Aaron Forestman.4758

I've found it useful in some raids. Most of the time Nature Spirit is better, but particularly on Sloth and Xera when you've got a lot of motion and the potential need for ranged revives, it can be wonderful. Plus if your squad is staying up nicely in Sloth, you can pretty much cancel out every other coconut phase by making your whole squad unable to gain conditions.

Ranger has solid power, condi, and support options. Druid is a fantastic choice for a lot of raid/fractal groups, and you can always do dps on most any fight. I think a lot of the reason ranger is looked down upon so much is that it's a very beginner-friendly class so it attracts some inexperienced people. If you put enough time into mastering it, ranger can be a really amazing and versatile option.

I've been playing druid for quite a while, as I usually end up in heal jail whenever my guild does CMs or other more difficult fights. I prefer Healing Spring for 95% of fights. It fills up your CA quite nicely, and most bosses have at least a little condi that you can easily remove with it. For anything stationary, you can keep up your spirits (including nature) through the entire fight just by making sure they're in your healing AoEs. For something like Sabir, you wait to cast Nature Spirit until the last platform but then should have it up the whole rest of the fight.

Definitely go high dps SB. Core ranger is only played because it's easy for new players and fairly survivable. It's far too weak to pull its weight in an significant matches.

Elementalist, of any configuration. They can be a little tanky and have some invuln, but with low armor and low health it only takes 1-2 good shots to drop them. Guardians and warriors often rely too much on blocks. Before the Signet of the Hunt nerf, they could be melted due to that reliance. Even now, it's not so hard.

I've been quite confused about this update since they first revealed where they were going with soulbeast. It's had a tradeoff since PoF first came out, one of the most glaring ones out there: when you merge to get your extra skills/stats, you don't have your pet there anymore. That seems like a pretty explicit tradeoff to me.

I believe Lich runes are the recommended set for D+T/SB condi soulbeast. Krait is for SB/SB.https://snowcrows.com/raids/builds/ranger/soulbeast/condition/

That would make the trait end up unused. Maybe for brief spike things in pvp/wvw settings, but in pve it would be a very bad idea to drop your merge in order to get a 5% damage buff for a bit. It could be switched to an activation whenever you use one of your bonded skills so that CC use isn't required, though with a good power build you have more than enough CC for 100% uptime and it's good to use them for damage anyway.

This does seem to be becoming more of a regular thing in fractals especially: pugs not reading the lfg post. If an lfg asks for specific things, either bring those things or don't join.

That would be so weird, and aside from specific cases like the one you gave, you probably wouldn't want this every time you merge.

Pretty sure they're just sorted in order of when you joined, with a higher open spot being filled first if you open up upper spots. So that is the only way to reorder them:

We run an hour and a half after reset on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Any roles are welcome as we've got some flexible people. Priority to people with experience, but if you're confident on T4s we'll teach you CMs! Mail/PM me in game for more info or to join the group!

If they ever decide to make a Guild Wars 3, they'll likely make some way like HoM to transfer achievements between games. I don't think Anet is in a good state to be making an entire new game right now though.

Consistently enabled novelties across game modes, please! Some chairs are allowed in some raid wings, some aren't, tonics usually aren't allowed, etc.I get why they should be disabled in PvP/WvW, but can we just allow all novelties and gizmos in every part of PvE? I just finished the Mystic Chromatic Ooze and was quite disappointed to find I wouldn't be able to use it in raids. It has some awesome interplay with the halloween infusions, and I'd like to be able to make it a permanent part of my character's look.

I'd be for a season without the downed state. Reviving is seriously disproportionate to damage, so even a burst build can have a lot of trouble securing a kill when the enemy team has a support or two that just keeps reviving people.

This is really disappointing that a bug like this would be allowed to persist for this long, considering it's something necessary for a collection.

If you do your daily recommended fractals, you get a free large potion of each variety. These can get you through the other fractal dailies just fine, so you should rarely (if ever) need to spend relics for extra potions. Then you can build up your regular and pristine relics over time, and if you like fractals enough you can get the infinite potions for convenience and (eventually) to get more relics back from trading in all the free potions you get. But that's all for people that enjoy regular fractal runs, of which there are quite a lot. If regular fractals aren't for you @"Ghetx.1752" , there's nothing wrong with that. There's plenty of varieties of endgame content to appeal to a nice range of people. Just don't denounce a game mode that doesn't appeal to you personally as "literal nonsense."

Exactly this. I don't get why people keep trying to make druid work for PvP/WvW. With the staff 3 change and pet nerf, it has solidly become a PvE only spec. If you want to support, play guardian, engineer, etc. If you want to damage, swap to soulbeast or grab any other class.

Is this a PvP question? Druid is quite ineffective there, but remains a solid pick in may PvE areas. The issue with buffing it is the potential for it to return to being the singular choice for healing in fractal/raid groups. Anet has been working to make several equal-ish options for healing and support, so now druid is one choice among many. Now we're to the point that different support classes are freely swapped in experienced PvE settings to fit the exact situation. Personally, even as a ranger main 99% of the time, I support this strategy. Only having one class that's acceptable for healing makes the game boring and excludes people that would like to play other classes.As for CA skill 3, it's an AoE daze, which is certainly quite useful in some situations.

Exactly this. Soulbeast condi ramp-up is very slow compared to other classes, so you'll be way better off going with power. And if you take traps to make up for the slow ramp-up, you become quite a one trick pony without important utilities to keep you functioning. Power soulbeast has been nerfed a fair amount, but remains a solid pick. Certainly head and shoulders above any core ranger build or druid. It's unfortunate, but druid is a solidly PvE spec. The moment you're out of CA, you're toast.

Power builds will generally be more optimal for fractals, especially compared to the slow ramp-up of ranger conditions. As you get more solid on mechanics and dodging at the right time, you'll also want to work toward dropping the longbow for a dagger/axe set to maximize your damage.

As a regular raider and fractal cm/regular runner:Fractals can often be more difficult than raids, at least in some respects. Some instabilities line up to make things very difficult depending on the fractal in question. Honestly, the boss fractals (99 & 100) can be the easiest ones for raiders because their mechanics much more closely line up with avoidable raid mechanics. Mai Trin can be one of the most shocking ones with all the cannon fire potentially combined with extra AoEs from instabilities, but is also one of my favorites because it forces people to move around instead of stacking on the boss and pounding it. Fractals in general require a bit more personal responsibility and mobility, plus some definite flexibility to deal with the different instabilities each day. Keep at it and get a regular group going that's willing to learn with you, and you'll manage just fine.

The mechanics on this one are somewhat difficult and possible to heal through, but that's where this strike mission is at as a stepping stone. As long as a mechanic doesn't fully kill you for ignoring it, it'll always be possible to heal more to ignore it. As this is the toughest strike mission out right now, it nicely prepares people to take the leap into raids with something like Vale Guardian, where healing to avoid doing mechanics is the standard strategy. So Boneskinner allows for two different kinds of practice: pressure on the healers to get them better, or individual mechanic pressure to encourage personal survivability and quick mechanic use. Both are valuable.

It's definitely the hardest strike mission yet, and a good stepping stone for getting into raids.

I've mained ranger since launch and won't be changing anytime soon. We still have the problem of it being a relatively easy class to play so your average ranger tends to be a pretty weak player. Ranger remains a solid pick with relatively little learning curve, but you still have to put in the effort to be good at it like any other class. No more of these LB/brown bear open world roamers. Let's see more people looking up advice and learning the profession so it doesn't get branded the noob/meme class anymore.