Guild Wars 2

Now, Shouts, they have been brought up many many many times. By large, they are useless, but they serve a purpose to some miniscule degree.

Some history behind shouts:
Shouts used to be worse then they currently are, but due to certain bugs, shouts such as Search and Rescue, which allowed the pet to rez DEAD (not just downed, but DEAD) players even when pet itself was dead. This caused rangers to become the ultimate “zerg support”. We had the power to revive dead players using a useless dead mechanic, and keep fighting deep into enemy territory due to pet leash being MASSIVE (at one point, you could rez almost 10000 units away with pet, while you were fighting)

Guard and Sic Em was useless and protect me was just like now, but more harmful to pet due to no regen.

Fast forward to present day:
Search and Rescue got nerfed. First through leash range, then through super long CD in PvP (it went from 80 to 180), then through pet rezzing dead people and finally pet rezzing while being dead. Search and Rescue is now, by all means, THE WORST, revival utility in the game.

Due to the introduction if Natures Voice, our shouts has seen a massive lift in sheer utility. Still it is not enough. They are only “viable” outside niche setups when traited with a grandmaster traits.
This is not so much a “viability” issue as it is a build diversity issue. Guard is only really useful, untraited, when running a non BM setup. Mainly because pets need the protection to survive. Protect me is best used WITH BM or regen, to make sure pet does NOT die. Sic’em is only good to troll thieves, and the shout design is outright horrible in the way it work in practice.

With this in mind, I found that asking for ludicrous buffs would not directly solve the issue. Instead, I though that if we change the functionality to fill in the “problems” rangers have in dungeons and WvW zergs, then maybe we can get a better deal that not only strengthens the utility skills themselves, but also our functionality across the game modes.

Here goes:

Guard:
Retain current pet buffs, but add “removes 2 conditions from pet”
Reduce cast time from 1 second to 0.5 (1/2) second. This will greatly increase user friendlyness and combat functionality.

Sic’em:
Retain current Revealed Duration
Change the unique Sic’em Damage and Speed buff to grant the pet swiftness for 10 seconds and 50% more damage on the next 7 attacks.
Optional solution: Make sure current Sic’em Damage and Speed bonus is NOT overwritten by issuing commands such as F1, F2 or F3. Sic’em should only “drop” when pet is told to attack a new target OR current target is dead.

Protect Me:
Your pet takes 50% of all incoming direct damage for 8 seconds
Allies (not ranger or pet) is given 8 seconds of quickness and swiftness
Cooldown increased from 60 seconds to 90 seconds.

Search and Rescue:
Complete redesign.
Command your pet to revive defeated (dead) or downed players at a location.
The command is AOE, affects maximum 3 players.
The skill is a channel skill, the pet will run to location (if alive), and start channeling the skill.
Channel should last no shorter then 20 seconds. For which the pet is given protection, stability and reduced condition duration (applied to pet) by 33%.

On successful channel (players are revived) pet is immediately set on cooldown (forced swap regardless of other pet’s status)
Skill cooldown: 180 seconds

Why allow rangers to revive dead players?
It is all about ROLES.
A mesmer is important mainly due to it’s unique utility such as portals, null field, mass invis and time warp. This is also true for necromancers with their boon corruption. Warriors and guardians bring healing, might, protection, stability, swiftness and more. Ele fills in the rest.
As things stand. Rangers has no unique utility that allow it to have a role that cannot be done by others. Rangers can outperform the other professions, but it has to specialize for this. And even when a specialized Ranger can beat other specialized professions, it is still so specialized that it looses generic value.
The Ranger need a unique functionality that allow it to perform a secondary task (short of being a great AE sponge) without having to invest greatly into specialized builds.

Allowing the ranger to sacrifice his/her pet to revive even dead players would be one such thing that would ensure rangers are more then just another AE sponge.

I completely agree with the analysis but I would be careful with buffing shouts straight out. Rapid Fire isn’t OP by any means based on the buffs it got. It just gets “OP” with all the multipliers and extra fluff that’s affecting RF.
Shouts are sitting in the same boat here.
That said, I think shouts should be overhauled. If the sole purpose of guard is to give you swiftness, them this shout is missing it’s purpose in my opinion. Same with Search and Rescue. Of we compare the skill with rez-mechanics of other classes, SaR is pretty lackluster, even with a shorter cooldown. Sic’ Em is useful but I really dislike that it’s only affecting the pet. Protect Me needs bugfixes, such as that the pet is using your toughness instead of it’s own. Furthermore it’s only a reliable way of killing your pet most of the time.
In my mind the shouts should be reworked to be less pet-dependant with effects that also affect the player. There should be also clear roles for each shout. Sic ‘Em as offensive shout (comparable to For Great Justice), Protect Me as defensive shout, Search and recue as reliable rez mechanic and Guard as something else than it’s currently.However I would step away from adding extra effects to all skills. They should have one clear purpose with extra purpose through traits.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Collaborative-Development-Ranger-Profession/page/2#post3683112

A suggestion I mostly agree with. I would make little tweaks here and there but overall this has my vote.

I feel like Guard could still use a bit more love. I’ve tried my best to find a use for it beyond perma swiftness and regen, but couldn’t. I like the suggestion of making it a taunt from the thread LostProphet posted. It’d give it a neat little role in dungeons.

The fact using F2 cancels Sick ‘Em is a bit ridiculous though. That should have been changed by now. The F2 for a lot of pets IS their burst, so naturally you’d want the damage boost on said burst.

On Protect Me giving allies around the user 8 seconds of quickness seems a bit much. Making the pet only take 50% of the damage would be a good change though, I feel. Especially since we now have Signet of Stone for a pseudo-invulnerability. Though looking at LostProphet’s link again, that suggestion for Protect Me would be incredibly overpowered in the current game state. You could use axe mainhand to get 25 might on your pet then use Protect Me and BAM! That zerker ranger has 25 might on it for a good 10-15 seconds and can switch to a greatsword and Maul basically anything to death instantly.

I really like the original poster’s Search and Rescue suggestion though. Rangers really need some special trick they can do that no one else can so they become appealing to the zerg scene.

My thoughts on the issue

“Protect Me” – make it give protection for X (maybe for the whole duration of the protection) seconds to the Ranger (I mean come on, it’s on the name for crying out loud!, and Signet of stone mostly outclasses it right now)

“Guard” – this has to be the most weirdest shout ever, first of all shouts are supposed to be a fire and forget things, this one just breaks the mold, firstly it has a casting time, which is a big no-no for something that uses your voice and commanding presence, second it has a ground reticle! this ability should be scrapped and be made in to a F command and replace it with something else, maybe make it in to a shout that affects allies giving Vigor and Aegis, akin to Guardian’s “hold the line”.

“Sick ’em” seems ok, no complaints there, maybe reduce the cooldown a bit, seems a little niche for my tastes when there are other skills I could take in it’s place.

“Search and Rescue” I totally agree with your proposed changes.

optionally, we could throw out Search and Rescue as a rez skill (why do we need two? spirit rez is 100 times better) and change it into a support targeted ally.

Pet runs over to ally, direct heals them for 2-4k HP and removes 2-3 conditions. Pet will fight enemies close to that ally for the next 60-120 seconds or until ordered elsewhere. This ability extends max pet leash to 5000 (far enough for pet to be put into assist mode with an ally on one PvP node, while you fight on the other). Pet F2 are still restricted to the normal range and target requirements while within assist mode. (IE: ranger cannot use pet to assist, then sit on a node and spam bird F2 to burst poor people to bits. You effectively turn your pet into a upgradeable pirate bird for a chosen ally)
The cooldown on this assist mode should be quite high, as ranger pets, even untraited, can be quite ferocious. I would expect no less then 120 seconds, possibly up to 180 seconds.

Since ranger “loses pet” for a notable duration (we can recall or swap them) ranger gets protection and regeneration for 12 seconds when using this ability.

They need a larger redesign than that. Shouts are a horribly broken concept – none of them packs any meaningful synergy with the others and they all have terrible effect-to-cooldown ratios.

Guard simply doesn’t do much. It’s good for nothing more than pet protection and a Nature’s Voice proc. The stealth mechanic on it is laughable.

Sick Em is decent and doesn’t really need much.

Protect Me is simply inferior to other invulnerability skills because, unlike the others, it has a large cost (lose pet dps/skills while also heavily damaging the pet). It doesn’t really have any meaningful advantages to bring it up to par.

Search And Rescue is just….. it’s silly. It is a skill that misses the mark so much on every level of its design.

I like your Ideas, except for Search and Rescue….. as posted above is just a bit… silly. Would rather it be a ground targeted AOE with a decent range (1500) And the pet rezz’s each target very quickly (around 4 seconds). Max amount of target being 3. 2 and a half second cast time maybe could be fair?