Guild Wars 2

I was looking at Zealots gear and thinking – with almost every ability of the druid having some kind of healing, do I actually need to bother with heal stats at all? Perhaps I can simply rely on quantity over quality.

It strikes me that +heal is only useful on the current type of healers, where their healing ability is minimal and requires a boost. The druid, if specced for +heal, is like to run into the problem of “overheal”, whereby the party does not have enough vitality to make truly massive heals worth the bother.

The way I`m looking at it, I can stat my ranger in its current manner and simply bolt on the staff and it should be sufficient. That way I can apply reasonable ranged dps, as the staff does seem to be quite a damage dealing weapon, albeit via pulse attacks.

So, before you go out and buy a potentially expensive set of new gear, I would say to consider just how much of the awesome healing can actually be applied to those meagre health pools the party actually has. Maybe we are actually better off boosting the dps side as the healing side is already greater than it needs to be.

All thoughts welcome.

The way it was explained during the stream, he had no healing gear on… So this is to make it beneficial to Rangers/Druids to use the staff with their gear. I however will be trying it out with other gear.

I`m currently longbow pretty much all the time. I`m going to toss out the skirmish line of traits and pick up the druid one….I never weapon change anyway and my only regret will be losing a little bleed and spotter.

put bluntly, we have no idea whether healing power will be useful or not yet.

It’s also worth pointing out that just because you play a druid doesn’t mean you have to heal, as far as we understand it so far. some of the traits and skills seems like they’d synergize well with builds we already have available to us.

That being said, I’m planning on converting my soldiers set to clerics, if BWE3 proves that to be a good decision. I’ve always been a healer at heart

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

put bluntly, we have no idea whether healing power will be useful or not yet.

It’s also worth pointing out that just because you play a druid doesn’t mean you have to heal, as far as we understand it so far. some of the traits and skills seems like they’d synergize well with builds we already have available to us.

That being said, I’m planning on converting my soldiers set to clerics, if BWE3 proves that to be a good decision. I’ve always been a healer at heart

I was thinking, would it be better to go down a vitality/ toughness kind of route then? With an aim towards staying alive while dishing the heals out? Perhaps we should be building for our own survival rather than concentrating on keeping others alive primarily. After all, we cant heal when we are ourselves taken out.

I plan on building a mostly offensive Druid! So I’m gonna so no, healing gear isn’t needed. The base heals are pretty beefy alone. It’ll function similar to a Meditation guardian. DPS with some side support.

Might or Might not be needed.

We don’t know just yet.
Heals seemed fine without any healing power whatsoever but might come up insufficient in raids. Who knows, time will tell.

i hope it will not scale to well, otherwise pvp/wvw fights will lose a lot of their dynamic and will be unnessesary long

Coarr.3286:

i hope it will not scale to well, otherwise pvp/wvw fights will lose a lot of their dynamic and will be unnessesary long

The longer the fight the longer the fun in my opinion.

@OP – I wouldn’t think so, but we’re not going to know for sure until we play it during the BWE.

No its not. You can run any gear with it.

To OP, you can take whatever gear you want!
You can go Axe/Trorch in Berserk or PTV
You can go full condi with LB/GS.

It’s all on you!

No, the druid does not need healing gear. Do not focus on the celestial from skill, just look at the traits and think of the [F5] as an “Oh kitten” button that you will flash when you are in dire need.
- You’re overloaded with condition? Flash [F5] to cleanse them all! (Though we could ask for a breakstun on the [F5])
- You need to flee a dangerous situation? Flash [F5] to disapear and gain super speed
- You need a Flash heal and your heal skill is on CD? Flash [F5] and use lunar impact or Tidal force (Yeah you got 3 personal healing skills!)
- You need to gain time? Flash [F5] and use Natural convergence.

See? Welcome in the necromancer’s world.

ATM, probably not, healing spells dont scale so good with healing power, one of the reasons is the fear of the celec gear stats getting out of control. If they raly want to make an healing meta, they will have to make changes to healing power stat and heals mechanic, the same way they did with condis(stacks intensity, low healing without stats, good scale with stats). Its funny they pushed a new healing stat(out going healing) to compensate for the bad healing power scaling, but you cant realy build for “out going healing” . Also we have this trait that supposed to incentivize for going healing/pwer(instinctive reaction), but becuase HP starts from 0, even an invesment of 1000 hp will give ya only 70 power bonus, which is a jock(it needs to be like 15%).

chronometria.3708:

ITheNormalPerson.9275:

put bluntly, we have no idea whether healing power will be useful or not yet.

It’s also worth pointing out that just because you play a druid doesn’t mean you have to heal, as far as we understand it so far. some of the traits and skills seems like they’d synergize well with builds we already have available to us.

That being said, I’m planning on converting my soldiers set to clerics, if BWE3 proves that to be a good decision. I’ve always been a healer at heart

I was thinking, would it be better to go down a vitality/ toughness kind of route then? With an aim towards staying alive while dishing the heals out? Perhaps we should be building for our own survival rather than concentrating on keeping others alive primarily. After all, we cant heal when we are ourselves taken out.

I could see that being viable. Though currently my mind is racing with PvP and Duo-ing dungeons in mind. and I already run settler’s in pvp fairly well, and in pve hopefully I won’t be taking a ton of damage directly so I can also toss in some extra damage with clerics.

In situations like WvW and Raids though, I could definitely see nomads being a viable option too. We’ll have to wait until the beta weekend to know any of this for sure, right now it’s just speculation and guesstimating. for all we know a zerker or marauder druid can be sustainable and do lots of damage (I mean, just look at zerker reapers. they’re pretty tanky)

i’ve been debating on getting celestial or cleric trinkets with zerk gear but I don’t think healing power will be a mandatory trait. as others have said, with so many heals and the way most healing skills scale having a little won’t do much at all and having a lot will probably overheal.

One of the minors can give you +20% healing effectiveness so no healing gear is not required.

I think its safe to stop thinking healing will not be useful considering how much effort went into druid.

Bryzy.2719:

Coarr.3286:

i hope it will not scale to well, otherwise pvp/wvw fights will lose a lot of their dynamic and will be unnessesary long

The longer the fight the longer the fun in my opinion.

@OP – I wouldn’t think so, but we’re not going to know for sure until we play it during the BWE.

I agree 100% that longer WvW fights = GOODNESS

Will zerker Druid be good?

Plays like zerker ranger, except now you’ve got extra self heals (not that important tbh) and an extra CC on your bar.

Dropping a traitline to get the new traitline will be really easy to to.

Thankyou for the great responses so far. It’s interesting to see the variety of rangers people are clearly playing and it seems we are all at the stage of thinking – “It seems ok, but how can I make this work with what I already do”.

To a certain extent, I think this illustrates how unexpected the druid was and how non-synergetic it is with the usual ranger playstyle……whatever that happens to be for the individual player.

It will be very interesting to see the feedback from the coming beta weekend.

nekretaal.6485:

Will zerker Druid be good?

Plays like zerker ranger, except now you’ve got extra self heals (not that important tbh) and an extra CC on your bar.

Dropping a traitline to get the new traitline will be really easy to to.

Probably.

People focus to much on the celestial form thinking that they will be able to camp in it, sit at a point and heal their allies from the rear. That is something that is unlikely to happen.

The right way to look at the celestial form is to look at it like a condimancer look at the Death shroud : a set of utility and a mean to survive. Do not let the first skill of the celestial form fool you, discard it, she isn’t friendly user at all. Instead focus your mind on the 4 other utilities which are great in any dire situation.

You will flash into the celestial form to use an utility skill (from your celestial skill set) and go back again in normal form. Your goal : not wasting Astral force. This way, the Druid spec, regardless of your stats, give you ton of sustain (up to 4 personal heal skills), control and escaping abilities. You just need to take a bunch of stun breaker and some stability as your regular utilities skill and “voila”, you can ignore your pet, you will do zerker damage with monstruous survivability.

I feel like you’ll want at least SOME healing gear as a Druid just to make all of your skills that much more powerful in terms of support. I personally will not be doning my full clerics set, I will stick with my celestial set so I’ll have a good amount of healing power without going fully into it.

However, I would like to know how well zealots and nomads will work for Druid, I feel like both would be very cool.

The reason healing power is weaker than other stats was because of scaling, no baseline healing power and low healing coefficients. What this meant was at max healing power (approx 1800 for Rangers), for a heal skill like WHaO which has a coefficient of 1 (which is on the high side for most healing abilities – when I say abilities I include utility skills, not just the heal skill), you would be healing an additional 1800 health.

But that was at the expense of 300 in 2 secondary stats and a complete loss of 1400 in a third. These 3 stats were normally zerker so you were losing a lot of dps output.

In real terms, that extra 25% health generation is much worse than in excess of a 300% dps boost. Add to it the fact that you could dodge roll through most damage, it made it nigh on useless to take.

With the druid they’ve given them a lot more heals but will a high healing power be necessary?

IMO it depends, if you need to squeeze as big a heal as you can out as often as possible, gaining approx 30% more in heals from high healing power could be useful. But this is because of another stat boost which we don;t often see mentioned – outgoing healing %. This stat appears to scale linearly like boon duration. This means 50 % outgoing healing = 50 % more healing.

The catch was this only effects outgoing heals. So it won’t make a self heal any more powerful. As there aren’t many outgoing heals which have high numbers e.g. 3k+, people just wouldn’t bother with healing power.

Druid changes that because of how some of the base heals, especially in CA form, are aoe. The 1 skill is 900 base, with 50% outgoing healing (easily gotten from food, crystal, trait + sigil), that’s now 1.35k. If you had high healing power, that would be 1.8-2k (depending on coefficients – I’m estimating low ones like we have). Still a 2k aoe heal, 0cd and 0 cast time and 1200 range is much better than the 900-1k base.

The CA glyph heal though could be potentially huge, with just 50% outgoing healing, that thing is 7.5-9k aoe heal on a 19s cd (traited). With high healing power, that’s more likely to be 10-12k depending on coefficients.

The tldr version of what I’m saying is Druids will benefit a lot from maximising out-going healing %. The question, and only the content AN have planned will answer this, is whether the extra 30 % in heals is worth a significant dps loss. But those heals, if a raid lasts an hour+ could easily add up to hundreds of thousands of hit points.

I think, if AN have made raids to require healers, then cleric’s will be the standard set initially, and the meta will become something like zealot’s. Just my 5 cents.