Guild Wars 2

It’s the first thing they mentioned in the new forum post about upcoming changes. To compensate, it appears they will boost the effects of healing power on druid healing skills. Let’s see how this plays out and pls dont whine before you’ve fully tested this out speculation is also unnecessary at this point (other than the fact that this is probably a nerf for pvp rangers) as we don’t have any more info.

I hope they changed other aspects of the ranger too and didn’t just focus on that. I’d love to see changes in spirit skills and pet AI (..and much more) but we’ll see.

I also really hope that the 3-4 things they mentioned about balance changes aren’t the only ones as that would be boring as hell

It’s probably the only thing they could nerf about druid that I don’t mind. I imagine they’ll also obliterate everything that makes druid playable as payback to me.

What bothers me is its gunna push more druid to menders type stats in wvw and pvp, what they should nerf instead is how food, dolyak runes and natural healing regen cele form way to fast. If they don’t address it…. well welcome to more bunk druids,

What i would like them to do is to continue reworking core pets and traits.

arnitheking.8427:

It’s the first thing they mentioned in the new forum post about upcoming changes. To compensate, it appears they will boost the effects of healing power on druid healing skills.

2nd time this is happening. Not surprising and not something I care about.

I don’t believe it will be a significant change, but probably more of a shave i.e 10% less base healing 10-15% more healing power contribution.

As it stands now, the issue people have with druids in PvP is that they are too bunkery. And what amulet do the bunker druids use? Mender’s. If they wanted to target that build specifically, then they would be nerfing the healing power contribution and not base healing.

However, in the post, Gaile states that while base healing will be nerfed, healing power contribution will be “enchanced significantly”. This implies overall healing will be increased for those who spec into healing, and therefore could end up making bunker druid stronger if we go on just these changes alone.

More changes due to PvE & PvP (including WvW). Druid is in a good state, my opinion, with a lot of build options. This is going to have an impact across the board with it leaning more towards Raids than PvP. WvW, well, probably be more felt by the HAVOC / solo roaming types than zergs. Boons will address the zergs.

Personally I was expecting, and waiting for this. Sort of give me a good reason to take another break and watch from the sidelines. See where it ends up. While not unique to GW2 they are still struggling with balance between formants can afraid to make some difficult decisions.

Dedicated Druids will adapt. Others already on the fence, myself, will use it to take a break. Others will kick and scream and fall somewhere in the middle.

Edit: Also wanted to note about the devs warning that this will impact gear. Now I could be wrong but wasn’t the original intent or selling point of GW2 not to have a gear progression grind? Yet enter ascended (that was a bloodbath) and then later agony, and later raid content. Two of the three formats will be impacted if that is your thing. sPvP gets a pass due to no gear constraints.

And in case anyone isn’t aware of what was posted, here is the Druid bit:

“One of the most notable changes being made is to the healing values of the Druid as a primary healer. Base values for the Celestial Avatar heals will be reduced, while the healing power contribution will be enhanced significantly. The reasoning for these changes is that while we are excited about the Druid being an incredibly strong healer, we would also like to see that role as one of many choices in your attribute build.”

PvP menders meta build will probably be the least affected.
You have 1050 healing power from the amulet and I don’t see big impact.

PvE healer druid will probably be affected the most depending on gear. You probably won’t put out as much healing as before with your current set of gears.

WvW druid roamer will also be affected a bit. Most druid roamer don’t heavily invest in healing power. The baseline survivability for druid is already very high. So most would invest in damage and boon duration instead of healing power.

As for the healing, it all depends on how much healing power you will need to have compared to today, to actually heal for the same amount.

OGDeadHead.8326:

As for the healing, it all depends on how much healing power you will need to have compared to today, to actually heal for the same amount.

True. Will be interesting to see.

WvW – I personally run power/healing/toughness because I’m usually solo. I prefer survivability and surprise so have about 1100 – 1200 healing with celestial base armor stats. Works for me. Toughness pushes 3200. I enjoy it but get called a lot of names in game but to each their own.

Maybe Minstrel’s will be viable now…

Basically, it will force Druids in PvE to heal w/ healing gear. There was the do I go full magi or not debate. Well, now that’s asnwered :P You could literally have full zerker gear with food, monk runes, a little HP and main heal a Raid. That won’t be the case now; I am fine with that. Not necessarily full magi but it depends what “HP contribution will enhance significantly” means in reality; or well game reality.

…
… Do they not realize where their problems are?

What am I asking. They never had an idea to begin with. They have been band-aiding their game ever since I can remember.
But this one in particular, I do not really mind or care about. As long as it’s not something like base healing reduced by 75% (400% nerf, anyone?) and Fern Hound F2 CD reduced as a compensation.

PvP wise, they’ll probably try to push druid more towards bunker support spec and reduce our 1v1 capabilities.

Especially since they were planning on nerfing pets to reduce our damage output anyways.

Alternatively they could decide to completely eff us over and end up removing or changing menders amulet.

What’s prolly going to happen is a baseline nerf so severe that the healing power buff will heal for less than prepatch

+ Improved healing power contribution
- Reduced base healing
=
???
Until we actually see the skills we won’t know if it’s actually a increase or decrease to overall healing. They want you to trait to be a healer, and, hopefully, should be rewarded by having more powerful heals.

Anyone else notice that their reasoning for nerfing heals was to promote build diversity but no where in the druid paragraph was a mention of tweaking skills, traits, dps or God forbid pets to give druids the tools to really expand into different roles? I found it interesting that they mentioned dps increase for rev and mesmer but nothing for druid. Smells like all nerfs to take ranger out of rotation again.

Well yeah, this is the same balance team that nuked SB to promote ‘build diversity’.

I REALLY don’t know what build diversity even exists for Druid, as most of the traits (especially GM ones) are just…meh. I mean most Druids I run into in WvW are taking condi-clear on enter form, shadow on exit, and ancient seeds. Druid line doesn’t seem to synergize that well with marksmanship or skirmishing, so most builds I am seeing revolve around NM and either WS or BM.

Also, how do you have build diversity when only two pets really ‘work’, pigeonholed into staff if Druid, and other than that only really have LB as a competitive weapon?

I’ll continue using my hipster stealth trapper core ranger though. It might lose to almost all meta builds, but it’s fun.

Mr Pin.6728:

Anyone else notice that their reasoning for nerfing heals was to promote build diversity but no where in the druid paragraph was a mention of tweaking skills, traits, dps or God forbid pets to give druids the tools to really expand into different roles? I found it interesting that they mentioned dps increase for rev and mesmer but nothing for druid. Smells like all nerfs to take ranger out of rotation again.

I was wondering that too, all this will do is decrease the build diversity of Ranger as everybody will start using healing gear thus everybody will play a Bunker build. Unless they are badly hinting at bigger reworks to Druid/Ranger this doesn’t make sense.

UnitedChaos.8364:

+ Improved healing power contribution
- Reduced base healing
=
???
Until we actually see the skills we won’t know if it’s actually a increase or decrease to overall healing. They want you to trait to be a healer, and, hopefully, should be rewarded by having more powerful heals.

I have no expectations one way or the other. But anet does have a penchant for making things objectively worse in the name of balance.

Anyone got a link to said forum post ? And like poster said cant say anything till we see the balance in game ? Will destroy the class ? i dont think so but it might make things harder but im pretty sure good druids will get over it . Druids will probably still be the class with most sustain . 1v1 dont think it will affect the class much it will just require more skills to play . And other class will also probably get nerfed (dh specifically ) then again i cant say for sure as i have not seen the post

I’ll continue using my hipster stealth trapper core ranger though. It might lose to almost all meta builds, but it’s fun. [/quote]

Rock on dude. As for your other points I agree with you 100%

cptn skyz.8706:

Anyone got a link to said forum post ? post

Summary:
“One of the most notable changes being made is to the healing values of the Druid as a primary healer. Base values for the Celestial Avatar heals will be reduced, while the healing power contribution will be enhanced significantly. The reasoning for these changes is that while we are excited about the Druid being an incredibly strong healer, we would also like to see that role as one of many choices in your attribute build.”

Link:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Balance-Changes-Upcoming

Can I just address the Elephant in the room? Arena Net, fix the pets.

Anymore nerfs to the Ranger / Druid without is just further gimping the class.

Azukas.1426:

What’s prolly going to happen is a baseline nerf so severe that the healing power buff will heal for less than prepatch

Quite possible.

I’m willing to bet that at say 500-600 healing power, we will heal for far less than what is the case today, and that you need somewhere in the range of 900-1000 to break even post patch. Above that we might see a minor increase.

OGDeadHead.8326:

Azukas.1426:

What’s prolly going to happen is a baseline nerf so severe that the healing power buff will heal for less than prepatch

Quite possible.

I’m willing to bet that at say 500-600 healing power, we will heal for far less than what is the case today, and that you need somewhere in the range of 900-1000 to break even post patch. Above that we might see a minor increase.

I doubt it’ll be far less.

You’ll need some healing power as opposed to builds who can run with zero and still be fairly effective.

I’m thinking people at 500-600 will be fine. Either no difference or perhaps even a small buff? I’m an optimist.

@ CETheLucid – I hope you’re right.

It’s the same as always anyway.
We’ll just have to wait and see.

If we are lucky enough they’ll come asking for feedback. Of course they’ll ignore it but it will give us some place to vent.

I’m guessing druids will be hated even more after the patch if it’s possible, no one likes bunkers!

Hopefully there’s an opportunity to provide feedback after the changes go live.

Personally I’m terrified that all druids will be forced into running either Zealot’s or Magi’s in raids, camping CA for maximum GoTL uptime. The balance between pushing personal DPS and focusing entirely on camping CA for raid-wide buffs is already extremely delicate. It’s already hard enough to justify bringing an offensive set in the hope that I can squeeze out a tiny bit of extra damage.

This won’t make raiding any harder for teams that currently use offensive druids, it will only make the game easier, more boring and restrictive for the druids.

Sooooo…..am I the only one that noticed that ANet is making the druid more of a healer class…and in turn making the druid a part of the holy trinity, something they said they wouldn’t do?

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

Sooooo…..am I the only one that noticed that ANet is making the druid more of a healer class…and in turn making the druid a part of the holy trinity, something they said they wouldn’t do?

The problem is that anet created a class system that revolved around dps… hence the crappy “everyone for themselves” zerker meta. Having damage plus support light builds made a system devoid of decent roles and diversity. This is not halo where everybody just brings a different weapon, this is supposed to be an mmo with a variety of quality professions, quality roles, quality builds…

Played city of heroes and each archetype and power set brought damage, but unlike here, there were good roles to play within each archetype and power set. Gw2 sucks for diversity and roles, and it’s something that needs to be corrected. Given the original intent of “all professions viable”, each profession should be able to build for any and all roles.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

Sooooo…..am I the only one that noticed that ANet is making the druid more of a healer class…and in turn making the druid a part of the holy trinity, something they said they wouldn’t do?

Yup. And no gear progression beyond exotics. Got it

Well…
… Their communication is awful.

So the only source we have are their quotes from 3-4 years back and they completely contradict their actions.
Players not only get their game-play gutted but they are not even told why. The reasons they give are usually to be laughed at since anyone who plays the game knows it doesn’t work like they claim.

For example, I’m still waiting to be able to “sustain a WvW zerg” and do “heals that we’ve never seen before”. How does reducing damage of pets over and over again, stealth-nerfing Sword DPS, adding ICD to BM traits and reducing healing/sustain of a Ranger help the cause, I wonder.

If I’ve been told beforehand that their promises are empty and I should be prepared to be useless everywhere except Hardcore PvE where people want (but not need) my unique buffs – I could have rerolled. This way we are all waiting for what are they actually going to do without being able to adapt or prepare for the strike.

No you’re not the only 1 bigpapasmurf.

But not wanting the holy trinity was a nice idea but doomed to fail beforehand imo, not being a gamedeveloper. I posted that pre-beta. Because people always tend to min-max their stats. There will -always- be 1 profession that can do 1 of the holy trinity-roles best, being it with a tiny margin. Add to that pretty hardcore endgame content, people will definitely look for the best healer, tank and dps-classes.
But every profession has a viable (meta) end game PvE build, which is nice.

Levetty.1279:

Mr Pin.6728:

Anyone else notice that their reasoning for nerfing heals was to promote build diversity but no where in the druid paragraph was a mention of tweaking skills, traits, dps or God forbid pets to give druids the tools to really expand into different roles? I found it interesting that they mentioned dps increase for rev and mesmer but nothing for druid. Smells like all nerfs to take ranger out of rotation again.

I was wondering that too, all this will do is decrease the build diversity of Ranger as everybody will start using healing gear thus everybody will play a Bunker build. Unless they are badly hinting at bigger reworks to Druid/Ranger this doesn’t make sense.

People are not going to pickup healing stat in meaningful amounts beyond what they have already. 500-600 will still be the cap for anyone wanting to deal meaningful dmg. This change will do little more than tone down heal-to-full-every-10sec on power builds. Ultimately the only effect will be the appeasement of non-druids pitchforking for druid nerfs, maybe.

So, here’s some things:

This nerf clearly isn’t intended to affect PvE in the slightest bit as far as the demand for Druids is concerned. Magi’s Druid will still be the best healer by a large margin as long as it heals better than the next best thing, because on top of being the best at healing, it also brings unique party buffs. The Zerk/Viper double Druid comp will still be used by speedrun groups even with lower base healing, because it was never really about the healing, but about the maximum DPS buff coverage across the group while bringing as much DPS as those builds can possibly bring. They already try to maximize time spent DPSing and minimize time spent not doing DPS (aka healing), so while the overall skill ceiling on raid performances may increase, the likelihood of these changes making an impact at all for raiding is slim to none.

These changes will be aimed at PvP balance, and to some degree WvW balance (WvW will always be balanced as an extension of PvP as opposed to its own game mode, but since Druids see use primarily in roaming/havoc groups, this will affect the commonly used build adversely). The general community thinks Druids are too tanky (because they don’t know how or when to hit a build running 0 toughness because they are bad), and ANet has heard that loud and clear.

So to think that with the same healing power investment we use currently, we’ll get the same output after the patch? That would be a surprising move by ANet, but only because there is no way total healing output isn’t getting nerfed to satisfy the complaint that Druids are “too tanky.”

Be prepared to see notes like “reduced base healing of the skill by 25%, improved healing power scaling 15%” across the board on “big” skills.

And that’s only the preview that they’ve shown us. It doesn’t include potential pet nerfs or GM nerfs or other commonly QQ’d topics.

jcbroe.4329:

Be prepared to see notes like “reduced base healing of the skill by 25%, improved healing power scaling 15%” across the board on “big” skills.

I will die from laughter if it’s only 25% reduced base heals on CA skills. With no healing power the 2 big heals = 6.5k. People healing for that much and having 3sec superspeed/stealth every 10sec are still going to troll hard as you know they are running healing power 500+ anyhow.

jcbroe.4329:

The general community thinks Druids are too tanky (because they don’t know how or when to hit a build running 0 toughness because they are bad), and ANet has heard that loud and clear.

^Quote of the day.

Jim Hunter.6821:

jcbroe.4329:

The general community thinks Druids are too tanky (because they don’t know how or when to hit a build running 0 toughness because they are bad), and ANet has heard that loud and clear.

^Quote of the day.

But but but…
Signet of stone gives 180 toughness and gives 6sec invulnerability on activation!

If they nerf HoT pets again it’s confirmed anet is as clueless as a 95 year old grandma at a rave in San Fransisco. They keep repeating over and over and over and over again they want to improve pets, give core pets some lackluster cooldown reductions and then wonder why no one uses them. Nerf HoT and druid and then wonder why no one uses ranger at all.

Until our profession mechanic can land an autoattack, lay off the nerfs.

Justine.6351:

jcbroe.4329:

Be prepared to see notes like “reduced base healing of the skill by 25%, improved healing power scaling 15%” across the board on “big” skills.

I will die from laughter if it’s only 25% reduced base heals on CA skills. With no healing power the 2 big heals = 6.5k. People healing for that much and having 3sec superspeed/stealth every 10sec are still going to troll hard as you know they are running healing power 500+ anyhow.

I was just giving an example lol, the numbers were arbitrary compared to the illustration.

If I had to make an educated guess/prediction, Staff 3 and CA 3 are going to take hits to overall healing (I’m going in with the mindset that both skills will receive a minimum of a 25% healing reduction with MAX healing power investment because ANet kneejerk balances for the general population as opposed to doing what any developer of a competitive game would do; which is tell people the game is competitively balanced and they need to get good).

Tragic Positive.9356:

Well…
… Their communication is awful.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure next year before the next expansion hits, they will be all open again to the feedback of the players, but only on expansion-specific content.

It’s just a shame that the work and tenacity they had leading up to the release of Heart of Thorns was not continued.

Swagger.1459:

Given the original intent of “all professions viable”, each profession should be able to build for any and all roles.

That’s an almost impossibility if you want to maintain inherent functional differences in the classes, IE warrior plays differently than mesmer.

You might as well do away with the class system entirely and go for a tabula rasa system like ESO or EvE.

What can happen though, is for the game to feature a set of loosely defined rolls and each class being able to fit in at-least one of them.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure next year before the next expansion hits, they will be all open again to the feedback of the players, but only on expansion-specific content.

It’s just a shame that the work and tenacity they had leading up to the release of Heart of Thorns was not continued.

Then the one and only person to ever take our feedback will rise again.

personally i like that you have to invest in healing if you want to heal. I would take down the base healing and increase massively the contribution from healing.
For me that could make sense.

However ranger and druid need more options, doing that will probably hit very hard in the zerker and condi builds, making them irrelevant and also forcing druid players deeper into full bunker.

If Anet’s skills team doesnt do anything else to balance the class in general while nerfing healing, giving more choices as increasing utility, dps or condi application, they will not solve anything and this patch will be a disastrous joke.

With the ranger it always the same: we will end up choosing the options that suck less. Destroying dps builds will push even more players into even more cheese. My advise for that team is not to do that.

anduriell.6280:

personally i like that you have to invest in healing if you want to heal. I would take down the base healing and increase massively the contribution from healing.
For me that could make sense.

. . .

They already achieved it with their previous treatment of this same kind.
But why aren’t other classes getting the same treatment, then? Other classes find healing power useless because they can heal themselves solidly without it.
Why are we glued into that stat as the only class in the entire game? Why don’t they just rework healing power and healing as a whole?

EDIT: To me it looks like we are suffering from their multi-level fail of design in healing role. And it’s bordering with having a bias against our class. We are limited on such a massive scale in so many ways that the only thing I can do is hope you guyz will get nicer treatment for the next expansion.

So any idea what inspired this brilliant idea?

I’m not too aware of the WvW or PvP issues with druids aside that PvP Druids are now what Scrappers used to be.

However, as far as the PvE meta goes, there were 3 viable Druid specs: Power, Condi, and Full Healing. Newer groups still benefited from the Full Healing Magi druid, while more experienced ones could use Power and Condi druids on a case by case basis. Lots of diversity there. In my mind right now, I am simply perceiving this as a threat that will eliminate the viability of Power and Condi druids in raids.

Is there something else I should be understand here? Something broken in the game that warrants this?

Ging.6485:

So any idea what inspired this brilliant idea?

I’m not too aware of the WvW or PvP issues with druids aside that PvP Druids are now what Scrappers used to be.

However, as far as the PvE meta goes, there were 3 viable Druid specs: Power, Condi, and Full Healing. Newer groups still benefited from the Full Healing Magi druid, while more experienced ones could use Power and Condi druids on a case by case basis. Lots of diversity there. In my mind right now, I am simply perceiving this as a threat that will eliminate the viability of Power and Condi druids in raids.

Is there something else I should be understand here? Something broken in the game that warrants this?

those nerfs in general are biased from wvw \pvp.
the druid is indubitably from pvp, but actually i don’t think it will fix anything, as they make the druids even to play more obnoxious builds.

the mesmer\revenant is because wvw. the melee blob train with full bunker but overbuffed was getting ridiculous.

personally i don’t think this will fix either too. Unless the boons quickness, protection and resistance stops stacking in duration you only need more mesmers to replicate the problem.

Ging.6485:

Something broken in the game that warrants this?

the devs common sense

Soilder.3607:

I don’t believe it will be a significant change, but probably more of a shave i.e 10% less base healing 10-15% more healing power contribution.

As it stands now, the issue people have with druids in PvP is that they are too bunkery. And what amulet do the bunker druids use? Mender’s. If they wanted to target that build specifically, then they would be nerfing the healing power contribution and not base healing.

However, in the post, Gaile states that while base healing will be nerfed, healing power contribution will be “enchanced significantly”. This implies overall healing will be increased for those who spec into healing, and therefore could end up making bunker druid stronger if we go on just these changes alone.

This is a pve nerf not pvp.

PVP Druid mender, meaning they could possibly get a buff, which make no sense.
Why do they have to nerf a pve spec and cut build diversity?