Guild Wars 2

The last aspect left to play with, thought I better finish off my ideas

Staff Redux
Glyph Redux
Druid Traits Redux

Going to copy and paste what I posted in the mega feedback thread here:

Comments/suggestions on Celestial Avatar skills only

Skill#1 – Change to frontal cone heal/cleanse one condi/small damage added
Reason for change: Frontal cone change would make this skill easier to use while keeping positioning important but not too restrictive. (Current ground target with 120 radius is insanely hard to use besides being clunky to use for what should be our spammable 1 skill.) Add cleanse since it ties synergistically with a small heal; generally you need to heal up after a condi cleanse.

Skill#2 – Change to PBAOE skill that gives stability to self and weakness to enemies around you.
Reason for change: Having good heals is useless if you can’t get your heals off due to not having stability (which the Druid currently has no access to). Add to the fact that our most potent abilities are long casting means we desperately need some sort of anti-cc. Adding weakness works synergistically with stability since you generally need stability when under heavy pressure and is also synergistic with Glyph of Unity (e.g., pop GoU in Druid mode, switch to Avatar, use skill#3 to reduce the damage you take). Having weakness be a secondary effect gives good reason for a player to use this ability even when stability is not needed since the damage reduction is a way for this ability to differentiate itself from the other heals spells while staying true to the theme of Avatar mode.

Skill#3 is a good skill as is except the daze duration is too long for such a low cooldown ability. With Moment of Clarify, you can potentially have perma daze which is just broken if it actually pans out (I have not tested). Currently this spell can be cast 3 times in celestial form. Should consider increasing CD if skill#4 is made into a fire and forget ability to compensate for the increased healing you would get from this proposed change to skill#4.

Skill#4 is a good spell but needs to change to a fire and forget ability (while keeping the mobile water field) so that it can be comboed with skill#3 for that extra burst healing while also making the skill more fun to use strategically (e.g. do I try to get this spell off before using skill#3 for more healing or do I forgo the extra healing because I need the burst healing/cc from skill#3 right now instead). Being a channeled ability currently, it doesn’t really differentiate itself from the other heals and feels clunky/not fun to use since your basically just standing there.

Skill#5 – No changes.

Natural Convergence is the skill most in need of Stability to be honest.

No thanks on the cone for Cosmic Ray. Increase the radius to 180 and it would be fine as 120 is too small. Lunar Impact daze duration would be fine at 2s or even at 3s with an increased cooldown of 8s. Poison is fine on #2.

Skill #4 is better served as a fire & forgot skill. It’s a water field and already has a high base amount of healing. It doesn’t need regeneration and that 1 stack of stability, though helpful, isn’t much. ½s cast time and let it pulse.

Not sure about adding torment to skill 5 – just seems like a random way to add more damage when that damage should be allocated elsewhere so CAF has a bit of damage spread out among its skill set instead of on a couple.

Changes look good. I’ve not used the auto attack yet but it being ground targeted feels like a pain. It’s part of why I don’t care much for engineer grenades. Daze might be a wee bit short. 2 seconds seem reasonable as that’d be 4 with Moment of Clarity, giving a 1 second grace period to dodge out of the control chain.

Seed of Life definitely needs to cure conditions instantly on use. Like I said in the druid feedback thread having the seed absorb conditions immediately on skill use and flower into a heal after the growth period thematically makes perfect sense, and would greatly improve this skill’s functionality. Especially since this skill is the main condi management tool for all glyph heavy builds.

When you need to get rid of a condition you need to do it now, not in a little while if you stick around in a single spot.

At OP, all skills need to have a strong focus and compelling reason to use them so that they actually get used or your going to have situations like icebow where only one or two skills are used and then dropped by the player. Since cooldowns on our main heals #3 and #4 are short (5 and 8 seconds respectively), there is not much time to get any use out of skill 1 since it hardly does much and you’re probably just better off ignoring it completely to use skills 2-5 on cooldown. That is why I moved condi cleanse to that skill along with a small damage component to give it a compelling reason to be used and to free up skill# 2 slot for stability instead.

Stability is important/strong enough that it can go on its own skill slot and by doing so, you make it more flexible to use with all of our other abilities (e.g., maybe you would rather use stability in conjunction with skill#5 instead or a utility/elite), rather than restricting its use to just skill 4 which is already a strong ability.

I believe the devs are hesitant to give us any sort of defensive buff (e.g., prot/regen/aegis) with Druid because the focus of the elite is on raw healing. They can’t give us access to large raw heals while also giving us access to other buffs or else we eliminate the need for other professions.

Stability is the one defensive buff I think we must push to have because it is crucial to have in order for us to perform in the role of a healing avatar. By adding weakness to the skill, we have three distinct ways of healing; skill#2 through damage reduction, skill#3 for burst healing/cc, skill#3 for a short duration super heal over time (that stacks with normal regen).

@ Wondrouswall & Ehecatl

I made #1 a cone because a ground targeted AA is a terrible idea imo, I really hate Grenade kit for that but totally want to use it at the same time. I wish it worked like it does underwater, above water.

If it stays like this, I’ll have to be honest and say that I’ll definitely be naughty and make a macro to spam 1 so I can just hold down the left mouse button and move it around. I don’t feel like getting carpel tunnel or not being able to actually play due to sore hands, because I need my hands that is just bad by design.

I just want to make it clear that I do not think my ideas are the best or have to be implemented, they are just ones I came up with at the time and felt like making the tooltips for, mostly its to generate specific discussion about the different areas of Druid. So, on that point, thanks for the discussion!

Why do you keep spawning so many new threads about changes you would like when there is already an official thread for this ?

Gilgalas.7860:

Why do you keep spawning so many new threads about changes you would like when there is already an official thread for this ?

Because this is not feedback. The “official thread” is a feedback thread. This thread is suggestion and theory craft only, and as such, should not be cluttering up a feedback thread. There is no official “post your suggestion thread”.

In order to discuss this properly, it can’t really be caught up with hundreds of other posts that likely are not constructive at all, similar to yours.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Gilgalas.7860:

Why do you keep spawning so many new threads about changes you would like when there is already an official thread for this ?

Because this is not feedback. The “official thread” is a feedback thread. This thread is suggestion and theory craft only, and as such, should not be cluttering up a feedback thread. There is no official “post your suggestion thread”.

In order to discuss this properly, it can’t really be caught up with hundreds of other posts that likely are not constructive at all, similar to yours.

Yet, your suggestions are constructing feedback. You should at least crosslink your threads with the main feedback thread I think.

Let us play the game ! Here are:
- my main suggesiton list from the main feedback thread
- Some new ideas I just got concerning CA and which I think could bring us a much more interesting active druid gameplay. To be discussed !

From my experience, #1 needs radius increase from 120 to maybe ~200, #3 has to Daze for 1.5/2s because 3s is too much and #5 should be castable when moving or have it’s radius increased.

All Celestial base healing values should be lowered and Healing Power scalling vastly improved.

And if generation of Astral Force on Staff doesn’t change, either Celestial Avatar or Druidic Clarity trait need 10s cooldown.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

@ Wondrouswall & Ehecatl

I just want to make it clear that I do not think my ideas are the best or have to be implemented, they are just ones I came up with at the time and felt like making the tooltips for, mostly its to generate specific discussion about the different areas of Druid. So, on that point, thanks for the discussion!

Well even if they may not be the best they are more like thous devs have time to make atm as they dont have some fancy mechanics and moust likely will make druid more than just one trick pony. Anyway +1 from me on these suggestions also and Anet should hire you to work as ranger dev:P

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

The last aspect left to play with, thought I better finish off my ideas

Staff Redux
Glyph Redux
Druid Traits Redux

I really like the changes you propose in all your redux threads.
I hope Irenio take them into account, this trits seems so perfect.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

I made #1 a cone because a ground targeted AA is a terrible idea imo, I really hate Grenade kit for that but totally want to use it at the same time. I wish it worked like it does underwater, above water.

Fair enough. As someone that also mains an Engineer, Cosmic Ray currently has makes me feel right at home. If they ever removed ground-targeting from Grenade Kit, I’d actually cry.