Guild Wars 2

I’d be pretty happy with a 1,200 range staff that, like the elementalist staff, has the range as more an added benefit than an optimal distance. Have some ground targeted skills for AoE so it’d still have a place in close range combat.

I’d like it if the auto attack summoned little spirit birds that flew at the enemy and attacked them, then flew out to nearby allies providing boons. That’d be pretty nice.

mistsim.2748:

Sebrent.3625:

I’m right there with you loving Druid. Was a WoW Druid myself … so versatile!

playing my WoW druid is still the most memorable and fun time ive had in online games. I generally go out of my way to play any games that have the druid in them =)

Druid was my favorite class in WoW too. I had both a boomkin and a feral druid at max level. When I started playing GW2 I went for the elementalist hoping for a similar playstyle, but it isn’t the same. I wanted to change attunements to benefit the situation, not because I ran out of cooldowns and had to swap immediately or die. Rangers don’t quite scratch that itch either, but at least it has the nature theme down as well as the animal companion you’d get as a DnD druid.

As for the discussion about consecrations, they fit the druid theme perfectly. Druids in both fantasy and actual history are religious figures who revere nature and are known to be closely tied to sacred spaces like meadows and glades. These can be described as consecrated grounds that the druids use as places of worship.

Shoot, druids in DnD had Hallow and Unhallow which allowed the druid to determine if a place was or was not holy.

You’re using some very strange and alien logic. I don’t quite understand why Anet doing a poor job balancing their game is making you a bad person.

Seems like this would just end in a very short team death match game every time.

Seeing as there’s an entire queue where you can go to avoid the “casual” maps I really don’t see what the problem is. And no one is going to be hurt by being forced to play a “casual” map once in a while.

Even if the “casual” maps did get a new queue just for them it’d only be a matter of time before people started demanding they get removed from that as well. “Why can’t I play super unranked without getting Skyhammer?!”

Deleted my first post. My reading comprehension failed me.

At any rate I disagree with this idea because it would make queue times for anyone who actually wants to play Courtyard or Skyhammer off the charts. I do agree that Courtyard should have it’s own queue with other deathmatch maps, though.

I gotta agree with Ronpierce about the current system. It’s fine. The majority get their way the majority of the time while the minority still gets to play the maps they enjoy on occasion. The fact that a minority of the majority are little brats who throw a tantrum when they don’t get their way shouldn’t be a reason to change the system. If anything these people should be appropriately punished.

Let’s also not forget that this trait is an AoE. It effects multiple foes near you. We’ve been discussing it as a dueling trait meant to protect us from getting jumped in a 1v1, but aren’t really considering the team fight applications.

Every 12 seconds the ranger will be passively applying weakness to any opponents in close range. While fighting on point this will effect anyone trying to pressure you off point. The enemy team will either suffer from a harsh DPS reduction or be forced to blow a cleanse every 12 seconds to keep the weakness off them. All while also greatly improving the pet’s ability to survive all the cleave and AoE being thrown about.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

The summoned Hyena has the same stats as the normal I thought, I tested them in the mists once, it may have changed though. The summoned one always uses the crippling leap 1st too. The CC is pretty great, assuming you can do damage on your own, not the strong suit of this build, but hey, it would play fun

Intimidation Training also works with the Hyena’s F2 so you can cripple the opponent while summoning the second hyena.

Though I don’t believe the second hyena benefits from points in Beastmastery, which is a shame.

This is a fine idea. Players who perform big plays should be acknowledged. We already get the rampage and conquering announcements, this could be one too.

Certainly better than “YOUR BASE IS UNDER ATTACK!” over and over again.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

You don’t have to apply 4s of protection to the Ranger, make it 4 applications of 1s and then the pet gets its 8s too.

I would find this acceptable. I’m not strictly against protection for the ranger, I just want the pet to get that protection too so it can survive a bit longer.

Zatoichi.1049:

@ Shade

Yeah I feel ya, BM focus players do have it tough, and I miss the old days of gw1 in that regard. but I think Anet has accepted, as you most likely acknowledge, along with the rest ranger community, the limitations of the pet as it relates to their code, and as a result, less and less players want focus placed on the pets because they are, as a result of the bad AI and coding, and lack of survivability in a evade-centric game, the biggest crutch of the ranger currently.

Perhaps this will change with the Druid though…

I will say this however, none of the changes listed in the thread would negatively impact the pet as all boons are shared with the pet through Fortifying Bond. If the rangers gets Protection, pet gets Protection.

Boons are shared, but not their duration. The pet would only get 2 seconds of protection instead of eight seconds, which would dramatically decrease the amount of survivability this trait gives the pet. And as you said yourself, the pet’s ability to survive is already an issue. This trait could help keep the pet alive much longer while still providing solid defense for the ranger.

Personally I’d take this trait without getting eight seconds of protection for myself. I don’t need a trait to give me a near constant 33% damage reduction. The weakness application is more than enough to stop a thief from bursting me before I have a chance to defend myself, and this trait combined with Wilting Strike will give the ranger pretty high weakness uptime. Especially combined with mainhand axe.

Ashern.5328:

If you actually enjoyed playing on a turret engi, then go right ahead and keep using it. The only difference now is that you don’t have a ridiculous lifeline that allows you to stay alive against 3 people at a time while running around on a point. It’s only more sad to see how everyone completely ditched Turrets now that they have a vulnerability like all other classes — it shows the true colors of the people that used to play on them.

I haven’t fought one turret engi within the last 3 days of active pvping. Sad part is I’ve encountered double if not triple the amount of shoutbows — talk about moving to the next ridiculous build that 3/5 of teams on average are composed of. It’s quite sad.

The reason they stopped using turrets wasn’t because they are suddenly balanced with the other professions. it’s because they are now free kills to literally anyone. The turrets don’t have the survivability to last longer than a couple seconds against any kind of pressure, and placing the turrets in unique spots only saves them for a few more seconds so long as the opponent doesn’t have any kind of ranged damage.

So now they are a bunker build that is only effective on certain points on certain maps against opponents who have absolutely no range at all. In other words they are completely non-viable in any form of PVP. They also no longer have the boon production they relied on for survival and their heal skill can be immediately killed with auto attack cleave by accident, so they don’t even have innate sustain beyond their toughness and vitality stats.

The turrets are actually dying faster than necro minions. The big difference there is necro minions can actually move out of AoE. Turrets just die.

ChillyChinaman.6057:

Off-topic, but what makes axe strong? I haven’t touched that in a while ankitten ot sure how it applies conditions better. Also I heard that poison will be made to stack in intensity, so while we won’t be the only ones, SB#2 will get a buff.

Mainhand axe stacks might on it’s auto attack and might increases condition damage. So basically you apply conditions with your first set then switch to axe, then stack might which will make the conditions already on the target start ticking for more and more damage.

Plus Splitblades is a pretty good bleed applier in it’s own right.

I dunno Heimskarl. I watched the video where Anet devs and play testers were trying out Stronghold and when someone playing the Revanant used a taunt it looked very much like it pulled the victim’s targeting to the taunt user.

Plus it’d be a pretty useless taunt if it didn’t pull aggro to the user. Taunts have always been a way to pull attention to the user.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

Why aren’t we asking about the interaction with other cc. Beastly warden sound good on paper but in application I think its not that great.

So I use the wolf, when I fear I want targets to run away from by pet i.e: away from my self or ally, Of a cliff or bridge in wvw and eotm.

How does this work with spiders and drake hound you immo so the first part of the taunt is wasted because they cant move. How does taunt work with my jaguar he stealths.

Pets that provide boons will most likely be near the party so mobs aren’t really going anywhere only benefit is that their auto attacking (cleave will still be an issue).

I can see uses of it by I also see greater limitations. Beastly warden should come in 3 flavors. Pets that already cc should get ability A, Pets the gaint boons should get B ability and pets that apply damage or damaging condition should get C ability.

This trait should expand the uses of our underused pet pool not limit it more.

As with all things in this game you bring traits to compliment your weapon/utility choices. You wouldn’t take a greatsword trait if you don’t use a greatsword, nor would you bring trap traits and not bring traps. Likewise you’d only take this trait if you intend to bring pets that can benefit from it.

Wolf already has a powerful control effect on it’s F2. Why would you add a second control effect on top of that? It’s contrary to why you brought a wolf in the first place.

Using an immob with a taunt may be very strong as the enemy won’t be able to use cleanses to break the immobilization as they are locked into attacking the pet. We don’t know about the jaguar yet but if stealth breaks the taunt then just don’t take the trait with that pet.

If you use your pet purely for boon support then again this trait doesn’t synergize with your pet choice. Just don’t take it.

In that same grandmaster slot you gave Quickening Zephyr which has phenomenal synergy with the wolf’s fear or with your own attacks so you can capitalize on the pet’s boons better.

As is this trait does provide our underused pets with more utility. It slaps a strong control effect on the F2 skills that don’t have control on them, which will let rangers finally step away from the usual double canine set ups that have become the best all around pet choices for PVP.

You really should try mainhand axe. Those might stacks are part of what makes this sort of BM build dangerous.

Also, they are not turrets. They are animals. They move and receive boons.

Warhorn definitely helps you get more out of your birds. It’s why I ran it for so long. The only problem is you do suffer for lacking an active defense from it.

If you aren’t completely married to the dual bird theme you should try Snow Leopard. Similar damage and comes with chill for more soft control on your opponent. It also has a leap finisher, which will let you play with your Healing Spring even more.

Jaguars are also good as they can attack while in stealth, meaning the enemy will take a few hits before they even see where the damage is coming from. Again similar damage to birds.

River and Marsh drakes are also excellent as they are tankier. They also have decent damage, can cleave, have a melee weakness application that doubles as a blast finisher, and their F2 is probably the closest you’ll get to a turret overcharge effect. It’s a large damage spike that can hit multiple targets.

Play around with different pets and figure out which pets you feel most comfortable with. Birds have the highest DPS but they don’t have as much utility as some other pets. Particularly the canines like wolf and drakehound that function as hard crowd control. Probably as close to the thumper and net turrets as you can get. Spiders are also good for control, but their damage is extremely lacking even in a BM build.

Oddly enough I find most of the hostility in PVP comes from team chat, not map chat.

I mostly use map chat to comment on something hilarious that happens to me during the game. Usually on Skyhammer where occasionally the map does legitimately beat me. Or I’ll use it to ask if the enemy team has an AFK member or something if it becomes an absolute blowout. And of course to say the customary “GG” at the end of a match win or lose.

It’s very rare I see people use map chat for trash talk. It’s either dead silence or some fairly civil commentary.

mistsim.2748:

cleric BM isn’t viable in any way, shape or form in any aspect of pvp. it used to be when double ravens were critting people for 7k. so don’t worry, it’s not getting nerfed.

however, with the upcoming changes, 0/0/6/6/6 condi bunker will be very strong having all the tools it has now, plus 25 stacks of might on a bird supplementing your massive condi damage.

It might not be viable at the highest tiers of PVP but I do quite well with it. In fact it’s my favorite ranger build, and I find it to be quite a bit more effective than the powerbow build most rangers cling to these days. Granted this is because the cleric BM build has the tankiness to fight on point so I don’t have to worry about my allies not having any sustain or not knowing how to peel properly.

Besides, the community has made it pretty clear they don’t just want AI focused builds to be less effective than other builds, they want them DESTROYED to the point the AI will die instantly upon being looked at. My fears are quite justified.

Please don’t direct people’s attention to the cleric beastmaster build next. If that gets nerfed into the ground I don’t know what I will do. It’s one of the funnest and most challenging builds I’ve come across and I absolutely love it, and we all know that when it comes to AI many in the PVP community aren’t exactly civil.

That being said I see you like birds. I’m a drake man myself, but I ran a pretty fun bird centered build before and it worked well. To complete your bird theme you should run with the warhorn for Hunter’s Call. More birds swarming the enemy as two bird pets deal high damage. It’s great, and a surprising number of players responded to being defeated by it with amusement. “The birds! The biiiiirds!” Plus the birds really benefit from the high fury uptime due to their already high crit chance, and combined with the bird’s swiftness generation you’d have perma group swiftness in combat and quite a lot out of combat as well.

That being said warhorn probably isn’t optimal. I just like using it with bird pets for the thematic synergy.

I’d also suggest you play around with mainhand axe since you’re investing in Nature Magic. It’ll let you capitalize on Fortifying Bond so that your pet has a near constant stack of 15-20 might at all times which will dramatically ramp up the bird’s damage output.

Since you are using birds you may also want a bit more Beastmastery so they aren’t quite as fragile. More importantly you’d get Loud Whistle which will let you swap your pets more often to make use of those low cooldown F2 skills and keep your pets alive by switching them out. You’d also get more out of Mighty Swap.

If you move points out of beastmastery you should put them in Skirmishing for Pet’s Prowess which will increase the critical damage of the birds for a rather large boost to their burst potential.

If you’re really hurting on condi removal Healing Spring is a good alternative. If you decide to go with the warhorn it also serves as a blast finisher for extra heals. Healing Spring cures conditions on activation, has a strong burst heal, and will cure conditions on you periodically as you stand in it while providing you and your pet a lengthy dose of regen. Your pet will get double the regen since it procs Fortifying Bond, allowing you to easily maintain long lasting regen to keep your pets alive longer.

Just remember, our pets are not turrets. They CAN benefit from boons, so you should build around providing as much support to your pet as you can.

From what I gathered Ghotistyx is right.

From their own example you can be a ranger who specializes in beastmastery, wilderness survival, and marksmanship or you can be a druid who specializes in beastmastery and wilderness survival. As a druid you are forced into the druid trait line and can pick two others.

So we won’t be able to use any of the full ranger builds, but we WILL be able to make new druid builds based on the trait synergy between the druid line and the rest. I’m betting Druidism, Beastmastery, and Nature Magic might result in something interesting.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

The pet is a part of the ranger one should treat it like it is. Don’t send your pet into the middle of a zerg unless you provide it with the support to stay alive.

Pets rallying on kill would trivialize pet death. Taking the focus off of keeping the pet alive. People have a hard time understand their pets as it is, they don’t need to have less focus on them but more.

While I agree with your premise that you should do everything you can to stop pets from dying in the first place, this is actually a pretty solid suggestion that would help rangers deal with the problems we face in zerg vs zerg combat. If pets could rally off enemy death like players do they wouldn’t spend 90% of the fight dead just for existing on the front lines.

Meanwhile this wouldn’t really effect small scale roaming or SPVP since the pet of a decent ranger generally won’t die to begin with. Additionally it isn’t like you can just rally on command. If your pet goes down in a team fight it won’t get back up until and if your team secures a kill, which will be a fair bit harder if your pet is down in the first place since the ranger is so dependent on the pet to be effective.

Lich Form is probably the only elite in this game that I’ve used that really feels like an elite skill. Big, dangerous looking transformation that produces insane damage output and can conjure a small horde of undead rats… Very elite. Supply Crate is also a good contender as it’s a fight ender more often than not.

I suppose Entangle could also count but it honestly feels more like a strong utility skill than an elite. But at least it’s USEFUL. Unlike two of my elementalist elites that actually make me weaker than I was before I used it.

AtoBoss.2906:

Wait.
So simply putting it.
YOU want turrets to be somewhat viable again?
- AI builds should never be viable in tpvp.
End of Story.
Not sure how you wanna be constructive when it simply boils down to, turrets should never be viable in tpvp.
Maybe get good and learn to press more than 6 buttons.
Or maybe use your brain and pick your fights more wisely. I bet you still expect to never die at mid with your turrets hahaha.

GET GOOD.

Just pointing this out. The turret engineers use the same number of keys as most other professions. The weapon skills on 1-5, the heal, and the overcharge effect for the turrets on 7-9, and occasionally their elite skill. Plus the toolbelt skills to compensate for a lack of a weapon swap.

Furthermore the idea that AI shouldn’t exist in competitive play is purely your opinion. There are plenty of ways to implement AI into a PVP format to make them difficult to succeed with but rewarding to play. If you think otherwise I’d kindly point you in the direction of every real time strategy game to ever exist. It’s literally pure AI being directed by a human player, and it’s some of the most intellectually stimulating PVP you’ll find in a video game.

For action oriented video games like GW2 the main goal is the same. To make the use of AI effective only when the necessary amount of micromanagement is applied. Turret engineers as they were didn’t have this as their turrets were stationary and largely self sufficient. It can, however, be improved so that there’s more thinking involved in the use of the turrets. Lessening the tankiness of the turrets was a good move, it was just taken way too far. Turrets ideally should last under AoE pressure for at least 15-20 seconds and only melt the way they do now when focused for 5-10 seconds or so, giving the engineer a chance to react to what’s happening so the engineer can actively pick up and relocate the turret out of harm’s way or defend the turret with crowd control skills. The last part is the most important. The engineer should be constantly vigilant over the health bars of the turrets and ready to jump in when needed. Self repairing turrets also shouldn’t be a thing. Wear and tear should be something the engineer worries about, causing them to bring their toolkit to repair the turrets between fights. This would create a bit of a risk as an engineer would be more vulnerable between fights.

I’d also personally change the way the engineer picks up turrets. Instead of putting them on a shorter cooldown I’d have them function like another kit, replacing your weapon skills with turret-based skills where you, say, clobber someone by slapping them with the turret. Then when you place the turret again it’ll have the same health as it did when you picked it up. So if you see your rocket turret being hammered you’d run to it, pick it up, smack the opponent with the turret for a knock down, then run off to replace it in a more secure location. I’d probably have the turret skills on long cooldowns so you’re not inclined to just use turrets like actual kits, but rather as emergency maneuvers to keep the turrets alive. This isn’t necessary to make turrets more active, I just think it’d create a really fun and amusing playstyle.

Then you can lessen the strength of overcharges but give them shorter cooldowns and balance them around the constant application of the overcharge effects so that when the turrets are down the engineer is still contributing to what the turrets are doing.

That’s really all you need to do to make turrets more active. Just because the damage is coming from an AI doesn’t mean it’s the AI beating you if the player behind the turrets is the reason the AI is able to do it’s job at all.

For now the Hall of Monuments staff skin is my stand by. Still shopping around. Though I have been contemplating a modrem staff.

Kind of difficult for me because my druid will be my charr ranger and there’s not exactly a lot of medium armor skins that give off the druidic caster vibe AND doesn’t clip horribly with the charr tail. So choosing a staff is a bit difficult.

It always baffles me why people say rangers are just outright bad in WvWvW as if the zerg is the only thing that matters. Yes, the zerg gives the biggest rewards. However it’s not the entirety of the game mode.

Rangers have multiple solid roaming builds and are one of the better roaming professions. We excel at small scale combat, which actually fits us really well thematically.

We have the powerbow roamer that is excellent at taking out opponents from maximum distance. It’s become prominent enough that when people think of ranger this is what they imagine, and it has generated a LOT of hate toward us from the general community because of how effective it is at what it does.

We have the stealth trapper ranger that has similar stealth uptime to some thief builds while still being tanky and dishing out respectable condition pressure. Very hard to pin down between the constant stealth applications and super speed for relocation.

Both of these set ups are very unique playstyles that are both fun and effective in small groups. There’s more, but these are the two most popular from what I can tell.

Unless this AoE is going to be crazy large this really doesn’t feel like a grandmaster trait. It’s competing with Beastly Warden too, which looks like it’ll be a playstyle defining trait for beastmasters.

Maybe if it were dropped down into master tier it’d be more acceptable, but even then the ferocity is kind of pointless. If that ferocity were precision or power I might be more interested.

Necro shouts would make sense to me. Not all shouts are strictly support. Warriors have a shout that induces fear and ranger shouts have a bunch of random effects concerning the pet.

Perhaps necromancer shouts are tied into the non-physical dead. You could be calling on the spirits of those who have passed on to bolster allies or inhibit enemies. Or the shouts could be a sort of unholy scream that tears away at the enemy’s soul. Lots of possibilities.

Here are some random, baseless guesses on my end.

Consecrations: The druid could enchant the ground beneath them to gain different effects. Some ideas include:
Spring Meadow: Provides regen, vigor, and cures conditions to allies in the area.
Summer Plains: Provides might and retaliation to allies and weakness to enemies who enter the area.
Fall Woodlands: Prevents enemies from entering the area and destroys projectiles, as well as damages enemies already inside.
Winter Forest: Provides stability to allies and inflicts chill, vulnerability, and damages enemies in the area.

Minions: The druid could summon additional beasts of the wild to fight by their side, all tied to the pet’s F1 and F3 keys for limited control. All using an active skill similar to necro minions.
Bear: Tanky melee minion. Active skill taunts foes in an AoE.
Wolf: Support/damage minion. Active skill causes AoE fear to enemies.
Raven: High damage, squishy minion. Active skill sends the raven flying to the target like a projectile and inflicts vulnerability and blindness.
Leopard: High damage, squishy minion. Active skill shadowsteps behind the target and inflicts bleeds and cripple.

Ranger is fantastic for solo play. I can’t imagine how anyone could struggle open world PVE on their ranger.

I started as an elementalist back in the first couple weeks of the game being out. Almost no health or armor and very few passive defenses made for quite the steep learning curve. I struggled fighting more than two enemies at a time and could barely defeat a veteran solo. Then I made my ranger and was ripping through groups of four or five enemies at once, casually soloing multiple veterans, and taking down CHAMPION mobs alone.

The pet is a very effective tank. Drakes, bears, and the canines are all pretty tanky and, since the AI tends to go after targets with high toughness, will hold aggro just fine. Drakes especially as they have cleave and a strong multi-target hit F2 skill to keep pressure on multiple opponents. As long as you keep your distance, kite properly, and know how to pet swap there is absolutely no reason your pet should be dying in open world content aside from the world bosses, and even then it isn’t THAT hard.

Shoot, I just got done running around the Silverwastes all day with a powerbow set up and my pet only died twice, and both times because I didn’t know the boss mechanics and was just kind’a winging it.

Archaon.9524:

I don’t attack ppl…as soon as someone goes 1v1 on their point and dies more than once, goes 1v1 vs bunker guard on his point for 2 minutes, loses 3v2, goes for boss or lord at start, puts target on ranger’s pets, team facetanking lich fully wiping and stuff like that it’s instant afk, after more than 16k matches i already passed the rage part..

How about when your thief tries ganking the warrior/guardian on point in a team fight and ignores the powerbow ranger or staff ele who’s freecasting off point? That’s some fun times right there.

Archaon.9524:

If you get close to top score you must definately be good…right?

On the other side i’d rather have a condi survival ranger (Not trapper for the love of god) than a reterded pew pew power scrub in team all day, even if neither of those are gonna do something against celestial specs (Maybe condi could do something vs engi but it’s more about how dumb engi is)

Anyway if you meet ppl who consider power ranger a good tn spec then you probably gonna lose no matter what…cause except VERY rare cases, like 3 or 4 ppl in all eu who play it with brains and mostly for a specific reason, like drazeh on legacy, i still have to meet a power ranger doing something decent outside spamming rapid fire while getting los’ed all day

If you’re playing an aggressive role it’s at least an indicator you’re doing SOMETHING. You’re getting kills, you’re capping points, and you’re staying in the game. That being said I did specify that my score was high when I’m not filling the defensive role. Depending on the team composition I’ll have to sit back and defend mid because my entire team decided to bugger off to far right after the initial team fight, leaving mid wide open to decap. If it’s only two enemies I can usually survive long enough for my team to come back, if not well… I can’t work miracles. Which reminds me.

- When your entire team goes far right after the mid team fight so that the enemies can capture mid again on respawn.

I favor tankier builds on my ranger for the same reasons you listed. Especially in solo queue where you can’t rely on your team to hold the point while you sit back at range. The builds I make are designed to fight on point, and while it certainly can’t be a full time bunker it’s better than being butchered every time I try to stop a cap.

Regardless, my point is you shouldn’t aggressively attack someone’s playstyle in the middle of a match. It doesn’t benefit anyone and will just make it harder for both you and the person you’re attacking to play to the best of your ability.

Archaon.9524:

or maybe it’s just you playing yolocrap…who knows…

Nah, I perform quite well with the builds I make. I have a fairly solid win/lose ratio for a solo queue player and regularly get top or near top score in most games I play when I’m not forced to fill a defensive role because my team lacks sustain. I do my best to rotate well and I tend to win just as many 1v1s as I lose depending on the style of build I go with. I don’t consider myself exceptional but I’m far from costing my team points.

I cannot contribute to the team while typing responses to the guy who, instead of focusing on the game, is attacking my playstyle choice, though. Nor can I effectively call incoming or communicate with my team when the team chat is being filled with “LOL ranger without longbow?! Kill yourself.”

- When someone on your team openly complains about the map choice and proceeds to do nothing/feed the enemy team kills.
- When someone on your team openly complains about your team in map chat and does nothing but tell everyone how bad they are.
- When someone on your team, instead of playing the game, focuses all his energy on drilling you about your non-metal build choices distracting both you and him from the actual match.

Bran.7425:

It is playing to that ‘strength’ of the ranger that got the pets an across the board nerf in damage (which they didn’t really need in PvE/WvW, spvp was arguable) and with the addition defense they are looking at giving to both ranger and the pet they might very well do it again.

Oh, at this rate I’m almost positive it’ll get nerfed into the ground. Anet caved hard to the tears of the community about turrets and obliterated that build to the point it’s not usable in any game mode. According to quite a few responses to the different threads on the matter the community is targeting us next.

We shouldn’t dwell too much on possible future nerfs. I’d rather try to be optimistic.

Gotejjeken.1267:

That is never going to get fixed if people want to keep the straight stat split between Ranger and pet. It only plays to counter builds, not synergy. That is, I can have a power pet to counter my condi build, but if I have a condi pet with my condi build…lol.

So…how about a trait that works like fortifying bond, except for stats? If I take it, my pet uses my scaling.

I prefer the pet’s stats being separate. It lets you build tanky while getting good damage from your pet. You should pick a pet that fills the gaps in your own style. It works far better than the pet just being a weaker version of yourself.

What they need to do is give certain pets condition damage and healing power in their stat pool. If devourers, spiders, and certain cats and birds had about 650 condition damage base you could trait it to get 1,000 condition damage on your pet. Then the difference wouldn’t be as severe and the pet would be an extra source of conditions.

Likewise if the sylvan hound and moas had around 650 healing power you could trait to 1,000 and have your pet function as a nice source of passive heals and a regen bot for builds with lower sustain.

We don’t really need an elite skill, but expanding us to have an F5 would let us get a second activated skill from our pets which is VERY much needed.

XerreX.7196:

hmm what else is ai based and u can check your facebook midfight with? MM necros? PU mesmurs? Spirit rangurs?
but in all hoenstly AI based builds should not reward anyone, they belong to pve environment with all other passives….

Spirits aren’t an AI build. They don’t fight and the only movement they do is follow the ranger like a mini. When you see them attack? It’s the ranger activating their active skill by actively pushing a button actively.

Aside from that they just provide boons like banners that are destructible.

I do admire the drakehound. It’s a much better immobilizer than the spider I use for my trapper build. At least in group fights. The only real reason I don’t use it is for flavor reasons. I play a charr ranger when I run beastmaster or power, so it feels weird to have a human bred dog as an animal companion.

That knockdown is pretty great. It’s saved me from a stomp many times when using the wolf. I mostly gravitate toward drakes for the free blast finisher and the cleave. Plus the sheer tankiness lets me now worry too much about them. It is possible the taunt will be easier to land with a canine, but we’ll have to see in what way the taunt activates. If it’s on hit then you’d be right, but if it’s on activation it may not matter.

Quickening Zephyr’s synergy with the river drake is probably my favorite part. One game in particular I just had to laugh. I got jumped by a thief and a zerker guardian when most of my utilities were on cooldown. Didn’t last long. They downed me and the guardian immediately left to go fight on point as the thief went to stomp. Thief was still at full health and for whatever reason he decided to NOT stealth stomp. My snow leapord pounced him hitting for about 4K. Then I swapped pets to river drake and interrupted his stomp with thunder clap. River drake uses a quickness empowered lightning breath and downs the thief a split second before he gets the stomp. I was then able to win with lick wounds and the downed auto attack. It was hilarious.

Peakitten.6412:

I have to come down on the side of the folks who do not want to have an arming time on HS. When I use it, I am at the point of needing a heal that regen isn’t going to cover. I also double dip on it by blasting HS with warhorn providing the extra area healing.

But if it works like a trap you’ll be able to throw it down at the start of a fight and then jump into it to trigger when you need it, and by that time it’ll be off cooldown so you can throw the trap down AGAIN, wait a second for the arming time, and get a double heal in the span of a few seconds. With both springs overlapping to provide their own pulses of regen and condi clear for the durations.

It’d be a tremendously more powerful heal. All it’d need from you is a bit more planning ahead.

I like Fortifying Bond in the BM line. In fact I think I suggested the same thing quite a while ago. However I’m not a fan of the ferocity for the pet coming from Rending Attacks. I prefer it to be in the master minor trait with Agility Training. Given both of these traits individually are only adept tier I don’t think bumping them up to master when combined makes them overpowered.

While I like your Beastly Decoy I think we should keep the name Beastly Warden. Sounds more intimidating and less like we’re pretending to be mesmers.

Sebrent.3625:

I agree that Beastly Warden could be a fantastic trait. We’ll have to wait and see the numbers though. I think this build could benefit from any of those 3 Beastmastery GM traits.

A nice side-effect of Beastly Warden is that we could take some pets whose F2 isn’t a CC like the Canines’ and turn it into a CC on top of what it already does.

I imagine Beastly Warden is Anet directly responding to how overused the canine pets were. It’s not that the other pets aren’t great in their own way, it’s just that fear is so effective that you’re hurting yourself by not taking it. With Beastly Warden every pet has a similar level of control on their F2. Could open up a lot of possibilities for the more creative use of pets.

Granted Quickening Zephyr is one of my favorite traits right now. Fast stomps and a near instant drake F2 is pretty hard to beat.

mistsim.2748:

ok why would the birds be pecking your eyes? they don’t do that IRL, theyd just be scratching you with their talons.

Have you ever used that skill? The birds are clearly pecking at the target’s head/face. Besides, limiting the skill based on the behavior of real life wildlife is kind of silly when you consider rangers are using nature magic to command the beasts to act contrary to their nature.

Anet is destroying build diversity now so they can add much greater diversity later. We’re going to get more Elite Specializations in the future and each elite specialization will provide us with an entirely new trait line, a new weapon, new utilities, and a new elite, as well as fundamentally change how we interact with our profession mechanic. This will create far more build diversity than a bunch of weak traits almost no one used to begin with.

I’d take Protective Ward even if it only provided the weakness. We’ll be able to have a really high weakness uptime if we build for it. Plus protection for your pet is hardly a BAD thing. To that end I actually feel like Wilting Strikes would be better than Natural Healing. The tooltip for that trait is worded strangely though. Every other trait just says on F2, but this one says “activated skills”. Could mean any skill used by the pet aside from auto attack.

It’d also make the F2 for your pet really strong with Beastly Warden, which is probably the trait I am most interested in trying out. A river drake’s F2 taunting the enemy and causing weakness while dealing substantial damage would be pretty sweet. River drakes already apply weakness on tail swipe too, and when combined with Winter’s Bite (I’ll be using axe/axe or axe/dagger over sword since latency issues tend to make the sword almost unusable for me) it would mean the enemy is suffering from weakness more often than not.

All things considered this seems like a natural evolution from the cleric beastmaster build I already use. I do wonder how hard hitting those pet bleeds will be, though. Even traited they only have 350 condition damage.

We’ll probably see a massive surge of professions than generally did poorly against turret engineers. So basically all the really powerful celestial builds that already dominated most other builds will no longer have to worry about one of their counters.

mistsim.2748:

and it makes sense, thematically. birds wouldn’t blind you necessarily or make u run slower (theyd make u run faster). but they would interfere with your actions like firing a bow or swinging a sword. theyd also make you bleed I suppose, but we have enough of bleed.

I’d say a flock of birds getting in your face and pecking at your eyes would certainly cause blindness. Not to mention all the feathers and dust flying in your face from their flapping wings.

Having the birds apply blindness effect each tick would be pretty nice. Just enough so that the opponent is suffering periodic blindness ticks while the birds are on them rather than stacking it. That way the warhorn has a strong defensive skill that can be used to stop stomps or mess up an opponent’s damage rotation every 25 seconds.

I will definitely be using this or some variant of this when the changes hit. I already strongly favor axes and greatswords for my beastmaster cleric build, and this set up will capitalize on those weapons perfectly and make up for the low precision. Though I immediately thought soldier as well as it has such a high power stat along with great defensive stats.

I like the possible variety of choices. Though I’m sure it’s a matter of time someone finds the absolute optimal way to run it.

I will miss Fortifying Bond, though. If condition cleansing wasn’t so limited I might have tried a variant with Nature Magic for the Protective Ward GM that spams weakness on your enemies. Maybe I could get by with Signet of Renewal and Healing Spring like I do now, but only time will tell. With Cleric’s amulet I’d go with Nature’s Wrath, but with Soldier’s probably Bountiful Hunter. Then grab Evasive Purity to deal with poison or Vigorous Training for more dodges… Could work.

I like the Guard change. It would give us a strong control effect on our utility bar and, when combined with the new Beastmaster grandmaster trait, would give us two taunts through our pet for more control. The cooldown would definitely have to increase, but only to around 30-40 seconds. Traited it would be lower. And with Heal as One becoming a shout a shout ranger could still maintain permanent regen and swiftness pretty easily.

I like the idea of Search and Rescue allowing the pet to bring the downed player to us for rezzing. It’d give the skill far more tactical applications and make it work as a very effective stomp stopper. I would like the cooldown to be lower though. Maybe around 70-80 seconds. 180 is excessive.