Guild Wars 2

From the video description: “In this video, I will cover the long-awaited Ranger specialization, the Druid. Although it was the first mentioned specialization, little is
known besides its name and use of the Staff weapon. However, every Druid in every MMORPG shares some commonalities, , and I’ll explain how
they tie in to the Druid class coming to our game. In addition, I’ll try to predict some of the specialization’s key aspects based on evidence taken from GW2 Lore. Enjoy!”

Check Out the Video Here!

wth sound is crap, music at start rekt my ears, but I can’t ear his voice clearly, even with everything at max. Too bad :/

I want anything but transformation skills, even if it suits the idea of druids in general.

If we do get tranformation, I hope it’s like this:
F1 – pet attack
F2 – pet special
F3 – pet return
F4 – pet heals to 100% without conditions (20s cooldown) / pet revives (60s cooldown)
F5 – transform into pet

You could only pick 1 pet and using F4 would still count as a pet swap.

Maybe they looked at my 1 year old suggestion of an F5 (I suggested an elite back then) where you and your pet merge into a greater beast for X time granting you powerful skills.

@Holland + @Yelloweyedemon: That’s a really cool idea! Druids naturally would have a greater connection to their “animal companion(s)” than rangers have with their pets. If they happen to include an F5 skill that transforms you into your pet, we could also potentially see new pets come into the meta, depending on how powerful those transform skills are!
This idea is exciting to me, thanks for posting this!

Bear form confirmed ! We’re getting kits !

I hope we get minions, and not a kittening nornish shapeshifting crap.

Holland.9351:

I want anything but transformation skills, even if it suits the idea of druids in general.

That’s the thing, though – Transformations do not suit druids, at least in Tyria, for several reasons, both meta and in character.

Druids in Tyria are plant mages. they were a group of krytan humans that went out in the Maguuma to be closer to nature, and eventually transcended their human bodies to become oakhearts in addition to their phenomenal power. then, they eventually grew out of those and became protector spirits for the jungle. Frankly, they were more likely to have been earth elementalists than rangers, but for the druid armor you could get for rangers in GW1. Three different setups (Rangers, elementalists, and what we know about the druids in lore) and not a single one of them has ever transformed into an animal.

OOC, Anet has gone out of its way in the past to avoid being too similar to its competitors. Instead of rogues, we had thieves and assassins. Monks instead of priests. Elementalists in place of mages or shamans. Hell, the Dervish and Paragon were in place of what would normally be paladins. If the pattern holds, ArenaNet would hate for their druid to be a knockoff of DnD or WoW, and would try for something unique. A plant mage, which fits the lore, completely evades the problem of homogenization.

On a Meta level, Transformation skills often suck. Lich form is powerful but unusable if your enemies know anything about how to fight them. All the norn forms are half-useless. The ranger elite to transform into an oakheart is near useless. Tornado form for elementalists doesn’t see any sort of competitive use; whenever you see it, it was just an engineer that had been hoping for rampage. Rampage is an exception, I’ll admit, but that’s because it got super buffed with the June 23rd patch; it has classically been a very weak skill to take.

On another meta level, what would transformation skills even be called? Physical Skills? Rampage set the precedent for physical skills being able to t ransform you, but it’d eliminate your pet (important) and disable the use of your staff (where Anet has gone on record saying that Specs that wield a two-hander are going to be focused more heavily on the use of that weapon). Kits? Once again, eliminates your weapon, and signs are pointing thieves getting them as part of some kind of ninja setup. Stances? That I could see, taking on animal aspects, but stances are instant-cast non-transformative skills.

Taking it even further, transformations are the Norn thing. if they wanted to give us those, they’d hold off until we went after Jormag, as that expansion would give us a much better story focus on the Norn.

@Harnel: You bring up a good point in your post.
Thinking about it again, it seems more likely that Anet will stay away from animal/pet transformations entirely, even though a Druid would naturally have a stronger bond with his animal companion. This is due to two reasons: First, Norn already transform into animal-like beings with their elite skill, and 2: Druids are more related to Spirits of Nature than they are to specific animals, so I believe that “Spirit of Nature/Oakheart” will be a theme of all the Druid’s utility skills in some fashion.
Let me throw an idea out there: Let’s say that the Druid receives “Manipulation” skills as its new utility skills, all of them involving control of nature/vines/CC etc. However, its elite Manipulation resembles that of a guardian’s elite skill Renewed Focus. The idea occurred to me earlier of how Ranger and Guardian seem to be taking elements of each other with their elite specializations to try to partially cover their weaknesses.
In essence, this channel skill (let’s call it “Commune with Nature”) has animation of a nature spirit appearing around the Druid. It would most definitely be a defensive skill, so let’s say that all allies around the user heal and receive Stability and Resistance as long as the channel is active.
Thoughts?

Sounds good to me. I’m personally in favor of consecration skills, though, since they would add AoE support rather than selfish options for the purpose of helping out allies, which is something that rangers classically lack.

Regarding pets, I posted a while ago with an idea on how pet changes could enhance their usability; if a ranger becomes a support caster in regards to playstyle, they could change the F4 from a “pet swap” mechanic to a “heal your pet” mechanic. The reason this would work is it’d let them roll a percentage of the second pet’s stats into the first one, eliminating the “it’s squishy” problem so many players who choose to run cats and birds run into and increasing their damage to make up for the Ranger’s loss of DPS and the pet being kinda clunky. that combined with the AI advancements in HoT would make pets honestly effective.

Harnel.6810:

Sounds good to me. I’m personally in favor of consecration skills, though, since they would add AoE support rather than selfish options for the purpose of helping out allies, which is something that rangers classically lack.

Regarding pets, I posted a while ago with an idea on how pet changes could enhance their usability; if a ranger becomes a support caster in regards to playstyle, they could change the F4 from a “pet swap” mechanic to a “heal your pet” mechanic. The reason this would work is it’d let them roll a percentage of the second pet’s stats into the first one, eliminating the “it’s squishy” problem so many players who choose to run cats and birds run into and increasing their damage to make up for the Ranger’s loss of DPS and the pet being kinda clunky. that combined with the AI advancements in HoT would make pets honestly effective.

Yep, consecrations sound like the more suitable skill name for Druids as well. Also, I think everyone can agree that improvements to our pet are likely to happen with this specialization… I also like the idea mentioned in this post of the single pet/heal mechanic for the Druid. Good thoughts all around!

Kehlian.4380:

I hope we get minions, and not a kittening nornish shapeshifting crap.

I dont think we are getting minions it seems like engie is getting those and I doubt they will give them to 2 classes at the same time

Im guessing we will get arcane (like Eles)