Guild Wars 2 Forum

Impressions:

Mechanic
I am aware that this is a beta, but is the mechanic even finished and will it be ready for launch by October 23rd? The cast times on the pet mechanic are much too long to justify some (most) of the skill effects. Also, the pathing and general responsiveness is horrendous. The mechanic seems almost like starter area AI (in the base game) was tacked on to a class at the last second and then changed to an ally at the very last second.
Hopefully though, because this was just a beta, either this is just a temporary mechanic, or there will be a ton of changes and iterations to the AI and skill responsiveness and effects of the mechanic.

Traits:
Quite a few of these traits are served the injustice of being tied to these unfinished feeling utilities (more on that later). Additionally, certain traits, like giving a random chance to destroy projectiles to sword or making axe’s chill AoE, are incredibly basic, beta level traits that need some serious up-tuning in order to ever justify their slots. Also, there seems to be a whole ton of damage modifiers missing, especially when compared to every other class, and the class itself doesn’t exactly stack boons on itself or anything either. That is definitely something that needs to be looked at before the live version of the game.

Utilities:
So, there are Survival utilities, Signets, maybe a spirit or two for exclusively PvE, and then just garbage utilities, pure garbage. Traps will never make ranger compete against something like engineer who just facerolls out the same sort of conditions at a higher rate and intensity than ranger can ever hope to, and Dhuumfire Reaper is a nightmare of a condition spec, along with mesmer and really anything else with heavy condition oriented combat. Spirits are immobile and for some reason have active PBAoE effects which makes them terrible by design, and the passives aren’t worth the slot the skills take up. Shouts…. Just wow.
Good thing all of these utilities are still in beta, because ANet, you definitely need this time to make these utilities worthwhile.

Weapons:

Longbow-Good weapon, ANet, you managed to get one right for this BWE. Don’t change a thing.
Greatsword-The autoattack chain is awful, but the rest of the weapon kit is pretty decent, although hilt bash only reaches about 200 of the 300 range it lists. Fix this bug before Druid goes live.
Axe-What is this weapon trying to be? It has range but can’t do anything at range, it has no conditions on autoattack even though the damage of this weapon is clearly favoring conditions, and the secondary effect on the axe is only as reliable as the mechanic, so aka, not reliable.
Sword-This is a great weapon, outside of the ridiculous autoattack chain animation binding you. Does this weapon even need this sort of treatment? It makes it very clunky and hard to use, even after you get used to it, because you have to use it either situationally or all in.
Shortbow- Horrible weapon. Outside of the autoattack and 5, the rest of the skills are boring, don’t really work well or add much to the ability of the weapon to do anything (shortbow 4 and the bleeds are so weak, this is just a beta issue right?). Good thing this is still beta, because this weapon needs a total overhaul.
Torch – another thing done right. Don’t touch this weapon.
Dagger – the third thing done right so far. Leave it as is.
Warhorn – Warhorn 5 skill is strong, though its effects don’t justify its cooldown. Warhorn 4 is extremely subpar. Single target, long-ish cooldown, poor damage, no additional effects. Since this is beta, the numbers or something on this skill is getting tweaked right? It could at least be AoE (like mad king rune effect 6) and dodgeable to compensate (delayed animation to where the birds meet, dodging the first hit negates the whole attack).
Offhand Axe – Axe 4 is perfectly fine, although it bugs out on terrain WAY too often, halving its potential or worse, since the pull effect is usually the part that fails on the second half of the skill. Axe 5 is one of the longest channels if not the longest channel in the game, and is plagued by rooting you during the whole cast, dealing lackluster damage, and only being functional as a reflect, which compared to all of the commonly used reflect skills, make it a poor choice to ever even activate since you root yourself and lose the ability to do any other action during that time period.

Overall, my beta impressions of the Druid were not pleasant (sorry that I keep using Ranger and Druid interchangeably). Everything was clunky and seemed fairly duct taped together, especially the mechanic, without any sort of design goal or effort to make the skills functional and effective.

Hopefully, these things improve for Druid by the next BWE or by expansion, because they are otherwise pretty awful and should never make it to a live game in their current condition.

Jroh | Former SOAC Ranger Podcaster | Platinum Division Top 100 Player
www.twitch.tv/itsJROH For stream, stream schedule, other streamers, builds, etc
https://www.youtube.com/user/JRoeboat

(edited 2015-09-08 16:50:18 by jcbroe.4329)

Many people will recall a Ranger Balance thread that spanned almost 30 pages by its finish and had in it more constructive conversations and information than the culmination of the entire Ranger CDI topic it prefaced.

The goal of this thread is not to try to recapture that conversation, but evaluate the Ranger class post April 15th balance update and as a collective, by using specific anecdotes as analysis, determine the core issues that players have with the ranger class, starting with my own opinion, and developing the conversation into a generic summary of where the community believes the class to be and/or should be.

Some initial ideas:

A Punishing Pet Mechanic

30% of our output, as stated by the developers, is directly tied to the pet, before even factoring in trait investment. The positive side to that is that the pet is one of rangers few tools that doesn’t require heavy investment to be functional. The negative side to that is that your output is directly tied to an AI entity that you don’t have full control over, is generally only single target damage, and scales almost exponentially poorly as the quantity of opponents or damage/difficulty of an encounter increases.

Now, that isn’t to say that the class mechanic needs to be replaced. But there are encounters in the game that are definitely not designed to be mindful towards the mechanics of the classes that populate the game, and upon pet death, there is no way to decrease the penalty (cooldown) of letting the pet die. Being able to completely disable a mechanic that at base level reduces the class by 30% of its output for a fairly extended period of time when no other class in the game is so extremely punished by their mechanic is absolutely ludicrous and needs to be addressed immediately. There is no excusable reason to punish players multiple times with the same mechanic, especially against situations that can’t always be dealt with by the player.

Personal Solution: Take away most, if not all of the damage split between the pet and the player at a base investment level, leaving the pet as almost a purely utility tool at base level. Then make Beastmastery scale well with pet performance, but force the player to take fair damage reductions in their own output but building for the pet over their own damage.

Low Utility Glass Builds

Building full glass as a ranger is a very poor opportunity cost compared to other classes built the same way. You basically sacrifice all team support, team utility, and self utility (damage increasing utilities, etc) in order to gain a damage boost. It’s an extremely linear tradeoff that doesn’t affect other classes as strongly, which is a combination of different factors (poor utility without heavy trait investment, damage traitlines having too minimal of an impact, etc). This isn’t an argument of damage output, this an an argument of “all things equal.” Looking at the damage output of rangers, investing for full glass doesn’t skyrocket us to the top of the DPS charts, so not only is the damage not entirely top tier, but we aren’t bringing the same utility that other classes can bring while those other classes can still do equal or greater damage.

Personal Solution: Not every utility option for rangers should require such heavy investment so that those utilities can be used with a wider variety of builds. Signets could be made to affect the player by default, shouts could be reworked to be more beneficial to the player, or etc.

Heavy Investment Issues

This is a two-part issue. Part 1 is the requirement of heavy traiting for utilities to have full effect, or even be effective. So, between 2 utility types, Signets and Shouts, there are 6 total utilities (Signet of Renewal and Protect me actually work on a base level) that don’t interact or only have 50% effectiveness with the player. Add in traps that are basically worthless without Trap Potency, and Spirits who without traits only have ~4k hp and 1000 range (meaning either they die before they are useful, or have to be manually killed which can’t be done in all content for them to be useful for more than just 1 fight every 80 (60 lifespan, 20 second cooldown) seconds) and that’s 14 utilities that are not effective (or not fully effective, but certainly not a competitive option) at base level, only 13 possibly because Signet of the Hunt could be argued since it is a 25% movement increase and is more often used for its passive than active.

13-14 traits not effective or useful at base level. That’s appalling. My last sections remedy works here as well though, and while the red flags in my own brain if I was a developer would be screaming “red flag, redesign now,” I don’t work for ANet so I’ll keep it simple.

Jroh | Former SOAC Ranger Podcaster | Platinum Division Top 100 Player
www.twitch.tv/itsJROH For stream, stream schedule, other streamers, builds, etc
https://www.youtube.com/user/JRoeboat

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