The Ranger has to be one of the most interesting professions to play once you start playing another profession. The Ranger was the second profession I leveled to 80 out of my 3 level 80s and have played the profession the most with over 700 hours of gameplay. I love playing the Ranger. Except for my half brain dead or literally dead pet, the ranger is a fun profession regardless. But what holds the Ranger back is our pet. Beside it be arguably 30% to 40% of our damage, the primitive AI, lack of evasion mechanic, no AoE damage mitigation, relying on our pet’s survival for our F2 ability and the pet’s F2 abilities being lack-luster compare to its RNG abilities put the Ranger in a category I would call Situational Limbo: not great at everything and not need by anyone.
I am a WvW PvPer. I focus a lot of my time in WvW and I think the Ranger needs some love IMHO. I support a lot of the changes from the last patch. They did one important thing that a lot have us ignored but it was a great change was: the Nature’s Voice trait. They made an unused skill tree useful. It’s not the greatest of changes but it a step in the right direction. Rangers lack a defined support role in both WvW and PvE. The addition of Nature’s Voice has opened the door half way for Ranger’s usefulness in a group situation. The next two steps I think Anet needs to take are:
1. Adding Blast Finishers to 1 or 2 of the Rangers current weapons
2. More Boon Sharing
1. Blast Finishers are badly needed on the Ranger. Projectile finishers are ok but not enough, Swoop finishers only affected the Ranger and the Ranger’s Whirl finisher is a 5 sec channeled standing still. People can argue that Rangers have the best water field in the game but that field is one of our core healing skills putting us in: Situational Limbo. I have few choices when to us Healing Spring: a) heal myself, b) place it to heal my group or c) us it to remove conditions. If I make the wrong choice, I am dead or my group is dead. Having a Blast Finisher on: 1. Hilt Bash 2. Call of Nature 3. Barrage would be the proper weapon skills to put them on without introducing a new blunt weapon. The cool downs to these weapons are from 20 to 35 seconds so the Rangers could only use it once per Healing Spring. I have love to see Maul get a Blast Finisher but with Healing Spring lasting 15 seconds, it’s just too OP and would be abused.
2. More Boon Sharing is another thing holding the Ranger back. Yes we have access to Call of Nature and now with the new Nature’s Voice trait we can spam perma Regen/Swiftness but we should have some of our utility skills to help with boon sharing. For example:
Ranger’s Signet. Our signets could have two ways of sharing boons: a) Beastmaster’s Might: Activating a signet grants 3 stacks of might to the Ranger and allies (15 seconds) b) Signet of the Beastmaster: Active effects of signets also affect you and your allies. My version of Signets of the Beastmaster boon sharing has to be watered down because sharing stability and increase damage to a group would make the Ranger needed for the one skill only. I would be happy with one or the other but you see where I am getting at.
Finally, I need to talk about my experience with the pet. The pets I have a hate, love, hate you relationship. Playing WvW mostly, the only time I see the pet is before a battle and after the battle when it’s revived itself. If you watch any of my WvW videos I ignore the pet almost completely (except in small fights). The reason I do this is: if I focus on saving my pet, I die and that is not good with the rally mechanic but if I focus on myself the pet dies but I live on. So in WvW zerg fighting, I become this low damage dealing class with no support abilities, no F key skills like every other profession has and become a situational utility (or situational limbo). Even with these disadvantages I still love play a Ranger!
Because the pet is such a liability to a Ranger, we need tools to support our pets and our allies. Many professions in this game can place fields and blast them and share boons with allies, remove conditions from allies with other utility skills, crowd control and does better damage all in one build. The Ranger on the other hand is stuck in Situational Limbo relying on the pet heavily, we only focus on builds to do only one role mediocrely; whereas, most of the other professions can do 2 or 3 roles in one build. My issue with the Ranger at the moment is more about giving us tools to help our allies (including the pet) survival. This would open the door for a more dynamic Ranger play in groups and in general.
Thank you.
P.S. The reason I brought this up is because of the evolving Meta in WvW and a discussion I had yesterday on the WvW Forums:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Did-WvW-recreate-the-Trinity