Guild Wars 2

So I’m curious, since it was a hot topic in my WvWvW the last couple nights that majority of the ranger traits are just plain useless when compared to other classes.

Now most strongly felt this towards the entire BM tree with the exception of master’s bond and even that is extremely situational due to the need to constantly be switching pets due to fra-gee-lee-ness and the minors of the tree encourages more swapping.

I’m curious what everyone else’s thoughts are on this?

Please keep it constructive and provide suggestions if possible, I repeat, not a massive flame thread.

BM I found was somewhat useful for leveling to 80, but as soon as 80 hit, I found it lacking greatly. Even with 30 points in this tree, my pets died nearly instantly in explore mode dungeons. In general overworld PVE, traiting marks/skirmish/wilderness downs mobs so much faster. It does help that several major traits are only for specific pet types, many of which have completely broken F2 skills right now.

I agree. The Ranger class has a few good traits so it is possible to make an effective build, but the class has far fewer effective builds available than many other classes (I am looking at you Mesmer, Engineer and Elementalist) and a pet build is not one of them.

At least the Ranger class is not as bad off as the Thief class which basically has 1 effective game play style.

I tend to agree with you – there are some very nice traits out there – but for the most part, the entire BM tree is horrible. For me, the only trait worth taking there is Zephyr’s speed (for obvious reasons) . Master’s Bond is really nice for PvE, not so much for PvP.

Shouts are pretty bad in general and Spirits (in current form) are not very good – which makes two of our trees pretty bad. I find a lot of Rangers using the same 2 or 3 builds now in sPvP.

I love the “Protect Me” shout in both PvE and PvP. I just used it in PvE while fighting a very hard hitting boss. I used that shout right when I was about to be hit by a spell I couldn’t dodge and my pet took all the damage. It would have downed me if I had not used it.

My main complaint with the beast tree is the master/grand master major traits. The fact that all the masters force you to tight cast one pet family seems like it was a last minute cop-out and very lazily executed.

If you sink 30 points into the tree, the last grand master minor should just grant each pet family a unique passive, showing beastmasters are truly just that.. Not waste it into a major trait role. Just seems they ran out of ideas and threw in a lot of useless filler traits across the board.

As for the beast grand master majors they just leave a lot to be desired. One is extremely situational and the other us just as lack luster. Even with natural regen and the regen sig, pets drop like flies if not constantly swapped.

The ranger does indeed have quite a few lackluster and oddly thought out traits. Some are situational and that’s fine, but others aren’t even worth using for the benefit they give. I’ll list off some of the offenders:

Companion’s Might- Gives might to your pet on crit. Sounds great til you realize the might is only a 1 second duration. Pets attack once every 2 seconds, so you’re lucky if the boon is up when it attacks. Not long enough to get any stacks going either.

It should last 5 seconds. Guardians have a might on crit trait that affects all nearby allies including themselves and it lasts 5 seconds.

Moment of Clarity- Gives an attack of opportunity for you and your pet on interrupt. Besides being kind of vague, it can be hard to intentionally perform an interrupt on an enemy with the exception of a few abilities because cast times are generally short and difficult to recognize in the heat of battle. I believe this would be a great trait if there were a more reliable way to use it.

Some consolidation of Spirit traits would be nice. Possibly making them mobile by default. You really just can’t pick anything else in the line if you want to use spirits because the traits are necessary for them to be effective.

Nature’s Protection – Certainly not a bad trait, but the damage threshold of
20% is a bit high especially if you happen to have a larger health pool accompanied by toughness. I’d maybe consider dropping it down to 15% to trigger.

Speed Training – Only reduces cooldown of pet abilities by 10%. Not much of a noticeable increase at all. Weapon cooldown reduction traits are usually set at 20%, why can’t pets have 20% as well?

Master’s Bond – Great for PVE, but it goes against our core mechanic of pet swapping. Two of the minor traits in the same line encourage you to pet swap frequently, but you’ll lose all your stacks if you change pets. Can’t obtain high stacks in PVP either because of frequent pet deaths and much less kill opportunities. Should change it to something that benefits all play styles and still lets you swap pets.

Various pet family specific traits – I’m not a fan of these not because most of them aren’t useful, but because they encourage you to only use one type of pet to get the most out of them.

My solution would be to make the mid minor trait unlock a family specific trait for each pet. That way you would have all the functionality of the current individual pet specific traits, but you could use two different types and still get the benefit from their family specific trait. The unlockable trait could be viewed from the pet interface. This would also free up a good portion of the BM trait line for other more interesting trait decisions.

The grand master trait selection in BM is a bit lackluster for their supposed grand master status.