I believe the upcoming buff for ranger on September 9th is good and bad in certain ways. First off, yes, I do main a ranger. I am happy that ranger is finally getting a buff. The thing I am NOT happy about is that Longbow and Greatsword are being buffed so greatly that it will force almost every ranger to run power with LB and/or GS in their build, which makes the build diversity greatly drop in rangers. What I believe needs to be done is to add in some more support into the Nature Magic trait line by adding in more buffs to allies or spike healing like when warriors heal on shout.
Nature Magic sounds like Water Magic in the ways of how they should work. They both sound as if they are suppose to help people. Really the only semi-useful trait in Nature Magic for support is “Nature’s Voice” which give regeneration and swiftness when using a shout. With that as nearly the most support you can give to allies, many WvW players and guilds just tend to dislike rangers because they seem to be not useful enough in a large group, whereas every other class has a role in WvW that people can accept easily. The only other boons you can easily share are from spirits which die VERY quickly when the fights turn into zerg or guild fights, making spirits almost useless. So in order to make rangers easily accepted in WvW, they would need to bring something more unique that no other class can, or something useful that another class has.
When people see a ranger is WvW, they almost all instantly go, “Ooh, a free kill!” and go straight for the rangers and focus them first. Even I do the same thing when I’m on my ranger or another class, when I see a ranger, I also think its a free kill. Almost the only time I see rangers stay alive fairly well is when they have to run full Settler’s gear or something else using high defensive stats which seems unfair to ranger because it really is true! Rangers have horrible survivability unless completely built to tank and do no damage! If the “Natural Vigor” trait point 1 in Wilderness Survival were to be bumped back up to 50% like it use to be and swap places in the trait line with the “Peak Strength” trait point 5, that would be adding on almost enough survivability to be equal in survivability to other classes.
I’ll give examples of how other classes stay alive when they are full zerker. A warrior naturally has high vitality and fairly high armor, even when full zerker. A Guardian has very high armor naturally. A thief has stealth to keep itself alive, along with mesmer, with the added on clones to block some attacks and add a bit of confusion to stay alive. Elementalists have a large amount of healing skills they are able to use. Necromancers have naturally high health and almost a whole second extra bar of health when they have life force. Engineers have Healing Turret, which heals very high on a very short cooldown and the possibility to use utilities for added on healing. Now… What do rangers have? A pet? Pets don’t help you stay alive. Natural high armor? Nope. An kitten nal of healing skills? False. Rangers have nearly nothing to help keep them alive other than speccing for full tanking and using their heal skills to stay alive. This calls for a buff in survivability, whether it come from pets somehow, traits, utilities, whatever. I personally believe, as I said, that swapping “Natural Vigor” and “Peak Strength” and then buffing Natural Vigor back to 50% endurance recharge would help tremendously without making it where every ranger has it because you would have to put 5 points into the Wilderness Survival trait line to actually get it.
Now, back to hopefully adding in more team support. I see rangers as more of a class that should be able to do anything with how they are set up. They do give a little support, they do give a little damage, they do have a little survivability. The thing is, for almost EVERYTHING a ranger can do, another class can do better. That is why people normally won’t accept rangers in WvW. If more healing and buffs were added into the Nature Magic trait line or into utilities, it would allow a lot more build diversity in rangers than everyone using Longbow after the buff comes.
I am truly looking forward to seeing something along the lines of all this happen to rangers to help make them more useful in WvW mainly, but just more useful as a whole. People hate rangers right now, and it needs to stop. If some, or all of these things can happen, rangers will no longer be looked upon with shame or laughed at as easily.
