Guild Wars 2

Level 80 Ranger here. It occurred to me that I very rarely see anyone using the Norn cultural skills. The owl swoop is pretty useless to me, the wurm AI seems lacking, and I feel like I wasted skill points with Become the Snow Leopard. The cooldown is too long to make it useful in situations where I need my elite. What do you guys think?

Well to begin with racial skills are meant to be weaker, so only for some situations you would want them.

In my case i play around with my forms from time to time just for the fun of it.

I use the owl from time to time, as a necro. The two stacks of bleed are nice. I pop BiP, then owl, then I epidemic the bleed stacks around.

My warrior uses Become the Wolf, but mostly for RP purposes. I swap it out when I’m actually doing any risky content.

my warrior and mesmer norn dont really use them, but my ranger norn uses owl and wurm and the snow leopard form.

I use the wurm with my thief. It gives me a little extra oomph when I’m in a particularly tough situation. Seems to work well when I bring out my thieves guild and my thief trap. I think I’m going to try the owl just to see how the bleeding stacks up with some of my other skills.

I use Become the Snow Leopard from time to time in WvW on my Guard. The stealth comes in handy when scouting by myself.

It is very situational though, but well worth the skill points spent. (Guardians can’t get a stealth skill any other way).

My norn is a warrior. I used the bear a few times while levelling, but prefer either either signet of rage or the battle standard depending on the situation.

My Norn is a Guardian. I rarely use any racial skills, sometimes I do like to play around with the forms though… more for fun than function though.

I swap between the Owl and Wurm for one of my slots. The Wurm makes for an extra meat-shield for my Ranger, helping to take some heat off my pet, and the Owl is a nice way to cause some long-lasting Bleeding that you can further stack with weapon skills. Plus, it just seems appropriate to have my Ranger calling down a feathered friend to attack her foes, without having to carry a Warhorn or a bird pet.

I use snow leopard in WvW and I wouldn’t really take anything else atm. I have used it countless times to escape a situation where I couldn’t win (usually an enemy zerg came out of nowhere). I have also used it to catch up to and kill a running enemy I probably wouldn’t have caught up to otherwise.

<3 snow leopard

I use the shapeshifting all the time for my elementalist when she gets in a bind and needs close combat.

On my Engineer not so much.

The two Warrior class skills vastly outperforms the racial skills.

Even if the shapeshifting was on a toggle with low cooldown I’d be hard pressed to replace my Signet of Rage.

Rarely I pull out the owl to stack bleed. Wurm is ok, but as a ranger it’s less useful (can still draw aggro in PvE).

Forms: Rarely. Easily defeated by Control; nothing like one little enemy knocking your butt off a cliff to make you rip them right off your bar. They’re not that tough, either. Make perma or gain Unshakable and I’ll have a reason to reach for them.

The Norn racials sometimes make me wish I’d chosen a different race. They’re not supposed to make a difference, but in W3 and PvE they can make a huge difference.

Pain Inverter, Prayer to Dwayna, Prayer to Kormir, Take Root…

All of those are WAY better than anything Norn has. Heck, I’d trade ALL of our racials for any of those.