rebalance, unless shortbow is now better DPS than axe/dagger and not just easier to use.

One thing to consider - if you drop Leader of the Pack for Oppressive Superiority, you'll get a personal DPS boost that might at least partially offset this, and given OWP is getting such a heavy nerf anyway, it may not affect group DPS as much anymore. I am guessing this will make greatsword the preferred build for pSLB since it doesn't lean so heavily on OWP procs for damage. Unfortunately there aren't any elites that can replace OWP for DPS builds. Strength of the Pack just gives boons you'll already have in group content (mostly might).

It's kind of fuzzy logic since I am not sure precisely how much of the DPS it amounts to, but I suspect condi will be the only spec that can still exceed 30k. Maybe greatsword pslb if we're really lucky since it's less dependent on burst damage, but the burst is still such a big component I'm just not sure.