Guild Wars 2

Is it possible to make a decent support/healing ranger to lvl with 2 other ppl with? I mean if I go healing gear and just full support would it work or be more of a hindrance than anything else? Also do spirits move/follow? Thnx!

Spirits do not follow you anymore, that used to be a trait but was taken away. The most ranger can do for support without druid specialization is cast healing spring and warhorn 5 for a water blast, and use shouts with resounding timbre to give regeneration. Since everyone can blast a waterfield, and regeneration doesn’t scale well with healing power, it isn’t worth investing in healing gear on a ranger. If you have druid spec, your staff has pretty effective heals and you have high healing output with celestial avatar, which might get some value out of support gear, but it won’t be necessary in most pve content.

Dang really wanna run a heal/support guess I’ll pew pew till I get drood unlocked. How viable is drood in open world and dungeons/raids/fractals? I was hoping hot would make it where tanks and heals would always be needed.

Please, keep in mind that healing during leveling is not needed. At all.
Once you kill the bunch of NPCs – you reset back to full HP in matter of seconds.

Which means you are much more efficient by helping your peers kill your target. That way they take less damage and you achieve your goal faster. Moreover, if any of your fellows get downed – all rally if the target dies. Otherwise you’d have to revive them 1 by 1.

When it comes to raids and fractals – yes. Healing is useful. It’s quite much training wheels but it does carry the raid. A raid without druid has to perform 4 times as good as the raid without one. And that’s a huge difference.

When it comes to fractals – only the higher scale requires a healer. For casual dailies or scale up to lvl 60 – none is needed.

Dizzle.5289:

Dang really wanna run a heal/support guess I’ll pew pew till I get drood unlocked. How viable is drood in open world and dungeons/raids/fractals? I was hoping hot would make it where tanks and heals would always be needed.

That seems like a good way to go.
Druid is viable in open world, dungeons, raids and fractals.
For this moment tank-roles and healing-roles are certainly needed in raids, depending on your team it can also be needed in fractals and dungeons.

I run full Minstrels armor with druid runes, minstrel bow and staff with water and a regen signet. And it works really well for WvW. Only complaint is that even in avatar form, outgoing healing is between 1,200 to 1,800, which when you look at it, isn’t a whole lot compared to the damage some classes can do (5000+ in some builds). But you sacrifice your outgoing damage if doing full minstrels. And using the staff, people in front of you are healed every second. It’s a good build, but not that great when running solo in wvw. Only other negative I found out was that you can end up with a high toughness, and bosses like to focus players with higher toughness.

Quincy.5490:

Spirits do not follow you anymore, that used to be a trait but was taken away. The most ranger can do for support without druid specialization is cast healing spring and warhorn 5 for a water blast, and use shouts with resounding timbre to give regeneration. Since everyone can blast a waterfield, and regeneration doesn’t scale well with healing power, it isn’t worth investing in healing gear on a ranger. If you have druid spec, your staff has pretty effective heals and you have high healing output with celestial avatar, which might get some value out of support gear, but it won’t be necessary in most pve content.

Regen scales really well with healing power percentualy, it’s the best scaling source of healing actually, it’s just that the base value is too low. Outgoing healing helps with it.

For leveling just go full damage it’s not worth playing defensively at lower levels TTK increases by a lot and your survivability doesn’t.