Guild Wars 2

This patch changed ranger a lot. it changed the way traps worked, spirits were changed, and they reworked entire trait lines. Overall I like how ranger is now but I feel like there are still obvious ways to improve. I’m going to be talking mostly from a pvp perspective as its what I spend 99.99% of my time in :P I bolded my suggestions just in case you guys don’t like reading my rant

The first thing is spirits. They received a rework that basically killed them. I honestly have no idea why this change was implemented and how the other devs agreed with it. my first big issue is how much of a joke Nature’s vengeance is. It pulses 1 second of a boon every 3 seconds. I believe I remember Calmon-Huang saying that if we stack our boon duration (real easy to do in pvp now 4Head) we can get crazy uptime. Honestly gonna go down in best dev quotes. My first suggestion for this trait is to raise the base boon duration to 2 seconds. that way with 50% uptime, which now that traits don’t give boon duration is a respectable amount, we get full uptime. Now if we look at the boons pulsed themselves, there are also some….questionable… choices. Frost Spirit pulses 1 stack of might. 1 stack. every 3 seconds. for 1 second. sound OP to me amirite? stone and storm spirit also pulse the boon THAT THEIR PASSIVE GIVES. they couldn’t even choose a different boon. My Suggestion to fix this is to either make frost spirit might last 10-15 seconds so it can stack over time or make it pulse 3-5 stacks for 2 seconds every 3 seconds. with storm spirit, I would say make it pulse fury, this would add synergy between it and remorseless builds and is just good altogether. now for stone spirit I had an idea of taking nature spirit’s stability and giving it to stone spirit. since the stability is only 1 stack it won’t be as strong vs coordinated teams (it would still be strong which is why this idea may be OP) to replace nature’s stability you can give it resistance. this is a great way to see how resistance will work in a team setting and it helps rangers not be AS pigeon holed into wilderness survival for condi cleanse). If that is OP (probably is) you can make stone spirit pulse Aegis lastly, non-moving spirits is a problem. spirits already died to any sort of cleave and you guys just made it easier for the enemy team to kill them. you have two choices, either Make them able to move (favorable option) or buff survivablity I just hate to see an entire skill type be made useless for no reason

Well, my next point of contention with ranger traits is Hide in Plain Sight being deleted and Shared Anguish being kept. ArenaNet finally gave HiPS the buff it deserved a few months ago and then they decide to delete it. I liked HiPS because it gave you survivability to bursts and was FAIR TO THE ENEMY. with HiPS, the CC when through and interrupted the player. with shared anguish, the CC would not interrupt the player and would honestly sometime win games. the enemy would make the right play but not get rewarded cuz shared anguish. its basically untrackable too because it has a 90 second cooldown so there was a chance it was up when you CC or it wasn’t, the ranger couldnt even tell. if you really want to know how aids it was, just ask ostrich eggs (RIP Q_Q). hide in plain sight had a 30 second cooldown so if a fight was being initiated, the anemies could be sure that HiPS was up if they were looking for it. Delete Shared Anguish as it is a poorly designed trait and replace it by bringing back Hide In Plain Sight

Natural Healing received a nerf as it no longer heals the player as well as the pet. it healed for 133 every 3 seconds. this wasn’t in the tooltip before the big patch iirc. so the devs either didn’t know its true functionality (the ranger dev didn’t mention that they had nerfed it) or they willingly changed it for some reason. Make Natural Healing affect the play if the nerf wasn’t intended

I never get tired of ArenaNet and ranger axe. they can’t decide if they want it to be a power or a condi weapon. in the GM trait Honed Axes. it makes you gain 150 ferocity with a MAIN HAND axe. nobody in their right mind would use main hand axe for a power build. however, it does suit offhand axe. Make the ferocity from honed Axes apply to any axe (main hand or off hand) winters bite being AoE is honestly a joke of a trait and should be changed too, along with either increasing axe 5’s damage or letting you move while you use it as a QoL change.

Lastly, I saw sad to see Porcine pet’s F2 functionality not get changed with this patch. its pretty silly that not only do you have to walk over to the pet to pick up the dropped item, it locks your 1-5, YOUR ENEMY CAN PICK IT UP, and some of the dropped items have longer CDs than forage ???? you can get a double drop of skull and have it being on a 60 second CD when you pick it up the second time. Remove unnecessary CDs from forage skills and make they go into the F2 slot like how old steal used to work instead of making them drop on the ground i believe porcine pets are good, especially if they apply this change.

tl;dr:
raise duration of pulsed boons on nature’s vengeance and change some of the boons
let spirits move again or buff survivability
replace Shared Anguish with Hide in Plain Sight
looks at the change to Natural healing and see if change was intended
make honed axes’ ferocity buff apply to offhand axe, rework winter’s bite AoE idea, and give axe 5 QoL changes
lastly, make Porcine F2 go straight to F2 slot like steal and delete unnecessary forage item CDs

edit for grammar

like +1 good changes

Ok Trig, I agree with pretty much all of the suggestions. One thing about Spirits is that I don’t really think they need to pulse boons, since most of them already give boons.

1. Spirits should be able to move. Making them immobile really voids a lot (almost all) of their potential in PvP and WvW. I’d like to see Spirits actually have some type of Aura integration. For example, instead of pulsing boons, the Nature’s Vengeance trait could give Spirits an Aura along with their standard boon or condition. Fire aura, frost aura, magnetic aura, shocking aura. It all works well. The duration of the aura could be balance as necessary (1-2 seconds on most I think)

2. Yes, Shared Anguish is awful design, Hide in Plain Sight is very cool functionality and not total RNG feeling like SA. Definitely most Rangers would prefer HiPS to just replace SA in the same line.

3. I never really used Natural Healing before so I can’t really comment. What I can say is that all the non-minor Pet Stat traits are quite underwhelming (the +condition and +healing ones). Arenanet should consider adding extra functionality to these traits to make them worth it. Maybe Natural Healing could give pets a passive that gives say, 50-70 health per second to allies that are within a 300 radius or something. The extra + condi damage for pets is close to useless until they decide to make an actual condi pet.

3. Yes, Honed Axes is a pretty bad trait as it stands. Given how Mainhand Axe has horrible power scaling, I’d suggest giving +150 ferocity for each axe you wield (a maximum of 300). I think it would also be nice to give Critical Hits with axes a chance to cripple foes, in addition to AoE Winter’s Bite. Please also give Axe 5 the ability to move while channeling.

4. Definite yes to the Forage skill just replacing the F2 slot. As it currently stands, this is pretty much a bug that an enemy can pick up something your pet drops and use it to kill you.

Pretty much agree with everything Trig said. Spirits should be let to move again, because anyone with half a dead brain will kill the thing in a matter of seconds. Letting so many utility skills being useless to this class is pretty sad.

I want my Hide in Plains Sight back so badly man.

perfect suggestions, I have nothing to add. I especially like the trait to enhance whirling defense into something….more practical.

I saw a comment a while back that I think would pretty much fix all spirit issues make the spirits like an aura from your pet instead making them easier 2 use in pve atleast since the tend to die so fast in pretty much every boss fight and world boss fight (it should still be cancelled if the pet is downed) it would also make your life easier if you are a range or melle ranger for instance if your melee and run stone spirit you no longer have 2 run up and drop it 2 give the buff to the guys that acually need it and if u want it yourself just use a ranged pet or call your pet back the only issue i see with this idea so far is that ANET wants rangers 2 swap pets as often aspossible atleast every 30 sec

I don’t mind spirits not being able to move (for pvp anyway).

But they need to live long enough and have a large enough radius to apply their boons.

Looking at you spirit of nature.

At the moment they both die too quickly, and fail to provide any meaningful buffs.

Eh, AOE Winter’s Bite should have just been rolled baseline. It’s a gimmick tagged onto a mediocre trait placed in the GM tier.

As for the rest of your suggestions, I can agree with most of them. Damage increase on Whirling Defense is the last thing I would have thought to see suggested since the radius increase from the missing off-hand training is what has been most vocally expressed to keep that weapon skill from being lackluster.