In my opinion, Rangers have gone so long without any true official theme for their profession (am I an archer? Am I a beastmaster? Am I a shamany spirit-summoning nature dude?) that some Rangers have been forced to come up with their own personal theme as to what they want their profession to be.
Almost undeniably, that personal theme has been DPS support. "Range"r, they say, it’s in the name! So they wanted Druid to support that theme they had spent long and hard following. They wanted the Druid to put them into the meta – the BERSERKER meta.
The issue here is that Anet absolutely hates the berserker pve meta, and for good reason: there is no variety. This game is balanced 80-20 in favor of PvP. PvP and WvW are vibrant places with multiple build options for all classes and the environment isn’t nearly as stifling for creativity as PvE is. I believe Anet wants to move the creativity of those two game modes into PvE, because whether they like it or not, all players start out in PvE. It’s the main mode in GW2.
Those players who strictly play PvE won’t realize this because they’ve never experimented with the other two game modes. They only see berserker, while Anet is looking – and designing – past the berserker meta.
I think this is where the disconnect happened, and is continuing to happen. The players are completely rigid; they’re confident that berserker will survive into HoT and remain the stable meta. Anet put the Druid in front of them – an elite specialization with a literal kittenload of healing – and the players immediately saw it as useless because healing power has no place in a meta where the best defense is a good offense, and active defenses take care of everything else. And because the Druid is primarily healing power, they can’t see past the wall of “uselessness” to gaze upon everything else the Druid brings to the table: the “control” portion of “dps, control, support”.
The Druid is two parts support, one part control. The perfect complement to the soft trinity Anet failed to deliver in the core game, but is now trying to reintroduce in HoT – because while they said they were going to get rid of the “hard trinity”, aka classes being locked into a specific role, they never said anything about getting rid of trinities altogether. Anet wants a “soft trinity” of dps, control, support, with every class having something to contribute towards each facet.
The base ranger class is overwhelmingly specialized towards dps, but people failed to recognize that through the mire of bugs, kittenty dev communication, iffy design practices and pet issues. So, again, when people saw the Druid with literally no dps, an elite specialization overwhelmingly leaning towards defensive support and control, they claimed there was no synergy with the base ranger at all, despite the Druid absolutely what the ranger needed more than anything else. Dps, support and control had all been met in the same class, finally. Soft trinity intact. Now the issue is getting the base profession up to speed so the dps portion can catch up to the other two, while keeping the Druid relatively stable and well-designed so we have options going into HoT – which will hopefully finally provide other options than berserker. To that end, I have faith in Irenio. If anyone can walk this tightrope, it’s him.
