Guild Wars 2

Magi’s got more of a point in PvE than it does WvW.

The only other Healing-based options have Toughness as a secondary stat, and toughness has a yet-to-be-defined-but-still-observable relationship to Mob Aggro. So wearing Magi’s over the other two gives you more freedom to, say, meander away from combat and stick a Spirit in a clever hidey hole or Rez somebody without a mob trailing along behind you to mess up your plans.

Ultimately it’s comparable survivability to Cleric’s and Apothecary’s, despite Healing power lacking the same synergy with Vitality that it has with Toughness. It’s just different; with Cleric’s and Apothecary’s you’re a healy juggernaut that can dive into the thick of things and laugh it off, with Magi’s you can ghost around the edges of combat and you’re diving in and out with precision strikes.

I think Whirl Finishers in general need a boost across the board. You might look at that skill with new eyes if they ever got around to improving those.

I know forum-talk traditionally ignores the human factor, but it’s really relevant in this circumstance.

What makes GS/Axe Warrior so powerful is not just the Output, but the low Skill Floor and how well it works in most contexts. Not only can nearly everybody pick up the build and do well with it, but they can do it nearly all the time.

A Ranger Cat Sword/x build is just not in a good place if half the people don’t have the multitasking technical proficiency to keep their glass cannon pet alive in most encounters, and the other half experiences the awkwardness of sword and drops that thing like it’s on fire.

You know, they wanted to include portal functionality on more classes, and they also wanted to give Longbow better ways to manage distance.

I’m just saying, I might stop hating Long-Range Shot with the burning fire of a thousand suns if I could utilize some good forethought to reset my distance instead of playing the world’s most hopelessly futile game of keep-away ever. Replacing Hunter’s Shot with a 1200 range Portal for me and four of my closest friends isn’t too OP is it? Actually it probably is, but dang it, that weapon needs help.

As far as dungeonplay goes;

The general survivability on Ranger is naturally pretty good, and that can be useful depending on what your tackling and who you’re with. If you actually build into survivability, and try to leverage your excess survivability as tanking it can be moderately successful….But, tanking in this game isn’t really a role, it’s a tactic. Like any tactic it has specific places where it is and isn’t helpful. I kind of feel like tanking would be a pretty hit or miss as a class identity.

I generally agree with your perspective Shiren.

AOE is still leaving my pets twitching piles of gore on the dungeon floor, but that’s to be expected. These weren’t changes to improve the situation vs. AOE, they were to keep pets from getting cleaved quite so often. As an anti-cleave solution, it’s actually pretty good. But it’s clear they still need to come up with a similar bright idea for AOE.

In my opinion, Spirits aren’t fixed until I can safely put them on my bar without a single point in Nature Magic.

I’ve found one instance where I’ve genuinely wanted to use Guard for it’s stated purpose in PvE. That’s leaving a pet on the other side of the map to help manage taking out healing crystals on the CoF Path1 boss.

I haven’t found many purposes for the Stealth component.

I’ve found many purposes for the Protection component. But, being brutally honest, it’s gangly awkward to use it that way and it always manages to be useful but rarely actually productive.

Good gravy, what is going on in this thread?

@Durzlla
Yessir.
In order to get my health down low, I have to let the mob beat up on me. So, inevitably, me, the mob and my Moa all right next to eachother. I Return my pet and let the mob beat up on me ensuring the Moa doesn’t get hit in the process, then once I’ve gotten to about 25% or so, I ask the Moa to attack and use Signet of Stone to ensure it won’t receive any damage in case the mob turns and starts attacking it. Dang bird just autoattacks the mob, oblivious to my pain until SoS runs out and it finally takes some damage of it’s own.

Honestly, the problem isn’t whether you can control it or not control, but because you have no idea what the CD situation is unless you count in your mind internally.

That’s a really good point.

I kind of wish there was a way to keep track of stowed and actives pet’s cooldowns. But what could they possibly do that wouldn’t be a UI nightmare?

@Durzlla
Last time I tested Harmonic Cry, I could be drowning in a pool of my own blood and my Moa couldn’t care less, but the nanosecond the thing stubbed it’s toe it was all over that with the healy goodness.

Did they change it recently, or is there some kind of additional clause I’m not activating by messing around with openworld mobs?

Maybe I’m alone in this,

But I’m actually pretty satisfied with the level of control I have over things like Drake Tail Swipe, Boar Brutal Charge, Canine Brutal Charge, etc. Because the pet prioritizes these skills as a first action, you can depend on it happening when you Swap. I think it’s one of the more successful compromises between automation and micromanagement, it’s a good deal of control for no additional buttons to press.

Honestly, instead of direct micromanagement I’d like to see more pets get their more prominent family skills as a first-action, and clean it up a bit so pets don’t sometimes autoattack a few times before executing. I could only imagine the sorts of build shenanigans we could get up to if Devourer Tail Lash and Moa Harmonic Cry were like that.

It’s a bit deeper than that.
Sometimes a pet won’t use a skill at all unless specific requirements on the battlefield are met (ex; Devourer Retreat, Moa Harmonic Cry).

…or I guess another way of thinking about it is that all pet Family Skills have a requirement for activation, it’s just these requirements can be as simple as ‘be in range + skill off cooldown’. So certain pets seem to operate like clockwork because their requirements are really easy to satisfy, while others are less so because they have more complicated ones.

Our profession mechanic is honestly one of the deeper ones in the game. It’s just kind of shame we’ve been so busy licking our wounds over being last pick, we haven’t put much of our collective intelligence into discovering it.

It happens for particular utility lines in every class.
But Ranger seems more burdened by the phenomenon than most. I think Survival is just about our only Utility line that feels like it works ‘straight out of the box’. Though, Traps are pretty close.

Mind the relationship between Sigil of Geomancy and Sigil of Earth, as activated effect Sigils share a cooldown. So, if you swap Geomancy, you’ll have to wait before Earth will proc.

I love skipping, OP and other like him act as though they have never done a dungeon before, once you have played a few MMO’s all dungeons are basically the same, my goal is to get my tokens, faster the better.

That’s like saying Greifers exist in every game so EVE Online has a friendly community.
There’s a difference between something existing, and being so pronounced and over-the-top it’s a defining characteristic of the game.

So, just to be sure.
Forums have a nasty tendency to polarize absolutely everything, and the information that’s getting glossed over is pretty important sometimes. Dungeons do lean in favor of DPS, but that doesn’t mean ‘Glass Cannon or Bust’. It just means support and control efforts have value that variates based on your group and the fight, and direct damage is consistently valuable across all encounters.

Anyway,
The thing worth noting about glass cannon Ranger is that it has a pretty high skill floor before it gets effective. Because you not only have to have the knowledge base and situational awareness to be able to keep yourself up with glass defenses, but be comfortable enough in that to routinely shift your attention to your pet and multitask it’s survival as well. CoF path 1 is sort of ideal circumstances for glass cannons, and if you’re in a place right now where you’re experiencing alot of dying during that path, other dungeons might prove more challenging to the point it’s undercutting your effectiveness.

So, there’s a difference between Bunker in the sense of Attrition and and Bunker in the sense of Area Denial.

Attrition is dragging out a fight in order to out-last your opponent’s resources and kill them, Area Denial Bunkering is about dragging out a fight for the sake of serving a greater strategy and is more about holding a position than killing an opponent. Attrition’s a different style of killing your opponent, Area Denial is an effort to keep your opponent from achieving a location-based objective which may or may not involve killing them.

This ultimately boils down to the win conditions of the two formats being different; Bunkering as Attrition works in Team Deathmatch games because the win condition is killing people, and Bunkering as Area Denial works out in Capture-Point games because holding your ground has a value in and of itself in the form of points.

I don’t want to overstep my boundaries because I’m not personally familiar with DAOC and honestly I don’t do nearly enough PvP in this game; but I kind of get the sense the Bunkering you may be familiar with was more about having an Attrition strategy, and the Bunker builds in this game lean a little farther into Area Denial. (though there’s enough control over building in this game that you can nudge your build into more of a hybrid, and even at it’s most extreme it’s not nearly to the same degree as FPS games).

Not entirely sure how Stealth helps you out with any of those?

But, I get your point with Portal on Jumping Puzzles. You know, technically, you could demand bringing a Mesmer to handle all your laser grid woes in COE. But how often do you actually see that happening in your standard pug?

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m not calling for an abundance of one thing to be replaced with the abundance of another (ex: all instances of trash mobs become jumping puzzles). I’m in support of a wider variety of things that brings us closer to a common shared dungeon experience.

But should content really be gated so as to deny skipping at all, and what would likely be the result of that given that the playerbase at large do speed runs?

Ideally, revisions to the spaces between boss encounters would be less about ‘stopping people from skipping’, and more about ‘improving something that’s obviously not going over too well’. Less gates, more jumping puzzles/environment obstacles/scripted encounters/ minibosses /etc.

And I imagine there would probably be much bewailing, but that’s true for every change, and to some degree it’s just the natural state of an official forum.

Ultimately, I’m for dungeon revision, but only if it’s accomplishing things and not revising for revision’s sake.

The content honestly does need to be remade so that it doesn’t favor direct damage so much and exploration into control/support builds can really open up. In that same vein, the Defiant mechanic seriously needs to be reconsidered as it’s basically shoved the entire control facet of combat and character building to the wayside.

They also need to fix the broken base, and get the entire pool of dungeon runners sharing a common experience when they run a dungeon. Tethers, jumping puzzles instead of trash mobs, more scripted encounters – it really doesn’t matter what happens so long as everybody ends up on the same page at the end.

Also, I’d like to see the open world scavanger hunt for legendary weapons to be introduced before dungeon changes are implemented. Honestly there’s some false sustainability in the format that’s going to evaporate into thin air, and I think the dungeon reward system should be calibrated to feel rewarding and have re-playability on it’s own terms and not because it’s bearing the brunt of acquiring legendaries.

You say that like Anet is holding you at gunpoint.
You don’t get a free pass to do whatever you want because you made the game into a soulless grind. That’s on your own head.

When you’re talking dungeon-stuff, you have to be pretty careful.

There’s how the ranger performs relative to the content, and how well a ranger performs relative to the content compared to how other classes perform. This is how Mr. Sharp can say ‘rangers have problems in dungeons’ and Mr. Peters can say ’it’s partly perception’ in the same interview and both can be correct. Rangers do have problems in dungeons, but not being little carbon copies of warrior and guardian isn’t one of them.

And, frankly, none of these issues are really deal breakers, as the content itself just isn’t that demanding.

I honestly think the entire concept Opening Strikes needs to go back to the drawing board. A for effort and all, but it’s hard to specialize in Vulnerability with Unshakeable around sucking down the duration by half.

‘with tokens’, not ‘and tokens’. As in, tokens are the part that is the same, not tokens additionally are the same on top of other similarities.

But, it’s not like you don’t have a good point. “You don’t see a base breaking culture split in SAB because it’s a self-enclosed system, and by virtue of giving you access to gold directly or indirectly dungeons aren’t.” People can just have fun with SAB because there aren’t any stakes, and running a dungeon is ‘profitable’.

But, what do you actually spend your profits on?
Blueprints? Crafting? Gemstore Items? Sure, you can use the excess financial gains for more than just funding a legendary or toying around with builds.
But, do you?

If you’re running dungeons and getting money so that you can either do better or look better while running dungeons, then gold may as well be baubles for you in how much of a self-enclosed currency it ends up being in practice. And when you stop to think about it, it’s really not so strange that a Dungeoneer could get like that. Other formats either don’t use gold (sPvP), don’t need much gold (Open World PvE), or don’t necessarily have a demographic overlap so the people who run dungeons don’t spend their gold on things in it (WvW).

Now, there probably are a few hardcore WvW/Dungeoneers out there, a number of people running dungeons and working their way through alot of Crafting, and at least one poor sucker who runs dungeons to feed his Gemstore habit. So I’m not saying gold is baubles for everybody. But I am saying gold can be baubles for anybody and might be for more people than we may realize just by virtue of not having much else to spend it on.

I think I know the cheese you are referring to. Will reporting this really do anything? And yes, I agree it’s ridiculous the lengths people will go to to get the prize at the end with minimal effort. It’s like they have no sense of pride or accomplishment.

It’s always worthwhile to report things, in my humble opinion.

And agree on the second point. How in the blue blazes is it that the cultures of gear treadmills have more respect for skill than a game with actual skill-based combat? That’s so ironic I think somebody with proper comedic timing could have turned that last sentence into a really funny joke.

Kind of depends what you’re after?

I’m an avid dungeon runner, which is our weakest format.
But, I’m not after a legendary. I’m the kind of person whose more interested in exploring builds and moving up the skill curve instead of growing my character through aesthetics and badges of honor. So I never join speedruns, which is where our lack of burst is felt most keenly and where alot of the forum comparison drama is really centered.

So I don’t have much in the way of regrets.
But I can see how people with different areas of interest might be dissapointed.

OP, players like you are the ones doing dungeons wrong. You don’t kill every enemy in mario, or any other game.

That’s an apples to oranges comparison.

If anything’s comparable to Mario in this game, it’s Super Adventure Box. You notice how nobody ever talks about skipping or speedrunning or fullclearing in Super Adventure Box? Same playerbase, same basic rewards system as dungeons with tokens at the end for purchasing unique skins, no base-breaking culture divide to be seen for miles.

Oh lord. Don’t mention what it is on the forums, but please report the heck out of it.
I swear to god, the culture in this game drives me up the wall sometimes.

Ahhh. Apologies.

I don’t understand people commenting that the Ranger deals “sustained damage”? I was always under the impression, that the general rule to all profession is; direct damage is meant for burst damage, and condition damage is meant for sustained damage.

Sustained includes Condition damage, but is not limited to it. For example; Sustained and Burst damage exists in FPSs, even though those games may not even have status effects at all.

But, if the whole Sustained vs. Burst dynamic exists in this game, I have a hard time seeing it. Classically characters who specialize in sustained damage are very good at maintaining forward momentum because their output creates consistency through energy efficiency and/or creates consistency through damaging in a way that circumvents avoidance and/or they’re sturdy enough to survive punishment to dish damage out reliably.

But there isn’t any system of energy for Rangers to be efficient at, while a pet can circumvent some ways people can avoid damage being the only un-removeable DoT in the game doesn’t count for much if it rarely ever hits, in terms of survivability I’ve never seen much of a tempo of pushing forward and falling back so what good is there in maintaining solid forward momentum if burst characters aren’t doing much in the way of falling back?

/blink
Not that this isn’t fascinating, guys. But a weeeeeee bit offtopic?

Well, It’s nice to hear them talking about ranger pet so frankly.
And ‘steps in the right direction’ are always welcome. But this sounds like it might be a bit of a drawn out process. It’s not like I don’t have alts to play in the interim, but it’s still a bit of a bummer.

There are valid criticisms,
but they have been bouncing around the internet chamber for so long they’ve lost a bit of their original perspective.

Dungeons are a bit skewed to direct damage, so our current common builds have a decently high skill floor barrier of entry and are ultimately less desirable in the long run solely by virtue of not being direct damage, and even if our control-centric profession mechanic was brought up to functional in a dungeon setting it still would have less opportunities to really shine.

That sounds pretty dismal, if you sit on a subforum and feed off eachother’s ever escalating frustration.

But, these problems are everybody’s problems; they stem from pretty far-reaching overarching mechanical concerns and every class has a mechanic or two that dungeons undervalue or outright break. Furthermore, how these problems impact your day to day gaming is more in terms of gameplay than result; pets keeling over at a sneeze is endlessly frustrating, but it’s not going to keep you from completing any actual content.

Sword is annoying.
And, yeah, can’t really blame a person for not liking an annoying thing.

Sword becoming less annoying and Longbow + Marksmenship successfully satisfying my sniper itch are my two biggest weapon wishes for this class.

I think that’s a pretty fair assessment, Blackhawk.
I really don’t know what to say other than ‘I hope Spirits and Pet Survivability gets some love soon too.’

In the meanwhile, just remember, there’s more to Good Teamplay than 3 Utility Skills. Don’t underestimate the life saving potential of well executed control, brush up on your combos, and abuse the fact it’s so easy to disengage and our solid mobility to be the first person offering your allies a helping hand off the floor.

Ahhhh. Shows how much I sPvP and WvW. :p

Ah, what a coininkydink! I just got done trying one.
I’m actually going through and trying out mono-condition and boon focused builds in dungeon PvE.

I just wanted to say I find your rune choice delicious.
And I wanted to add, Ice Drake’s Frost Breath cooldown is surprisingly fast for the family and due to the movement impairment nature of working with a perma-chill build I found it alot easier to land the F2. I don’t know how translatable that is to sPvP (which is what I think this build is for?), but I thought it was worth mentioning.

We currently have a pretty major value system split.

Once you’ve hit a equilibrium of satisfactory armor level, a person’s got two choices for how they want to continue playing the game. They can either grow their character aesthetically and are gold/token focused, or they can grow their character by exploring their skill curve/build options and are fight focused.

I think both of these are valid ways to want to grow your character and continue playing the game. And I would hate for Arenanet to pick and choose which they wanted us to identify with in perpetuity.

That said, I’m a big proponent of tapering the extremes of our behavior and bringing the community back to a common dungeon experience. What I mean by that is, in other games, it’s possible to run a dungeon with differing desires and goals but experience the content in the same way. I know that must seem really bizarre if your experiences are limited to the GW franchise, but we’re far more capable of cohabitation than the current forum divisiveness would have you believe. Largely because we’re not nearly as black and white as we like to pretend we are; focusing on aesthetic growth or skill curve/build exploration are not mutually exclusive desires, have degrees of strength, and how much emphasis you’re putting on one over the other can change from one day to the next.

If we were able to get back to a common dungeon experience, we could revisit the concept of a leader-board. We would all be on the same page experiencing the same thing, and as a community could come to common consensus of what factor of performance we would like to value, as opposed to having one imposed on us.

@ Durzlla

Maybe I should have been more clear with my answer to the first one.

It may still be possible the Spirit receiving a buff could improve the Spirit’s own performance (Storm spirit receiving Might maybe improves Call Lightning?), and it might also be possible that the Spirit receiving a buff improves the Spirit’s buff’s performance (Sun Spirit receiving a stack of might improve the burning it grants?), but it’s not the case that a spirit receiving a buff will improve the Ranger’s performance (Sun spirit receiving stack of might won’t make your rapid fire any better).

I also share your skepticism. I think it’s as you say, a Spirit gives you a chance to proc your own effect, it doesn’t proc it’s effect through you.

I think their general catchall term for summonable AI allies is ‘Companion’, and anything involving that term works on pets, spirits, turrets, minions, elementals, etc. Which is what you see on things like Rune of the Ranger.

(Not to be confused with Companion’s Defense and Companion’s Might which still only work on the pet despite their titles).

1) As far as I can tell, buffs on your spirits have no translation to your own statistics.

2) Fortifying Bond doesn’t work on Spirits.
This is because they aren’t affected by anything involving the word ‘Pet’.

I have Thief and Engi alts.
I don’t know if either of them fits your bill exactly. Thief has the mobility aspect of Ranger and was a blast to level, but I don’t know if I’d recommend the class to somebody who doesn’t want to get close to the action. Engi potentially has the multitasking aspect of Ranger and I feel like I can stay at Range, but the early levelling experience was pulling teeth for me.

@Shiren

It’s kind of like; there are problems with a trapper build, but the problems are game-wide concerns about DoTs in general for PvE and nothing necessarily specific to Ranger.

Namely, mobs rarely ever give you a reason to prefer a slow damaging status effect versus front-loaded direct damage. Usually DoTs are valuable for their consistency. But attrition isn’t a thing in this game so DoTs aren’t really ‘cost-effective’, and mobs don’t do much in the way of moving or blocking; so there’s nothing keeping direct damage itself from being perfectly consistent.

Though the new dungeon revamping might be taking that in a better direction, if Graveling Stalkers are any indication.

There’s this hidden property to freshly swapped pets.
They’re overly eager, and will take weaponskill presses with a target selected as a hidden F1 command. You could technically wave a melee weapon miles away from a target, and a freshly swapped pet will take that as a cue to tear it’s throat out. This effect lasts until you press Return for the first time, and comes back everytime you swap it in.

Maybe what’s happening is the hidden F1 in the eager state is giving the pet the necessary mindset to sally forth without interruption when told to Sic ‘Em, but once it’s lost it’s eagerness the hidden F1 isn’t there anymore and the pause happens?

I’ve heard somebody call it ‘Anchor’, and I think that’s way more fitting than tank/support.

I think it’s important to make that distinction, because as a Guardian you’re used to accomplishing Anchoring through a more classically tank-like approach; getting up in something’s face and staying there with a combination of defensive buffs and healing effects. As a Ranger you’ll be Anchoring with Dodges and Evades, and you’ll divide the labor between yourself and your Pet who’ll use passive regen effects and Fkey repositioning to facetank.

So, less like being one big anchor that radiates security to the players around them, more like being two anchors who can disengage to rez pretty easily when only one is occupied.

As for build specifics, use your best judgement. While I can give you the gist of what I’ve puzzled out in my long tenure of messing around with ranger builds, as a community we haven’t done much to flesh out the concept. I can say your stat priorities are basically the same, and signet of the wild and greatsword seems to be keystones. But beyond that, I’m curious to see what you’ll come up with.

Hard question.

When I was levelling up Ranger through dungeon play, there really wasn’t a defined Beastmaster spec yet and the community at large was still pretty new to the game. So, while I have experiences with the BM spec and varying levels of healing power, it’s in tandem with certain other decisions that relate to the effectiveness of it that are kind of n00bish today (having high healing power and not taking healing spring, for instance). So, I kind of have to frame this answer with all the context, and hope that puts you somewhere in the ballpark of understanding the relationship between pet survivability and healing power.

In my lower levels, I had 150-ish Healing Power due to being halfway through Beastmastery and took Sigil of Life. I really noticed the impact it had on my pet survivability depending on the number of stacks. With Signet of the Wild, Signet of Stone, and careful use of Return/Swap I was able to keep my pet up throughout in most dungeon encounters, and half the boss dungeon encounters I was high enough to access.

Around 600 Healing Power it started to dawn on me my Bear could not only keep standing versus most dungeon mobs until my next Troll Ungent cooldown, but could also reliably keep dungeon mobs distracted by face-tanking them. At that point Signet of the Wild and Natural Healing combined kept my pet up in most situations with Signet of Stone to pitch in if things got troublesome, and I could face-tank most 1v1 encounters and some select minibosses with judicious use of Return and Attack to avoid the worst of it.

It’s really around 800 Healing power with Natural Healing and Signet of the Wild equipped that I started to realize passive regen is overcoming the fact pets can’t kite. I no longer had to active focus on minding my pet all the time, and could trust my pet to start handling itself on weaker mobs. The entire profession mechanic really snapped into place, overcame it’s dissonance with the game design, and left me with enough control utility to think; ‘Oh, so this is what a pet mechanic can do’.

Around 900 Healing Power with Natural Healing and Signet of the Wild equipped, I felt my Bear was managing fine by itself most dungeon encounters. Additionally my pet could face-tank most 1v1 encounters all by itself, most 1vmany encounters, most mini-bosses with Troll Ungent, and the occasional boss encounter with Signet of Stone/Return around to help. It was around then I started to realize the limits of going too far in the Tanky/Controlly Beastmastery. Namely there are diminishing returns on investing in your pet; because some fights are simply designed in such a way pets can’t be used or the damage threshold is meant to be a fatal spike and can never be overcome by a regen effect. So, while you can take it surprisingly far considering how pathetic non-BM pets are, you do kind of have to ease off pet investment a bit and take a sub specialization to make sure your build is viable in more situation and brings something to the table across all encounters.

I sub-specialized into support. Because I had high healing power, I like supporting in other games, and genuinely find running with pugs/newbies more engaging than these eyegougingly boring speedrun things. (I sincerely do think you GW1’ers are off your rocker sometimes :p) So my current build kept Signet of the Wild and Natural Healing, I dialed back on pet survivability by replacing Bears with Double Drakes and Troll Ungent with Healing Spring. Right now I sit at around, 884-1063 Healing Power depending on which weapon I have equipped. And I feel my pet can not only keep on it’s feet in a large number of situations, but can also face-tank a surprising number of them with minimal micromanagement.

I’m basically in agreeance with Strooper.

There’s risk/reward gameplay in keeping the spirit close enough for the use of their activated effect, but in practice it’s much more risk than reward. Nature’s vengeance really does make the whole thing feel redundant to traps. The immobility, the randomness, and the passivity of them are also things I don’t really like about the design.

Personally I’d like to see them revisit the core concept and go in a Bloomhunger-esque direction with the new beam tech.

More like, the Spirit is an anchorpoint that will shoot a laser beam at you on command which causes you to be the center of an AOE group buff, and anything it hits en route to you is subject to a secondary effect. Like, if you’ve got Stone Spirit down and command it to use it’s skill, you and the buddy next to you will get Protection, and a mob between you and the Spirit would get immobilized.

More mobile, less random, less passive, spirits don’t have to be in the heat of things to use their abilities so their HP is less a factor in their performance.

Patch-wise Rangers do tend to make out pretty good generally speaking. Most of the time it’s buffs. It’s not that they aren’t going in a good direction, it’s just they aren’t going in a good direction terribly fast.

Pets are indeed statistically separate from you.

Pets are statistically wearing at least Exotic level armor
So unless you’re talking about the 8% difference Ascended gear gives you; gearing up is a case of you catching up to the pet, not the pet being unable to catch up to you.

More specifically, If you add up their stats they’re 6780-6991. Which is comparable to the Exotic stat spread of around 6790. (For argument’s sake, in sPvP putting on Soldier’s everything and taking toughness/power trait lines, without any major/minors/utilities that alter your stats).

Except for Bears, who I’ll never call stupid again because they’re apparently hacking the game in their spare time.

I think having restrictions is a bit different from fumbling the PR ball as badly as most people in that kind of demographic tend to.

That’s not to say, ‘newbies welcome’ doesn’t naturally come across far better than ‘please be familiar with the content’. It does. But that doesn’t mean anywhichway you could phrase the former is necessarily doomed to come across as the worst of all possible elitist slogs.

Where people are really shooting themselves in the foot is all the other stuff they put in there. Making sure to highlight the threat of kicking as though you had a particular gusto for it, using namecalling in lieu of simply describing inexperience, and writing in capital letters hollering aggressively at the reader.

My god, people.
You could be talking about adopting puppies and you’d still sound like a cretin.