Guild Wars 2

After a 5 minute fight with a thief.. this is how much my AF bar was able to generate..

This is with full ascended nomad’s w/ Druid ruins and Minstrel weapons. On heal with Druids my healing power goes to a little over 2500..

So basically unless I kited around using Staff 3 and GS 3 I would be bursted down by any class.. As full support.

You have completed ruined the Druid with this.

5 Minute Fight….. 5 Minutes…
If this pic is what you expected… I’ll be taking myself elsewhere.

If you need CAF to kill a thief then you deserve to lose in the first place.

Also you can lay off the exaggeration, none’s buying it.

Honestly, this is exactly what I expected. A vague photo with a bunch of empty rhetoric.

With so much HP and can get enough sustain from staff+regen+sotw. Not using your main heal(especially if u’r using WHAO) Until you regenerate enough AF is the secret.

I don’t think its optimal , but this could be played around.

Pooka.3420:

After a 5 minute fight with a thief.. this is how much my AF bar was able to generate..

This is with full ascended nomad’s w/ Druid ruins and Minstrel weapons. On heal with Druids my healing power goes to a little over 2500..

So basically unless I kited around using Staff 3 and GS 3 I would be bursted down by any class.. As full support.

You have completed ruined the Druid with this.

5 Minute Fight….. 5 Minutes…
If this pic is what you expected… I’ll be taking myself elsewhere.

So you don’t know how to play a Druid effectively then.

Got it.

You’ve must have completely missed the point. It’s not that I was trying to fight any thief. The build I use, which is posted around here somewhere, is not designed to kill anything but to be full support for a group or zerg.

Clearly, if I died to the thief I wouldn’t be able to post a picture of what my AF was after 5 minutes. He got bored and left.

My point is I was unable to generate enough AF to go into CA after a 5 minute battle. Thats a problem. So as a support, my group now has to take tons of damage before I can use the skills that I wanted to play to help them. If portal or well bombed: there is no quick was to regain advantage. -

And I’m quite sure I’m the best Druid in WvW <3 according to the endless enemy tells for hours on end : p.. so I’m not just talking.. I’m identifying a major flaw and one that ruins the experience that I geared and planned for.

Talk trash if you must.. but I’m right and your A. Wrong. B. Troll.

with the way things changed, you can’t run a tanky build solo and build astral force effectively unless you are purposely taking damage, which is the exact opposite of how you should be playing tanky ranger builds. (if anyone wants to prove otherwise, show me a build where you should be taking damage on purpose to be more effective in the same fight)

Anet’s probably going to find a way to change astral force….again in a few weeks, so you might need to hold on until then.

Pooka.3420:

You’ve must have completely missed the point. It’s not that I was trying to fight any thief. The build I use, which is posted around here somewhere, is not designed to kill anything but to be full support for a group or zerg.

Clearly, if I died to the thief I wouldn’t be able to post a picture of what my AF was after 5 minutes. He got bored and left.

My point is I was unable to generate enough AF to go into CA after a 5 minute battle. Thats a problem. So as a support, my group now has to take tons of damage before I can use the skills that I wanted to play to help them. If portal or well bombed: there is no quick was to regain advantage. -

And I’m quite sure I’m the best Druid in WvW <3 according to the endless enemy tells for hours on end : p.. so I’m not just talking.. I’m identifying a major flaw and one that ruins the experience that I geared and planned for.

Talk trash if you must.. but I’m right and your A. Wrong. B. Troll.

Don’t blame them. They are just part of a growing group of “Rangers” who believe they are experts with the class because they found a way to play that is automatically the best way…that for some reason are so full of themselves, don’t even post a build or video or any link at all of the druid being played “properly”. Some of them have an entire post history that shows empty rhetoric (also, lots of reaction pics), but nothing that actually proves them to be good players, so just ignore them…

oshilator.4681:

So you don’t know how to play a Druid effectively then.

Got it.

We can’t build AF by overhealing anymore and he was dueling a class that is designed to hit with the kind of damage that you can’t simply face tank and you say he was doing Druid wrong?

What, in your clearly expert opinion, was the correct amount of hits he should have purposefully eaten from a thief to allow for AF generation through self heals?

The point is that the design is wrong. You get the most of CAF (the best healing mechanic) if you have 0 healing power, don’t use any burst healing skill.

Which means that if you make people laugh from Regen, SotW, Natural Healing (BM), Rune of the Dolyak – you’ll get instant access to the good stuff (Which we all want).

If you, however, do your job as you are supposed to and bring people (yourself included) to full health – you are stuck with zero AF.

So as a druid you are forced to let people lose health, so you can tickle them with 120 heal per second for 10 seconds hoping they won’t die, because blowing a heal on 20 sec. CD is pointless – it would either delay their death by 3 seconds or would again ruin any AF gain you could have had if the heal was successful and healed the target to full.

You have to pretend to heal in order to gain access to heal for real. That is my biggest concern. It doesn’t matter how many healing power you invested. Unless you exploit regen and SotW with condition stats synergy (you don’t need staff) – you will never be a good druid.
Is that the design you guyz are so proud of?

Tragic Positive.9356:

The point is that the design is wrong. You get the most of CAF (the best healing mechanic) if you have 0 healing power, don’t use any burst healing skill.

Which means that if you make people laugh from Regen, SotW, Natural Healing (BM), Rune of the Dolyak – you’ll get instant access to the good stuff (Which we all want).

If you, however, do your job as you are supposed to and bring people (yourself included) to full health – you are stuck with zero AF.

So as a druid you are forced to let people lose health, so you can tickle them with 120 heal per second for 10 seconds hoping they won’t die, because blowing a heal on 20 sec. CD is pointless – it would either delay their death by 3 seconds or would again ruin any AF gain you could have had if the heal was successful and healed the target to full.

You have to pretend to heal in order to gain access to heal for real. That is my biggest concern. It doesn’t matter how many healing power you invested. Unless you exploit regen and SotW with condition stats synergy (you don’t need staff) – you will never be a good druid.
Is that the design you guyz are so proud of?

Finally, someone that gets it!
As a support you should be rewarded for investing in toughness and healing to support your team, however in the current state we’re punished for being being good healers. Which makes 0 sense.

AF generation needs to scale from healing power and how much you heal by per skill, not per tick. It’s stupid that a 250 tick of regen will charge the same as a 7k heal, but then regen is better because it’s a duration so it’ll tick often, generating more AF.

So no, this player is not a bad druid, in fact, they’re being punished for being an effective druid and I’ve had similar results to this in PvP on my cleric druid.

I’m getting fed up of being ping-ponged on druid, I was hoping the ranger curse had been lifted, if anything, it’s worse.

Pooka.3420:

After a 5 minute fight with a thief.. this is how much my AF bar was able to generate..

This is with full ascended nomad’s w/ Druid ruins and Minstrel weapons. On heal with Druids my healing power goes to a little over 2500..

So basically unless I kited around using Staff 3 and GS 3 I would be bursted down by any class.. As full support.

You have completed ruined the Druid with this.

5 Minute Fight….. 5 Minutes…
If this pic is what you expected… I’ll be taking myself elsewhere.

And if you actually got to use AF it would have lasted … 15 sec tops maybe.
So you heal as he pounds on you with his weapons and then when your AF is done he still kills you. That is the problem AF does not change the outcome of a fight it just delays it a tiny bit and its not like you can deal any damage when in AF so he has nothing to fear from a druid in AF anyway.

Lets face it its a Poor design for a healing class the person who designed it should be ashamed.

Merrex.5384:

Lets face it its a Poor design for a healing class the person who designed it should be ashamed.

That goes for the whole class.
Can you tell me how Staff #4 fits the astral theme?
It’s a mashup of several random ideas glued together without proper testing behind it.

With the balance changes it became obvious.
What do you suppose changing 2 out of 3 grandmaster tier traits mean if not a fail of design from Developers’ side?

But hey, Druid is perfectly viable so threads like this shouldn’t exist, am I right Tragic?
(/sarcasm)

Chrispy.5641:

But hey, Druid is perfectly viable so threads like this shouldn’t exist, am I right Tragic?
(/sarcasm)

It’s user-unfriendly, poorly designed, bugged, thematically out of place, clunky …
… But viable for certain contents.
But with their last changes done to the class? I’m this close to starting a petition.
(/completely frank)

Tragic Positive.9356:

Chrispy.5641:

But hey, Druid is perfectly viable so threads like this shouldn’t exist, am I right Tragic?
(/sarcasm)

It’s user-unfriendly, poorly designed, bugged, thematically out of place, clunky …
… But viable for certain contents.
But with their last changes done to the class? I’m this close to starting a petition.
(/completely frank)

I am extremely disappointed with Druid’s handling. Druid has been, quite frankly, poorly conceptualized and even more poorly executed. There is a lot of wasted potential in Druid, and, judging from the advent of Heart of Thorns, it seems that the future holds even more disappointment.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Chrispy.5641:

But hey, Druid is perfectly viable so threads like this shouldn’t exist, am I right Tragic?
(/sarcasm)

It’s user-unfriendly, poorly designed, bugged, thematically out of place, clunky …
… But viable for certain contents.
But with their last changes done to the class? I’m this close to starting a petition.
(/completely frank)

Just making sure.

Tragic Positive.9356:

Merrex.5384:

Lets face it its a Poor design for a healing class the person who designed it should be ashamed.

That goes for the whole class.
Can you tell me how Staff #4 fits the astral theme?
It’s a mashup of several random ideas glued together without proper testing behind it.

With the balance changes it became obvious.
What do you suppose changing 2 out of 3 grandmaster tier traits mean if not a fail of design from Developers’ side?

Between staff 4, the one leaked “aspects” trait from a while back, and the druid gear being covered with animals, it looks like we were supposed to get a much more archetypal “Nature Warden” type of druid.

I have a feeling that either they just couldn’t make it work or they realized that raids needed a healer and that they couldn’t make Rev or Ele strong enough for the role without breaking pvp so they created the star pew pew druid we have now.

They just need to scrap astral force regeneration, and make it a static cooldown, say maybe 20 seconds cooldown after it is used… Clearly they don’t know what they are doing since they can’t seem balance the kitten ed Astral Form regeneration.

20 seconds cd is too much.

OGDeadHead.8326:

20 seconds cd is too much.

I’m pretty sure he meant “10 sec CD”, cause anything above is the death of healing druid.

OGDeadHead.8326:

20 seconds cd is too much.

I suggested a 5% AF gain per attack and heal and 25 second cooldown of it.
But any healing applied would proc “alacrity” of sort onto it (66% faster recharge).

So berserker builds could use it early but not often
and healing builds could become unchanged or tweaked.

Both would have better synergy with the druid overall. Not many people commented on the idea so it got cowered by forum dust.

There’s so many ways to fix their mess yet they only keep ruining it further.

+1 to the OP. Right now i’m enjoying my Glint/Ventary herald in full clerics so i can’t say anything about the AF generation.

But really, that crap about the AF bar must go. In CAF we only heal and the damage we receive goes straight to out HP pool, so the only requisite should be just the cooldown of 10 seconds.

Tragic Positive.9356:

I suggested a 5% AF gain per attack and heal …

When I first saw Druid AF mechanics, I suggested that AF be tied more towards attack than healing so that weapons besides staff could be used. After thinking about it some more though, I realized my idea was flawed for one simple reason; you can never balance it.

Everyone’s perception of AF generation will be different depending on the weapons/abilities/runes/sigils/traits used in addition to the type of encounter they are in (WvW, PVE, PVP). AF generation will vary from one individual to the next and even within the same individual from one moment to the next. Its the reason I laughed out loud when Irenio commented that he was watching gameplay to determine if AF generation is undertuned/overtuned. What is he going to do? Look at everyone’s AF generation in every imaginable scenario to determine if AF generation is satisfactory? And even then, would you even be sure as a designer that you are on the same page as your audience so far as the perception of AF generation is concerned?

I also realized that there was no point trying to normalize each weapon/ability for AF generation if your goal was to have the average fall to a certain median; just set AF generation to that median and be done with it. This way everyones experience is the same (and quantifiable) and you don’t waste your time futilely trying to balance AF generation for every single weapon/ability/trait/sigil and for every type of encounter/game mode. This is NEVER going to happen.

Also, as a healer, you are often in situations where you are doing things that are important (dodging, moving out of aoes, cleansing, etc) but you will get punished for doing these things because AF generation is tied strictly to attack/heal only.

The above reasons were enough for me to realize that the current DPS/heal to gain AF design model was flawed inherently and will never work. (Yes, some people will still use it and happily do so but to me, the design is too amateurish/poorly thought out.)

Anet wants to capture eSports with design decisions like this? You haven’t demonstrated you can walk, yet you want to compete against companies that are lapping you in the PVP department? (Blade and Soul says hi.)

Leodon.1564:

Tragic Positive.9356:

I suggested a 5% AF gain per attack and heal …

When I first saw Druid AF mechanics, I suggested that AF be tied more towards attack than healing so that weapons besides staff could be used. After thinking about it some more though, I realized my idea was flawed for one simple reason; you can never balance it.

Everyone’s perception of AF generation will be different depending on the weapons/abilities/runes/sigils/traits used in addition to the type of encounter they are in (WvW, PVE, PVP). AF generation will vary from one individual to the next and even within the same individual from one moment to the next. Its the reason I laughed out loud when Irenio commented that he was watching gameplay to determine if AF generation is undertuned/overtuned. What is he going to do? Look at everyone’s AF generation in every imaginable scenario to determine if AF generation is satisfactory? And even then, would you even be sure as a designer that you are on the same page as your audience so far as the perception of AF generation is concerned?

I also realized that there was no point trying to normalize each weapon/ability for AF generation if your goal was to have the average fall to a certain median; just set AF generation to that median and be done with it. This way everyones experience is the same (and quantifiable) and you don’t waste your time futilely trying to balance AF generation for every single weapon/ability/trait/sigil and for every type of encounter/game mode. This is NEVER going to happen.

Also, as a healer, you are often in situations where you are doing things that are important (dodging, moving out of aoes, cleansing, etc) but you will get punished for doing these things because AF generation is tied strictly to attack/heal only.

The above reasons were enough for me to realize that the current DPS/heal to gain AF design model was flawed inherently and will never work. (Yes, some people will still use it and happily do so but to me, the design is too amateurish/poorly thought out.)

Anet wants to capture eSports with design decisions like this? You haven’t demonstrated you can walk, yet you want to compete against companies that are lapping you in the PVP department? (Blade and Soul says hi.)

A big +1 – best post so far commenting on balancing AF and druid in general. Everyone wants to implement their balance so it would fit there needs and playstyle, that’s inevitable. People that wants to play the healer want better scaling of healing power and lower base heal to punish zerker druids, others that are ok playing with staff feels it’s ok for them to get more AF than the guy next door that wants to use longbow and so on.

Imho, CA should be readily available. Either a flat cooldown of 10 seconds/15 seconds active (two traits needs to be balanced accordingly) and/or have CA skills cost energy, energy that regens over time.

Current system will be impossible to balance; for some playstyles/encounters AF will not be an issue whatsoever, for others it will feel almost impossible to be able to enter CA.

I don’t expect anything done now while ESL is running, so get used to running with the current implementation until ESL ends in february next year. E-sports you know…

There are way more than enough drawbacks to CAF, it needs to be a stance maintainable until downed or manually exited. The AF mechanics need to be completely dropped as well.

And before anyone complains, yes, Druid will need to be tweaked to make this happen so don’t start throwing “but this and this and this power, radius and number” at me. Things can be adjusted to make Druid function in a balanced way.

If you disagree then I’m sorry, but you can’t have a healer who can’t heal sometimes because of some artificial restriction. It’s bad design to gate an important role that already has tons of weaknesses built in.

Swagger.1459:

There are way more than enough drawbacks to CAF, it needs to be a stance maintainable until downed or manually exited. The AF mechanics need to be completely dropped as well.

And before anyone complains, yes, Druid will need to be tweaked to make this happen so don’t start throwing “but this and this and this power, radius and number” at me. Things can be adjusted to make Druid function in a balanced way.

If you disagree then I’m sorry, but you can’t have a healer who can’t heal sometimes because of some artificial restriction. It’s bad design to gate an important role that already has tons of weaknesses built in.

I agree.
In CAF we get full damage but lose all the mobility GS/staff brings.
I wouldn’t care if they redesign the CAF to not to be able to use the utility skills, same as the reaper, and they bring useful and different skills to the CAF because the actual ones is only heal heal heal.

So yes the AF must disappear.
Staff has to become an utility weapon from mobility and CC and with one choice in the adept trait line we should be able to choose if we want the staff to be power/condition/healing oriented.