Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to decide what race to go with for my Ranger, and I am torn between the Norn and Human.

I tend to play female characters because they just look much better in armor than their male counterparts and teh human armor looks extremely good in this game, where the Norn is so-so. Yet, Norn get to shapeshift, and one those shapes if I am reading it correctly is a wolf, which is my favorite animal on this green earth…lol.

So I am torn and am looking to see if there is any advantage to being able to shapeshift?

This question would be answered much better if it were on the Norn board.

But, as a Norn Ranger, I can tell you that yes, there are advantages of being able to shape shift, but it’s very situational. So much so, in fact, that you will probably never end up using the skills. Hounds of Balthazar would serve you much better in most situations than any of the Norn forms.

Paken Kai.5970:

This question would be answered much better if it were on the Norn board.

But, as a Norn Ranger, I can tell you that yes, there are advantages of being able to shape shift, but it’s very situational. So much so, in fact, that you will probably never end up using the skills. Hounds of Balthazar would serve you much better in most situations than any of the Norn forms.

I guess it would have been better placed there, but I was thinking Ranger only, so that’s why I put it here…lol.

Don’t roll Norn for the animal forms.

You’ll be sorely disappointed.

They are horrible.

The transforms make you do less damage than normal.

Roll Norn if you don’t mind never using racial skills.

As a Norn Ranger…

Doing damage while transformed is not easy because most of the skills stop you in place when attacking. They buff your stats really high but then give you really bad auto-attacks to hit with.

The Wolf Transform is kinda nice. The life-stealing is powerful and it has an AoE fear, an AoE blowout, an AoE knockdown, Aoe Fury, and AoE Regen. The others offer things like higher health, really fast really far running speed, and stealth so there is utility there to work with.

Your pet disappears while transformed, but your spirits and traps stay out. Some of your traits and runes still work while transformed. When you come out of the transformation your pet comes back at full health even if it was dead when it started.

In general you’ll probably do more damage with Rampage as One, more group Healing with the Spirit, and control more foes with Entangle, but it is fun to turn into a giant bear with 50,000 health and ram through 15 guys, hitting them all. (You stop charging when you hit your target, so target the guy in the back or don’t target anyone at all, and then just hold down the button.)

If they would just remove the self-root on attacks they’d at least be usable. Not as good as class Elites, but not entirely worthless either.

Kormir > transformation.

If you do wvwvw, then Snow Leopard is handy. Forget damage, but stealth and long sprint are brilliant to get away or to run through a zerg and get inside your keep. Heck, i even ‘wasted’ it the other day just to make it to the capping circle in time. :p

Now as a rule, Rampage as One (stability) and Entangle (aoe immobilize+bleed) are more useful, but Snow Leopard is a handy little toy.

And well, for non-elites, it’s very ranger-y, you can summon more pets. :p