Guild Wars 2

Silicato.4603:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

then why anybody is going to take a druid? If there are other clasess that will kill better… there is no point for taking a druid.

That he is the best healer? Oh nice. Just evade and res, like a top player would do. Dont need “the best healer” in a party.
And specially in pvp.

You should to give more damage to the druid and make them desirable for meta parties.

This is very much an issue which needs to be addessed, the reason to bring a druid in the first place is because of a mechanic in raids which force players to take damage (the red/orange circle thing) so a druid which heals is ideal. That however is the only reason to bring a druid as it stands atm the dps on druid is pitiful so they will need to swap weapons to provide some moderate level of dps but that means you wont be healing. And constantly swapping weapons isnt ideal at all that Im fairly certain in raids they will only look for a druid which runs full support.

As far as pvp goes druid will be practically useless, druids have no standing against the other classes and they are only effective when running with mini zerg and with that argument then why not just play another class which will be useful both in mini zergs and on their own.

I believe most of these issues will be solved if they increase the dps on druids, no to a high level but to a level where they can provide a moderate sustainable dps while supporting the team rather than picking. With the current mechanics of the game druid is never going to get good drops either because of their pitiful dps.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

with high uptimes of Stability

From spirit of nature? Am I wrong when I say that it needs to be placed within a radius of 360 to even apply the boons (and the healing), or am I missing something here?

Silicato.4603:

What a ranger needs in the game and in the community it is to be needed, to be wanted. I would love to see people in guilds or lfg asking for rangers and druids instead of asking them not to join…
Rangers are not bad per se, but any class is better than them in any espectre thats why meta players avoid them.

With druid they will be “The top healer” in a party. And that is not needed or wanted, sorry.

What? People were asking for druids majority of the times. I kept seeing “Lf1m druid prefered” everytime in map chat. They even had a druid for the first worlds first Vale Guardian kill..? Not sure how it would have worked without a druid, but he did put up constant heals and help the team alot with the supporting.

Silicato.4603:

I would love to see people in guilds or lfg asking for rangers and druids instead of asking them not to join…

This is an indictment on the game, and has been for some time. I can’t see druid changing this attitude – it’s simply unnecessary as other classes can do almost as much + much more dps. Unless they have specifically catered some raid encounter around some gimmic that “requires” certain classes.

That’s the problem – people will always find the path of least resistance. Also, the way the game is structured, making the druid viable would mean restructuring everything.

The game was made so everyone can do a bit of everything. Suddenly druids are told, “you can pretty much only be a healer. You can try to dps but you’ll be terrible.” Gee fricken thanks. Rangers were shunned a lot already, and now you’ve given them another useless role that no one will want them for.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I appreciate your effort to make the game more dependant on classes and roles (aka the trinity), however balance a system like this is always impossible.

GW2 base concept is “jack of all trades”, every player is autosufficient in a way or another, the game don’t need a tanker or healer since everyone is dps/tank/healer/crafter.
Now a system like this don’t work well with classes but the countrary, a system like this work well without classes, where you aren’t locked to use only some sets of weapons and gear.
Pratically classes is the limitation that negate any balancing.

At this point is better if you remove classes altogether along with gear but berserker and weapon at choice, where weapons determine what skills and utilities you use.

Or, the solution invoked by lots of players, make this game based on trinity and avoid this infinite class balanced.

In this way every gear in the game is meaningfull and balanced and isn’t useless like now where pratically only the meta zerk is balanced, so cleric for healers, soldier and knight for tankers, rabid, carrion, sinister for dot conditiondps, zerker, assassin for melee dps.

Trying to insert roles into a jack of trades system with classes is a hell and you never be able to properly balance something without screwing another, not to mention that all the gear in the game, from cleric to rabid to carrion, to dire to apothecary is pratically useless apart some situations that don’t cover the majority of the content available.

ps: i have 4 characters, mesmer, ranger, thief and warrior, tryed different kind of armours, from cleric to rabid to knight and simply the best gear still zerker is almost every situation, the game is only balanced around maximum dps output because everyone is jack fo all trades, all other kinds of damage, support and tanking are 100% useless, but i guess you already know.

Miporin.3529:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I appreciate your effort to make the game more dependant on classes and roles (aka the trinity), however balance a system like this is always impossible.

GW2 base concept is “jack of all trades”, every player is autosufficient in a way or another, the game don’t need a tanker or healer since everyone is dps/tank/healer/crafter.
Now a system like this don’t work well with classes but the countrary, a system like work well without classes, where you aren’t locked to use only some sets of weapons and gear.
Pratically classes is the limitation.
at this point is better if you remove classes altogether along with gear but berserker and weapon at choice.

Or, the solution invoked by lots of players, make this game based on trinity.

In this way every gear in the game is meaningfull and isn’t useless like now, and moreover balanced, for example: cleric for healers, soldier and knight for tankers, rabid, carrion, sinister for dots condition dps, zerker, assassin for melee dps.

Trying to insert roles into a jack of trades system with classes is a hell and you never be able to properly balance something without screw another.

Exactly!

_"Translation:

Instead of buffing the scaling of healing power directly on top of base heal, you’re going to nerf the base healing and push Druid into even more inferior damage heal-bot by pigeon-holed them into healing power… Now 1000 Healing Power will have the same effectiveness of the current 0 healing power one, making Druid a utter piece of joke.

… You’d push Druid into even more useless position after you nerf the base heal."_

I fully agree

I must add that I am very disappointed. Druid was the first to be shown.. and the last to be explained. We found that Druid are the only “concept” revolution in HoT but sadly it seems that ANET still have not idea how to implement “their revolution”…

Poor druids and , among all… poor rangers. No future for them.

My 2 cents…

Survival traits, Refined Toxins; 6 seconds of poison on attack while at 90% health…. same level as Ambidexterity, which gives 150 condi damage… bleh!

Combine it with the GM trait Poison Master, which increases the damage your poison does.

So now there is an open space at the master level for a skill that adds a small about of healing on attack, similar to the guardian’s greatsword trait.

That small amount of healing can be used to proc Lingering Light’s Cosmic Wisp.

Proc’ing the Cosmic Wisp would allow any weapon to become a healing weapon, but not as good as the staff. The wisp isn’t huge self healing, so that isn’t an issue, and the location of the new trait, opposite Ambidexterity (torch/condi damage) also prevents torch offhand from becoming too op with healers.

I would also make the Staff 2 skill (Astral Wisp) last much longer, but you can only have one Astral Wisp at a time, so casting/recasting isn’t so traumatic if it’s cast on a mob that dies quickly, or on the wrong one, or the player just gets bored constantly casting it…. but only having the one won’t make things too OP.

As far as the avatar goes…. it feels weird…. the two sided coin nature of glyphs is rather overwhelming…. but the worst part is finding the players that need heals.

Classic whack-a-mole healing in games like wow means watching healthbars on the side of your screen… not fun, but GW2 doesn’t have many ways of making people stand out when they are on low health.

…perhaps a large area heal (900-1200 radius), that only heals a small amount, but gives the visual queue (green numbers) on people that need heals.

…maybe even add that smaller heal to the Avatar #1 skill’s normal heal.

…or an even simpler solution, massively increase the aoe range of shouts traited to give regen… i think the current radius is 240, which is sad.

…and that’s all i got.

The more Irenio posts the more I’m convinced we need at least another BWE with the Druid.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

Thank you!

I was about to cry when i’ve seen that druid was limited to staff astral energy gain ONLY, so as soon as i’ve seen this i simply had to stress this out on forums that this is mechanics breaking! Thx for quick redesigning!

ALSO:
I have one more concern and this is not only druid based, but in general Specialization oriented, i think weapons mechanics and traits should be locked on specialization.

Utilities, heals and elites should not be, i think this will limit us in future, and will be very limited for users and also very grounded for coming up with unique play style.
Please reconsider those to be simply expansion skills and not specialization ones.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

But do any other Elite Specializations not serve as good all-round improvements to their base class? Has any single other class but Ranger been told “yeah don’t bother with your Elite spec if you want to focus on damage”?

Personally, I found 2/3rds of the Druid traits to be unattractive. Natural Stride and Ancient Seeds were my constant picks because the other 2 choices in each tier were so meh that even if you combined them I wouldn’t have taken them over Stride and Seeds.

The melee emphasis on the glyphs also seemed totally at odds with the design of the entire class and spec. Is Staff Druid, with its 1,000 range or so, supposed to run into melee range so it can hit enemies with its short-range glyphs? Why not make them ground targetable and give em a medium to long range?

My only takeaway is: Eles, Engis, to a lesser extent Guardians, and probably Revenants, all have the ability to “shift gears” between damage and healing. It’s one of the great contributors to their success. It’s versatile. And now Druid is being designed away from that to force you to take Healing Power? Will Eles no long heal well without Healing Power? Will Engis? Will Guards? Or are ONLY Rangers going to be hit with this stipulation that your heals should be weak if you don’t spend item budget and traits on them?

Silicato.4603:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

This scares me. Raids are meant to be for top players, right?
then why anybody is going to take a druid? If there are other clasess that will kill better… there is no point for taking a druid.

That he is the best healer? Oh nice. Just evade and res, like a top player would do. Dont need “the best healer” in a party.
And specially in pvp.

What a ranger needs in the game and in the community it is to be needed, to be wanted. I would love to see people in guilds or lfg asking for rangers and druids instead of asking them not to join…
Rangers are not bad per se, but any class is better than them in any espectre thats why meta players avoid them.

With druid they will be “The top healer” in a party. And that is not needed or wanted, sorry.

You should to give more damage to the druid and make them desirable for meta parties.

Your premise considers old GW2. Things will be different moving forward, regarding new content. In short, there will be good players usong non-berserserk’s gear-the old metas no longer matter, and the “good players only need Berserker’s because they know how to dodge” (which was insulting to those players who ALSO dodged but just didn’t want to use Berserker’s for whatever reason) no longer will hold true, save for the older content.

We should at least wait until the expansion to make judgements on the meta-ANet has already stated that the “zerk” thing was fun and all, but not healthy for the game.

Not insulting you for preferring DPS, however. Thanks for not coming accross as a jerk in your post.

(Of course, as you stated, the Staff “Healer” Druid most likely won’t be meta for the older Dungeons, but that may be OK.)

OGDeadHead.8326:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

with high uptimes of Stability

From spirit of nature? Am I wrong when I say that it needs to be placed within a radius of 360 to even apply the boons (and the healing), or am I missing something here?

That is correct. A shame it is not regular spirit range, hopefully that is looked at.

Had to add, ANet should really look into that “DPS done indicates reward”, because some builds are not meant to DPS that much. It has never been right, and especially now, the game should take into consideration “support” offered, rather than base everything on damage, which is a model they don’t even agree with given the latest revelations.

Everything Irenio has said is true. However, it needs to be applied across all classes.

Star Ace.5207:

Had to add, ANet should really look into that “DPS done indicates reward”, because some builds are not meant to DPS that much. It has never been right, and especially now, the game should take into consideration “support” offered, rather than base everything on damage, which is a model they don’t even agree with given the latest revelations.

Aren’t they also tightening up contrib rewards too? Im sure I remember them stating that “everyone who turned up gets gold” will no longer be a thing. Might be even harder for the druid healbot to get contrib depending on their system implementation/tweaks.

Chokolata.1870:

Everything Irenio has said is true. However, it needs to be applied across all classes.

Yeah. I don’t see why Scrappers/Warriors get to get 300+ heal per sec passive on Zerker stats… or Guardians and Mesmers go from X% to 100% on Dire. Shouldn’t they be forced into Heal stats too?

But then we end up with everyone using Celestial, and its back to square one.

Ho hum.

So why is this unique to the Druid/Ranger when the Guardian has been rolled out as a support class / hybrid?

To further clarify is it the expansion pack / HoT raids that brought this requirement on and Druid was set as the default Healer?

I mean I understand the expansion pack and raid content and idea behind agro, some tanking requirements and now healing. But are the raids going to require people to target heal ala other MMO’s primary healer roles? Or, are we talking about we are gearing and dodging and triggering AoE type heals without the single target ability?

The way the game has evolved since launch it does not appear to me that there has been any success in trying to remove Zerk play and/or gearing. Agony has not seemed to help Fractals.

Enter more class complaints and balance issues that other MMO’s encounter due to raids. So called “first” vale guardian kill was made up of zerker stats, 4 engi’s, 3 revenants, 1 druid, 1 chronomancer, 1 warrior…

Beta, yeah. Launch around the corner I don’t see this being cleared up and I’m not even talking about sPvP, Duid, healing, and WvW…

Atherakhia.4086:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

Do any of the other specializations come with a ‘you probably shouldn’t play me’ label? It doesn’t seem right to force the Druid so heavily into a support/healing role and leave no other options for it to explore.

Is there no way you can split the load between staff and astral form so both at least compliment a condi build in some fashion or perhaps provide enough utility (immobs, blinds, cripples, etc) so a power build would consider the build?

Doesn’t seem right? Almost all it’s skills heal dude. You can do power/condi and healing but it won’t be optimal.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

I hope you won’t change the healing component of Celestial Avatar’s spells. The four first spells are great as they are (maybe #1 could use less delay between cast and effect – or get a bigger radius). Adding a little damage would be good but, please, don’t do it by nerfing healing too much or fundamentally changing the spells.

Aomine.5012:

Traslation:

Instead of buffing the scaling of healing power directly on top of base heal, you’re going to nerf the base healing and push Druid into even more inferior damage heal-bot by pigeon-holed them into healing power… Now 1000 Healing Power will have the same effectiveness of the current 0 healing power one, making Druid a utter piece of joke.

May want to recalibrate your translator. Because what I get is~

• Druid healing during the beta-test was TOO powerful. Full stop.
• It’s NOT going to be that strong on live while wearing pure offense gear. Full Stop.
• Our choices as designers are either flat nerf it so it’s never this powerful again OR allow the players the option to get back to this level of healing effectiveness AT THE COST of losing some offensive punch. We chose to let the players decide which way they want to configure their gear. Full stop.

Zenith.7301:

Nike.2631:

xarallei.4279:

Sulfarius.1756:

On a more serious note I do agree that at times it feels like across the board base heals might be a bit too much but I also feel like it’s harder to balance while keeping the philosophy of “you don’t really need a healer to do stuff”… even tho raids look like you do in fact need a healer, but we’ll see!

-10% heals across the board might sound small, but I think it would have a huge impact. For better or for worse.

If they want to do this exclusively for raids I might be ok with this. But outside of that? No. Because the rest of the game you are supposed to not have to lug a healer around to do content.

Gearing for a couple hundred points of heal power is not “lugging a healer around with you.”

It is putting a boot on the Zerker’ metas neck and pressing down.

It is putting a neck on ZERKER RANGER’s neck. All the other classes will still be running zerkers. Engineers can run sinister because they’re the supreme condi spec far above others.

This change will strictly punish offensive rangers who want to make use of their elite spec.

The whole idea of druid just being a healing spec is what’s so thoroughly offensive to me. Why? I’m really wondering why rangers, who have kept asking for improved damage and offensive support, were given in turn a healbot spec as a tongue in cheek answer to lack of team support.

No other class has their elite spec so thoroughly focused on a niche. Chronomancer, reaper, and scrapper can build for DPS, bunker, or support. The druid is the only spec where you are told “you heal, that’s it. If you try to be offensive, you’ll be a crappy hybrid”.

That last paragraph. That. So much that.

Basically instead of having the traits be organised in to 3 categories such as “Damage, support and control” for example, they will be sorted in to “Heal by X, Heal by Y and Heal by Z” how exciting…

Irenio,

Please, consider the following information:

During beta, I saw many original warriors, elementalists, even guardians being accepted in a raid… but not one single Ranger (just druids)

Rangers have not been improved and Druids are just a total different profession, healing oriented.

In HoT we will find warriors, elem, druids… but not rangers.

So… rangers are dead. Amen

No other class has their elite spec so thoroughly focused on a niche. Chronomancer, reaper, and scrapper can build for DPS, bunker, or support. The druid is the only spec where you are told “you heal, that’s it. If you try to be offensive, you’ll be a crappy hybrid”.
That last paragraph. That. So much that.

you shouldn’t be so fussed about it; the devs have already said theyre adding more damage to druid

I’m happy to see more communication.
Here are my thoughts on the matter if somebody is interested.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

Yes please. I mean i must agree that CAF is the best healing in game. But except some very extreme situations i don’t think that much healing is really needed. CAF to be able to give extra support options (protective boons, CC or other kind of damage mitigation) would be awesome. In the beta i found that once you healed your team you had nothing else to do (well spam Lunar impact). Some damage would be nice, but if you prefer to keep the healing theme on the CAF with support abilities that are not only heal should be enough.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon.

I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Again a correct observation. Just saying that Healing spring also filled up your astral bar.
However maybe I’d like to use an hybrid build that allow me to support offensively my team while keeping some healing attribute.
Adapting one minor to provide an small healing to allies around your target (up to 3) with any attack would be nice and would solve any complains about the staff This way if you want to be full healing you use the staff otherwise you could use you usual weapons and keep building the Astral with no need to use the damage (that i see kinda difficult to balance having in mind the variety of spike/sustained damage skills we have).

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

Well, we all know that if we would want to go for top offensive we would not have chosen the ranger in first place.I don’t think that’s the point here, the constructive feedback usually pointed out that the druid needed more support options.
The staff is find as a pure heal option, the damage is really low but has a lot of heals instead. If the Druids can keep an small aspect of the healing while use other weapons that i think could solve any complains about the damage in that weapon.

Some change in how the Glyphs work would be very welcoming too. In this forums you have a lot of new ideas to apply so i hope you can adjust them for your glyphs.

Personally i don’t like the shout-like mechanism. For me it feels really boring with no strategical awareness of those. you just put yourself in the middle and hit 7 to 9.
The variety in normal state was good just working in the effects to be relevant, the CAF state needs to differentiate from more healing.
I would go as far make the mechanics closer to the signets from the thief with ranged activated component.
I would make the active effect to be a ranged small AoE (the actual 300 is fine) with 10 seconds delay trigger that triggers automatically if a foe/ally step on it. Short lived traps.
Just to make the mechanics differentiate from shouts, because although Glyphs behave like shouts the miss the synergy with the actual items in game. Something to make up for the lack of synergy.

anduriell.6280:

you just put yourself in the middle and hit 7 to 9.

sounds like a supporter^^

lushy.5310:

Irenio,

Please, consider the following information:

During beta, I saw many original warriors, elementalists, even guardians being accepted in a raid… but not one single Ranger (just druids)

Rangers have not been improved and Druids are just a total different profession, healing oriented.

In HoT we will find warriors, elem, druids… but not rangers.

So… rangers are dead. Amen

That could be solved if Irenio consider apply the suggestions are being made i the forums like the ones in my signature. Most of them are really easy to implement, just some small changes, but enough to feel significative.
The most difficult could be Pet Ai and the change in shouts to became more like status you assign your pet. If you could activate the search and rescue status, so your pet goes by itself to res allies (although at 1/3 of the real speed) or the guard command so the pet could attack stealthed enemies the other players really would begin to appreciate the ranger as a useful tool. The ranger wouldn’t need to do any powercreep (like the recent changes in MDG hat although addresses in some way the lack of might stacking stills doesn’t solve the deep problem of that is impossible to give use to that trait with our HP pool).

Irenio, I agree with the need to add scaling based on healing power for celestial avatar and lowering base heals. That’s just common sense.

These points are also common sense:

1) If healing power is becoming more important (as it certainly will be for the Druid), please consider adding a few new amulets in pvp that have the power/precision/healing stat combo, like +1200 power, +900 precision, +900 healing power. Or Perhaps a 4 stat variant like: power 1050, healing 1050, precision 525, toughness 525. Or, power 1050, precision 1050, healing 525, toughness 525. Or Power 1050, Healing 1050, Vitality 525, Toughness 525.

2) Frankly the vast majority of healing abilities in this game don’t scale well with healing power. Could you guys please review all healing oriented abilities across all classes and give them all appropriate scaling from healing power? If +1200 power more than doubles your power based damage output, shouldn’t +1200 healing power double your healing output for a power (or at least add +50%)?

Thanks!
Soul

Please be careful when bringing down the base healing of the druid. I’m not entirely convinced the Berserker meta is finished with, but it’s great that you’re trying to move away from it. However, even in Valkyrie armor/weapons and Berserker trinkets, I was still able to assist fairly heavily with damage and bring healing to the group.

If you require a healing power set to stay on par with the healing amounts of BWE3, then the damage of the druid will drop significantly. If the raids end up not warranting druid healing and we cannot do decent damage, then druids will be entirely unnecessary.

Edit: Also, it would be nice if you could auto attack with GTAoEs. I don’t care if the skill activates while I’m turning my camera and the skill fires off in completely weird directions. Or maybe an option to turn something like that on.

Or even better yet, an officially supported mouselook mode would do wonders.

anduriell.6280:

I mean i must agree that CAF is the best healing in game. But except some very extreme situations i don’t think that much healing is really needed.

You should try some WvW to understand how much this burst healing is needed ;)

OGDeadHead.8326:

Irenio, I think you’re making a mistake if you nerf the base healing of the druid by too much, thereby forcing players to go for healing power to make decent/good use of the new traitline

I have to second this. forcing us to use healing power in pvp will make us useless. healbots will never, ever work in pvp. hybrid specs – yes. keep base heals the same, improve scaling of certain skills. healing felt right with marauder stats in bwe3 and I wouldn’t want to see it go lower, i.e. it only made a little bit of a difference, sometimes.

1k ticks with 1.5k and 2.5k here and there – this is NOTHING when people are putting out 10-15k bursts. there is absolutely no point in nerfing base healing, it’s already pretty bad. just make it scale better with HP.

Star Ace.5207:

Aomine.5012:

Razor.9872:

Aomine.5012:

Razor.9872:

Ehecatl.9172:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

I am glad that Celestial Avatar is getting more damage, which may alleviate some of my following concerns, but I can’t stress enough how important it is that Celestial Avatar remains a valuable mechanic without any healing investment at all.

I fully understand and support the notion that to have the best healing you should have to invest in healing power. It’s only logical. However the fact Celestial Avatar is so completely devoted to healing means that if you lower the base healing of the skills too much the form will be outright useless to anyone without healing power on their gear. Celestial Avatar is a class mechanic and is not optional if you spec into druid. It would be a shame for it to only have value if you’re sporting healing power.

Like I said in my first paragraph, adding more damage to the Avatar State may alleviate some of my concerns as a more damage oriented build could compensate for lower healing in exchange for the ability to pressure people off them as they heal up more slowly. I just don’t want to see this mechanic make you weaker than base if you try to use it without the right stat spread.

No one should spec into druid for the glyphs, Ancient Seeds, or other abilities and find Celestial Avatar useless to their build.

If you are playing the Ranger profession for damage, you should not spec into Druid. That’s like saying you’re trying to get warmer, so you take your clothes off.

True, Druid will be the only elite specialization avaliable to Rangers at the start, but we will get more down the road.

In 3 years. (chuckle)
History is really good to study.

I’m not even sure this game will survive until next expansion = next specialization come out. Not being mean or anything, just feeling like their Korean boss are getting upset about the revenue and stuff.

Anyway, if I have to wait another 3 years for ranger to become better than a pigeon-holed class (the only support class that need stat investment or it becomes trash), I’d probably go main Revenant instead.

That is a rather pessimistic/negative outlook :\

You have to look at the bigger picture. The reason it took 3 years for this expansion, is because A-net was still unsure about their planned development and release model. Coupled with them still getting their base game/structure together, they had little room for the concept of an expansion. However, now that these types of releases are on the table, I would say that another expansion is, at the most, 2 years away. But really, I’m thinking that a year away is just as likely.

Not sure where you’re getting that stuff about A-net sucking up to NCsoft? Really, the relationship between the two has been distant and healthy for the past several months. (Notice the lack of the NCsoft trademark on recent releases/announcements)

Finally, that is a mighty extreme accusation about the druid being trash without Heal.P. We don’t know any numbers yet, but you are already jumping to conclusions? Maybe you should roll a revanent. Clearly you don’t enjoy what the Ranger (and by impied extention, the Druid) has to offer.

Not to say history isn’t important (it is), but I’d take critical thinking over history any day.

I enjoyed ranger’s style of playing, that’s why I played ranger.
I also enjoyed the new pet

However, Druid is Druid, and I do not like the direction they’re going to make Druid be.
The lack of defensive boons and the reliance of staff is troubling too. Furthermore, Irene’s direction of nerfing non-healing stat is like cutting all diversity on Druid. If all the good stuffs of Druids are going to be taken away, while all the bad stuffs (Staff, Glyphs, Astral meter mechanic) is going to remain the same, then yes, it is a class I would not be enjoying and like to move on.

Think about what you stated-how is it going to cut diversity? If all you want is an offensive Druid, that’s WAY less diverse compared to what we have now. In short, there are too many things you are ignoring, in favor of your own bias, which is understandable, but I fear instead of a reasonable reply I will be attacked for stating an opinion different than yours.

And you have stated MANY times (paraphrased) “I’ll go Revenant if you don’t please me, Irenio!” You know what I would do if I was him with that kind of feedback? Ignore you. Find better ways to express yourselves other than those kind of empty threats that threaten no one. Besides, if Revenant will be more fun for you, why not play it? So many other better ways to go DPS, and you just bash one of the few valid non-DPS options, as if your bias is all that mattered for 100% of players in this game?

IMHO, Druid is a team player, so the few things it lacks will be provided by other teammates. You can “normal Ranger” the game when you don’t need Druid, and I am sure that by the time of release they will find ways to a bit more of oomph to non healing Druid specs-just don’t expect tons of DPS on Staff Druid, because that’s not what it’s meant to do?

If you are going to respond aggressively, please just ignore my post and feel free to just disagree on this matter.

Guess some people are so easily offended, no matter how constructive I make my post be. As long as people have different opinion than there’s, they suddenly feel they’re offended. I always take arguments as a mean to get awareness and improve the game, but some people always take arguments as an offend. I know Irene would not impress me, by the way he talked about Druid, but at least I have my own free to decide what I can play and what I want to play.

Im talking from a PvP perspective: It is true that investing in Healing power stat was not so rewarding. On the one hand that is a weakness, but on the other hand it made the staff also useful for not full-healing builds. In fact, I probably made the best Ranger build I ever had for pvp with using the staff without going for a Healing Power amulet. In my opinion it would be a pity if the staff gets tweaked to an heal-only weapon. Please keep in mind that we won’t expect the staff to be a raw damage weapon, but improving build diversity can be done by making the staff suitable for more hybrid builds as well. If you scale down the base healing stats of it, you probably should consider increasing the damage as well.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

Hi Irenio, thank you for the hard work. My thoughts On Celestial Avatar (CA) and Astral Force(AF) rate gain:\

CA principles
*Astral Force(AF) should be gained while in “combat only”, When “Out of combat” The bar should empty out like the warrior adrenaline bar. Each new fight should start with empty bar. This plays into what Roy Saied on the revenant forum regarding the differences between druid and Ventari.
*The CA will not have time frame, the form will end only when the druid is out of AF or pressing F5. Getting out of CA will not empty your AF bar. Getting in and out CA from, costs little portion of AF, you can only enter CA form while your AF bar is 100% (to prevent some traits abuse).
All the CA skills should be made around managing the AF and not to be gated by casting time, channeling, CD, time frames etc… CA 1 skill for example could be an “upkeep” ability like some the revenant abilities. The idea is to make the abilities from CA very spiky and rewarding (after you took the time to build AF from empty bar). For example, CA should be able to combo CA skill 4 with CA skill 3, but this combo will be very expensive AF wise. You want to throw tons of seeds(CA 2 skill) ? go for it but it will cost you all of your AF bar.
*The CA and staff damage coefficients should benefit somehow from healing power in addition to power(by modest amount).

AF gain coefficients.
The idea is to have various ways to gain AF while incentivizing healing power stacking and the use of staff and druid specific traits.
Change the rate of astral force gain based to the amount of damage/healing dealt (%) and not per tic. Ofc, you should keep the coefficient of healing to be much more effective in gaining AF compared to damage.
All the ranger’s healing abilities should be taken into account. – Regeneration, signet of the wild, IB etc… In order to maintain balance and provide incentive to run staff and traits like Lingering light, you must do some coefficient splitting.

Rnger’s heals like (TU,WHAO, SOTW, sigils,runes, blast finishers, IB) should get 100% effectiveness .
Regeneration should have smaller coefficient (~50% effectiveness), because some builds can prema aoe regen, and we don’t want regen to be our main source of AF.
Druid and staff healing abilities/traits(lingering light, staff AA etc..) Should get 500%-1000% effectiveness as we want them to be very effective way to regen astral force and most of the druid traits/staff specific heals(not while in celec form) are rapid but low in amont.
glyph of rejuvenation also should enjoy from much higher AF coefficient (1000%,?), AF gain should be the special advantage of the heal as it is less effective in direct healing for the ranger and pet.

Let’s play with numbers:
let’s say every 1000 healing to an ally(pet ofc is an ally) = 2.5% AF gained. So our big heals like WHAO, TU will produce ~20% AF(TU 21.25%, WHAO 16.3%). Glyph of rejuvenation will gain 25% AF for healing pet only and full bar for healing 4 allies(pet included).

Staff specific heals will boost the AF gain very rapidly as it is now(one tick from staff AA is almost 2.5% AF) also healing ticks from other sources like regen and sotw will help to build AF in small scale battles, both regen and SOTW scale very nicely with healing power having both on pet only with ~1000 healing power will produce 2.5% AF every 4sec if you give more allies regen, the numbers will be much higher.

This will open up lots of ways to play a druid. For example LB zerker that doesn’t want staff as second weapon, can play it with clarion bound and windborne notes for the aoe regen, SOTW for extra healing ticks, and IB, Together with TU and the LB massive damage, this build will be able 2 build AF in OK rate (~40 sec in 1v1 , much faster in group fights).

This is also an opportunity to look at traits such as instinctive reaction, natural healing and most dangerous game. For example :
instinctive reaction – change the order, gain healing base on power(7%-10%) its much more effective as power can scale for high amount like 3k while very high healing power is ~1200.

natural healing – YOU give you pet natural health regeneration that scales with your hero power, instead of the +450 healing power to pet it could be, your pet heals are count as ranger heals and scale with ranger healing power. This way both the trait effect and pets like moas and fren hound will scale with your healing power in contribute to AF gain.

Most dangerous game – You gain 5 might (3sec), 1 sec interval, all ranger heals are 25%-33% less effective. Healing penalty makes much more sense for ranger compared to threshold.

mistsim.2748:

OGDeadHead.8326:

Irenio, I think you’re making a mistake if you nerf the base healing of the druid by too much, thereby forcing players to go for healing power to make decent/good use of the new traitline

I have to second this. forcing us to use healing power in pvp will make us useless. healbots will never, ever work in pvp. hybrid specs – yes. keep base heals the same, improve scaling of certain skills. healing felt right with marauder stats in bwe3 and I wouldn’t want to see it go lower, i.e. it only made a little bit of a difference, sometimes.

1k ticks with 1.5k and 2.5k here and there – this is NOTHING when people are putting out 10-15k bursts. there is absolutely no point in nerfing base healing, it’s already pretty bad. just make it scale better with HP.

Agree also, active defense is near negligible for Ranger/Druid unless you are dual melee, in which case its much harder to get the AF to be able to use the heals. Because of the low defense and vulnerability to CC while in CAF, the heals absolutely need to be big to counter the burst damage that is prevalent in PvP and even more so in WvW. And that is just for self-defense, if you can’t keep yourself alive, you can’t heal anyone else and that just means you are pointless.

Seems like nearly everyone here is assuming that the change to healing power scaling on these skills will actually nerf the numbers they do, rather than buff them. I may just be optomistic here, but I think the new scaling could quite possibly scale our heals past what they were previously (if you gear for healing).

Its not an assumption. The developer himself said on page 13 of the druid feedback thread that he would adjust the base heal down.

Now by how much we don’t know but people are concerned that they will be lowered enough that the spec will be impractical for power builds.

Mr Pin.6728:

Its not an assumption. The developer himself said on page 13 of the druid feedback thread that he would adjust the base heal down.

Now by how much we don’t know but people are concerned that they will be lowered enough that the spec will be impractical for power builds.

But he also said he would raise the power scaling. This could quite potentially mean bigger numbers when geared with healingP.

What exactly are you refering too when you say “power builds?” By builds do you mean build, and by build do you mean zerker? Because zealot exists, and that’s a power build.

Reducing the healing won’t, in and of itself, make the spec impractical for power builds. It will just make them less effective at healing with druid skills. They still would gain a bunch of healing they didn’t have before, as well as various utility and CC options offered by druid.

Nah, power needs more than stats. The trick of power rangers is finding ways to sustain. Condi clear, crowd control, disengage mechanics, active damage mitigation, stability, etc. All those things are pillars in power builds at least in a competitive environment. Rangers really struggle with coming up with enough ways to sustain to be competitive. With the power creep in the game at the moment it gets to be an even greater trick.

Druid would require giving up the wilderness survival trait line which is a corner stone for a lot of that sustain or a power line. Beast mastery, marksmanship or skirmishing. However, druid could work, I’m not even saying that the changes will be bad. Its just in the single beta we got with the druid it synergized poorly with the base ranger for power for all the reasons given in the feedback thread. So without any more information than what has been given people are just expressing their concerns that if you have to go all in just to get decent heals out of it and you give up all these other things it will really be a separate entity smashed into the ranger class. I’m hanging my hat on how astral force generation works myself. How that is reworked will play a larger role in druid’s ability to find a home in core ranger builds and open up build diversity. At least that’s my initial thoughts.

As to zealot’s. Yep its a thing. A really expensive thing. The recipe goes for around 100 gold now about? It’s also not available in pvp. So that’s another concern.

Conversation in this thread

Anet:
- “If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.”

Community:
- “Well, we all know that if we would want to go for top offensive we would not have chosen the ranger in first place”

So, what is left for rangers? No past and no future?

Decrase base amount of heal on ALL heal skills in game + regen. Make it scaling better with healing power, and make healing other people in pve pvp and WvWvW more rewarding. Right now no1 cares about these heals.

Lapserdak.9056:

Decrase base amount of heal on ALL heal skills in game + regen. Make it scaling better with healing power, and make healing other people in pve pvp and WvWvW more rewarding. Right now no1 cares about these heals.

and that will buff Celestial Elems, Guardians(in WvW)Necros and Engineers.

You got better idea? For whole old content Druid is NOT needed. And all things what ranger do, other classes do better.

Earix.5684:

anduriell.6280:

I mean i must agree that CAF is the best healing in game. But except some very extreme situations i don’t think that much healing is really needed.

You should try some WvW to understand how much this burst healing is needed

Earix, I did test WvW over BWE3 with Druid. By the end of the weekend, everyone had learned to spot Celestial Avatar Form when I popped it to heal my group, and I was focused down within a few seconds—much like Necromancers who use Lich Form.

Lapserdak.9056:

You got better idea? For whole old content Druid is NOT needed. And all things what ranger do, other classes do better.

Lapserdak, we know that Druid is not useful in older content, but that’s why we’re asking for changes to Druid. It’s unlikely that 90+% of the game (base GW2, and probably a significant portion of HoT) is going to be altered to make Druid a useful elite specialization—it’s better to request changes NOW, while Druid is still in development, that will improve Druid’s synergy with the base game.

TheFantasticGman.9451:

The more Irenio posts the more I’m convinced we need at least another BWE with the Druid.

It’s Obvious that scrapper and druid need one more BWE. If they are changing the druid’s based healing, they will push people toward the Zealot’s stats, a stat that came from a story update that ended years ago. A lot of players will be unhappy about that one.

Lévis.5489:

TheFantasticGman.9451:

The more Irenio posts the more I’m convinced we need at least another BWE with the Druid.

It’s Obvious that scrapper and druid need one more BWE.

100% true! It would be a great feeling to have it feel finished for Launch. I mean. . . Day of HoT is going to be a mess as is with all the people trying to log in, download, etc. xD

The least we could know is that our specs are ready for proper game play.

TL;DR: Pls make an overall healing power-scaling remake of all skills and traits for all professions. Low base values but good scaling with HP (up to 2-2,5 coefficients)

My opinion to this, quoted from another thread:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Thx, Irenio, I really appreciate this. This should be an Overall makeover of skills and traits that give some healing.

Regeneration is fine, no changes needed there.
As well for Healing-Skills. They should be decent for each profession without Healing Power but should scale with it. Most Healing skills scale with a coefficient of 1, and I think, ist ok for whis (there are exceptions like Troll Unguent or such skills, but it’s finde overall IMO)

But for all other traits and skills that provide some healing, I think it should scale much better, so that you feel rewarded if you take some HP increase in your stats.

I know ist possible, ist already done for Necro in traits like “Life dfrom Death” or “Transfusion” which scale very well with HP. Same should be done for Druid skills.

For example Lunar Impact. Actual it has a base heal of something like 2950 IIRC.
This should be tuned down to 1500 healing and increase the scaling with healing power to 2-2,5. In that case, you feel rewarding, when you go for HP with 1000 and you see “wow, I can heal for 3500 now instead of 1500, cause i have invested 1000 attribute points into HP”
In that case, the 1500 is not bad as a base heal, it’s a nice boost for ppl are not playing with HP and such who do, can heal for more.

Pls discuss this intern with all devs, to bring the healing power attribute in line with other ones (like condition dmg) and make it a reason to skill =)

or is asking that Druid scale better with non-Healing Power builds asking for Druid to be overpowered.

the druid scales worthlessly with healing power right now; asking for it to scale better with non-healing power builds seems like a non-sequitur.

It’s Obvious that scrapper and druid need one more BWE. If they are changing the druid’s based healing, they will push people toward the Zealot’s stats, a stat that came from a story update that ended years ago. A lot of players will be unhappy about that one.

Players don’t have to use all the same stat combo. You could mix Berserkers and Clerics, for example.