Guild Wars 2

The normal Glyph of the Tides pushes foes away while the avatar version pulls them in. Isn’t that the opposite of what you would want them to be?

In avatar mode, you are focused on healing. Your allies are presumably not in the best of shape, and you might want to relieve the pressure on them by pushing foes away.

In non-avatar mode, the focus of the group is back to maximizing damage. Pulling your enemies in at this time would be a great skill for the group (think Temporal Curtain), even if the ranger is personally using a range weapon.

It seems to me the skills are reversed, and we all know how an incorrect use of push (think Longbow 4) will quickly earn the ire of fellow players. I like my ranger, and would rather not see the class find a new way of getting ostracized.

Well you also have a aoe daze in celestial form iirc, so it’s a way of supporting by pulling in the enemies and dazing them while you’re pushing out heals

I believe the idea is that you pull them in with Tides, then start casing Celestial Skill 5, which will force enemies to scatter or take heavy damage / become immobilized. Or pull them in and then use Celestial 3 to daze them all.

Granted, that is just a two specific combinations, and I do agree that pull would be more useful overall as the normal version rather than the celestial version. Particularly since your other glyphs are offensive in normal form, so you could pull them in and then combo other glyphs on them for burst damage.

It may also be a theme issue, though. We didn’t get to see the celestial versions of the glyphs (sadly), but I have a feeling the graphics may be changing from the normal non-celestial versions, in which case Glyph of the Tides may become a moon based skill, with the moon pulling enemies into its “gravity”. And if that is indeed the case, then the pull version wouldn’t really make sense for the normal version, which is water-based (I guess they could make it a whirlpool or something, but that wouldn’t really be a “tide”).

As for the whole “incorrect use of a push”… pulls can be just as guilty of that problem. I’ve had many a Guardian who pulled a group of enemies out of my AoE using Binding Blades, for instance. So I don’t think there’s much difference there.