Guild Wars 2

So SB nerf ruined the class yadda yadda. As I’d developed a longbow/gs (landscape) axhe+wh (dungeons) with traited traps build I had little to complain about, but then I spent some time on my alts and realised they problem is that – my build wasn’t actually a playstyle preference – that was my ranger’s only useful build.

E.g. I run with an axe/axe + rifle warrior alt with banners and shouts. My friend prefers mace/shield + hammer with signets and physicals. Both are equally viable builds to take into high-end pve content. (I’m almost exclusively a PvE player, landscape is forgiving enough that you don’t need to worry about this stuff, so I’m coming at this from a dungeon pov.)

1. Apart from ranged DPS my only outstanding ability is dropping ranged combo fields. This requires a very specific skill and trait setup, all other builds are going to reduce the effectiveness of the team.

2. I love the lack of trinity and the flowing nature of GW2 combat. But, this does mean to carry my position in the team I need to be able to cc, buff and heal as well as dps. So, as a ranger, I HAVE to bring along healing spring, a warhorn and entangle. These are the ONLY viable ‘choices’. Find me someone that disagrees.

3. In landscape a ranger that builds with some vit and toughness (to crack out some smashfaces aoe melee goodness) can balance this with a dps pet. In dungeons we HAVE to have vit + toughtness AND a resilient pet… That has to have useful buffs on it’s F2 becuase it will spend 50% of it’s time on passive.

So already my build is stuck with 30pts in skirmishing, axe + warhorn (no ranger will ever bring melee weapons to a dungeon*), healing spring, two traps and entangle. My pet choice is limited too, as some of the pets are effectively now useless.

[* This particular balance problem is for the Dungeon forum – that silver mobs somehow get 3x dps to ranged and 10x dps to melee rendering all but very specific warrior and guard builds unsustainable for more than 15secs at anything other than full range.]

OK, great I get to pick one more skill and which type of bow I want – this is hardly building your character to match your playstyle, which I believe is want the devs want all players to be able to do…

Our signets, spirits and shouts – along with traits to syngerise the build – could be refined so that we have more viable choices. Let’s brainstorm, but be realistic. What could be improved without being OP?

I have a couple of suggestions:

a: Give pet AI the automatic ability to move out of a telegraphed AoE attack. Seeing as enemy mobs are capable of this I don’t think this is unfair.

b: Signet of the Hunt – raise the passive to 15% runspeed. Movement is one of our characteristics yet we get stuck with the same runspeed buff as mages (eles) and meatheads (melee warriors). Also make the active worth using as it’s currently useless.

Eles (yes that’s casters) get a 10% runspeed buff signet with a very nice aoe blind on a 20s cooldown. We get +meh damage for one pet hit on a 30sec cooldown. Please, anyone, tell me how this is balanced?

Let’s make that button actually worth pressing, rather than what amounts to a 30 sec debuff. Suggestion – either 3 secs of stealth to relocate, up the cooldown to 45 or 60 secs to compensate;
or ranger + pet gains ? seconds of stability (breaks immobilization) – did I mention that we seem to be the only class that can’t break an immobilize, kinda sucks when you’re move-to-stay-alive doesn’t it?

Tl;dr: Suggest specific improvements to the specific ranger skills to give us our ‘jack of all trades’ status. Don’t suggest stuff that’s insanely OP and don’t QQ (‘cos it’s annoying and doesn’t achieve kitten):

Spirits: Remove the 20% chances – make it 100%. The buffs they provide aren’t particularly powerful anyway. If they were always on, rangers might at least contribute something besides the warhorn. Spirit of Nature could do with being 5 times more powerful as well, the healing on that is so weak it’s a wasted elite.

Ranger utilities are currently not great, but I don’t think the situation is as bad as people make it out to be. Going by category:

Survival: These are really well done. You can just fill your bar with them and do decently, or you can add one or two to improve your build. Trait investment is nice but not necessary to make them viable. Not much trait support, but the skills themselves are quite good so it doesn’t seem necessary.

Traps: Traps are ok- a bit more specialized than other lines, but that’s not a big deal. Trait investment makes a huge difference here, but I can see a ranger without the traits taking one (probably frost) to round out his build. Solid group of utilities, with the exception of Spike trap. Suggestion- Lower the cooldown to 20s so that a ranger who only wants one trap slot can choose Fire (high damage, low CD, fire field), Spike (Medium damage, low CD, gives CC but no combo field) or Ice (No damage, best CC, highest CD, ice field). Currently there isn’t enough differentiation between Ice and Spike trap since the cooldowns are so close.

Traps could also really use underwater versions- make them act like targeted grenades of some sort (require an enemy target, small explosion radius around them).

Spirits- The problems with spirits are pretty well known and universally complained about on the Ranger forums. Too fragile, skills take too long to cast, lots of trait investment for relatively poor returns, effects aren’t particularly good. There are a number of ways to solve these problems and make spirits viable without being overpowered.

First of all, Spirits are completely awful without trait investment, to the point where I would never take one without it being in a full spirit/Nature magic build. Lower their duration and cooldown to something like 30 seconds- this way it won’t be so devastating if your spirit gets gibbed early. Next, make the effects a bit more common at baseline- maybe a 35% base. Finally, spirit health should scale with Ranger health- maybe 20-30% of ranger health? It should be killable but not completely trivial. Once these changes are made, I can see people taking single spirits for things like point holding or dungeon bosses, putting them in relatively safe spots to give their party a boost.

The only change I would suggest for traits, combined with the previous suggestions, would be to make Spirits Unbound also remove or reduce the cast time on spirit activated abilities. Currently, activated abilities are really nice but take far too long to cast, and putting 30 points into spirits should probably remedy that in some way. This would also make a more compelling choice for the previous tier, since you would have to choose between a 15% boost to your passive chance (bumping it to near 50) or improving your active abilities, which are now more useful.

Storm spirit needs a bit of a boost too- maybe swiftness for 5 seconds, to make up for the fact that it isn’t directly boosting damage or defense.

(continued)

Signets- Currently kind of weak. Signet of the hunt is very poor- a 10% movespeed boost to a mobile class with decent access to swiftness isn’t a useful passive, and the active effect is pretty bad. It honestly needs a different passive entirely- maybe it could grant increased power/condition damage to ranger and pet? The active effect could have 2 or 3 charges of Attack of Opportunity to give your pet more of a chance of actually hitting with the increased damage. Alternately, the cooldown could be lowered to 20 seconds for 1 AoO.

Signet of Stone and the Wild are both quite nice, but an elite-level cooldown of 120 seconds is crazy, considering other classes can grab stability and invulnerability on cooldowns of less than 60 seconds. A cooldown of 60 seconds seems more appropriate for these skills, maybe a bit longer for the Wild due to its duration. Signet of Renewal is good as-is.

Trait support for signets is decent- the 1st and 3rd tier options are solid. The second tier (activating a signet grants might) is really, really bad and should be changed to a different activation effect.

Shouts- Shouts aren’t a terrible group of skills, and their problems are really more related to pet problems than the skills themselves. Sic Em would be a fantastic skill if pets were better at hitting moving targets- as is, you need a good amount of CC before it becomes useful. Protect Me is, obviously, really good. I am having a hard time judging Guard- the entry on the Wiki says that pet’s skill cooldowns are shorter while guarding, which could make it really good with the short CD on guard, allowing you to run around and tell your pet to guard any area where you’ll be fighting for a damage boost. I’m not sure if that’s accurate though, since the tooltip gives basically no information and it’s difficult to test. Search and Rescue is solid, no complaints there.

The main thing that shouts could use is more trait support. I think that a 30 point trait in Beast Mastery could give an additional effect to shouts- either something healing oriented (since it’s the healing line) or a specific effect depending on shout (Sic Em gives 5 stacks of might to all nearby allies for 15 seconds, Protect Me gives protection to all nearby allies for 10 seconds, etc). Possibly combine this with the existing pets getting natural health regen trait since it’s somewhat weak?

Overall, utilities are decent but not very exciting- most of them just need a little more “oomph”. Weapon skills and traits are probably a bigger issue with the ranger, especially traits (which is another wall of text entirely).