Guild Wars 2

Logan is clearly a flawed hero (although as pointed out, most people would chose the well being of a loved one over a friend… but the stakes in this case were obviously very high, which makes him look worse)… but lets not kid around here. They are all going on about the greater good, but now that Rytlock is a butthurt kitty, he’s being just as immature – “I refuse to work with this human to SAVE THE WORLD. I’m going to put my anger above the well being of the planet.”

Zojja seems even worse. I’m not quite sure (I haven’t read the books) why she blames Eir for what happened. The drama between those two characters seems incredibly forced.

Just saying, Rytlock is no better than Logan at this point. And Zojja just is a spoiled kid lashing out and trying to find someone to blame for a tragedy.

At this point, Mantra of Pain feels like a Support skill, as it is by far the best Mantra to use with Restorative Mantras. Personally the only Mantra I like is Mantra of Diversion, because having 2 instant interrupts is just awesome (I don’t spec for the 3 cast, but even then, the skill is still great). I would only ever use MoP with a full on support build with 30 Inspiration and a Staff.

I find Mantra of Distraction is fantastic in PvE, even without speccing in to any Mantra traits. The power of an instant daze that can be cast at ANY time, regardless of your current animation state cannot be overstated. For Dungeons I typically run Mantra of Distraction, Feedback, and Null Field, along with Greatsword and Sword/Pistol. With the Diversion shatter, this gives me 5 potential interrupts, without having to sacrifice a lot of hitting power. That said, I think the only way the other Mantras are worth it is if you are running a Restorative Mantras build. And even then, all you really need is Mantra of Pain to get the full benefit of that trait.

Just wanted to throw in my <3 for these guides. While I ended up not going with your suggested build personally (I’m a big fan of the GS, esp. post-buff) I think these are fantastic guides. Mesmer is such a difficult to understand class and this guide I think does a great job of teaching people of the proper mindset to have while playing. Subscribed to your channel, keep up the great work!

I agree almost 100% with everything in this post. Ranger is a good class and I don’t think it’s horribly broken or anything… but it feels like we don’t have a large amount of viable builds for high end PvE and PvP because of some of the issues listed above.

I personally really like my Trap spec with Melee as my primary weapon… but I am frequently irritated with my melee options. Greatsword has the issues listed above with the damage feeling too low (probably an after effect from nerfing it from it’s horribly OP state in earlier BWEs) but 1h Sword has the issue with the Auto Attack Chain making you lose your mobility. Even though I want to play more in melee, I always find myself falling back to shortbow, as it kills noticeably faster than my melee option usually does.

I also wrote a post on Ranger Spirits and agree 100% on the things here as well. Spirits as they are probably need to be looked at right after the Pet F2 issues, as it is probably the single biggest issue concerning ranger Utility behind Pets.

Unless it’s been fixed recently (haven’t checked in a little while), the White Raven has half the vitality of the other birds.

I’m surprised I haven’t really seen any posts concerning the state of Spirits for the Ranger. There was a post that kind of touched on this, but for a PvP standpoint.

Currently, Rangers have no real viable support options due to the state of their main support skills, Spirits, having a host of problems. Conceptually, Spirits share similarities to Warrior banners, but the banners far outperform Spirits in every conceivable way.

I’ll provide a quick breakdown of what I feel the main problems are currently

1. Survivability: The largest issue at hand. Even with the double health trait, Spirits die far too quickly in any real large combat. This can be in larger DE’s or more commonly dungeon encounters. Simply put, AOE wrecks them. I’m fine with them falling to directed single targetting, but with all the AoE that gets tossed around in most dungeon encounters, it is VERY difficult for Spirits to stay up. Even with the 30 point trait to have them follow you this is an issue. With a long cooldown the fact that they die so easily is a problem.

I’m not sure the best way to fix this, but my guess is just giving them a flat AoE damage reduction in PvE only. Since I have not really played much PvP I can’t speak to that mode and would not want to upset the balance over there.

2. Active ability. Similar to our Pets, our spirits also have extremely sluggish active abilities. After clicking it, they have a fairly long wind up before they do the effect. This usually causes the ability to miss whatever it was trying to do in the first place. At the moment the active abilities don’t feel strong enough to warrent such a long cast time. I’d either boost the power of these abilities to justify the long cast (making it powerful but harder to land) or just keep the effect hte same and reduce the cast time.

3. Traits for spirits feel lackluster. At the moment there are 3 main Spirit traits in the Nature Magic tree that all Spirit builds take. Extra health, extra proc chance, and allowing them to move with you. While the second and third ones are mandatory for any spirit build, they don’t really feel exciting. The fact you have to wait until level 60 before the spirits move with you (and really a spirit build is TERRIBLE before that) makes playing ranger support very difficult at best.

I’d love to see the 30 point trait moved to either Tier 1 or 2 (or heck, even made baseline for spirits!). Maybe add in some AoE resistance to the health trait (as described in #1). Finally for Tier 3 talent, the “higher proc chance” trait could be improved and placed there… make it something like “All spirits give a passive effect of +10 to all stats (stacking for each pet, giving you +40 if you have all 4 spirit utilities out) and increases the chance for their effect to trigger by 15%” or something along those lines.

4) Possibly re-consider what some of the procs do. Right now the Storm Spirit and Sun Spirit are both considered pretty worthless. Due to how Burning stacks only duration, it is a fairly minor DPS gain to bring to a party overall. Honestly I could live with Sun spirit though, it does have small niche places (like if nobody on the team really has burning stuff). Storm Spirit giving Swiftness is USUALLY not worth it in most PvE encounters however. Swiftness is great, especially with how movement heavy so much of the game is, but due to the fact it’s a fairly unreliable proc, it’s hard to justify bringing this along usually… and it’s a T3 utility. I’m not sure the best way to change this, but in it’s current state almost nobody ever uses it. Maybe it’s really more of a PvP thing.

Honestly those are the biggest issues. Right now, support rangers really are all about Healing Spring and Call of the Wild (which are both amazing, don’t get me wrong). If pets F2 responsiveness was addressed, this would put yet another feather in their cap as well (and I know this is being looked at currently, which is great!). They fall behind other support specced classes right now, which is disappointing. Rangers don’t have a particularly powerful Control game and their Support options are sadly somewhat limited. This is putting most ranger players in the PvE world in to pure damage roles which is unfortunate.

I won’t pretend my suggestions above are perfect or the only way to fix things, but i just want to make sure that the state of spirits are known and that Arena Net are hopefully looking at them sometime in the near future.