Changes rangers need from the perspective of a mechanist main [PvE]

[Sindust.7059]

I did fractal CMs a few times with power soulbeast, and there was not a single boss in the CMs where I did better on it than on mechanist, even though on the golem I do about 2k more DPS with the power soulbeast than with the power mech. Literally the only boss in all of the fractals where I found power soulbeast to be superior to mech was Old Tom in the Uncategorized fractal, because that boss is basically a golem, and the fight is short enough that the superior burst of power soulbeast gets to shine.

 

The biggest obstacle I encountered for the usability of this spec is the channeled skills. While using longbow 5 or axe 5, which are the most damaging skills, my char can neither move nor dodge without putting those skills on their full 20s cooldown. And with longbow 2, while I could move, I couldn't dodge, which is the same issue, just a little less severe. This makes it nearly impossible to do the damage rotation without getting hit by mechanics. This also means there is a high penalty if the group doesn't have enough stability. And some instabilities are excessively punishing (flux bomb, vomit, last laugh, poison trail, social awkwardness) because they either make you move when you would need to channel, make you screw with other team members, or make it easy for them to screw with you. Neither mechanist nor virtuoso have this problem. Their skills are doing damage at the end of the cast, so when interrupted, they only get a 4s cooldown and can be used just a little bit later, without a huge DPS loss. Hence my first 2 proposed changes:

1. Make it so that no channeling skill forces rangers to stand still.

2. Only put skills on full cooldown at the end of the cast and make it so that they only start doing damage at the end of the cast to compensate.

 

The other thing that I find to be a big issue is that untamed f1-3 skills cannot be set to autocast. Mechanist really did not need the autocast on the f1-3 skills, because the cooldown on those is pretty long and cannot be reset, 1-2 of those skills (depending on build) bring utility that you might benefit from by holding back a few seconds or making sure that you put your mech in the right spot before triggering them, and there isn't a whole lot else to do when playing mech. But untamed rotation is absolute madness. Skill cooldowns get reset constantly, and there are always enough buttons to press without the f1-3 skills, which in turn bring nothing but raw damage, so there is no reason to ever hold them back. If there is any spec in the game that needs its f1-3 skills to be set to autocast, it's untamed. Hence obviously my third proposed change:

3. Allow autocast on untamed f1-3 skills.

 

And no, neither of these changes would mean that rangers need a DPS nerf like mechanists got recently, because the rotations would still be more complicated, and they would still have less utility in their pure DPS builds (no stun break, no teleports, less self-healing, less CC), and would have comparable DPS loss at range due to axe 5 being melee and axe 2 only hitting once or twice at range rather than 5 times like it would in melee.

[Beddo.1907]

47 minutes ago, Sindust.7059 said:

1. Make it so that no channeling skill forces rangers to stand still.

WD is one of the most hard hitting skills in the game so no.
LB in instanced PvE bad, so no need to change in with this in mind (LB does need to be refreshed, but for a different reason).

50 minutes ago, Sindust.7059 said:

2. Only put skills on full cooldown at the end of the cast and make it so that they only start doing damage at the end of the cast to compensate.

Doesn't make sense for those skills, since you are using a physical weapon in real time.

52 minutes ago, Sindust.7059 said:

untamed

Untamed is already on the to do list so no feedback is changing anything till the rework.

Overall Mechanist in not the best baseline for other specs, due to being on the chopping block with the "tickets" overflow.

[Sindust.7059]

2 minutes ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Doesn't make sense for those skills, since you are using a physical weapon in real time.

You could be "physically" pulling out multiple arrows one at a time and then shooting them all at once. Same channel time, same skill duration, same damage, but the damage would only start at the end, so the cooldown would only need to be started at the end of the channel. Not sure how to justify it with axes (that's up to the people who get paid for designing the game), but this could easily be done with bow.

6 minutes ago, Beddo.1907 said:

Overall Mechanist in not the best baseline for other specs

Virtuoso then. All the same things I said apply compared to it.

[anduriell.6280]

5 minutes ago, Beddo.1907 said:

WD is one of the most hard hitting skills in the game so no.

That is incorrect. Hard hitting is Arcing slice with a coefficient of 3.0 before any buffs or traits. 

WD is a very mediocre skill which can deal damage if you can keep the target pinned in the ground for 6 seconds. That doesn't happen in PvP modes unless playing against bots. 
When you add that to the fact the damage is low in each impact, means any other class with better 1 hit skills can deal more damage to you and not be worried about the WD. You haven't had any thief bursting you while channeling the skill, obviously. 

An Arcing slice will destroy your WD at any moment. Even the reflect is weird not reflecting the full distance. 

WD can and should benefit from a reduced movement skill so at least the ranger can position itself a bit during the chanelling. 

1 hour ago, Sindust.7059 said:

2. Only put skills on full cooldown at the end of the cast and make it so that they only start doing damage at the end of the cast to compensate.

Doesn't make sense and also it goes against all the other classes mechanics. Ranger is fine in PvE. Not the meta, not good but fine enough. I have seen very few times where a ranger is actively not wanted in fractals. No need for more of this obscure trade-off not reflected anywhere. 

Mechanist as being one of the favorite devs classes will obviously be better always. It is not in the numbers but in all those nuisanses the devs put int he ranger skills but don't disclose them  which pile up and make the profession feel like garbage. Until we get an actual dev whom plays and likes the class we will get no real solutions here. 

[Beddo.1907]

16 minutes ago, anduriell.6280 said:

That is incorrect. Hard hitting is Arcing slice with a coefficient of 3.0 before any buffs or traits. 

"One of the most hard hitting" does not mean the best. Also AS has 3.0 coeff only on targets under 50% hp.

[anduriell.6280]

2 minutes ago, Beddo.1907 said:

One of the most hard hitting" does not mean the best.

The same we can say about WD. But if you ask me the warriors skill is simply better. 

[Gotejjeken.1267]

Tbf, Arcing Slice is 150 radius to WD's 180, and WD reflects projectiles to make up for its damage in comparison to AS.  In addition, WD is a whirl finisher (i.e., can be used to spread AoE blind and the like).  

Whirling Defense also used to give retaliation, which has to be taken into consideration since they haven't reworked any weapon skills, so the motive behind the root of WD must take retaliation into account even though it's no longer a thing.  

Edited October 31, 2022 by Gotejjeken.1267

[Mell.4873]

I think it is more discovered the inherit weakness to Power builds on Ranger. Most the high damage skills especially for Soulbeast which relies on setup skills are very hard to land and can be easily interrupted.
Your best bet is to use a Hybrid or even better full Vipers Condition damage.

 

The reality is Ranger is just not very good at any instanced content in general. Sure you can play, sure you can get good DPS especially is a short window but the reality is the skill ceiling is very low.
This is exactly why I switched to Mesmer for Instanced stuff, even Virtuoso arguably even easier but when played well is amazing for Raids and Strikes. You can quickly tag and perform a full rotation on the Boss + Ads without dropping any DPS.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Mell.4873

[Levetty.1279]

15 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Tbf, Arcing Slice is 150 radius to WD's 180, and WD reflects projectiles to make up for its damage in comparison to AS.  In addition, WD is a whirl finisher (i.e., can be used to spread AoE blind and the like).  

Whirling Defense also used to give retaliation, which has to be taken into consideration since they haven't reworked any weapon skills, so the motive behind the root of WD must take retaliation into account even though it's no longer a thing.  

"It's fine that WD doesn't move because it used to have an irrelevant boon but doesn't anymore."

[Vordrax.5243]

Don't take this as a bad faith question, but I've heard that the difficulty of the Untamed rotation comes primarily from the skill resets. But that's just a trait, right?. If it's making it too difficult to play effectively, why not just take one of the other GM traits? One of them looks like it keeps a 15% damage increase on both the ranger and the pet. That might not be more golem DPS but it would be way easier to use in play. If the complaint of difficulty is more from the unleash/ambush mechanic then I'm mistaken.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Vordrax.5243

[Gotejjeken.1267]

6 hours ago, Levetty.1279 said:

"It's fine that WD doesn't move because it used to have an irrelevant boon but doesn't anymore."

 

Until they rework the weapon skills, then yes that's exactly why. 

Not sure how this is hard to understand in the slightest--literally look at Path of Scars for another example of a skill that drastically needs an update because of the mobility spam of today's game.  

Regardless, to imply WD is weak or unusable even in rooted state is facetious at best.  

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

5 hours ago, Vordrax.5243 said:

Don't take this as a bad faith question, but I've heard that the difficulty of the Untamed rotation comes primarily from the skill resets. But that's just a trait, right?. If it's making it too difficult to play effectively, why not just take one of the other GM traits? One of them looks like it keeps a 15% damage increase on both the ranger and the pet. That might not be more golem DPS but it would be way easier to use in play. If the complaint of difficulty is more from the unleash/ambush mechanic then I'm mistaken.

You're still gimping yourself heavily if you're playing with Ferocious Symbiosis. You need Fervent Force to do well enough to justify taking Untamed over Condi Soulbeast in an instanced scenario.

[Vordrax.5243]

55 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

You're still gimping yourself heavily if you're playing with Ferocious Symbiosis. You need Fervent Force to do well enough to justify taking Untamed over Condi Soulbeast in an instanced scenario.

That sounds to me like they need to reduce the power of Fervent Force and up the baseline power of the Untamed to balance it out then.

[Sindust.7059]

7 hours ago, Vordrax.5243 said:

Don't take this as a bad faith question, but I've heard that the difficulty of the Untamed rotation comes primarily from the skill resets. But that's just a trait, right?. If it's making it too difficult to play effectively, why not just take one of the other GM traits? One of them looks like it keeps a 15% damage increase on both the ranger and the pet. That might not be more golem DPS but it would be way easier to use in play. If the complaint of difficulty is more from the unleash/ambush mechanic then I'm mistaken.

That might work for DPS depending on the specific numbers (not an expert here), but it wouldn't work if you play alac (which is what I actually played with untamed), because you need it to reset the cooldowns of the spirits. The only other way would be to slot 4-5 spirits and run with ritualist gear, but that would be a much bigger DPS loss, since you would be not only losing the highest potential DPS trait, but also utility skills and stats on gear.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

4 hours ago, Vordrax.5243 said:

That sounds to me like they need to reduce the power of Fervent Force and up the baseline power of the Untamed to balance it out then.

No, they just need to rework it.

 

Having Untamed just be core with more flat bonuses would be boring. Even with how broken OP Fervent Force is and how much of a dev oversight Fervent Force is in terms of DPS rotations its still more interesting than Ferocious Symbiosis, and more flat bonuses and less power on FF will be both boring and potentially worse off in the long run.

[Mauti.3520]

Regarding Soulbeast in fractals I would like to heavily disagree.

Right now Soulbeast is one of the best if not the best Fractal CM DPS Spec featuring both an incredible and all applicable Power Build and an extremely strong Condi Build for 100CM working extremely well there, especially since the latter works so well with Condi Thief in tandem.

Mechanist straight up doesn't compete with an experienced SLB rn in Fractals. Wingman Data post October Patch Fix will back that. Not on 100 Condi nor on Power in 99 and 98. pMech and pVirt will perform better in slower groups and lesser experienced hands but will fall off quite heavily in fractals, especially pMech, compared to SLB the better the group is and the more experienced the player is with the class and the fight. Imho not everything needs to be balanced with low end in mind, as long as it's ceiling is reasonable and realistic and pSLB has only recently been made much more forgiving and easier.

Longbow in PvE is clunk and most players are better of using Axe/Axe + Warhorn anyway as LB 5 in particular require experience. Bit lower burst but way more reliable and fail safe.
If you fail to make use of LB5 you are better of playing Axe/Axe only anyway.

Though I wouldn't want to change it based on PvE alone. There is more to the game than that and Longbow is a staple in Ranger's PvP and WvW Roaming and Smallscale arsenal for 10 years straight.

In terms of Untamed uuuuh, I think, manually casted F1-F3 are the least of it's problems. It's design is soooooooo off from anything reasonably designed to be played well in PvE in a realitstic scenario it hurts.

 

Edited November 2, 2022 by Mauti.3520

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

6 hours ago, Mauti.3520 said:

In terms of Untamed uuuuh, I think, manually casted F1-F3 are the least of it's problems. It's design is soooooooo off from anything reasonably designed to be played well in PvE in a realitstic scenario it hurts.

 

Calling Fervent Force anything less than a dev oversight is an insult to the people who worked hard to get it to 43k DPS. FF is so broken but also the only thing keeping Condi Untamed (and the alac variants) alive.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

On 10/31/2022 at 12:32 PM, anduriell.6280 said:

The same we can say about WD. But if you ask me the warriors skill is simply better. 

Whirling Wrath on Guardian trumps this entire line of discussion. Also, you're being disingenuous using the sub 50% HP threshold coefficient on Arcing without mentioning the condition for it.

Besides Whirling Axe is the highest coefficient skill outside of Dragon Slash - Force in PvE.

[Kodama.6453]

18 hours ago, Vordrax.5243 said:

That sounds to me like they need to reduce the power of Fervent Force and up the baseline power of the Untamed to balance it out then.

Tbh, considering the recent balance philosophy we got from Anet, fervent force shouldn't actually exist at all.

They mentioned that they want to consider the concept of "purity of purpose", which means that they want every skill and trait to have a clear identity. They should excel at some things and be unable to do other stuff.

Fervent force is the absolute opposite of this vision of purity of purpose. It is a trait which improves literally everything.

• Damage? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your dps skills.
• Defense? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your defensive skills (including your healing skill, blocks, barrier, etc.).
• CC? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your CC skills.
• Boon distribution? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your boon share skills (as seen in the alacrity untamed build).
• In combat mobility? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your mobility skills (dashes, blinks, etc.).

It gets to the point that no matter what your build tries to achieve, you might end up with taking this grandmaster trait as an untamed. Meta dps builds are taking fervent force. Meta alacrity share builds are using fervent force. Even if your goal is to tank alot of damage, you will end up using fervent force, especially since they nerfed the PvE version of the healing trait (restorative strikes) to just heal for 5% of your strike damage in PvE.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

39 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Tbh, considering the recent balance philosophy we got from Anet, fervent force shouldn't actually exist at all.

They mentioned that they want to consider the concept of "purity of purpose", which means that they want every skill and trait to have a clear identity. They should excel at some things and be unable to do other stuff.

Fervent force is the absolute opposite of this vision of purity of purpose. It is a trait which improves literally everything.

• Damage? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your dps skills.
• Defense? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your defensive skills (including your healing skill, blocks, barrier, etc.).
• CC? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your CC skills.
• Boon distribution? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your boon share skills (as seen in the alacrity untamed build).
• In combat mobility? Improved by reducing the cooldown of your mobility skills (dashes, blinks, etc.).

It gets to the point that no matter what your build tries to achieve, you might end up with taking this grandmaster trait as an untamed. Meta dps builds are taking fervent force. Meta alacrity share builds are using fervent force. Even if your goal is to tank alot of damage, you will end up using fervent force, especially since they nerfed the PvE version of the healing trait (restorative strikes) to just heal for 5% of your strike damage in PvE.

Untamed is FAR from being really "meta" in the sense of usage. It's extremely difficult to get it to work perfectly in an actual encounter and Fervent Force doesn't specifically improve all of those things directly.

 

For FF to really be broken, you need to be on your target all the time. Ranger doesn't have enough defensive tools like blocks to make cooling those down specifically worth it- the only block ranger had that can be cooled down is greatsword 4, which has 1 CC skill on a long cooldown. Alacrity is only viable on untamed because you only need 1 spirit as opposed to the 3 required minimum at 100% boon duration.

 

While Fervent Force is broken OP, it's not going to be an untamed pandemic. Like Elementalist, most players playing ranger for specifically untamed fall between the low 10% skill bracket or above the high 10% skill bracket.

[Kodama.6453]

8 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Untamed is FAR from being really "meta" in the sense of usage. It's extremely difficult to get it to work perfectly in an actual encounter and Fervent Force doesn't specifically improve all of those things directly.

 

For FF to really be broken, you need to be on your target all the time. Ranger doesn't have enough defensive tools like blocks to make cooling those down specifically worth it- the only block ranger had that can be cooled down is greatsword 4, which has 1 CC skill on a long cooldown. Alacrity is only viable on untamed because you only need 1 spirit as opposed to the 3 required minimum at 100% boon duration.

 

While Fervent Force is broken OP, it's not going to be an untamed pandemic. Like Elementalist, most players playing ranger for specifically untamed fall between the low 10% skill bracket or above the high 10% skill bracket.

Maybe I didn't make my point clear here.

I am not saying that untamed will overrun the game and replace all team slots, but that fervent force is inherently going against Anet's proposed balance philosophy (the "purity of purpose" part, specifically) and you can see the related effects of it in gameplay.

My point is that fervent force doesn't have a clearly designed niche and instead is an amplifier for basically any build you can come up with. And the effect of that is that the other 2 grandmaster traits are crowded out by it. Why take a trait that heals me (restorative strikes), if I can take a trait which will improve my healing by giving me more access to my healing skills, but also improving everything else my build does?

Why take the damage trait, if I can take a trait that reduces the cooldowns of all my high damage coefficients, which not only improves my damage even further than the actual damage trait, but also gives me more healing skill usage, CC and anything else my build has on the side?

It's problem is that is is crowding out the other grandmaster choices which untamed provides. One grandmaster trait is designed to be a dps choice, but it isn't really taken because fervent force provides damage as well (and even more of it in PvE if the spec is played well), on top of providing all the other stuff like more CCs, more healing skill usage, etc.

Fervent force simply has no purity of purpose. By design, it always improves literally everything your build is capable of doing, instead of improving one aspect of it while being unable to help with other stuff like the other grandmaster trait choices.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Kodama.6453

[Vordrax.5243]

50 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Fervent force simply has no purity of purpose. By design, it always improves literally everything your build is capable of doing, instead of improving one aspect of it while being unable to help with other stuff like the other grandmaster trait choices.

Yeah, to your point, if Fervent Force remained a cooldown reduction, it should impact specific skills (think the Bladesworn elite that used to refresh all ammunition skills, including shouts - it got changed to just refresh the gunblade ammo skills.) So Fervent Force could possibly just refresh the Unleash skills. Then it would be significantly easier to balance, and it wouldn't add so much convolution to the Untamed gameplay.

[Mell.4873]

23 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Living Untamed just be core with more flat bonuses would be boring. Even with how broken OP Fervent Force is and how much of a dev oversight Fervent Force is in terms of DPS rotations its still more interesting than Ferocious Symbiosis, and more flat bonuses and less power on FF will be both boring and potentially worse off in the long run.

They definitely need a PvE only buff, it would be cool if it was cooldown reduction instead of 3% damage increase.

On 11/2/2022 at 9:11 AM, Vordrax.5243 said:

That sounds to me like they need to reduce the power of Fervent Force and up the baseline power of the Untamed to balance it out then.

 

10 hours ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

Calling Fervent Force anything less than a dev oversight is an insult to the people who worked hard to get it to 43k DPS. FF is so broken but also the only thing keeping Condi Untamed (and the alac variants) alive.

It is very hard to preform the rotation in time with the 1 interval second cooldown for the Trait.

7 hours ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Maybe I didn't make my point clear here.

I am not saying that untamed will overrun the game and replace all team slots, but that fervent force is inherently going against Anet's proposed balance philosophy (the "purity of purpose" part, specifically) and you can see the related effects of it in gameplay.

My point is that fervent force doesn't have a clearly designed niche and instead is an amplifier for basically any build you can come up with. And the effect of that is that the other 2 grandmaster traits are crowded out by it. Why take a trait that heals me (restorative strikes), if I can take a trait which will improve my healing by giving me more access to my healing skills, but also improving everything else my build does?

Why take the damage trait, if I can take a trait that reduces the coefficients of all my high damage coefficients, which not only improves my damage even further than the actual damage trait, but also gives me more healing skill usage, CC and anything else my build has on the side?

It's problem is that is is crowding out the other grandmaster choices which untamed provides. One grandmaster trait is designed to be a dps choice, but it isn't really taken because fervent force provides damage as well (and even more of it in PvE if the spec is played well), on top of providing all the other stuff like more CCs, more healing skill usage, etc.

Fervent force simply has no purity of purpose. By design, it always improves literally everything your build is capable of doing, instead of improving one aspect of it while being unable to help with other stuff like the other grandmaster trait choices.

This is why I love Fervent Force, it is engine of any build I make and the stuns are the fuel. 

Celestial Untamed Axe/Axe is amazing and if played correctly you can get very good DPS 20k+. Sometimes I'm the only one to survive in a PvE bounty train or Meta event when the numbers are lacking. 

[Kodama.6453]

2 minutes ago, Mell.4873 said:

This is why I love Fervent Force, it is engine of any build I make and the stuns are the fuel. 

Celestial Untamed Axe/Axe is amazing and if played correctly you can get very good DPS 20k+. Sometimes I'm the only one to survive in a PvE bounty train or Meta event when the numbers are lacking. 

Unfortunately, that's pretty unhealthy design and should actually get changed....

You say it yourself, "it is the engine of any build I make". There is no reason to take any other grandmaster trait on untamed as long as fervent force exists. And according to the balance philosophy they have presented to us, this should not be a thing. Traits should have defined niches, instead of literally always being the best choice no matter what you try to achieve.

[Zyreva.1078]

46 minutes ago, Kodama.6453 said:

Unfortunately, that's pretty unhealthy design and should actually get changed....

You say it yourself, "it is the engine of any build I make". There is no reason to take any other grandmaster trait on untamed as long as fervent force exists. And according to the balance philosophy they have presented to us, this should not be a thing. Traits should have defined niches, instead of literally always being the best choice no matter what you try to achieve.

Only in PvE tho, in PvP FS is the better choice. And it's not like there aren't many other traits, that are the only viable choice in a game mode. FF is op when looked at in a vacuum, but it's the only thing that makes untamed viable in PvE. And since untamed isn't really problemetic or unhealthy in PvE and it's questionable whether they can come up with something better, changing it in PvE should be low priority.