Shagie.7612

Traps competing with your stunbreaks and other utilities make them extremely difficult to balance. A lot of damage based utility slot skills run into similar issues. Things like stunbreaks and condi clears are so ridiculously valuable that giving them up is a decision a lot of builds don't really do. One slot at best, basically. You die too easily otherwise.

For them to be of equal value to other utilities means making them ridiculously strong in terms of damage (as that's most of their value), or adding a bunch of non-damage effects that mirror other utilities, at which point you're largely just creating clones of other skills with an extra effect on it and then it comes down to a basic math decision of "is A or B better"

They would probably work better as a weapon set competing against other weapons, or like engi kits. It's not a perfect solution, but I definitely think it'd be a lot more functional than what they are now.

I don't understand the Viper's Nest change.

The only place it gets used is underperforming condi builds in PvP for the healing from Predator's Cunning.

The poison damage isn't as important as extra healing, and it's a 1/3rd reduction (6 applications vs 9) in that for... no real reason?

Probably minor, all things considered, but why do it?

Wonder if it makes it closer to Flame Trap in PvE or something.

It's partly in what they're working on, but honestly MMO PvP just isn't a popular subset of the genre. Heck, MMOs in general are pretty stagnant, let alone their PvP.

They're all decreasing in PvP participation.

MMO players by and large aren't interested in PvP and never will be. That's just not why they play them.

New blood doesn't come in because younger people don't really play them either. At least not in any significant enough number to matter.

All you've got is an aging playerbase that isn't interested in PvP, and starts dropping games anyways as they get older.

I think that's a lot bigger factor of PvP losing numbers, especially in an older game like GW2.

You start adding on things like people getting tired of the game no matter how good it is and all the other reasons people stop playing and it's really not a surprise they all struggle to pull numbers into a competitive mode.

Been playing similar builds pretty much exclusively this season cause core and sic em are boring.

They're a lot of fun, but man, dagger and even sword are pretty underwhelming weapons.

Unflinching Fortitude's so nice off Siamoth/Wolf/Whatever. Really helps since this build doesn't really get away with running triple stunbreak like core.

Quick question for you or anyone playing with a stout pet, do you notice it bugging at all? There's times where I'll merge and press it, the buff goes up but I'll still be taking damage. Just last night I had a reaper do a spinny spin on me and I got eaten despite having the buff up. Not sure how to replicate, but it always seems to happen at the worst times. :l

nah it's gonna happen, lol

even if birds die relatively easily it's still coming

so at the same time let's also make the other... 45 pets in the game not suck so bad. like, across all game modes there's like 5 pets that see any use and that's dumb.

why can moas not hit a moving target but Signet of Humility on said moa makes it capable of doing so? how's that even a thing with the AI?

or let me start customizing pet skills/stats so i can have mister bear be useful instead of a dumpster truck

can they make it actually capable of catching people who hold the w key too?

been playing almost exclusively d/d in pvp for the last 2 weeks cause i'm bored, and my goodness it's just SUCH a mediocre skill in general.

no evade, bad tracking, for a pve-only weapon the quickness is pretty useless, pretty eh damage, long cast time, bleh

> @"frareanselm.1925" said:

> I havent played the soulbeast in depth but... if now you only can have one pet... when youre fighting and you pet dies you cant swap to the second like in the core ranger??? This nerf is excessive. Say bye to soloing content.

You can just merge and unmerge and it's at full hp lol

If anything, soulbeast is better at soloing than druid or core because of the ability to rez pet every 10s instead of 20/60.

Comparing things in a vacuum in a game where class abilities and weapon kits are _meant_ to be significantly different is silly.

GS might need another nerf for Ranger, but this isn't very solid reasoning.

Red Moa's command skill is a buff, lol

It literally doesn't do damage. There is no "missing" because there's nothing for it to land, it's just an aoe buff around it.

Anyways, pet AI is horrible in pretty much every way and it hurts them as a mechanic and the game would have been better off if they were optional from the very beginning like GW1.

oh also a fun fact, pets that can't hit moving targets, including moas, can hit them if you hit the pet with Signet of Humility

It's hilarious.

I wonder if people would be angry about any of the various beastmaster builds that existed in GW1.

Pets in that game were simply autoattack bots and the ranger controlled all the active abilities.

I suspect so, if only because of a change in attitude and expectations for a video game from then and now.

I fully understand and support nerfing passive pet damage (and bird actives and other untelegraphed stuff), but I can't really help but wonder what people consider to be "different" about an activated skill like Tiger's leap. It's highly telegraphed, controlled by the player, and on an extremely squishy pet.

The only thing different about it is the direction from which it comes from.

Also, Sind and his chat are absolutely hilarious and regularly extremely tilted about rangers to the point where they throw together everything ranger has available into one build that doesn't actually exist. Not to mention really weird claims about it having the most stealth uptime and better map mobility than thief, stuff like that.

Like I get it, ranger's annoying, there's tons to be mad about with it and tons to be mad about with thief, but dudes keep pullin things out of thin air and it's so far off reality that it doesn't mean anything.

> @"Eurantien.4632" said:

> That's literally what is going to happen. Pet nerfs WILL happen. Or marksmanship nerfs.

If they nerf MM, the same people running it'll just switch to Skirm and hit real hard with a flanking burst and nobody's opinions will have changed, lol.

It'll still be considered too high.

Also a strong chance they nerf both pets and MM and not just one or the other, tbh.

Mini siege turtle would be amazing, but maybe a bit unfitting as a pet. Same for a kirin or saltspray dragon since those aren't very beastly.

The turtles, and if we keep stickin around in EotN areas, the dinos would be a ton of fun to see though.

Would love to see them rework it so you could change the pet's model. Like, white tiger and tiger were the same pet but just looked different.

Curious to see what they end up doing with pets, since there's already a ton and like all but like.. 8 are kinda useless and I don't think it's particularly fun for anyone when something they want really badly ends up sucking (peench peench crab better be the strongest pet ever), especially if they want to do something other than open world.

> @"Aktium.9506" said:

> The name doesn't matter. The skills have different ids in the api and that's the data the recap uses. GS slash is 12474 and and the bird slash is 12682.

And the Soulbeast Porcine Maul is separate from the pig one (IDs 41406 and 12734) but both are reported under the same icon in death recaps.

Same with merge swoop and bird swoop (44991 and 12709, respectively), as far as I can tell.

The bird slash and GS slash stay separate, but there's a lot of soulbeast things that don't because of the merge.

Skill ID doesn't necessarily matter for the death recap because it's notoriously unreliable.

It's also infuriatingly difficult to get a decent looking recap showing the information you want, lol

Anyways, pets do too much damage, but I really don't think death recap screenshots are particularly useful given the lack of a timeline, inconsistency, and general misrepresentation of what's actually killing people they bring.

That goes for every source of damage, not just pets or ranger.

> @"Stand The Wall.6987" said:

> how do you eat that many bird autos? doesn't normal kiting take care of that lol?

He probably didn't.

Slash is also Ranger's GS chain.

And Swoop is GS3.

And the death recap combines those skills all the time, in the same way it does for Maul(Pig) and Ranger Maul.

Pets hit too hard but the death recap isn't always the most reliable.

why link a video of a pre-expansion patch where everything is broken because you have overinflated stats, extra procs from trinkets/legendaries/tier, and are missing things that came from leveling through BFA (azerite, mostly)

the arcane mage video is absolutely useless and intentionally misleading even though the spec (and all others) is a joke.

wow is bad and has been forever, bfa is extreme trash, but removing things isn't inherently a bad idea. sometimes things just outright don't work mechanically or are bad for game balance and a class would be better off without it.

changing things via removal is only a bad idea because no game developers understand why something should or should not exist, especially in the case of blizzard.

Elite specs are almost inevitable.

They're quite possibly the biggest content refresh and selling point of an expac for the rest of the game, if not PvP as well.

You're setting yourself up for disappointment if you're wanting them to not be added.

how soon until more people start eating a big ol tiger pounce into a bird swap

an AI biting everyone's ankles is going to be infinitely less popular than soulbeast was lol

Ranger melee weapons are lame.

Greatsword's strong but it's built around maul and maul alone, sword's extremely underwhelming after skills got moved around. It's just an autoattack machine.

Hammer or Mace (both or maybe offhand shield at the same time, whatever go for it) are the way to go. Bunny Thumper was the best.

Rifle would only happen as a close range shotgun because otherwise it's a second longbow and axe already fills a bit of that role.

Gunpowder in general is pretty anti-nature in RPGs and GW2's ranger especially is very connected to nature.

Ranger's too nature-y connected to use pistol or rifle. Gunpowder goes against pretty much all the ranger/nature RPG archetypes and tropes.

Also, rifle and longbow would be the same thing unless you make the rifle a shotgun.

Hammer is way cooler. Bunny thumpers are still the best.

Ranger's melee weapons outside of greatsword are extremely lame anyways.

i better get hammer and my roller beetle pet

bunny thumper here i come

Like half the pets in the game can't even hit a moving target without BM's speed boost lol. There's an old video of a moa struggling to hit a moving target until a mesmer hits it with a signet of humility, at which point it can. Mister Bear can't hit a moving target even with the speed boost, iirc.

I don't think it's necessarily a problem that there's a handful of "PvP pets" like Smoke though. Ones that have the most desired utilities/merge skills, stats, whatever.

Not really realistic to expect every family to have a PvP use, and trying to do so probably ends up hurting more than helping in the end.

The fix just ends up being making its damage significantly lower, since it has a stealth, evade, knock, teleport, and is fairly beefy.

It'd probably be pretty unpopular for both fighting as and against, but I don't think it'd be a big deal if the ranger had to choose between a high damage pet that just does raw damage, and a pet that does very little but has CCs, blinds, stealth, whatever. Especially now with Soulbeast being locked to just one in combat.

Someone would get the dumpstering by a damage pet and be pretty annoyed though since it's from an AI (can't really blame em, it feels pretty awful to get chased by a robot that can actually murder you).

Having said all that, I think pets would have worked better from the very beginning as entities that scale based on the ranger's stats, or have been relegated to mostly utility choice in PvP.

Alternatively, you force the ranger to activate skills delivered through the pet, like GW1 ones were.

There's a lot of different approaches you could have made for pets, but a threatening, AI based one that can randomly outskill you with no input from the player is like all of the negatives of a pet class archetype with little to none of the positives associated with it.

It's a bug with uhh... BM or WS, I forget which.

You can make a brand new ranger and have it have empty traits except for Soulbeast, and it works while merged.

And then you put one of those on and it no longer works.

is this like one of those screenshots where someone pulls up their death recap and Pig's Maul is combined with the GS Maul because the death recap sucks and does that?

not really sure it's the pet basic attacks rather than the activated ones like tiger leap or chilling slash that are the dumb part about them

but yo we're all down, make pet damage negligible and have em exist for utility purposes

then bump up the ranger's coefficients instead :^)

i agree, let me decide when mister bear uses his knockdown instead

mister bear's my best friend, we should be able to communicate when we want to cc people

dumpster pet damage, nobody wants to get their ankles chewed off by AI in a pvp game. it doesn't matter very much if it's killable or anything, if it chases people around, hurts, and can randomly skill you with a CC, nobody's gonna be happy.

allow the ranger to select when the pet uses its special skills, particularly the CC and current active skills.

adjust the damage coming out of the ranger in exchange for pets doing very little damage.

wow learned this with bm hunters like 13 years ago (though they've repeated the mistake a billion times ever since lol)

if pets are going to be a thing, they function best as a tool through which the controller executes skills, not some dumb set-and-forget face eating monster.

it's the same reason why they just do basic attacks in gw1 unless commanded to do more.