Guild Wars 2

Aomine.5012:

Sorry to break your dream.

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

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

This is why you need friends. You play with them and everyone can play how they like and everyone has fun.

Aomine.5012:

Sorry to break your dream.

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

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

I’m sorry but this is BS. you just haven’t found the right build. topping up and locking opponents down for players who know how to sustain themselves is incredibly useful. healing a bunch of bads does nothing and makes the druid seem pointless. there is a variety of strong offensive builds that can support, 1v1, roam, and team fight. have a look in the ranger forums, I posted the build.

there are also tankier builds with grove runes, s/wh, and celestial amulet that work just fine.

mistsim.2748:

Aomine.5012:

Sorry to break your dream.

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

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

I’m sorry but this is BS. you just haven’t found the right build. topping up and locking opponents down for players who know how to sustain themselves is incredibly useful. healing a bunch of bads does nothing and makes the druid seem pointless. there is a variety of strong offensive builds that can support, 1v1, roam, and team fight. have a look in the ranger forums, I posted the build.

there are also tankier builds with grove runes, s/wh, and celestial amulet that work just fine.

That guy is most likely talking about a PVE situation with a group of 5.

As Druid, you sacrifice all the dps trait-lines to pick up Druid.

If he wants to “focus” on healing, then his dps will definitely be bad.
Add that to the fact that druid has minimal offensive and defensive buff (also you lock one weapon to staff already), making it only a healbot.

Also, those “suggestions” of all the people here to improve druid’s utility and chunkiness (like sacrifice the whole Astral Bar by leaving?) may not be taken at all, and Druid may stay the same when launch as of now.

Currently stand, Druid is a very clunky and restricted class, with bad utilities available and more selfish traits. (It’s better off just grab those spirits in PVE, and survival skills in PVP than bringing any of the glyphs don’t you agree?)

Druid’s traits seem to be more focus on roaming than helping team really.

My feedback based on a night of playing pve and www:

1. Nerf the smokescale at your own peril, devs.

2. The healing output is pitiful compared to the damage output of champion event mobs.

3. Building up energy to switch to celestial form is clunky. When you need to heal, you need to heal. Celestial form should probably just a be a straight up toggle.

4. The #1 staff ability in celestial form is awful in mobile fights. Miss. Miss. Miss.

5. The #2 on staff, the wisp thing, is pretty slow and only seems to heal once. Kind of disappointing.

Taking the WS line and survival skill seems the best way to play druid… sadly.

Chokolata.1870:

Taking the WS line and survival skill seems the best way to play druid… sadly.

Yes, which means giving up dps trait.

The condition removal of Druid is only available in Astroy, which it’d take forever to get the necessary bar w/o a staff. To make things even worse, after you cleanse your condition in Astroy, you either waste it by quitting it, or stay in Astroy and does no damage. Very clunky mechanic, with useless utilities that couldn’t do anything.
You’re still bound to WS to grab those useful survival skills because glyph absolutely does not help Druid a single bit.

protip if your celestial energy is always full, then you always have a full condi cleanse =P

mistsim.2748:

protip if your celestial energy is always full, then you always have a full condi cleanse =P

Translation:

Use staff all the time to get a cleanse. (Otherwise it’s too slow to be of any use)

You still need WS to have enough cleanse. Otherwise you’re like stuck in staff because you can only cleanse with Astroy. Plus staff has no burst = staying in it too long = lose of dps/ burst potential.

The current system is way too clunky. Should work more like Shroud to have practical uses.

I have been playing Druid all night and tried about a half dozen different specs.

Some general comments:

Staff 1 is great.

Staff 2 needs something more, probably more or AoE damage or vulnerability…. Something. It is quite underwhelming. Maybe even just raising the heal coefficient would help.

Staff 4 should either be a longer immobilize or have a light bleed like all other vine skills.

Staff 5 healing is kind of low. Reflect would have been better.

Celestial Avatar 1 is horrible. Like really, one of the most awkward unrewarding skills to use ever. The rest of the CA skills are great, but this one sucks. I suggest having it do AoE damage around the druid and apply a small (200 or so) radius heal. At least that way we are spared the wrist killing ground targeting.

CV 3, 4, and 5 are pretty cool. 5 could use a bit (1/4 second?) fast cast time.

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.

So I ran a Druid spec for max healing power. Took it into two explorable dungeons with pug groups and it was effective but rather boring to play. Also tried this in PvP and it worked only when running in zerg. Most effective in Courtyard and when running with a zerg on Conquest maps, but still boring compared to healing with an Ele, Herold or Guardian. It seems clear this class wasn’t hashed out as well as the others and ANet just needed a dedicated healer spec option for Raid content.

However I really did enjoy playing the Druid spec we start with (Longbow and greatsword with Druid traits). There is a lot of fun in that spec and it felt balanced.

If Druid is really you plan for dedicated healer I don’t think that will go over well. It seems very counter the play habits. Everyone at this point has had to defend themselves and now they are turned off to the idea of depending on a support class.

The good, the bad and the ugly, from my experience so far this Beta Weekend testing Druid (cleric exotic gear, monk runes, staff + sword/warhorn … and sometimes staff/longbow, default/supplied build).

The Good
Map design is truly immersive. Well done!

The healing output of the build is crazy. This might be “good” or it might be “bad”. I guess I am not certain if there is a valid reason for making healy-Druid healing output so high. Maybe the designers want to give a boost while people learn raiding content, then follow it up with a nerf when they consider content to be “learned”.

The Bad
The story is, in my opinion, rather mediocre. I consider this to be not meeting expectations/hype.

I do not like what I call “encounter design”. I feel that damage output from staff-Druid is rather poor (see build details above). Maybe I have overlooked a few things. People will say Skill number 1 is OP, and it might very well be, except I find I cannot use it for as long as I would like, except in party sizes of 4-6+, and the other skills just don’t seem to do much if any damage. Additionally, I find the scaling to be bad at the low end (i.e. single player). This really makes the experience rather unenjoyable for me, just like the horrible Living Season 2 boss fights from Chapters 4 through 8.

“Mastery Point Accessible” nearby on the map … really? I cannot seem to access them. These need to be better labelled/accessible.

The Ugly
Game/client/patch stability. Wow, QA = zero, or? So many things missing/non-functional. The less I say the better, I suppose.

Summary
It is Saturday morning, so there is a lot of Beta time ahead, but my initial feeling is that I do not like the heally-Druid. I have not tried the raid, and I suspect it will turn out to be a raid/group content build only. Which raises a bit of a can of worms … the game might now need a way to handle multiple gear sets in PvE.

Additionally, all the bugs associated with the Beta patch really detract from the fun of testing beta content. I would encourage the managers at Arenanet to iron out these wrinkles as a modestly high priority.

Aomine.5012:

Sorry to break your dream.

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

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

Healers aren’t there to make bad teams decent.
Druids don’t just heal either, although specializing is usually not a bad thing.

Ok, opinions on druid so far:

1. healing scales awfully and so does damage, so you sit there doing no damage and no healing. You should really have one or the other cause at the moment staff in particular is just not good. Right now you might as well stick to normal damaging stats because there’s no point in speccing healing power at all. Since the intention is to make healing useful, please do so and improve the heal scaling significantly.

2. The tiger’s F2 skill should cause the Fury at the start of the animation not at the end. Because of where it is in the skill it often just affects nobody at all. Either that or increase the radius.

3. Staff animations are really clunky on human females. Not tested out other race/gender combos, but the over head animation just feels very uncomfortable and weird.

4. Cosmic ray is very hard to hit with because people are always moving around. I think to fix that the cast time should be removed so it hits right away. At the moment as long as the cast times are going the person you’re trying to heal has left the area

-Heal from regen and damage from conditions should add astral force.
-Staff need some changes (there is topic about this made by Heimskarl Ashfiend)
-Staff 1 needs to be usable without target
-Astral form weapon skill 1 need biger aoe ring and some dmg/other extra effect
-Healing seeds need to pop faster 3-4 sec is to mutch with current condi burst meta
-Glyps need increased effect range and some other utilityes like stun break
-When leaving astarl form remaining astral force should remain at energy pool or be used in some sort of aoe heal etc that scale debending how mutch energy was left

STAFF WEAPON
In wvw the staff generates a full bar of astral force almost instantly if you have a large enough group of people with you, but with damage it is so slow that in order to help your team you have to equip the staff. I think the building of astral force should made a little closer between the two methods, maybe 3/4 percent from damage and 1 +3/4 percent from healing to balance that out. The staff itself felt great overall. The damage does not put it above longbow, but it still feels powerful enough to stand on it’s own and it’s support capabilities are balanced with celestial avatar. But I noticed what I thought might be an unintended function. If I targeted someone who was out of range with solar beam, the beam would still extend all the way to their character, affecting enemies and allies who were in range between their position and mine. It created an odd interaction where I would target someone who was in the backlines of the enemy team, and run back and forth to hit whomever I wanted. That functionality was very convenient and I like it as is but I want to know if it’s not a mistake. Astral force is an unfun still though, since it doesn’t have any skillful play. It gets used immediately when off cooldown if allies are within range and that’s it.

CELESTIAL AVATAR AND WvW
When I was in WvW it also felt awkward to have what seemed like redundant spells in celestial avatar. The cosmic ray and tidal surge basically do the same thing, aoe heals. Just one is more potent if coordinated with a team to blast in it. I always wanted to use Lunar Impact offensively since it provides the druid’s strongest control, especially if traited with Moment of Clarity, so I think it should just have damage added to it instead of healing, or be fully dedicated as a control ability and also be movement impairing, maybe a brief ice field. Also the seed of life could convert conditions to boons, have no healing and a bit longer cooldown to give it a more specific purpose, different from the other skills.

ASTRAL FORCE
After some use I started to like having the entire astral force disappear after being used. It makes the activation of celestial avatar a bigger commitment since, in theory, it should be down for quite some time. Only issues are that the staff can generate astral force extremely fast in large fights, making it’s use less significant. And like death shroud on the necromancer, an accidental double-tap can result in immediate cancellation of the form. I imagine that would have been very frustrating in spvp, or if I was trying to build astral force through damage.

GLYPHS
With the glyphs having such short range, their more offensive functions only make sense to use with melee weapons, and the glyph of empowerment’s effects feels too weak for it’s short duration.

First off great work Anet for making a move to shift the existing meta. I’ve seen a lotta zerkers fall at wyvern last night. I will break my feedback down to three sections:

Pets:
Great work on pets. They feel really good with some evade mechanics and are more responsive to recalls. I am particularly happy about the smokescale which huge damage burst and evade. There are some concerns that this pet is OP, however it is a great mechanic to sustain the smokescale while it is in melee. I did have smokescale die a lot is the boss battle so i dun believe the burst is too much to be concerned about.
The wyverns are amazing with great knockbacks and look super kittening awesome :P

Weapon & Utilites:
The staff is an amazing weapon. It really helps sustain the team and has decent DPS to go along. skill 1, 3 and 5 are amazing and can turn the tide of battles. Wisp duration and healing is barely noticeable but i see it is a great tool to sustain the melee classes. #4 is hard to aim as the indicator is too thin… tbh a wider indicator would help better understand extent of the skill.
Utilites are meh. I did not see any need to change from the current utilities. Damage glyph is nice with short CD.

Feel:
Here i can say that there are a ton of people still going meta and trying to melee all the bosses. The heals can only do so much when they are taking 4-5k damage and insta down. The Astral form decay is a bit too fast, i can’t activate full set of skills in astral form and for some reason daze was not working on the break bar. Overall i love the class mechanics and amount of defensive support offered.

Aomine.5012:

mistsim.2748:

protip if your celestial energy is always full, then you always have a full condi cleanse =P

Translation:

Use staff all the time to get a cleanse. (Otherwise it’s too slow to be of any use)

You still need WS to have enough cleanse. Otherwise you’re like stuck in staff because you can only cleanse with Astroy. Plus staff has no burst = staying in it too long = lose of dps/ burst potential.

The current system is way too clunky. Should work more like Shroud to have practical uses.

that is not a correct translation. that’s what you want it to be.

Well first little feedback, i think AF should scale with regeneration ..its not really workin well with shout builds so far, but it would be really nice if it would. After all giving reg. is also some kind of healing : o

Celestial Shadow: this trait does seem really useless so far since gettin into cele Avatar is way to rare..i do not see a lot of use for it.

Heal Skills other then TU should give some more AF too :/

I have tried Druid for a few more hours and also have kept reading comments on this forum.

These are my second impressions:

- Yes, Druid can be build as a Power/Heal hybrid. I do not know if it is intentional or if it is just the fact that healing coefficient is generally not that good in this game. Maxing Healing makes little different than having a little less. So I do not feel that Druid can be a hardcore backline constant-heal-doling traditional healer that solve all the problem in difficult contents. For the time being, at least on paper, the best build is either Cleric or Zealot, or a bit of both.

- Yes, Druid is very Staff dependent, which is rather annoying indeed. I do agree that at least one power in Staff has to buff the pets similar to other weapons. How about Staff 2? Staff 4 needs not to be ground-targeted; it makes it so hard to use. Other effects need to be longer as well.

- Other weapons need to be able to contribute to the build up of Celestial Avatar as well. Celestial Avatar needs to be able to activate even if the metre is not full. Sometimes, you just need that little emergency heal to get through. Also Celestial Avatar, or Druid in general, needs stability. Or at least a stun-breaker to be able to function properly as a (emergency) healer in life-or-death situation. It could be the Celestial Avatar, i.e. F5, itself.

- Heal coefficient needs to be a bit higher than normal for the Druid to work. I suggest that either be higher in Celestial Avatar form or have a trait that convert other stats into Healing.

- Glyphs need wider radii. My main issue is with Glyph of Unity; I can never see if I actually tether to someone or not. Most of the time, I do not.

- Cosmic Ray is so very hard to hit since people are normally moving around all the time. I saw most people just firing it randomly without much hope of it actually doing something as intended. I would rather it be a skill that targets other players instead.

- Those new Pets are just right. Well done!

Druid so far has received mixed review. I think the negative reviews are mostly to do with the “chunkiness” of some skills (as listed above). Have those polished will certain make it a very solid Elite spec.

One thing that I saw on forums that REALLY concerns me.

GLYPH IS NOT POPULAR.

Like seriously, it is not popular at all…..

3. Building up energy to switch to celestial form is clunky. When you need to heal, you need to heal. Celestial form should probably just a be a straight up toggle.

I kind of agree and disagree on this as well. It needs to be more flexible. You need to be able to go into it, heal a little, come out, and have energy left over if you didn’t do much. I don’t think you should be able to Celestial infinitely, that would be tough to balance, but ti would make sense to have it be something you could swap in and out of every 5-10 seconds, like Shroud.

JKLeetro.6935:

One thing that I saw on forums that REALLY concerns me.

GLYPH IS NOT POPULAR.

Like seriously, it is not popular at all…..

The reason is simple, because they’re near useless, and subpar to survival, signet, spirits 100% of the time.

Totally need a redesign and radius increase. It seems like some random idea without much thought. I already gave detail examples as to how to fix them in one of my previous posts.

JKLeetro.6935:

One thing that I saw on forums that REALLY concerns me.

GLYPH IS NOT POPULAR.

Like seriously, it is not popular at all…..

some glyphs are okay. for example, tides and equality are quite good on offensive builds. rejuvenation is decent, I used it quite a bit today on my support hybrid.

the real flops are unity, empowerment and alignment. empowerment needs to last longer, not sure what they were thinking with alignment, and unity just cant maintain the tethers. unity’s secondary is amazing btw, if your teammates know to stay close. tethers need to be at least 600 radius range.

Ohoni.6057:

3. Building up energy to switch to celestial form is clunky. When you need to heal, you need to heal. Celestial form should probably just a be a straight up toggle.

I kind of agree and disagree on this as well. It needs to be more flexible. You need to be able to go into it, heal a little, come out, and have energy left over if you didn’t do much. I don’t think you should be able to Celestial infinitely, that would be tough to balance, but ti would make sense to have it be something you could swap in and out of every 5-10 seconds, like Shroud.

Having an always on Celestial Avatar will make Druid into a traditional trinity healer. That is what most people were worrying about since the revelation.

Celestial Avatar is not like Shroud; it is more akin to Plague or Lich Form with an addition mechanism (instead of a fixed cooldown) for which to be available. I think it is a very well thought out setup to have a healer but not a trinity healer.

That said, Celestial Avatar needs some fine tuning to be user-friendly. Yes, “user-friendly” from a healer prospective, which seems to be the major complaint people are having so far.

Some feedback before I go to sleep:

First, great job working on the spec, It feels polished and have really enjoyed it while using it with berserker gear

The following changes are the ones I strongly wish would come about

Staff:

1. Change staff skill 1 animation for human female. Currently it looks really awkward the way my character raises the staff to attack. This looks awkward because my character arches her back and looks really uncomfortable. The idle hammer holding stance is fine, in fact, I like it, but I recommend switching staff 1 animation to that of guardian staff 1. Personally, I think I guardian’s staff 1 animation is ideal for shooting a concentrated light beam from a staff.
Regarding the damage of staff 1, Since it’s really the only DPS skill on staff, I feel it’d be great if it could be bumped up slightly by about 10-15% while still remaining a power weapon instead of a condi weapon.

2. Staff skill 2 feels rather “meh” in that it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes much. I recommend maybe adding some extra damage to it or an additional effect such as “pet deals extra damage to foe for duration”

3. Staff skill 3 is great except make it so that if one doesnt choose to travel the 1200 distance, it ends at whatever shorter distance one chooses instead of standing still waiting for animation to finish.
Also I think it should either have an evade/invul on it due to the fact that one turns into a light wisp and it doesn’t make sense how one can damage a wisp of light.

4. The animation is great and I like how one can choose the direction it goes instead of just going directly to target, good design on that. Since the skill is rather low on damage I recommend adding an extra second or two to the immob duration or an additional condi removal.

5. I like this skill and its recharge time. Also since it’s currently a water field, I think it should be left like that if its not intended. If it is intended, then the tooltip says nothing of a water field.

I’ll give more tomorrow, about to fall asleep, again though , good job on Druid spec.

I have the problem that often i cant activate skills. Especially after the greatsword leap + getting immobilizing. It seems to me, that the ranger is floating in the air and then he cant use it.

Druid is awsome.

I may agree that other weapons other than staff need to be “effective” on building the avatar but there is no need on allowing to activate it before it gets full.

I do prefer +1000 having to fill the avatar bar rather than dealing with a cd (wich would obiously get). However i do agree that finishing early the avatar should not empty the bar OR make that action to cause an effect wich would scale depending on how much of the bar was left.

F.e: The stealth + superspeed trait is related to this so… why not make it give more stealth + sspeed seconds depending on how much bar is spent on it?
The actions could be from an AoE short radius heal burst to a mystic AoE damage splash.

I have played it in WvW where it really shines. You can either play as a melee aoe heal support or as a ranged backline support. The rest of the rangers weapong allow different playstyles.
We need to understand that the specs goal is to heal support so pretending to do it otherwise is a waste. If you don’t want to heal just don’t pick druid spec.

Gyplhs probably will need some buffs and even staff 2 needs to scale better with healing power but in general is one of the best specs right now.

So… First impressions. Life Shroud basically requires that you use a staff or Troll Unguent. Regen, the Ranger’s primary method of healing itself and allies, doesn’t provide any synergy with Druid at all, regen needs to provide some amount of astral force to open up Druid build diversity. As it stands the only way to get enough healing ticks to reach 100% astral force in a reasonable amount of time is to spam solar beam through your pet. Staff should reach 100% faster.

On the other hand, testing with Troll Unguent, the tooltip and astral force required to enter celestial state don’t add up. 14 ticks from TU reached 100%, that means it’s over 7% per tick. Assuming heals on myself and my pet count, that’s still over 3.5% per heal, not 2.5% as stated in the tooltip. Troll Unguent is the only reasonable way to reach Celestal state without using a staff. I tried combining TU with attacking as fast as possible to fill in the remaining 30%, but by the time TU was off cooldown again I had only manage to gain a small chunk.

In short: Astral force from bloodshed might as well not exist, astral force from healing is higher than the tooltip suggests. Regeneration doesn’t give anything and that’s terrible.

Edit: To others thinking the astral force shouldn’t just vanish/do nothing if you leave avatar state early, I totally agree. It’d be an interesting trait choice, over, say, Cultivated Synergy which is just “heals heal, yeah, woo.”. Thus for players without the trait they have the tough call of wasting astral force or staying in astral form when it’s inoptimal. Players with the trait never feel bad about leaving early.

Since we’d be replacing the “gain lots of astral force trait”, why not replace it with, “when you leave celestial form, retain a percentage of your remaining astral force.”?

Been running with Ancient Seeds and Shortbow, this combo gives me some troubles:

- Having it activate only on a dazed/stunned foe really gives you a very small window to hit the target again, with only 1s of daze/stun on Shortbow. At max range you will need to be on autoattack or spamming another skill to make sure you hit the target in time. Activating another skill midcast in your autoattack will usually mean you are too late. Perhaps bring the daze/stun duration from Concussion Shot up to par with Hilt Bash (1.5s)? Otherwise, increase the duration only when flanking to reward skillful positioning.

- Ancient Seeds lacks synergy with the pierce mechanic. It will go on cooldown immediatly after hitting a foe, which means Ancient Seeds is only applied to the first foe you hit. This punishes you for using the pierce mechanic (e.g. keeping enemies between you and your target).

- The immobilize triggers with a delay, too late to be reliable.

Update:

- As a main PvE player, I would prefer the bleeding from Ancient Seeds to come all at once instead of one stack a pulse (given the pace with which enemies get killed).

- An indicator on when Ancient Seeds is recharged would be nice, due to the possibility of missing out on Ancient Seeds if another player applied the daze. You will basically have wasted your daze/stun on nothing.

This is gonna be a bit all over the place, but..

The avatar buildup has an abysmal synergy with other weapons than staff, and that’s an immediate turn-off. Which brings me on to my next point, the staff is too onesided. There is no “umph” to it. It’s needs some damage to it, and possibly some damaging conditions aswell. The port skill (staff #3) needs an evade and it lingers way too long before you actually get out of it. The vines on staff #4 could possible cover a larger area. Staff #5 is missing the “water field” in its tooltip, otherwise fine. Staff #2 could possibly damage neary foes aswell as healing allies?

The minor traits doesn’t really excite me at all, they’re too one sided for an elite spec that has the potential to be so much more than just a healbot. The first minor trait ties in with the poor avatar buildup without a staff. Most of the major traits are fine, but due to how restricted I am to how I build up the avatar, the traits related to it rarely feels rewarding. Also, Natural Stride should be a minor. It would simultaneously solve the problem of wasting minor traits if you’re not a healbot.

The Glyphs are.. okay-ish. The radius is way too small on all of them (but a small skill radius seem to be a recurring theme of the ranger…). Buff the radius for starters.

Due to the limited use of druid without a staff, I feel like the potential synergy with moment of clairty in marksmanship together with all the new dazes isn’t where it should be at. We got very few skills to properly punish someone for being dazed by a ranger with moment of clarity, and that’s especially the case when we’re forced into using the staff, which again has very little “ummph” to it.

Furthermore, there is a strong lack of boon applying for an elite spec that is leant towards a supporte role. And it needs an instant stability, some way or another.

As for new pets, the Wyverns are too slow, and the fire wyvern uses its F2 on location instead of attacking your target. The tiger should apply fury before it pounces. The bristleback and smokescale seemed fine (the bristleback enlargement bug was hilarious, keep it!).

Edit: I would like to +1 this:

Been running with Ancient Seeds and Shortbow, this combo gives me some troubles:

- Having it activate only on a dazed/stunned foe really gives you a very small window to hit the target again, with only 1s of daze/stun on Shortbow. At max range you will need to be on autoattack or spamming another skill to make sure you hit the target in time. Activating another skill midcast in your autoattack will usually mean you are too late. Perhaps bring the daze/stun duration from Concussion Shot up to par with Hilt Bash (1.5s)? Otherwise, increase the duration only when flanking to reward skillful positioning.

- Ancient Seeds lacks synergy with the pierce mechanic. It will go on cooldown immediatly after hitting a foe, which means Ancient Seeds is only applied to the first foe you hit. This punishes you for using the pierce mechanic (e.g. keeping enemies between you and your target).

- The immobilize triggers with a delay, too late to be reliable.

Take this as a simplistic feedback from a healing pov, maybe in a pve raid setting: What boggles me a bit is that a staff ele (also tempest) could provide enough heals but over a larger area while also doing other stuff like damage a raid boss and provide boons like 40% prot and might. A druid has his healing bursts in CA but is it really needed, and it only provides heals and some condi cleanse, over shorter time and area. Why take a druid that only does that at best, when class x could do more things at the same time, which is of benefit to overcome an encounter faster. I dont like to compare classes I just wanted to mention the functionality from a narrow perspective. Hopefully Im wrong.

As for a pvp pov CA form is a great recovery tool to heal up on any marauder amu build, can also be useful onpoint with our shout elite. It adds a new mechanism to power builds, like lb staff, and makes us able to give up the previously mandatory WS line.

nacario.9417:

Take this as a simplistic feedback from a healing pov, maybe in a pve raid setting: What boggles me a bit is that a staff ele (also tempest) could provide enough heals but over a larger area while also doing other stuff like damage a raid boss and provide boons like 40% prot and might. A druid has his healing bursts in CA but is it really needed, and it only provides heals and some condi cleanse, over shorter time and area. Why take a druid that only does that at best, when class x could do more things at the same time, which is of benefit to overcome an encounter faster. I dont like to compare classes I just wanted to mention the functionality from a narrow perspective. Hopefully Im wrong.

Well… perhaps if you factor pets into consideration, the Druid can heal on one side while simultaneously pets can do a lot of other things else where. So essentially a Druid can do whatever a Ranger does in its normal form. Then when the time is right, switch to Celestial Avatar form for some heal support. All the while the whichever pet is doing whichever pet does.

I think the key is “simultaneously” doing two things at two places. A Druid can switch between the Celestial Avatar form; one pet can switch to another. So there are quite a few things going on at the same time. So, Druid does have its uses.

(I know pet’s AI can be a bit of a problem. But that is an all together different topic best discuss elsewhere)

Hidden feature: it seems permastow for pet has found its way into the game. After gliding my pet can’t be activated again. Map travel, character swap and restarting the game all didn’t fix it.

Inc.4753:

Hidden feature: it seems permastow for pet has found its way into the game. After gliding my pet can’t be activated again. Map travel, character swap and restarting the game all didn’t fix it.

I can hear people screaming with tears of joy: “FINALLY”!

A lot of issues I have with the Druid spec have been touched on and what I’m going to say comes from a primarily PvE point of view. Low healing power numbers, low damage, no boons, locked into staff to really get celestial form, glyphs are bad and low range, you can’t into celestial without form bar and if you leave you lose everything, no damage on avatar (not a big deal if HoT changed things and allows tagging based on healing or something but it would still be nice if a meteor did damage), and traits seem a bit mixed up.

For the ranger positives, love the new pets except the wyverns (the fire F2 should be targetable not based on wyvern position) and yeah. That’s all the positives. I’ve heard of some people using their pets as the dos and keeping it alive with staff and such, but that seems laughable because let AI is still a joke. Outside of raids (if it is truly that difficult) and WvW, I don’t see Druid doing well. No on demand stability keeps it out of PvP.

My main wish is for the Druid to become a support bot not a heal bot. If we can pump out boons and heals (especially in difficult PvE content where it’s one shot to die), I might actually use Druid in PvE.

Oh My God.8423:

Well… perhaps if you factor pets into consideration, the Druid can heal on one side while simultaneously pets can do a lot of other things else where. So essentially a Druid can do whatever a Ranger does in its normal form. Then when the time is right, switch to Celestial Avatar form for some heal support. All the while the whichever pet is doing whichever pet does.

I think the key is “simultaneously” doing two things at two places. A Druid can switch between the Celestial Avatar form; one pet can switch to another. So there are quite a few things going on at the same time. So, Druid does have its uses.

(I know pet’s AI can be a bit of a problem. But that is an all together different topic best discuss elsewhere)

You could have been saying the same thing about the core ranger for three years, we all know very well that this isn’t a viable way to build a ranger, and that we’re far away from being able to utilize our pets to fullfill a very different role to our own without it ending up being subpar.

It would be better if pets could be more easily incorperated into our builds and strengthen our role, instead of acting as a subpar separate unit.

Hi Irenio!

Played around with a couple of builds in various PvP scenarios tonight, and here are my thoughts:

- The healing in Avatar form is great. Even as full zerker you have very impressive health sustain. I’d even suggest bring down the base heal and bringing up the scaling, to make running +healing more rewarding.
- Some more damage on the Avatar skills would be nice. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but I don’t like the idea of having to drop ALL of the life resource that I’ve built just so I can go back to doing any form of reliable damage. Having the Life Seed (#2) do damage on explosion, Lunar Impact (#3) doing some sort of AOE damage, and/or the Tidal Surge (#4) skill also doing pulsing dmg like Irenio suggested in the stream would go a long way. Again, it doesn’t need to be a lot (or even all of the skills mentioned), just enough to make going into druid form more meaningful apart from only spam healing. #5 is nice, but it requires some setting up to land on half-decent players, which isn’t good considering it’s the only skill that currently does any damage at all.
- Moment of Clarity + Lunar Impact (CA #3) is kinda cheesy for PvE and PVP. 6s Daze on kitten CD, with a 1s cast. Even more broken than Technobabble!
- Staff damage needs to come up a little bit. We get that it was designed with support in mind, but that doesn’t mean it can’t at least have some respectable damage. I think it would be okay for the staff to be a ‘sustained’ damage weapon, as we already have GS and LB for power bursts.
- Staff #3 needs tuning. The cast time is always the same regardless of how far you go, which is troublesome.
- Any chance of evade frames making it into staff #3? It can be shut down relatively easily. Since rangers do not have any short CD stun-breaks, or reliable access to instant cast stability, you can literally find yourself running up against a wall (or line).
- Rangers/druids really need a shorter CD stun-break to bring them in line with many of the other classes. Some already had low CD breaks, and others got them with the elite specs. Maybe put one on one of the shorter CD glyphs? If we can’t get that, can we at least have one on SotW? That thing really needs to be instant.
- I really like the traits we have currently, great job! I’ve already found several different ways to use them effectively.

ALSO (bug reports):

-Please fix Quick Draw not working with Staff skills! I don’t know if this is intentional, as the wording of the trait does say ‘ranger’ weapon skills.
- Please allow us to use the new pets in sPvP!
- Please fix damage not filling the CA resource bar!
- CA resource generation seems very inconsistent between skills that actually generate it.

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/professions/ranger/Natural-Stride-and-Verdant-Etchings

We seem to all overwhelmingly agree that Natural Stride should be swapped with Natural Mender in the Druid trait line.

Natural Mender is a bad trait to force on all Druid builds and we should be able to have both Natural Stride and Verdant Etching in a build.

mistsim.2748:

protip if your celestial energy is always full, then you always have a full condi cleanse =P

#

How viable that is without staff or troll unguent to feed CF energy in the first place?

Having an always on Celestial Avatar will make Druid into a traditional trinity healer. That is what most people were worrying about since the revelation.

Celestial Avatar is not like Shroud; it is more akin to Plague or Lich Form with an addition mechanism (instead of a fixed cooldown) for which to be available. I think it is a very well thought out setup to have a healer but not a trinity healer.

I don’t think that’s something you can split the difference on though. I mean, Shroud, that’s just more DPS. DPS is always useful. Healing is much more situational, it can be vital for 5 seconds, and then useless for the next 30. It needs to be something on demand. I definitely don’t think you should have perma-Celestial, but it should be something you can turn on and off as needed and use as a resource, rather than something that if you use it at all, you burn it completely until it’s recharged.

Celestial energy
Recharges too slow without staff.

Suggestions for staff improvement:

Solar Beam – Add apply cripple (1s) and 1 poison (1s) per pulse
Astral Wisp – Add apply 3 torment (3s)
Ancestral Grace – Leave as it is
Sublime Convergence – Switch this skill to staff#4. reduce cooldown to 16.
Vine Surge – Switch skill to staff#5. Increase the width to match Inspiring Reinforcement (revenant road paving). Add apply 5 bleeds to targets. Increase cooldown to 24s.

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

Druid Feedback Post

My thoughts on the new mechanic and how I would like it to be changed.

Out of celestial form Staff skills and glyphs are more offensive or “selfish” less heals more attacks.

F5 activates always on healbot mode

In celestial form Works as it does now but the resource pool from out of form is active in form to generate heal energy by using the #1.

The visual que of the form needs to be seen as the same as an engineer holding their bomb kit (only much more sparkly)

It’s a shame this one was put out last as it needs work it won’t get done

Feedback: Make Wisps Rotate counter clockwise instead of clockwiese. That way we get synergy with Serpent Strike from 1HSword instead of Anti Synergy, because we “roll away” from the heal.

Even a bunker guard has more dps than a healer druid.

PvP Changes:

Staff #1 —> needs burning
Staff #2--> it’s fine
Staff #3 —> needs AoE damage
Staff #4 --> needs bleeding.
Staff #5 —> it’s fine (with the water field).

Celestial form has to work like Death Shroud, you need a new health bar and to use it even if your astral force is not full.

Celestial form #1 —> needs damage.
Celestial form #2 --> add aoe regen when casted (before blossom)
Celestial form #3 —> it’s fine
Celestial form #4 --> channeling has to be deleted
Celestial form #5 —> needs to be channeled while moving.

Glyph of Rejuvenation —> it’s fine.
Glyph of Tides --> needs a bigger radius.
Glyph of Alignment —> Condis are really weak
Glyph of Equality --> Needs to be a stunbreaker on “ranger form”
Glyph of Empowerment —> Celestial form needs a rework, it has to improve your healing on allies.
Glyph of Unity--> needs a bigger radius

I would like to test the new pets at pvp but we can’t…

For the lack of stunbreaks with the new spec and glyphs:

GM Minor Natural Mender: Additionally breaks stun when you enter and leave celestial astral form.

Problem: The Druid animation on female characters with staff and on the Astral form, looks strange and needs more polishing, by far the weaker of all professions.

Solution 1: If the Druids have a idle animations of a hammer, them let them use it like a hammer but with range spells, the first skill in the staff really needs to change, it transition and overall animation is the weakest of all. Astral form need more flare too.

Solution 2: Change the overall animation of the staff to a kind of spear use, explicitly looking for IRL example of spear use.

I expected Druid to have a savage kind of feel with a lot of focus on nature as a theme, the effects are not bad but there is something missing and overall it does not feel right.

druid looks amezing atm i happy with it.

the thing that annoyed me right away is how the druid handles the staff like a freaking gs or hammer isn’t druid suppose to be the mage of nature?
ihope we can hold the staff like guard does.

other points the druid is healing spec.
opinions here might divide i like how it is all though reading some comments here some skill in celestial mode need some dps add to them.

glyphys i was testing them reading them testing back and forth.

glyphs lack range and depth.

with depth i mean some are really weak in my eyes
glyphe of the tides would nice combination with a break stun.
one of the glyphe would be nice have some stabbi on it. rangers lack this asswell (its own stabbi)yes i know signet of the wild and elite shouts both big cool downs.
if druid will be support type we need glyps with immediate acces to support.
its time another class bring party stabbi in this game.

at least this what i think. not gone make a long post i hope anet does something with out opions.

last thing this is more a ranger problem for the past 3 years.
pets arn’t worth nothing in group content plz do something about.
cheers i am gone test more druidy stuff

Everything would’ve been fantastic if they just made a nature themed (including astral because why not) mage. I’ve said this before and I’ll say this again; There is MORE than enough support in this game as is.

4 things,

1 : please make glyph ground targetable, right now it trigger where u are.
2 : the way the druid wield staff looks like he is holding a greatsword or hammer doesn’t look like staff as held by elemental or mesmer.
3 : the fire wyvern applies f2 skill where he is standing intead of the target.
4 : staff needs more damage …….