Ehecatl.9172

I really want to use staff but it feels like Anet doesn't want anyone to touch it unless it's specifically to heal a raid group. If someone stacks a lot of power and crit damage any weapon should viably do at least decent damage. It already can't burst because it has only its auto to do steady, consistent damage. Leave it alone.

Thanks. And yah, I had PVP/WvW mostly in mind for this weapon, though depending on the damage numbers it could have use in PVE I suppose. For 3 think how traps used to work. We used to throw them and wherever they landed is where the trap was set. The idea is you can toss it ahead of your opponent to better catch them so you can run them down with the shotgun. I suppose it could do more though. I just didn't want to overload the weapon with too much power. For 5 the idea was that, with the weapon itself, it sets up unblockable high damage auto attacks for six seconds if you're in melee range or strips swiftness off a distant enemy so you can catch up to them easier. Might make more sense if I had it steal the enemy's swiftness instead. In Zergs you're right. The idea was hitting the enemy with the mark and then swapping to longbow for burst. Maybe combo it with Signet of the Wild so you have up to 12 seconds of uninterrupted shooting every 20 seconds. The trap on 3 could also be useful for when the enemy zerg is charging yours. Then when it gets messy you swap back to the rifle to punish the enemy a bit for getting up in your face. I also think it'd pair nicely with Greatsword in more of a roaming/dueling build. It gives you a little ranged damage so you can still whittle the enemy down when they're kiting you, and between Swoop and Hunter's Leap you can close a lot of distance quickly. Then you got the trap to set up Maul and the mark to strip boons and let your close-to-mid-range projectile punishment actually land.

A bit off-topic, but one of my Shadowrun (TTRPG set in a cyberpunk setting with magic, for those that don't know) was a troll shaman who wielded a shotgun when he wasn't casting spells. He revered the spirits of nature by putting down those who disrespected them.

I'll throw out a concept. Why not? The basic idea is a sort of inverse of the longbow. A ranged weapon that deals more damage the closer you are to your target. A shotgun rather than a standard rifle. Ideally, you could use it to compliment your longbow or help force the enemy into melee for your greatsword, sword, or hammer. It also gives Ranger some capacity to deal with projectile hate. I don't have a good grasp on damage numbers and coefficients so I'm just going to leave that area vague. 1. Name: Hunter's Shot Text: Fire a shot at your target. The closer your foe the more damage you deal. Cast/CD: 1/2 / Auto Range: 1,200 Target count: Pierces Damage: Low at max range, medium at 900 range, high at 300 range. Effect: None. 2. Name: Buckshot Text: Fire a cone of shrapnel in front of you. Cripples foes. Cast/CD: 1/2 / 8 Seconds Range: 600 Target count: 5 Damage: High. Effect: Cripples for 4 seconds. 3. Name: Bear Trap Text: Throw an invisible bear trap at the target location. Immobilizes foes. Cast/CD: 1/2 / 12 seconds Range: 900 Target count: 1 Damage: Low Effect: immobilizes the foe who steps on the trap for 2 seconds. 4. Name: Hunter's Leap Text: You leap a short distance and bash the target with the butt of your rifle, stunning them. Cast/CD: 1/2 / 18 seconds. Range: 600 Target count: 3 Damage: Moderate. Effect: Stuns enemies struck by it for 2 seconds. 5. Name: Falconer's Quarry Text: Designate a foe by pointing at them. A falcon spirit dives at the target with incredible speed, stripping boons and marking them for further punishment. Cast/CD: 1/2 / 20 seconds. Range: 1,200 Target count: 1 Damage: Moderate. Effect: Strips Swiftness and up to two additional boons. Projectiles fired at the target become unblockable for 6 seconds.

Why would a WvW player care what your SPVP rank is? Someone who exclusively plays WvW isn't necessarily less skilled than someone who plays a lot of SPVP on the side.

At least a few of the mace skins are more like clubs, which do fit into the more primal warrior aesthetic. Unfortunately, they all look like big, fat cudgels rather than the smaller, sleek clubs of many pre-iron civilizations that I like. I could see the Luxon's Hunter's Mace or the Maguuma's Mace skins looking solid though.

As a repeated returning player who keeps getting into PVP before inevitably leaving again I feel I have decent insight into why new players might bounce off the game mode. The biggest issue, outside toxic players making the experience worse, is the sheer lack of transparency into what is going on. Whenever I return from a long break and try to get into PVP I'm immediately met with insta-death one-second-kill combos that have little to no tell. When you're a new player and you're trying to learn the game getting taken down from 100% to 0 before you can even register what the enemy class is isn't fun and doesn't feel like a learning experience. There are also just a lot of skills that don't have obvious tells and stuff as vitally important as boons don't have an obvious visual display on the character model either even though being able to baseline defend yourself with a knockdown or stun can be entirely negated by a few seconds of Stability you'd only know an enemy has on them if you took the time to look under their health bar and knew what each symbol was already. If Stability say, gave you a coat of stone or metal for the duration, new players would have something to look at and know when to use their control effects and when not to. As-is they might not even realize the people they're hitting have stability and will just be left puzzled as to why nothing they do can stop that guy from rushing them and one-shotting them. Heck, I've been in exactly that situation before until I realized "Oh yah, Stability. That's probably why." The best advice anyone can give to a new player for how to better understand what their opponent is doing to kill them tends to be "Make an alt and play that class a bit," and that is a problem. Learning all the classes should certainly be how you truly master the game's PVP so you can play at the highest levels, but it shouldn't be mandatory to just know what is even going on at the introductory level of the game.

That is extremely interesting. It makes a lot of sense for the obviously elementally inclined skins, but I wonder what my skyscale had to eat to get a giant horn in the center of its head and a bunch of weird, mutated tusk-looking teeth (Venomous Greathorn). Obviously something venomous based on the skin name. I kind'a wish each skin had a little lore blurb describing what diet led to that appearance now.

Ash Legion would make a lot of sense. The charr do a lot of animal husbandry for their war effort even now that they have become an industrial power. I could easily see them taking up firearms to chase off poachers trying to get at their beasts. With the Flame Legion largely collapsed I imagine a lot of them could've turned to raiding ranches for food, which would become a major problem pretty fast but probably not one that warrants a full-scale military reaction. The warbands dedicated to ranching would be heavily encouraged to deal with the issue themselves.

It'd be cool if the maces were used more like drums. Pounding the earth to stir up nature spirits to attack nearby enemies or something. It'll probably just be cracking heads with furious melee strikes, but one can hope for a little more variety in the ranger arsenal.

"Wild West" is just an easy shorthand for a "quasi-mythical era of hotshot pistol wielders, animal spirits, and a deep reverence for the land and its beauty". It's an iconic and instantly recognizable trope to most Western audiences to get across what I mean. Whether we're talking about the Gaucho of South America or the Stockmen of Australia the core principle is the same. They even have much of the same aesthetic as far as those three go, though I'm not nearly as familiar with the cattlehands of Asia during that period. Besides, I'm not saying we copy-paste an American cowboy directly into Tyria. I'm using the themes and flavor as inspiration for what the pistol skills could look like. Snakes are associated with speed and lethality, so conjuring the spirit of one to visually display the speed of a quickdraw works well. Pretty much everyone was riding horses by that point and horses are a big deal in many cultures, though I do think a raptor spirit would fit better with Tyria specifically since horses aren't really around much in-game.

Unfortunately, my salamander drake is just not as good as other drakes on land. Sootmouth is still pretty great underwater, though. So he has a place in my underwater pet slot pretty much all the time. I really wish they'd fix the short-range drakes so they can land their breath attack like the long ranged drakes can.

The more I think about it the more I really like the idea of a cowboy-style ranger elite spec with a pistol or dual pistols. Something revolving around riding out pets or something. Now that weapons are divorced from elite spec it needs to stand on its own for Ranger flavor, though. I'd lean into "The Spirit of the West" as a theme. The pistols could invoke animals like rattlesnakes, buzzards, eagles, or horses. A skill where we mount up onto a Horse Spirit (Or raptor if we want to stick to Tyria's mounts) while rapidly firing the pistols for a short distance could be really cool. Or give spirit wings to the bullets while making them bypass projectile hate for a short time. A skill where we holster our pistol and quickdraw it as a rattlesnake coils around us and strikes would also be visually awesome.

To be fair, any weapon can pretty much do anything at this point. One of the things I find charming about Anet's weapon design is how willing they are to break a mold. While mace COULD be a support tool it's a little weird we'd be getting maces for that role instead of something like a scepter, which isn't to say you're wrong in your theory. Just that we can't know that a ranger rifle or pistol set wouldn't also solve those problems. A ranger's rifle could have a bunch of boon generation. Maybe themed around the sound of the gunshot similar to how blowing a warhorn provides boons. A big bang and then everyone gets Might. Swinging it in a melee strike could grant Fury. Swiftness is easy to excuse on any ranged weapon, but you could argue for Rifle having a block that grants Aegis or something fairly easily too. Pistols could have a cowboy theme and have a bunch of fancy quick shots that inspire allies with boons or buff up the pet with Boons that can be transferred back to the ranger. A quickdraw that provides Quickness or Superpseed is a no-brainer. Rapid unloading to provide Might or Fury makes sense. Ranger could use more Boon stripping too, and I think a firearm would be extremely thematic for that sort of thing as well. At the end of the day, any of these weapons could do almost anything. Rifle could be a mid-range AoE weapon based on a shotgun with lots of scatter shots and melee butt-strokes for all we know.

The only issue with Rifle is it'd be difficult to make meaningfully different from Longbow. Both are traditionally long ranged Strike damage weapons. Though personally, I think it could be done if you got a bit creative with it. I've seen people suggest Ranger Rifle could be a condi weapon, using the rifle as a tranq gun. That is a pretty cool idea and would give us a long-range condi option we don't currently have. Personally, I think it'd be cool as a multi-range skirmishing-style weapon. Make it sort of the inverse of the longbow. Longbow wants to keep the enemy at maximum range. Maybe Rifle wants to get the enemy into a close range from a distance. Auto Attack: 1,200 range, but does more damage the closer the enemy is. Number 2: A melee buttstroke blow that causes Daze and does solid damage. Number 3: A forward leap that shoots the enemy and applies Slow. Number 4: Toss a bear trap somewhere in a shortish range of you that immobilizes the target when they step on it. Number 5: A long-range, high-damage shot to get their attention or finish a fleeing enemy. The bullet could be guided by a bird spirit to follow the target.

I am still amazed that Anet released an elite spec based around empowering and comboing with the pet and didn't give us a single mechanic or skill that makes the pet harder to kill. We even got a heal and an elite skill that makes us super hard to kill, but it doesn't apply to the pet for some unknown reason.

My Untamed can rip through large squads of enemies and solo elites without much trouble. I almost feel invincible in full zerkers. I dunno why there's not currently an Open World build on Metabattle, but I promise you that Untamed can very easily do Open World content.

I'm not really a numbers cruncher so I can't say how good the combos are, but staff certainly feels more fun on Untamed than it did on Druid. The extra Ambush skill with the wide AoE damage and heal looks cool and is fun to use, and Unleashing the pet compensates a lot for the otherwise low damage of the staff while you're using it for utility/mobility and waiting for the weapon swap cooldown to end. Daggers are similar. That extra teleport coupled with its dash gives the weapon more life. It makes you feel like a druidic assassin teleporting through the leaves and stabbing enemies in the head. Teleporting your pet in and then swapping Unleash to teleport yourself in right after also feels very fun.

Not my first choice, but there are a lot of mace skins that are basically clubs that I think would fit the nature theme of the Ranger. I imagine it as a weapon with a lot of pounces and stuns. Maybe a big charge with say, a boar spirit animation to represent the ferocity of the weapon set.

My charr ranger is a former Iron Legion drake rancher who's warband raised salamander drakes for the war effort. Remember that while the Iron Legion might specialize in war machines that doesn't mean they completely stopped using warbeasts or beasts of burden where it is efficient to do so over machines. While he heavily leans into the nature magic sphere of ranger/druid he also utilizes a compound bow and embraces the gadgetry of the Iron legion to make his job easier. I'd imagine yourself as a sort of war-shepherd. Decent leather armor with a staff to keep your "flock" under control. I lean more into the woodsy nature hermit motif with mine, but you could also lean more into the Iron Legion aesthetic with a metal staff that gives off sparks like a big cattle prod. Your pet obviously fits into the theme. Drakes and Devourers are very common Charr pets, though you could play it as attempting to raise something more exotic for the Legion if you wanted. I can't imagine the Legions would oppose having access to trained wyverns or smokescales. The healing magic would be vital in keeping your herd healthy, while the bow, swords, axes, etc. are for keeping the herd safe from both natural predators and poachers from the Flame Legion trying to steal your animals. It also helps that druidic magic is maybe the furthest removed from what a Flame Shaman does as any other form of magic, so most charr would probably be a lot more calm with what you're doing. Magic to heal and support your warband and Legion rather than just to kill or steal power for yourself.

Anet's dedication to not touching Untamed at all since the expansion launched is truly impressive. Came back after a couple months of hiatus and expected something in all the patch notes I've missed. Nothing. Not even small numbers tweaks. It's like Anet's balance team doesn't remember that the ranger exists.

It's actually almost never a better idea to kill a character off than it is to keep them alive. This is because a living character can be used to create more narrative while a dead one generally can't. When choosing to kill a character you have to weigh how much drama and motivation you get from their single death against a potentially limitless amount of drama and story telling you could've gotten out of them alive. For example I think killing Trahearne was a mistake. His death was shocking but didn't actually DO anything to advance the story. All it resulted in was Logan replacing him. Meanwhile we lost one of the more developed characters and the Sylvari's single most important character to their race short of the Pale Tree herself. The Sylvari lost a lot and gained very little. Just a lackluster funeral and a broken sword that never got narratively replaced. The early seasons of GoT worked so well because every major character death was masterfully constructed to push the story of every other character forward or to make the entire cast pivot in response to the unexpected. Robb's death wasn't just shock value, it had a massive impact on Jon's story, more or less ended the War of Five Kings, set up the fall of the North as a major player in the story, forced Arya's story to change trajectory, and in the books kicked off Lady Stoneheart. A good writer needs to be selective in what characters they kill off and why. Every character is a pool of resources at the writer's disposal that can be used to create more story. If you burn through it fast for shock value or to breed a nihilistic dread in your audience you run the risk of ending up like The Walking Dead where 70% of your cast are new characters barely anyone cares about.

Huh, that's interesting. Alacrity doesn't really suit ranger in my opinion, but given we can already produce a lot of selfish quickness at least it won't be redundant. I wonder how far back they decided ranger was getting alacrity. It might explain a fair bit about why Untamed was designed the way it was if we were meant to double down in cooldown reduction from multiple sources.

I'd personally like a mainhand scepter to go with a more offensive caster elite spec with good AoE damage. I could see it pairing well with warhorn and offhand axe. Druid's staff made us a caster but is almost purely a support tool. Scepter could be for mid-range ground targeted damage and control.

Malyck's tree and the possibility of other trees like it offer that exact potential for Sylvari. The Sylvari we know are strongly shaped by Ventari's tablet, but another tree wouldn't necessarily have the words of a wise pacifist engraved in stone to live by. There could be Sylvari out there that are highly militant due to having come from a Blight Tree that wasn't purified of dragon corruption. Their Mother would instead be raising her people to be soldiers for when her true master awakens, and now with Modremoth gone might be doing what Tequatl did and gone rogue to take over the power gap her dragon left. Heck, another tree might not even have human-like Sylvari at all. The Pale Tree chose humans to mimic because of Ronan. Another tree might have chosen the Hylek or centaurs to be the basis, or even went and created something original by taking characteristics from multiple species and combining them into one plant creature. There could be a tree with an entire population of giant, intelligent Sylvan hounds because that tree only had wolves to work with as far as social animals go, while another might have had a nest of harpies in her branches leading to a race of winged Sylvari that can fly. The possibilities are nearly endless.