Shiren.9532

Can you at least tell us what your vision is for ranger in WvW? We've had a WvW meta that excluded rangers from organised groups for as long as there was a meta (not even druid could break in compared to tempests and now firebrands). What design space do you think rangers are supposed to fill in organized WvW?

Longbow ranger is already pretty weak in WvW and it is often ineffective against meta comps before the last round of nerfs, I don't know why you are doing more. If you want to spike someone down with a glass build, thief and mesmer are already far more effective than the stronger longbow builds (which have all their effectiveness restricted to a small burst window which has since been significantly nerfed). Nerfing longbow again is beating a dead horse. Unlike sPvP, where projectile hate is limited to five possible enemy sources, a single revenant, guardian or warrior can almost completely shut down a longbow ranger's role in WvW with a single skill, and that is incredibly common in WvW with groups of 20+ players, any one of them can protect the rest of the group with projectile hate. Similar "pick" roles already outperform rangers due to no less reliance on projectiles, and often more useful abilities like boon rips (necros) or long range pulls (engineers). When trying to pick off someone in a group, these are by far the most useful abilities, which rangers do not have. All ranger has is a short window of burst DPS on a glass build. Outside of that it has long range shot to sustain pressure but it no longer benefits from DPS buffs and is completely stopped by projectile hate because the unblockable buffs will wear off. I'd also like to point out that a nerf to longbow is nerfing a core ranger ability when it's clearly the Soulbeast's ability to stack extra stats (from merging with a pet) that is causing the "problem". More nerfs to core ranger abilities (just like when spirits got nerfed because druid was too strong) will flow on to the rest of the profession's performance. Every build using longbow will suffer, when only the Soulbeast was the one pushing out the big numbers. Stop nerfing core ranger abilities to fix problems with elite specs. I've played ranger since launch and a lot of that was in WvW. It's one of the most common complaints (at every point in the game's life) that a commander wants 0 rangers in their squad. The profession is one of the least wanted as an ally because it doesn't do all the things the more dominant professions (warrior, guardian, necromancer) do and even in its role (pick) it's less popular than the alternatives (mesmer, thief, engineer). Soulbeast was the first time ranger actually had smooth gameplay in WvW and it was worth bringing one over another profession (it had a small but fun niche - a brief window of burst DPS that could down a target but rarely finish them, but at least they had to stop to revive). Whenever you got too good at it, the enemy zerg gets two guardians to bring Wall of Reflect, or a rev maintaining Ventari bubbles and your ability to do anything with a longbow is massively reduced (this is before you even consider than the large health pools, defensive stats and endless barrier zerg groups have makes longbow burst at its best ineffective many times). If this change goes through it will weaken an already weak build. Yes the build is strong against glass roamers, but glass roamers are incredibly strong against it (it doesn't have the escapes/stealths that mesmer and thief have and it doesn't have the durability of a tanky roaming build like druid or engineer). Ranger is already not welcomed by many zergs, nerfing one of the only viable group fight builds the profession has is just going to make it harder for rangers to do anything other than roam ineffectively or scout. It won't change the meta (the meta already ignores rangers) but it will make one of the nine professions much less welcome at all in WvW. PvP is the only place longbow is good at anything. It's incredibly weak in PvE, you can't use it in raids or fractals, but in PvP it's the only place where a longbow ranger can accomplish anything competitively. If you really are going to keep hitting it like this you may as well remove it from the game because it usually doesn't have a meta role anywhere.

This promotion provides different kinds of prizes depending on where you you live, because of the way our partner Alienware built it (the Dell part of this is not available outside of the US). European players are able to grab a Miniature Egg if they register to Alienware Arena. We're working on promotions that will be available to our European players later. Some of us don't live in either the US or EU. What are we supposed to do?

I they give titles to people based on what server they are on when the current system closes, I hope all servers open up and transfer costs are eliminated a week or two before the new system is implemented allowing a migration back to people's home servers. Lots of people consider a server they are no longer on as their "home server" despite having transferred off to play with friends or a guild that left. Many people are on lower tier servers because of their pairings rather than having any relationship with that server itself. If there is a title to recognize the server we are on at the time of the retirement of the current server, it would be nice if they remove the restrictions (and costs) allowing people to return to their home servers for the final days. Just because a Canadian might be living and working in the UK it doesn't mean they don't consider themselves Canadian.