Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’m relatively new to the wvw scene but I’m trying to get more and more into it. I tend to play backline ele or a midline wells necro, but I’ve been curious as to whether or not druid has a roll in zerg fights. I don’t see many druids running in zergs which is why I’m unsure, but the healing that they could provide to the front line seems like it would be good.

So would running a support druid be more beneficial to the team as a whole over a back line dps or should I just stick to what I’m doing on ele/necro?

The problem I see is that the Druid heals are too extreme. When you go Celestial Avatar or use a staff, for example, you lose most of your dps while a Ele only needs 2 seconds to go in out of water and then proceed to constantly dump damage with meteors and whanot. Eles can also share auras all over the place and proceed to heal and cleanse without much sacrifice or any investment in healing power. Eles also don’t have to maintain a resource like Druids have to— just cooldowns.

It also does not help that the gylpyhs are limited by a trait that sprays light fields all over the place. They’re also requiring one to be stationary which isn’t good.

When you’re just focused on healing yourself, losing dps uptime isn’t a big issue in say, a small scale fight. You just wait until you recover and keep fighting— I can run all the way to spawn on a druid with people chasing me and reset the whole fight. But in a big fight, what about your allies? your lack of presence in either damage or healing will be troublesome. Furthermore, blasting water fields tends to be so strong for group sustain that it doesn’t really make sense to have dedicated healers especially when the healing power of the blaster is what determines the heal.

In the end it is very hard to compete against easy water fields, AOE protection spam (40% damage reduction on tempest), high damage of which a good deal is ground targeted and thus cannot be reflected, and high survivability while picking aggressive stats,

The existence of whatever the heck Revs crap out, damage reduction, durability runes, resistance spam, boon share, and the power of the Tempest all with minimal cost unfortunately just has such a stranglehold on frontline sustain that it is hard to carve a niche role for the druid. The only real advantage a ranger can provide is a somewhat longer range for sniping targets and the potential for high self survival— but this is a group fight. All we can do is blame Arenanet for applying the mechanics and balance of pve/pvp, which generally assume a few people fighting in a few small spaces brought out to WvW and act surprised when it doesn’t really work for everyone.

This isn’t to say you couldn’t make a druid work, but the current game is dominated by these things and to be able to compete with this honestly seems more effort than it is worth.

I did give it a shot last week just for fun though. This was my mediocre build: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJAWTnMqA1Ci9CC+rActglZB7JA012aw/zE6C1ZqNn+XnUrHPD-TlCFABr/AAQSZEWKBlSpD77PAwRAQf1fsVHg6aCE4SAIKA/C-w

I could outlive the whole zerg, finish off stragglers, and keep people up, but I just was doubtful that I wouldn’t be contributing more on an ele or something. To be fair, I am rather bad with ranger (if not in general) and people could do better just by playing better or optimizing a build.

Also, I just came to the realization that the radius for a lot of these things is utterly atrocious.

Thanks for the detailed insight. I’ll stick to ele for large fights, I’d rather not take up a map slot trying to wedge myself into a potentially unneeded niche on a druid.

If you want to be a dedicated healer, make a healing revenant. 700 regen. 6000 heals every 3 seconds. Permanent protection.

Access to stability on druid is behind a 1sec cast.

I’d stick with the ele.