Guild Wars 2

Maybe I’m alone in thinking this, but in my opinion, the utility skills for rangers are the worst in the game. Every other professionhas stronger effects on comparable (if not better) cooldowns, and it is my opinion that this is the area that the ranger class needs the most love. At present, rangers need to spend important traits to bring their utilities in line with the utility skills of other professions — when un-traited. Every profession has a few different mechanics that are unique to it, and I’m not suggesting adding new mechanics to replace the current ones, just tweaks to put them in line with other classes abilities. I know lots of balance changes are made for sPvP and tPvP, but most of my suggestions will be focused towards WvW and PvE.

Below I’ll go through what I personally would like to see happen to the current ranger utilities:

Spirits:

At present spirits have a % chance to trigger their effect whenever an ally in range takes or receive damage (depending on the skill) and then the effect goes on cooldown (generally 10s) — and can be killed by enemies. The unreliability of WHEN these effects will take place coupled with the fact that the skill can be entirely negated by the enemy so long as they spend ~2 attacks (or just hit it with AoE) make these sub-par skills unless heavily traited. The active portions of these skills are generally in a good place.

Frost Spirit: gives a 10% damage boost to an ally’s outgoing damage packet every 10s. This is exceedingly underwhelming, when you consider it is unlikely to trigger more than twice in a fight. I suggest making it a flat 5% dmg buff to allies while it is alive, without a cooldown. The fact that this skill can be killed by the enemy is enough of a drawback. Making it larger threat forces the enemy to make the tactical decision of either destroying the spirit (and potentially sacrificing a second or two of dps on the ranger) or take increased dmg.

Stone Spirit: Chance to gain protection for 3s on 10sCD. Again I’d suggest removing the cooldown and modifying the effect. Here I would like to see it effect 5 allies and reduce incoming damage by 10% (does not stack with protection). Alternatively, a buff that makes 5 allies immune to critical hits.

Storm Spirit: Chance to gain swiftness on outgoing dmg on 10s CD. I object to this one the least of the four, but I’d still like to see the CD removed (dropping the swiftness duration to compensate)

Sun Spirit: Chance to burn foe on hit for 2s every 10s. Can’t do the same as the others, but I suggest using a system similar to the Guardians virtue of justice: every ‘x’ attacks cause burning. This way you can plan on WHEN you will burn the foe, and if you stack things like quickness or aoe effects, the spirit’s effect will trigger more often.

Water Spirit: Heal on hit every 10s. Firstly, I think this heal is a joke. At present, the healing you get from this (unless you stack a fair amount of Healing Power) is only marginally stronger than a Mango Pie. As a Profession Heal. I’d suggest changing it to “Receive 10% of outgoing damage as healing”

Some of these effects may seem strong, but remember: the enemy can kill the spirit to end it prematurely. A system similar to ritualist skills in gw1 could be used as well: on the stronger spirits, make a set number of times the effect can trigger.

Shouts:

The ranger shouts are all about buffing your pet, and you have to use a grandmaster trait to get any kind of player benefit from them. This makes their effectiveness tied very closely to the state of the Pet AI. Now there have been some improvements on that note over the last couple years, but for the most part they still remain fairly clunky.

Sic ‘Em: This is one of the more useful shouts, and with the ’revealed’ buff it got, it is getting a bit more usage. That said, I think it could use a little more player benefit in the form of ‘Your pet applies 5stax of vulnerability on next hit, 5s duration’. Just a little window for a damage spike.

Search and Rescue: many professions have a ‘ranged rez’ skill — they usually have long cast times or other requirements, so in some regards this is the best of ‘those’ skills, but as it requires defeat to become even available for use… it is sort of counter-intuitive. If its current mechanic is kept (rezzing), the only thing I can think of to improve it, is to make this able to rez from defeated (not just downed).

Protect Me!: I like and dislike this skill. On the one hand it provides damage immunity to the player for a healthy duration, on the other it will kill your pet. Which supposedly accounts for ~30% of your damage. For a class that is supposed to be about pet mechanics, it is ridiculous how many skills and traits rangers get that harm your pet. The only thing I’d like to see out of this, is to swap the ‘damage redirected to pet’ into a ‘pet gets 10stax vulnerability for 6s’. The pet still wont attack while its active, and the player still gets some immunity, but it will not straight out kill your pet (unless they are AoEing it).

Guard: my main qualm about this skill is that it gives the ranger the level of control over the pet that should be vanilla. Again, the skill only benefits the pet, and that is generally what was aimed for, but there should be some sort of intrinsic benefit to the player outside of micro-managing your pet. Perhaps the pet’s attacks apply cripple so there is a control aspect.

Signets:

All of the ranger signets require you to take a grandmaster trait to get the active benefit… Generally, I’d like to see the current state reversed: a grandmaster trait gives the active portion to the PET, not the other way around!

Signet of Renewal: I’d like to see it as a “Convert Torment, bleeding and poison to regeneration”. Builds that focus on condi-dmg will be able to re-apply them, and this would give rangers a powerful tool to combat condi-dmg.

Signet of Stone/of the Wild/of the Hunt: effects are nice, I’d just like the active effecting the player as standard.

Traps:

As zone control and damage utilities these work fairly well, though their effects are rather bland. The main issue with these skills is that all the traits that benefit them are in the precision/ferocity line and they don’t synergize well — in terms of stats. That said, the grandmaster trait is once again necessary to make these skills good. Other classes get decent vanilla skills and their traits make them better. Rangers have to trait to make them comparable to vanilla.

Survival skills:

Of the current utilities, ‘Lightning Reflexes’ is probably my favorite, but Muddy Terrain and Sharpening Stone are both rather underwhelming. Quickening Zephyr is probably the best non-elite source of quickness (that is until engie’s got ‘quickend synapses’) and doesn’t need much of a benefit.

Muddy Terrain needs a bit more oomph to get more use, and I think its because it is only a cripple field, with an imobo on cast. I think it would get more use if stationary enemies in the field were immobilized for 1s on a 2.5s cd. That is: if they stop in the field they get another small immobilize.

Sharpening Stone is pretty lackluster because weaponsets where you are running condi-dmg usually have built in bleed sources, generally on their auto-attack or low-cooldown skills. Bleed on five attacks isn’t strong enough to warrant one of your three skill choices. I think if they added “next 5 attacks critically strike” it would be a lot more attractive.

Elites:

Entangle: an aoe immobilize that applies bleed/s. Nice. Wait. Enemies can break the skill by KILLING IT with cleave. The high damage tool-tip is incredibly deceiving since the enemy will break out of this skill in less than 3s. A lot of the elites in the game are fairly lack-luster, but this just takes the cake as far as class elites go. If the current functionality must stay, make it apply 5 stacks of torment if they break it, or at least remove the 5 target cap so that you can minorly inconvenience a larger number of people… Otherwise I’d like to see this as a high-duration immobilize with a set number of bleed stax on it.

Rampage as One: This is a solid, if passive, elite and the strongest ranger elite imo. Fairly boring in terms of effects, but solid. Main issue is how the pet auto attacks are haphazard and you will never get all that much might from it. From a thematic standpoint it makes sense to make the pet be the trigger for the player’s might gain, but it doesn’t really work out as well as it should due to the pet’s AI. If I could change it, I would take away the Fury and Might boons from it and replace it with the ‘frenzy’ mechanic seen on abominations: every time the player or the pet is hit, their outgoing damage is increased by a percentage up to a cap.

Spirit of Nature:

Suffers from the same problems as other spirits: it can be killed and its effects have a fairly low net result due to the timer. If this could be a heal/s that is slightly stronger than it is now, it would be better in my opinion. That and an increase to the range on the active would be nice.