Guild Wars 2

General
Targeting: It would be great if support healing skills would allow ally tagets.

Staff
Support weapon. We should be able to cast Solar beam and Astral Whisp on allies and not only on enemies.

Solar Beam: Feels fine aoe animation could be increased so it is more visible
Astral Whisp: Whisp could move much faster to the target
Ansestracal Grace: I like it, favorite skill on the staff so far.
Vine Surge: I don’t like the targeting cast speed could be faster as well. This could be a combo finisher
Sublime Version: This should be a combo field like water or light

Glyphs
Didn’t really tried them so can’t provide feedback on them.

Traits
Drudic Clarity:
Full Condi Cleanse against condi burst is fine

Cultivated Synergy:
2x 1k aoe extra heal, it’s great. I take this most of the time.
I guess it should be decreased to 500 base heal base + 1x healing power.

Primal Echos:
It’s fine

Celestial Shadow:
This is a master which is not really use full in my opinion.

Verdant Etchinng:
Dunno

Natural Side:
Why 33% movement speed? Other traits that work the same only get 25% usual. I want 33% on mesmer and engineer as well

Grace Of The Land:
Didn’t testet it

Lingering Light:
This should be the same as whisp of astral whisp and healing, damage and cooldown

Ancient Seed:
Played this one within a pewpew build it’s ridiculus. This is really strong to pick out single targets. I guess the icd has to be increased a lot. Like ~25 sec.

Celestial Avatar
General: Base healing should be dramatically lowered and scale way more with healing power instead. You can basically currently run an insane pew pew build with high healing capabilities. Really ridiclous to play and to play against. Specially because troll unguent nearly fills the bar of the celestial avatar. Is this a bug?
To build this up without staff or troll unguent is really hard.

Cosmic Ray:
This is hard to place on allies because of the small aoe. Also you can only hit multiple allies when they stack properly.

Seed of Life:
Too small aoe, too high delay

Lunar Impact:
Great heal and that daze on 3 seconds daze on 5 seconds cooldown :O

Rejuvenating Tides:
Strong heal, low cooldown. Really strong to heal your allies and yourself

Natural Convergence:
Beeing locked in place sucks really bad, it can be evoided easily.

New Pets
Smokescale:
I love it will be my new favorite pet. Two points on the skills. Smoke Cloud should apply blind each second. Second.. Smoke Assault is that just a copy of unyielding assault from revenant? lol. The damage is insane even I guess the stronges attack from a pet yet. Should be lowered a little bit. Could hit opponents for 12k with that one.
Further I would wish again we could use all pet skills seperatly. So we can better use the blind field AND the spike damage of the pet AND the knockdown.

Tiger:
Furious bounce is a source for perma fury while we have the tiger out and we hit with that attack. I like that. The shown cooldown states 1,5 seconds while it is actually 10 seconds.

Wyverns:
Lighting assault is really nice on the electric wyvern because it is instantly and can be used as an interuppt. Cooldown could be decreased a little bit.
Consuming Flame is hard to hit and can be easily avoided by opponents. Also it takes to long till this is a fire field.
Wing Swipe and Tail Slash attacks are really slow also the damage is really low.
Wing Buffet: Aoe could be increased and the animation before the knockback should be increased. I guess also the knockback range.

Ever used Signet of the Wild on Bristleback? it get like 6 times lager than it usually is. Pretty funny Add all add more bleedings stacks and criple or imoblize. Currently it feels too weak.

Please make the tiger’s pounce fury effect 600 radius like the jungle stalkers roar, this is a screen of me using it on a husk and i dont get the fury unless im literally standing on him, 240 radius is just too small.

SemiProBBQ.8946:

Please make the tiger’s pounce fury effect 600 radius like the jungle stalkers roar, this is a screen of me using it on a husk and i dont get the fury unless im literally standing on him, 240 radius is just too small.

In that pic not even 600 would give you fury.

This pet already stepping on red moa toes, maybe quickness or boon removal shouts!

After playing Revenant; Ventari and Glit stances outshine the druid specialization by far.

In my opinion Celestial Avatar should be turned into a stance with no resource, and have all druid healing functionality attributed to it. Rework staff into a proper range damage/cc weapon.
Right now Druid it all about heals, yet has low output in both healing and damage.

Also… make glyphs ground targetable. Boon application in CA form would increase their value, and increase damage output in standard form would be welcome.

Tried out druid in Verdant Bring and Chanmpion’s Dusk – so fun, esp. in big PvE events where you feel your heals might reduce the number of downed players. Staff works well with the pet and the positioning playstyle of the ranger.

The strongest PvP builds I found use druid traits and F5, but not staff and no glyphs, or only the daze glyph, and take troll unguent to power up druidic mana.

Glyph of tides is nearly as good as glyph of equality, except it interferes with melee (staff doesn’t really need defensive PBAoE, it has great mobility). I suggest swapping the push and the pull.

Glyph of alignment would be good if 3 glyph builds were good. I moving verdant etching to adept tier, swapping place with e.g. primal echoes (which might need a buff in case of a move).

Glyph of rejuvination is weak, both numberwise but also because it doesn’t contribute much to charging F5, I sugget adding a minor pulsing AoE heal to it.

Staff and F5 didn’t do enough to win 2vs2 fights in PvP. Staff #4 (vine surge) felt especially weak.

It’s hard to target moving allies with cosmic ray, I suggest increasing the radius a bit but reducing the number of targets cap to 1 or 2.

I don’t like the basic wyvern attack animation: they’ve got long teeth, yet attack with their flimsy wings, I wish it were a bite animation instead.

I feel like the Bristleback’s projectiles need to be more visible, it’s kind of hard to see them compared to a spider’s or devourer’s.

Also, the wyvern’s heads should be scaled down a bit so they don’t look so cartoony, they look really goofy with heads almost as big as the rest of their bodies.

From PvE perspective:

Druid have little synergy with core Ranger. If you don’t run staff/TU you can’t reliably fill your CA. So it really choice beetween Ranger and dedicated healer. And i can speak only for myself, but if i pick ranger as my main i don’t really looking for healer playstyle.

After some tries I crafted some prety nice build, with berserker’s stats, LB/S+A and inreased daze duration. I have decent damage, and CA is kind of panic button for dazing enemys and healing. Only problem is as filling CA.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNBMhZ6kQFolFskFwiVgqFskJYw30e6Q9ZyF5ecNJrAwBokF0F-TpxGABAcEAUZ/BYPEA5eCAeqMABPAAA

Just used this build on PvP.

Additional thought on druid:
With the build I’m using I was able to gain significant battlefield control. However it was getting exponentially ineffective as the number of people increased.

One of the main problem that was caused was that staff is not equipped to utilize some of the trait and skill: namely glyph of equality and trait Primal echoes. However in a conquest mode, against enemies who have less stability access, such as necromencer or ranger without signet of wild and strength of the pack, I was able to lock them down and let my pet deals damage.

Gear did not need healing power stat as the base healing was adequet in sustaining in small scale fight and amount of support it can dish out is quite significant. This portion is exactly what ranger needed, though I will admit I am not quite happy with the lack of pet interactions on any of the druid skills.

Currently while druid does have few tricks to deal with conditions, still the survival trait is the best and I am forced to take Wilderness Survival. I would like to see some of the traits and glyphs getting reworked to address this issue.

As for celestial avatar, I am conflicted. The fact we lose all our energy the moment we drop out of the avatar is a huge setback in the trait druidic clarity as we may lose all the conditions but it is just as easy to re-apply them thus forcing us to stick with WS. Possible solution would be this trait reworked to cure 2~3 conditions at a steady purse while we remain in the avatar or simply we gain resistance during celestial avatar.

Considering how in team fight, the energy does not regenerate quickly, just having a inferior version of Guardian’s contemplation of purity isn’t strong enough. At the very least, primal echoes trait much better option as it allows the druid to deal with melee attacker without swapping out of staff.

Also staff is in an odd place. It fills up celestial energy quicker than any other weapons, as was addressed and to use celestial avatar effectively, we MUST use staff or Troll Urgent which forces us to use certain set-up. As it stands, ranger really has one trait line free for customization. WS and Druid trait lines are the must.

As for celestial avatar, I found myself just spamming daze and waterfield healing all the time. Cosmic ray has very small effective radius and some fights, well many fights aren’t that static to use that skill effectively. Seed of life is a good condition cleanser, but it isn’t as effective due to the fact that it has a cast time. One more reason why WS is a must trait line. Ranger/druid still lacks on-demand condition cleansing that is free from interruptions.

Lunar Impact and Tidal Surge are skills that I am expecting a lot of people to QQ about , especially Lunar Impact as it dazes and heals. With the new pet buffs, I expect even more pretty soon. As for Tidal Surge, its less of an issue however it still does good healing and combined with Lunar Impact, it can sustain ranger quite easily (not the blasting water-field, but daze-heal).

Natural Convergence is quite nice. I like it.

As for staff I do have issues on its own, however others already discussed it indepth so I won’t say it as it will just be repeating. I just hope I didn’t repeat about other stuffs too.

TL;DR – Ranger/druid still lacks on-demand condition cleansing other than WS.
Celestial needs some touch but it is quite strong.
Other weapons must be able to give more celestial energy otherwise we are forced to use a weapon set.
Druid gained significant control ability and lacking damage I don’t mind too much.

Just a general wondering about pets:

Why do pets have unique F2 skills? Would it really be a problem if both of your pets could use the exact same skills? Pets should really be about skins > F2 skills.

If I for exemple want to use a tiger, but don’t wanna be forced with the current F2 skill, why are you stopping me?
Instead give the Rangers the option to choose!

PvP:
Staff #4: Cast time is too long and effect too weak.
Staff #5: Healing from projectiles too weak.
Glyphs: Equality works great. Range is too short on others.

PvE/PvP:
Astral Form: Too difficult to charge without using Staff. Please let outgoing Regen and healing from Pets charge it.
Staff #1: Please double/triple Healing. It really is a little lackluster right now.

Other than these, I really enjoyed Druid. Fun to use in PvP, and PvE.

One more thing: Could you add an option to always see friendly health? It’s very difficult to tell where we should focus and position, in a large fight, without being able to see friendly HP.

If you don’t use staff and/or Troll Unguent, it can take literally several minutes of constant attacking to fill up the bar.

It should be significantly harder to fill it purely with damage, but this is way too much.
On the same note, nerf astral force generation with staff a bit. Fills up too quickly, even if you’re just healing your pet with the autoattack.

Also: The healing power scaling is pathetic. There is no incentive to ever invest in healing power, ever.

asweknowit.4798:

After playing Revenant; Ventari and Glit stances outshine the druid specialization by far.

In my opinion Celestial Avatar should be turned into a stance with no resource, and have all druid healing functionality attributed to it. Rework staff into a proper range damage/cc weapon.
Right now Druid it all about heals, yet has low output in both healing and damage.

Also… make glyphs ground targetable. Boon application in CA form would increase their value, and increase damage output in standard form would be welcome.

I second this.

Gonna rant about what i Like/Dislike about druid so far :P

Pets
I love the smokescale and bristleback pet
The attacks are well thought out. The damage is good. And bristleback becomes a godzilla with signet of wild!!!! Love it!

Potential bug: not sure if anyone notices this but taunt doesnt seem to work on the new pets all the time. The Icon comes out on the tooltip but they still charge at me.

Traits:
Love the ancient seed and natural strides (please dont change them). these two skills synergizes well with the core ranger as well as the druid.

Skills:
Glyphs have too short of a range. They are also non instant cast, making it not that great. I think it either needs a larger range or make it so it is instant cast

Nothing is more annoying than to try to interrupt someone but having to watch ur druid flail his arms around before the tides come out… Worst yet, because the cast time is 1/2 second sometimes i get interrupted on my skill that is meant to interrupt… very ironic..

I can deal with a slightly longer cooldown if it can be insta casted

My feedback is WvW specific.

I think a lot of the feedback here is forgetting that the Druid is primarily a healer. The staff heal may be small, but it fills the bar fast and the Celestial Avatar can change a fight.

My original plan was to go full Nomad’s ascended gear and be a tank healer for the raid. With the squad problems that was not possible, so I went with full exotic Cleric’s. The amount of healing put out felt very strong. I still assume I’ll eventually want to move to Nomad’s as organized groups start to focus healers (the standard practice in many other games).

The staff does what it needs to do and has some other nice skills attached.

1. - Bread and butter Celestial Bar filler
2. - Used properly in WvW it adds some decent sustain to your groups melee train
3. - I used this for two purposes. 1st, I would flash to my melee group during sustain regroups to do an AOE 3k heal. 2nd, I’d use it for mobility/escapes with a weapon swap to GS #3 to create even more distance.
4. - This was good for breaking up enemy melee trains. it does not need to lock them in place. Just a split second pause for a few people gets them out of the pack to make them easier targets.
5. - This skill is amazing, especially in chokes.

Celestial Avatar healing is game changing. Skills #3 and #4 are very strong at almost all times. The #2 and #5 skills get good situational use. The #1 is a very strong spam filler.

In organized groups the class shines. We had about 20 people with 3 druids and the sustain added was noticeable.

Ancesteral Grace (Staff 3) defeated by stairs (and slopes) and anything else that blocks line of sight.

Druid is just amazing :p

Celestial Form Ideas: Make it that u still do dmg but u got nice healing skills aswell in them. It’s a little boring to not do dmg at all when u enter this mode exept for skill 5
You still have your health when you enter the mode so it should be something extra stong thing that u use when u get full astral force and then destory things and heal allies

new auto attack? maybe ranged if u enter it with a ranged weapon and melee auto attack if u enter the mode with a melee weapon!

hard to notice when u have full Astral force, maybe u should start glow a little or something on the charactar (I don’t look at my skills when I’m in combat, just when the skills doesn’t activate)

Skill 2

It’s boring and slow. Atleast add blast finisher or something to make it more fun and better as a skill.

Some sort of leap/tp would be nice in celestial form aswell but it works with the skills we have.

Make the skills give more boons and not only heals in every skill.

I think the Class should be less of a “Healer” and more like a strong support with dps and in celestal form have nice healing/boons attack to support the team.

wvw

i noticed the beam on auto attck isn’t really visible. dps too low on auto attck.
also instead 3 target make it 5 pls.

suggustion other ideas

-auto attck like that of gaurd a cone with powerfull sun ray.
-second attk on staff have a toggle activate whisp around healing allies toggle whisp burst and dps foes around the whisp.
-ancentral grace add dps when coming out off it.
-vine surge target 5 dps a bit higher.

i compared this skills to existing skills ingame mostly guard.

zealot’s embrace = vine surge
orbe of light = nr2 skill on staff
wave of wrath= auto attck druid.

spamming the forums as i go :p and notice things

Aurika.6751:

My feedback is WvW specific.

I think a lot of the feedback here is forgetting that the Druid is primarily a healer. The staff heal may be small, but it fills the bar fast and the Celestial Avatar can change a fight.

My original plan was to go full Nomad’s ascended gear and be a tank healer for the raid. With the squad problems that was not possible, so I went with full exotic Cleric’s. The amount of healing put out felt very strong. I still assume I’ll eventually want to move to Nomad’s as organized groups start to focus healers (the standard practice in many other games).

The staff does what it needs to do and has some other nice skills attached.

1. - Bread and butter Celestial Bar filler
2. - Used properly in WvW it adds some decent sustain to your groups melee train
3. - I used this for two purposes. 1st, I would flash to my melee group during sustain regroups to do an AOE 3k heal. 2nd, I’d use it for mobility/escapes with a weapon swap to GS #3 to create even more distance.
4. - This was good for breaking up enemy melee trains. it does not need to lock them in place. Just a split second pause for a few people gets them out of the pack to make them easier targets.
5. - This skill is amazing, especially in chokes.

Celestial Avatar healing is game changing. Skills #3 and #4 are very strong at almost all times. The #2 and #5 skills get good situational use. The #1 is a very strong spam filler.

In organized groups the class shines. We had about 20 people with 3 druids and the sustain added was noticeable.

The issue isn’t that it’s a healer, the issue is that it’s gimmicky. If heal form was always on it would make sense but as it stands now you’re swapping out of heal form to a sub par weapon to fill up a bar to activate heal form. Also not using all of your resource in heal form is punished as you lose any remaining on exit.

3 druids helped sustain 17 others I’m sure but that could’ve been done by 3 revenants. If the form was an attunement I could justify it’s existence in raids, but I’d rather use my ele based on this test.

Healing is not a class mechanic unique to druids and I see no reason healing form shouldn’t be always on

A few small things I thought should be changed are the following:

Staff 2 and 4: Cast time feels too long at 3/4 seconds, felt very clunky to use. Reduce cast time a bit, maybe to 1/2 second.

Staff 3: Make it not do the whole animation if you move shorter than the full distance.

Celestial Form: I love the celestial form but generating “star force” on a condition build is very difficult. Please make condition damage generate star force, and perhaps increase the amount of force gained from physical/condition damage a bit.

Glyphs: The trait for glyphs is very good but the glyphs themselves seem rather lackluster. Personally I’d like a 1/4 second cast time on these, and maybe some improved effects. I think one of the glyphs being a stunbreak with 3 stacks of stab for 5-10s on a shortish CD would improve the druid experience in PvP a lot.

For those who don’t want to do the testing and need some accurate values:
Healing Power Scaling:

Staff1 (Solar Beam): 0.02
Staff2 (Astral Wisp): 0.05
Staff3 (Ancestral Grace): 1.00
Staff5 (Sublime Conversion): 0.025

CF1 (Cosmic Ray): 0.2
CF2 (Seed of Life): 0.5
CF3 (Lunar Impact): 0.5
CF4 (Rejuvenating Tides): 0.15

Glyph of Rejuvenation (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Rejuvenation in CF (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Alignment (in CF): 1.00
Glyph of Unity (in CF): 0.05

Life Vicariously: 0.01
Cultivated Synergy: 0.2
Lingering Light => Cosmic Wisp (same as staff2): 0.05
Verdant Etching => Seed of Life (same as CF2): 0.5

Feel free to correct if I’m wrong.

panda the chop chop.4712:

panda the chop chop.4712:

FAIR, WELL BALANCED … RISK/REWARD (PVP FEEDBACK)

I’ll keep it short:

1. Increase normal mode healing by 8-10% healing effectiveness towards pet + 10% of base for loves

2. Increase charge (time it takes to build up force of celestial avatar by 2-2.5x longer! )

(should be a Rampage warrior effect feeling ) It will give *ALOT more risk/reward…and getting moa’ed or focused reall badly in cele should be a HUGE risk factor but being able to potentially turn the tides in that small moment should be the reward. sooo……………


3.*Increase healing in cele mode by 20-35%, then damage by 15-25%.

4. Decrease cele mode duration by 5%

5. decrease lunar impact daze from 3 seconds to 2.5 (seems a bit more fair for everyone)

*AFTER THAT OVER ALL.. WELL BALANCE COOL DOWNS, DURATIONS ECT!!..

GOING TO ADD ON TOP OF THE FACT OF MAKING THIS F5 MODE A (TARGET ON MY HEAD RISK/REWARD CONCEPT) WITH THE LESS DURATION & LOT MORE HEAL/DAMAGE…

ADD STABILITY CONCEPT; THE BIGGEST WAY TO HAVE COUNTER PLAY TO FROM A DRUID FROM ITS RISK/REWARD WORTH IT BUT ALSO A FACTOR TO BE COUNTERED BY THE (hey team druid poped celestial avatar focus it down) factor.

CELESTIAL AVATAR

Base healing of what it is should def. be increased… (note) please refer to my other post/ideas for more skilled Risk/Reward

BUT

From that base healing what it is now.. DRASTICALLY increase the healing scale with healing power!

&

PLEASE INCREASE AREA OF (c-mode) 1 skill to 300 ish radius!

I only have a little playtime logged so far on druid, but that has convinced me that there are quite a few ways in which the overall ‘dynamic’ of the druid is off.

Healing to build up astral force to unlock bigger heals isn’t interesting enough to make a healer class work. Healers make decisions, that’s what makes them healers and not HPSes.

Worse, since you still get the AF gain from healing even if your heals are unnecessary — or even lost completely as overhealing — this design rewards healers for atrocious play. If nobody needs healing, your healers shouldn’t be healing.

It might be better if astral force built naturally out of combat but could only build in combat by damaging enemies. This would avoid encouraging poor play, and it would avoid the current problem of players overhealing their pet to make sure they start the next fight with a full tank.

But I think more is needed. A better version of the astral force/celestial avatar dynamic might be as follows:

1. Assuming celestial avatar form is limited by a medium-long-ish cooldown and just instantly fills your AF to full.
2. While CAF is off cooldown and you’re in combat, you naturally build AF.
3. You build extra AF by dealing damage and while there are nearby allies below 75% health.
4. Having AF before using CAF substantially lowers its cooldown, and the cooldowns of its associated skills, in proportion to the amount of AF you had. There could instead be different buffs, provided that they support a healer dynamic rather than an HPS dynamic.

As I said above, healing is about making decisions. You can’t choose when people are going to need healing, but you can choose when you respond. This proposed design is essentially a form of the classic “heal these people now, but at heavy cost” vs. “heal these people more slowly, but do so cheaply” dynamic between spot heals, spike heals, and heals over time.

The other comments I’ll make:

• The roles filled by wisps and staff autoattack are already incredibly well-trodden ground in GW2, especially with all the self-heals players bring along.
• Natural Mender is an HPS trait, not a healer trait. Healing is about delivering the right heals at the right time, and this trait does precisely nothing to change the way that a good healer would play.
• Natural Mender could be replaced with the trait that enacts the dynamic I described above.
• Staff autoattack could be replaced with a straightforward damage skill, and probably an extremely powerful one — after all, you do take a substantial DPS loss to become a druid in the first place, and you’re sacrificing DPS to use the extra tools that druid gives you.

It only takes 3 seconds to fully load celestial avatar with a staff. 3 seconds…

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I’ll just leave this here, most of the reveal feedback is confirmed by the beta as being needed, imo.

Druid Feedback Post

Excellent, +1!

Vine Surge
Is a very weak skill. It has a long cast time and the vines move slowly making it miss most of the time. But even if it hits, it only does 1 second immobilize, which only lasts a fraction of a second in WvW with all the condi duration reduction. It’s damage is also very low.

2s immobilize would fix it. It would also be pretty epic if it was the only skill that could trigger Ancient Seeds on its own. So 1s daze/stun/launch directly followed by some damage to trigger the trait.

Kidel.2057:

It only takes 3 seconds to fully load celestial avatar with a staff. 3 seconds…

Begs the question of why it needs to be temporary. Spec druid equip staff and F5 should be there as a form. Healing should be generated with the form 1 skill not the staff 1 out of form

Ranger/druid feedback… well well…

Pets :
Smokescale : That guy burst like hell and have high survivability! I looooove it!
Bristleback : I though I could use it as a condi damager but in the end it’s disappointing. A bleed on it’s auto attack would be more than welcome.
Wivern : No comment, I don’t like them .

Druid :

- Staff : The staff is in great place. Only the skill#4 make it clunky due to the fact that the skill doesn’t track your target but you gotta aim at it (It a matter of taste, maybe some like it in it’s current form but that’s not my case). Staff synergy with companion’s might may be a tiny bit to OP (I love it when I put 9 might stacks per second on my pet but I have to admit that it’s a bit powerfull).

- Glyph : They are usefull. It’s more skills that I’d expect to find on a weapon than utilities skills but they are usefull. I still had trouble linking with mobs with the elite skill, the skill fail a lot.

- Celestial form : This thing stand on it’s own as a mechanic. honestly, It’s a bit to easy to build Astral force at the moment, I barely recall worrying for astral force. CF1 and CF2 were boring skill but well they are strong enough as it stand. CF3 is surprisingly good and fun to play. CF4 is a 2nd healing skill on 10s cool down (It’s OP). CF5 really need to be used while moving, It’s a great skill but the lack of mobility just kill it.

Trait : they are all great, don’t change anything. Or maybe work on he staff trait, the daze on swap ain’t really attractive.

Conclusion : Overall, after using it, I’m staying on my position that the celestial form is a mechanism a bit to strong versus the pet. And the lack of synergy between these 2 mechanism hurt even more. At the moment, the Druid is OP as hell… Well, to be honest, it’s a relief that you need “Druid” to use the staff, otherwise PvP creeps would cry “Omfg Nerf pet please! nerf pet!”.

some extra stuff after sleeping on it:

• I’m starting to think of this crazy idea, to just make celestial avatar a CD skill, no an nergy build up skill, eliminating the need to run staff/TU to build it up decently, opning up other druid builds.
• people are talking about Healing coefficients…I don’t want more healing added, I want more damage. That’s better balance.
• Druid is too weak against CC focus. Going BM after testing isn’t an ideal line in conjunction with Druid, so we cant optimally spec into builds that utilize Resounding Timbre for RaO and WHaO. There really doesn’t seem to be room on the bar for Signet of the wild either. So real no self-applied stability option. Therefore, Druid line needs stability.
• Natural Stride should be minor. Merge the two current minors to make that happen.
• Plz fix Ancient seeds.
• give us some kind of boons in Druid to help out pure Power builds, to make up for losing the overly important stuff we don’t get if we have to forsake one of the traditional lines

The Druid needs more damage output abilities, not op numbers but the solar beam should cause a 250 radius ape per pulse around the target.

Bug:

The blast finisher of clarion bond and lunar impact doesn’t trigger area stealth on smoke field of smokescale. Staff 3 trigger the stealth effect.

however, blast finisher of clarion bond and lunar impact do trigger area heal on water field.

so... i rolled up a druid and went right into WvW on reset night... what the kitten was i thinking... haha. anyway

my first thought was to play staff/axe+torch. seemed meh. tried staff/sword+torch.... way too risky in a zerg environment. went to my go-to zerg ranger weapon... longbow... found out something amazing... the knockback from 3 skill counts as a launch... so it works with ancient seeds... this turned out to be an awesome and unexpected combo when i was picking off stragglers, and later in a havoc group situation. this leaves me with a dilemma.. i had planned to run my druid in full apothecary (and had already aquired said armor) but now i’m thinking that a balance between power and condi would be better... perhaps sinister or cele... for the playstyle i enjoy at least.

i had hoped that glyph of equality + ancient seeds would have been a good combo, but as others have said, the radius is small... it’s barely useful except at practically point blank range, which is not where i want to be when trying to CC a mass amount of people in wvw or creatures in pve... altho the stun on swap to staff trait is nice.

it was hard for me to notice green numbers in an extremely chaotic zerg (we were pretty badly outnumbered for many of our fights last night) so i can’t really speak about the healing ability... i’ll keep a closer eye on it tonight when i try it again... staff damage skills are... while underwhelming, not HORRIBLE... they could definitely be better. i agree staff 3 needs an evade, or an invuln while in transit (like mist form). i was enjoying using it as a travel skill, but the root if you don’t target an area at max range is annoying and potentially dangerous.

all in all... i like it... i don’t LOVE it... but i like it... could definitely use a bit more polish.

Gwaihir.1745:

The Druid needs more damage output abilities, not op numbers but the solar beam should cause a 250 radius ape per pulse around the target.

Without some sort of way to tag mobs, people will rarely use Druid in open world after a while, unless it’s intended…. So yeah, damages are needed, even if not amazing.

arkealia.2713:

For those who don’t want to do the testing and need some accurate values:
Healing Power Scaling:

Staff1 (Solar Beam): 0.02
Staff2 (Astral Wisp): 0.05
Staff3 (Ancestral Grace): 1.00
Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025

CF1 (Cosmic Ray): 0.2
CF2 (Seed of Life): 0.5
CF3 (Lunar Impact): 0.5
CF4 Rejuvenating Tides): 0.15

Glyph of Rejuvenation (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Rejuvenation in CF (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Alignment (in CF): 1.00
Glyph of Unity (in CF): 0.05

Life Vicariously: 0.01
Cultivated Synergy: 0.2
Lingering Light => Cosmic Wisp (same as staff2): 0.05
Verdant Etching => Seed of Life (same as CF2): 0.5

Feel free to correct if I’m wrong.

I found an error: Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025. Staff5 in normal formal is:
Staff5 (Sublime Conversion): 0.2.

And I will add these for damage Power scaling:

Staff1 (Solar Beam): 0.12
Staff2 (Astral Wisp): 0.32
Staff4 (Vine Surge): 0.2

CF5 (Natural Convergence): 0.16

Glyph of Alignment: 0.4
Glyph of Equality: 0.4
Glyph of the Tides: 0.4
Glyph of Unity: 1.15

Glyphs in CF: no damage

First, we will start with FACTS (incl. what seems to be bugs). Correct me if I am wrong. NF = normal form, CF = celestial form. What definitely looks like bugs is emphasized in bold

EDIT: looks like the forum sometimes transforms “5 s” (without the space) into “kitten”.

Pets
General

• The ability to go underwater is obviously tied to the pet and not to the family: tigers are cat yet they are not amphibious
• New pets active abilities F2 have a very short cast time (up to no cast time), except for the tiger which uses cat leap cast time
• New pets could not be selected in PvP (hope this is a bug)
• Except for fire wyvern and bristleback (which is ranged), new pets all have at least one skill that allows them to quickly close in on a target from 400 at least. Tiger and electric wyvern use an activated closer, while smokescale has two automatic closers

Wyverns

• Akin to drakes with less vitality. They hit for less than a drake with very slow attak animations that often miss if the enemy moves. Just as drakes, their base attack is a short range (130) AoE which can hit at least 3 enemies (tested)
• Attack 3 is an uncontrollable knockback with very slow casting animation
• Wyverns F2 create combo fields
• Fire wyvern: when activated, the F2 ability is triggered imediately at the current wyvern location, instead of telling it to go to the selected target and then only start channeling the fire field
• Electric wyvern: the activated F2 ability lacks an electric combo field fact

Tiger

• Your basic cat
• Activated F2 ability tooltip lacks a 10s cd fact. That cd looks very short (especially when the skill grants 15s of fury)
• Activated F2 ability has a 400 range, the buff it provides has a 240 range and is triggered after the leap

Smokescale

• Stats are between a bear and a wold, the skillset looks more like wolves’. The base attack damage is in the same range as wolves
• Activated F2 ability is kitten smoke field on a 20s cd
• Automatic skill #3 is a burst skill which inflicts around 10k in 2s
• Automatic skill #3 has a 750 range. When pet is set to attack within the 750 range, it will immediately use this skill to attack target. When pet is to attack outside the 750 range, it will first go to around 500 of target then will use this skill to “jump” over the last 500 => looks like their is a small IA flaw here

Bristleback

• Stats akin to devourer, as well as base attack damage
• Attacks have a 1200 range except for the AoE (600)
• Automatic skill #2 is a cone projectile AoE with a 3.5s channel. At short range, it inflicts around 10k damage (if most attacks hit target), while at long range (where the pet normally sits), it is almost useless (at most 3 attacks hit target)
• Activated F2 ability instantly grants 1 stack of bleed to the next kittens (not attacks)
• Signet of the wild active effect (or similar trait) makes grow excessively large

Devourers

• While testing new pets, I noticed that 90% of my devourers base attacks do not inflict the poison they should

Druid
General

• The word “allies” in tooltips is inconsistent. Some times it means “allies + druid”, sometimes it means “other allies, druid excepted”
• The druid spec (staff and glyphs) has no access to stability (without using another weapon or utility)
• The druid spec (staff and glyphs) has no access to stun breakers
• The druid (staff and glyphs) spec does not grant any boon
• The druid (staff and glyphs) spec has little access to conditions: 1s of immobilize every 16s, 3s of AoE cripple and + weakness every 16s (range 300), and 5s of immobilize + 5x 5s bleed on hitting CCed target with a 10s icd if investing into a grandmaster trait
• The druid spec has one blast finisher on a 12s cd in NF, and one blast finisher on kitten cd while in CF
• The druid spec has one 5s / 20s cd water field (hidden on staff #5) while in NF and one 5s / 8s cd channeled water field whin in CF

Astral force (used to trigger celestial form)

• Accumulates 2.5% for each tick of direct heals, whether they are active or passive (from traits), whether they heal for 0 (i.e. the heal activates without healing) or more. Includes the heal from water spirit activated heal
• Accumulates 0.25% for each tick of direct damages, whether they are active or passive
• Accumulates 2.5% after life leech effects (e.g. sigil of leeching). Impossible to tell whether leech effects are actually 2.75 (2.5 heal + 0.25 dmg) or just 2.5, the difference is to small. When triggered by “Hunter’s call” (horn #4), the life leech effect did not provide astral force. However, this skill still provides much more force than other attack skills since it is a multihit skill that grants 16*0.25
• Does not accumulate on combo effects (water field heals, combo damages), regeneration ticks, condition ticks, pet activities (even F2 triggered heals), the heals triggered by the trait “Live Vicariously”, the “Signet of the wild” passive heal, and the water spirit triggered heals
• Is completely drained upon cancelling CF early (F5)
• Can’t replenish while in CF

Staff

• Staff skills don’t benefit from “Quick draw” trait
• #1 lists a maximum of 3 targets, but can actually hit three targets per mode, i.e. it can in a single tick both damage up to 3 targets and heal up to 3 targets. Don’t know if it is a bug, but it seems fine to me
• #1 is quite as much a heal as an attack, however it can’t target allies
• #2 can be dodged. Dodging it also cancels the healing part. Damages target only, heals allies around
• #2 astral wisp (as well as cosmic wisp from trait) last 5s, which means they will perform 2.5 around the target/druid. The location the wisps appear at around the target/druid seems random
• #3 requires line of sight, which causes annoyance in slopes. The channeling time is the same whether the druid stands right on the target or 1200 units away. This means that, while targeting under your feet, you will hover uselessly at the same place for 2s
• #4 hits each enemy only once. I could not test it but given the former, I suppose that “number of targets: 3 + number of impacts: 7” means that it can immolize up to 3 enemies and cure from 4 up to 7 allies depending on how many enemies were hit
• #5 lacks a water field tooltip fact. It also works more like a mesmer “temporal curtain” than a guardian “wall of reflection”, which means it is ineffective against ballistic projectiles or tall enemies which projectile starting point is high (e.g. hushs rocks, fractal harpies knock balls)
• #5: enemies can be healed by other enemies projectiles transformed into heals by the skill !!!!

Celestial form

• Lasts for 20s if not cancelled early
• #2 “Seed of life” takes about 3s to “bloom” (i.e. heal and cure) after the cast is finished
• #4 is channel
• #5 roots and has a very small range (enemies move !). Tooltip lists 5 stacks of 1s immobilize, but it is actually 5 stacks of 1s vulnerability

Glyphs

• All have a range of 300
• All lack tooltip fact from trait “Verdant Etching”
• Glyph of empowerment" tooltip states allies, but effect includes the ranger too
• Glyph of rejuvenation has no pet healing component, i.e. pet will not get any heal if farther than 3 or if 5 other player allies around (both NF and CF)
• Glyph of unity: NF effect can be excessively strong. Their is no icd to the damage being inflincted. Therefore, if the focus on the druid is strong enough, it has the potential to almost instantly kill the five linked enemies. Combined with signet of stone, I can be deadly in WvW. Tried it in PvP with players relunctant to hit me, got 3 from full health to downed in a matter of seconds.
• Glyph of unity: link is broken if target moves beyond 240, and does not reinstate if target moves back in

Traits

• “Druidic clarity” removes 13 conditions, i.e. all currently existing conditions. Should be changed to “all” so that the functionality is kept if more conditions are added in the future
• “Celestial shadow”: even if they are within range of each other, the heal from the pet does not heal the ranger, and the heal from the ranger does not heal the pet. Seems ok to me, but it is a contradiction with all other skills that state “… allies” and include the ranger in allies
• “Live vicariously”: the trait is triggered only by real heals on allies/pet (i.e. heals that heal more than 0 on targets that are not full HP). All the skills/traits listed as not granting astral force also don’t trigger this trait
• “Verdant etching”: the triggered seed of life is the same as CF #2
• “Natural mender”: tooltip lacks duration fact in the trait panel
• “Grace of the land”: tooltip states allies, includes druid
• “Lingering light”: the wisp appears on the druid, whether the heal ally is close or far. The wisp is the same as staff #2 (except that it only heals since the “target” is the druid)

Now, here is my general OPINION on the new pets, the druid, and the pet mechanic in general (now is probably a good time to discuss it).

Pets
Overall, the new pets are great. The reduced cast time on F2 abilities is very enjoyable: they are finally reactive ! If only all older pets could benefit from this. Thanks to the smokescale, rangers can now bring group stealth on par with thiefs, which means that rangers should now fit in the meta in the same slot as thiefs.

The bad part for new pets is, in my opinion, the Bristlenback. Why do you create ranged pets with “passive” skills that have different range (1200 and 600 here) ? It will always force the pet to use the smallest range, which 1/ will make it lose the benefit of longer range skills (safety) and 2/ will make it lose damage the first time as it will have to move from max range to mid range.

Moving to pets in general (and ranger spirits as well as other summons for mesmers, necromancers, engineers, guardians and thief/elementalist elites), there is a real problem with them and boons/heals (not speaking of IA or other things). This is once again highlighted by the healing glyph which lacks a “pet heal”, but is also true with all group buffs in general. Most group support abilities, heals or buffs, state that they only hit 5 allies, which will always exclude all the pets and summon in 5 player groups. This is extremely annoying, as it means that a player that (almost) does not use summons (warriors, thiefs, most guardians and elementalists) fully benefit from group buffs, while classes that use summons (rangers, mesmers and some necromancers) will only partly benefit from group heal/buffs, since a part of their damage output, the summons, won’t get heals/buffs. In my opinion, the epitome of this problem is the ranger trait “Fortifying bond”. Since rangers rely so much on pets, you felt the need to give them a mean to transmit boons to pets (yet they have to sacrifice a trait for this).
All summons/pets/spirits/phantasms/minions/spirit weaons should never count as allies as for skill caps, BUT they should always automatically inherit from the heals and boons their “masters” receive.

Another similar point: all summons should always derivate all their stats from their masters (possibly with a coefficient). That is already the case for some stats of mesmer phantasms and necromancer minions. Why do ranger pets use fixed stats ? They do not improve when we improve our equipement, there stats do not evolve when we chose our equipement to favour one type of damage over another …
Ranger pets should derivate all their base stats from their masters. Then, a coefficient could be applied to these base stats to improve/decrease some stats and thus adjust them, to a reasonable extent, their stats to the focus of their family (tank vs condi vs direct damage)

Now to Druids

1st, I understand that there needs to be a first and last, but I must say that I am extremely disappointed that there won’t be any other BWE between the 1st druid test and the release. Especially when I see the terrible state the druid is in at the moment.

2nd, I must say that I am not especially fond of healing, however I tested the druid with an open mind. Especially since I play a ranger, have been out of the “meta” since start and Anet statement implied there would be a need for strong heals in raid. Well, one of my ranger is even ready to turn as a druid, with an appropriate skins and so on.

In my opinion, the whole druid system is completely lackluster at the moment, for several reasons. I will explain my point below.

• 1/ The druid feels like a poor copy of WoW moonkin form
• 2/ GW2 is built around a soft trinity system that includes damage, control and support. Healing is a part of support, however support also includes protecting, buffing and debuffing. With the druid, I found an elite spec that solely revolves around healing, healing, healing. Absolutely no boon, no group cc breaker, almost no condition: a very small amount of cripple and weakness, a bit of slow (does it has any effect on NPC bosses ?), no chill, 1s of immobilize (!!!), and an amount of weakness that will have any other profession, including base rangers, laugh). Druids feels like they are singlehandly meant to heal. Not support, heal, and heal only. That is a very dumbed done role and it feels very lacking compared to diversity of support that other professions have. Druids need more support diversity: boons to maintain, stun breakers, more debuffing conditions
• 3/ The way astral force is earned at the moment is ridiculous. If the druid is not using staff, it won’t stack. If the druid is solo, it won’t stack, until using bugged Troll unguent or playing gimicky heals with pet. If the druid is in a group, it will stack in 3s at most, thus allowing the druid to almost permanently seat in celestial form. Either CA is inaccessible, either is it completely dumbed down (because 1/ I suppose the druid gameplay is meant to revolve around switching in and out of CA and 2/ the healing output in CA is so larget that sitting forever in CA holds no interest: it is mindless spam #2, spam #3, fill in with #1). Earning astral force needs a complete and thorough rework (detail below)
• 4/ All staff skills are underwhelming: appart from mandatorily providing astral force (since no other weapon succeeds in), they provide (almost) no damage and an amount of heal that is ridiculously low in comparison of what CA can do. Sublime conversion acts as “yet another projectile protection” (we already have guardians, mesmers, thiefs, and lately necromancers doing this) and that is all for staff utility. As soon as the 2s astral force stacking is done, there is no reason to stick with staff.
  Staff skills need a rework to provide increased damage (although less than a regular weapon) and much more utility to give them some real use (all the things listed in 2/ that it will make for a diversified and fun support spec) (no need of more healing, there is already far than enough in CA) (details below)
• 5/ The radius of all glyphs and healing skills is way to small. As it stands now, the druid makes the “stacking meta” even more mandatory than ever before.
• 6/ The staff and glyphs come together, yet together they are clunky: staff seems meant as a ranged weapon (why a 1200 range otherwise), especially when optimizing staff #1 may require some distance to the target, while glyphs all work on druid centered very short range, forcing him/her to stack with other players. Make glyphs apply around the current target (be it an ally or an enemy), or the druid if no target
• 7/ Ranger has a lot of regeneration sources, yet the druid does not synergize at all with regeneration. Make it so that regeneration also grant astral force
• 8/ channeling combo fields is not fun: you must entirely rely on allies to make a proficient use of them. Although I understand that combo fields are meant to promote interaction between players, one should be able to trigger a bit ones own fields. Otherwise, please turn elementalists fire fields into channeled fields so that they stop being able to singlehandedly provide perma fury + 25 might
• 9/ carpal tunnel syndrom mk. 2, a.k.a. the grenade engineer rebuilt as a healer: way too many ground targeted abilities, especially in CA. Some ground targetted skills should be replaced character targetted abilities (keep Ancestral Grace as is !)

Now, here is what I think should change in DETAILS

New pets

• All wyverns: turn “Wing buffet” into stun/knockdown. I understand it feels less like adult wyverns, however an uncontrolled knockback is extremely annoying and makes the pet pratically unusable (there is already for enough uncontrolled knockbacks around with longbow rangers)
• All wyverns: autoattack cast needs to be reduced to one second !
• Fire wyvern: change F2 A.I. so that the pet closes in on the target before triggering fire field
• Bristleback: swap “Sharpen spines” skill with “Rain of Spikes” skill. “Sharpen spines” is an uninteresing skill that could very well be baked into base attack and replaced with a new skill with more interesting effects. “Rain of Spikes” as an active skill is an interesting option, as it will allows the ranger to trigger it when it is really proficient (pet in melee range or enemies stacked). As a passive skill, it is just a waste of pet damage since pet #1 deals more single target damage when the pet is at 600 range of target
• Currently, the tiger becomes the stronger cat with its low cd F2. If that is not a bug to be corrected, the cd should be increased

All pets and summons

• Pets should inherit all their stats from the ranger with some scaling depending on pet family (i.e. 0.8 (dmg stats) – 2 (survival stats) from ranger +/- 0.3 – 0.6 from pet family)
• Pets should get all their healing and boons as exact copies of the healing/boons received by their master
• Ranged pet should have all their skills with the same range (900 / 1200), or at least all pet controlled skills

Astral force

• Many changes to allow for stacking it outside of group situation and while using other weapons too (it is way too tied to the staff at the moment)
• Astral force should not be earned off fully healed targets
• Astral force should be earned something along the lines as as:
  - 1/16 from conditions ticks (per condition intensity level, max 1.5 per second)
  - 1/2 from regeneration ticks (max 2 per second if multiple targets affected)
  - 1.5 from direct attacks or combo direct attacks (per hit. Max on tick per skill/trait per second)
  - 3 from direct heals (skills or traits), pet outgoing heals (i.e. not drake selfheal), pet heals from F2 traited with “Invigorating bond” or combo heals (per hit. Max on tick per skill/trait per second)
  - multihit skills such as “troll unguent” and “hunter’s call” should only trigger one tick of astral force (well, I consider them as oversight actually)
• When cancelling CA early, remaining astral force should be kept (I think necros would be very angry if lifeforce disappeared upon cancelling death shroud). Astral force works exacly like life force for all other points (does not dicrease out of fights, slowly decrease when CA active, does not disappear when logged of), so let’s streamline it completely. The way it works now, you feel “forced” to completely exhaust CA instead of cancelling it

Celestial Avatar

• Should also affect traits
• If cancelling CA early is changed to not drain astral force anymore, cancelling CA early should then be given a CD (just as necro shroud) to avoid players abusing effects triggered on entering CA.
• While entering and leaving celestial avatar, glyph cd should reset (since their use is so different)
• Slightly increased healing power scaling to encourage using that stat (at least rejunvenating tides and cosmic ray)
• Should grant some stability to the druid (akin to leech form) (not necessarily self renewing stacks, but something along the lines of 3 20s stacks, so that the druid can start healing quietly yet dedicated CC can take him/her off)
• All 5 skills radii made 360
• More distinct CA #1 to #4. Currently, they all look like strong heals with some little flavour. One should grant stability, another protection maybe (altough I would leave that one to staff)
• Remove the channeling on #4, or make it grant also a pulsing 1s stability while channeling (in the later case, channeling time could be increased to make it heal less as a tradeoff with granting pulsing stability)
• Longer CD on some to force druids to think instead of the mindless spam that comes off many too short CD skills
• Less ground targeted heals, more character targeted ones (healing around targeted enemy/ally
• #5 should not root, otherwise most of the effect will be lost with enemies moving out of the effect area
• #5 should be ground targettable (or even better, able to target an enemy or ally)

Staff

• increased damage, heal, power scaling and healing power scaling across the board
• much more healing power scaling for #1, #2, #5 (yet staff skills should not compete with CA in terms of raw healing, otherwise the later becomes useless in turn)
• #1 should be able to target both allies and foes
• #2, make the wisp part undodgable. Astral wisp should also inflict damage on enemies around the target. Could grant fury/power/retaliation too, or, even better, act as a light field (very fit for a orbiting light wisp)
• #2 duration should be increased to 6s, so that the wisp can complete the 3rd circle and heal/damage equally all targets.
• #2 should be able to target both enemies and allies. When targetting an ally, the target damage is converted into additional initial heal to that player. Staff #1 and #2 being able to target both allies and foes would bring more interesting decisions to the staff
• #3 correct the channeling bug when targetting a close location, make it work like other movement skills that follow the ground without requiring a line of sight (e.g. ranger/warrior greatsword movements). Could grant protection too, and blind the enemies in range (after all, a wisp is a bright light)
• #4 increase immobilize duration to 3s per target. Should also grant retaliations to allies hit (vines have thorns), and possibly bleeding to enemies.
• #5 make it able to transform all projectiles (i.e. like guardian wall)

Glyphs

• All base radii extented to 360, and 600 for “of unity” (NF) and “of the Tides” (CA) to put them in line with similar skills from necromancer shroud #4 and guardian GS #5 skills respectively
• Increase damage across the board or give the more (interesting) effects
• Make them all instant casts except “of unity” and “of the Tides”
• Glyphs should be able to target enemies / allies / the druid and affect targets around them (similar to staff skills, provides diversified gameplay)
• Glyph of rejuvenation: add the pet missing pet healing part ! (the pet should always receiver the bigger heal, whether the druid is in NF or CA)
• Glyph of empowerment: lackluster when compared to water spirit. Boost duration to 10s and maybe make it grant damage buffs along (fury and/or some might stacks for the same duration as the glyph)
• Glyph of alignment: increase conditions duration to 5s
• Glyph of unity: large boost to damage per tick and power scaling, it is too small at the moment to make it even remotely usefull in solo/small group situations.
• Glyph of unity: add an icd per target (1s probably) to the damage dealt to avoid overspike situations when the druid is being targetted by a large number of enemies. This and the above point should make for a comfortable middleground between insignificant damage and overspike

• Note: making most dual damagin/healing skills and glyphs able to target enemies/allies/the druid will make the staff fully operational as their won’t anymore be incompatiblities between staff range and glyph radii.

Traits

• Druidic clarity should also include a stun breaker
• Cultivated synergy: the druid and the pet could heal each other when in range. But that is really not the change I am most worried about
• Lingering light: the cosmic wisp should be triggered around both the pet and the druid (because it is lost if it triggers only around the druid, and (s)he is far from allies). It should be a copy of the astral wisp (i.e. also inflict damages and grant boons / or light field), however, it should only heal/damage for half the amount of astral wisp (currently the same amount). This way, we again get some middle ground: if the pet and the druid are stacked, they get the full effect just as of BWE3. If they are not, both can support allies around (i.e. pet in melee and druid at range).
• Ancient seed: should work also on knock backs (it seems to already be the case but the tooltip does not mention it) and on fears, so that it operates on all control effect types.

Traits CA forms

• Note: optional: having traits that change between NF and CA and affect differently both forms (along with CA skills and glyph changes) would bring more consistency to the druid. The suggestion below were more or less creating by inverting the names and effects from one form to the other
• Druidic clarity CA: should turn into “Star Light”: gives one of all boons while exiting CA (duration ?) (other option: druidic clarity merged with Celestial shadow to make the CA switch of this skill)
• Primal echoes CA: should turn into “Celestial symphony”: grants the CD reduction to CA skills (which should then be 10-20% baseline longer) and, upon leaving CA, grants 1 stack of 3s stability of allies around
• Live vicariously CA: shoud turn into ’ “Share vicariously” ’: while in CA, healing you do allies inflict damage to enemies around
• Cultivated synergy CA: should turn into “Deadly energy”: using a healing skill damages enemies around you and your pet
• Celestial shadow CA: if not baked into Drudic clarity, CA form if this trait should be Daylight brightness: reveal all stealthed enemies around and inflict them with blindness
• Verdant etching CA: should turn into “Bright etching”: instead of summoning a seed of life (which is a CA skill already), this skill should turn into summoning an astral wisp around the character the glyph was targeted on (assuming glyphs are made targettable as they should be, or around druid if they are not)
• Grace of the land CA: should turn into “Splendor of the suns”: while in NF, grant X% more condition damage to allies around

*Overall druid

• Needs much more support options and gameplay diversity
• Needs streamlined astral force generation across all gameplays
• Needs more synergy with all damage/healing types, even combo
• Needs more staff dps
• Needs glyphs that are compatible with ranged staff
• Needs greater scaling with healing power. At the moment, the HP scaling is lackluster while the spec lacks a lot of damage, which encourages once again to select zerker stats. Kind of sad for a spec that is supposed to be a dedicated healer
• Needs traits that change depending on whether the druid is in NF or CA.
• Melee staff animation instead of caster animation is sad, but it won’t kill me
• I would have enjoyed more vine/plant animations. Currently, the druid seems to be more connected to light/stars than to plants :/ (hence the moonkin comparison in 1/)

Note1 : the proposition of allowing druid staff, glyphs and CA form skills to target either an enemy, an ally or self and have them take effect around the target would open for really interesting gameplay options: druid could force an enemy of its mates (otherwise the enemy would inflict the druid AoE on them) or discourage enemies from closing in on an ally.
Note2: please don’t come saying glyphs should stay as they are just because elementalist glyphs have no target either. If that is the case, then please simply rename “glyphs” into something else and make it.
Note2: if having a skill be able to target both enemies, allies and self is technically difficult, then you could resort on making all these skills ground targettable (druid would then with something like 10-15 ground targetted abilities, which is quite terrible in my opinion, yet better than useless glyphs targeted on self with a riny radius)

Conclusion
Druid for the moment feels terribly lackluster, like a rushed one dimensional party healbot that does not require any thinking, and will be completely avoided out of WvW / raids / specific PvP comps). It is either avoid it outside of groups, or forget about staff and use it once in a few to run for CA while in a group. It definitely requires a strong overhaul and another 4th beta week event to test the changes. As it is now, I will clearly not use it even if it secures me a raid spot, and will stick with my ranger (with an improved pet at least). Better not raid than play a mindless and clunky spec. It is really disappointing to see the first elite spec revealed in such a bad state. Especially when reaper, tempest, chrono or berserker are so fun to play.

If I wanted to say really bad things, I would go as far as saying that raids happened to be overtuned and druid was hastily changed to provide some counter. I doubt that is actually the case, but the current implementation feels like it.

Substance E.4852:

jcbroe.4329:

• 5 needs SOME additional effect, because it’s super situational as is. If it isn’t a field (tooltip didn’t say it was so I didn’t use it like one), it needs to be one, preferably a water field, and it could also cripple people passing through it or something, but definitely something in the same family of thought.

It is a water field. It’s unlisted but you can blast it with staff 3 for an easy test.

Good to know, I didn’t think to test it, I got more into build testing than mechanic testing.

Gilgalas.7860:

I found an error: Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025. Staff5 in normal formal is:
Staff5 (Sublime Conversion): 0.2

Fixed the name, but I’m still finding 2.5% (162 to 192 with +1200h.power).

Played some more. It would be really nice if you would put a stun break on one of these glyphs. Idk, put something on them to make it worth taking them.

Considering the nature of the Druid (and of rangers in general), why are glyphs close ranged?

Aomine.5012:

Mouse.7382:

Peakitten.6412:

First things first: Bristleback for life! I love this pet in so many ways. He just looks so cute and cuddly, til he starts flinging those shards around.

Have only played Druid in Verdant Brink and Silverwastes so far:

-Like the synergy with the three new pets that lay down fields. Direct the smokescale to do his F2 then Staff3 right into the field, and voila, area stealth, or might with fire wyv/swiftness with lightning wyv. I’ve generally found the lightning reflexes utility super useful both for traited condi-clear, but also immediately evading back out melee after dropping Staff 3.

Found the best use for Staff 1 to be standing back with bristlepet at range, and letting it roll while strafing or circling the target, depending on where the melee folk are positioned. Often just strafing back and forth brings out the green numbers like no one’s business, because you’re constantly crossing paths with the melee players. Staff 2 works nicely for this as well.

I have not tried any of the glyphs, none of them appeal to me, and frankly I like my survival skills.

Lunar Impact is amazing, for me, that’s the go-to heal when I see party members start to get low on HP. I am in agreement that Cosmic Ray has some issues. One small move by the target, and the heal is completely missed. The tiny target circle is far too fiddly for my tastes.

The manueverability and speed from Natural Stride, I feel really augments the playstyle of needing to strafe with Staff 1.

As someone who has always mained a healer in other games, I’ve got to say, Druid is the most fun I’ve had in a long time! The next three weeks are going to crawl on by, while I go back to condi… Really can’t wait for HoT now!

ETA (because it’s late and I forgot): +1 with everyone who says that Druids need SOME form of Stability. That’s one of the biggest problems with the spec at the moment for me.

Being an old MMO player, having always played a ‘healerbot’ style class—I welcome the change—while this might not be the change for all—I have enjoyed it.

Cant kill stuff—don’t mind that at all. But with proper positioning and awareness of your party—the druid has been a refreshing and similar style of play that I glad to go back to

Sorry to break your dream.

Druid is only needed in WvW and potentially raid, and nowhere else, since it has minimal to no offensive and defensive supports.
No one except bad team really need a dedicated healbot.

For a party of 5, it’s too great of a sacrifice to carry a healbot who can only heal and does nothing else.

What? You must been a bad Druid, because I been rolling in SPvP, keeping allies alive and protected. Druid is a beast in Stronghold and Foe map.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Considering the nature of the Druid (and of rangers in general), why are glyphs close ranged?

Because its meant to best at close range. Thats why it has all the knockback and pulls. Its built to be close to “tanks”(translations: other players that can defend you and keep enemies distracted).
Your close range abilities help keep them alive as well.

Having now gone through a reset night on SoS I can say that druid is really the placebo effect. You see green numbers and think “Hey I’m being effective!” but honestly that’s not the case. I was really hoping that in a large group environment this is where the spec would really shine and pick up. A large number of my initial bad impressions still remain however.

What the druid needs is some sort of dps component. Despite the proclamation"zerk meta is dead" DPS is still king in this game. Without any way for the druid to actually force opponents to disengage you can heal all you want while the enemies merrily whack away at you and wear you down. All you are doing is ensuring you are one of the last to die. Nothing is really getting done. And with the spec so married to staff you really can’t even swap to a dps weapon set to try to pressure the engagement. Its further complicated by people’s natural reaction to roll out of the damage, this leaves druid exposed or largely out of position to be the most effective to the front line they need to carry them.

Water fields on Eles and even scrapper with their mobile blasting water field are far more desirable to a druid spec. They have the option to switch to heavy dps as well as sustain. This allows then to push or turn the engagement, something the druid is completely incapable of doing.

Glyphs are pretty useless, short in range, complicated alternating effects (Am I pulling in this form or pushing? I want to pull but now I’m in a form that cant do damage…) and no real damage component, no real group utility that others classes can’t bring to greater effect.

Unfortunately this late in the game there isn’t an opportunity to add any real functionality to the druid. The best we can hope for are numbers tweaks. Well unless healing is tweaked to God levels that can really sustain 20 people against 50. But that would be broken as all get out. Something this pigeon holed into a role probably shouldn’t have been one of the last to be revealed and openly tested. With such a narrow focus there are too many things that can derail that intended role.

All in all druid feels like a giant missed opportunity. 3/10

Does anyone actually like the glyph elite? Seems pretty useless…it has potential though but it doesn’t seem to work half the time.

Ray’s Concise but Thorough PvE Overview

Overall, the synergy is missing. I can become either a healer or a ranger, but not both at the same time. Flexability should be added so that the healing can either compliment a damage build or that the rest of ranger’s abilities can compliment a healing build.

Staff: Not only is the damage low, but it has no condition damage. In other words, after swapping to it, you are no longer using the the stat Condition Damage at all and Power, Precison and Ferocity aren’t worth mentioning. Healing Power is the only outgoing stat not wasted.

Suggest adding conditions to synergize with a Condi+Heal Apostate build.

Celestial Avatar Form: As a power or condi ranger, this takes forever to charge up. As a healing based ranger I’m hearing it charges up perhaps too fast. The skills are very nice to have, but they seem kind of redundant.

Suggest normalizing the damage vs healing charge up rate.
Suggest giving one of the skills the ability to add health to the bar of downed allies. At least something to slow death and protect allies helping resurrect the downed player.

Now for the minor traits:
1. Celestial Being – Basically a tutorial slot explaining the new mechanics.
2. Live Vicariously – This is good, it encourages healing builds.
3. Natural Mender – This is good too, it helps bring druid above other healers.

Suggest that all Elite Specializations should be getting an added bonus to this first slot, I don’t feel that just adding the mechanics is enough.

Trait slot 1 (forgot what these were called):
1. Druidic Clarity – Kind of encourages you to waste your Celestial Form, fairly useless and redundant in PvE. The original non-trap Healing Spring was better for Ranger.
2. Cultivated Synergy – This one is good. Allows non staff builds to do healing.
3. Primal Echos – Probably very annoying in PvP, but the stun part is not very useful in PvE. Again, it encourages you to wrongly time switching to healing.

Suggest Druidic Clarity applies smaller instant condi removal to successful heals instead.

Trait slot 2:
1. Celestial Shadow – Encourages wasting Celestial Form. Not useful in most PvE situations.
2. Verdant Etching – This one is fine as far as I can tell.
3. Natural Stride – Probably useful in PvP. Encourages playing badly in PvE.

Suggest rethinking Celestial Shadow.
Suggest Natural Stride ony applies condi reduction while swiftness is active, does not apply passive swiftness BUT casts 6 seconds of Glyph of Empowerment (separate 20 sec ICD) on all allies (and self) that Ranger applies swiftness to.

Trait Slot 3:
1. Grace of the Land – Redundant. Druids should be removing those conditions anyway.
2. Lingering Light – Seems pretty good.
3. Ancient Seeds – A nice small bonus to condi builds, but limited use in PvE. Probably OP in PvP.

Suggest Grace of the Land looses passive condi reduction and applies protection and/or regen to allies who have had a condi removed from them by a Druid in Celestial Avatar form.
Suggest Ancient Seeds instead applies damaging conditions (Poison/Bleeding) to enemies near an ally that has been healed by the Druid.

Glyphs:
1. Rejuvenation – This one is great. Just needs to apply the self heal to the pet as well.
2. Alignment – Kind of “Meh.” in PvE.
3. Equality – Same as above.
4. Empowerment – Very much a step in the right direction for Rangers in instance parties. More exclusive support options.
5. Tides – Seems like it should do something else in addition to the CC. Great for trap rangers though, except for the fact that it steals a trap slot away.
6. Unity – Alright for tank builds I guess. The healing variant can be a little redundant on Druids with high Healing Power.

Conclusion:

Rangers should be able to say: “I want to do damage and also heal.” OR “I want to heal and also do Ranger things.”

As a DPS Ranger, switching to staff turns you into nothing but a weak healer for 10 seconds.

As a Healing Ranger, switching OFF staff turns you into a weak damage dealer for 10 seconds. Might as well have made Druid a new class and disabled weapon swap.

Celestial Form charges too slow for damage dealer Rangers to the point where it becomes a rare gimmick and not a stable method to support the team.

The traits are so narrow to Druid that you either become a single specialization Druid with two throwaway Ranger specialization or a double specialization Ranger that has thrown away the third to be called Druid.

Otherwise, the skills are fun and it’s a generally goo idea. A few balances and a lot more integration with the rest of the class should make Druid a viable option for many playstyles.

Druid is definitely weak. Played with full berserk and cleric/magi (2 sets)
Verdant brink and WvW

Good:

• The art involved in this class is very cool.
• The names of the skills fit thematically and the effects.
• Support oriented class.

Bad:

• Staff does very little damage. You have to use it to build astral energy but the player feel somehow very punished for having a healing oriented weapon.
  It needs to do a damage closer to Greatsword than to the Shortbow.
• Healing scaling is too low. Even with 900 healing still the healing with the staff#1 is around 80 hp. The weapon needs to be more relevant for healing.
• Staff could apply condition damage. Burning should be perfect to take the damage output up to the level of other weapons.
• Staff#3 needs to be a teleport instead what is now or increase the range. The skill is really unreliable in most terrains because it does not go in an straight line.
• Staff#3 locks the toon when it finish. Even if you keep pressed forward when the skill end the travel it just lock your toon out for 1 sec. You have to press again the forward key or the Autorun (also deactivate the autorun).

Glyphs

• They are pretty bad. The effects aren’t really useful in any mode although it could be the range of the skill. 300 is too small, consider at least upgrade to 600. The cap is the targets if you add so small range the glyphs are just punishing.
• In general the effects are too weak. They need to be redesign to actually work as support. The only one that can be sometimes useful is the Glyph of Equality because of the Daze with the trait MoC (4 sec. daze). The other glyphs are just forgettable.

The elite Glyph of Unity is really bad for 2 reasons:
The range is too small. It need to have much greater range (cast at least 600, range of link at least 1200)..
Because you have to stay in melee you are being burst all the time by classes with more HP and armor than you. It needs to apply protection.

Avatar
Avatar seems the worst thing about the Druid.
The healing of this form is really low.
The lack of damage in this form is really frustrating. It desperately needs decent damage output in Cosmic ray.

Cosmic ray has a delay of 1-2 seconds from cast so most of the times it won’t land in your team mates if they are moving around.

• The radius of skills#4 and skill#5 is really low. It has to be doubled at least otherwise you have to be on the top of a melee class.

• Skill#2 i didn’t use it much, it’s too slow like the Skill#1 to actually be helpful to others.

• It get consumed too fast although being as it may such punishing mechanic seems like an eternity.
• Having to have the astral bar full most of the times you don’t have access to it when you needed.

Definitely the Avatar state feel like again, the player is being punished for choose a support class.

The Glyphs in the avatar state felt like more weak healing. Didn’t feel to make any difference from casting those to keep hitting Skill#1.

The Druid Mechanics: A bad design thought for other game than GW2.

The druid seems to be designed for another kind of game than to Guild Wars 2 where every single class has access to healing.
The healing provide by the druid is not that amazing. It will not hold your team, the very random burst healing is not a good idea in a game that the damage can be done in a sustainable way.

The druid depends too much in healing others. Which make the class by definition weak. It has no sustain because it has no sources of healing by himself.

The support it provides is really weak and does not has many CC.
Because it needs to be in the middle of the fight but has not got any damage mitigation the druid is a very weak class. Or stays in the back line where it will be of little help or will die constantly.

The damage output is really low compared with the already low damage from other weapons.

The druid trait line offer no synergy with the rest of the class, and because the druid is so different from the original profession as some players already pointed out that looks like a new profession that got scrapped when the reventant came around, it makes the ranger even more squishy or more weak when you have to take the Druid traitline.

Some changes to have in consideration

• Staff needs to do more damage. It’s damage output should be closer to the damage done with the GreatSword. Some condition like burn would be very welcome.
• Glyphs need a rework in normal state. They need to be significant and give more Control Conditions so Druid can actually being able to support it’s team this way.
• Glyphs need a rework in avatar state. They need to differentiate from the healing skills from avatar. They should bring support boons or mechanics that are significant to the team.
• Glyphs need to have increased their range.
• Avatar state has to go away from the pure healing concept. That’s not needed in this game. It needs to deal damage although it’s mainly healing.
• Avatar state has to last longer. You lose the remnant energy when you leave should it has to feel it’s impact is significant. Right now it does not allow to be really helpful.
• Avatar state needs increased range and do more damage. Enough to feel useful.
• The lack of sustain really plague the druid. It need means to be more sustainable, damage mitigation would be very welcome, and active defences like evades that the Staff has none.

Right now this class seems to be designed for people that hasn’t touched a ranger in all his life. Seriously it is really difficult to make a class that is fully committed to support but at the same time is really weak and enfeeble so it dies faster than even the original profession.

My experience with Druid.. I love it!..Amazing job Anet!.
Damage is fine on AA as this auto aim is constantly casting I easily got high numbers so fast over time without even zerk gear. some people I think are so used to big numbers instantly that they shouldn’t be playing druid as its a support heal specialization as it should be and its doing its job wonderful.. but ya I adore Duird very much xD.. The only issue is the scaling with Healing Power needs to work much much better but overall good experience with it.

Some things on Staff:

-Solar Beam: Love it! not much change needed.. would be nice if you can cast it on allies and foes. Damage is very good as it is meant to be a spam of heals and charging energy for avatar.

-Vine Surge: perhaps a 2 second cripple when foe crosses and extend the immob to 2 seconds.

-Astral Whip: This def needs to do a bit more damage and some fine tuning. I do agree this should be able to cast on allies OR foe to damage nearby foe/s and heal allies in a short duration around them.

-Ancestral Grace: This skill imo is perfectly fine.. but evasion wouldn’t hurt one bit and def should anyway since other classes have evasion on these types of skills.

-Sublime conversion: love it! just needs the water field stated in tooltip

About Glyphs:
-All need range increase to be remotely practical to use in a fight.. I tend to be using them and forgetting the short 300 range on them lol.

About Avatar:
-I actually barely use it (prob should more but I def use it when I need burst healing) when I do the skill 1 is def too small of a radius I keep missing but other then that it’s very good and should be for such the short duration in it.

asweknowit.4798:

After playing Revenant; Ventari and Glit stances outshine the druid specialization by far.

In my opinion Celestial Avatar should be turned into a stance with no resource, and have all druid healing functionality attributed to it. Rework staff into a proper range damage/cc weapon.
Right now Druid it all about heals, yet has low output in both healing and damage.

Also… make glyphs ground targetable. Boon application in CA form would increase their value, and increase damage output in standard form would be welcome.

Revenant is the new OP class.

Sword 3 can easily do 9k damage with enough mights.
Not to mention Revenant can self stack around 20 stacks of might without doing anything lol…

Only problem is the lack of cleanse w/o Ventari, which is actually a big issue XD…
So Revenant will be quite OP in PVE that’s for sure.

Hammer is doing more dps than LB too lol..

mistsim.2748:

nscarpenter.9341:

5: Sublime Convergence – Love this skill, only change I would make is make it a Light field.

currently it’s a water field, not in tooltip. please do not change this. it works great with the blast finisher.

krzysiek.9061:

3. Building astral power
I don’t know what to think about it. I understand how it works but I think that it’s easier for necromancer to build death shroud than for druids. It was easy to build it in zerg in WvW but with small, spreaded group, it was really hard to hit that cap.

I’m running a celestial dmg/heal hybrid in conquest. in teamfights, by bar fills up in under 20 secs. I’m cranking out as much damage as I can and healing when I can. I was never in a situation when the avatar wasn’t available when I needed it. I have other problems in terms of survivability…having my bar empty definitely isn’t one of them.

Thank you for the replay.
Isn’t like celestial form = survivability? 20 sec is really long. Too long for tPvP.
As I said, it’s easier to fill that bar with zerg in WvW but when you’re alone or with people who are too far, it’s really hard.
But I changed my set to celestial and I don’t see any difference in my healing. I thought that I’ll go with full cleric set (full healing power) I’ll have amazing healing and very bad dmg. With celestial I’ve got almost the same healing and good dmg. Is it the problem with scalling?

Today I had another match in WvW and:
1) I’ve never been too good with PvP and I always died (as an engi or ranger) because of thief burst. Now, for the first time, I survived! I didn’t kill him but he couldn’t kill me either. And that’s something, I guess.

2) I don’t understand why Druid or Celestial Avatar don’t make any condi damage. Burning seems logical.

3) Ancestral Grace #3 skill on staff – I thought you fixed that bug. Sometimes, when I auto-run, I stuck after using Ancestral Grace.

4) Solar Beam #1 skill on staff – another bug that I thought you’ve fixed before. In logs I make ~200 dmg with staff but on screen I can see 11k damage and more. Damage text stacks.

5) Cosmic Ray #1 skill in Celestial Avatar – radius is too small, 360 radius (radius of lunar impact) would be great. Also, add 800 damage.

6) Lunar Impact – add 2-3k damage.

7) Natural Convergence – let us channel that skill while moving.

8) Resurecting player works with filling bar for celestial avatar. So why it’s doesn’t work regeneration?

I think that Celestial Avatar should be powerful. Not only in healing but also making damage. You made that game without healing class and you can’t change it. Something in that spec must making damage. Not only for tagging mobs but also for making you dangerous.

The problem is not with a druid but with specializations. Specs aren’t new classes, they’re 3rd trait line that adds new experience to your game. Classes have roles (bunker, support, dps etc.) because they can change their traits. You can’t make roles for only 3rd trait line. It’s impossible. But every spec has something with damage and Druid is making none. You may say, “swap weapon” but it looks like staff is needed to fill that avatar bar. For now, I feel like a bunker but I’m not in PvP, and that’s a problem with this spec.

@Kidel.2057
Yes, in WvW, in blob.

I only see two problems with Druid: the first is the difficulty in generating AF without staff which is most likely intended, but I still think this could be addressed pretty easily with the damage percentage contribution being upped slightly.

Secondly, stability. Again this is probably intended, but it compresses bars when we are forced to slot stun breaks QZ, LR, SoR, Protect Me. Glyph of Equality is strong, but it is gated behind CAF of course. I think the easiest way to fix this is just to modify a trait to give stab. I propose that Grace of the Land be changed to break stuns when entering CAF (ICD) and giving 1 stack of stab every 2s while in CAF or something along those lines. Grace of the Land is a good candidate for this trait because its current effect is imo lackluster. Furthermore, it would create tough opportunity costs when choosing between the GM’s. For instance, Lingering Light is strong in WvW, but Grace of the Land would also be a tempting pick or even Ancient Seeds if you’re trying to bomb with dazes or Natural Convergence.

Edit: also if its not intended can Ancestral Grace be fixed to not make you wait out the full cast time if you are moving less than the max range?