Guild Wars 2

Since the balancing thought process in wvw is to focus on zerg play, and to continue to allow stuff like massive burst damage numbers, “perma” stealth and condi damage to rule… the first step to fixing druid heal support is reverting CA back to the original 10s state and then start working on better, more user friendly and less clunky skills where we are not apologizing to teammates for not having heal skills available…

Then let’s start working on this…

Swagger.1459:

Druid was supposed to be capable of supporting “zerg trains” as well, so I’d like to share some of the greatest ideas that will make playing Druid more viable in mass combat situations and more desired by players in any part of the game.

Supporting these suggestions absolutely guarantees to make your Druid super popular across Tyria! All the cool kids will invite you to their parties! You’ll get tons of friend and guild requests! Players will even email you gold and legendaries to buy your favor! You will undoubtedly become the envy of all professions!

Additionally, these changes will be so great for the devs because we will have to buy second accounts and roll non Rangers to get a break from it all.

Read on and be amazed!

Seeds of Life

These need to pop instantly and have their radius increased to 360. 5 targets as normal.

Staff

We need this weapon to be a better ranged support weapon with useful skills.

Staff 1- Add 1 burning condition to the 3rd attack tick. The low damage and low healing make adding conditions to this skill ok.

Staff 2- Add 1 burning condition and increase radius to 300. All effects hit 5 enemies and allies within the radius. The current 130 radius is not enough to support allies so the increased radius would help. This change would also be a useful for helping to contribute to breaking up the tight zergs.

Staff 4- Make this a circular patch, like all those other aoe patches, and add bleeding. The current cone design is awful to use in any movement based combat, so the aoe design allows this skill to be useful. This would also make the skill useful for zerg breaking and sieging structures in wvw.

Staff 5- Make this skill an aoe dome. The current small rectangle design is as useless as vine surge. This change allows us to support better during mass combat situations.

Celestial Avatar

This form is not dependable, it is clunky to heal with and very easy to interrupt and shut down currently, so I’d like to turn it into a dependable, smooth and more sturdy form that is front line support capable.

CA Form- Provides natural stability to the Druid and pulses stability to 5 allies within a 360 radius.

AF- Make CA a stance that is maintained until downed or killed or manually exited. Once downed or killed or exited, you have to build up Astral Force again to activate and reenter CA form.

CA 1- Make this skill function like Guardian staff 1. Wide 600 range “astral” cone attack that hits 5 enemies and heals up to 5 allies within the effect.

CA 2- Remove the reticle aiming function and make it a point blank aoe that pops a seed instantly. 360 radius. 5 targets.

CA 3- Remove the reticle aiming function and make it a point blank aoe with the same 360 radius.

CA 4- 360 radius.

CA 5- Remove the root and make this skill mobile. Add a 5 player, excluding the Druid, healing component that coincides with the pulse and final damage. Same 360 radius.

Glyphs

Make each glyph independent and an individual selectable choice. This would add more slot skill options and build diversity.

What these changes do

First, these changes fit thematically with the duality design of Druid. You have your ranged support role with staff and your melee support role with CA.

Second, all skills become useful, dependable and smooth to use in any movement based combat and zerg play.

Third, this makes bringing a Druid to any team, in any mode, more desirable.

Fourth, the Druid support role actually becomes user friendly and fun to play.

Edit- You devs are witty. Posted this originally in the general section stupidly, and upon deletion this awesome message popped up… “Swagger has turned into a quantum object. They both exist and do not exist at the same time.”.

Edit- and since the condition meta is in a good place, let’s add various conditions to all CA skills.

Cosmic Ray and Seed of Life need buffs.

My suggestion would be to be able to toggle them from ranged AoE to PBAoE. Also increase all CA skills to a radius of 360 minimum.

Also, with regards to Seed of Life, I would remove the cast time and reduce the delay for activation, add back 2 conditions removed but increase the CD to 2 seconds.

The other option is to greatly increase Seed of Life’s range to 600

Hmm… would rather smaller changes to some of the CAF skills now. Cosmic Ray radius increase from 120 to 180 since we can spread GotL to 10 people. That would make it a bit easier to cover more allies.

Seeds of Life I’d rather have it pulse twice. Split the current heal in half for each pulse, have the first pulse cleanse 1 condition and heal allies, and the second pulse blind foes and heal allies.

This would also mean Seeds of Life applies GotL twice when traited, but allies also receive the condition cleanse and a little healing sooner. Nothing too drastic.

To the best of my knowledge the game wasn’t designed around supporting or healing classes. Of course I always hold the right to be incorrect.

To complicate things we are trying to balance classes in a free for all format of play. We are talking about any gear, party, or buff combination multiplied by any number of players.

They would have a better chance by combining sPvP and WvW together to include all restrictions. Otherwise they would be wise to remove it all together and just provide a open world server for those who like this playstyle. While this is the format I prefer to play (former DaOC player) A.net has no clear desire based on what we have seen to promote or develop this format. It has been on auto-pilot for many years now.

Just my opinion.

Actually i never liked the idea of cosmic ray changed to a cone. Simply because it won’t get rid of the click-fest one way or another as you can’t target an ally an let auto-cast.

I’d like it to be like now but with AoE auto-cast. You pointed at a place and the animation can be a thin column of light similar to one skill (i don’t know which exactly) that cast a ray that create a CC area around it, just in this case only heals. The area get 1 sec pulses that heal up to X allies in it.

Thus we can keep positioning us around without the need to do acrobatics with the click fest that is Cosmic ray.

Also the allies see the place were that skill is continuously hitting to they know were are the heals, thus instead the druid running after the allies the allies may come to the heals.

Think wonderwall hit it on the head there.

10sec druid form ya no I’m happy about the 15sec one. Unless if they were to Nerf the aoe stealth