Guild Wars 2

I feel like I’ve posted on the Druid before at some point. Hence the title.

Anyway, the Druid seems to be getting some flack. Is it deserved? I’m not sure. My impression is, “perhaps not”.

I’ve been running around Maguuma for just about 5 hours now. For most of this time I simply wanted to see if I would finally have pets that I could honestly find some use for. Joyfully, I can say the new pets are all pretty great except the tiger.

When it came to playing the Druid I was thinking, “This is probably going to be awful.” I had teamed up with another Ranger and we were holding our own against champions, although the fights were sometimes half an hour or so. He was running a Druid build, I was running pure DPS.
After a bit I decided I’d swing out of DPS and try this healing out. My impressions at first were, "The casting animation for button 1 is pretty goofy, but oh well. I’ve played a lot of MMOs. I can live with this one. The sound effects I like. I’m usually cranking the sound effects down because they give me a headache. The Druid skills don’t so that’s all pretty good.
My next impression was, "I’m not really sure the weapons skills off staff can really be called noticeable. I teleported over to Orr to give more familiar creatures a try. The damage one-on-one wasn’t bad at all, but when I started to try out a few more creatures at a time I found myself thinking, “the base damage of all of this needs to be a little higher.” HOWEVER…

I then, by accident, clicked F5…

I’d meant to change pets using F4. I have a shaped keyboard though and sometimes I get my nails caught on the buttons from the way they set together. For a few moments I was occupied with, “What just happened? What?! What’s not supposed to do that! What’s going on?!”
I was soloing a champ in Orr so my next thought was, “How’s my health? Erm… what? It’s full? How?” Usually this champ slaps me pretty hard when I mess up. It’s the Mesmer one over by Fields of Gold.
So, what happened? Well, it turns out F5 is where the healing’s at. The staff is more about crowd control and recharging F5.

F5 unlocks a whole new set of healy skills that are pumping out 863, 632 and cleanse, 3,032, and 1,010 healing from buttons 1 through 4 respectively. This in full zerker gear.

Button 5 does pulsing cripple, slow, and immobilize so there’s symmetry here. You heal your allies and then cripple at the end. Button 3’s massive heal also does daze to nearby enemies: Radius 360.

Button 1 from staff hits for pebbles. The most I’ve been able to get it to hit for is 255 dps. So, if you’re never going to kill anything with this. It’s also got the engineer’s flamethrower bug. It reports doing ever increasing damage, but in actuality is (if the combat log is true) is maintaining 250 dps every pulse. It does hit multiple targets though from what I can see.

So, this radically changes my opinion of the Druid. It may not be necessary to dump our ascended gear and zerker stats so that we can be heal-bot to some elitist jerks that will never appreciate us giving up all that time and effort to make ascended healing gear. We can keep what we have, but swap out a weapon to become a secondary healer while a guardian runs primary. OR, a for-serious Druidy-healer can go be primary healer while we still run our zerker for more dps.

Summary, the Druid was much better designed than the demo videos gave it credit for. We’ll be able to keep our zerker gear to give the group that extra dps and (if it really comes down to it) get some time before we have to wave goodbye to our zerker ascended stats when Anet’s misunderstanding of their game mechanics really kicks off and they nerf zerker into the ground.

There’s hope for this class and it shows some better understanding of the community’s inevitable rage if they just wiped out zerker stats suddenly. The real healing from this class is not coming from the staff, but rather the skills out of F5.

Yea the staff is really just light healing and Celestial Avatar(CA) recharge. Don’t get me wrong though because alone the staff really isn’t bad. It gives you a bit of mobility with 3 that lets you get in close to blast your big heals in CA.

In truth, CA is an incredible healer. At first I thought the recharge for CA was way too fast. Just fighting a champ frog it seemed like every time I left CA it was ready to go again within seconds. As I looked more into the Druid though I found the fast recharge of CA is appropiate. Without any stable application of proactive support(like protection for example) I think the high burst healing that is offered makes up for the lack of boon stable boon aplication.

Some other updates:

The staff is required to reach the F5 ability – Celestial Avatar.

I’m not really sure what’s causing it to charge up as sometimes it appears to do this from using simply button 1, but sometimes it stops. So then I switch over to using a few abilities and it charges up. 3 animations of the staff casting button 1 is enough to charge the F5 ability 1/3 of the way. After that you have to use a different ability to get it to charge up more. You can switch back to button 1 after using whatever alternative ability you want.

I’d recommend running Smokescale for DPS and Fire Wyvern if you’re dealing with a lot of creatures you want to put damage on. The Fire Wyvern has a good aoe. The Smokescale simply hits supremely hard.

So far I haven’t done much with the glyphs.
- Damage and Impair foes, or heal and remove conditions
- Daze foes or break stun for allies
- Empower the outgoing damage or healing of your allies
- Draw your enemies in or knock them away

They’re pretty self explanatory anyway.

By and large the staff doesn’t do enough damage even with zerker gear on to be useful. I really mean it. The staff is utterly useless for damage. It’s there to charge up F5 or move about the battlefield using button 3.

- Fire a concentrated beam of light, damaging the targeted foe and healing allies inside of the beam. DPS 188, Healing 69.
~ basically pointless
- Send a wisp to attach to your foe. While attached it will circle the foe, healing allies it passes through. Damage 501, healing 330.
~ Sounds good, but doesn’t seem to be healing about 69 to 243 no matter what I do.
- Become a wisp of natural energy, traversing to the target location. When you reach the target, heal nearby allies. 1,761 Healing. Combo blast finisher.
~ This is about the only one that’s got much utility so far.
- Send forth vines that immobilize enemies and cleanse conditions from allies.
~ This shows a lot of promise and works as advertised.
- Summon an energy barrier that causes enemy projectiles to heal upon impact.
~ Works just like Guardian’s deflective barrier (whatever it’s name is) and the Thief smoke screen. Again, the healing isn’t really there.

So far, all of the skills are rather well done, but they just don’t do enough healing or dps. Especially the DPS. This is a sound class mechanically, but the mathematicians in the dev department need to be released from their dungeon and allowed to play the game a bit.

I hear you! The Druid is really satisfying to play.

Just for the last hour I’ve been running it around the Silverwastes with a group. There’s some functionality with it I find not quite what it needs to be, but I’m starting to think it’s a limit of the game’s design rather than a fault of the devs.

For instance, I was trying to use the root ability on some creatures. Despite that I had them targeted and was turning my character to face them, it shot the root off in some other direction. I have had the same problem with the Revenant’s ghostly stones ability (whatever it is) in the other betas. Sword button 2 on Warrior and Rocket Boots on Engineer do this too. The game is just dumb that way.

In general I’m still finding the healing to be a little too weak. I found I was able to do things in a group because I was there that we hadn’t been able to do before. That was really satisfying. We’d be taking on a veteran or champion where (before) we’d have problems, but I’d just pulse healing waves and ground target heals; problems over. I think the major thing this class will do is bring a sense of group coordination that wasn’t there before. I think that’s going to become true for all of these Elite Specialization. We’re gaining a kind of content where we can actually support and compliment one another without sacrificing our ability to play how we like. I really like this.

Anyone who thinks the staff is required to get into cele form doesn’t have a clear understanding of ranger or druid mechanics yet. With that said you can prep getting into cele with Troll Unguent in fact, you should now be using this heal much earlier than normal I am starting to do it around 90% hp to fill up the cele it takes 2 to fully fill up the bar so you should be using your heal as soon as you spawn.