Balance changes opinion after testing.

[Beddo.1907]

Spirits
-Water: High healing if traited, nothing else worth of mention besides it. Needs something else to not be healing Glyph, but ranged with delays.
-Stone: Prot duration is WAY too low, needs at least 150% increase
-Sun: Blind and burn are pretty useless, might is lacking. Double the might stacks and duration, change blind into pulsing burn and add boon removal to slam.
-Storm: Since we have CotW, Spirited Arrival and Spotter, this spirits is easily overshadowed. Needs more effects fury duration and another effect to be an alternative fury source.
-Frost: Resolution duration is too low, same as Stone.
-SoN: Skill itself seems good enough for now, but the cast time to way to slow when combined with the slam animation. Lower the cast to 3/4 at least.

Core
-Pounce: Needs more range and an evade, animation feels slightly off.
-Serpent's Strike: Good enough, but sword still needs improvement.
-Farsighted: Raw positive, nothing to complain about.
-Strider's Strength: the amount of might provided is pretty low, making it a bit meaning less compared to the raw power part.
-Rejuvenation: Remove the internal CD.
-Instinctive Reaction: Not much to say, since the scaling part which was the main point, is still the same.
-Evasive Purity: Raw buff, good change to the synergy of the whole line.
-Spirited Arrival: Could use more might stacks.
-Windborne Notes: Pretty good change for team heal.
-Lingering Magic: Raw buff.
-Protective Ward: Would be a good change if Guard! didn't suck.
-Invigorating Bond: Raw buff, but I'd swap vigor for a different boon.
-Nature's Vengeance: Good on some spirits, worthless on other. Could stay as is, if the spirits are improved instead.
-Trapper's Expertise: All traps should be readjusted after this.
-Healing Spring: Same as with trait so it's ok.
-Spike Trap: Raw buff, even with trait nerf.
-Resounding Timbre: Commands were readjusted so it's fine and technically ended up with a buff.

Druid
-Grace of the Land: Alacrity needs to be a bit longer to allow more freedom.
-Rejuvenating Tides: Technically a raw buff.
-Natural Convergence: Also technically a buff, although a bit wieird.
-Blood Moon: Bleed could be slightly stronger. Overall something is missing to make it good.
-Natural Balance: Pretty good trait overall.
-Eclipse: The conditions are pretty weak, even if CA is used as fire and forget to use Natural Balance.
-Glyph of Alignment: Raw buff, glyphs still suck.
-Glyph of Equality: Same here.
-Natural Mender: Raw buff, nothing to see here.
-Cosmic Ray: One of the best changes this patch, change my mind.
-Lingering Light: Seems good for better CA uptime, can't really complain.
-Seed of Life: Raw buff.

Soulbeast
-Spiritual Reprieve: Raw buff.
-Instinctive Engage: The animation feels way better now and can be used like a mobility skill, damage is good enough to use in a rotation. The cooldown could go even lower.
-Deadly Delivery: Raw buff. Dagger still needs more buffs to targeting and flow.

Untamed
-Rending Vines: Raw buff, needs auto cast in PvE.
-Enveloping Haze: Same as Vines.
-Unleashed Power: Raw buff, however there is still a huge issue (on that later).
Savage Slash, Deft Strike, Relentless Whirl and Multishot: Raw buff, Multishot is still a pain to use.
-Restorative Strikes: This trait seems to have an internal CD, which should be shown on the tooltip. It's still a bad trait outside of OW. When used in instanced PvE it's useless, when used in PvP/WvW it's weak due to inconsistency of the heal. I feel like the concept of lifesteal is not fitting in Untamed.
-Let Loose: There is a huge flaw of this design. Due to Unleash taking time, it's hard to use it effectively when you go from one amush to the other, not to mention it causes pet and hammer skills to mess up. Ambush needs to be reworked as a mechanic, either by disconnecting other mechanics from the same button or by adding ambush to weapon swap. Additionally quickness needs a longer duration to make up for the animations wasting time in a rotation and resulting in a downtime, unless you sacrifice more DPS.

You have one chance to fix this mess Anet, I doubt there is that much hope left in the community.

[Halbarz.3854]

Curious to see some of the untamed builds to be honest, it's not a spec I personally enjoyed so far but maybe it's time to mess around with it. Based on your feedback Untamed is still rather Meeh but curious to play around with it while we wait a year for a good balance patch. 

[Roadkizzle.2157]

So the Let Loose doesn't just reset the Ambush on Weapon Swapping?

 

Now you'll need to swap Unleash twice still to activate the Ambushes?

 

 

[Valfar.3761]

Yikes at the new ranger changes. Talking about Untamed here because that is the only elite spec that services the classic ranger fantasy of fighting alongside your pet (Druid ignores the pet and goes for some weird caster/wizard thing, and Soulbeast cannibalizes your pet).

Spirits no longer give alacrity. RIP the low APM alacrity hammer build where all you had to do was keep your spirits up and press hammer 2 and 4 every 6 seconds.

They reduced the cooldown on the Untamed's pet abilities which you have to manually press (unlike vanilla ranger pet abilities which can be automated). Even higher APM whether you want it or not!

Fervent Force is dead! RIP our high survivability double axe build.

The devs increased the damage of the unleashed ambush skills. Fervent Force has been replaced with Let Loose, which causes your Unleashed Ambush skills to give boons. None of this matters because flipping back and forth between unleashed pet/ranger stances is still clunky and not worth the bother. You have to press F5 to enter unleashed ranger, press 1 to use your first weapon's unleashed ambush, press ~ to weapon swap to your second weapon, press F5 to switch to unleashed pet, press F5 again to switch back to unleashed ranger, and then press 1 to use your second weapon's unleashed ambush. That is a 5 step process to use this trait.

Dagger's unleashed ambush skill is a shadowstep teleport. That is cool. Combined with Unnatural Traversal, you could become a some sort of nature ninja teleporting all over the place, though the fundamental issue with how clunky Unleashed Pet/Ranger swapping is would need to be addressed first.

Feels really bad.  😞 

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

Blood Moons bleed doesn't proc off ranger pet CC. Please fix this

[Zyreva.1078]

Just now, WhoWantsAHug.3186 said:

Blood Moons bleed doesn't proc off ranger pet CC. Please fix this

It procs off jacaranda roots. Which is likely a bug, because pets generally don't proc traits, unless explicit stated otherwise (eg "when using a beast skill").

[Pedro Sequeira.3198]

I think they could fix let loose by giving some quickness into weapon swap and then some more into ambush attack utilisation, not sure if increasing it's base duration is enough. Would be a start though. Also was looking forward to use Restorative Strikes but it appears to have an unintended ICD bound to ambush timers. Patch is quite buggy from what I have seen so far.  That and some classes being able to overcap quickness and alac with low boon duration and others not so much lol

[voltaicbore.8012]

5 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

adding ambush to weapon swap

I think this makes the most sense. As @Valfar.3761 laid out very clearly, the process to make use of this trait is horrible. I'll take a shave on the damage numbers for ambushes in exchange for being able to use the new trait sensibly.

As for the sword changes... I'm actually pleasantly surprised. As a power weapon in a power soulbeast sword/axe build, it's nice having big chunky 5-digit numbers coming out of these moves, which are animated fast enough to use in melee, or more properly as gap closers. I'd really only consider sword 3 as a true gap closer, given the range and evade on it. On my tanky condi roamer builds that use a couple traps, having consistent leaps and extra immobs has been very nice.

I haven't run druid yet, and I'm honestly not looking forward to it.

[Levetty.1279]

I think we should push for Druid Alacrity to be tied to regen application instead of CA but just increasing the base duration of  most of Ranger/Druids boon application would fix a lot of things up.

Completely agree on Untamed, trying to trigger ambushes already felt clunky and now it is worse since you are trying to spam them to give out Quickness. At the very least ambushes need a bit of a rework but the Elite Spec as a whole still needs reworking to turn it into an actual elite spec. I feel like the trait should also give out some might as well.

[Firebird Gomer.9563]

Im sad about the Fervent Force change. I really like the old Untamed trait Fervent Force.. I think it made the Ranger stand out for once. If you played it properly you could get some good damage without being a SoulBeast and more importantly it was just plain fun. If Anet were really annoyed with how much it reset skills or that players were simply and actually having fun because of the trait, then cull it down till you are happy, change the elite skill, anything else but get rid of something that was enjoyable.... I think that the new Trait is just a massive step backwards and it is going to prove to be total rubbish and they will have to change it to something else again. Hopefully back to Fervent Force, even if it was a modified version of the trait. Very Very Silly Anet

[Beddo.1907]

10 minutes ago, Firebird Gomer.9563 said:

Im sad about the Fervent Force change. I really like the old Untamed trait Fervent Force.. I think it made the Ranger stand out for once. If you played it properly you could get some good damage without being a SoulBeast and more importantly it was just plain fun. If Anet were really annoyed with how much it reset skills or that players were simply and actually having fun because of the trait, then cull it down till you are happy, change the elite skill, anything else but get rid of something that was enjoyable.... I think that the new Trait is just a massive step backwards and it is going to prove to be total rubbish and they will have to change it to something else again. Hopefully back to Fervent Force, even if it was a modified version of the trait. Very Very Silly Anet

No matter how dissatisfied I'm, I don't want FF back. That thing is either an entire espec or too weak to use at all, no inbetween.

[Levetty.1279]

Worth noting that Storm Spirit damage now seems to scale of Ranger stats, even if the tooltip doesn't represent it.

[Firebird Gomer.9563]

12 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

No matter how dissatisfied I'm, I don't want FF back. That thing is either an entire espec or too weak to use at all, no inbetween.

I disagree. It wasn't weak. Hence they nerfed it first and then replaced it. If it was weak it would not have had either of those things done to it. I will admit that it was more likely to be chosen over the other GM traits because it was the best of the GM traits.

It was fun trying to see if you could get your Elite too reset between hits and FF before the Elite time ran out. To be honest I think that's why it was removed more than anything. The Elite skill. If you have a good rotation and lots of enemies (I get it, that's what you mean between an an entire Espec or too weak) you could reset your Elite over and over and over and I am pretty sure that the Dev's didn't want or like that. Hence this situation. I think its removal is a mistake, I think that the new GM is bad, I think that it takes the unique gameplay style of the Untamed away and I think that they will have to rework or replace the new trait for a second time because it will prove to be bad.

I'm sorry you didn't like it and I know there are others who didn't like it as well. But I did and I know having watched YouTube videos others did as well.

[Beddo.1907]

5 hours ago, Firebird Gomer.9563 said:

I disagree. It wasn't weak. Hence they nerfed it first and then replaced it. If it was weak it would not have had either of those things done to it.

I think you misunderstood me. I mean the trait is either so strong, it's the entire point you use Untamed or too weak to justify playing it at all. When it was 3s, you could loop the cc and perform well, but the moment it was nerfed to 2s nobody used it, due to no skill being worth using up slots for CC. 

The trait itself was fun, but balance wise it was a nightmare and would cause core and untamed to be balanced around it so you don't do something insane.

As for the current trait, yeah they probably didn't test how bad it is in practice, but that's true for a lot of things in this patch.

[Firebird Gomer.9563]

4 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

I think you misunderstood me. I mean the trait is either so strong, it's the entire point you use Untamed or too weak to justify playing it at all. When it was 3s, you could loop the cc and perform well, but the moment it was nerfed to 2s nobody used it, due to no skill being worth using up slots for CC. 

The trait itself was fun, but balance wise it was a nightmare and would cause core and untamed to be balanced around it so you don't do something insane.

As for the current trait, yeah they probably didn't test how bad it is in practice, but that's true for a lot of things in this patch.

Nah I get what you mean. It definately could be good but then at the same time it could be bad.

 

Insane is where I live LOL. And it was fun having a Ranger Espec that was actually useful in different settings. I don't count Druid.... I made a Ranger to stay away from healing as I was a healer in another game and it was very very toxic. And then Anet dumped healer on Ranger.... Its fine I get it I have heard all the arguments about how that's what should happen because that's what a Ranger is...... Doesn't mean I wanted the very first Espec to be a healer... I probably wouldn't have cared if it was the 2nd Espec =-P

 

You are totally correct on how many skills and traits have been munged on the different Professions.....

[Acheron.1580]

Quickness untamed is without a doubt the clumsiest rotation ever. Between the cooldown on the unleash, and then the rotation of unleash, unleash, attack, swap weapon, unleash, unleash, attack, make sure your ambush is up before weapon swap (which is only indicated by the dinky buff), then repeat that mess; it feels so clunky. It feels like you are basically doing nothing for 5-6 seconds.

Quick and Alac thief needs 0% boon duration to be effective when means they are basically crazy dps. Druid can't even manage with 100% boon duration, no condi alac build, and you are required to have at least 20% boon duration to break even just barely assuming you did it perfectly. If anyone had put in the 20-30 seconds to test these things it would have been painfully obvious that the boon durations on spirits and alac were too low, and how unwieldly untamed quickness is.

 

Edit: Im 100% on board with ambush not being bound to auto attack which was a problem even before this mess.

Edited June 29, 2023 by Acheron.1580