How straightforward is the ranger?

Core ranger used to be so straightforward, it made the class to simple to play for my taste..

But with druid and soulbeast, that does no longer seem to be the caseI think there must be quite some depth to these elite specs?

For what content? pve or pvp/wvw?

In addition to what Ranger can already do,

Druid adds staff possibly, which has a movement on 3, a projectile block, a root and ranged dmg.The druid spec itself adds Avatar form which is healing in nature and also has abilities that add Crowd Control, stability, blind and regen.If you are traited for it, going into avatar form removes all condis and going out of avatar form gives an aoe stealth.You also have access to Druid only utilities

Soulbeast adds merging with a pet which can add boons of the pet and a f1 f2 and a f3 ability.These abilities can range from dmg, heal, movement , cc and boons (I think) I havent personally tried every single pet.Soulbeast also adds Soulbeast only utilities which do everything from breaking stuns, stability and more dmg--the stances are also shared via aoe.

Druid is not very tricky. It takes time for CAF to build before you can use Avatar form which is time gated.Soulbeast is tricky in that, to get the most out of the Spec, you need to use both pets and there is a double time gate-one to switch petsand one to get into soulbeast.Personally, using soulbeast I rotate between the Smokescale for dmg and the owl for the heal and leap (to get away from a bad situation)

Anything more detailed than what I've explained, you can check into the GW2 Wikior watch youtube videos

/cheers

Soulbeast is more hands on. More depth? Arguable. Once you built it, it has one of the most straightforward rotations and a fair amount of CC / utility available to it in all situations.

Pretty nice spec but a rocket surgery, it's not.

If you could describe what makes base ranger too simple for you maybe I could comment more on that? The reason I'm saying this is the fact that everything is 2-3 buttons in solo overland. Except for maybe base Mesmer and Weaver, there is no spec that is "complicated" to use in that content. And ease of use / effectiveness vary greatly based on which of the other game modes we are talking about.

Cheers...