The druid has seen the most changes since HoT went live, I believe that this isn’t due to a lack of vision, or Roy for that matter, but that the Druid is faulted by design. Let me elaborate:
When the druid was first announced I was foremost disappointed to see that the Ranger, the class that was already known as ‘the one trick profession’ get something as ‘simple’ as the Druid. I wanted to see Arenanet give the Ranger so much more depth but instead I saw Irenio go over all the skills and say: “Do you know what this elite glyph does more? Guess what, it heals, (again)!” I was positive however and tested the Druid during his first and only Beta weekend. Despite countless of feedback that we as the community gave the Druid was brought into HoT with only minor changes crushing my personal hopes.
Having an elite specialisation rely on just one mechanic (the major ability to heal) is non-ideal because:
- There are only so many unique ways to make healing skills distinct, meaning all the heal skills have to be very well internally balanced in order to see use in the game over other skills (e.g. CA #1) in any situation.
- Over or under-tuning of this one major ability overall cannot be counterbalanced by other abilities the class or specialisation might offer (because there are practically none), making it hard to hit a perfect line of balance.
- All the skills are set to behave the same in PvE, Instanced PvE (raids specifically), PvP and WvW meaning that there isn’t a perfect line of balance but rather a broad spectrum making the class only viable in certain modes if certain balance is already achieved.
- It’s also simply put unflavorful.
What I described above is just the first part of the problem I am trying to bring to light. Somewhere in the design process of the Druid the designers made another choice and they created what we now know of as: Celestial Avatar (+ Astral force, more on this in a bit). They gated roughly 2/3 the healing potential behind this mechanic. This in itself was not a bad thing; In theory I even think I was a really clever solution to some points I made above. By balancing 2/3 of the new abilities through this one feature they could balance most of the Druid with adjusting this one feature only. But somewhere along the line they also made the paradoxical decision to generate Astral Force with healing. We have to heal people in order to be allowed to heal people! That doesn’t make any sense (I remarked on this already after the Beta but it only became a real urgent issue due to the lastest changes). Through this they tied back the remaining 1/3 of our healing potential back to Celestial Avatar.
This had the following effects:
- Vanilla Rangers could only really make use of Celestial Avatar if they also brought the staff as weapon (or troll unguent until Tuesday), ending many possibilities for Ranger/Druid synergetic combinations relying on other weapon combinations (e.g. condition ranger).
- Any change to Celestial Avatar now directly affected the whole new specialisation directly resulting in huge swings to how the class played. Which is evident in the changes that we have seen go live until now.
Saying the Druid can only offer healing is of course a little bit of an oversimplification but I feel safe to say that: “From the core up, the Druid is a package that is designed to only heal well and is gated/ balanced around Celestial Avatar and Astral Force generation.” It might just be crucial for us to understand this about the Druid is we try to further balance the game. Changing how Celestial Avatar and Astral Force works, messes enormously with the overall class.
As a final note: I have seen a lot of threads pop up with suggestions for new ways to generate Astral Force, I also think this is the way to go. The longer I think about it, the more I feel like we are still in Beta..