Guild Wars 2

Introduction
One of my main problem about the current raid meta is the need of 6 players who set up buffs for the left 4 pure dps classes. The fact that these 6 ‘support’ classes in most cases deal only round about the half damage of the dps classes make this even worse. So I started to think about solutions how at least one support class can be removed for a real dps. Sadly there is no alternative for the chronomancers at the moment, so even if they gain ‘only’ qickness and alactricity there is no way around it. So only warrior and druid is left, which both gain powerful buffs which you don’t want to miss on your dps players. In detail there is spotter, grace of the land, spirits healing on the one hand side and banners, empower allies and might on the other hand side. This makes it very hard to kick one of them you of the team composition. However this is exactly what I have tried.

The idea
I’m a ranger main since gw2 realease and playing nearly all variants of druids in raid for almost one year now. I organize a raid group with my guild, but it is definetly not a speedclear guild. Please have this in mind while you are reading this. The fact that a lot of groups uses builds from speedclear guilds without doing changes is one huge missunderstanding at the moment, but this is something what I don’t want do discuss deeper. However I play a nearly full zealot druid (with 2 beserker trinkets) at the moment. So i have a healing power round about 1200 what is enough to repair some mistakes, but not too much in order to learn that some attacks you should better dodge. I think a lot of healers playing with a similar gear. Last month I tested a bit around with my druid build, when the basic idea came up: Is there a way to support my team even more? This leads into the try to gain as much might as a current Phalanx Strength Warrior or at least almost without losing the possibility to heal my team.

The build
Might stack druid
Above there is a link to the build I have created. If you aren’t see how I’m able to gain enough might with this build here is it in detail:
- Pet: 5stacks for 22,5s | every 27-28s (25+3)
- Spirit: 3stacks for 5,5s | every 3s (not included: spirit uptime ~85%, with alactricity 90%)
- Horn: 3stacks for 30s | every 9s
- Fire Blast: 3stacks for 40s | every ???
Assuming that you are blast at least one fire field in 40s (which is very likely), you have round about 23stacks uptime of might for 5players. I want to do a short comparison between this build and a typical zealot druid.
Healing: With Horn you gain regeneration to 10 players with an uptime of 85% this is how you compensate the lack of staff healing. Regeneration fills astral power too, there should be no problem even without using a lot of glyphs. However you don’t have burst healing outside your astral form, which is possible with staff 5+3. To compensate the 175 healing from monk rune there are no berserker trinkets anymore, unfortunatly the 10% can’t be compensate. Healing with staff if difficult to calculate: It is highly based on how good is you and your teams positioning and how often you are in astral form. This means, if you are camping in a good position on staff without using astra form, your healing will be better. However you want to use astral form often in order to gain grace of the land.
Damage: Damage is the same or even higher than with staff + X. Sword autoattack is the best you can have as a druid if you want to do damage. On the other side you lose a lot of dmg-buffs using nature magic instead of marksmanship this is at least 15% and perhaps the 10%. If you are using natural magic anyways, with horn will you deal definelty more damage.
Flexibility: You will lose a lot of flexibilty. As a ususal healing druid I often change weapons (2nd staff for mobility, axe4 to pull, axe5 for reflexion, lb4 to push) to do some special jobs. This is not possible with horn anymore. In addition you are now a melee class (except horn4) which means e.g. a condi druid have to kite at sabetha.
Support: With horn5 you gain fury and swiftness in addition for all players permanently. So there is no need for tigers anymore.
Might: Compared with the might of a standard PS-Warrior, there are some differences. At first my build need some time (~18s) for setup, but for a 9min fight this weight nearly nothing. One benefit is, that the might last longer. From PS all mightstacks run 12seconds, while the druid cast might (except the spirit) for 25s+. This is good, if the group is splitted (e.g. tempest at sabetha). Another benefit is, that with druid you don’t have to attack to gain might. On many bosses there are phases where you can’t attack someone especially with a melee. One pro for the PS: You get healing power for each might stack (max. 250).

To sum up this a little bit, you lose flexibility to gain might. Beside that the changes in healing and damage are minor. If you are running not a healing druid with around 1k healing power I created two alternatives, which could be playable, too (not tested!).
Full Heal/No Dmg
No Heal/Full Dmg

The team composition
The question now is: How much damage you lose without banners and empower allies? For direct damage the answer is: A lot! I do some tests with a tempest and you deal round about 16% less damage without these 3 buffs (two banners, empower allies) even if I take assassins gear to get 100% crit. chance again. In other words a tempest which is do 28k damage, without buffs do only ~23,5k. So you will lose in a subgroup of 5 players together ~12k dps, which isn’t worth. For a reminder Warriors do ~15k dps, tempest ~27k (with the usual buffs). This is based on experience, I know the theoretical maximum is higher.
So this does not lead to any benefit. But: Doing the same tests with condition-based classes fits better. I did some tests with a condi ranger which is able to deal 32k dps. Without banners and empower allies he is doing ~6% less damage, means 30k. Assume you are running a condition group of 4 palyers: condi-druid, chrono, 2xcondition-DPS (one of condi-ranger, condi-engi, necromancer) you would lose only lets say 6k overall dps. So there is a way to get a dps increase of several thousands if you are running a condition subgroup.
In the follwoing video you see a dps test of the composition. First with two Warriors, second with the discussed changes. Please have in mind that we are not a speedclear guild while watching this.
Normal
Only one PS
DPS in detail: I wrote down the average DPS of Group1 (before|after), we did 4 trys with every composition. Chrono: 9,7k|8,5. Druid(no Condi here): 7,6k|5,9k. Ranger: 26k|25,2k. Engi: 22,1k|22,5k. Might Druid: 6,45k|5k
Hint: After tests we found out, that that the description of ‘Grace of the Land’ is wrong: It does not depend on which ally got the heal, instead it behave like any other buff. So the used composition is not optimal, because group1 will get more stacks GOTL. I suggest another composition in the next paragraph, to solve that problem.

Conclusion
I can only speak for my raidgroup but with this new empower druid it is possible to increase our dps, while losing flexibility on only myself. On the other hand, if you are running at least one condition on most of the bosses anyways, your team flexibility increases, because now you have one DPS more and therefore have more opportunities for choosing DPS-classes. In patricular I want to suggest, to do the following change:
Previous:
Group1(Power): Chrono | Power-Druid | Power-PS | Power-DPS | Power-DPS
Group2(Condi): Chrono | Condi-Druid | Condi-PS | Condi-DPS | Condi-DPS
After:
Group1(Power): Power-PS | Power-DPS | Power-DPS | Power-DPS | Power-DPS
Group2: Chrono
Group3: Chrono
Group4: Condi-Druid
Group5: Might-Druid
Group6: Condi

If you want to try out my suggestions please notice that there is a bug: Leaving astral form while canneling a skill will use quickdraw on the interrupted skill if it is available. Please have this in mind.

We have already killed some bosses with this composition. Until now I didn’t recorded them. If I have some material I will add it here.

Nice build, I guess overall it boils down to merging the PS + Healer roles into one combined role. Freeing up an extra slot for another DPS. I could see this working for small hitbox, immobile bosses (i.e Sabetha) where condi builds edge ahead of their power counterparts.

For some feedback, I like the concept but I don’t think that the proposed squad would work very well. Having a squad of 5-1-1-1-1-1 would mean that any of the buffs produced by the guys in the “1” subgroups would be shared purely by proximity. That means that your might, grace of the land, quickness, alacrity, spirits, spotter and glyphs are being spread out in an almost random fashion (Assuming people are moving around during the raid).

For the sake of even buff distribution I’d suggest something like:

Group 1 (Power): Power-PS | Power-Druid | Chrono | DPS | DPS |

Group 2 (Condi): Might-Druid | Chrono | Condi-DPS | Condi-DPS | Condi-DPS |

The problem is; you’re merging two ~15k DPS classes (Condi-Druid + Condi-PS) and getting back a 5k DPS might-druid and a 25k DPS condi DPS. Overall it’s close so I could see it being useful if the group lacks warriors, although finding 3 good condi DPS players might be tough!

Rather interesting idea. Although, I have to agree with what has been said already.
It seems to come down to wether you can give up on one of the PS warriors due to a lack of effected power dps classes. In which case this might work quite well.

More than anything, this actually shows that you do not have the play the exact Meta strategy to be effective. Nothing new of course, yet people struggle to understand that for some reason.

Thank you for your answers.

Basically, I want to achieve with this strange subgroup composition, that every power based DPS in the squad will get the warrior buffs for sure.
I know that healing can “overflow” to other players ff they are full life. Is that the same case with boons and buffs? E.g. If I have 2 Druids with spotter in my team and they both stay at exact the same position. Did they gain spotter allways to the same 4 people around them, assuming that they don’t move, too? Or is it that way that every player get spotter as long as they are in max. range?
The same question with might: If I already have 25 stacks of might and someone next to me gain might again, does it “overflow” to another player? Or did i get it anyways (even if the gained might duration is shorter than every duration of the 25 stacks I currently have)?
Non stacking boons should not be a problem, e.g fury, quickness and alacticity. Before the last changes a 4-4-2 composition was quite usual and everyone got fury from herald and quickness from chrono in a satisfactory way.

Buffs/Boons don’t overflow in the same way that heals do. You’ll always give the buff or boon to the players in your subgroup which are closest to you before any others. If they already have full stacks and nothing can be overwritten then a boon is simply wasted.

Short duration buffs & boons can be “overwritten” by longer duration effects of the same type. An example of this is with buffs like spotter, you’ll see it tick down to ~6 seconds before being refreshed back to 9 seconds. The same apparently now goes for boons, although that’s a recent change.

Well this is really annoying.
It seems anet can’t handle the 10 player raid content with their balancing. At the moment a mirror composition is allways better then other comps or at least other comps have to compensate a disadvantage. I hate that fact. It reduces the huge possibilities of team compositions a lot. It’s only a question of the best 5-man group and copy it twice.

Ok I have to live with it. I hope there will be some changes in the future.

With this in mind I would do the group composition this way:
1: PS | Condi-Druid | DPS | DPS | DPS
2: Might-Druid | Condi | Condi
3: Chrono
4: Chrono
The main problem is spotter, since it does not stack in duration. Might maybe too, but here you have more scope (stacks, duration). Like i said before there is no need to put the chronos in the subgroup. In an boss fight there are a lot of this little movement that are enough that allways other players stay in the middle of the well. Further there is no reason to play without a condi-druid as long as he can play with both spirits.

What’s the reason for using rune of strength instead of scholar?

You want to reach 100% might duration. You get this from 20% traits, 33% sigil, 1,8% backpiece and 45% rune of strength.

does it affect your outgoing might duration so it affects other people? Afaik it only affects personal might.

gin.7158:

does it affect your outgoing might duration so it affects other people? Afaik it only affects personal might.

Boon duration affects all of the boons you apply to yourself or to others.
Your own boon duration doesn’t affect boons applied to you through other sources nor does it affect boons applied by your pets or spirits.

Boons applied by spirits (e.g. frost spirit) are affected by own boon duration. I just checked it ingame.

EpheSOSIayer.6370:

Boons applied by spirits (e.g. frost spirit) are affected by own boon duration. I just checked it ingame.

You are right. It seems to affect the spirit actually. No idea why I missed that.

Here are some videos where I play the presented build, there are some little changes in pets and skill 7-10, since it is not in raid, but stuff like rotations should be the same:

Hint: The videos are done for the german community, please don’t get confused about the description and headline.