Well, the April patch was a welcome bit of attention for the rangers of Guild Wars 2. I know my catssassin BM ranger was happy for the reduced cooldown of “Sick ‘Em”. The pet buffs were nice and I did notice an improvement on pathing for PvE.
For the rangers who want to utilize the Nature Spirits, well, it was a lovely gesture. A 60% increase to a HP of paper makes cardboard. Seriously, devs, make the spirits truly the ranger equivalent to the warrior’s banners! Especially since the buffs have a chance to proc, not straight up application. I know a few rangers who would love to build a Nature Magic/Beastmaster ranger to do the whole one-with-nature druid thing and play a solid support role. BTW, staff weapon option, please.
My guardian hasn’t noticed much change in his gameplay, so not much to comment on there.
The conclusion to the Living Story… Goddammit, Anet! If you start a story with soloable instances, end them with soloable instances. Is a little consistency too much to ask? I’m fine with the unimpressive and unfun dungeons having their own story arc. It begins with dungeons and ends with dungeons. But to repeat the same damn mistake done on the “Personal” Story and end a soloable story with a 5-man dungeon? Are you kidding me? GW2 has something called dynamic events. Things that scale to the number of players. So, we couldn’t have a soloable instances and we couldn’t have an open world meta-event, when both clearly exist and work fine. It’s not that I’m even against grouping. I group frequently for the temple runs and I find those fun. It’s a case of hop in, bring whatever you got, screw the gear and skill check, and run it. The temples are challenging, active, and with a zerg trying to bring down the baddie without going down, it’s rather epic. Who the hell decided to shove fixed 5-man relics of dungeons into a game that features scaling mechanics? I lost half of my guild to frustration over the dungeons. And to cap off instanced stories with that crap?
/deep breath
Well, onto the Molten Facility dungeon. I certainly enjoyed it more than the standard dungeons. My ranger duoed with my partner’s warrior and we made it all the way to the final bosses. Didn’t finish because we needed food badly and there was a new build warning flashing on our screens. It wasn’t frustrating for us in the same way we raged at the standard dungeons. While the trash mobs were still bags of HP, they were mostly Elite Veteran level bags of HP, not Elite Champions. I remember running Caudecus’s Manor and wondering how the hell Caudecus managed to hire rooms full of Super-Bandits from Krypton. Really, my hero character eats bandits for lunch, as long as they don’t gang up in large numbers. Also, the mook level bandits dodge. Why can’t the ranger pet do that? Anyways, getting off topic. If Anet insists on continuing with the dungeons, the Molten Facility is a step in the right direction.
For a bonus, here are the build sites I like to play around in.
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/
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