Guild Wars 2

After attending a video game seminar a few months ago, I got a good glimpse on how much effort it takes to program something as simple as a hole in the ground(about a week for one person). With that in mind I tried to think up something that would be easy to implement without being too taxing on Anet’s programmers and Devs.

At the moment rangers are pretty much forbidden from WvW guild raids, kicked from fractals /dungeons regularly, and are considered useless by many in any sort of PvP/WvW format.

Why? When people who hate on the ranger decide to elaborate beyond their expletives and ranger class slurs they explain in the following. “Whatever the ranger does, another class does better”, “The ranger is a selfish class, it synergises with its pet better than other players”. The worst part about this is that these people are right, I can’t think of a single thing the ranger does better and I die a little inside every time it comes out of my mouth when instructing guildies. Hell even the warrior can serve as a better support class with no sacrifice to dps or survivability(which is why I grudgingly use my warrior when leading/following guild raids).

Anyhow, enough horsing around here’s my idea for an easy fix. Give rangers the capacity to use an ability similar to the already existing ranger “Guard” shout but in a sort of targeted version. Basically left click an ally, then have an F5 utility* to lock-in/lock-out your pet to follow your ally around and engage any enemies attacking them or any target your ally is engaging. When locked-in on an ally abilities like “Protect Me” benefit your ally instead of yourself and possibly signets as-well when speced with “signet of the beast-master”. Also when locked-in This will allow the ranger to effective to use it’s pet to synergise with other players better, such protecting the glass cannon/support characters in a dungeon or buying your commander several precious seconds of survival. When locked-out the pet will aggro your targets normally and skills function like they normally do. Naturally there should only be a fixed amount pets locked-in on a particular ally, probably best to limit it to one.

*Instead of an F5 skill it could alternately be made into a shout to increase shout build viability.

I pitched this idea because many of these features already exist in the game but can be a huge game changer with some tweaking.

Thoughts?

If a ranger is played right he can even out dps a warrior with the pet together, unfortunately this only goes for melee. Frost spirit, spotter and healing spring supports the group nice. People just don’t get/know it because of the high amount of bearbow rangers… sigh

I’ve just started using the spotter trait and it helps me as well of others if they stay nearby. I don’t play pvp but I see your point with WvW. As for dungeons, I can earn my own keep. I just wish there was a template system(like in GW1) to store builds for whatever I need at the moment. Having to pay to shuffle traits around around as needed doesn’t cut it for serious players. And having only 2 weapon slots to switch between is really annoying. Rangers need a warhorn to run but I get better dps with a torch. Leeching off of someones aoe swiftness isn’t always possible.

I actually do like this idea. I’m pretty new to Gw2 but have played the ‘ranger’ class in WoW for several years in hc raiding, you’d be surprised how similar alot of the abilities can be, that goes for alot of mmo’s and classes. What i have found is that yes, the ‘ranger’ is a very selfish class, while you can get huge amounts of survivability for yourself (if played right) there’s not much you can do to help others… be it a raid cooldown or an aoe heal/ signet.

The only reason this is a ‘problem’ in Gw2 is because there is no specified healer or tank, so each player is care-bearing the other (as and when needed) I do like this idea, and typically ‘ranger’ is one of those classes that is played ‘wrongly’ alot.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with ranger as it is, IF you play it right, but these changes could make for a really sound, slightly more simple class and eliminate some of that speculation that rangers are useless.