Thursday, March 20, 2008 Game Update

On the other hand, the angorodon mesmer might be viable again with a bit of tweaking. I remember when that build was first made... it beat just about anything I went against in PvP. Like a ranged touch necro with much faster kill times and enchant removal thrown in.

Maybe the extra energy would allow for dropping AuI and adding in another life steal.

Well this skill update update just took it too far for me with nerfing ranger skills.
After this skill update one question that comes to mind is Why do we need rangers anymore if their Bloody skills are doing to get powered down or changed.
I mean the ranger is known for its bow damage, few interrupts, and armor penetration. Yet now bow attack skills are being so powered down that they aren't worth using. Rangers aren't used for their interrupts due to Mesmer domination in that category. The only two builds that are really even make it worth having a ranger is touch ranger (which everyone is amazed hasn't been nerfed) and Burning arrow spammer.
So why do we even have rangers?!?! I feel like deleting my ranger which is my oldest character just so I can create a class that doesn't get so horribly under powered. I mean if you look at the history of skill updates the rangers overall power has decreased so now it is a pitful class to even use. I love anet to death but seriously them constantly boosting other classes skill while decreasing rangers overall damage is just a hypocrisy. This is one ranger who is sick of being nerfed.

Sincerely,
Itzl the Ranger

Oh hi, my name's Broad Head Arrow.

this is funny, you can see where Izzy spends his time ig. As if "turret rangers" were/are imba anywhere other than vs his three fire ele one wamo ra team. I think these were a nice/easy/fun build for rangers who weren't ready for dshot/savage templates. Come on, if one sb ggs your entire bar rest assured its not a problem. Ironically, Escape being one of the most abused skills of the month gets a small boon via the guiding nerf. Escape and Wail are the current creepers, stop encouraging f'n blockway.

WTF with the ranger nerfs, I mean I don't use those skills, but they were not overpowered, so why then? I hope GW2 skills are seprate, or it will = fail.

i agree with cmdr sub zero most of the ranger interrupts are good for small scale battles not huge battles like AB and HA

They were. rofl

actually, rangers are known for crippling shot and distracting shot... that's about it.

My poor Ranger got nerfed, but I did manage to find out [skill]Zojun's Shot[/skill] and [skill]Screaming Shot[/skill] work fine together.

And don't forget his big brother D shot, and his little brother Magebane.

After a lifetime of 20% pen, they nerf it AND the dmg. This is about as overdone as putting exhaustion on rits lol

Rangers are not nerfed, they are still amazing.

And no, in an 8v8 setting, they are not easy to beat. Coupled with Rigor and GftE! they are disgusting.

And that's the problem with the metagame. Instead of letting people work out counters and letting these counters become dominant enough to force out the "flavor of the week" build, the build gets nerfed and the players go scavenging for the next overpowered thing again. Except that the metagame just remains unbalanced, and is "balanced" again by the next nerf.

Take the turret ranger, for example. That build has virtually no defense. Blocking works against it, hexes work, heck, even conditions do! The build has a ton of counters which, assuming a normally flexible metagame, would start getting used frequently enough to render turret rangers useless. Instead, the skills are changed, and the build, instead of seeing occasional play in the hope of catching an unprepared opponent, has effectively been broken into a state where no one will use it at all.

Sure, dervspike was hard to prot against, but the key point is that it was hard, not impossible. Prot Spirit could still catch what cut through Aegis and other blocking skills, and Shelter could do it on a party-wide basis. Dervspike was simply a reaction to the meta's over-reliance on blocking, and - since it wasn't an "auto-win button" - the meta should have been allowed to adjust to it and find the right counters for it.

But, hey, not like it matters now...

They were overpowered in many ways.

Case in point:


When coupled with a curse necro or 2 using Rigor and a paragon spamming "Go for the Eyes!" and relentless spamming on a single target, then rapidly switching to another target, it was extremely overpowered and nothing short of a giant gimmick.

It was an unprottable, uninfuseable pressure "spike". You could infuse it once, but the arrows would just keep raining down, be unblockable, and your heals barely scratching the damage output.

The fact is, machine gun rangers with a properly organized team were disgusting. This nerf will helpfully hope tone things down a bit.

Seriously, I don't see why people can overreact to 3, lame, bad concept skills (Rangers are not a DPS profession) that made an imbalanced build get nerfed.

A-net are not "Nerfing everything", the are simply ridding of things that are imbalanced, passive defence, or anything promoted buttom mashing and big spikes.

Exactly the problem with the meta game.
Very well put.

Exactly. Rangers are not a DPS class, just like Mesmers. Mesmers and rangers share very similar characteristics. The key differences are that rangers are far less punishing then Mesmers, but they have higher damage output and better survivability. Rangers are still perfectly fine, and are unchanged. If you want to have DPS, stick to shock axe.


In a 4v4 setting, I would tend to agree. In an 8v8 setting, 2 curse necros with Rigor, 3 machine gun rangers, 1 GTFE! Paragon with party support (perhaps D-Anthem) and 2 monks. HA = destroyed. In GvG, tweaks would be needed obviously, but it is quite viable when playing against some standard meta builds. Advanced guilds would know how to counter it however (split it).

unfortunately, the turret rangers were the meta game. if you admit that the problem was the meta game, then you also simultaneously admit that there was something wrong with turret rangers. by nerfing the turret rangers, we fix the meta game.

problem solved.

I would jump on the bandwagon of tears for rangers but I cried hard enough when Crippling Shot's recharge increased from 1 to 2 a few weeks ago.

Come up with something new is the only solution...that, or rage quit because you don't have every skill in the game =/

You mean "farmer". The "casual PvE player" don't care one whit, and most of the time doesn't even notice the changes.

Oblivion was also a good example of why "no changes even to broken skills" isn't always a good idea.

The worst part about this update was simply that it didn't nerf Ursan. Dear Anet: change the AoE knockdown to single target.