Gotejjeken.1267

The fact that almost all of them use Sic Em, OWP, RF 'burst' which is GREAT for unaware ganking but horrible for literally everything else. Seriously, most Soulbeasts I see spend more time running than doing anything useful. Like not running to kite, just plain running not to die. Outside of that, you get the 'wall rangers' that will try to be useful by picking off a single target or using barrage behind a door, but they get run over as soon as the door/wall comes down. All that said, I've found great success as playing roamer/scout/flanker. I don't use longbow or greatsword though.

Taking traps severely hampers your damage / survival ability--someone linked paper roll above, I suggest everyone go and review his stuff for what I'm talking about. Essentially adding the other conditions in to a druid build stretches it too thin since both ancient seeds and entangle are bleed based. So naturally you are going to want to add sharpening stone in with that and need lighting reflexes for your stunbreak / immob remove...so you have room for pretty much one trap--and none of them are really that good--so it's best just to take really anything else, especially survival because you will be clearing conditions as well. I mean specifically looking at traps, spike trap is pretty laughable in general and you don't need more CC when you play druid, venom trap is pointless if you are running shortbow as you have all the poison you will need (not to mention potential extra from WS traits), and frost trap is in the same vein of the chill isn't going to do too much for you (if you really want it, just take axe instead of shortbow). That leaves flame trap which is fine for a trap, but still bad--it had its time a few years ago when traps were throwable and the trapper runes could be abused. The heal trap itself is debatable, I don't personally use it as it has some very weird mechanics and you can still be condi overloaded fast while standing in it--so I just take TU. I think the reason paper roll himself uses the heal trap now is mostly content related, as this bleed druid build has been around for a long while and I can imagine it getting stale if you are trying to run a YT channel.

Right, the reason I ignored those is poison damage is laughable (even with the 2-3 traits you can take to help) and burning access really only exists on torch which is a pretty bad weapon in general. Those two will also fare better on Soulbeast where you can get some damage / duration stats from the pet and also have access to other covers like confusion and such (through Iboga). Druid is literally a bleed build or nothing. As mentioned before this lynchpins on Trailblazer's and Ancient Seeds along with survivability from WS and damaging from Skirmishing.

IMO, KDR in WvW is idiotic. It just promotes a set of very bad behaviors--the top two being ganking and running meme builds. You also have the people that never leave structures and thus never die but can get many kills through siege or 'door warfare'. I agree with promoting guild prestige though. There needs to be more to recognize guilds that do a lot for their servers.

Really when we say 'condi' druid we're talking about bleeds because that's the only (damaging) condition that ranger in general has access to. I mention that as bleeds are hit or miss--most people in WvW are terrible and ancient seeds seems 'OP' to them so you can get fairly high stacks of bleeds fairly quickly. This is what you will find on most roaming montages and YT, but the reality is a bit different than that. Running a condi druid myself for the past 4 or so months I can say that against competent players it has pretty big weaknesses. The only thing really saving it is that Trailblazer's armor is so powerful, but the druid skills themselves need a lot of skill to use properly. In a nutshell the pet is useless without taking BM, but if you take BM you have very limited clear options as you HAVE to take skirmishing. You also are limited on what pets actually do anything, and some of them are straight up bugged (ex: electric wyvern's F2 has a high chance of doing jack). In addition, anyone who knows what CC is (thankfully most of WvW players do not) will wreck you, as you have zero source of sustain, and most likely one method for getting out of bad situations (lightning reflexes). You'd think they'd add some sustain on entering or exiting CA but nope--you do that at the wrong time and you're going to waste it as someone will just CC you and force you to leave it / stealth. Finally, against anything with high cleanse and / or a lot of barrier, reflect, etc. access you are going to either lose or stalemate a high percentage of time. You could say this is a natural hard counter but so many classes have access to massive cleanse / escapes that it becomes more of a major build weakness than an isolated thing.

Ranger definitely has a lot of problems, not sure any of them are fixable though. Since launch the biggest problem is the pet, but they can't fix that without someone complaining, so it remains mostly useless. Really, if you want an example of how hopeless this is, look at Soulbeast--it was specifically made to take away the pet and then hit AGAIN with taking pet swap in combat away, because reasons. The weapons and traitlines all have never really been updated either. Specifically about traitlines, like what even is beastmastery anymore? None of the traits do anything, and you can't even take the line for shouts because they randomly changed that to something else that has zero synergy with any runes ("commands"), and didn't compensate. There is currently zero balancing effort as well. We can blame it on all the resources going to the expansion, but seriously what even was this last patch? It tells me that Ranger at this point in time is too broken to fix.

It'd be neat, but don't want a changing of the guard at Anet to result in a random permaban if they decide to adopt a no tolerance policy for DPS meters at any point.

I think I understand, the editing team must also be the team that is responsible for skill balance.

Ok wait, you want to remove Ancient Seeds...but apply Ancient Seeds when using Vine Surge? The thing that hits 3 targets, can be used with no CC needed, and that can be used very quickly with Staff trait + Quick Draw? You also want Jacaranda to use Vine Surge and trap 3 targets when you can't even avoid the single, VERY slow moving projectile? Yeah that definitely sounds like it wouldn't cause massive crying on forums. Ever. In addition, you want to remove Entangle as a survival skill and put it on a spirit--with what recompense? Firstly, Entangle almost never works to begin with in WvW, it's a literal condi clear and it's an Elite. Second, If you put it on the spirit you are removing an Elite, like literally we'd now have no survival Elite. All of this is kind of funny since your avatar is a Deadeye...and thieves are the one class that is literally unable to be CC'd let alone immob'd unless they blow all of their escape abilities. So I'm not sure where all this vitriol about Ancient Seeds is coming from, especially since every Ranger I meet in WvW is running Soulbeast anyway (something that also cannot be immob'd really at all).

So Ranger Commands?

Certain classes I can see it, like Scourge with a bunch of minions. In general, I've noticed condi doesn't use many boons unless they are traveling with a support. I do think that high toughness is far less of a problem than high protection and other boon uptime though; this could be rectified if they gave more classes boon strip.

Oh, yeah to match our Moas...

Ah, my bad...didn't realize they changed that as I haven't ran signet of the hunt in years (or any signet for that matter).

This I will agree on. There is zero reason to use the WH daze over literally anything else; and yes the fact that the range is smaller than a utility skill while needing to switch an entire weapon set is laughable. It's actually a nerf to Soulbeast as well because of losing the unblockable aspect. In fact, Ranger now has nothing that is unblockable outside of traps, and literally nothing to grant it. Which is wonderful considering two of the main weapons Ranger uses are bows... This is one of those times I'd love to know what prompted the change. Like, the patch notes literally say some stuff about Ranger being too mean to PvE bosses and then randomly, at the end, we have this. I swear, there probably was a meeting with people drawing nonsense on a whiteboard and someone goes 'oh you know what, Warhorns are loud man! It should daze!'; and that's how we got the change.

Power is less forgiving? Maybe if boons didn't exist.

A bit ironic bringing up Vindictus when Nexon (in general) has the WORST F2P structures in existence. Vindictus was particularly bad (I played from Beta in 2010 for about 3 years) and died early because of the 'boat structure' where you had a limited number of free runs a day and if you wanted more had to buy tokens / passes / etc. Not to even get into the farce that enhancing weapons was... Anyway, GW2 at its core is a 'buy to play' model anyway. You have to buy expansions and such to get full features, the gem store is really just an addon. I mean yeah all the QoL stuff would cost (bank expansions, char slots, etc.) but really even with the calculations above it's only $500 which is less than a retail PS5 and the game has been around for almost 9 years now. In short GW1 was B2P, GW2 is B2P and should stay this way--if you want subs go play WoW or watch Netflix.

Yeah Lesser Call of the Wild is pretty bad, they just left the weakness component and added nothing else to it. On the other side, does this now mean that a SLB will have 99% condition immunity when running WS + OH Axe 5 for over 4 seconds if running boon beast? Add to that Dolyak Stance and Spiritual Reprieve and GL taking one out in WvW lol....

Yes, but only if this 'daze spam' didn't already exist in the form of Primal Echoes + Glyph (and if you really want to go nuts Shortbow 5). From a Druid perspective, you'd only get a daze every 13 sec if you trait both Marksmanship and Nature Magic (why would anyone do this) and mindlessly spam them off cooldown; but again, can already do that on Druid with Primal Echoes and the Glyph (without taking two traitlines that don't synergize). Even so it isn't really all that effective since Ancient Seeds has a 10s ICD. Said this in the other topic, but easy way to balance this is not have it apply to beastmode at all, and only apply to an actual pet swap. That way you have to choose to do it and your pet has to be alive (which is difficult enough in group fights). If your pet isn't alive then you can't swap anyway. With my current build I don't think the patch is going to mean much unless they have bigger changes throughout the traitlines. If it is just WH and SLB changes then it won't really do much (at least on the surface).

In some ways I wish there was a requirement to be level 80 before posting on the forums...

All of which can be obstructed or LoS'd very easily. Quick Draw is also 'bugged' where it works after certain things it probably shouldn't that count as swaps (Celestial Avatar being the big offender as it changes your bar). So for mobility I'm talking about things that have built in mobility skills (leaps / evades); LB and MH axe have none of these. Also, from a pure WvW standpoint I don't think I've seen another ranger run MH sword (maybe on a condi build with torch but that's like 1 in a 1000)...GS yes, but never sword. From playing Ranger for nearly 3k hours myself I can say it's because the sword has kiting but lacks both utility and damage. Staff is definitely not limited in combat, but it does take a lot of getting used to. Essentially you never use it for anything but kiting, except to recharge CA in short bursts. If not used like that then I can see where you'd think it isn't a good weapon.

I don't feel like reading through 6 pages, but about Ranger Clarion Bond...why can't it apply on pet swap again? The WH version should be 2 sec and trait version 1 sec. This is in line with the 1 sec Daze that Staff provides on weapon swap (Primal Echoes). Yes, Clarion Bond would give 1s more of Daze because it can apply to more than just one pet (as Primal Echoes only triggers on swap to Staff), but is that really game breaking? I mean, if you're worried about Druids we won't be taking Marksmanship any time soon. I don't think immobeast is strong enough to warrant not putting it on pet swap, I mean you have to be in range anyway; if worried about SB burst off it (essentially Maul or Worldly Impact), then just make it not apply to going in and out of beast mode. We know you can do that as plenty of things don't trigger when going in and out of beastmode lol.

Have any solo roaming vids?

I dunno about PvP but have tried this many times in WvW. Practically, it doesn't work as well as it should, mainly because sword leap range is pretty abysmal. Like yes, you can kite and yes if you set pet to passive you can use the smokefield pretty well, but running that setup you only have literally two leaps (maybe three with monarch/hornet combo but it's flakey), a dodge (serpent strike), and smokefield blast. Switching to LB at the wrong time is a death sentence as it may be the least mobile thing Ranger has--actually, is, because even MH axe is meant to use while moving. Your best mobility tools are hands down GS and Staff. As Druid main I'm probably biased but Staff to me is the most mobile and versatile kiting tool we have; I like GS, but it is melee and that can be a big problem sometimes. Staff on the other hand is ranged but cannot be projectile blocked, and thus can chain immob off it with pet CC to escape even better. All that said, no Ranger is not more mobile than thief. As others have pointed out CC is a huge pain point for practically any Ranger mobility when not running Dolyak Stance. Even in stealth it is entirely possible to get randomly CC'd with no recovery option outside of burning a literal survival skill (lightning reflexes, etc.). You do that and just immediately get chain CC'd and are done.

What does WvW rank have to do with literally anything? I've found higher rank is inversely proportional to skill...even in this quick video it shows, I'm silver rank and those are two golds. My estimation of the video is a bit different than yours...the SB started outside the camp because they are used to winning pretty easily (players with 'no skill' often immediately retreat into camp before engage); the only time they retreated was when they know they weren't going to win (which is normal WvW tactics anyway). The mes came to +1 and got greedy / ignored condis, and finally the SB got 2v1'd itself only to retreat back into the camp again, showing a lot more awareness than someone that has 'no idea what they are doing with their class'. Anyway, I have plenty of videos of 1vx I don't feel like uploading, they all go something like that and someone like you will always say that the other person has no idea what they are doing with their class. What you don't seem to understand is power SB is a one trick pony. I can show you stalemates against actually hard classes, those being holosmith (way too many cleanses / invulns / escapes to fight on Druid) and certain condi herald builds (way too much CC and condi application even for all the cleanse Druid has). So maybe your problem isn't with Druid itself it's the entire Ranger class needs a buff then...

I mean, I won't say no to more Druid buffs but--I've never played PvP (so have no idea what 'tier' I'd be) and produced this in WvW: