Guild Wars 2

Dawdler.8521:

juno.1840:

This.

A key point being made is regarding the class build. A commander cannot tell a player is running a “good” WvW build simply by class identification. There are “bad” builds.

Yet at the same time, necros/guards/wars are always assumed to have good build by class identification.

Necros in particular get a complete pass, considering so many are running a fairly pointless reaper instead of a core wellomancer.

Guards are not even looked at as long as they dont bring the obvious tell of the taboo bigger marks and use a staff, lol

Hm. Kind of odd, no?

My necro is non-core and runs no wells (lots of shouts- I love the surprise that still gives people who try and jump me…) . Staff/GS, a lot of time spent in shroud. Unless we are short of well necros, then I’ll swap around..but not my preferred build. Massive aoe damage and finishing off the downed- don’t want those pesky downed getting up again!

Again, I see a lot of meta built necros with no clue what they should be doing when so totally agree with you that no one should get a free pass into a decent group no matter what class they are on. My favourite watching a necro is when they throw wells at random on a single target as well as all their marks and never swop out of staff at all! Or even more fun, a lich form necro, which is like painting a big target on yourself saying ‘kill me’.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

@apharma
I might be wrong, because i’m usually not a zerg/GvG player, but from what i can see in WvW, warhorn and 5 shouts is not meta, because it will leave the ele way to vulnerable to focus/spike dmg (An issue that applies to druid to some extent). They usually run focus offhand and lightning flash, sometimes even armor of earth. For cleansing water you also have to give up powerful auras, and aurashare is imo the biggest advantage tempest has over druid.
Druids can bring healing spring, which doesn’t only cleanse conditions, but is overall a very strong (the best?) water field. They can easily selfblast it multiple times (d/f tempest has no water field, d/w only 1). Add Glyph of Alignment, Glyph of Equality and/or brownbear, soft cc remove with Vine Surge and you don’t have to rely on the delayed (but still potentially strong) cleanse from Seed of Life. Shouts with soldier rune would be an option too for druid (though not optimal imo).

I’m not saying, druid is better than tempest, but after messing arround a bit with support druid in pug zergs, i think, it is not as bad as many people claim. AOE stunbreaks, cleanses, blinds, projectile destruction, regen, fury, vigor, swiftness, stealth, superspeed, spotter, strong rezzing and of course tons of healing shouldn’t be underrated. It basically just lacks on demand stability/invuln and maybe a bigger radius on some skills.

It’s very clear you’re not a zerg player because you don’t realise the meta we are in. A group running high boon uptime can get very high uptime of resistance and stability while having permanent protection, swiftness, 25 might, fury, quickness (or close to 100%) and regen.

What this amounts to is a very mobile wrecking ball that cannot be stopped easily (indeed that is their weakness, getting stopped in boon removal AoE) as conditions don’t stick, CC does nothing and with the amount of damage reduction they take next to no damage. The guards also run minstrels last I heard with mercy runes for quick rez to minimise their only weakness. This is why everything you suggested for druid isn’t great, a lot of it is stationary and this meta is all about moving. In this regard healing spring is useless and you’re better with rejuvenating tides which is why I say it’s harder to self blast.

As for the ele, it depends what the group wants, aura share is incredibly strong sustain but lacks cleanses and is better on D/F. Some however do run full shouts and rely on guards for the stab to prevent being locked down and have stone heart for being focused. You ever tried killing an ele that only takes 54% of the damage you do after toughness calculations that cannot be crit? It’s requires focused boon removal and focused spike and even then chances are they won’t die. Ele is a healing and cleansing beast if other classes give it stab, a role it excels at more than any other ATM.

I’m well aware of the boon spam meta that is dominating zerg play (i don’t know, how meta builds exactly look like, but i got a roughly knowledge about what is used). And those boons allow a lot of facetanking and favour stacking more than ever. There is usually very little movement in zerg/guild fights (less in GvG, more in Pug zergs). I don’t have to take part in those to see people just clump together till something eventually dies.

Healing spring is very very strong in such scenarios. And why is it even an argument that druid can can’t selfblast Rejuvenating Tides – which is even without blasting the strongest mobile aoe healing skill in the game – when d/f tempest provides zero water fields? Tempest has bigger radius on some of his heals, which makes it easier to “hit” spread out players, but it is not more mobile than druid.
As for boons – druid can provide all that tempest can provide, with the exception from protection (theoretically druid could bring blue moa or stone spirit, but both doesn’t work that well so i don’t count them). But for perma prot everybody (including druid, who doesn’t lose the majority of cleanses when doing so) can just run with durability rune, which is actually meta for pretty much everything.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

I’m well aware of the boon spam meta that is dominating zerg play (i don’t know, how meta builds exactly look like, but i got a roughly knowledge about what is used). And those boons allow a lot of facetanking and favour stacking more than ever. There is usually very little movement in zerg/guild fights (less in GvG, more in Pug zergs). I don’t have to take part in those to see people just clump together till something eventually dies.

Healing spring is very very strong in such scenarios. And why is it even an argument that druid can can’t selfblast Rejuvenating Tides – which is even without blasting the strongest mobile aoe healing skill in the game – when d/f tempest provides zero water fields?
As for boons – druid can provide all that tempest can provide, with the exception from protection (theoretically druid could bring blue moa or stone spirit, but both doesn’t work that well so i don’t count them). But for perma prot everybody (including druid, who doesn’t lose the majority of cleanses when doing so) can just run with durability rune, which is actually meta for pretty much everything.

Except you ignore how most tempests run dagger and warhorn not focus which means not only do they have a travelling water Field but can also blast it with dagger 3 while letting others blast and can blast again with aftershock and sand squall. You also are ignoring how I say that the meta we are in relies on staying moving, staying still leaves you open to AoE boon removal from null field and well of corruption so they stay moving. Healing spring doesn’t work for that.

Please also stop bring up pets for using skills or giving boons, you know as well as anyone that they will be dead most of a fight. The stone spirit is especially silly to bring up.

I’m not saying that druid is rubbish, I’m saying that tempest is better as it can put out similar healing while also putting out more cleansing.

Guessing you’re NA if you’re seeing fairly stationary fights because I haven’t seen fights in EU stay in 600 range of the same place for a very long time.

apharma.3741:

Guessing you’re NA if you’re seeing fairly stationary fights because I haven’t seen fights in EU stay in 600 range of the same place for a very long time.

NA here: the only stationary fights are the ones where we kill everyone trying to push through us because they aren’t comped to properly push a choke. Any fight vs competent players is highly mobile.

Jeknar.6184:

But back on topic. I couldn’t care less about what people think I should be playing. If I want to play mesmer, I will play it, and the commander can go kitten himself if he want me to change profession. But I never bothered entering squads before and I continue to do so.

I find Zerg play so boring. I prefer to roam and did so either solo or with a friend until I found some like minded players and ended up joining a roaming guild.

I’ll uninstall the game before I build my guardian as a staff guard.

I follow some zergs around just to find some battles and then go attack the sides or the stragglers. Most of the time you can get on TS and not actually need to be in squad.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

When it comes to water fields and blasts, druid is better than d/x tempest.

Which is why our tempests usually run staff. D/wh has better water fields than druid, and staff tempests are superior for waters in every way. You also totally missed most of my point. I know that druids can drop a water and blast it. The point is that an ele can drop a water and the guardians can blast it without using any long cooldowns. Druid can’t do that.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

So auras and protection (which you get almost perma from durability rune alone if everybody runs it) and easier to use (but weaker) heals is all a tempest provides, that druid can’t. Pretty much what i said.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea that druid heals more over a long time period. With the aura heals and tempest traits, elementalist ends up being higher sustained healing. Druid is burst. You’re also just disregarding the effect of auras which is absurd. 10% dr from frost aura, massive stability strip from shocking aura, might support from fire aura, and even effortless projectile denial from magnetic aura. These are huge effects that druid has no access to. Druid also doesn’t provide party-wide vigor, which is obviously powerful.

I’m from EU and i see those stationary fights quite often. You can also watch pretty much any random GvG video on youtube to see those.

So you think, tempests wh5 (the only waterfield a d/w tempest provides) + blasts is better than druids RT? Lets see:

Water Globe provides 1 waterfield on 28 (35s cd) that heals for less than 4k (@~1400 hp) and which they can selfblast up to 3x (45s cd on aftershock!) for additional ~5k healing, if the field doesn’t travel straight into the enemy bomb or somewhere else where they don’t want to move. But let’s be generous and say, it provides ~ 10k*5 mobile aoe healing every 30s (=20k*5 per minute).
Druid can use Rejuvenating Tides 2x every 20-30s (lets say every 20s because we are generous again), for about 16k*5 healing without any blasts. That’s 48k*5 mobile healing per minute with only 1 skill and more than twice as much as tempest with wh5 + blasts.
You can’t tell me, WH 5 is better than RT or even one of druids other water fields.

I also don’t get, why staff tempest’s water fields are better than the druid’s. Ele has 1x 2s duration on 16s cd, 1x 6s duration on 36 cd. Druid has 1x 10s duration on 24s cd, 1x 5s duration on 20/25s cd (can be quickdraw’ed for 8s cd! if neccessary) and a mobile one with 8s cd (requires CA, so 2x every ~20-30s). With the right rotation, druid can keep up a water field permanently. Druid can also provide aoe vigor (~16s every 20s till pets die -but bears can actually survive for quite a while).

Tempest can maybe (too lazy to do the math) outcleanse druid, if it gives up aurashare and durability rune (which means less aoe auras, healing, protection, regen and vigor) and they obviously got the benefits from aoe auras and bigger radius on some heals, but it won’t outheal druid. With or without aurashare.

I really don’t understand why druid is compared to ele to be honest, since they provide different things. There are different situations where ele is better than druid, and situations where druid is better than ele.
Talking about healing while moving, a druid can jump on the frontline with staff #3 (4k AoE heal), than going CA form, calling “water” and pop CA#4 (2.3k heal per pulse AoE), then CA#3 (8k AoE), then CA#4 again, then Healing Gliph (9k AoE), and exit CA form giving stealth and superspeed aoe. So it’s not true at all that they can’t heal properly if your allies are moving. Also even druid can grant perma might-fury-swiftness-regen-vigor if traited. They can move downed corpses, and last but not least they buff allies damage better than ele (7% crit chance+10-20% damage aoE).

ELE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER THAN DRUID: if you take a 15k damage spike from enemy attacks (cuz protection or not you will take damage anyway), you prefer a druid that can actually refull your hp in 1.5 seconds or an ele that needs to cast every cooldown at your service, and only God know how much time is needed to cast all those skills?

Anyway, ele is certainly better in most scenarios.
I agree that is better to have more eles than druids, like is better to have more guardians than warriors, but hey, in a 50ppl zerg they can all coexist without any problem. Or not?
The difference is that ranger, engie and mesmer are not even considered, they are just left on a party all together without any chance to get a good gameplay experience like other classes can guarantee if you play them.

Totally agree that all classes should be able to offer something to a zerg, however i disagree that mesmers are not considered, imo Mesmers are one of the best classes to have in a zerg the boon uptime,Veils and Portal bombs can make a zerg incredibly hard to kill, quick access to stealth and catching other zergs by surprise, i have seen Engis starting to be used only to stop the pin sniping with the stealth gyro but not used for anything else

Fay.2357:

Burst healing has a place in WvW, and that place is on the regroups. However, it’s far more efficient to get that burst healing by dropping a single water and having all the guardians blast it with a 5 second cooldown than it is to make a druid burn a bunch of strong skills to accomplish that burst healing. Auramancer tempest is also far better at healing on the move than druid, since druid is quite tied to ground targeted effects they drop. It’s much more possible for an auramancer to heal throughout a push.

Auramancers also are providing heavy buffing that druid simply can’t provide. They provide huge uptime on vigor and substantial uptime on prot, which is necessary to jumpstart the mesmer’s boonshare as they don’t inherently produce either of those. This is on top of the other defensive/offensive benefits of the auras themselves that druid can’t supply.

And yet a melee build with what’s probably the best mobile water field that also grant protection to mitigate further damage while guards are blasting is one of the undesirables in the melee train…

Rant from one of EU commanders

Its about the probability of usefulness and max 50man squad size.

How squad works:
Your party in squad has priority in squad for heals/boons, after that other squad members, prioritizing closest one. So if you get low, just go to the commander tag and someone will heal you because no way everyone has their partymembers right next to them.
If you’re self stab reliant, you wont normally be high on priority list for party. Revs (mallyx/dwarf, if you run glint, you wont often be put in melee party), guards, necros get party first, then warriors/scrappers.

- 90% of rangers/druids run bow and stay back, they dont need squad. Also id take aurashare tempest over healdruid anytime just because auraeffects + condipressure + boons(druids cant relaly share boons)+ constant regen/soothing mist + heals + Immob spam is so strong, it isnt just about the Maximum heal amount. Kicked first from squad with thieves. If there is a druid running glyph of empowerment and grace of the land, ill put them with as many warriors as possible, but they need to communicate for it.

- Scrappers are somewhat okay, ill put a scrapper I know to my party, however most of them suck and dont run the superspeed spam on engage + waterfield or stealth commander. I normally keep scrappers in squad, but not normal engis.

- Mesmers are great, not as wet noodle boon bots but as Focus party players, gravity well, immobs, boonrip shatterbombs. They dont need a party, they can just roam around and come to tag when they need heals, normally kept in squad unless full and not dropping veil when asking for it on teamspeak, somehow 90% of mesmers dont join teamspeak.

These are my personal opinions. I wont kick scrappers, warriors, chronos (normal mesmers/engis yes), revs, guards, melee eles or reapers. Rest will be kicked after squad is filling up. Each commander has their own way.

Also blasting/calling waterfields is not meta anymore due to sustain/field/build changes, I dont know why having a waterfield is even an argument.

Let me explain this to everyone

Bring meta classes and builds to get squad invites. Doesn’t matter if you know how to play it or not, commanders will want you because even if you’re bad with it, you’re still providing more support than a personal build or roaming build.

There’s nothing wrong with playing what you like and playing how you like it but zerg play is team play and requires the teams co-operation. Which means doing what the commander asks of you.

It is not okay for a commander, or for others, to berate you for playing what you like but unfortunately it is the mentality that metas breed. You can ignore it or you can fight upstream.

You probably won’t get invited to a squad if you’re not a meta class/build but that doesn’t mean you can’t play effectively if you’re comfortable with what you play. Pay attention and don’t be a rally bot.

Every class offers something unique and should be accepted regardless but realistically, it would take far too long to evaluate individual skill levels and builds. It’s easier to accept only what’s most effective and to hope the person playing it can play it half decent.

Don’t be personally offended just because a commander doesn’t want you in their squad. Make yourself useful if that’s what you want to do and forget about trying to get in to the self-entitled cool kids squad. Better yet, squad/party up with friends and make a picker group, sniping off siders and backliners.

It all comes down to the fact that, unfortunately, some classes are better suited for zerg play than others. You can try as hard as you like to validate your special snowflake build but it will rarely grant you a space in the group if you’re not running something meta.

You do you and stop worrying about what others think. Don’t be a dead weight and contribute how you can, that’s all that matters.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

I’m from EU and i see those stationary fights quite often. You can also watch pretty much any random GvG video on youtube to see those.

So you think, tempests wh5 (the only waterfield a d/w tempest provides) + blasts is better than druids RT? Lets see:

Water Globe provides 1 waterfield on 28 (35s cd) that heals for less than 4k (@~1400 hp) and which they can selfblast up to 3x (45s cd on aftershock!) for additional ~5k healing, if the field doesn’t travel straight into the enemy bomb or somewhere else where they don’t want to move. But let’s be generous and say, it provides ~ 10k*5 mobile aoe healing every 30s (=20k*5 per minute).
Druid can use Rejuvenating Tides 2x every 20-30s (lets say every 20s because we are generous again), for about 16k*5 healing without any blasts. That’s 48k*5 mobile healing per minute with only 1 skill and more than twice as much as tempest with wh5 + blasts.
You can’t tell me, WH 5 is better than RT or even one of druids other water fields.

I also don’t get, why staff tempest’s water fields are better than the druid’s. Ele has 1x 2s duration on 16s cd, 1x 6s duration on 36 cd. Druid has 1x 10s duration on 24s cd, 1x 5s duration on 20/25s cd (can be quickdraw’ed for 8s cd! if neccessary) and a mobile one with 8s cd (requires CA, so 2x every ~20-30s). With the right rotation, druid can keep up a water field permanently. Druid can also provide aoe vigor (~16s every 20s till pets die -but bears can actually survive for quite a while).

Tempest can maybe (too lazy to do the math) outcleanse druid, if it gives up aurashare and durability rune (which means less aoe auras, healing, protection, regen and vigor) and they obviously got the benefits from aoe auras and bigger radius on some heals, but it won’t outheal druid. With or without aurashare.

Let’s see, at what point did I say it outheals druid?

Read a bit and you will see I say that it outcleanses druid while putting out similar healing. This is my favourite part where I quote myself:

apharma.3741:

I’m not saying that druid is rubbish, I’m saying that tempest is better as it can put out similar healing while also putting out more cleansing.

I know full well a druid can outheal tempests, I also know that their cleanses aren’t great and even a trooper rune ele will usually outcleanse a druid. Ele also gives high amounts of protection, regen and vigor it’s worth mentioning the regen ticks for nearly 300hp/s and then you have soothing mists on top that bumps it up to 400.

Once again you keep bringing up pets and those static water fields from healing spring for regen, vigor etc. The fights are not static that I see unless you count a bunch of Germans sitting in a tower building seige all day.

@Pyro thanks for confirming NA is also mobile fights, I guess the meta is similar access the board.

You didn’t say, tempest outheals druid, true, but Fay did. And tempest only outcleanses druid when it runs a subpar build, with significantly less healing than druid, and we assume, 2/3 of druids cleanses do nothing.
And tempest does not provide more or stronger aoe regen than druid. A single! tick from healing spring provides more regen than an aura. 2 seconds inside HS can already provide near perma regen – for more than just 5 players. And if we still assume, HS is useless, we can just take traited shouts instead – each providing more than 2x as much regen as an aura. And the regen can tick for 450+/s (Pretty funny that you think, 300/s is worth mentioning. Yes i know, more than 300/s is possible on tempest too. Druid got better/more access to outgoing healing modifier, so there will remain a small advantage).
I don’t really understand this discussion. There are obviously enough reasons to take tempest over druid, so why do you want to find even more?

UmbraNoctis.1907:

You didn’t say, tempest outheals druid, true, but Fay did. And tempest only outcleanses druid when it runs a subpar build, with significantly less healing than druid, and we assume, 2/3 of druids cleanses do nothing.
And tempest does not provide more or stronger aoe regen than druid. A single! tick from healing spring provides more regen than an aura. 2 seconds inside HS can already provide near perma regen – for more than just 5 players. And if we still assume, HS is useless, we can just take traited shouts instead – each providing more than 2x as much regen as an aura. And the regen can tick for 450+/s (Pretty funny that you think, 300/s is worth mentioning. Yes i know, more than 300/s is possible on tempest too. Druid got better/more access to outgoing healing modifier, so there will remain a small advantage).
I don’t really understand this discussion. There are obviously enough reasons to take tempest over druid, so why do you want to find even more?

I’m not, just explaining why druid is inferior as a pick than ele which is what the entire discussion was about was it not?

It’s you that’s trying to convince everyone druid is a great pick over ele which it isn’t at least that’s what most of your posts infer.

I never said, druid is better in general. I was just wondering about some of the reasons people brough up (heals/cleanses/waterfields).

Arguing that Driuds, mesmers, rangers and thiefs have builds that are beneficial to the zerg doesn’t change the fact that 99.9% of them don’t run those builds and don’t have the gear to run them either. Thats why they aren’t wanted.

The reason is these classes don’t run the builds, that you guys said they can.

Another problem is just redundancy. Stealth/breaking target is awesome, but do you really need 10 people doing it? So even in theory this guild needed a pocket druid celestial shadow or something of the sort, they’d probably only allow 1-2 to do that duty, and not place it at the hands of some random. Most of the mediums do not scale well as a result, and while warrior’s not in a good spot, they have banners which is hard to argue against.

On the other hand, you’d be hard pressed to answer why the group wouldn’t need another guardian or rev as they are pretty much universally useful.

The moment I hear someone just talk about how much they heal (and nothing else), I think it’s a good time to stop listening because there’s a lot more than that when it comes to keeping others up and running [read: cleanses]

And again, I am definitely not saying that you can’t be useful on whatever you play, but just understand that people have very good reasons for doing what they do. Of course, this doesn’t justify screaming at people for taking up their precious queue space, but I think this is another topic.

Those three classes have miserable aoe.

Mesmer has no sustained damage whatsoever, it has the lowest autoattack damage in the game and its burst is tied to clones which die immediately in a zerg.

What did you expect?

Next you’re gonna tell me thief is a great frontline class. Until you get pinballed to death because outside guardians you have no good access to stability or immunities.

Hell, even playing as a revenant is miserable if you don’t get placed with guardians to feed you stability.

Zergplay is summarized by three classes:

-Guardian frontline
-Staff ele backline
-necro well/epi bomb group (and you still want only a few necros, since they’re only effective with epidemic and dropping wells, and they’re ineffective compared to ele after that).

Those 3 are supplemented by a few revenants for resistance, a mesmer or two for moa pin sniping/portal/invis, and a few warriors for banners.

There are two core problems to the matter:
1. People dont bother to even remotely inform themselves about those classes they see as bad or unworthy. Hence all the objectively wrong statements about druid in this threat that can be refuted by simply looking into the wiki.

2. The good builds for those classes are not exactly public knowledge, mostly not unified and often require more effort/class knowledge to be actually good. As a rule of thumb, most pugs have neither.
I play main druid in our fight oriented guild basically since HoT and when we are sometimes running blue and I manage the parties as lieutenant, even I, who knows about the effectiveness of druid healers first hand, will usually put druids in the trash party. If you dont know the people, you are not going to spend several fights to find out if they are one of the maybe 2% who dont play a trash build and are decent players. In comparison, a bad player with a cookie cutter guard build will still be useful.

I know it hurts to be rejected because of those reasons, but you cant put all the blame on the commander. Accept it and get a guild.

Just to adress some of the riddiculous statements in this thread:
1. We did the math, we did testing with dps meters: Healing druid clearly outheals support tempests by a large margin. Druid’s burst heal does not shine just at regroups, its the exact opposite! You push with the tag and provide burst heal during the clash/counterbomb.

2. It might be that over a period of time ele theoretically outcleanses druid. But ele does not have one skill that removes ALL conditions from your party, which can be super useful to counter a condi spike if you get caught in it. Also hitting seeds of life in avatar form on a mobile team is still very much possible if the commander does not chaotically change directions every second.

3. Most ppl dont know it, if you set your pet to passive it will actually survive in a lot of fights.

4. The comparison between ele and druids is useless as both fullfill different roles. 2 eles + 1 druid / 2 druids + 1 ele is atm always superior to 3 eles or 3 druids. You want all of the following: Auras, boons, grace of the land, spotter – not just two.