Guild Wars 2

These suggestion make a solution to current “bad design” of CAF that everybody is complaining about. They’ll address all possible contents.

• Astral Force:
  ~ Increase cooldown of CAF to 25 seconds
  ~ Increase Astral Force generation from attacks and healing to 5%
  ~ Limit the gain from AoE to 1 target only (bounces and sequence attacks like PoS or Warhorn #4 count as unique attacks, not AoE).
  ~ Outgoing Healing reduces the recharge of Astral Form by 66% for 3 seconds (ICD 3 sec) seconds; Regeneration and Spirit of Nature do not contribute)
• Astral Energy drain mechanic redesigned to deplete by casting abilities, not passively
  ~ #1 Free
  ~ #2 5%
  ~ #3 10%
  ~ #4 20%
  ~ #5 20%
  ~ Astral Energy drained when interrupted in CAF (25%; none if not casting)

• What will be achieved?
  Astral Force will be built much easier and the mechanic will be made much more user-friendly. Any build at any content will have easy time building up the Astral Force but non-healing builds will be directly nerfed by increased Cooldown.
  Staff-oriented build will remain roughly the same (#1 spamming 1 will fill the bar below in 9 seconds, sooner with Wisp since #1 is Multi-Target ability and Wisp is a “bounce” of sort).
  Last but not least: Glyphs usage in CAF will become viable and comfortable.

Shortbow, Axe and Warhorn will have easier time generating Astral Force while dealing 100% DPS in melee to have synergy with Astral Wisp while Longbow would suffer in DPS from potential melee-wisp game-play.
Pure DPS builds can only benefit from 66% recharge by Water Field leaping or Blasts (which is all melee oriented) pushing Longbow further back in CD recharge Rate.
Also – synergy with Invigorating Bond.

I’m fully aware a huge overhaul like this would probably never happen but it makes a clear solution to probably all the problems a druid is exposed to. I’m presenting these ideas as possible template for developers in case they decide to improve their bad design and horrible quality of life mechanic we were put to struggle with.

It opens a whole new world to synergy among lots of places and promotes awareness just as well PvP counter-play of CC against the Druid. It also makes “healing” builds better in potential since the weak heals do not drain (or only a little of) the Astral Force and druid can choose between sacrificing DPS for weak sustained healing or cooldown management of disruption and burst Heals.

Also, in case the non-druid cooldown on CAF is too short, I’ll suggest reducing the base healing by roughly 10-15% and increasing the scaling by the same amount to differ Zerk CAF use for more disrupting uses from Healing Staff-druid uses.

All your feedback on these ideas is appreciated. Keep in mind that the numbers I used were calculated very quickly to hopefully match current “chaos” rotations we are forced to hold (due to timer). Judge them as placeholders. The idea matters.

Interesting ideas, I like your suggestion for the depletion by skill in CAF. I have to ask, tho why nerf access to the form for non-healer builds? Part of the problem and one of the major complaints is that non-staff users have lower access to CAF. You’ve just moved the problem from the start of CAF to the end. If you’re trying to pre-empt the dev’s habit of endlessly limiting, nerfing and restricting, I guess it makes sense to shift the balance to the end of the skill instead of preventing acess upfront like the current AF balance.

I think your post was definitely needed, it’s exactly the sort of thing devs should be reading.

wolfyrik.2017:

Interesting ideas, I like your suggestion for the depletion by skill in CAF. I have to ask, tho why nerf access to the form for non-healer builds? Part of the problem and one of the major complaints is that non-staff users have lower access to CAF…

This is a very good question and I’m glad you asked.

The reason why I decided so is the reason of balance. If non-staff builds were given the Druid sustain treatment with easy access – it would make it slightly toxic since no one would play Staff if you just had access to the full druid potential without it. So, I naturally made Staff appealing for healers, allowed every single build to use CAF without risking any potential abuse of the mechanic.

This way every single build gets easy access to CAF fast. Every single one.
BUT: unless you decide to play a role of dedicated healer – you won’t be able to exploit Zerk Healing idea. You will still have easy access to it and you will have no problems filling the Astral Bar (which is the current Zerk problem), but once you decide to leave it early – Zerks will be considerably punished by doing so.

However, even Zerks have plenty of interesting synergy with CAF. Glyph of Tides > Natural Convergence (CAF #5) is an incredible nuke that forces enemies into completely different reactions and is definitely rewarding for good execution. QuickDraw synergy is amazing here, too.

tl;dr it basically differs builds from Zerks with infinite sustain to builds dedicated to healing.