Guild Wars 2

Celestial Avatar needs to gain more quickly from giving/receiving damage and gain more slowly from random heals. It also needs the ability to be activated at any time there is Celestial Avatar force in the bar, not just when it is full. The Celestial Avatar bar should also remain unchanged upon death, just like the Necromancer/Reaper life force bar, Why?:

• Gaining so little from DPS or damage received discourages anything from play outside of tanky healing specs. In other words, this is no good for different viable dynamics within the Ranger/Druid spec as the only option to make the HoT Druid trait line competitive or even viable amongst other HoT specs, is to exploit the new Celestial Avatar function by having 100% uptime of regeneration + massive healing in general. This is no fun. We would expect a Guardian to have a function like this but not the class in the game originally designed around ranged attacks.
• Without high regeneration uptime and a massive healing spec, it is likely that a Ranger/Druid can win or lose a 1v1, 1v2 or sometimes even a team fight situation without ever even being able to use the Celestial Avatar function. This is because gain from DPS dealt/damage taken is too low and not being able to use the Celestial Avatar until the bar is full will often result in situations where the non-heal spec Druid will get his bar almost to full but then go on respawn and need to restart filling his bar from the bottom up. Again, this discourages any spec outside of tanky healing specs as the Celestial Avatar function is virtually useless without the high uptime of regeneration and a tanky healing amulet.
• Why not run a classic DPS spec and ignore Druid traits you say? Well as we all have seen, classic specs are no longer up to par in any way with HoT specs. This leaves Rangers one option and that is playing with the Druid trait line. Considering the above comments, you can see that the only viable option while playing with the Druid trait line, is to play as a healing team support reviver that has no DPS. I’ll say it again, this is not fun while selecting the character originally designed for ranged attacking.

In a nutshell: Druid is completely designed around team support healing, reviving, surviving. The Druid trait line must be used amongst other HoT specs to remain viable but the problem is that Druid offers only that one viable role of team support healing, reviving, surviving! This is ultimately due to too little Celestial Avatar gain from damage given/damage received and too much gain from massive healing. If the function of Celestial Avatar gain was slightly fixed, it would enable the viability of many more Ranger/Druid specs. Specs that could run DPS but still have enough Celestial Avatar force to survive while running that DPS.

Please consider these beta ideas as a fix:

• Double gain from damage dealt.
• Double gain from damage received.
• Cut gain from healing in half.
• Allow activation of Celestial Avatar before bar is full.
• Celestial Avatar bar remains unchanged upon deaths/respawns.

If you support these changes or have comments, please give feedback.
~ ty much

I like the proposed changes, especially activating it before it’s full. This allows decent options to switch in and out quickly for stealth/superspeed, condiremoval or a quick burstheal etc.

They would probably have to make the CD of celestial avatar a bit higher, like 15 seconds. but I think the added versatility would make up for that.

Also, I don’t think you gain AF by taking dmg…

i suggest keep celestial avatar the same but make druids able to activate it only if there are at least 2 other teammates nearby

Lexander.4579:

i suggest keep celestial avatar the same but make druids able to activate it only if there are at least 2 other teammates nearby

And see rangers completely removed from play again.

PowerBottom.5796:

I like the proposed changes, especially activating it before it’s full. This allows decent options to switch in and out quickly for stealth/superspeed, condiremoval or a quick burstheal etc.

They would probably have to make the CD of celestial avatar a bit higher, like 15 seconds. but I think the added versatility would make up for that.

Also, I don’t think you gain AF by taking dmg…

Yeah the cool down would need to be increased a bit.

You do gain from taking damage but it’s very small.

Let me put this in to other words:

While running/testing DPS Druid specs after the patch, in unranked and in 1v1 practice, I find that without the constant shout regeneration to Celestial Avatar “which requires a healing amulet and not DPS to be effective”, you aren’t able to use Celestial Avatar frequently enough to make it viable or even present. This pushes an enormously lopsided choice between running DPS on the Druid or a low DPS sustain/survival/revival build, where running the tanky spec is clearly the right choice if you want to utilize your HoT spec in efforts of viability vs. other HoT specs. This is boring and narrow for older Ranger players as well as sad for a game that should be providing so much more viability in build structure.

Why can you not run DPS on the Druid? Because running DPS forces trait/utility choices that do not revolve around regeneration healing. The regeneration is negligent and useless in contrast to other choices for a DPS spec that revolve around self survival, which DPS specs need. Why is shout regeneration so important on the Druid? Because without it, you cannot cycle Celestial Avatar force quickly enough to do what a Druid needs to do. Thus you are forced to run shout regeneration specs. Why does shout regeneration kill DPS? Because to make that shout regeneration count, you must take beast mastery, druid and either nature or wild. You also must take some form of a +heal stat amulet. Between these two factors, DPS is out the window and tanking is in.

I’m not saying that Druid is OP or underpowered. I am simply stating that if you were to use my proposed changes, it would allow the Druid sustain builds to maintain the same type of Celestial Avatar gains that they have now but it would also allow DPS specs “who have little regeneration” nearly twice the gain of Celestial Avatar as well.
This would allow DPS specs a minor healing boost but much more access to Celestial Avatar condi clear and stealth/superspeeding.

Again, this change is good because it would enable two viable build archetypes for Ranger/Druids. Both a team support and a peeler +1’er again.

Wasn’t Arena-Net’s goal to allow every class to do everything? So let’s do it. It’s an easy fix for the Ranger/Druid to enable DPSing options along with the Team Support options. All while not nerfing or boosting the original Druid support role. These changes would simply allow Ranger DPSing viability once again.

You druids are a mess to balance. You guys deal a ton of single target damage because of your pet, while using bunker-bruiser amulet.

What’s the real solution?

I think it is amazing already and doesn’t need any changes besides maybe increasing radius of #1 and bugfixing #5.

Alekt.5803:

You druids are a mess to balance. You guys deal a ton of single target damage because of your pet, while using bunker-bruiser amulet.

What’s the real solution?

nerf dps-pets (bristle and smokescale) and buff druid…. it’s really simple.

Fluffball.8307:

Lexander.4579:

i suggest keep celestial avatar the same but make druids able to activate it only if there are at least 2 other teammates nearby

And see rangers completely removed from play again.

that works for me too

This is well thought-out, and i agree. I could see this allowing for wiggle room in a Druid build in a few different ways without ultimately unbalancing the spec.

PowerBottom.5796:

Alekt.5803:

You druids are a mess to balance. You guys deal a ton of single target damage because of your pet, while using bunker-bruiser amulet.

What’s the real solution?

nerf dps-pets (bristle and smokescale) and buff druid…. it’s really simple.

This does also need to happen. The Bristleback specifically could lose 25% of it’s burst and still easily qualify as the best DPS pet. Druid needs DPS options enabled “not a buff! just fixes like I mentioned!” and the Bristleback needs a nerf.

PowerBottom.5796:

Alekt.5803:

You druids are a mess to balance. You guys deal a ton of single target damage because of your pet, while using bunker-bruiser amulet.

What’s the real solution?

nerf dps-pets (bristle and smokescale) and buff druid…. it’s really simple.

But Eurantien says that Bristle and Smoke are the only way to kill people with Druid.

Alekt.5803:

PowerBottom.5796:

Alekt.5803:

You druids are a mess to balance. You guys deal a ton of single target damage because of your pet, while using bunker-bruiser amulet.

What’s the real solution?

nerf dps-pets (bristle and smokescale) and buff druid…. it’s really simple.

But Eurantien says that Bristle and Smoke are the only way to kill people with Druid.

That is because of all the reasons I mentioned above. The Druid itself can only run low DPS archetypes with a lot of heal to be viable so it needs that absurd pet DPS.

The problem however, should not be viewed in terms of balancing pet DPS for these Druid specs but rather fix the Druid to begin with so it can run DPS that is independent
of broken pet DPS. Then we can talk about fixing pets.

It’s too bad this post isn’t receiving more attention than this.

I sincerely hope Arena-Net has paid attention because this is the best quick fix possible to allow Ranger/Druids access to their class features beyond meta heal builds.

Druid is a failed team healing design. They made a top notch self sufficient and self healing bunker.

Professions need to be redone period.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

It’s too bad this post isn’t receiving more attention than this…

You have to stir controversy to get a popular thread—intelligent content comes second. Just change your title to “Please nerf DH traps” or something.

But on a serious note, this is a very class-specific thread in the PvP forum; I’ve noticed they get less attention. You do have over 700 views though.

Allowing access to Celestial Avatar before bar is full is reaaaaly bad idea. You didn’t consider other skills/traits designed around CA such as Druidic Clarity and Celestial Shadow, which would become super OP unless they are changed. And adding ICD to these skill would be clunky since I wouldn’t know when the skills are off CD to cleanse conditions/break stun. So simply no.

Incrased gain of astral force from damage ain’t competely bad idea, but I don’t see this so necessary. Gaining astral force from regen is very easy as ranger has great access to regen through various utility skills and traits. Even with offensive amulets you are able to charge CA every 10sec or close to that. It simply sounds fair to me, that ranger have to sacrifice some utility skills and/or traits to charge CA faster or chose differenty for the price of charging CA slowly. We simply shouldn’t have everything.

It’s fine as it is.

I feel like Druid is at a good standing right now, playing wise 1v1s if the other person (not Druid) actually knows how to play/look out specific skill rotations (and not the typical casuals and then cry on the forums that x skill/class is op for small easily counter able things they didn’t put in the time to figure out and practice) it is actually and very equal fight.

That aside, I absolutely 100% agree with the functionality of going into avatar without 100% fill up since there is a significant drop if you leave early anyways. Obviously the bar should be at least 1/4 full so if you use it for 1 skill, you’ll basically go back to 0%. Going into the state before 100% could be a possibility if the energy degeneration was 25/33/50% faster as a fair trade I guess?

On the flip side reasons why I would be hesitant is because doing so may open up people who cry on the forums for anything that: avatar this and that op, ect. leading to more if not already internal cool-downs on: potential skills/ traits, which are 100% balanced already… In which case I’d rather leave as is. But if it’s possible and doable w/o negative effects it’s worth a try