Upon initial inspection Druid seems great. Great healing, cool skills, etc, but upon closer inspection you notice a recurring theme.
Utilities
Empowerment +10% damage while in 300 radius. This not only encourages stacking, but forces it. In order for this glyph to be of any use, at all, you’re going to have to stack very tight.
Empowerment-Celestial +25% healing to allies within 300 radius. Same issue as Empowerment above.
Alignment-Celestial Heal and remove conditions to allies within 300 radius. This skill actual could make sense if you think that you have to race over to your allies and pop a bunch of close heals, but it just feels very slapped on.
Unity An incredibly short duration, 300 radius, elite skill. Several issues exist with this: first, it will only tether foes within 300 radius, meaning unless you have all 5 enemies within 300 radius you’ll never see full effectiveness (this will never, ever happen in pvp); secondly, it’s half the range and half the damage of entangle without an immobilize and I fail to see why you would use it.
Unity-Celestial Another 300 radius, stack-encouraging skill. I fail to see this glyphs use outside of stacking in a corner in PvE while your team facerolls and you spam heals. The difficulty of catching your allies in PvP, let alone multiple allies, within 300 radius rarely happens and makes this skill relatively useless.
Rejuvenation and Rejuvenation-Celestial Another set of boring 300 radius heals.
Traits
Celestial Shadow This skill is complicated, but let’s look at the different game modes.
PvE: Stealthing by trash is a great way to get by, but with an laughably short duration it isn’t an option. You could use it to super speed while stacked in a corner, but its ridiculously short duration makes it worthless compared to the other two master druid traits.
WvW: Similar issues to PvE, but chances are the effects probably will proc because of the close proximity of teammates; but, again, why would you ever take this over the other two master traits?
PvP: What’s obvious is that this could be a great res. Healing from afar when all of a sudden your ally goes down and you start reviving your stealthed, downed ally from the safety of cover while under super speed…but it only lasts two seconds. So unless you’re planning on standing ontop of your allies all day in celestial form, you won’t see a real benefit. Another good benefit would be breaking line of sight for you and your allies…but it has a 240 RADIUS!. 99% of the time, unless your reviving an ally like aforementioned, it’s never going to see this kind of play.
It seems that this skill got the special treatment when it comes to range. It’s the smallest radius, it’s very specific to trigger (you have to leave celestial form), and both potentially useful buffs are devastated by the fact that they’re both super short duration.
Grace of the Land Wow! A -33 condition damage skill for all your allies!? That’s sooo powerful.
Well, not really. With a, you guessed it, 300 radius unless your stacked in a corner this grandmaster won’t see much play. Now if it was a permanent -33% condition damage, that would be OK, but it’s only while in celestial form which further devastates the effectiveness of this trait. This trait is limited to you playing a healer, standing on your stack, spamming heals while your team takes a little less damage from conditions. Compared to how amazing Ancient Seeds is, I doubt that this will ever see any real play.
Solutions and Thoughts
Phew, that was a lot; but don’t get me wrong, I love the concept. I would love to share some actual input and solutions.
1. Healing power HAS to scale better. Currently you can run full berserker and still basically heal just as effectively. ALL healing skills across ALL professions should have a low heal, and be better with higher healing power. This is one of the major reasons nobody runs anything but berserker. With the actual threat of death, players will start to run some survival traits, or play with a team composition that includes someone to help negate some of that burst. This could really be said about all traits: vitality, healing, etc. Tuning attribute scaling should be one of the cornerstones of ANET’s continuing plan, but it’s been cast aside.
2. The theme of glyphs dealing outgoing damage while not in celestial form and healing allies while in celestial form is thematically good, but it has a certain je ne sais quoi that just makes them boring. No, I don’t want the devs to slap a larger radius on them, but they need to be re-evaluated. Since no one has questioned the default, automatic 300 radii, which I doubt the devs even looked into, I doubt it will ever change. I just hate to see skills and traits that sound good, but have little to no effect because players don’t understand that you have to literally be stacked to see any effectiveness.
Maybe non-celestial glyphs stay short-range have more potent effects. Glyph of Equality, – 3s cripple and 3s weakness, isn’t exactly Wow!. It’s more of a cliche ranger eye roll.
Maybe celestial glyphs should have less effectiveness the closer an ally. Glyph of Equality (celestial) should break stun but grant 1 stack of stability(3s) <300 radius, 2 stacks of stability(3s) <600, and 3 stacks of stability(3s) <900. That change makes this skill much more useful, fun, and favorful.
Thanks for taking the time to real, and I hope you enjoyed.
(edited by UnitedChaos.8364)
. It’s sort of like how dodging is a good enough defense for a lot of pve, except blasting fields is actually better in a lot of ways than actually building for healing or might stacking.
