Guild Wars 2

I’m not much on long posts, so this may end up short

so, basically, a lot of people (not going to say a majority or anything, I don’t know the numbers) don’t seem 100% satisfied with the current form of astral generation. That got me thinking of what I thought druid might have back when I first heard of it. With that in mind, here’s a few suggestions (perhaps more-so food-for-thought than a suggestion) of changes to astral force/astral form.

Firstly, I think a large part of why astral form is tied behind staff is because it deals lots of small numbers very quickly, in the form of heals and damage. I think it would open up more diversity, while not making a specific build OP, if astral force generated based on the AMOUNT of healing/damage you did, not just the amount of times you deal damage/heal.
For that to work, I think we’d need to get rid of the percentage of astral form, and replace it with a static number (e.g. when fully charged, you have “1000 astral power”). then, instead of damage filling 1% of the astral force bar per hit, say, 10% of all damage, and 20% of all healing is converted into astral power.
I think this would open up more diversity, by allowing you to run something like greatsword, and you can still generate astral force at a decent rate, as long as you keep putting out good damage.

This is more 2 suggestions in one, but I think it might be neat for astral force to function like death shroud, giving us a second healthbar (albeit definitely a lot smaller than deathshroud). This would allow more counterplay in PvP by focusing the druid while they’re in astral form, forcing them out of it and nullifying their heals.

Along with that, I also think it could be neat to have astral form not naturally decay, but have an “upkeep” cost on the skills. for example, the #4 skill could burn through ~30% of the astral bar, where-as the #1 skill only uses 5% of the astral form bar. I’m honestly not sure what practicality this has… I just think it could be fun!

I have no clue how viable these suggestions could be, or if they’ve been suggested before. Consider this more of just ideas to get the ball rolling on how astral form could be improved (because currently, it’s good in specific builds, but I think we could easily open up more diversity without it being OP. especially if astral form scaled even better with healing power.)

CA form is like necro’s death shroud in that it requires you to use certain skills(for us it’s more universal – any type of heal or damage), but for us we don’t have a second health bar, cannot go into CA form unless we have 100% AF filled and the AF bar is reduced to half when we go out prematurely.
Though I must admit trying to compare an elite mechanism to that of another class’s main profession skill is a bit reaching.

At this point, now that Astral force has CD I wonder if we really need to fill it up with heals/attacks just to use it. I would like to ask for either a natural regen of AF bar or just get rid of AF bar and let us pop into CA form every 10-15sec and re-adjust the depletion of the AF bar to 10/20% per sec when in CA form to balance it out.

Current method works sure, but feels rather awkward by requiring correct positioning to use staff and filling AF up with damage takes too long :

Tested on 1 mob:
Greatsword : 1m 35s avg.
Sword : 1m 10s avg.
Longbow : 1m 2s avg.
Staff with pet in between beam : 17s avg.

All that to use CA skills for 15 seconds. Is it not a bit too unreliable?

If allowing access to CA form every 10-15sec without doing anything is too rewarding, then maybe adjust the digits around a little.
I do realize that they probably made this system in place so that staff is the weapon set that they had in mind to allow better and quicker access to AF generation for whatever reason they had. But honestly, I would use staff with or without CA form(not that I will, I love CA form) because it’s a very good weapon it self.
I think having a trait line in Druid should alone suffice for unrestricted access to CA form with just cool down to regulate it and if that is too rewarding, adjust the cool down/degen/heal numbers a little.