Guild Wars 2

Sigh. Minstrel amulet removed. Lingering Light completely gutted. How do we troll the hot joins now? I wanted to share what I’ve been playing with now, 1 day later. I’m really curious to see what you’ve all found as well.

Like many of you I really enjoyed Minstrel amulet. You could be an incredibly annoying presence on the field, support your allies through massive heals, and had really good control over objectives. Take a point and hold it all match against all odds.

Without the Minstrel ammy I basically see 2 options. Celestial or Cleric’s. Celestial has the obvious benefit of providing all 3 stats we got from Minstrel’s, albeit far less. Cleric’s gives us 2 of the 3. Now I expected Celestial to be the more effective of the two thanks to the Vitality. I’m getting far better results in game with the Cleric’s ammy. I think there are 2 reasons for this, for one you are far less susceptible to burst with the higher toughness. Second your burst heals are burstier. This means if you get even a second to breathe you can heal yourself back to full.

As a side thought, my general experience with celestial so far is that it doesn’t split the difference well enough for ranger. If you want to be tanky, its not quite tanky enough with very little offensive trade off. And vice versa.

Is everyone else finding Glyphs work really well with this playstyle? I’m running with 4 on my bar right now. Aoe ccs, aoe heals. Pretty nice. I’ve also been playing around with Druid runes. The buff is pretty strong, though it has some real limitations. The Buff only lasts 3 seconds. It’s not quite enough to benefit the Seed Of Life that casts with your Glyph. It also doesn’t stack. Still though, the 3 seconds you have 1800 Healing Power for can be pretty glorious. It’s a major boost to your Regen, as well as Live Vicariously. Also, it seems like most Druid heals that are meant to benefit allies scale incredibly well. Usually over 100%.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been running. Again, I’m using the Superior Run of the Druid. I am really enjoying it. What do you guys think of Bunker Druid? How have you guys built yours?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNBmYD7keVoiVskVwhFgoVsgJYw10eaQ1Zx14ecNLrBQAokpNG-T5AIwAAuIABeCAHLDAA

I’ve been running a Clerics/Crusader Staff/GS build depending on the occasion. My personal shenanigans build was only mildly effected by the nerfs. Repaers sticking out as the hardest to fight of the new “OP specs”. (Most are not an issue but I sure dont kill them in a reasonable amount of time)

But I haven’t had too much of an issue. The issue is I’m playing scout/backcapper and finding myself more useful to run away from fights then pull out my GS and bring out the beastmaster. Oh well. We cant all be 1v1 heroes.

The lingering light nerf was bullkitten.

even if they upped it to 5 or 7 seconds, it would be pretty harsh of a nerf.

BUT, let us not remember. Ranger cannot have shiny toys, nor can Druids

ohhhhh Lingering Light was shiny too, wasn’kitten It’s not all bad news though. My personal experience is that Druid Runes really help to make up for that loss in sustain. I will say though Grace of the Land is a bit underwhelming. You are definitely more dependent on your team to make this one work. Running around in hot joins last night I was really struck by how much people just run around with no purpose. Team mates of mine kiting enemies AWAY from me meant I couldn’t heal them. And if someone dies, they always die 1000 units away from you, closer to the enemy team than yours. Good luck with the res >.<

Has anyone had good luck with Ancient Seeds in a bunker build? I tried it a bit, but my personal experience was that it was a bit finicky getting it to trigger. A couple times it guaranteed kills for my team though mostly seemed to occur randomly.

@Alypse I’ll give GS a try later. I’ve really enjoyed Sword/Horn for bunking so far though. I typically use the extra blast finisher for aoe Retal. The evades are nice to for buying a little extra time.

Reapers right now man. If they don’t hard counter your build the sure as well soft counter it. They just have every match up right now.

I should have included a tldr in my initial post. Basically my experience is that Cleric’s is mostly as effective as Minstrel’s was. You can still decap for your team. You can still force odd man fights for your team. You can still be a massive presence in any team fight at mid point. It’s pretty nice.