Playing a backline druid is no where near dead weight. Sometimes i watch the frontline of the zerg enguage and never down a single player. Given… if they do this maybe twenty times you might get a down once in a while, but most commanders dont have the momentum to push through and actually kill someone. This is where the backline, mainly rangers and high dps classes come in.
Dropping to the side, rangers can be very effective in killing anyone in mid or backline and even sometimes downing 4-5 frontliners as you push through. Just because ranger doesn’t drop boons that get immediately stripped away in the first push, doesn’t make them any less effective.
Those are not valid points to support any argument. It comes across as pouring out of tears and nothing more.
While I find rangers useful for what they are supposed to do… you don’t make a zerg based on a pin sniping core. On top of that, far too many times, I see rangers not contributing nearly enough, yes it’s the back lines primary job to dish out dmg and finish downs. It’s the front lines job to break heads of large groups (preferably producing downs). Good players do this. Bad players do not. You say most commanders like your in t8, but guess what bad players exist on many servers. So do good players. it comes down to players paying attention and owning their roles, and being accountable for making sure they produce (whatever there job is). Meta’s are built of large group play… the defacto in past was that ranged dps … ele’s and necro’s take the cake because they spam AoE continuously. Rangers may be able to hit 5 people with piercing arrows which would be great for single file pressure. But dropping many AoE’s within a vacinity can produce more output to localize dmg output.
Think about how groups move when they engage eachother. They try to break lines through enemies groups to divide and conquer, they move from the ‘callout’ to the area you want to lay heavy dmg to force the enemy to scatter, where they can regroup /reset and push back. They want to create safe areas for there teams survivability while laying pressure to move the opponents force in a manner they don’t want to go in.
This is why other professions can do this better than the ranger/druid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those guys who hates on rangers at all. I think they are very useful in a good players hands for many reasons already listed. Personally though … that playstyle heavily favours pick teams versus zerg v zerg. If you have 25% of your group on rangers… and you are losing constantly on engages. It’s not just the rangers fault, but the people that are responsible for laying out the dmg altogether because the group is under-performing or not applying enough pressure. Typically rangers get singled out because of the nature of the arguement at hand.
To prove the validity of rangers and druids being in the meta, you would then have to prove how they excel over the other dmg dealers of the meta (GREN). Basically tell how Rangers are superior to either Ele or Necro … and provide reasons which prove the ranger excels at areas they provide to the group. If you have some nice healing plus the ability to lay heavy AoE… maybe try pick on the ele role and see what kinda comparison you can come up with.
Hell change the meta, and provide the supporting reasons why ‘new meta’ can beat old meta. I’ll give you a relative yet unusable example… in gw1 GvG scene the meta heavily favoured 2 monks, 1 E/Mo, 2 Wars, 1 Crip shot Ranger flag runner, and 2 ‘x’ either DMG, or boonstrip characters of choice. Most guilds ran with this … until out came the 8 man ranger spike team which could split squad 4 / 4 and down players easily in a time spike build. This changed the meta, and soon out came the Air Spike 8 Ele group (or 7 and a boonbot), then came the 8 IWAY Warriors… with each iteration of the meta, came a new iteration where the others could defeat the old meta because they excelled at something better. Find the ability to articulate that and theory craft, and put it to work in a real engage. You could be surprised with the results, but don’t be disheartened when things don’t work out, back to the drawing board.
This place likely is filled with theorycrafters, I’d bet most guild leaders who build comp all do it. Find a place for rangers in a new meta. That’s real power.
