Guild Wars 2

I did not play a lot of druid, but do have a couple of thoughts:

1. Celestial Form is very short I think. It eats through its resource extremely quickly, maybe I played it wrong, but should healing while in celestial form give more of the resource back? If not, why not? All you have is healing and condition, so it gives a very active play style to keeping Celestial form up, and when combat dies down, you lose it naturally.

2. Gaining the resource for Celestial form is too hit or miss. Ranger does not have a lot of Heals to pass out in the first place, making it based on the healing they do is not the best measure.

Druid in sPvP

Druid was the focus a lot of time and die really easy in teamfight if the enemies know how to play spvp, they make hard stun on him.
The downside that I see the druid and lacks because it will be his weak point is going since focused on glyphs, staff and celestial avatar (F5 ) .. not have stun breaks , stability and regeneration , it must be removed many glyphs or maybe the elite .. to have stability and breaks stun , that will make the Druid loses effectiveness of healing to their allies.
I propose that as we enter the celestial avatar (F5) so stability is granted a certain time (8 sec, 5 stacks) and that at least some glyph had stun Breaks.

Celestial Avatar (F5 )

- If you are downed and wake up, astral force should not be reset. (only if you are not in celestial avatar form).

- If you leave the celestial avatar (F5), astral force should not be reset , sometimes that strategy have to leave the celestial avatar with astral force by half.

- If you enter Celestial Avatar (F5): Add stability (8 sec, 5 stacks)

- Increase duration of Celestial Avatar form

- Skill 1 : Add damage
- Skill 2 : Add the explosion damage to seed and grant regeneration and protection to allies
- Skill 3 : Add damage and freezing
- Skill 4 : Add freeze per pulses
- Skill 5: Increase distance

Glyphs:

- Increase damage
- Add breaks stun
- Increase radius
- Grant a boon to allies

Stuff:

- Skill 1: Increase damage
- Skill 2: Add combo finisher: physical proyectile
- Skill 3: Error range 1200, the skill have only range 1000, fix it
- Skill 4: Increase damage
- Skill 5: Increase duration

Druid Traits:

- Celestial being: Astral force per damage, increase 1% more
- Druidic clarity: Add stability (8 sec, 5 stacks)
- Cultivated Synergy: Increase radius
- Seed of life: Grant regeneration and protection to allies
- Celestial Shadow: Activate Glyph of the tides when leaving celestial avatar form (if you put stealth to allies in a point its a fail, because the enemies decap your point when you leave the celestial avatar form, you can knockback out the point the enemies when put stealth to allies in a point)

Basically Druid has zero synergy with the base spec (which every other class has), the only trait is Natural Strides cause it makes you move faster which rangers need to not be ganged up on .

My thoughts for druid in spvp so far:

1.Celestial Avatar Skill:

Skill 1: Not worth using it. Increase range or add some weak dmg to it so that it can trigger together with ancient seed or some of our spiritbuffs.

Skill 2: Not worth using it. The casttime and the time until it will remove the condition is to long. A burnguard will dmg my mates for 2 or 3 seconds until i remove the burning for example. Remove the healing, increase the cd and make this skill instant.

Skill 3: Nice skill combined with quickness from petswap. Without quickness it is really hard to land a hit on the enemy.The Explofinisher in the tooltip isnt working. Many people complain about the synergy of moment of clarity who makes the stun a 6 second daze, but i dont see a real problem here. It doesnt matter, if the daze lasts 6 or 3 seconds. One stunbreaker and its gone anyway. Second problem is that a druid with markmanship is squishy as hell. He loose most of his survivability if he uses this synergy.

Skill 4: Strong and really good. Lets make the waterfield last a bit longer than the actual casttime so that we can blast our waterfield with a working skill 3.

Skill 5: Good with quickness and a bit to weak without it. Let us move while casting it or make the casttime a bit shorter so that it is possible to land the dark hole against experienced players.

2.Thoughts about filling our Avatarform

I think its ok that we loose our full avatarlifebar after getting out of this form as long as there is no cd. Give us the chance to fill up our bar with regeneration, natural healing or the signet of wild in exchange for leaving it as it is. This will give us the chance to use other skill instead of troll urgent. Water spirit also works well but it is not a really good option for pvp even with druidtraitline in use.

If you add some kind of cd to transfom into avatar form than dont forget to give us a better way to fill our bar. For now it takes between 10 seconds(teamfight),20 seconds(small scale fight, 1v1), 30 seconds (1v1) to fully upload this form depending on the situation.

3.Traits

3.1.Adept

druidic clarity: strong and good

cultivated synergy: the scaling with healingpower is to low. From settler you get additional 180 hp. Lets make it scale better and add in exchange a cd so that it cannot be spamable with “Weal as one”. Increase radius to 360.

primal echos: Did not use it, sorry

3.2.Master

celestial shadow: Increase radius to 360 and make superspeed and stealth last 3 seconds. Add cooldown to prevent to make it spamable in teamfighs. 20 seconds or somethin like that. Dont forget that we loose our whole avatarbar to get this

verdant etching: I didnt used glyphs in pvp as much as possible to say something abut this, but it was a good trait for my interuptranger in pve.

natural stride: Strong and balanced in my opinion. Conditiondurationdecrease is nice, also the movementspeed. Without it the druid would be to slow to support the team. Before beta i thought about using resounding timbre together with We heal as One to get swiftness and regeneration to fill up the avatar bar. Since this is not working troll urgent is a must to have(it takes 3 minutes to fill the bar the We heal as one) we are forced to use natural stride to not getting outrotated.

3.3.Grandmaster

ancient seed: strong and really good skill

lingering light: strong and healing is pretty nice combined with our minortraits. And its really needed to fill up the avatarbar fast enough. Together with Troll urgent it
triggers twice. Hope this is intenional. Without this synergy it would be to weak.

grace of the land: strong and good as it is.

3.4.Minor

celestial beeing: Astralforce per healing would be ok, if it could work together with regeneration or the other healing traits. Without it (and thats actual the situation) its to weak. Either you make a synergy with regeneration or you increase astralforce per damage. I prefer the synergy with regeneration.

Rest of the minortraits are really good and i dont see any need to change it.

4.Pet
No chance to test the pets in pvp. Sad thing that this will stay like this until the release.

5.Conclusion:
Love it. Synergy with other sources of healing or other healingskills would be better, but the new classmechanic itself is awesome. Never thought that healing would be a real option compared to damagereduction via boons(aegis, protection) and conditions (blind, weakness). We are weak against cc and burstdamage in our avatar form and we need to stay in the damagecleave while healing. Thats why i think that our really great healpotential is not to strong. Healing the group has its price and thats ok in terms of balancing.

Heal is real.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Nova Pint Kiosk.7085:

The druid beta has showed me one thing: Healing Power & Healing needs a MAJOR rework across all classes.

Compare Engineer Medkit #1, which forces you to actively follow someone to heal them, and give up 100% of your damage for the entire time. This healing does about the same hp/s as regen does. You give up 100% of your damage to do something a herald can do with their healing skill. while still doing anything else they want. Hell, if you’re both full healing power builds the revenants regeneration would outheal your medkit, thanks to the bonus healing % a revenant gets.

Off topic, but…

I don’t see why healing needs a MAJOR rework. Obviously, Engineer is not supposed to be as healing support oriented as a Revenant who is not as healing support oriented as a Druid. What’s the issue? You want homogenous classes where everyone can do the same thing?

Also off topic… but…
I don’t see the big deal with Herald, Ranger core can already do 90% of what it does. Although, you do have the Legend swapping.

you used the term “supposed to” and you are right on some part because that’s the same thing most of us thought…. Rangers are not supposed to be a healer!.. buffer? kinda should tap it more since our support build does not give required buffs in pve or pvp and they should have focused on that or our pet skills changed to work better with different builds.

to make staff 1 look a little more obvious, put swirls of light around the beam to make it look like Piccolo’s Makankosappo (aka special beam cannon) =D

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/dragonball/images/8/85/PiccoloSpecialBeamCannonK.png/revision/latest?cb=20100611160409

First I want to thank you if you have been reading this far you are doing all of us players a great service. Many of the issues with the druid are well known and I suspect by now if you have been reading it all you have a good idea about how everyone is feeling. I am sure that once you get a chance with balancing it will work out in the end. Now that I have sweetened you up I would like to mention my one real big issue. the celestial avatar 2 skill. It have some functional issues people have mentioned but for me the issue is its appearance. It does not look like a beneficial thing. It looks like a little pustule that pops, not bloom as in the description. I feel you could make it into a night bloom like on a cactus those are nice or more mushroom like.( like on the glyph of alignment). Better yet swap the staff 2 and celestial 2 give the wisp a cleanse on allies it touches and make the seed a tangle of vines targeted aoe for taging. (that was just a thought). But if you do nothing else please look into changing that animation. Thanks for reading.

My ¢2 on Druid :
Staff #1 is in a good spot but could use a burn, especially when doing solo content. I’m thinking “applies burn if no ally is healed through the beam” which wouldn’t make it too aggressive.
Staff #2 wouldn’t change it, except maybe give it synergy with fields, like either a Projectile finisher or Whirl finisher (only for the first 0.5 second though , not full duration) (would also synergize with Wisp on Self when using Healing Spring, for water field finisher)
Staff #3 I really like it, just fixing range to 1200 instead of current 1000 and also make it finish casting when reaching destination, as other pointed out.
Staff#4 I’d like to see more clearly the range of the line, maybe replace the target mark by a big rectangle that actually depicts the range.
Staff#5 I get that projectile mitigation is good, but the healing isn’t high enough to bring over other reflects or Smoke Wall that can be blasted for stealth or blind with a projectile finisher.
Celestial Avatar Form: I absolutely love it, I think the rate at which Astral Force is generated is perfect, but only on Staff. Need to nerf down recharge rate on Revive Healing and Troll Unguent. Oh and a Poison on #2 on implosion would be much appreciated.
Glyphs: did not really care to bring over Core Utility Skills, they need to be overhauled.
Other than that, I’m really liking the direction that Druid is taking, good job

One other issue is most of the glyphs have a cast time when they shouldn’t, like the knockback one. It is a defensive glyph it shouldn’t have a cast time like that, it makes it useless.

People told me to post this here, so here we go:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Some people might disagree, some might be against any additions, but I for one – and from what I have seen on the forums and ingame – many others feel like the way that druid is centered around healing is probably hurting the ranger as profession more than helping it on the long run.

The problem, with only three weeks till the launch of the expansion, time is the fire in which we burn. There is only so much you, Irenio, can do before the druid goes live. To be honest, I have been going through a lot of feedback on this forum, but I could harldy read it all, so my idea might have been brought up before (even several times). This would only proof my point though, there is a fix, which is realizable in the short amount of time left.

Here we go:

1) Staff: Leave staff alone, besides some minor adjustments it seems perfectly fine for the role it was inteded to fill. Play a bit with the numbers, but overall just leave it the way it is.

2) Traits: They are OK, they are good enough for launch. Same as staff, fool around with some numbers if you need to.

The exceptions to 1) and 2):

Here we go, something has to happen after all.
- Lower the amount of astral force gained from healing to 1.5, raise the amount of astral force gained by damage to 1.5. Nature is all about balance, be it life and death, day and night and healing and damage. Make astral force a thing for every ranger player (stay with me if you don’t want to heal all the time in this matter).
- Wisps are pure light, as many have suggested before, they should cause damage to foes as they do cause healing to allies – nature is about balance, you remember. Give them some burning condition on hit, that should do the trick.

3) Avatar: Now things get interesting. Keep you healing avatar as is, BUT, add weapon switch to it. It would work like a regular weapon switch (with cooldown) which would give you the option to switch only once while in avatar form (will need some minor adjustments to astral force consumption).
When you weapon switch in avatar, you will recieve a different set of weapon skills, which will be focused around damage (on the level of sword) with boons that are related to nature for your allies. This would include, but is not limited to vigor, protection and quickness.

While the damage in your second avatar line won’t be any higher than normal (it offers some burst though) you will offer group utility, which will be very welcome in groups. As a trade off, make all the attacks melee based (with one gap closer), risk vs. reward so to say.

This would also correlate with the former design of the druid of having more than one aspect. Call the second one “Aspect of the Wild” give it a shiny green glow and tadaa, the druid specialization got some more complexity, something for people that don’t even like healing and feel even more druid than what it is now.

Things to considerate:

4) Glyphs: I am not very happy with the design of the glyphs in general. Aspect of the Wild could get new effects on the glyphs, but as it is for now, I see harldy any use for them anyway. They need a fair amount of rework after launch, maybe then a third functionality will be realizable.

5) New skills: We need five new skills for Avatar of the Wild, melee with boons, one gap closer. Better than adding all the damage to the existing avatar, as it would be hard to balance, better than to start from the scratch. If you need inspiration, I may be able to help you.

6) Balancing: This is an ongoing process anyway.

I am fairly sure, this would work. It won’t limit the existing concept and actually adding a controllable second layer for players that don’t like it.

Im pretty happy with the class so far.The only things that really got on my nerves were:

Astral Form needs some damage added and/or some bigger radiuses.

Glyphs feel a bit clunky. When i tried to spam them, for some Seed heals, and pressed the Hotkeys in the same tempo as i always with every other class and “insta cast”skillset do, only the first one came through. This felt really awkward.

The Hammer holding animation needs to be changed.

And the Sounds of Staff 1…. Am i the only one who thinks these sounds dont resemble Lazerishy sounds but more like something wet,mean and grumbly in someones stomach?
Its almost as annoying as Necro Staff sounds were when the game released.

If Druid’s are going to be primarily healers we need better stat scaling with healing power. For Druid to be relevant as a healer we need to not only heal better then other classes but also better than just blasting a water field.

I did the PvE raid, and my healing felt very lackluster. It seemed no matter how much healing I did the raid really never benefited from it.

Astral Force need really burst to fill up.

In solo play it s impossibile fill up. Just using Troll Unguent…but i m trapper… upbuilding AF with regen too for example and add % dmg / AF, 1/4 is very very little % to fill up.

Celestail Avatar: need stability or skills are useless (expetially 4-5)

Staff 3: need evade (like GS 3)

Lunar Impact don t blast

Ancient Seeds don t work with Spike Trap (knockdown) and with knockback in general.

Ps sry for my horrible english:(

Rabid Dingo.7053:

Thoughts on Ranger – Spirits
The loss of mobile spirits, and the loss of on-death effects, combined with the small range on the activated skills means outside of PVE content that allows us to stand in one spot for an extended duration (such as in boss arenas), they don’t serve a purpose, and when you do summon them, they die faster than you can activate their kamikaze-skill

My thoughts would be to make them appear similar to the staff wisps, but with identifiable features. Given their similarity to banners (passive aura bonuses to allies), it would make more sense to have them untargetable, and they don’t actively attack enemies, so aside from avoiding them when the active skill is used, they don’t pose a direct threat like phantasms, gyros, minions or elementals. Obviously the storm spirit daze duration would need to be decreased, and the cooldown may need to be increased to make them less spammable, but it would give the druid more options for support with auras, and make the active skills more accessible as they’d be centered on the ranger.

I feel the same way. As is they die way to quickly and in certain situations you can´t even circumvent that with clever positioning.

I found celestial too slow to charge, so by the time it’s needed the fight is half over and half the zerg is dead before I can start to heal.

Tagging anything using staff and cele was problematic- getting loot in wvw was hard enough (don’t use barrage in big fights, instant death by retal) before on a LB, using staff and trying to charge up cele made my loot even less.

Skills don’t seem to link very well, although that might be more to do with lack of practice over the weekend and perhaps there is more synergy and fields to be able to blast than i noticed.

Level of healing in a full cleric’s set was very low- warrior with heal sig does 2-3 times per second than what I can throw on staff 1.

Skills long delays make it decent for static fights or where the target doesn’t move much (think most pve battles where the ‘legendery’ monster hardly bothers moving), but pet skill activation is so slow it’s always happening well behind where I am now, making it pretty useless in a pvp battle.

Needs a lot of work before I see it having much impact in wvw as any kind of healer.

Glyph of Unity: This skill has some sort of aftercast issue currently, which prevents you from casting a new skill right after. It only works if you’re already spamming the button for the next skill you want to use while casting Glyph of Unity. That means if you try to use a skill right after the 1/2 sec casttime of the glyph, nothing will happen. The aftercast seems to be about 1 sec.

AF Building needs to be tweaked. Staff builds it much too fast and any other weapon builds it too slow.

Celestial Avatar needs some diversification. Mainly in that skill 1,3, and 4 are rather similar. Leave skill 1 as your spammable heal and skill 4 as your emergency big AoE heal that requires positioning. Change skill 3 to stunbreak on allies instead of healing them.

Also, allow Druids to enter this form at will, remove the duration limitation and instead make each skill have a fixed AF cost. This allows you to better control HPS.

Staff

• Needs more damage. Whether it be raw damage or by adding conditions to it.
• Ancestral Grace
  • It’s bugged in where the channel never fully finishes. Dropping you out at 1000 units or so. It also needs evade frames during the channel.
• Vine Surge
  • Allow the Ranger to cast it faster. 80% of the time it misses due to cast time.
• Sublime Conversion
  • Add a Crippling component when enemies cross over it. Also, It should be in the shape of an upside down "U’. So like protection on the Left/Front/Right of the Ranger. Not 360 degrees but around 280 degrees or so.

Celestial Avatar Mode
Give the ranger the ability to start casting the Celestial Avatar Skills immediately after pressing ‘F5’. There were instances when I wanted to use Lunar Impact but couldn’t because it takes about 1-2 seconds before I can start casting Avatar skills upon change.

• Seed of Life
  • Needs to execute faster. If the ranger is relying on it for condition removal, chances are they have already moved out of the small radius. Either make the condition removal happen at the beginning of the cast or instantly on use.
• Lunar Impact
  • The blast finisher isn’t working.

Utilities

• All the Glyphs are fine except the range needs to be increased. Especially Glyph of Unity. They should also be separate casts from Celestial Avatar Mode versions.

Traits

• Celestial Shadow
  • Increase the duration of Stealth and Super Speed to 4 seconds.
• Verdant Etching
  • Again, allow the condition removal to happen either immediately or at the beginning of Seed of Lifes Cast.
• Ancient Seeds
  • Increase the amount up to 5 targets.

One thing that’s been pestering me is Ancestral Grace.

The skill seems to have a set duration which makes you hover around in wisp form if you travel a short distance. However, it isn’t an evade so you’re just stuck in a vulnerable state. You should either dodge (under similar ruling as the Revenant mist evades) or leave wisp form as soon as you arrive at your destination.

Vine surge cast time can be reduced. Its feeling a little clunky atm.

Can we get a buff to the scaling on healing power as well as more damage on the staff… It feels like your doing nothing for both…

Celestial form: (3) Often times attempting to cast this right as the form ends results in me using my (3) skill for the equipped weapon. Throwing myself at enemies with staff.

(1) The delay and small AoE combined makes it too difficult to land on moving targets. Either make it faster (compensating with after-cast) or increase its AoE slightly.

Glyphs: Generally glyph AoE feels too small, I basically have to stand on top of what I want to hit with it.

Staff: (3) Should end sooner when used in short range. As it is if you want it for a blast finisher or burst heal without the mobility it takes the same amount of time as using it at max distance.

(5) Feels weird having a flat healing amount. As rapid shots heal a lot but one large attack has minimal effect (outside of negating the damage itself).

Added note: It would be nice if the avatar had ‘some’ offensive potential such as the seeds having added poison damage.

I found the Druid was too vulnerable to condi spikes/condi dmg nor did he control them well enough to fill that group support role. If you are going to have a support character in WvW it needs to remove condis reliably and a Druid just doesnt do that. Nor does he deal with them well himself.

Condition control is life in the current WvW meta. You can easily have 8 stacks of burn put on someone in a second. By the time i activate my avatar form and the animation completes there’s 1 or 2 ticks of burn. then i have to plant the seed for the avatar skill 2 ability once i locate my team mate with the burns in the melee, another couple of seconds then we have to wait for it to grow and pop another 2-3 seconds.

So i just log off the Druid to my Guardian, load up PoV/trooper runes someone gets 8 stacks of burn, fire off an instant cast shout. As long as he’s within 600 radius of me, no more burns. No faffing about building avatar energy, no trying to find where he is in the melee, then having to ground target some seed, then having to wait for it to grow.

As someone who has mainly played ranger since launch, I was incredibly excited to see the mechanics that druid brought to the game. I’m still excited for it, but there are a few concerns that I have.

Two of the concerns I have revolve around the staff animations. Druid is caster, not a melee fighter like the Daredevil or Revenant. I feel they should hold their staves like others casters do, like the Elementalist or Mesmer.
The 1rst staff skill’s animation, to me, feels like the solar needs to be slightly larger. I felt it was far too small in appearance. I also felt solar beam could use a damage buff to help make it more viable in solo situations.

It was very awkward to have a weapon with such long range support capabilities, but have the glyphs be point-blank-AOE. I think they should have a slightly extended range in the form of ground targeting.

Lastly is some feedback regarding the pets, the Fire Wyvern in particular. When its F2 skill is activated, it activates right at it’s location rather than at the target enemy. It would be more beneficial if it sought out your target (if you have one selected) and activate its ability there, and activate it at its current location if no target is selected.

I have to say, overall I really do like the class and am looking forward to playing it in Heart of Thorns.

Traits Review PvP Focused

Minor Adept:

Celestial Being: On par with every other specialization except scrapper which actually has a function.

Major Adept:

Cultivated Synergy: Great trait. Provides an option for condi clear, this is needed for ranger to break out of the commonly used Wilderness Survival mold for condi clear. Good adept tier trait with how Celestial Form works currently.

Druidic Clarity: Ok skill, has cool synergy with low cool down heals and also helps Troll Unguent be a burst heal. Good synergy with runes that provide a heal bonus as well, like Runes of the Flock or Runes of the Water. Still could use some slight improvements somewhere compared to the other traits. Good adept tier trait.

Primal Echoes: Good trait. Does it need an internal cool down? Good adept tier trait.

Minor Master:

Live Vicariously: Fine trait.

Major Master:

Celestial Shadow: Amazing trait. Provides a ton of utility not only in PvP for stealthing teammates to save them or while rezzing. Also works great for giving super speed. Wouldn’t change a thing. Good Master Tier Trait

Verdant Etching: Great trait if glyphs were slightly better. Not great at the moment. Could be a good master trait with some changes.

Natural Stride: Cool trait, great synergy with condition duration reducing runes like Hoelbrak or Melandru. Good Master tier trait.

Minor Grandmaster:

Natural Mender: Cool trait, could maybe be improved some how. Provides good bonus healing while throwing out all the heals.

Major Grandmaster:

Grace of the Land: Not a good trait! There should not be traits that passively provide buffs like this. There is already a lot of condition hate in the game because of condition clears. There does not need to be a -33% condition damage buff for PvP. People don’t like these passive traits.

Lingering Light: Ok trait, not great for PvP. Could have an added functionality. I can see its potential for PvE/WvW

Ancient Seeds: Amazing trait for druid. Helps give the druid some much needed CC to stay competitive. With what all the other professions can do, it is really easy for them to get out of the roots so it really helps to have this on a 10s CD. If this were to be changed and the ICD was increased then the immobilize duration per root tick would have to increase. Any runes or traits that reduce condition duration allow foes to just walk out of the roots. Thats why it is balanced with the 10s ICD (especially because its hard to CC every 10s to get a root anyway) because people can get out of the roots so easy. I wouldn’t change a thing and am most concerned about non-healing druid viability without this trait. This trait feels worthy of a Grand Master, the other two not so much.

Side Note: I love the current healing scaling on Druid. It allows for people to go into healing power and get REALLY big heals out to teammates but it also allows for druids without healing power to be more hybrid in terms of healing and doing damage. This is great because since the ranger lacks in comparison to the other DPS professions its cool to give them this nice distinction where they can still give out pretty significant healing!

Solar Beam
Good, but add a bit more damage to it. Make it fire a beam without a target and allow it to target friendly objects and allies.

Astral Wisp and Cosmic Wisp (from the Lingering Light trait)
Both need to become unblockable and do something negative to foes it passes through. That would make Wisps a whole lot more interesting and useful. 3s Blind, or 2s Weakness or 1s Slow for example. Astral Wisp should also apply it on-hit to the target.

Sublime Conversion acts as a Waterfield, but the tooltip doesn’t say so. Add it to the tooltip. It also doesn’t look like a Combofield visually. Add the visual indicator on the ground. I don’t think this skill needs anything else anymore, because the Waterfield will always give it a use, even if the opponent doesn’t use projectiles.

Vine Surge
Give it 2s immobilize or 4s cripple to give it a bit more punch.

Ancestral Grace
Just needs a fix where the Ranger stops moving at the end of the cast. It would be nice if it would become immune to CC for the duration (but not immune to conditions or damage). This would go well with the idea that Wisps should be unblockable.

Option on solar beam….

How bout the heals are not given directly to allies within the beam but create an aoe burst around the target for healing.

If the healing was burst around the target it would be seemingly a message of “Kill this one now”

So I tired raid a little and now I see problems that I’ve not seen in WvW.

1. Healing with AoE is pretty hard. It’s easy when ppl stack (you don’t even have to ask about that in WvW, you’ll hit 5 ppl without a problem) but with 10 ppl, when they’re running around, it’s very hard. I don’t know how can you deal with it. Healing in Wildstar is really fun. You don’t click on UI but also you don’t have to place AoE. There’s some kind of rectangle going from your char and you just cast.

2. You can dodge healing. Really….

3. I was with PUG. I didn’t know what to do. Stay at range or in close fight? Staying at range was really hard but if staying in meele is intended, why didn’t you make healing “aoe around the caster”? Would be much easier to heal.

I think I possibly found the cause of the bug causing Celestial Avatar to end prematurely (especially in pvp). Every time I have experienced this bug it has been when trying to do the combo of Lunar Impact immediately followed by Natural Convergence to proc the Ancient Seeds trait while they are dazed.
It seems like queuing up Natural Convergence while Lunar Impact is still casting, then getting Lunar Impact interrupted and pressing Natural Convergence again is what does it. Reproduction rate somewhere between 60-80%.

Just going to leave this here too.

Make non-healing Druid a good option as well by moving Natural Mender to the staff trait and moving the daze on staff to GM minor as daze on weapon swap. Thanks!

Sublime Coversion is a skill that is very difficult to use and is also very weak. Considering how small the wall is 162 healing per projectile is not really enough to do anything. I would like to see that number increased drastically so the skill will actually punish an enemy for shooting though it and reward the ranger for placeing it in the right spot. I really do love the idea of the skill I just think in its current form it is to weak to be useful.

Natural Mender
Make it increase and trigger on all healing, not just outgoing healing. This trait forces Druid to pick a trait that only helps to heal allies, which only rarely happens in many game modes. Having it also benefit the Ranger selfishly would make it useful in any Druid build.

After playing around with it here are my thoughts on what needs to be changed.
My Number 1 Gripe, to where if nothing else is fixed this should be fixed:
FIX THE WAY DRUIDS HOLD STAFF PLEASE
THERE IS NOT 1 SKILL ON DRUID THAT IS MELEE EVERYTHING IS CASTING
DON’T LET US HOLD THE STAFF LIKE A HAMMER!! JUST NO BAD BOY!
Just let us go back to holding the staff like any other caster, you know: Mesmers, Eles, Necros, and Guardians.

Traits:
Druidic Clarity
It’s cool that you’re able to drop conditions that are on you; however, it’s competing with two other traits that are in higher demand. Maybe add: Blind (3 Seconds) and Removes 3 Conditions from nearby allies Radius 240.

Cultivated Synergy:
Only complaint is that for raids, you’re limited to 5 people versus 10.

Primal Echoes:
Pretty solid the way it is, maybe add “inflicts 1 stack of burning to solar beam” if they chose that trait. It will give some type of condi option/ damage option.

Celestial Shadow:
No real complaints

Seed of Life/ Verdant Etching:
Pretty good all around, maybe add: Inflicts 1 stack of poison to nearby enemies when it blossoms.

Natural Stride:
Why was: Slow and Taunt omitted from this list?

Grace of the Land:
Concern for this is again Raids, 5/10 people.

Cosmic Wisp:
I love this trait, the only thing I would add to it is: Damages foes it touches.
If it heals for 401, let it damage for 401. The duration is rather short and this gives Druids another method of getting tags while healing.

Ancient Seeds:
Pretty solid trait, I would add 1 skill modification to this:
“Vine Surge now applies 5 stacks of bleeding on hit”

Minor Traits:
No complaints

Glyphs:
No complaints, took a while to get use to.

Solar Beam:
The beam is very thin and hard to see which makes it hard to coordinate for initial heals. Maybe adjust the effect a little? Also, would be nice if The Bitfrost modified this, maybe into a Rainbow beam with little diamonds around it?

Astral Wisp:
Pretty solid all around, I do think adding “damages foes it pass through” would help with getting tags.

Ancestral Grace:
The cool down seems a little long, maybe reduce it to 10 seconds?

Vine Surge:
Add a poison field to this skill would be a nice way to allow Druids to combo with Ancestral Grace.

Sublime Conversion:
Really not a fan of this skill…
The healing is so small for PvP purposes unless a Ranger is using Rapid fire you aren’t really going to see anything. PvE wise, creatures don’t shoot often to make this worth while.

Maybe modify it to something like:
Reflects Projectiles, when reflects: Heals nearby allies for 50% of it’s potential damage.
Creates a Light Field at the location it is placed.

Celestial Skills:
Seed of Life:
Only gripe is that the picture is a Flower and the skill it’s self drops this egg sac looking thing. A larger detailed version of kudzus foot steps would work for this.

The Duration for Celestial Avatar seems a little too short, maybe increase it by 5 seconds?

Pets:
Bristleback:
It seems to be very squishy very little damage

Smokescale, no real complaints. Does seem a little op with the revenant sword 3 attack.

Tiger:
Not a fan of it’s F2, maybe change it to Furious Roar:
Grants Fury & Swiftness to nearby allies
(could have 5 seconds of Katie perry playing? )

Electric Wyvern :
Weird that this one doesn’t fly. It’s field seems to last very short in comparison as well.

Fire Wyvern:
It’s F2 doesn’t go directly after the enemy being targeted, you have to spam F1 and wait for him to get there and finish his attack cycle and hit F2 for him to do it and wait for the field to finish building. Just seems clunky over all. it is very pretty and bad kitten looking though

Tried a Magi’s condi build in raids using SB and A/T. With Vampiric Aura from necro and Lingering Light you can refill Astral Force quickly enough to have it available when needed.

A few things I didn’t like when healing:
Ancient Seed and Cosmic Ray are hard to land efficiently. Cosmic Ray especially could benefit from a larger circle (and some damage).
If you don’t have any form of lifesteal you’re pretty much forced to play on staff, meaning that you forfeit damages for heal. Druid could benefit quite a bit from damages here and there.
We’ll see in the future but I wonder which class could replace a Druid for the healing part. Druids can pretty much burst heal on demand, something I can’t really say from other classes.

Minor additional feedback, since I can flat guarantee the Ranger subforum has spent all thirteen of these pages pointing out everything that’s wrong with the spec already.

I actually really liked the ‘Blackout’ Druid playstyle, focusing on Moment of Clarity and multiple long-duration Dazes. To me, it was really cool to be able to play that duality of role – heal my pet/allies with the Druid’s crazy greenbar paste, but also prevent enemies from doing damage in the first place with multiple hefty Dazes. Ancestral Grace was awesome for getting where I needed to be to hit a Daze. Yeah, the staff damage was a lot lower than I wanted it to be, but given the frequency with which I could lock enemies out of their abilities, it didn’t matter quite as much as it otherwise might have.

When HoT goes live, I honestly think the Blackout Druid – if it still exists – is going to save my Ranger. I haven’t been able to figure out anything worthwhile to do with my Ranger in basically ever, but this was a lot of fun to mess with. It’s a semi-unique role in GW2 so far; we’ve never really had anything that could frequently soft-lock multiple enemies and stop them from actively harming you. Heh…I have the usual list of buff requests I’d like to see to really make the character pop, but I’m going to forego it. No doubt Irenio’s already got thirteen pages of hissing spitting frothing-mouthed nastiness all informing him of exactly what he needs to do to make the class better…but I’m not a game dev.

So. Feedback Summary:

Good:
-‘Blackout’-style Druid, with MoC traited in Marksmanship and Primal Echoes, Glyph of Equality, and Lunar Impact was surprisingly cool to play, and felt like a valuable disruptor/lockdown expert instead of nothing but a passive healbot. More support for this playstyle would be awesome.

-Smokescales are fantastic and I want more of them. No srsly – Smoky Bandit is best pet. Would double-Smokescale if could.

-Ancestral Grace is fantastic for quick spot-heals and also maneuvering around the battlefield. It was crucial to me contributing properly in my first and currently only Wyvern fight – having something to get between safe spots amidst the fire was awesome.

Bad:
-Staff damage is…not really there. I’m utterly certain this has been covered, however.

-Bristleback did not really feel at all like a ‘brutal condition-applying dinosaur’. It has two bleed attacks, both on long-ish cooldowns with moderate size and duration of bleed stacks. I love the way it looks (spiky war-quaggan!), and the Wild Growth SUPAH-BRISTLEBACK glitch makes my entire guild giggle like drunken sorority girls – Psyckos wants it to be left alone desperately...but it doesn’t feel very impactful as a pet. Maybe some bleeds on AA? I’unno. All I know was that it did not feel like a brutal anything dinosaur.

Ugly:
-Solar Beam’s (sylvari) animation was…weird. The pose for it looked actively painful to the Ranger (staff above head, back arched way back, head twisted sharply to the side), and the odd gargling-rocks SFX were very off-putting. I really wanted to switch to the awesome hipfire animation for Vine Surge from the HoT reveal trailer back in January, and have the SFX sound more like a beam of energy and less like…well, gargling rocks.

I’m sure this has been said before, but the Staff holding and Idle animation needs to be changed.

Currently it looks like we’re awkwardly holding a hammer. Why do we not hold staffs like every other class does? It looks horrible in its current state.

So, please just change Staff Idle to the correct animation.

Thanks!

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Can someone send this man back in time 3 years with a delorean please?

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Please don’t. A lot fo people prefere them like this.

I like staff animations. hows about you “look at” other parts of the Ranger that need fixing huh? LIKE THAT HUGE LIST OF BUGS EHH? EHH?

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Honestly if you nerf the base heal in cele form you most likely will make druid not worth taking in any instance outside of support. Is this the vision you have for druid and ranger?

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Ahem, I’d like to put this qoute here (from myself):

“For all of the people wanting druid healing to scale better with healing power, be careful what you wish for – knowing Anets track record, they probably would go ahead and nerf the basic healing to make healing power ‘more attractive’ (remember nerf to shortbow range…)”

*

And there’s that…

Kitty.1502:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Honestly if you nerf the base heal in cele form you most likely will make druid not worth taking in any instance outside of support. Is this the vision you have for druid and ranger?

ATM heal in berserk are to high and scaling from gear are not worth at all to take it.

IMHO it have to be lower about on 25% and higher than now if you take +healingPower.

Rizo.9534:

Kitty.1502:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Honestly if you nerf the base heal in cele form you most likely will make druid not worth taking in any instance outside of support. Is this the vision you have for druid and ranger?

ATM heal in berserk are to high and scaling from gear are not worth at all to take it.

IMHO it have to be lower about on 25% and higher than now if you take +healingPower.

I disagree that its to high, the scaling could be better with healing power, but going into cele form you are losing all real damage potential, its what you give up to heal yourself. With all the sustain that other classes have, this actually feels like a good amount of sustain against other classes. For crying out loud we shouldn’t be the worst in every kitten aspect of this game.

Yeesh…why do I subject myself to this place?

Zealot’s armor is a thing that exists, folks. Seriously. Not everything needs to be set up to perform optimally in Berserker gear. Poor healing coefficients hurts game diversity – if you want to play a pure-Berserker Druid, then accept that you should by all rights heal for less than someone in Zealot’s armor. Just like the Zealot’s guy needs to accept that he’s not going to hit as hard as the Berserker guy.

Telling the Zealot’s-wearing guy that he gets no return on his investment of Healing Power is kinda awful. If you go Berserker stats, you lose healing efficiency. That’s what you get for taking a support class and giving it zero supportive ability.

I really don’t like how the Druid holds the staff like a hammer. It doesn’t make much sense and they should hold it like Ele holds a staff.

Wow, as if giving up a traitline with damage potential for the druid traitline wasn’t sacrifice enough, now you want us to give up useful stats to become somehow efficient healbots for the new content.

I am not entirely sure if this is the way to go.

Choosing druid is a damage penalty already, forcing healing power on us is just like kicking a guy on the ground in the face…

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Yeesh…why do I subject myself to this place?

Zealot’s armor is a thing that exists, folks. Seriously. Not everything needs to be set up to perform optimally in Berserker gear. Poor healing coefficients hurts game diversity – if you want to play a pure-Berserker Druid, then accept that you should by all rights heal for less than someone in Zealot’s armor. Just like the Zealot’s guy needs to accept that he’s not going to hit as hard as the Berserker guy.

Telling the Zealot’s-wearing guy that he gets no return on his investment of Healing Power is kinda awful. If you go Berserker stats, you lose healing efficiency. That’s what you get for taking a support class and giving it zero supportive ability.

+1 thank goodness for the few people around here who make sense….

people, if you don’t like Druid don’t play Druid. there is nothing forcing you to take this trait line. DPS rangers will still be needed to DPS. the nerf to icebow makes frostspotter a valuable addition to any team.