Guild Wars 2

The new way of generating Astral Force is just awful… It generates way too slow and degenerate way way way too fast. It matters not whether the cooldown is 10sec or longer, you will need much longer, and a lot more juggling, to get it filled in the first place. I prefer the BW3 mechanic.

I ran around the new zones in my Druid; mostly in small group. I have tried every whichever way to increase the generation of Astral Force. But I can never have Celestial Avatar ready when needed. Then may as well not have a healing Druid at all. In fact, the current incarnation of Druid completely defeat the purpose of playing one in the first place: why having a healer when in the moment of need it will always fail to perform…

The current state of Druid is like having a Top Gear Jeremy Clarkson designed ambulance that is overly off the mark and constantly stuck in traffic whenever it is needed.

The hurdle of achieving the Celestial Avatar is too high and the slope of come down is unnecessarily too steep. Please at the very least revert back to the BW3 mechanic in terms of Astral Force and Celestial Avatar.

Is the rate of generation of Astral Force scales with Healing stat? Or, if not, should it be?

Swagger.1459:

My experience last night..

Zap enemy with staff 1 and strafe to hit team, while team is running all over moving and dodging attacks. Crappy amount of healing

Staff 2 radius sucks and barely does any noticeable healing. Players standing that close to enemies were getting eaten alive anyway.

You can’t even tell who needs healing so you spam stuff which leads me to staff 3…

Staff 3 was to jump in to enemy group, hit CA form, spam stuff… because two of five staff abilities, plus glyphs if you have them, plus the new Druid designed self/team heal are all about needing to stack to be useful… So jump into fray, spam stuff and dodge roll out. Rinse and repeat ad nauseam.

Staff 4 is a joke because you are just using it to use it. Players can’t even tell if there are conditions on others so just spam it. The immobilize is negligible and you have to aim it instead of having it like other “snap target” ranged attacks.

Staff 5 is a waste in this red circle meta…

No stability meant at times I’m getting knocked around while trying to do this “role”.

Some enemy models are big so the point radius for ranged aoe heal on staff 2 and CA 1,2 seemed useless. Plus I players are moving around like chicken with their heads off so it was “drop heal and hope for the best”.

Yes, in the ideal set up against an AI, and if your team is stacked up and not needing to dodge damage, then the Druid can do its job. As is, though, players are running all over dodging red circles, while avoiding melee hits too, we can’t see health bar and we are also needing to bob and weave to keep ourselves alive…

So basically this is spam useless staff skills. CA is spam what you can because of timers. Waste of time because it’s not about skill, it’s about spam stuff that has a negligible effect in “real” combat setting.

Want to fix staff? See that necro staff? See the radius on necro staff??? There ya go… Make it a medium damage and medium heal set up.

Want to fix CA??? Make it a stance and adjust powers to reflect it, adjust radius of skills, design it so you can stay in form until downed/killed… This would be the high heal and low damage condition role.

Listen, I don’t mean to be negative, but I’ve gamed a long time, and while I’m not near the best “twitchy” player around, I spent many years playing heal, support and disruption in a game called city of heroes… Gameplay was 10 times faster, “professions” and powers were designed far better, play and counter play was far superior… and surprising enough they had capes (you guys can’t even do that in 2015 with superior tech) lol…

Here it’s auto attack, stack-spam-hope for the best… All while we are not given the right UI tools like simple health bars and your aoe targeting system, for both players and enemies, sucks…

Very early on I brought this up when I started here because I came from a vastly superior combat game during the WoW era, and we are basically given this modern “junk” and UI to play.

Seriously, you guys need to sit down and see where a game like city of heroes got it right with powers, combat, stealth, healing, support, build flexibility and customization, roles, targeting, conditions…

There is a reason that players call gw2… Dodge wars, condition wars, Gwen wars…

Sorry, but I’m tossing hundreds of dollars at this game and it’s been such a waste.

On Staff 1: the beam is soooo narrow to be effective in generating AF via healing; and AF generating via attacking is abysmal anyway. How about making Staff 1 a ground target AoE instead? In that case, it can at least cover a few more enemies, or if necessary allies. In that case, it will make the duo nature of Staff 1 more effective.

I think they had it a lot closer to where it should have been in BWE3.

Now you all know how Warriors feel.

Bwe3 I averaged 600k+ healing

now struggling to get to 200k healing per match running clerics and dwayna runes

It is almost impossible to be able to build up enough to use it in almost all fights. Thank you anet for nerfing druid to the ground in all your glorious “wisdom”.

Thuggernaut.1250:

Now you all know how Warriors feel.

Hah! Warriors actually get their adrenaline full before the fight is over. In fact, sometimes they can fill their adrenaline bar more than once in a single fight. On the other hand, a druid without a staff might get CAF once or twice in an entire PvP match.

I’ve been enjoying playing a Druid exploring Verdant Brink and after getting nearly 100% map completion and participating in most of the outposts’ events I think I can draw some conclusions.

Celestial Avatar Form is a moment of glory where you throw out a huge burst of healing, cleansing and area Crowd Control. The biggest issue is that by design, that moment, where your explosion of support matters, can’t happen. The best use I found for CAF was to save it for a CC burst when the boss’ break bars became available. Any other usage of the form was dropping in for no real purpose or glaring angrily at an empty bar that I was wishing was available. CAF overall is kind of bland, but each skill has its purpose and conveys the point of CAF, though I mostly found myself hopping into the form to fire a Lunar Impact, channel a Natural Convergence then one more Impact and machine gun heals as necessary.

The real problem is Astral Force itself. If you leave combat for even a moment, which is very easy in PvE, then you lose the majority if not all of your AF. This is why CAF can never have the “I am space Jesus, saviour of my team” moment, to enter CAF you must survive a fight for an insane duration if you aren’t using staff and a still pretty hefty duration if you are, by which point, does your team really need more survivability? That’s the key question really, why would I ever want to become the ultimate defensive support when we already have the defensive prowess to outlast most burst rotations twice over? The game would have to be balanced on a razor edge to result in a fight that is deadly enough to justify CAF but not deadly enough to make it impossible to reach if all that was done now is number tweaking. I can’t imagine CAF ever being useful in PvP with its current implementation.

Making it so your AF build up doesn’t matter by allowing you to use it without max AF is not the correct choice. Neither does gating it behind a cooldown only, as that would make it just as useable by non-dedicated healers. AF should be kept when you leave combat and maybe if you’re downed. That would make CAF in its current form far more useful in PvP.

Long story short. CAF is a big moment skill. That moment is a declaration that for the next few seconds, nobody dies. If you’re in combat long enough to reach that moment, most of the time nobody was going to die anyway.

I absolutely love how many people were praising Irenio and hailing him as being the saviour of the Ranger. No comments yet about this bullkitten and I just love how they didn’t tell us all of the changes until release. The Druid is kitten now.

Not going to add much, I think most of what I feel has already been said. If you don’t fix the Celestial Avatar and how to gain astral force (with or without staff), I won’t be playing druid again.

Ever.

(And I had made a new ascended armor set w/ runes, new weapons and gotten new trinkets. Looks like that was all for nothing if druid stays as it is now.)

HotHit.6783:

Making it so your AF build up doesn’t matter by allowing you to use it without max AF is not the correct choice. Neither does gating it behind a cooldown only, as that would make it just as useable by non-dedicated healers. AF should be kept when you leave combat and maybe if you’re downed. That would make CAF in its current form far more useful in PvP.

Long story short. CAF is a big moment skill. That moment is a declaration that for the next few seconds, nobody dies. If you’re in combat long enough to reach that moment, most of the time nobody was going to die anyway.

It should be usable by non-dedicated healers. No other elite spec is shoehorned into a specific role that they have to play, yet you’re asking for this to be the case for druids? Foul!

I cant stand Astral Force gain! Irenio! CAF needs to be more like death shroud!

SirWarriant.2319:

I absolutely love how many people were praising Irenio and hailing him as being the saviour of the Ranger. No comments yet about this bullkitten and I just love how they didn’t tell us all of the changes until release. The Druid is kitten now.

Just didn’t want to go down the “I told you so” route, seen enough over the last 3 years.

i wasn’t wrong i didn’t want to say anything but….. I TOLD YOU SO.

For the astral to build up Irenio could use what i suggested long ago:

• Just simply make any outgoing attack to heal for a small amount the allies around your target like the water sigil and make the Astral to build up just with healing like in BWE3.

I can’t understand why Irenio does not make it happen. Although it seems he likes a lot of countdowns. Not fair when the Ranger is the only one affected by this disease.

For the clunky Astral form he could use my suggestion:

• Astral form is drained ONLY by skill casting. Longer the CD bigger the consumption.

But again, his last comment was the 19th. Let’s see if he hasn’t taken a long holidays from the forum.

PS: have any of you tried to build up caf underwater? I can kill the megalodon champ in Arah before it get 100%

My ONLY complaint about our avatar state is that in any 1v1 my celestial force isn’t built up until the fight is over. Now in team scenarios I don’t have this problem, AT ALL.

I don’t mind there being a CD and the force being difficult to generate, because I never have the trouble of being able to enter the form while I both have force AND it’s ok CD.

Also, I’ve found that LB, Sword/WH, and Axe/Axe generate plenty of astral force on their own, it’s not as much as staff, but it shouldn’t be, staff needs some sort of incentive to be taken, because it’s sure as kitten not the damage or the healing it does on its own.

Played Druid for a while, shrugged and laughed at having healing gated and not on demand. Which by it’s very nature is how healing is needed.

Went back to support guard. At least i know when people ask for healing i have at my disposal.
Empower for 2.5k
Receive the Light 1.5k/pulse – 5 pulses
Virtue of Resolve 2.3k
Shield of Absorption 1.5k
Selfless Daring 1k

Not gated into waiting another 10 seconds to build up AF. If players need healing they need it now, not in 10 seconds. Not to mention in any sort of small man scenario the fight is generally over by the time your avatar becomes available. I mean it’s already got a 10 second timer it should not decay outside of combat if it is going to build so slowly to begin with.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

HotHit.6783:

Making it so your AF build up doesn’t matter by allowing you to use it without max AF is not the correct choice. Neither does gating it behind a cooldown only, as that would make it just as useable by non-dedicated healers. AF should be kept when you leave combat and maybe if you’re downed. That would make CAF in its current form far more useful in PvP.

Long story short. CAF is a big moment skill. That moment is a declaration that for the next few seconds, nobody dies. If you’re in combat long enough to reach that moment, most of the time nobody was going to die anyway.

It should be usable by non-dedicated healers. No other elite spec is shoehorned into a specific role that they have to play, yet you’re asking for this to be the case for druids? Foul!

Agree, totally. Its totally useless right now because not even dedicated healers can use it effectively.

It’s not good enough to be gated so hard or be a big moment skill.

Why shouldn’t non-dedicated healers have access to CAF? They would not have the same healing capacity because of the lack of healing power. What about hybrid builds for off-healing? Why should they be forced into Staff use?

It’s all just mindless gating. A plain 10s CD would be ample restriction on the form.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

HotHit.6783:

Making it so your AF build up doesn’t matter by allowing you to use it without max AF is not the correct choice. Neither does gating it behind a cooldown only, as that would make it just as useable by non-dedicated healers. AF should be kept when you leave combat and maybe if you’re downed. That would make CAF in its current form far more useful in PvP.

Long story short. CAF is a big moment skill. That moment is a declaration that for the next few seconds, nobody dies. If you’re in combat long enough to reach that moment, most of the time nobody was going to die anyway.

It should be usable by non-dedicated healers. No other elite spec is shoehorned into a specific role that they have to play, yet you’re asking for this to be the case for druids? Foul!

Considering the Dev response to us pointing that out was basically telling us not to buy the expansion, Druid is forever screwed.

Zatoichi.1049:

i am very sad to wake up to this news. I am downloading now in hopes to get right on druid to test things, now I wont even bother with it… ok lets make a revenant

There isn’t even any reason to creating a Revenant. Unless of course you’re keen on going through the 1-80 level grind again, in addition to the 400 point Elite Spec grind, in addition to the gear grind (most likely manifesting in the form of a gold-sink), in addition to the mastery grind, in addition to-

…you get the point.

I’m calling it: CTD

Someone call the nurse.

While I understand the thoughts and feelings shared by the “QQ” side of the ranger community, I wanted to speak for the small community of new Druids, many of whom are aghast at our forums, or who are simply having too much fun in game to come to the forums in the first place.

Let me say that,while I agree there could be a bit of tweaking, I am cool with how Druid currently works.

-I am a support healer
-I spend much of the fight supporting while throwing around medium-sized heals. (A mixture of abilities/traits/awesomeness allow me to have several small heals ticking across the group at all times). ((This also goes a long way toward my AF generation))
-Then, if/when the poop hits the fan, Celestral Avatar comes out and “No one dies”.

I guess what made Druid “ok” by me was the preconception of what it was going to be. To me, Druid is a support/healer that can, when push comes to shove, drop into Celestial Avatar and really pump out major burst heals.

I could see how people that wanted to play their Druid as a pew-pew Ranger, and then pop into CA to be Jesus the healer, would be disappointed.

In zerg vs zerg i don t have any problems with CA…every 10 sec u can heal ur allies very well.

In 1v1, playing heal pow/ condi with traps, need -25 – 30 sec to full up AF and with our normal healing skill, i think it s fair. AF regen better then Beta (1/4 vs 3/4 per hit).

If AF regen quicly, in 1v1, Druid become immortal… normal Heal Skill plus 1000000k heal CA in few sec, every…5 sec, 10 sec?
With my spec, if i can enter in CA every few sec, nobody can kill me in 1v1

Ps. sry for my english

ski.4927:

While I understand the thoughts and feelings shared by the “QQ” side of the ranger community, I wanted to speak for the small community of new Druids, many of whom are aghast at our forums, or who are simply having too much fun in game to come to the forums in the first place.

Let me say that,while I agree there could be a bit of tweaking, I am cool with how Druid currently works.

-I am a support healer
-I spend much of the fight supporting while throwing around medium-sized heals. (A mixture of abilities/traits/awesomeness allow me to have several small heals ticking across the group at all times). ((This also goes a long way toward my AF generation))
-Then, if/when the poop hits the fan, Celestral Avatar comes out and “No one dies”.

I guess what made Druid “ok” by me was the preconception of what it was going to be. To me, Druid is a support/healer that can, when push comes to shove, drop into Celestial Avatar and really pump out major burst heals.

I could see how people that wanted to play their Druid as a pew-pew Ranger, and then pop into CA to be Jesus the healer, would be disappointed.

People want to play an elite specialization that connects with the other specializations. Instead we got a disjointed spec from the rest of the class which got over nerfed as usual and people are kinda edgy for that.

Q: Would it be a better alternative, to have the skills use a set amount of AF, instead of the decay?
If so, you could stay in the form for as long as you want, until you had used up all the energy and wouldn’t feel the rush to spam skills as fast as possible to actually use the energy you built up. As it is now, many times it feels so rushed that you just spam heals all over the place, there’s simply no time to make tactical decisions.

ski.4927:

While I understand the thoughts and feelings shared by the “QQ” side of the ranger community, I wanted to speak for the small community of new Druids, many of whom are aghast at our forums, or who are simply having too much fun in game to come to the forums in the first place.

Let me say that,while I agree there could be a bit of tweaking, I am cool with how Druid currently works.

-I am a support healer
-I spend much of the fight supporting while throwing around medium-sized heals. (A mixture of abilities/traits/awesomeness allow me to have several small heals ticking across the group at all times). ((This also goes a long way toward my AF generation))
-Then, if/when the poop hits the fan, Celestral Avatar comes out and “No one dies”.

I guess what made Druid “ok” by me was the preconception of what it was going to be. To me, Druid is a support/healer that can, when push comes to shove, drop into Celestial Avatar and really pump out major burst heals.

I could see how people that wanted to play their Druid as a pew-pew Ranger, and then pop into CA to be Jesus the healer, would be disappointed.

That is cool and all, but try using it without a staff or TU and let us know how you go.

Most of us are talking about PvP, btw, not PvE. Although, unless you are in a group, its still largely useless in PvE as well.

CAF should not be gated behind Staff or multiple TU uses, it’s as simple as that.

People are QQing because Druid is the only ESpec that is required to use the new weapon in order to use the new mechanic.

We want CAF skills to scale with Healing Power really well so that you cannot play DPS and jump into CAF for massive heals, but we also want access to CAF to remove conditions, CC and Heal.

It would actually be so great if it just had a 10s CD. How would it be any different to Ele having water attunement every 8s? It would heal better, sure, but that’s because its an ESpec. The heals on CAF should scale with Healing Power properly, which currently, they do not. The base still needs to be dropped and the scaling increased dramatically.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Q: Would it be a better alternative, to have the skills use a set amount of AF, instead of the decay?
If so, you could stay in the form for as long as you want, until you had used up all the energy and wouldn’t feel the rush to spam skills as fast as possible to actually use the energy you built up. As it is now, many times it feels so rushed that you just spam heals all over the place, there’s simply no time to make tactical decisions.

That is a good idea.

Roy doesn’t play ranger, doesn’t like rangers, doesn’t know how to kill them on his revenant. That’s why druids got overnerfed. Cause Roy is not Impartial, neutral, objective. He knew kitten wel it’s an overnerf. I think Irenio’s sleep was bad the last nights, cause his hard work got shafted, by one higher up decision. Roy basically destroyed Irenio’s Druid, with a few number crunchings. I normally don’t judge people, but there’s about 99,99999999% probability, this is what happens, all the signs are there, since start of game. If one person, who clearly doesn’t play enough professions to have a balance grasp does this, then we have to speak up about it.

Mike O’brien, please set things straight. It’s not correct for one employee to take all the fun away from expansion content, that promised to look good in beta/twitch. Not that this is gonna happen but one can hope. Roy is on a hugely wrong, biased, unbalanced path. More then ever.

is it possible to get money back for HoT?

played for 3 years my ranger and can’t handle these nonsense from devs… not anymore.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Roy doesn’t play ranger, doesn’t like rangers, doesn’t know how to kill them on his revenant. That’s why druids got overnerfed. Cause Roy is not Impartial, neutral, objective. He knew kitten wel it’s an overnerf. I think Irenio’s sleep was bad the last nights, cause his hard work got shafted, by one higher up decision. Roy basically destroyed Irenio’s Druid, with a few number crunchings. I normally don’t judge people, but there’s about 99,99999999% probability, this is what happens, all the signs are there, since start of game. If one person, who clearly doesn’t play enough professions to have a balance grasp does this, then we have to speak up about it.

Mike O’brien, please set things straight. It’s not correct for one employee to take all the fun away from expansion content, that promised to look good in beta/twitch. Not that this is gonna happen but one can hope. Roy is on a hugely wrong, biased, unbalanced path. More then ever.

As much as I too love to hate on Roy as the enemy of all Ranger kind, do you have any proof that Roy is behind the gutting of Druid?

Guys, its just stupid to go blaming Roy for Druid because of one truthful comment on Twitter.

Nobody knows anything, so stop pointing the finger please.

For some who were championing Irenio I can see why it would be hard to swallow some of that now we’ve seen nerfs. Shifting the blame to Roy will make it easier for those people who feel justified in their support of Irenio.

Possibly?

Remember that this is still basically beta for Druid, it has nowhere near the same testing or time spent tweaking it as the other specs, so not all is vain. Things will change, guaranteed. Keep posting constructive feedback.

I stand by my thoughts that AF can simply be removed and it would make the Druid miles better, as long as they make the heals scale better with healing power and reduce the base heals more, it will not be OP.

But, if it must stay, then what if Druid gained AF per second while in combat and outside of CAF, regardless of what you were doing, so that there would be a set maximum amount of time to charge it. But, you could then charge it far faster with attacks and heals. And AF did not degenerate OOC for at least 20s?