Guild Wars 2

Despite the changes to the class recently, we’ve seen no real improvement for the class when it comes to entering the meta in either WvW or PvP. Part of the problem is how easily the class is trained down, but another issue is the alarming lack of ‘effective’ utility the class provides.

I put effective in quotes because a lot of the utility the class does provide comes from their pets and minions. Neither of which hold up well in this game due to all the random AE, the inability for the pet to move while casting, and the long cast times on a lot of their skills.

The most valuable thing ANet could do would be to give pets blanket AE damage reduction (significantly more in WvW than in PvP) and make all pet skills cast with a .5 activation time (and a rebalance in potency if the short cast time would somehow overpower it).

But beyond that what else could ANet do to dramatically improve the group utility the class has in hopes it starts to see some acceptance in WvW/GvG and PvP? Would it even need more than what I mentioned above? Is even that needed?

The easiest thing they could do would be to simply change Healing Spring from a PBAE to a 900 range targetable AE.

Another easy change would be to improve shouts. Protect Me is a bit redundant with the changes to signets. Some may even claim it’s overpowered having it and SoS. I would like to see Protect Me changed to a 30 second cooldown shout that gave our pet a pulsing, 1second group protection for 8 seconds.

What do people think of these minor changes? Would they improve the group utility enough to see more open acceptance of the Ranger class in groups?

Changing Protect Me into a buff skill wouldn’t be bad. Shouts can already be traited to provide some solid support, and this would make Protect Me and even better skill as it’d give swiftness, regeneration, and protection on one skill. Though I’d say this suggestion works equally well for Guard, which is a shout that currently has no use beyond keeping up permanent swiftness from spamming it.

I’ve felt certain pets could use a third mode for support. Moas, the fern hound, and maybe bears who all have support oriented F2 skills. My idea would be to have the combat mode be similar to passive, but rather than do nothing the pet uses a skill that puts out small, continuous pulses of healing for the ranger and the group. That way the damage the pet can’t do is offset by continuous heals for the group, and the pet’s F2 provides further support when needed.

Rangers do have plenty of nice group support. but a lot of it’s tied up in traits instead of utilities. The meta builds for other classes are mostly team support utilities like stand your ground, hold the line, shadow refuge, banners, etc.

If we want to provide boons we need to trait for shouts, trait for spotter, trait for spirits, etc.

A counterpoint might be that rangers are good for skirmishing, which anet said they wanted us to be good at, and if you want to play team support you can play a guardian. That doesn’t make us ideal in a WvW zerg, but it might get us a spot in PvP. We have 3 or 4 utility skills that provide group support mostly untraited. Healing spring, SoR, MT and entangle.

If I were to change anything, it would be to address some of our never-used utilities.

Traps!

Change spike trap into a 3 seconds duration trap that applies 1 second cripple each second and 2 stacks of 5 seconds bleed each second.

After that change, we have 4 traps of which all have a duration.
Remove the 100% extra duration from Trap Potency and make it default.

After those changes, we have a GM trait “Trap Potency” that only reduces recharge on traps.

There’s the place where group support can be added.
Trap Potency:
Each trap receives a specific supportive property in addition to a common one.

Flame Trap: Pulses grant Vigor to allies.
Viper’s Nest: Pulses grant Regeneration to allies.
Spike Trap: Pulses grant Protection to allies.
Frost Trap: Pulses grant Retaliation to allies.
All traps: Traps cleanse 1 condition when triggered.

Might seem OP at first, but it is not. The ranger either has to be in melee and fight to gain the extra supportive effects or support allies by throwing the traps into the fight from range, but then the ranger wouldn’t have any condition cleanse or extra boons.

I tried to go for the boons that are the opposite of the conditions, but I had to keep the “everyone benefits” style of it. Everyone benefits from those 4 boons. A bunker might not gain noticable benefit from “Fury” instead of “Protection” and “Fury” is also more offensive than the others.
The traps are ordered in increasing cooldown lengths, which means vigor comes much more often than retaliation.

If it proves to be too powerful, the conditions for applying the boons can be changed to “…if there is at least one ally and one foe affected by the pulse” which would reduce the amount of pulses that apply boons. Also, a change like that would also create a distinct difference between low- and high-level play.
Low-level as in “average” players just continues fighting in the traps and
High-level as in “skilled” players will think “oh kitten gotta get out of the traps”

Rangers are in a great spot for everything but WvW…and let’s be honest. WvW is kind of a joke.

Rangers already have the best ranged single target dps/burst.

They bring some of the best utility to dungeons (spotter, frost spirit, lots of vuln stacking)

In sPvP, we have a strong power and condition build that gives us flexibility to be strong in multiple team comps. In our power build, we can melt enemies while a teammate bunks a point. In the other, we can lay down countless roots/snares while condition bombing and being able to hold side points.