Guild Wars 2

Will the take away our LongBow?
Will it be a Spirit focused Spec (like Ritualist)?

Interested to hear speculations, it’s obvious it won’t be anything like the WoW Druid (form changing).

Izzy confirmed you can use all the old weapons when you specialize. You lose 1 trait line and gain a new one.

So are you able to weapon swap while using the druid weapon? How is that going to work with the traits ..interesting..although I wish you got more then one trait line for a specialization…seems kinda weak

Yes, weapon swaps. If I’m not mistaken, you get the new trait line, new utilities and the staff.

So Staff / Longbow it is then
I’m sensing it’s going to be a spirit focused spec – Frost Spirit, Stone Spirit, Water Spirit?

My speculation would be a trade of Nature Magic into druidism.
That might eventually lead to trading Spirit-kind Support for Druid one.

Especially when it changes the Elite to a healing skill. Sounds about right to do that.
Moreover, the staff is definitely going to be AoE, disruptive oriented – means that I would definitely go for Sword + Dagger as offset to stay alive and apply poison pressure, or shortbow for exact same purposes but more disruptive uses.

After all, the video was spirit-less. I’m sure that if I wanted to make a promo of support Druid, I’d include some. I’m actually betting on having more “plant-like” style. Spirits are more ethereal than natural.

Tragic Positive.9356:

My speculation would be a trade of Nature Magic into druidism.

I was hoping that, with changes to profession mechanics, the trait line with the profession specific attribute will be the trade off. If they want professions to transform into something new, that’s at least what they should do…

…that at least was my initial thought upon the reveal of HoT. With no idea on how the profession mechanic will change, it’s kinda hard to speculate on. Trading off Beastmastery would incline some serious changes to the pet mechanic.

Tragic Positive.9356:

My speculation would be a trade of Nature Magic into druidism.

I’m gonna guess Marksmanship.

It’s the only one revolving around a specific weapon and the staff could easily be a 1200 range weapon making replacing a similar long range weapon easy.

If druid is spirit based or transformation based, I’m not going to play it. I’m not interested in more AI or wonky transformations. I’m looking for support/aoe damage in our specialization.

shadowpass.4236:

If druid is spirit based or transformation based, I’m not going to play it. I’m not interested in more AI or wonky transformations. I’m looking for support/aoe damage in our specialization.

I believe they have stated that the specializations are just refinements or additions to the classes. Not entire reworks of the class.

It’s the reason I think it will feature a lot of AoE damage/cc or party support as those are the two area we really suffer from compared to other classes.

In this case the lowest hanging fruit works to our advantage.

I hope we lose beast mastety

Staff on ranger?
Useless in dungeons. That’s my speculation. Would love to be wrong. Can only hope -.-

J Eberle.9312:

Staff on ranger?
Useless in dungeons. That’s my speculation. Would love to be wrong. Can only hope -.-

Keep in mind that meta might drastically change as well.
Right now, Zerk is what we need, because healing power is laughable and by killing things you rally. And you can always dodge things that hurt you.

That being said, in HoT there might be a change of system that will promote longer fights that will need some front liners and some supports. We are going to face raids, after all.

What ranger needs:
- a decent blast.. like other classes.. they can blast per 5 sec… rangers have only ONE blast, and that’s horn5…
- sharing conditions to ally
- jedi staff melee combat first 3 skills
- pet removal because AI is simply not worth having it and almost no control on pet then.:
- attack
- stop attacking and avoid combat
- use your only skill
if we don’t have at least 2 active skills on ranger.. then it’s pointless to have AI pet..
- we need more pet control if anet wants to keep the ranger ~ pet role
- MY OPINION: we need marksmen specialization, interrupts, preparations and while in specialization, total removal of pet physically and gain his power.

I hope that if we get staff specialization… that we wont get something like copy of other classes with reworked skill effects like this kit:
- elementalist staff fire 1( Fireball ) to auto attacks..
- warrior banner skill 5 ( Plant Standard ) to drop combo field..
- guardian hammer 3 ( Zealot’s Embrace ) to root enemy..
- ranger greatsword 4 ( Counterattack ) to block with staff…
- ranger healingspring ( Healing Spring ) acting like ele big water..

If arena net has something like this in mind.. please don’t…
Rangers were never meant to be healers or what ever else to support through healing..

What i see as viable option is to put back in game preparations.. self & aoe buffs (5 ppl ), sharing bleed and poison. Giving more ability to share ranger conditions since we gonna see a Revenant which will offer immunity on those.. SO my idea is ranger staff will apply a lot of boons and condition busts for allys.

Given what we’ve seen on the Revenant and how they will be loaded up with directional AoE attacks, I am pretty much assuming that is what our staff will be like as well.

McWolfy.5924:

I hope we lose beast mastety

I’d love for that traitline to be replaced for the specialization, seeing how it has the least amount of redeeming traits. However, knowing Ranger luck, we’ll probably get Marksman replaced ¬_¬