Guild Wars 2

I’m seeing a lot of misinformation and bad ideas being spread around like wildfire, practically everywhere, about how druid should be played effectively… So I thought “hey, I should also spread my own misinformation!” so here you have it.

This build is basically designed for people who aren’t in the top 99th percentile of raiding guilds currently. I mostly pug, and while I have ran a couple times with members of decent guilds, I mostly play with casual players.

Anyways, here goes

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJAWTnMqAtqg1sCOrAUtgFGBD+pWVzqOfugVMgpA8tCAn8sSIB-TxxGABAcBACS5Xb6AUU9nh2fg8HAAUKBJFgfzsA-e

I ran the rough numbers on the build and I’m too lazy to post all the calculations in here, so feel free not believing anything I say.

First, I’d like to talk about zealots. put bluntly, my build has an inconsequential DPS loss than if you were to replace the armor with zealots (around 3% base damage, or ~7% when considering crits.) The upside of this is that you get a lot more healing (about 10% better) and you don’t have to heal yourself nearly as much what-with the extra vitality (which is even more important since you are using GoTL which is currently pretty insane)

Now, even if you want to complain about my statistics (which even I will admit is using pretty rough math) you’re going to be spending roughly 36 seconds per minute in CAF because as a druid, your goal is to put out as much GoTL onto as many people as possible (more on that later). that means that you’re getting a minor dps boost for a minor amount of the fight, and losing quite a bit of heals. over-all, I just don’t think it’s worth taking until it goes on farm-tier and you absolutely MUST complete the run 20 seconds faster.

also, clerics is terrible. not only are you sacrificing as much damage as you would be in magis, you’re also making the tank take more toughness, which is more of a dps loss. a majority of the builds for tanks rely on just grabbing enough toughness to grab aggro, since nothing puts out remarkable unavoidable damage (and as a druid, you’ll be doing more than enough to keep them good). 1000 healing power is good enough to keep everyone full health as long as they aren’t doing terrible, and if so that’s their fault, not yours

a few more bullet points before this gets insanely long

-Healing spring is great. it’s an insanely large heal to 5 people
-Replace glyph of empowerment with Glyph of the tides for VG (seekers op) or Glyph of Alignment for any fight that you need more heals for.
-Spirits are still great, bugs are buggy, oh well.
-Entangle is good for like, everything. for VG you use it on the seekers, for gorseval you can save it til the spirits get close to the boss and then feed off the praise as everyone is like “omg you just totally saved our booties”

Uhmm… that’s basically all I have to say about the build. feel free to trash my build and me mum and pet hamster for being awful at the game

As a druid on this build, your goal is essentially to sit in CAF as much as possible (36 seconds a minute, not including alacrity which affects CAF recharge rate, and with this build you’ll be reaching full charge in ~5 seconds.) and spam heals to proc GoTL. It it really THAT simple. (well, maybe not THAT simple, but it’s honestly pretty easy.)

./build over.

as an addendum, I’d like to state that no matter how cynical I may seem, I’m not trying to trash anyone else’s build. Feel free to run whatever you want. In the end, having fun is the most important to me, and should be for you too! This is just for those who find winning to be fun ;P

as a second addendum, I’m posting this after raiding for about 12 hours straight (it’s 8am now) so… apologies if something doesn’t make sense.

minor edit: also, I go by Feyris in game. hence the title. Didn’t think that that wouldn’t make much sense until after I posted this

good build, i’d swap Nature’s Vengeance for IB personally but that’s just me.

Prophet.1584:

good build, i’d swap Nature’s Vengeance for IB personally but that’s just me.

You could definitely do that if you want. I’d actually almost recommend it for Gorseval, since placing the spirits is an artform for that boss, compared to VG which is basically just “stick it in the middle!”.

I tend to use more glyphs but it is very situational. Though my trinkets are all bezerker, my armor is currently still cleric, but since I’m not running in Raids anytime soon, toughness instead of vitality is not such a big issue, I think. As far as the traits go I have exactly the same

So thank you, for posting you build. It gives me the feeling I’m not doing it totally wrong.

I like the general idea, and I’m pretty sure that in time, the pendulum will swing in favor of more damage and less healing power. It always does, lol!

Personally I go with celestial though!

lyriael.4375:

I tend to use more glyphs but it is very situational. Though my trinkets are all bezerker, my armor is currently still cleric, but since I’m not running in Raids anytime soon, toughness instead of vitality is not such a big issue, I think. As far as the traits go I have exactly the same

So thank you, for posting you build. It gives me the feeling I’m not doing it totally wrong.

More glyphs are worth taking at times, e.g. for vale guardian you can replace a spirit with the glyph of tides if you really want to. The only glyph that isn’t really worth taking is the stunbreak one. the only place i could see that being useful would be for gorsevals knockdown, but you’re better off letting people learn to dodge that than try to carry them even harder.

and yeah, toughness only matters in raids where the bosses aggro on toughness, and practically require someone to hold aggro.
And, you’re welcome!

OGDeadHead.8326:

I like the general idea, and I’m pretty sure that in time, the pendulum will swing in favor of more damage and less healing power. It always does, lol!

Personally I go with celestial though!

I think we’ll have to wait and see. the thing about druid is the a majority of their damage done is done via buffs to allies, therefore your damaging stats aren’t nearly as important. And having that extra healing power just means you’re going to be keeping runs more consistant with better heals and not much loss in damage. In time though, I do agree that speedruns won’t take a healing power druid.