The glyphs all seem awfully undertuned.
General issue: 300 range based around the ranger is pitifully small, and doesn’t really align well with staff usage, where you want people to be in between your beam for healing so you’ll try to modify the distance.
Consider making glyphs ground targeted
Glyph of Rejuvenation: The heal does less healing than we heal as one, or any other heal for that matter. For what? 1.1k base ally healing? You get far more out of healing spring by blasting the water field for your allies.
The glyph heal will become like the water spirit, completely outclassed in group healing by any water field, not just group heals. As such, it will not be used, since it has a cooldown of 24 seconds as well, close to healing spring and it doesn’t even remove conditions.
Glyph of Alignment: 3 second cripple and weakness are too short to make it a worthwhile utility, and the damage is nothing to write home about. It’s basically less than an autoattack. The breakbar also heavily diminishes the value of this glyph, basically all bosses will be immune to this glyph and 3 seconds of cripple and weakness aren’t something of note for the purpose of damaging a break bar. Might as well use hard CC.
Glyph of Equality: This should be a stunbreak baseline for the ranger when out of celestial form. No Glyphs are stunbreaks, why? Having to be in celestial form to deal with stuns on the druid toolkit is impractical.
The Celestial variant of this glyph in addition to the stunbreak should grant stability or protection. The glyphs in general feel bareboned and low impact. They won’t compete for group utility with spirits.
Glyph of Empowerment : The weakest of the glyphs. 10% for 6 seconds out of 20 sec cd translates to a 3% damage boost to people within 300 range. It’s pitiful and not even half the bonus of frost spirit, it won’t be worth a utility slot.
You either need to bump the percentage considerably, leading to worries about spikes in PvP (which I doubt you’ll split balance for PvE).
My suggestion would instead be bumping the percentage up to 15% and make it a 15 second duration, increasing the uptime of the glyph and giving it more effective boost than frost spirit given the glyph’s 300 range limitation.
Glyph of the Tides: Swap the effects between forms, why put the offensive (pull) aspect on a form with zero offensive tools? Celestial Form is a defensive tool with no offensive play whatsoever.
Moreover, add a 2 second chill to the pull, and a 4 second cripple to the knockback.
The effectiveness of the pull/knockback at 300 glyph range is still dubious, might have to increase it.
Traits
Minors: The most problematic of the tree, these minors basically mean you use the staff or you don’t benefit at all outside celestial form, heavily penalizing the use of offensive weapons that are not staff. No other weapons heal, so the traits become obsolete when using a greatsword or longbow.
Live Vicariously
The first minor should convert damage to healing and healing to damage. Each heal you give to an ally damages foes for x nearby them, and any damage you do heals allies for x. This will support a wider variety of ranger weapons and builds.
Natural Mender
Change it to also give outgoing damage whenever you use a healing skill. Better yet, instead of just based on healing, tie it to also giving allies boons. This will synergize with clarion bond, potentially shouts, warhorn, and boons your pet applies.
Adept
Druidic Clarity: Make it so when you enter celestial form, it breaks stuns off the ranger as well.
Cultivated Synergy: Apply 4 seconds of vigor as well.
Primal Echoes: The active effect is no good. You won’t be switching to staff in melee range most of the time, as the swords are far better defensively, so the daze will be wasted when you most need it.
Just give 1 second of vigor when using a staff skill to the druid and allies affected by said skill. Or something else, just not some niche 300 range daze tied to a weapon swap, it’s too weak in PvE where weapons are camped far longer than in PvP.
Master
Celestial Shadow: Increase to 4-5 seconds. Celestial Form usage and exit is too infrequent for this trait to really be worth it.
Grandmaster
Ancient Seed: Another grandmaster that will be neutered by breakbars on bosses. You need to change this into something else that is of any worth in PvE.
Staff
I can kill things with retaliation faster than I can kill with this staff. It needs flat out sizable buffs on all its skills.
You are turning this into the guardian staff, except worse, a staff with some small healing at the complete expense of any damage potential. You are pigeonholing this class into a cleric healbot set, something that will make many of us who rolled rangers unhappy.
Besides all the skills doing pretty horrid damage, Vine Surge also has an immobilize that lasts way too little. Should bump it to 3 seconds.
The only good skill on this weapon is skill 5.
Skill 2 on the staff is particularly surprising, because you would expect it’d pulse damage like the orb pulses healing when it passes around allies. Not so, just one pititful damage pulse.
- For reference, I am in full ascended zerker stats, armor, accessories, weapons, with scholar runes. Staff 1 was doing ~1k damage, staff 2 1,2k damage. This is unacceptable, it’s a fraction of our already low sword and greatsword autoattack damage**
Closing thoughts on the class in general
Highly disappointing. The druid is a one dimensional healbot with no damage synergy and weak offensive options.
This means if you take a zerker stat or traitlines like marksmanship or skirmishing or even beastmastery, this line won’t complement them or any of your weapons for that matter.
The druid traitline and the staff don’t mix well at all with a PvE offensive ranger. Since you’ll always want a melee weapon for damage output, the staff competes with longbow. And boy, what little healing you gain from the staff is not worth the massive damage and CC loss, not to mention cleave from the longbow.
Druid feels like a forced bland clerics stats healbot meant to tickle opponents while building celestial force, mainly through heals since the percentage from damage is so low, to spam some more healing on allies at the complete cost of your DPS since celestial form doesn’t even have any damage.
What’s more, this spec may see the light of day in pvp, but in PvE it gimps your group’s damage output for healing that isn’t even necessary because in PvE all a group needs to heal up to full is to lay down a water field and with the amount of blasts ele/guardian/warrior/engineer/thief have, a group is healed back to full immediately without needing a ranger to kitten his damage completely by going druid.
Time to stow away my staff and shelf my ranger for the time being until changes are made. This specialization has pushed people who rolled rangers to play as damage dealers and offensive support away by being a bland healbot spec.
The list of druid skills and traits can be summarized by “this skill heals and removes conditions, this other skill heals and removes conditions, and this skill also heals and removes conditions”.
. Token dmg on autoattack is good enough