Guild Wars 2

The PvE meta right now is everyone contributes a little bit to the party’s safety, which allows all 5(10) players to bring almost max damage. I just can’t see them making content so hard it would put people off that. 10 players functioning at 95% of max damage and everyone helping to keep the party up makes a lot more sense to me than 9 players at 100% damage and 1 guy who is utterly useless except for healing.

That’s not to say druid won’t have his place for healing, I just think it will be as part of a bigger party comp and the druid is still going to be running mostly damage traits and utilities. Maybe 3 eles, a zerker+zealots druid running glyph, FS and spotter, a herald, 2 engis, 2 guards, a warrior, and a thief with SB is a colossal amount of healing and everything doesn’t completely fall apart if the druid gets knocked down.

I’m still pretty skeptical about druid healing when waterfields that have no cooldowns on blasts still exist.

mistsim.2748:

- Muddy terrain is not being slotted by anyone because no one cares about cripple, and the initial immob is not a game-changer. this utility needs to do more. revamp it, buff it, or remove it.

That’s for PvE. For PvP/WvW it’s obviously used pretty widely. It very rarely leaves my skillbar regardless of what type of build I’m running, it’s that good. PvE isn’t the only game type, some skills just aren’t going to be very useful in PvP but are really powerful in PvP (warrior hammer for example.)

For WvW I think just running a normal build (longbow, a/d + s/t etc) and using druid for sustain would be the way to go. Hard to say without trying it.

I have some ascended cele gear with defender (healing power) runes that I think will go great with druid in WvW if I wind up getting HoT.

A question a lot of us have is “how does a druid get credit for anything?” I think the next elite spec may be “become a WvW scout and get absolutely nothing for 6 hours of play.”

Presumably mobs in raids are going to drop zero loot, as that seems to be the trend of the living story. So the druid would get the end chest and that’s all anybody gets. If that’s not true, and bosses or mobs drop loot, druids are hosed.

How do druids get anything in WvW?

Open world PvE is clearly a no-go for druids, it’s not even possible.

Electro.4173:

Can’t really speak to WvW specifically, as that’s not a mode I generally partake in.

No one in their right mind would even make an open world PvE bot anymore. The amount of hours it would have to run to make any sort of money is insane. I mean that’s what bots are for, insane hours, so I’m sure people still try.

Anywho,

Fact: You do not tag things in PvE zergs as a beast master or condi ranger. Pets don’t even reach the PvE targets before they die.

Fact: Fully equipped condi characters usually don’t tag things in WvW zergs. Most of my non-ranger characters have exotic/ascended condi gear and they don’t tag anything at all in zergs. There is no way a single target, AI, dead in .015 seconds pet is going to get you any loot in WvW.

Bryzy.2719:

Yeah true, I’m just too anxious to wait an extra day to watch it (assuming it’s a 24h turn-over for them getting stuff uploaded)

You can watch “past broadcasts” in Twitch before the channel-owner uploads them. I do that for some people I follow, but I’m not sure if that’s the default or not. That’s how I watch from the beginning if I come to a live broadcast too late.

Anet always posts their videos on Twitch and YT. I prefer it that way, then you can fast forward through their jibba jabba or just read the cliffs.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

Of course everyone uses magic. That’s what signets are, that’s what allows engineers to build autonomous turrets, that’s what allows everyone to heal themselves within seconds…

That wasn’t in response to you but a couple people who didn’t believe all the professions use magic (specifically engis and warriors were noted, and signet are by very definition a source of magic.)

Unholy Pillager.3791:

I just think of their lack of guns as a ‘just in case’ type of thing. A ranger wants to be prepared to trek into the wilderness for a few months, and if that situation arises, any guns and firearms expertise would become dead weight and wasted time, respectively.

So would that fancy 6 foot two handed sword, though. There is no excuse for carrying that thing through the Maguuma jungle.

Firearms are extraordinarily easy to use. Within minutes of the first time I picked up a rifle I was bulls-eyeing targets at a hundred yards, and that includes historic weapons (my dad uses an historic black powder muzzle loader to hunt; it’s actually more accurate than modern weapons.) I think we both agree rangers are thematically practical, and it would be practical to pick up a gun if your current situation warrants it. Certainly the player character ranger’s situation warrants a gun.

I guess I would also note that IRL, let’s say American pioneers going west, rifles were one of their most prized possessions. They weren’t going out into the wilderness for a while, they were going out indefinitely.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

You don’t need to make yourself a new sword every month, though. If you have one, and take decent care of it, it will last you. A gun might…although the moving parts are more prone to corrosion than a sword is.

Absolutely. Rangers are sort of ‘practical survivalists’. My point was that they don’t have religious beliefs or something that prevents them from having guns, it’s just not practical if you’re not in a city for months at a time. My ranger, however, spends 95% of her time in the mists fighting with and against people using firearms. Seems like a good time to pick up a readily available firearm herself. Edit: Another though, if we assume the personal and living stories are where your character actually spend their time, that’s even more reason to use a gun. It may be no coincidence that a Pact ranger uses a gun in the personal story. He is, after all, in an army at war and not in a hut being a hermit.

Shortly after launch (presumably before elite specs were dreamt up based on what little we’ve heard about behind the scenes) the devs said they wanted to make sure every profession had access to every weapon. Elite specs appear to be the current method of making that happen.

Also I looked diligently for the quote that all professions and even normal citizens use magic on a daily basis, but it appears that thread was deleted. I’m quite sure it was by Angel McCoy and I believe it was in a layline thread. I looked through her entire post history and couldn’t find anything. Maybe it was Bobby Stein and it was just too long ago…

I believe that’s fairly ‘common knowledge’ among the lore folks though. The wiki offers this, anyway: “Almost every being in Tyria has access to magic in some way or another, and there are countless ways of utilising that magic.”

The devs have said that everyone in Tyria including small children use magic on a daily basis. One of the writers posted in the lore forum a couple years ago that basically every single skill in the game is magically affected, which is why none of them are at all realistic. She used the thief as an example; thieves get good at martial skills then use magic to enhance them. Everytime a thief autoattacks with a shortbow, he makes the arrow bounce around (and teleports and going invisible?). Same for engis, especially asura who don’t make any distinction at all between magic and technology. Magic just exists because it’s a fantasy game.

So ya, most of the skills rangers use are magic, but nearly 100% of all warrior skills are magic as well. The point is, rangers are by no means a casting class. Just like the thief, they get good at fighting hand to hand and surviving in the woods, and use magic to supplement that.

I don’t want any profession to be OP.

Unfortunately our problem is if we get to be like 85-90% as good as the other professions the general community throws a temper tantrum. I just want to be 100% along with every one else. It actually bums me out to think about how kittenty rangers get treated by the devs.

Another note, even if classes aren’t OP, some will always take more effort. Ranger will probably always take more effort than most because we have more to ‘take care of’ at any given moment.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Then you get to ranger. Ranger uses an EXTREME amount of magic in comparison to the other non-magical classes.

Completely disagree.

I went through and counted all the ranger skills and came up with ~17% that possibly be classified as magic (i.e. I guess we can call healing spring “magic” but then you also have to call things like shadow refuge “magic”) and the overwhelming majority of that was spirits that are a niche, possibly that bridges the gap with druid. If you’re not a spirit ranger, your ranger is probably carrying 1 to 0 “magical” skills.

Likewise their traits suggest knowledge of nature (‘oakheart salve’ or literally ‘wilderness knowledge’) rather than mastery of nature (‘lingering magic’, although that just applies to what pets do.) Much more prominent is the theme animal handling and pet synergy.

Rangers are the 3rd least “magical” of the professions, behind warrior and engi. So little of their gameplay is non-martial it’s not even mentioned in their description on the wiki. “Rangers are flexible and durable—proficient with the bow, yet surgical with the sword. Their loyal pets, which rangers tame and train, distract enemies while the rangers strike safely from a distance.” That sums up non-spirit rangers pretty perfectly.

Magic in quotes every time because it’s a fantasy game and I would guesstimate <1% of all skills are realistic. Warriors throw a 2 handed sword like a boomerang.

Rangers are martial, not forest wizards.

#FullOnNerdy

You really are required to have a stun break at a certain point though. Even if you are made for 1v1s, you’re going to get some random CC like a overcharged shot that has no tell, and then you’re just instantly dead from the stealthed thief or the guardian on the other side of the wall or any other player that’s playing smart by being in the right place.

Condi removal speaks for itself, that’s just not enough IMO. The same thing could happen with a muddy terrain or net turret and then you just sit there watching the other team descend on you while you wait for your death.

Looks extremely similar to something I used when I first started learning ranger. Fun idea, but stun break and condi removal are going to limit you pretty hard, plus a few other things.

Edit: Here I am as a baby ranger back in 2012! I think I was using 64400? not sure what the heck the amulet was… that’s a lot of health. Greatsword was on swap. Not recommending any of this at all, it’s just for nostalgia. Also that coffee and cigarettes guild used to be a pretty big deal in PvP. I have no idea why I took that screenshot where absolutely nothing is happening. Maybe we were playing a guild team or something.

Norjena.5172:

Because the class is based upon nature, more like a shaman. Not like the american invaders (sry settlers) guys who were called “rangers”.

Rangers are all over the world, not just something the US usurped. Aragorn was the same type of ranger as Texas Rangers and forest rangers (both of whom carry firearms), all same word origin. If aragorn had access to a blunderbuss, he definitely would have carried one.

GW2 Druid is probably shaman like, but base ranger is a most definitely not a shaman. It’s a martial class that supplements his martial attacks with nature magic.

MiniEquine.6014:

Guns do go against the philosophy of the natural, so it makes sense that a core ranger would not be able to use them or rather would choose not to. They may get them as a future elite spec as others have stated, but this is why they don’t have it now.

Swords aren’t exactly something you find growing on trees either. I guess you could craft yourself some black powder for crude blunderbuss type thing if you were unusually crafty.

There is a 2nd definition of ranger that I’ve always felt was just as appropriate: a member of a body of armed men, in particular, a commando or highly trained infantryman.

To me that fits exactly the playstyle of a ranger, especially in WvW. Basically a scout (not the WvW definition of scout.)

/ramble

Looks like a drake to me. Similar horns anyway.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/3/34/Salamander_Drake.jpg

Edit: Also I’ve never really taken the time to admire how cool river drakes look:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/b/b8/River_Drake.jpg

Anet has told us it’s because pets share the same AI with ambient enemies (i.e. a hostile river drake) and it’s not fixable. So we’ve had garbage pets for 3 years running. It’s especially laughable since I think the entire GW2 playerbase agrees open world enemies are the equivalent difficulty of those baby toys where you have to put the square in the square and the circle in the circle. “Oh no, river drakes can now attack on the move, Queensdale is unplayable!”

BTDubs, the bird thing is an optical illusion. Cats actually do more damage on moving targets than birds because the bird swiftness move eats up too much time.

I wonder if the reason we have more soft CC than all the other professions combined is because anet was trying to compensate for our pets not being able to catch up…

Hot join is a disaster area, you should give unranked a try. And probably play with map chat turned off. PvP in any game is notorious for attracting horrible whiners. Cleric’s survival sounds totally reasonable to me.

Why in the hell is anyone recommending a bear on the ranger forum? We’re supposed to be the ones breaking stereotypes, not working to make them a reality. Bears are absolute garbage in PvE.

My advice for leveling is to just use whatever the best gear and weapon you find. That will teach you all the weapons in a cozy environment before you have to start playing for real in WvW/PvP/Fractals. Using only a LB will be a bad crutch and you’ll never learn how to actually play ranger.

They’ve got 10k health. Sic em or interrupt the BP/HS combo and they’re absolutely toast most of the time. d/p thieves don’t actually have much stealth.

The sticky build compendium is actually up to date, so you can check that for ideas. It just got stickied.

Puck.9612:

yeah but that only works if you are using axe on a power build which is pretty bad in every other situation

I occasionally WvW roam with a condi-focused cele MH axe. Cele armor and a mix of trinkets to get the right stats. Works pretty well against mesmers, especially since they’re weak to condis.

Also what’s up with all the Nike rangers posts lately, are you a ranger player now?

Whoa. Weird. Sounds like ele attunements. Interest piqued.

I remember a year ago or so we had a thread discussing “pet attunements”. I wonder if anet read that.

CandyHearts.6025:

Well I hope it’s okay to mention that Druid’s had some tiny bits and pieces datamined. Aspects, and unless I heard wrong. 3 of them. It made me think of

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zephyrites

I know they may have 0 in common but I found it interesting that it’s a bit similar.

Do you have a link to the aspects data mining? I haven’t seen that anywhere.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

The real question is what would a rifle bring to the class. We already have 3 ranged weapons two of which are completely overshadowed by the long bow.

A rifle wouldn’t enhance the class it would either be sub par or overshadow what we now have.

Actually I would love to have a long range condi weapon. Axe and SB are technically condi, but both barely fill that role at all, and both are close/melee range weapons.

Also, randomly, there is a rifle wielding ranger in the personal story mission in the Temple of Grenth in Orr. He has a raptor pet, too.

Wolfey.3407:

I’m sure it will be fine; however, I do believe this will be a make it or break for most people if they keep their rangers as their main or demote it to a secondary class for Revenant or another spec. (at least for a couple of months)

It’s a make or break whether many of us buy HoT at all. There is a 0% chance I do if druid isn’t any good. Or at least until they do one of those 75% off sales or whatever.

Survival and signets already make up roughly 100% of any ranger build’s utility skills. Shouts and traps are what need the help.

There are combos of 3ish skills that are used frequently, but no profession I can think of other than d/d ele has a set rotation for PvP, it’s all about your opponent.

Raven.9603:

that could be, but with remorseless you are losing 10% dmg from PO from 1h sword for both you and the pet which generally carries over into the LB side of the rotation….

Ya that’s what it was. I remembered something reverted back to the olden days!

Also I think someone proved S/A + GS was back to being better than LB again after Remorseless changed.

For PvE? RF Barrage RF, Maul Maul Maul, RF Barrage RF, Maul Maul Maul. S/A is a little better damage than GS though.

For PvP there is no rotation.

Nicknobreak.7543:

*Conclusion (aka TL;DR)

I think you wrote a big report on common sense. Everyone already knows condi mesmers are a tough fight.

However I have killed plenty of condi mesmers on a variety of ranger builds, so ‘avoiding them at all costs’ is a bit of an overstatement. I have even killed them with pure melee builds, although that is one fight I would try to avoid. Sometimes you land enough CC at the start you give it a try anyway.

How to play condi builds: apply condis and then run away. Of course that’s hard to fight.

Also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_shot

There is a theory that rangers are last because they needed the most help. The elites were revealed in the order listed on the old profession page (original eight) except ranger was number 4 and skipped. All the other reveals were in the same order.

That’s might be wishful thinking and it’s just last because it was the first shown in the PAX trailer, but we’ll see.

Ryou.2398:

Usually in mmorpgs there is something to offset the weaknesses of a class, so the ranger just offers nothing for having the worst dps?

It’s not that black and white. All the professions have massively complex interactions of active and passive defenses, crowd control effects, condition and direct damage, area or single target damage, sustain, group support capabilities, the ability to do multiple things at the same time, etc. etc. It’s kind of like trying to balance the races in Star Craft; you can’t directly compare anything. Only the professions are a hundred times more complex than SC races.

Understanding all that: ranger players and most of the GW playerbase feels Anet got the balance wrong. It’s not off a lot, but it’s off enough that rangers are — and always have been — ostracized.

The reason most of us main ranger is because we all feel the gameplay is the most fun, and there are certain things ranger does extremely well. If you like doing the things ranger does well, obviously you’d want to play ranger even if the profession is subpar.

Edit: And a little more specifically, playing a damage necro has huge compensations. You don’t have any blocks, you don’t have any evades, you don’t have any stealths, you don’t have any reflects, you don’t have any damage immunities, you don’t have any invulnerabilties, you have the lowest mobility in the game by a million miles, and so on. Every profession has it’s own flavor and you can’t just compare them head to head in a meaningful way other than “gut feeling of effectiveness”.

Just to clarify, thieves are extremely high damage machines that are consistently the best or one of the best professions. They’ve been one of the devs’ favored classes since release (although they in theory try to keep all the classes relatively equal, that doesn’t work out in practice.)

Ryou.2398:

So longbow is bad for soloing to? How can great sword be better? Just use max range hit them while they run up to you then melee… This is really odd guys.

Melee does more damage and almost all melee weapons on all professions have movement skills so you get around the map faster. It’s good for soloing because you can jump into a mob and do a lot of damage quickly. Anything will work though, LB is fine for solo, just boring.

Mcrocha.3891:

Edit: also Rangers were meh in general pve. I remember we had that one turret build for awhile that could spike pretty hard, but in general you had to abuse Expertise for dagger, scythe, sword, or spirit spam to do anything really.

I made some completely ridiculous hero teams in GW1. It took forever to set up, but then I could instagib pretty much any mob in the game. 8 pets, each with Strength of Honor on them, splinter weapon, mark of pain, etc. Just buffed everything to a ridiculous extent so much so that I had to have a necro primary running blood is power just to keep the team from collapsing. Almost zero healing, I think I had one primary ritualist. Zero healing was my jam… I vanquished all of ascalon with 4 (3 heroes) mesmers that didn’t even use a self heal. Man GW1 has some fun replayability.

Ok the link may not be enlightening, but the original game was. The GW1 druids have some really cool lore. Sorry, wasn’t trying to kitten you off, but there is a lot of lore you may not be familiar with. The lore forum might have some stuff, although I wouldn’t have any idea where to look for them. I think Wooden Potatoes has some videos as well. There is TOOOONS of lore from the first game, and it can be difficult to sort through it all.

Overall, it probably has next to nothing to do with how the druids will play though, that’s going to be 100% about game mechanics.

bloodpyrope.8630:

Oh snap. I had a gut feeling that Druid would be heavily based on spirits since they gutted spirits. Especially given that they gutted the acro line for thieves and gave it back to them in the form of Daredevil…

Then when the data miners showed aspects, I kept thinking we might have something like Aspect of the Sun Spirit, or Aspect of the Water Spirit….and have glyphs that change along with whatever Spirit aspect we had.

Now that wiki just makes me feel spirits are going to play a big role in Druid.

Who knows. There was this weird thing were if you killed a GW1 druid spirit, a bunch of ‘forest guardian’ spirits showed up and slaughtered you. They shared the same model as some of the demons from the under world elite area. I still think the devs will look at gameplay before lore, although they did say they wanted a few of the specializations to be very GW lore-based.

Zatoichi.1049:

Just thought I would put some interesting notes about real Druids from Wikipedia that could tell us a little about what themes me might expect:

GW2 druids are based on the GW1 druids according to Colin when they were first revealed. It’s some of the cooler lore from the first game (I guess because it was very mysterious). This should be more enlightening than the real world Wiki.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Druid

I actually find GS to be quicker in open world. With LB you might kill the mob (and maybe not depending on how they’re arranged), but you still have to finish running to them. If you swoop in and maul, you’re ready to move on immediately.

But as always, nothing really matters in the open world.

I don’t understand what you mean. Just that they look cool?

Sinister, apothecary/dire or celestial are good bets. Sinister for glass condi, apoth/dire for tank condi, and cele for experimenting with any kind of build in WvW. Cele isn’t necessarily optimal, but it covers all your bases easily without having to mix and match with expensive armor.

Ryou.2398:

What do you mean inferior? In any rpg game melee should always hit harder then ranged because of risk/reward

Ryou.2398:

still hearing allot of complaints about bows in general for rangers.

Yup, you got it. Bows are really bad for PvE because they do less damage, and bad players like to role play “archers” in groups that want to complete content quickly.

Bows are really good for competitive (PvP and WvW) because they have obvious safety from range. They’re also a hell of a lot more fun in a situation where you have to use a variety of skills than in PvE where you want nothing but damage. For example one of the skills on longbow stealths the ranger, and that has 0 application in a PvE burn.

If you hear bad things about bow rangers in competitive, it’s because people get testy that someone is killing them from far away, and rangers are really, really good at killing people from extreme range.

Bow is a lot of fun in competitive, which is pretty much the only place you’d want to use it anyway. Bow in PvE is a lame at best, and frowned upon in groups.

livlaender.8790:

Fluffball.8307:

Unholy Pillager.3791:

Ranger, on the other hand, is the only profession that wasn’t in WTS.

This just blows my mind every time I think about it.

cough the dankening with Eurantien cough

They weren’t in the last WTS. There have been tons of rangers in the past, but not anymore.

Also I don’t know much about the team, but based on his posts, I think Eura doesn’t play ranger with them anymore?

Moas are underrated in PvP. They have a predictable AoE (although very short range) heal, and a couple of their F2s are better than most.

Not that I use them or anything, I mean why would you when things like wolves exist.

I think he meant a future elite spec in the next expansion, by which time there will be no ranger players left and anet won’t have to waste dev hours on it.

Serophous.9085:

I knew it! Everyone I see and talk to in the game is really just a bot controlled by anet! I’ve been a fool!

Anet learned a thing or two from the Ashley Madison scandal!

Pink Ninja Man.4375:

First off, that is some serious dedication to becoming a druid, who knows it might not be your style.

Ascended staves are account bound, and fractal skins can’t be traded, so he hasn’t really committed anything.