Guild Wars 2

When the druid was announced I was insanely happy that I could play more of a support role on my ranger. Now that I am playing that druid I am struggling to find a place to use it other than on open world zergs. In a duo group the healing is less effective than contributing more to DPS.

For example, me and a reaper friend doing champ/vet hero points together. I am a lot more effective in DPS gear in our duo than I am in heal gear using druid staff to heal/support.

Is this intentional? Is the druid only really designed to be really effective in Raids? I can’t see it being effective with a staff in fractals either.

Is there some meta I am missing? Should I be going for crusader gear for some DPS and a little bit of healing? What runes would make life easier? All of the x effect on heal skill is only for the actual healing skill, not the weapon heal skills, so they are useless.

Should I just change to another class that actually has an effective duo/fractal/solo application in the new content?

There are some smaller engagements where druid seems pretty good, though in my opinion, the druid is meant for groups of at least 5. The healing you put out can occasionally make a big difference in some fractals too. You don’t really need healing gear to heal effectively, so I don’t see using cleric or nomads being the better option unless in WvW.

Grace of The Land can make up for some of the damage loss from having druid spec. Up to 15 percent increase on allied damage as you heal them while in Celestial Avatar. Also, if you use staff you might be able to do without marksmanship, since the staff 1 pierces, unless you think having more daze with moment of clarity is worth it. The damage of staff is also either as good or better than longbow at medium and short range, so you can stay closer to your teammates, sharing boons and healing without losing dps. Don’t forget hidden waterfield on sublime conversion too.

I’ve been trying out something similar to the linked build below. It allows quite a bit of might stacking, support and damage.

I let frost spirit pulse might on my ranger, which in turn gives the pet a longer duration of it with Fortifying Bond and a roughtly 7 percent damage buff for nearby allies. After a while (the pet will probably have taken quite a bit of damage anyway), I use WHaO to give myself the might stacks, which can easily be near 25. I switch to longbow when enemies are in low numbers. Glyph of Equality has a stunbreaker as of my typing this, and Grace of the Land as I said, is damage amplification now. The site hasn’t been updated yet.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQJAWTnUqAtqgVsC+rActglOBDelWTvpO9tAwD4pFEqWYlcs0A-TlCEwAOVitVJohLAATlGSVGwS9nO6CAcIAit/wjnAAA-w