Guild Wars 2

Staff

You’re pigeon holed into a power build since there’s no condi. Sprinkle some condi as part of the damage for each skill.

Solar Beam – Increase damage and/or make third pulse a blind from the front, and make it a burn when applied from the back.

Astral Wisp – Increase damage. Make the wisp cripple the foe in addition to healing allies.

Ancestral Grace – Add damage component and/or knock down for enemies.

Vine Surge – Increase the vine speed substantially. The longest immobilize in the game is Entangle with 1 stack for 5 seconds. The bulk of the other immobilize skills are between 1 to 3 seconds. Yet the cast time for this is 3/4 seconds. Even if you had the best of reflexes when combined with the slow travel time of the vines, you really won’t be clearing any immobilize off allies. Secondly, if you’re require to aim it, thereby delaying the execution vs something that’s tab target and fire, that move must be more powerful and worthwhile to perform. Compare Ele’s Phoenix to this, when aimed correction, it could hit 5 to 6 times, gives vigor, it’s blast finish and it clears a condi.

Increase damage and speed of vine projectile, add bleed and torment to enemies, increase it from 3 to 5 targets in addition to clearing mobility status.

Sublime Conversion – Converting range dmg to heals is not enough. Add small damage component. Make it knock down targets that move through it and turn 3 boons to conditions.

Celestial form

It takes far too long to fill up the F5 bar, unless you’re mashing staff 1 and overall feels really clunky.

I think the F5 bar should not drain when you leave astral form. One, there’s no damage really available in that form. Two, besides the auto attack, there are internal cool downs already for the moves but the heal are not enough to sustain you when focused on anyway. Three, it makes astral form spammy and devoid of proper rotation of skill for PVE, or proper counter play in PVP.

F5 should function like death shroud, in form. Slowly ticks down, but bar remains when you exit form early.

Add boons to celestial avatar skills 1 to 4, so the pet can be buffed to do the damage component in a 1 v 1 in astral form, and it makes more sense for WvW and PVE also since both healing and buffing should happen before attacking. I wouldn’t add condi components to the celes skills since condi specs mostly all have tanky builds, to output additional condi damage while healing might be a bit too much.

Not all healing skills fills the bar, e.g. signet of the wild, regen, procs from food etc. For some reason troll unguent fills it up even when you’re not getting healing.

Cosmic Ray – No change.

Seed of Life – Add aegis/resistance

Lunar Impact – Add fury.

Tidal Surge – Add might.

Natural Convergence – This is basically churning earth for ranger only this will never hit because this class has no cantrip to provide stability/protection and teleport for it to hit. Make the skill usable on the move and provide some protection during the channel. Allow glyphs to be cast in conjunction with the channeling, like glyph of tides to pull or unity to bait someone into hitting you.

Animation – When you go into astral form, a full moon appears over the head of the druid, when you exit astral form, it should go from a full moon to an eclipse so allies and enemies can figure out when your astral form is ending.

Glyphs

Glyph of Empowerment – It’s seems like it’s a worse version of spirit for only 10% boost for 6 seconds. Make it give pulsing stacks of stability regularly and resistance in astral form instead.

Glyph of Equality – Make the power of the effect based on the difference between your HP and the target’s. The bigger the spread, the more dmg, and longer the daze.

Traits

Celestial Shadow – Makes little sense to get stealth as you exit. You’re most vulnerable when you need the healing so it makes more sense to get stealth when you enter celestial form, and get super speed as you exit it. This way you can have added few seconds to get those heals off and might actually make it easier to land natural convergence while stealthed. Moreover, if you take primal echoes with ancient seeds, it makes sense to run hydromancy sigil on it to get an extra proc. This will actually get rid of your stealth and make this trait not work properly. You should get stealth when you enter celestial form, so people can control when stealth kicks in.

Verdant Etching – Make this trait turn glyphs into stunbreakers in addition to existing benefits.

Grace of the Land – Make it clear 2 conditions off allies when you enter celestial form in addition to lower condi damage.

Lingering Light – Make the wisp around you and your pet, clear 1 condition. Use this in combination with cultivated synergy and get 1 condi clear around your pet also

Ancient Seeds – It’s bugged with spike trap, the knock down from the trap won’t proc this trait.

Pets

Tiger – This is a huge pet peeve for me since day 1. The long bow’s killzone is 1k so if you send your stalker/moa out to attack your target you won’t get the F2 buff. The tiger’s F2 takes that penalty to the extreme, you don’t even get the buff when you cast it beside you since it leaps away. The bigger issue is, why should a class required mechanic have this contradictory nature to it that even when you try to play the class properly, you’re penalized? Make all F2 buffs ignore range for the pet owner!

Fire Wyvern – It doesn’t seem to fire the F2 at the target. It seems to only ever cast the fire field under the ranger.

@Irenio,

Thanks for being willing to change the coefficient and usefulness of healing power.

However, since we are extremely limited for dps and already extraordinarily low on damage…..

Please let our damaging abilities scale better for us building healing power.

Kill The Zerk Meta, by giving us better bonuses TO NOT USE ZERK pls

Hopes are with you

Kailee.8790:

@Irenio,

Thanks for being willing to change the coefficient and usefulness of healing power.

However, since we are extremely limited for dps and already extraordinarily low on damage…..

Please let our damaging abilities scale better for us building healing power.

Kill The Zerk Meta, by giving us better bonuses TO NOT USE ZERK pls

Hopes are with you

Actually it would be pretty neat if while the zerk-meta dies, Rangers get to be some of the few that still have the option to remain and be optimal to use zerk on.

It is a skirmishing class after all. As the stack meta dies, our mobile damage dealing (aside from autopilot sword…) becomes more attractive.

Holland.9351:

I think it’s very much a WvW trait where you wisp into a zerg and pop this together with signet of stone and some other Glyphs.

In theory, yes.
In practice, no, not really.

I tried nearly a dozen times on reset last Friday and not once was I able to successfully get into the zerg to pop the skill. The amount of hard CC and immob spam from venom wells means utalizing it to it’s full effect is nearly impossible in a large enough zerg. The stability from Wild signet instantly evaporates.

I came very close one time but stone signet ran out before I could down the enemies and I ended up rallying everyone who hit me once I got instagibed.

It may work in a lord room fight where there isn’t a front line to push through, but for open field fights it’s essentially pointless and a waste of a slot when SotP and Entangle are just so much better.

The only real use the skill has is in it’s astral form for heal bursts to the team.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Thanks Sir, though I do admit that I LOVE the way the Staff skill #1 animation works, and it would be a pity to lose that over people’s dislike of the regular staff hold. If one needs to be sacrificed for the other, I rather have the melee-type staff wielding. The hand-cast wouldn’t make that much sense for that skill, IMHO.

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.

There is no zealots gear in sPvP. A druid cannot be viable if its required to take too much healing power to be effective with the current amulet pool. As it is currently, if a druid is around and doesn’t use a tanky amulet anyway its super easy to out damage its healing especially since celestial form provides very little defense. As a consequence the relatively low survivability of a druid cannot be viable without relatively high base healing. Higher base healing also allows for more build diversity as it isn’t mandatory to take a healing power amulet, of which there are 3 options: Crusader, Clerics, Settlers. If the proposed changes aren’t done well then it is unlikely a dps oriented druid can be viable as it has to give up precision and ferocity with these amulets in order to properly be an effective druid. Either add zealots to PvP or be very careful please.

Star Ace.5207:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Thanks Sir, though I do admit that I LOVE the way the Staff skill #1 animation works, and it would be a pity to lose that over people’s dislike of the regular staff hold. If one needs to be sacrificed for the other, I rather have the melee-type staff wielding. The hand-cast wouldn’t make that much sense for that skill, IMHO.

Someone mentionned having the ray out the top of the staff, like the gardian animation, which I find would fit better.

Zatoichi.1049:

funny thing is, I wont be surprised if the “reward” end result healing (with healing stats) is no different than what it is now base. So all an all it could just be a straight up nerf to healing (if it forces you to respec, loosing damage, just to get the same value, well, you know…)

This is what I fear might happen. It’s been done before, please don’t repeat this, Irenio!

Wondrouswall.7169:

Zatoichi.1049:

funny thing is, I wont be surprised if the “reward” end result healing (with healing stats) is no different than what it is now base. So all an all it could just be a straight up nerf to healing (if it forces you to respec, loosing damage, just to get the same value, well, you know…)

This is what I fear might happen. It’s been done before, please don’t repeat this, Irenio!

Especially since druid has little defence as is. In terms of PvP even if the numbers were twice what they are with 1000 healing power the druid can just be focused down in a team fight when in celestial form and it wouldn’t even be able to heal.

I do hope also that the scaling with healing power will also mean a way to scaloe with power and/or condi also. But since Irenio wrote :

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

[…]reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.
[…]

I do believe we should get some damage on the staff (along with some boons), and not just a fix of animations (the vine port skill blocking the player).

Be nice with Irenio, so he don’t run away!

I don’t believe we should have butter and butter money – which is what some are asking. (huge heal without healing power), but I do believe we shouldn’t be struck with needing a specific stat (healing), and that there should be a trade off (healing or damage). For it to be a trade off, we will need some damage on staff, so I trust Irenio to work on it.

Irenio did some good job on ranger and balance, and he sure looks passionate enough to help bring us out of the "unwanted’ category (as long as he can keep Roy away).

I have faith in you, Irenio!
Don’t let us down!

Star Ace.5207:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Thanks Sir, though I do admit that I LOVE the way the Staff skill #1 animation works, and it would be a pity to lose that over people’s dislike of the regular staff hold. If one needs to be sacrificed for the other, I rather have the melee-type staff wielding. The hand-cast wouldn’t make that much sense for that skill, IMHO.

Seriously. The existing staff 1 animation is so fun. Please don’t turn it into a hand laser >.<

Change Primal Echoes to Primal Poison- Staff attacks now apply poison to enemies.

Right now, the daze feels useless because you are never close by when using staff as you are trying to kite most of the time for the daze to be useful.

And this gives an option for those who want to run conditions. (which I am trying to do with an Apothecary build)

2. QUESTION does Glyph of Unity apply to condi-damage as well? If not then it’s quite useless depending on who you are fighting. Needs to work for both direct and condition damage.

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.

I’m looking forward to see what changes you’ve cooked up for it, as I’m sure balance will be found to make healing satisfying for those with +healing, while keeping it useful when one doesn’t spec into full healer.

Something that came up to my mind, and while not directly connected to the Druid elite spec… now that we got the healing wisp that floats around targets and heals allies, would it perhaps not be interesting to look into making spirits more alike the wisps? Little orbs that float around the ranger and grant the buffs to targets within a certain distance to the ranger. Sacrifice could make the orbs enter the ranger and the affects could happen around the ranger. The hp of the spirits could be changed to a damage threshold for sorts. Say a spirit gets 4000 (8000 when traited) threshold and each 1 dmg on the ranger would remove 1 threshold. I think it would fit very well with the ranger and druids alike, giving both competitive support options. Right now spirits are just too annoying, too clunky to use and not really that fun.

Thanks for the hard work that you’ve already put into the making of the Druid (and scrapper too for that matter, even if I’m not a big engi player!). Looking forward to see the changes.

edit: some typos, can’t promise all were found.

Jocksy.3415:

Star Ace.5207:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

Thanks Sir, though I do admit that I LOVE the way the Staff skill #1 animation works, and it would be a pity to lose that over people’s dislike of the regular staff hold. If one needs to be sacrificed for the other, I rather have the melee-type staff wielding. The hand-cast wouldn’t make that much sense for that skill, IMHO.

Someone mentionned having the ray out the top of the staff, like the gardian animation, which I find would fit better.

Since they already put the work on the newer and fresher animation, I disagree. It’s a very nice 1 skill animation-the Guardian one is good, but should be reserved for Guardians-the new one, for Druids (no offense intended, and totally fine to disagree.)

I am actually totally neutral on the staff hold (whichever way they choose, it’s fine) but the 1 skill should be left alone.

Everybody SHOULD express their likes and dislikes on this thread, but I find it sad that such a small thing disgruntles so many people. Granted, I thought it was a “bug” at first (staff “hammer hold”), but after using the weapon, I just don’t want the new animations sacrificed for just holding the Staff like mostly everybody else save the Daredevil. Ideally, if they choose to please you, hopefully they don’t need to touch the new animations.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Hey all.

Now that the Beta Weekend Event is live and you’re able to check out the Druid please post constructive feedback here.

You need to make the staff animations match the other caster classes animations, because right now they run around like its a hammer and its kind of gross looking.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The animations for staff are getting looked at.

YAY. Best news from you if thats a change from hammer’s to caster’s idle animation. They look really awkward on human/sylvari female. I honestly don’t care much about the spec itself, but the animation really bugging me Q.Q My poor Bifrost so heavyyyy.

I already commented and gave my feedback on page 13, and I’m fairly happy with what I’ve said thus far. However, I missed a couple things, so here goes.

Druid vs Ranger
While the druid line gives us some access to much-needed condition cleanse, the fact remains that the stand-alone ranger is what is vulnerable, and is what needs to be addressed. Forcing us into wilderness survival for reliable condition cleanse really pidgeon-holes our build choices for offensive rangers, and the condition cleanse options on the druid (the reliance on glyphs to proc. the blossoms, the need for astral form, the lack of any proper condition cleansing on the staff 4) are a bit lackluster.

Also, while a couple options exist to deal with burst damage (signet of stone, protective ward GM, spamming every evade skill we have), as a specialisation whose sole function is as a healer, we really need consistent access, or access at all, to protection, resistance (of which the ranger has none), and weakness, because while we can signet of stone ourselves to prevent us being burst down once per fight, we can’t extend this to our allies.

Changes to Heal as One
Not directed at the druid, but rather at the recent balance updates. I thought the initial changes to heal as one, where a direct copy of pet boons was given to the ranger was an amazing idea. I did notice the obvious issues where ranges were able to stack 8 minutes of fury, and 12 seconds of 25 might stacks, and I agree it needed to be fixed. However, the way it was fixed was perhaps the reverse of what was needed. The issue that I saw was that whenever the ranger gained a buff (5 stacks of might every second for 3 seconds, for example, or the 3 stacks of might from the frost spirit), the pet gained a non-true copy, typically with extended duration, due to the shared boons trait, meaning instead of Heal as One giving back 15 stacks of might with a 5stacks/second decay rate, it was giving 15 stacks of might with a 12 second duration.

In my view, the appropriate fix would have been to the trait, and not to heal as one. If a ranger manages to stack a significant duration of high might stacks on themselves, and through the trait, their pet, then more power to them. This isn’t likely to happen, as without investment in boon and might duration the ranger doesn’t have many sources of long-duration might, meaning even if we did self-copy to 25 stacks, it wouldn’t last more than a couple seconds. The only exception would probably be swiftness and quickness, as with pet-swap, quickening zehpyr, heal as one, you could get 15+ seconds of quickness, but with shout traiting you cna already achieve permanent swiftness anyway, and the cooldown on quickening zephyr is high enough that you couldn’t permanently buff yourself with stupid levels of quickness

Going to cross post to express my thoughts on the design approach to druid:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I don’t get this position.

The problem is that healing power sucks for a variety of reasons

Healing Power as a stat comes at a great offensive cost, which means you are sacrificing any ability to do solo content or play an offensive role for the sole ability to have stronger heals.

By pushing the druid into Celestial/Settler/Zealot gear, you are making them healbots for raids, but crippled in overworld PvE, dungeons, story instances, and fractals where the role of a healbot simply isn’t needed.

What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

To you it seems fine to pick traitlines other than druid for offense, BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE OTHER OFFENSIVE OPTIONS ARE SUBPAR AND UNWANTED IN META COMPS.

Vanilla offensive ranger is NOT competitive with the top offensive specs. 1h sword still isn’t fixed and is our only remotely viable DPS weapon that locks us out of dodges.

Moreover, while the other specializations somehow fit into a variety of stat options and playstyles, the druid is pigeonholed into a healbot. Why? Why is the new toy for rangers so limited and restrictive?

By making Druid THE healing spec of the game, you force rangers into a corner:

a) Druid heals will be required in raids, and as an effect all rangers who want to raid will be forced to play druid healbot.

b) Druid heals are not required. In which case the one dimensional druid spec becomes obsolete and unwanted as it loses the group considerable DPS when your raid bosses so far display strict DPS enrage timers.

Since non-druid rangers have no competitive DPS builds with the other classes, all types of rangers will not be desired in current content just as the current meta excludes them.

From a personal stance, I also DESPISE being forced into a cleric stat set, because no other of my 7 other classes wants to use cleric anywhere. That means I have to have a full ascended set of berzerker, a full ascended set of sinisters, and a full ascended set of clerics just for the ranger. This translates in cost to roughly two precursors worth of gold and immense time investment. This is what introducing ascended as opposed to keeping exotics caused for players.

I also want to address the “best heals in the game while running berzerker is not good for the game”.

You are getting best heals because presumably you’ve picked up the druid specialization at the expense of a more offensive traitline. So you want to not only limit our offensive trait options by designing the Druid spec, staff, and traits around just healing, but you also want to limit what stat comboes we can run and benefit from the spec with?

You already nerfed shortbow to irrelevance and disuse in order to make the longbow more attractive. It didn’t work, you had to buff the longbow so people would use it. So don’t go nerfing berzerker druids just to make healing power druids more attractive, just fix the healing power scaling so a healing power druid gains even bigger heals than the baseline berzerker, at the expected cost of completely garbage damage which is what Cleric does in PvE.

Celestial Avatar -

Skill 1 – Cosmic Ray – Larger area of effect would be nice. It’s not fun to try using it on anyone that is moving, which is most often the case with the person you want to heal.
Also didn’t enjoy the spammy feeling of using this skill.

Skill 2 – Seed of Life – Make it 3 second duration, pulses condition removal 1per second, 3 total, bursts/heals at the end + applies regen/heals for more if condis were removed.

The current delay in condi removal, however short, makes it much less effective than instant, on demand condi removal, which is usually much more desirable and enjoyable to have.

Larger radius perhaps. Maybe 6s cool down, feels too similar to Cosmic Ray in terms of spamminess and effect.

Skill 3 – Lunar Impact – Feels good as it is. Blast finisher needs to work (it doesn’t at present). Maybe heal for slightly more.

Skill 4 – Tidal Surge – Feels okay, the heal is alright, could tick/pulse higher, water field okay, not much use when everyone is stacked/competing with other fields though, so the secondary intent of the skill is partially negated. Not sure what else would make this skill more interesting, or whether it needs something else to make it more fun to use.

Skill 5 – Natural Convergence – Pulse stability/protection for self and allies within the area. Could make this ability more interesting and useful in more situations and more fun to use.

I think adding the stability pulse to this skill would really work to round off the Celestial Avatar form and make it feel more full and complete.

Also it could make it more fun to use offensively, since the enemy will have no choice but to run away or eat the root. Instead of being able to simply flick the ranger away with a cc or knock back etc.

Extensive Glyph Skills Suggestions and Balance
In short:

General

• Radius up to 400 from 300

Of Rejuvenation

• Non-Celestial: Bonus healing to self per allies healed, 7% per allies (potential total bonus of 35%)
• Celestial: Bonus healing to allies by 7% per allies.

Of Alignment

• Non-Celestial: 4s to the base conditions (from 3s) and adds 1 stack of vlun to enemies per targets hit (8s)
• Celestial: Cleanses a base 1 condition and an additional condition per allies around.

Of the Tide Becomes Blast Finisher (both forms) – Ranger lacks some on demand out of combat blast finishers

• Non-Celestial: Deal some AoE damage on use
• Celestial: Heals a little bit (AoE)

Of Empowerment

• Non-Celestial: +15% Outoing Damage for 7s
• Celestial: -15% Incoming Damage for 7s

Of Unity

• Non-Celestial Add a pulsing damage effect per second – PVE creatures attack slowly so it adds something.
• Celestial Add pulsing healing to tethered allies – so there’s still an effect if you dont actively heal.

Of Equality

• Non-Celestial is a self stun-breaker
• Celestial adds team stability and keeps team stun break, but no stun break to self

make healing power also the damage modifier for druid attacks.

punahou.3986:

make healing power also the damage modifier for druid attacks.

You are looking for Instinctive Reaction

Edit: Okay never mind I get what you’re saying, and that would be awesome!

But on the same topic, Instinctive Reaction needs a major boost… No one runs pure healing, so 7% power from healing power is really bad… And unless you have any additional healing power, it’s an attribute that starts at 0, so… It’s PRETTY bad. I’d make it at least base 10% but 15% would be best… With 1000 healing power that’s a mere 150+ Power

Few things I noticed. Coming from a guy who has played over 4k out of 5.5k hours on ranger at least. I’m mainly PvP / WvW oriented so this is where I’ve put my focus on during the beta weekend. I’m pretty sure some of the things I mentioned might not apply in PvE, as I don’t know how raids are going to be, where GW2 is moving towards having a holy trinity setup kinda thing going.

First some feedback on the weapons…

- Weapon skills feedback – NORMAL FORM

Staff skill 1:
Appears to be a bit low on damage – even on a full zerker setup and it’s basically your only form of consistent damage output while wielding staff.

Staff skill 2:
This is a great skill, like the way that it applies healing and with a melee pet near your foe it will grant astral force nicely. Could do just a tad more damage in my opinion, or add an effect like blind (wisps are bright for the eyes you know). This attack can also easily be dodged it’s a fairly slow projectile compared to other ranged weapons.

Staff skill 3:
Great skill, but doesn’t seem like you can always actually travel the 1200 range with it, and all it does is give you a somewhat of a delayed heal/blast finisher. If it would actually travel the 1200 distance it’s a pretty neat skill – no change/adjusts required.

Staff Skill 4:
I found this to be the most useless skill out of the bunch as the vines are very low on damage, very slow and don’t seem to have a really wide range of impact as you’d expect (looks like the textures are wider than the actual hit box). Also, since NON-celestial form is supposed to be a more greedy setup, you’d expect to also remove a condi from yourself rather than only allies in a straight line in front of you. (You don’t remove a condi from yourself when casting this skill most of the times since you’re not being hit by the vines).

Staff skill 5:
Well, what can I say, it’s a nice barrier and can be useful at times, but would have been better served as a utility skill as it does on Guardian. (Staff skill 4 and 5 are pretty much useless versus a melee fighter who can: teleport/remove immo/immune to condition impairing abilities, or ranged fighters with non-projectile long ranged hits. Yet, it’s not a bad skill. Just would have liked to see some more damage on this skillbar, and normally skill 5 on ranger is a pretty decent skill with good damage out put/cc, no matter what weapon you pick.

- Weapon skills feedback – CELESTIAL FORM

Staff skill 1:
Awesome bursts of healing but no damage, not even a weeny bit. I’d say a cosmic ray can definitely hurt someone or inflict some condition like vulnerability on every 3rd or 4th hit or something (scientifically speaking). Or you can just rename it to Healing Ray :-P.

Staff skill 2:
Seed of life is a nice skill (sort of like ventari’s heal orbs), but the delay is just a bit too long it seems sometimes. But great skill none the less.

Staff skill 3:
Awesome skill, basically allowing you to do a 6 second daze. But there’s a problem, you can’t utilize the daze at all as all you can do is heal.

Staff skill 4:
Great skill, can’t say anything bad about this one. Both for 1 v 1’s as well as in team fights this skill will come in handy.

Staff skill 5:
During Celestial Avatar form is rarely used outside PvE. It’s no point using the skill in PvP/WvW situations since it’s a static position you have to maintain in order to cast (much like the ele channel skill, but without a way to teleport to your target and effectively hit something with this skill). Also, a black hole that only puts an immobilize on you? meaning, it’s cleansed in a blink, or removed by warrior sprint easily for example… Since it takes 2,5 sec to get the final effect, and all you get is an immobilize and minor damage, this skill is not worth using. I tried using it just to see, but it won’t work anywhere in PvP / WvW (standing still is just too much for these game types).

Utilities: Celestial/Non Celestial form.
I’ve only used the glyphs sporadically, but couldn’t find a nice place for them in my builds. I did try out the Glyph of equality and but just didn’t fine the effects worthy enough to replace for example a Lightning reflexes or Quickening zephyr. Heck even my Sic Em and Signet of stone with humongous cooldown just feels to comfortable to play with to swap out for a glyph with just (in my opinion) too simple effects. Even thought he cooldowns are pretty good on the glyphs. The radius of impact of most of the glyphs are very small, with a staff at 1200 range it just doesn’t synergize well (yes i know i can wispform towards someone, then combo with a glyph, swap to melee wep and such… but no, effects are not good enough for me really). Could there be a glyph that would do more than 1 thing, for example stunbreak + daze would make it much more interesting → Now you either daze, or you stunbreak based on your form. But you dont want to only swap to Celestial form in order to be able to break your stun with Glyph of Equality for example… Just doesn’t make sense.

The Elite glyph: looked good in theory, works out to be pretty useless in practice in PvP/WvW. Everyone has mobility skills and it’s easy to break out of it. cause the radius is only 300!?! 300 radius, just 1 dodgeroll in the right direction and the tether breaks. Complete waste of you’re elite skill i’d say. Prefer to go for entangling roots (condi specced) or Strength of the pack (shout/dps specced). Glyphf of Unity has no purpose in PvP for me personally.

The Traits and more general feedback:
Will be continued.. I’m tired. need some rest! Positive and Negative feedback awaits.

Zenith.7301:

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

To you it seems fine to pick traitlines other than druid for offense, BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE OTHER OFFENSIVE OPTIONS ARE SUBPAR AND UNWANTED IN META COMPS.

Vanilla offensive ranger is NOT competitive with the top offensive specs. 1h sword still isn’t fixed and is our only remotely viable DPS weapon that locks us out of dodges.

Moreover, while the other specializations somehow fit into a variety of stat options and playstyles, the druid is pigeonholed into a healbot. Why? Why is the new toy for rangers so limited and restrictive?

By making Druid THE healing spec of the game, you force rangers into a corner:

a) Druid heals will be required in raids, and as an effect all rangers who want to raid will be forced to play druid healbot.

b) Druid heals are not required. In which case the one dimensional druid spec becomes obsolete and unwanted as it loses the group considerable DPS when your raid bosses so far display strict DPS enrage timers.

Since non-druid rangers have no competitive DPS builds with the other classes, all types of rangers will not be desired in current content just as the current meta excludes them.

From a personal stance, I also DESPISE being forced into a cleric stat set, because no other of my 7 other classes wants to use cleric anywhere. That means I have to have a full ascended set of berzerker, a full ascended set of sinisters, and a full ascended set of clerics just for the ranger. This translates in cost to roughly two precursors worth of gold and immense time investment. This is what introducing ascended as opposed to keeping exotics caused for players.

Zenith, you have described my fears about Druid perfectly. And, as someone with one of every class who enjoys high-level fractals (and hopefully raids—this first one was a blast!) your second point is on-the-nose for me!

ProtoMarcus.7649:

punahou.3986:

make healing power also the damage modifier for druid attacks.

You are looking for Instinctive Reaction

Edit: Okay never mind I get what you’re saying, and that would be awesome!

But on the same topic, Instinctive Reaction needs a major boost… No one runs pure healing, so 7% power from healing power is really bad… And unless you have any additional healing power, it’s an attribute that starts at 0, so… It’s PRETTY bad. I’d make it at least base 10% but 15% would be best… With 1000 healing power that’s a mere 150+ Power

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

ProtoMarcus.7649:

punahou.3986:

make healing power also the damage modifier for druid attacks.

You are looking for Instinctive Reaction

Edit: Okay never mind I get what you’re saying, and that would be awesome!

But on the same topic, Instinctive Reaction needs a major boost… No one runs pure healing, so 7% power from healing power is really bad… And unless you have any additional healing power, it’s an attribute that starts at 0, so… It’s PRETTY bad. I’d make it at least base 10% but 15% would be best… With 1000 healing power that’s a mere 150+ Power

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Now THAT would be an excellent change, and would help close the gap between Ranger and Druid.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

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.

Translation: “We’re sticking with the rushed and poorly planned healbot, rather than properly develop a thematic Druid and admit that we poorly managed our time.”

Perspective: Rangers need better treatment. Players deserve the “very plant based” Druid they were told they would receive. I genuinely enjoy the Celestial theme, but it should be stripped from the Druid and applied to a future new class. It simply doesn’t fit the Ranger. Fix Druid into what it was meant to be, and save the Celestial mechanics for a better planned and developed class. Everyone gets something they want, and no one is ostracized.

I really think they should add condis to staff/cele form

I actually feel the Druid is more interesting than Berserker and Dragon Hunter, and maybe some if the others. I understand the discontent regarding it lacking a bit of synergy with the base Ranger, but many other specializations SEEM to just add extra flavor (which is fine). For instance, the original Guardian still seems way more attractive to me than its variant. Though both should be viable, I feel most of the specializations add little other than a different way to do this or that which they already do.

Haven’t tested them all save my favorites for hours, though, but that was the impression.

The Druid does seem like a Profession which should have been added, along with the Revenant, but in the spirit of roleplaying games, the Druid/Ranger multi-class has quite a few precedents, and both have thematically had pets and/or animal summons-in short, there’s nothing “wrong” with having Druid being part-Ranger/its specialization.

For that matter, the Berserker implementation is actually “weirder”, as well as the horn Tempest, etc.

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

It would have been very cool if the Druid form had had Solar/Lunar forms to choose from where Solar did damage and Lunar was healing. Maybe too much of a WoW copy of Boomkin, but still :P

infantrydiv.1620:

It would have been very cool if the Druid form had had Solar/Lunar forms to choose from where Solar did damage and Lunar was healing. Maybe too much of a WoW copy of Boomkin, but still :P

Yeah some players suggested a weapon swap available when in Celestial Form, 1st Mode Support/Heal and 2nd Mode more Offensive oriented. The theme you suggeste could work real well.

Was gonna suggest solar would be heavy on burns and blinds… But guardian is all about burns and blinds ahaha

ShadowKain.9410:

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.

Translation: “We’re sticking with the rushed and poorly planned healbot, rather than properly develop a thematic Druid and admit that we poorly managed our time.”

Perspective: Rangers need better treatment. Players deserve the “very plant based” Druid they were told they would receive. I genuinely enjoy the Celestial theme, but it should be stripped from the Druid and applied to a future new class. It simply doesn’t fit the Ranger. Fix Druid into what it was meant to be, and save the Celestial mechanics for a better planned and developed class. Everyone gets something they want, and no one is ostracized.

The druid doesn’t exactly contradict the lore (and, if GW druids are anything like real life druids, a celestial theme is even better than a pure plant theme). The problem is that, of all the elite specializations, druid seems to be the most limited in build variety and role versatility. You get a little bit of mobility and cc support and, if glyphs are buffed out of their current anemic state, maybe some limited offensive support…but it still looks like a druid without healing power is going to be less potent than one with healing power, and that is going to hamstring druids in >95% of the game. By contrast, reaper and scrapper (for example, I’m sure other new specs can as well) can both go tanky with celestial and still deal decent damage, or they can go power, or condition. That’s three different build paths that they can take, and still be extremely effective. How many such paths can the druid take?

ProtoMarcus.7649:

infantrydiv.1620:

It would have been very cool if the Druid form had had Solar/Lunar forms to choose from where Solar did damage and Lunar was healing. Maybe too much of a WoW copy of Boomkin, but still :P

Yeah some players suggested a weapon swap available when in Celestial Form, 1st Mode Support/Heal and 2nd Mode more Offensive oriented. The theme you suggeste could work real well.

Was gonna suggest solar would be heavy on burns and blinds… But guardian is all about burns and blinds ahaha

Yeah, i think that would have been amazing. Ohhh wellll :/ At least Irenio said they might be putting damage on the Druid form skills

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

My point is that they want the Druid to spec for healing. They clearly do not want a druid build to have the same offensive capability a vanilla ranger will while still maintaining a solid level of ally healing.

Expecting them to give it to you is a pipe dream at best.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

My point is that they want the Druid to spec for healing. They clearly do not want a druid build to have the same offensive capability a vanilla ranger will while still maintaining a solid level of ally healing.

Expecting them to give it to you is a pipe dream at best.

You already give up DPS compared to a vanilla ranger build. Expecting to get a useful amount of support for that sacrifice is not unreasonable, particularly since rangers are already considered inferior in almost every area of the game.

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

I agree with and support these changes.

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

My point is that they want the Druid to spec for healing. They clearly do not want a druid build to have the same offensive capability a vanilla ranger will while still maintaining a solid level of ally healing.

Expecting them to give it to you is a pipe dream at best.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

By the very nature of Druid’s Celestial Avatar, even if outside the form you had good damage potential, as soon as you go in, you are doing pure healing. Druid would only have top damage and healing output if they somehow put giant amounts of damage on the Druid skills, which we know isnt going to happen. And clearly, just by taking Druid you are giving up either Marksmanship, Skirmishing, or Beast Mastery, all of which would be required to do top DPS as a ranger…

What people do want is for Druid to be able to contribute offensively somewhat in PvP/WvW/PvE while still being able to heal well inside of the Celestial form.

Zenith.7301:

What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized

What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.

I agree with everything else you said in your post, oh so very much, and this bit here I find very interesting. What I would prefer to see is a boon intensity stat. At the moment we have condition damage and condition duration, as two ways to boost condition builds. But at the moment we only have boon duration; healing power boosts regen and heal skills, but no other boons. I think a boon intensity stat would also help break away from the beserker meta. Yes, you can still choose to run beserker stats, and yes, you can still pump yourself full of fury and might, but I feel that reducing the base of each boon to 70%~, and replacing healing power with a boon intensity stat (that also affects healing, so perhaps calling it benevolence). And a proper investment in ‘benevolence’ could give boons of 125%-150%~ of the current strength.

At the moment, people are able to build large stacks of aoe boons (Guardian staff 4, elementalist fire-blast finishers, etc), but the ability to provide these doesn’t require any deviation from a pure damage build. By reducing the effectiveness of base-boons, and making it possible to stat-build for BETTER boons, it would give motivation, especially in the current PvE environment, to not just run 5 beserkers, as having a fifth person able to stack 30% crit chance, 40~power per might stack, and 45%~ protection would be incredible, and would give better benefits to the team’s damage and survivability.

The problem I see with the beserker meta is you can still build support and control without having to make a change from beserker stats to do so. Benevolence, as a sister-stat to condition damage, would provide this motivation.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

ShadowKain.9410:

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.

Translation: “We’re sticking with the rushed and poorly planned healbot, rather than properly develop a thematic Druid and admit that we poorly managed our time.”

Perspective: Rangers need better treatment. Players deserve the “very plant based” Druid they were told they would receive. I genuinely enjoy the Celestial theme, but it should be stripped from the Druid and applied to a future new class. It simply doesn’t fit the Ranger. Fix Druid into what it was meant to be, and save the Celestial mechanics for a better planned and developed class. Everyone gets something they want, and no one is ostracized.

The druid doesn’t exactly contradict the lore

It neither supports nor contradicts it, this is a moot discussion.

However, there is no precedent for a Celestial theme for the Ranger class. Let me give you some perspective:

Reaper picks up a greatsword and applies his already existing necromantic magics to amplify the greatsword.

Tempest picks up a warhorn and applies his elemental magic to amplify the use of the warhorn, sending elemental magic along sound waves (a stretch, to be sure, in the physics department, but I can forgive this – it’s a game.)

Guardian picks up a Longbow and amplifies its use with light magic.

Warrior gets enhanced adrenaline and some fire magic (which falls into place with the magical sphere warriors exist in, see: Balthazar)

Do you see where I am going with this?

Ranger was slated to get plant-based magic (falling into place within their magical sphere – Melandru) and instead gets… astral magic? Ranger has absolutely no precedent for wielding this magic whatsoever. This does not have to directly contradict the lore to be a problem, as it feels out of place to anyone with a vested interest in this game’s narrative (ie: The players that will stick with this game once the rest of you jump ship for other games)

and, if GW druids are anything like real life druids, a celestial theme is even better than a pure plant theme.

Tyria isn’t our world. Please stop drawing parallels with it.

Also, while I won’t get into a discussion about druidic history on a Guild Wars 2 forum, your statement is based on a very basic understanding of druidism that takes a great deal out of important context.

The problem is that, of all the elite specializations, druid seems to be the most limited in build variety and role versatility. You get a little bit of mobility and cc support and, if glyphs are buffed out of their current anemic state, maybe some limited offensive support…but it still looks like a druid without healing power is going to be less potent than one with healing power, and that is going to hamstring druids in >95% of the game. By contrast, reaper and scrapper (for example, I’m sure other new specs can as well) can both go tanky with celestial and still deal decent damage, or they can go power, or condition. That’s three different build paths that they can take, and still be extremely effective. How many such paths can the druid take?

Wholeheartedly agreed here, aside from (perhaps) that being the only problem.

Celestial Form Weapon Skills

Detailed Post Here
Tooltips

I know the CAF is focused on healing but having so little damage is still a bit weird. I don’t want TOO MUCH damage but maybe some focus on effects/non-damaging conditions instead.

Cosmic Ray

• Base 80 damage sharing the same radius as the healing radius
• Vulnerability (2s) – 1 stack Sounds short but remember it affects an AoE and can be spammed.

Seed of Life

• Base 100 damage on the seed burst
• Weakness (2s) on the burst aswell. Synergizes with my next suggestion -

Lunar Impact

• Base 300 damage
• Stun 1.5s – Weakened foes are stunned instead of being dazed.
• Lower daze duration to 2.5s – 6s of daze is a LOT with Moment of Clarity trait

Rejuvenating Tides

• Vigor 2s – 2s of vigor per pulse, for a potential max of 10s vigor

Natural Convergence

• Blind (4s) – at the final pulse/final damage.
• Combo Field: Dark – Make it a Dark Field. Adds some blinds with projectiles and some lifesteal. Black hole.

Also,

• What if the Astral Force was not depleted when exiting the form?
• What if a small cooldown is applied to the F5/Transform skill?
• What if there’s no base depletion nor timer but every CAF skill uses a % of the Astral Force?
• What if you could gain some astral force when taking damage ? Astral force would be generated by: (minor) Dealing Damage, (minor) Getting Hit, (major) Healing self/pet/allies

Alright, I played a bunch of Druid, but mostly in Raids so my opinion will be skewed towards how the Druid fares in Raids.

Staff
==============
General: Staff needs higher damage. I get that it is meant to be a support/healing weapon, but higher damage would go a long way towards making it feel better to use.
Astral Wisp: Didn’t really feel like it did much.

Glyphs
==============
I barely used Glyphs, as they all seemed weak in comparison to a lot of the other utilities. In Raids, running Frost/Stone spirit was way more support focused than the Glyphs. For a support based spec, these don’t seem very useful for support

Celestial Avatar
==============
Base healing is too strong, so healing power is basically useless with it. Skills however, are very fun to use. The water field on 4 is extremely useful and Lunar Impact looks fantastic and feels fantastic.
Natural Convergence however, doesn’t feel very useful, in Raids at least. Maybe it has more place in open world PvE, but at the moment I don’t see it.
Losing all ‘life force’ when exiting Celestial Avatar didn’t feel very good or needed. Maybe a system more similar to a shroud? I think some more visual effects on the screen, or at least something that makes me stand out some more as being in my Celestial Avatar could be nice to show others that they can come to me for heals.

Traits
==============
Not the best when it comes to traits, gonna leave this part to others.

==============
All in all, Druid feels very fun to play and seems to have an important place in Raids. With a bit of tweaking, I can see it becoming even better.

I am really, really loving druid. I think almost everything it does, it does right.

I’d like to see the #1 skill in celestial tweaked a bit. It is pretty difficult to land, because of the small radius and how long it takes to hit.

I also found the #5 skill pretty underwhelming, considering the long cast time. It’s beautiful though, love the animation.

How celestial form works is a little weird, too. Right now, you can’t sustain it while in celestial form, like you can with death shroud. Personally, I think that’s fine. But if you wanted to put a sustain in there, you could use a % of damage taken.

If you leave it early, you lose all your energy, even if you only popped it on accident and left it immediately.

However, because you can get energy out of combat, just by using healing skills on/near allies, the previous issues are tolerable and perhaps even necessary for balance. I think that if the out-of-combat energy gain is to remain, then losing all of the energy upon leaving celestial form is fine. However, if it’s your intention to tweak energy gain out of combat, then I think we should keep our unused energy when we leave celestial form early.

It is comparatively hugely difficult to gain celestial energy when not using a staff vs using one. I feel like druids shouldn’t be punished for wanting to use other weapons QUITE as much as they currently are. Especially if there’s any plan to tweak celestial energy gain outside of combat, there NEEDS to be more ways to get it when using weapons other than staff.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the rest of everything. The traits seem solid. Staff damage is pretty underwhelming, but it’s not meant to be a heavy damage weapon, so I’m not tremendously worried about that. I love Glyph of Empowerment, although it was the only glyph that I was really willing to run on my mostly-support build. The glyph heal I’m sure has been mentioned – it needs to have the pet included, and not taking heals from my allies, in order for me to ever slot it. And the elite seems slightly situational, but pretty neat regardless.

OH AND THE PETS ARE AWESOME. I love love love love love the Smokescale. And I’ll be tremendously sad at my lack of giant bristleback come HoT…but I’ll survive.

Thanks for all your work on this! The beta was super fun!

Unholy Pillager.3791:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Substance E.4852:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I really think that with Druid coming, that this trait should definitely be swapped. So 10% of Power becomes Healing Power. Then you could go more damage gear wise and still get a decent amount of Healing Power.

It is more helpful for all builds rather than healing power becoming power.

Won’t be nearly enough from the sounds of it.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

We are on the road to having zerker druid be less useful than it already is. Not more unfortunately…

Yeah, if they add more damage maybe not. But either way, if the heals get dropped base and increase the healing power scaling then this change to IR would really help out. You would be able to run only zealots armor (15% crit damage drop) with zerk trinkets and still have 700 healing power. Which should be enough to heal reasonably well, plus you have the other support. Not only with Druid, but it helps roaming builds and all builds that use Nature Magic, in fact. All these traits should scale off a Primary stat.

My point is that they want the Druid to spec for healing. They clearly do not want a druid build to have the same offensive capability a vanilla ranger will while still maintaining a solid level of ally healing.

Expecting them to give it to you is a pipe dream at best.

You already give up DPS compared to a vanilla ranger build. Expecting to get a useful amount of support for that sacrifice is not unreasonable, particularly since rangers are already considered inferior in almost every area of the game.

And the places we are considered inferior are the places that have no need for healing at all anyway.

Druid is solid in Raids, WvW, PvP (from what I hear), and will probably be a good pick for GvG in the future.

Trying to shoehorn the spec into content that never had a need for it will just end up making it a crummy hybrid that has no purpose anywhere.

Ya, it bites the big one that we didn’t get strait powercreep like the necro or mesmer but we got a good spec that will ensure us a spot in raids and gave us a purpose in WvW/GvG when we previously had none.

Aridia.3042:

Add boons to celestial avatar skills 1 to 4, so the pet can be buffed to do the damage component in a 1 v 1 in astral form, and it makes more sense for WvW and PVE also since both healing and buffing should happen before attacking. I wouldn’t add condi components to the celes skills since condi specs mostly all have tanky builds, to output additional condi damage while healing might be a bit too much.

Celestial Shadow – Makes little sense to get stealth as you exit. You’re most vulnerable when you need the healing so it makes more sense to get stealth when you enter celestial form, and get super speed as you exit it. This way you can have added few seconds to get those heals off and might actually make it easier to land natural convergence while stealthed. Moreover, if you take primal echoes with ancient seeds, it makes sense to run hydromancy sigil on it to get an extra proc. This will actually get rid of your stealth and make this trait not work properly. You should get stealth when you enter celestial form, so people can control when stealth kicks in.

I have been suggesting to add some defensive boons (and/or conditions) to Celestial Avatar making those boons (and/or conditions) as a supplement to heal. For example, Protection, Aegis, Stability, Blind or Weakness, or even 1-2sec of Invulnerability.

I kind of make this suggestion from the point of view as a first aider: after you have assessed the situation and decided someone needs help (healing), the first thing that you ever do is actually “do no harm”. You do not rush to fix the problem; you instead first stabilise it; hence, by analogy, in this game, applying some defensive boons or conditions.

As to Celestial Shadow, I have tested it briefly and found it weird. Does a Druid need escape boons AFTER exiting the Celestial Avatar form? And why a short 2-second Stealth? And why within a hugging distance of 240 radius? At best, Celestial Shadow can function as a repositioning tool whereby the Druid can relocate him/herself after healing the team. Otherwise, I do not see any reason to pick it over the other two Major Traits

IF Stealth and Superspeed are to stay, at least make them activated upon entering the Celestial Avatar form. But I would suggestion to change Stealth to something else, like those boons and conditions I suggested above. Superspeed can stay since a Druid may need to rush to the victims, I suppose.

Oh Oh OH! I just have an idea regarding adding condition damage to Staff 1:

Instead of, for example, burn a target regularly on each pulse, it burns a target IF Cosmic Ray actually heal an ally on that pulse?

It adds a layer of positioning to the gameplay.

So if Cosmic Ray ONLY hits a foe, it applies a flat damage per pulse, perhaps similar to what it is now. BUT IF it hits a foe AND an ally, Cosmic Ray applies burning per pulse. It can even be per number of stacks of burning per ally hit.

This could add some strategic positioning to using Staff and make the (rather small) healing portion of Cosmic Ray means something more. It incentivise a Staff Druid to make the most of its (constant but little) “maintenance” healing outside Celestial Avatar.

Druid Staff Weapon Skills

Detailed Post Here
Tooltip

The staff is not too bad. Not the best, not good, but not TOO bad. Again, I understand its focused on healing, but the offensive component is really lackluster.

Solar Beam

• Slightly Increase base damage
• Burning 1s on the third pulse. Has to be a low base duration as its a pretty fast pulse. Maybe make the burn AoE? Small radius, 3 targets. Or perhaps, burn when the target is within 600 units?

Astral Wisp

• Vulnerability 6s – And I’m not talking about the foe its attached to, but actually any other foes the astral wisp passes through. Of course, can only apply a stack of vuln to the same target every 2s.
• Make it a 100% Projectile Finisher? Not the orbiting phase, but the attack phase

Ancestral Grace

• Daze 0.75s – AoE daze on reaching the target – in PvP situations it could temporarily cancel a stomp while you rush to a downed ally. Has to be short as with Moment of Clarity trait it’s doubled.
• Superspeed (3s) to the PET. The staff lacks skill that grants an effect to the pet, as every other main hand/two handed ranger weapon has 1 pet effect. Giving the pet Superspeed fits with this skill, as you’d either use this skill to run away, or charge into battle. With superspeed, the pet could follow with ease.

Vine Surge

• Remove the condition cleansing – As utility its good, but kinda weird to think vines would help you remove chill/cripple/immob.
• Immobilize 1.5s – just half a second longer (also, make the graphical effect last 0.5 longer. So sexy.)
• Crippled 4s – its really a movement impeding skill
• Vigor (6s) – Grant vigor to allies it touches. Still gives them some movement-related utility.

Sublime Conversion

• Duration: 6s – VERY situational skill, make it last a wee bit longer wouldn’t hurt. Yeah it would heal. But yeah, I’ve mainly used it to use the waterfield, very rarely for the projectile conversion effect.
• Convert 1 ally condition to a boon – Conversion
• Convert 1 enemy boon to a condition – CONVERSION – Again it fits with the theme of conversions, gives the ranger/druid ONE boon strip/hate skill, and gives support to allies by converting something bad to something good.
• Don’t forget to add ‘Combo Field: Water’ to the description, and add the Combo Field AoE/Outline graphical effect to it!

Also,

• What if the staff would bring a new dynamic to PvP/WvW, namely Group Seperation? Auto Attack would make an AoE Burn based on the target, Astral Wisp would debuff enemies surrounding target, Ancestral Grace would be a small AoE daze, etc. Maybe glyphs could have some buffs related to the amount of enemies surrounding the player; a 3% damage (on damaging glyphs) per enemies around, or a 5% duration on effects/conditions on glyphs based on enemies around
• What if the staff had better synergy with Daze? Burn Daze Foes on auto attack? Blind Dazed Foes?

Also I REALLY love the druid skill animations. Staff skills, Glyphs, CAF Skills… All but the auto attack ahaha. Some more work needed, and also, maybe change the auto attack sound effect? All other sound effects (again, CAF skills, other staff skills, and glyphs) are super duper

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.

Traslation:

Instead of buffing the scaling of healing power directly on top of base heal, you’re going to nerf the base healing and push Druid into even more inferior damage heal-bot by pigeon-holed them into healing power… Now 1000 Healing Power will have the same effectiveness of the current 0 healing power one, making Druid a utter piece of joke.

Duh, it’s ok, I’d play more selfishly if you do that. I’d only transform to cleanse and heal myself because I know my healing will be useless anyway. Also Guardian has on demand short CD Aegis, which equates to 10~15k damage immunity on tougher bosses, which is way superior than Druid’s so-called OP healing anyway. Guardian gets to keep all the offensive and defensive boons w/o sacrificing a thing. You’d push Druid into even more useless position after you nerf the base heal.

Time to reroll a Revenant then. Thanks Iren for driving us away even more. It can do everything better than Druid, and fulfill universal roles, while keeping all the dps.

infantrydiv.1620:

What people do want is for Druid to be able to contribute offensively somewhat in PvP/WvW/PvE while still being able to heal well inside of the Celestial form.

You can contribute.

I ran reset night with a longbow for 2 hours straight and only really ever used staff for the movement on #3. Between Lingering light and Trolls I filled the bar in about 2-3 seconds while stacked and still did nearly as much damage as I would have done because I swapped out wilderness for druid in a M/S/WS build.

Ranger was already barely decent in zerg combat. Anything short of a direct copypasta of the necro/ele staff in druid wouldn’t change that.

You have never needed to run staff to keep the bar filled as long as you slotted Lingering Light and the heal everyone already uses anyway.