Guild Wars 2

Nature magic is supposed to be about boons and boon support. Why not add a little support to the minors? I’m thinking that this might be too strong, but it would address a certain problem. I’d just like to see this a trait somewhere honestly.

I want to add an effect to this trait that allows your pet to grant 3 allies (excluding itself) near it boons you grant yourself. This should scale off of the ranger’s boon duration and not the pet’s because it’d get crazy with that 50% buff. The reasoning for this is to allow you to grant boons to your front liners that are beyond the range of your shouts, warhorn skills, and what have you. That way you can still hang in the back with your bow while fortifying the front liners.

Too crazy? Yeah. How about just making Fortifying Bond work both ways? I give my pet nice things, why can’t he lend a helping paw and give me some of that might he happens to get from being in the thick of it?

Nice idea.

But I believe we all can agree we all want FB baseline.
Your idea might be a good alternative for it’s place in traitline.

First suggestion seems wildly OP to me. I mean, the concept you have of being able to buff frontliners while hanging in the backline is nice, but… if you’re NOT in the backline but rather in the “stack” with everyone else, then Rangers would essentially become beacons of boon multiplication for every AoE buff performed by their allies. Which would be pretty insane.

I love the second suggestion of letting your pets’ boons transfer to you, though. Of course, they’d need to figure out a way to code the trait so that boons originally transferred via Fortifying Bond wouldn’t trigger the opposite effect so that you wouldn’t end up with an endless loop of boons going from Ranger > pet > Ranger > pet stacking infinitely, which I imagine would be the main hurdle to the concept. But if they could get it to work somehow, it’d be amazing. Perhaps even a little too amazing, but it’d be something to try at least.

Back before Fortifying Bond existed, the complaint was that because of the 5-target limit for buffs and buffs going to players first before pets, pets never got a buff in a dungeon party. That seemed horribly unfair to rangers. Everyone else gets a buff and 100% of their damage is increased. The ranger gets a buff and only 70%-80% of his damage is increased.

We argued that either Anet either needed to stop nerfing ranger damage because we “also get damage from the pet” – so pretend the pet didn’t exist and raise all ranger weapon skills damage coefficients across the board by about 25%. Or our pets needed to automatically get a copy of every buff we got (and armor bonuses, and weapon bonuses, etc).

They opted for the latter. Except they made it a trait. So yeah, Fortifying Bond really should be made baseline. As it is, the trait just brings ranger up to par with the other classes (except for possibly minion necro). Or if they’re going to insist it be a trait, it should do more than just bring us up to par since it costs a trait.