Guild Wars 2

There seems to be a lot discussion about druid going on in many threads and a lot of good ideas. However, I am seeing a lot of the ideas being lost in the discussion. I wanted to make a thread where people could post constructive ideas to help improve the spec.

So with that said how would you change change druid?

My own thoughts are:

1. Astral Force is convoluted when trying to generate it by healing.
   I would like to see the tick mechanic changed to a 1% per 250 hp healed mechanic. That way healing power scales more our access to celestial avatar and getting into celestial avatar is more consistent.
2. Celestial avatar is supposed to be about burst healing. I think that reducing the duration of the form and increasing the scaling on the heals and skills would make us a better burst healer. How? By having more potent skills and less time makes our choices mater. We need this to make us unique compared to ele and ventari which are better sustained healers.
3. I would like to see some form of condi on staff. Vine surge really should have bleeding on it, and astral wisp could burn opponents its passes though.

What difference does it make?

They’re not listening.

They’ve made that clear multiple times.

doesnt matter, they havent reply on reddit, they wont reply or read there own forums. its been 3 years kitten and you people dont learn that they dont care about you, customers, rangers or at this points about there game at all, at least seem like it. If they actually played and tested druids they would know this ruin the whole class but they are clueless. Whatever i am kinda done with all this, seem like all they care and use this game for at this point is as a cash cow, to sell as much gems as possible to get revenue. As someone said every update that comes they mess up something even more, fractals messed up, dungeons screwd, wvw and the new borderlands lol, druids completely useless and broken now, just to mention a few things. LIke someone said in a comment previous now everytime there is a new patch i get scare they will mess up even more (at this point i don’t think they can mess it up even more but i am not rotting for them).

Do everything opposite of what Anet did so far. Energy regen slower (double the bar) but has a base regen. Healing, damage, regeneration and condition tick all contribute to make the regen fill faster.

And change the Avatar 1 to a long channel heal at pointed location. Tapping 1 is annoying when Anet server cannot hold itself.

1. Druid does not have a pet – Return weapon damage multiplier to standard
(this increases the weapon damage to be on par with other classes)
2. Staff skills

• #1 with the change to damage multiplier should be fine
• #2 add stronger heal and damage than staff #1 and dmg enemy + burn enemies the whisp touches 10% more than Staff1
• #3 fix bug that puts us in combat
• #4 add a bleed and increase root to 3 seconds similar to entagle elite skill but at 50% effectiveness
• #5 make it last 15 seconds and is a dome (like mesmer skills)

3. Celestial Avatar Skills

• #1 Radius slightly larger and instant
• #2 Make it trap like mechanics
• #3 don’t change
• #4 don’t change
• #5 change completely, make a new one similar to staff 5 but CA version

4 glyphs (first make the only new druid skills available under water, so far none are)

• Rejuvenation: looks good to me
• all ultility (including the elite) glyphs should have their powers and range increased and their cooldown from 20 seconds to 30+ so more power more cooldown. so many times i am fighting mobs, i get out of melee range and I pop my elite, and none get tethered,
• add a small heal factor to activating the glyphs (on par with the new staff #2

5. Traits
oh just start from scratch that is just a pure mess

i would like to see some synergy between the pet and the druid added. the pet is the main mechanic of the ranger class. its weird that for the “elite” class option the pet is of no use at all. that’s like taking away the stealth from the thiefs elite.
for example add a trait like pet swap will fill up AF or make pet damage gain Af too

Like this:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Change-Suggestion-Celestial-Avatar-Mechanic/first#post5761103
It’s a broad remake, so I felt like directing it straight instead of flooding.
Basically making CAF more user friendly while giving more options and counter-play.

How would I change Druid?

By re-rolling an engi/reaper/revenant/DH/ele/Chronomancer. Thankfully I have one of each already, now I just have to decide which to play.

~the constant beatings with the nerf hammer are getting old~

roll a necro and pretend you play a ranger

I’m very much in favour of a radical overhaul of the entire thing. Before HoT, if I wanted to heal, I’d just quit the game and fire up something else, and that state of affairs hasn’t changed in the slightest.

In fact, I’m pretty sure my BWE3 feedback included the argument that the druid’s design at that time was a showstopper-level flaw with the whole expansion.

Anet deletes the Druid elite specialization.

jihm.2315:

roll a necro dragonhunter and pretend you play a ranger

1) Astral force can be generated even while in Astral Form.
2) Entering Astral Form only requires >50% force.
3) Amount of force generated by heals/regen scales with healing power.
4) CAF #1 is changed to bouncing zero damage projectile, with splash healing.
5) Staff AA has a burn dmg component.
6) Ancient Seeds is displayed as a visible “buff”
7) Spike Trap will now proc Ancient Seeds.
8) Elite Glyph is reworked to…. almost anything. lol.
9) Grace of the Land is changed to a an aura buff similar to Spotter.
10) Celestial Shadow is reworked to self speed/stealth as long as you are in Celestial Form.

Like, just generally?

Move Celestial Shadow’s superspeed -> Glyph of Unity
Move Lingering Light’s blind -> Celestial Shadow
Do something AF generation-related for Lingering Light.

I’d do this because:

• Tying the ‘blind trait’ to a controllable event as opposed to being random-ish makes it something you can use for breaking breakbars. Right now Lingering Light is brainless, and adding a control element to Celestial Shadow might make me consider the timing more as right now my in-combat usage of it mostly ends up being to secure a Rez.

• Superior mobility on Glyph of Unity seems like a natural fit to help manage the Tethers of both forms. I’d happily trade off an AOE Superspeed effect for Easier-to-Access-Self-Superspeed, and personally getting it out from behind the AF gate would remove much of my reason to want the contentious OOC AF generation.

• Having a Trait to play with might make it easier to fine-tune AF generation. This seems to be noticeably giving the dev team a hard time.

Also,
A Burst Healing Mode that contains both a Water Field and a Blast Finisher that can’t combo with eachother is super-unintuitive and frustrating. I get wanting to promote teamplay with Rejuvenating Tides, but sometimes the best communication is demonstration.

Simple: stop basing decisions on a PvE game around PvP actions and complaints.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Simple: stop basing decisions on a PvE game around PvP actions and complaints.

But PvP tournaments = money.
I mean… That’s the whole purpose of the company.

The only problem is they are dumb enough to let 20% of their community slip to other games by destroying a single class.
And the danger of that happening has been obvious for more than just a few weeks. It has been years and it was only getting worse.

The only thing they needed to prevent it was to discuss or explain why the nerfs happened or were about to happen. Tweaking numbers is not as difficult as it seems. But they never take opinions of their core audience into consideration.

I’d like to see something like this:

Astral Force:
- AF refills itself like a Mana\Magicka
- healing allies\self will speed up AF generation

Celectial Avatar:
- CA is unlimited by time
- CA abilities costs Astral Force
- You can enter CA at any moment
- AF will stop regenerate itself when in CA or AF generation speed will be reduced by 70-85% while in CA

what will probably never happen, but what I would like to see:

Celectial Avatar: Offensive mode(Shadow or maybe something nature themed?)
- completely new skills, new resource which is generated by inflicting dmg.
or
- you’re able to use Offensive mode. When in Offensive Mode abilities instead of healing allies will damage foes.

oshilator.4681:

What difference does it make?

They’re not listening.

They’ve made that clear multiple times.

Seriously what the hell is the point, it’s all wishful thinking atm.

At this point I think it’s fairly obvious that they do whatever they want and do not consult the community unless there is absolute outrage (Smokescale, AF degen OOC).

My suggestions for druid, mean to keep it at the same level but with more frontloaded healing so that the druid can run into an ongoing fight and save that low-health ally.

Immobilize/condition damage:
Reduce Ancient Seed duration to 4s, increase Vine Surge to 2.5s immobilize, add 1 more stack of poison to Glyph of Alightment (keeps the conditions at the same amount, but moves some from a strong trait to two weak skills).

Damage/daze:
Increase Solar Beam damage by 10%, reduce Lunar Impace daze to 1.5s [edit: on second look, the damage is pretty ok already on solar beam], reduce bristleback autoattack direct damage by 20%, make wyverns hit moving targets (buff something weak, nerf something strong).

Healing/astral force:
Double the healing on Astral Wisp and make the initial projectile heal allies it passes through (to help frontloading healing).
Make downed only give a partial astral force loss, same as leaving the avatar early (so that solo/open PvErs in difficult areas have a chance to use the avatar).
Increase the healing on Lingering Light by 400%, increase recharge to 18s (more frontloaded healing, less CC).
Add a stacking debuff on exiting Celestial Avatar that reduces astral force generation by 15% for 30s, compensate by reducing astral force loss on leaving the avatar to 33% (nerf to compensate for buffing astal wisp and lingering light, makes long-term sustained healing weaker, striking at the tankiest builds).

Not sure what I’d change, but changes to certain things and Astral Force definitely.

AF either remove or make gen faster
I liked it when AF was super easy to generate, especially since it was super easy to lose it all too in less than 10s. I mean spam number 4, number 3 and maybe 2 shots of number 1 and it be gone by the end of that cycle. I would make it easy to generate AF again or make it so that AF is not needed for CA at all.

CA as stance
If you didn’t use AF for CA, then you could make it so that CA could stay in that form longer for better support options in group, and make it as a stance like a revenant’s ventari stance for group healing… and another stance for solo concentration on self healing/damage output… and then it would open up the door to more viability with the use of stances allowing to make damage of druids a thing. Where as right now any druid that uses staff is not really doing that much damage to any target.

Pets (remove or make smart pets)
I like ranger and druid for pets. On most of all the games I played, I always make one minion master class and on this I made two, but having a living pet be no smarter than blood fiend or flesh golem minions, is ridiculous. Especially when they are suppose to help the ranger/druid.

I know, they won’t fix that likely. So give rangers and druids the option to give up pets and concentrate on themselves entirely. This would make it so that the Druid would go from being a druid to a more of a priest/priestess like cleric character. That would open up a whole world for RP as well as open up the ability for better builds that could do high damage and give better rewards than relying on a pet to occupy the unskilled players while the ranger pew pews with long bow from range. As well as open up a whole new world of play too since you could have a healer that does okay to good dps and be tanky without having to search for find and learn to work with the pets.

Sorry for the rant, but pets hold the potential for ranger and druid both back.

What else?
Well if ANet did say the Pet one making them either smarter or giving us the option to not run them at all, and/or make stances instead of CA a charge up skill, then I could see where Druid would be a lot more versatile, and likely more wanted for other content in the game. As it stands, I really think the current iteration of staff skills, glyphs and broken AF, makes Druid less likely to be a preferred to play class/profession by many.