Alright, this is gonna be a long one. The ranger has no advocate on the forums. We are a class plagued with many problems. This isn’t a conversation about pet AI it’s about the class being essentially forced intro traitlines and therefore builds. Sure, wvw has a wide variety of specs but spvp and tpvp there is one. At the moment that build is spirits.
The current meta is very condi heavy. Almost every team runs one necro and one spirit ranger and some run double. The rate at which necro and ranger can reapply condis and all at ranged forces the necessity of condition removal. Ranger has 4 ways to clear conditions.
- Healing Spring: 6 conditions or so if you stay inside the field the whole duration. But if you stand in the field for the whole duration in a competitive match then you will take a lot more damage than if you were using another heal because one cannot kite effectively within its radius. The heal is also bad for 1 v 1 because it has a low initial heal and a long cool down. Sure, we can blast finish with drakes and leap finish but for the more effective blast finishers we have to rely on our pet being within the field and range of the enemy.
- Signet of Renewal: Great utility and one of my favorites. Full condi cleanse for team and requires tactful play to cleanse a teammate or yourself because the players must be in range of the pet and then the pet must be swapped to avoid epidemics or the death of the pet. That being said the pet is required to be alive for this condi removal to work.
- Spirit of Nature: A great elite, however, it is rarely used for the purpose of a condition cleanse because the rez utility is so much stronger than its condition cleanse. Not to mention, upon going down all condis are cleansed anyway. Also, the fact that conditions can be reapplied so rapidly makes this kind of condi removal sort of obsolete.
- Trait: Empathic Bond: This is our crutch and our best condition cleanse. Transfers 3 conditions every 10 seconds to our pet is amazing. However, once the pet dies the ranger is screwed because all condition clear becomes impossible.
- Sigils and Runes (ie Lyssa) i’m not counting because the sigils proc even without condis making them almost worthless and if one uses Lyssa then using the spirit elite is less efficient.
So yes, we can bring decent utilities to clear conditions but trying to find a condition heavy meta without empathic bond is suicide (this is coming from an experienced berzerker ranger who does not run empathic bond in said build).
Without other effective condi clears we are forced to trait into Wilderness Survival which gives toughness and condition damage. Therefore, if we want to survive we must use condition damage because otherwise we are wasting damage. That means that every ranger is condition specced. We cannot run power because we have no condi cleanse. If we do run power our damage is not enough to kill them before they condi load us so we must run condition specs.
Conditions have always been viable for rangers but in a game that wants to push build diversity there is an entire half of the ranger rarely seen. Marksmanship, skirmishing, and more recently beastmastery are traitlines not as frequently traited into anymore. Our pets no longer do as much damage to invest into them, ranger power damage is pitiful, and skirmishing is only traited into for traps for the most part. Sadly, traps have no place in high level play because they can be easily triggered by dodges and AI. Traps also leave the player completely unprotected. So right now rangers have one build and that’s spirits.
Every patch we lose more and more build diversity. Traps have always been “viable” but as players have learned they are no longer effective. BM was always viable until the recent nerf. Spirits was always viable but up until the BM nerf weren’t the go to spec. The one thing these specs all have in common is passive condi removal and the use of condition damage for maximum efficiency.
Ranger needs more condition removal in traitlines other than wilderness survival. Certain traits (like the pet buff traits in skirmishing lines) need to be merged to make room for more traits that allow for such things as condition removal. Also, pets have no way of removing condis besides the one condition every ten seconds from SoR. This requires pets to be swapped which makes some traits (Master’s bond) completely useless. We need more trait condition removal and more trait synergy.
Am I good?… I’m good.
