Guild Wars 2

As reported in this Reddit thread by several players and this Youtube video, Chronomancers can stack alacrity for very long durations on allies and themselves, if not forever. Given the very strong bonus alacrity brings, this seems like an overpowered mechanic. In regard to the recent WHAO nerf for rangers, it seems obvious that alacrity stacking should also be nerfed.

It seems reasonable to expect a maximum alacrity uptime similar to quickness uptime.

Hello,

Despite being a ranger and extremely unhappy with the state of the druid which is worse than in BWE3 and with recent changes to smokescale that once again bring a hard nerf to ranger utility with no reason after giving us hope,

I want to say thank you to all the Arenanet staff. For a strong and mostly well designed extension. Despite a lot of ruckus around, I must say that as far as I am concerned I like how elite specs and personal story are tied to mastery and hero points, giving the extension an overall good pathing. And the new maps are gorgeous and a real pleasure to explore and “dive in”. Considering how the original maps were great in their own time, this does not come that much to a suprise, however the feeling of verticaly is extremely strong and it is hard to imagine that there are only four maps with so many layers with intricate interlayer connections scattered around. I am about to unlock the 5th gliding mastery and I can’t wait for gliding forever in VB looking for hidden updrafts and secret locations.

Morever, thank you for your continued work all over the week end, and for a very smooth extension launch. From my memory it is the first time I am given the chance to experience a launch with so few progression blocking bugs, no hardware issues nor queues (druid and ranger being design issues that are not related to the launch itself)

zinkz.7045:

Taku.6352:

While it might be a decent change for pvp folks it just completely guts it in pve since it finally gave rangers an on demand smoke field.

It isn’t a decent change for PvP folks, you can’t use it out of combat to say set up a stealth bomb or cover yourselves as you cross over to far point, the using it “on demand” aspect of using it on pet swap is crappy, because again you have to be in combat and of course the pet runs to the target and then activates it there, rather than where you actually want it, so before for example if you suddenly come under focus fire and you need to leave you could begin to disengage and then if you got a little space between yourself and those pursuing you, you could use the smoke field staff 3 into it, and stealth on the run as it were, now you can’t do that.

Furthermore you now have to deal with the hassle of calling the pet back to interrupt the field if you don’t want it, which will be a needless pain in the kitten on the initial pet swap and if you have the pet long enough for it to cast again, you like likely miss many times, which occasionally is going to result in you losing a cap in PvP as no doubt at some point the pet is going to cast smokefield, as someone is blasting and you’ll lose that last tick on the node with everyone in stealth.

They may as well scrap the pet, the whole point of it was the utility of smokefield, the clue is in the name, now you just have another burst pet, with the actual utility hamstrung by being moved off f2.

This sort of dumb decision is why Anet gets criticism, and example of why after 3 years and money thrown at it, their “e-sport” peaked at about 9k viewers last WTS, less than some kid gets streaming from their bedroom in many games.

Happy to see that even profficient PvP players dislike the change.

Dojo.1867:

Unpopular opinion here but are you aware that the smokefield does not blind? All it does was enable stealth combos and from playing ranger with this pet the last few days I found this VERY situational.

Being able to control the burst on the other side seems like a mayor improvement. I am sure it can be used a lot more frequently now aswell. You can succefully combo it with Sic’Em (would stop the attack before if you just use it when Smoke Scale started the mist walk) and you can stack 7 might with WHAO.

So unless they would also change the smokefield to actually pulse blind I MUCH prefer the new installment. You can hate me now.

The smoke field are far from situational in any party based PvE content. While controlling the burst is very easy: swap pet. This pet is useless out of its burst and (before nerf) smoke field. So the smart way to handle it is use another pet and, when burst is required, swap to it. It will instantly use the burst followed by the CC => powerful combo. Saying that you need the burst as active ability equates to saying you don’t understand the inner workings of your pet.

Today when I connected, I had the pleasure to find myself lying dead on some random ground (not a surprise :p) but with several meta-event chests waiting for me. To be clear, I did not have these chests before I blacked out in front of the screen.

Sure this was a nice welcome, but considering the change to event participation, it seems to counteract it: a player simply needs to take part in events until reaching 200% participation, then can AFK for 25 minutes, move 1 sec and AFK again indefinetely while still earning meta rewards.

To me this looks like we may quickly get maps partly filled with AFK players just waiting for their automatic meta reward while still using map slots once players find out this.

True beast master with bigger, stronger pets (ofc the rangers forgive a bit of personal damage potential to compensate), one ranger own autoattack skill, one ranger skill to actively control the pets that depends on the pet family (felines, birds…) and three ranger skills to actively control the pet that depend on the pet function (damage vs support vs control vs …). Elite allows to summon of pet as well, temporaly granting two pets at once.

I used to joke on teamspeak saying that druid was no elite spec (it is way too broken at the moment) and that base ranger was the new ranger elite (with smokescale and pet/spirits survivability improvement). Now I think we have no elite spec at all.

Hello everybody. This thread is not meant at discussing the Smoke assault 50% damage nerf. Please do so in other threads.

When the new smokescale pet was introduced in BWE3, it got much praise due to its on demand smokefield, which finally granted the ranger a party stealth capability through blast finishers. It is a much needed feature in order to give rangers a chance to fit in the “meta”.

Yesterday night, however, the smoke assault skill was nerfed (did not try it in PvP however, considering the damage potential, it was probably a disserved nerf). At the same time, it was switch with smoke cloud at the active pet F2, thus denying rangers their on demand smokefield. With that change, the smokefield is a pet triggered skill, i.e. it will only trigger during combat.

• it renders the smokefield useless when it comes to party stealth
• it creates issues during combat with the automatic smokefield interfering with firefields

As consequence of this F2 swap, the pet suddenly becomes useless in party PvE (fractals namely) when before the swap it was promising.

Now, I can understand that some PvP players may prefer the new on demand burst (although I am confident that many also prefer the on demand smokefield).

As a consequence, Anet, may it be possible to have two distinct new smokescale pets (e.g. black smokescale and ashen smokescal), one with the original smoke cloud as F2 skill (much needed), and one with the new smoke attack as F2 for those that prefer this option ? This way both needs and gameplay preferences are met and you make all rangers happy (or happier) again.

If impossible to have two pets, then may it please be possible to get smoke cloud back as F2 (while keeping the smoke attack nerf) for the afore mentioned reasons ?

What the title says. Sorry for the harsh tone. It was nicer before the 45 character limit hit.

Smokescale: Smoke Assault: This skill has switched places with Smoke Cloud

This change is absolutely terrible and completely removes the point of the smokescale. Now the smokefield will be uncontrollable, will be triggered at the worst time (overwriting other fields), and it will be impossible to use it to grant group invisibility.

Utility skills should stay on F2 and “dps” skill should remove as baseline skills. With the change, utility can’t be controlled and loses all utility purpose, and the ranger needs to activate the pet F2 every 20s to get the maximum possible dps out of it, which is a really poor gameplay.

Keep the 50% damage reduction if you want to, but please swap back smoke cloud to F2 skill

Why did you do this change when there was so much good feedback concerning that skill ????

Smokescale: Smoke Assault: This skill has switched places with Smoke Cloud

This change is absolutely terrible and completely removes the point of the smokescale. Now the smokefield will be uncontrollable, will be triggered at the worst time, overwriting other fields, and it will be impossible to use it to grant group invisibility.

Why did you do this change when there was so much good feedback concerning that skill ????

I am seriously starting to consider stopping this game. Why is it impossible for rangers to get something nice that does not get destroyed three days after being introduced ? It feels like you are laughing at us on purpose !!!!

Ragnar.3916:

overall:
spirits was amazing one year ago and suck now.
95% dmg reduce would fit perfect to the old spirit system

Completely agree (with a were instead of was :p)

Funny, looks like the last beta weekend test was to no avail. They said they improved druid following the beta reports, yet it looks like the druid is an even worse state now: none of the stated improvement AND AF drains out of combat …

I don’t care, I still with my ranger as I planned to anyway and will enjoy the new pets and improved pet survivability (at last, after 3 years of bad treatment to animals !). Now we can replace thiefs in the meta with smokescale.

At work right now, but reading this, it looks like I won’t even give a try to the druid until it gets at least 2 strong updates (just as other elite spec gots, except for Scrapper)

I see this change as a great news. Now people will have to work for their rewards. No more people tagging then moving to something else without contributing to the event. I hope this also affects people staying perma dead during an event.

Such a system will automatically prevents toxic behaviours such as swapping between all breach bosses, and so on.

My only fear is for people that don’t stay dead and chose to travel back from the nearest waypoint when they die. For example, on the Teq fight, will this cause players to miss on the event reward if the event succeeds while they are on they way back from the WP after a death ?

In my opinion, the system should add a 3 min grace period after a death + WP (as long as WP is done within 30s after death) and the player did not tag on another event during the grace period.

Strange, I do not remember getting all my base skills and talents unlocked as soon as I started a new level 2 character. In my memory, I had to play the game for some time in order to progress to level 80 and unlock everything.

Why should it be different here ? Getting the required 400 HP is like going up from level 2 to 80. Just like it, some will try to do it as fast as possible and some will take their time. Don’t forget that GW2 is about enjoying the way !

Well, in my opinion, it is even better this way. FIRST you have to play through HoT openworld using the spec you are used to at the moment. THEN you will have plenty of time to replay it using your elite spec. The first phase will give you a correct base for comparing the experience with and without.

BTW, the way it is done right now looks quite neat and well thought. The required amount is enough that full map explorers will not get it outright from start, and it is an incentive into thoroughly exploring HoT maps (unless you prefer to grind early HPs). All in all, it looks a bit like the previous way of unlocking talents before specs were redone earlier this year, except that now it is much more feasible.

It strongly dislikes the new way of thinking these days that supposes everything should be handed down for free.

Could not agree more. Here is a list of all back items that look like they should allow for gliding/hovering:
- all spinal blades (at least starting from Tempered spinal blades)
- molten jetpack
- holographic dragon wings & holographic shatter dragon wings
- wings of the sunless
- daydreamer wings (BLTC)
- new butterfly wings (BLTC)
- black/white feather wings (BLTC) DONE!
- light of dwayna ??

From the news thread, it seemed that holding LClick while in action mode would trigger autoattack as long as it was being held down.

This is some great news for PvE. All sorts of pets/minions may finally get some use.

Although I am not one of those, I however feel for WvW players whose minions are subject to the same sort of AoE damage spikes. And to a lesser degree for minions in PvP. I understand that dealing with these game modes is much more complicate as making minions almost immune in 1v1 would have them too powerful (think at turret engies in the past), while having them take any less than 98% damage reduction in 50v50 vows them to instant death.

I suppose the technology does not exist at the moment in the engine, however it would be great if minions could also take reduced damage in WvW and PvP, with the coefficient actively varying between 25 and 99% depending on the number of enemy players within 600-900 range of the minion.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Hello Irenio. Thanks for the feedback. It is nice to see most of our points were heard. Looking forward to reading your updates concerning Druid changes. I am sure that with the proper tweaks it can make for an interesting dual gameplay (although I will always remain a ranger at heart and as main for RP reasons).

Also, please consider healing x UI questions too, that have the potential of making strong healer builds great or broken. And submit them to the appropriate designer/developer amongst your colleagues

This, and the fact that 3 of 4 new melee pets have a mid range skill that enable them to quickly close in on their target on a rather reasonable CD

Bump

/15 chars

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Gilgalas.7860:

Why do you keep spawning so many new threads about changes you would like when there is already an official thread for this ?

Because this is not feedback. The “official thread” is a feedback thread. This thread is suggestion and theory craft only, and as such, should not be cluttering up a feedback thread. There is no official “post your suggestion thread”.

In order to discuss this properly, it can’t really be caught up with hundreds of other posts that likely are not constructive at all, similar to yours.

Yet, your suggestions are constructing feedback. You should at least crosslink your threads with the main feedback thread I think.

Let us play the game ! Here are:
- my main suggesiton list from the main feedback thread
- Some new ideas I just got concerning CA and which I think could bring us a much more interesting active druid gameplay. To be discussed !

After more pondering, I come back with some more ideas.

1/ As many of us already said it, CA heals strongly lack diversity. One of the classical tool in the healer kitten nal is the “Greater heal”: long casting time, big heal. It is meant to help prepare and recover proficiently from a strong boss AoE you can predict (i.e. topping raid mates).
As a consequence, I suggest CA #4 be changed as follow: 3s casting time (not a ticking channel, a real cast), heals for 20% more than current CA #4 with all the healing coming at the end of the cast. Creates a 4s water field at the end of the cast. Increase recharge to 10s. To make it viable outside of PvE yet, add at the start of the cast 2-3 stacks of 3s stability to the druid. And to prevent druids from cast cancelling that skill to abuse it for free stability, make it go on full recharge if cancelled

2/ Currently, druid feel like a bland one dimensional healbot whose sole purpose is to rush astral force to spend as much time as possible spamming heals in CA. That is really not fun and many of us have suggested tweaks to CA skills, staff and astral force generation to make it more interesting. Here I come up with what I think is a new idea (well, to be honest I did not read all posts around).
To make the alternating between CA and NF (whether using staff or another ranger weapon), turn CA into a ressource management mechanic. I suggest the following changes:

• when exciting CA (whatever the mean), put it on a 10s recharge
• when cancelling CA early, keep remaining astral force
• do not add damage components to CA skills. Staying in CA should be made a choice. When there is no real choice when there is no tradeoff. Here we sacrifice damage for strong party healing
• astral force does not decay while staying in CA, players can stay iddle in CA as long as they enjoy BUT
• using CA skills drains astral force. Each skill has a distinct associated cost

Thanks to these changes, you can get players to actively manage their astral force, decide when to use it and when to build it. It as reminiscent of mana management yet with a strong active component instead of passively sparing and waiting like in other games.

Linking here for feedback two different threads that deal with an extremely important UI concern related to healing in GW2.

Please post your feedback in the main feedback thread (started by Irenio). It will add your voice to our common concern and will avoid creating forum cluter which pushes back other valid concern threads such as healing and UI.

Link to my own inner working analysis post. Let us try to have everythink linked across thread to get a complete picture, especially on astral force which has complicated inner workings.

Why do you keep spawning so many new threads about changes you would like when there is already an official thread for this ?

I concur, same request on my side. Let us bump this UI thread, that is a serious question which has as much importance to proper healing as improved druid.

Link to my own druid UI thread.

Reminds me the early days of WoW WotLK when the brand new exotics pet were growing so large that they could fill a whole building and prevent other players from interacting with all merchant NPC inside (core hound mayhem)
Or trolling my raid with a pet that I made grow and occupy the whole viewport at the same time the raid had to move out of deadly AoE

anduriell.6280:

KayCee.4653:

I’m not sure what server you on, but on mine Ranger is actually sought after for havoc’ing in particular since two rangers can duo or trio even the castle. Granted, you’ll generally want more for it, but its possible. I’m only up to solo’ing towers. Keeps and castle are still too hard for me to take…

Also depending on your server, most servers I play on don’t care what profession you play on for WvW. Granted, sometimes we need tanks more so than healers and elementalists… but if you can take and tank on any profession like GW2 does allow, then you can be helpful to most WvW zerg parties and havoc groups.

Yeah right, let me guess you play bearbow.
You kitten the supervisor with the LB while your bear tanks for you.
And you pray no other enemy player comes around.
Not a solution not the point

Here you are wrong. The condition based trapper ranger inflicts tremendous damage (at the expense of sacrificing almost all survivability) and can down WvW / PvP bosses very quickly

I hope you did not wanted to go staff with druids :p . Kudzu just fits perfectly the spec theme !

GW2 is about dynamic combats you have to react to, AoE or other attacks to dodge, and so on.
Yet, now we get a pure healer spec. In my opinion, the spec design is quite terrible right now, but why not. Let’s imagine druids turn into a super awesome well rounded healer AND support class with no clunky mechanic. What does it still lacks ? A proper UI !!!

How does a healer operate ? It needs to find out the damaged allies and heal them. How does (s)he locate damaged allies ??? Well, either (s)he

• 1/ selects each ally successively by mouse or target next ally shortcut to have a look at their healthbar. Terrible and higly inefficient (well actually, I tried the next ally shortcut for the first time today and it does not even work !! But I guess nobody ever used it)
• 2/ look at health bars on squad UI, then locate the tiny nameplate of that ally, lost in the chaos of skill effects, so that (s)he can more or less aim ground targetted heals on that ally
• 3/ look at health bar on squad UI, and target that ally by clicking on its UI square. Will work for targeted heals if UI allows for it, will do little to help for ground targetted heals which, without much surprise, make for 3 on 4 of the strongest druid heals. Problem: welcome in WoW, healing through UI will take you out of the fight and will have you spend hours of raid contemplating your wonderful squad UI. Which anyway is not exactly advised in GW2, you will quickly die from an AoE doing so. Welcome headaches !
• 4/ ask the UI to display all player healthbars above their tags, look in the fray, heal as you go by looking actively into the fight and pointing your mouse (and your ground targeted heal at the same time) at the red and depleted healthbars in front of you. You should not have much issues with AoEs and targetting this way.
• OR 4 bis/ asks all the members of your raid to make a cute tiny 120 unit wide stack which you will mindlessly spam with your ground targeted AoE heals which will then heal all the group members at once without requiring from you to think at who you will heal first. Such a wonderful healing experience !

Conclusion: Please Anet, if you are really going to have druids play as dedicated healers, please give us a UI option to properly display at the same time all allied health bars above their nameplates (without requiring us to mousehover succesively over each nameplate to display the healthbar). Otherwise it will be a UIWar (played way enough of this in WoW) or yet another instance of stackWar.

Best healing experience I had in a game was with Global Agenda (squad based "MMO"FPS), where the healing allowed (well, actually forced) medics to look at the game, at their targets, in order to properly heal instead of sticking to a piece of UI.

EDIT: after some recollection, I remember that during my last days in WoW, I had an addon named “Clique” which allowed to click bind a dozens of spells to mouseover click, and another addon, “Tidy plates” that replaced nameplates with pretty healthbars that included my selection of ongoing buffs and debuffs icons, duration and stack. This allowed for a great healing experience by allowing to heal while hovering over nameplates in the world window instead of the UI. Keeping track of the lifebloom this way was a bit hard, but GW2 has no such issue.

I would like for a similar UI feature in GW2 to allow for healings that does not take the healer out of the combat in favor of the UI.

Shield/Aura healing tempest will be raid meta, not druids

Here is my own statement: most rangers will not want to play druids. If druids are really mandatory for raids as Anet seems to state it, then raids are done. If they change raids to adapt for the lack of druids, then druids are a complete failure and it is possible many rangers will leave the game. And if druid are not actually that mandatory for raids, then they are already a complete failure, because they are not good at anything else.

But hey, we are rangers. We should not have expected any less. It will be fun, having to choose between a damage dealer spec no one wants of because ele/guard/war already got everything and will keep on, or an even more useless pure healer class in a game where pure healing has been long replaced by support. Feels completely out of context.

Yashuoa.9527:

I like druid in general.
It looks cool and it has a lot of fun stuff.

Glyph of Unity however I find lacking.
It has a small radius in which you tether yourself to friends/enemies.
Dependable if you are in celestial form or not, you will either heal friends tethered for x for every heal you do or damage enemies for y every attack they do to you.

These x and y numbers are ~300-400 dmg/healing for every hit/heal.

Isnt that like low?
Both the dmg/healing and the range/radius?

Glyph of Alignment seems better than Glyph of Unity to me, even though the latter is an Elite skill.

Sublime conversion differentiates itself due to not just being a wall that stops projectiles for you (which already exist on classes).
It also converts the projectiles into healing.
However this healing is almost nonexistant.
Which makes it basically another projectile destroyer wall right?
The healing from projectiles that fly into the wall add a little bit energy to gaining celestial avatar form.
The healing however, is less than 200.

I kinda love the idea of a wall that converts dmg projectiles into heals and had expected it would heal a lot more for each projectile.

What do you think of these two spells?

When fighting 1 or 2 enemy, the damage is completely lacking. When fighting 5-10 enemies at once, especially enemies that hit very quickly (1000 blades, dagger thiefs), then it turns into hell for the tethered enemies: because their is no ICD, so they suddenly huge amounts of 300 damage ticks, enough to get them down in seconds.

This glyph needs to find a middle ground between useless and instagib.

Raids and druids would really need another BWE (scrappers probably too, but I did not look much at them).

I see that we are many to formulate the same requests for druid changes.

Hydrolysis.6810:

Traits:
Natural Stride – does the movement speed only occur in combat? Feel really slow.

It does. Basickly, it is switfness without the effect at your feet, which makes it seems slow. Quite a lackluster trait, just there to grant switfness to a spec that otherwise completely lacks it.

To OP, sadly, I think we aren’t. But it looks quite like it. My birthday is the 19 and I thought HoT was a somewhat great birthday “gift” from Anet, now I completely think the opposite.

MeanCoffeeBean.2073:

We really need something with an AoE for tagging in WvW. I love the healing I am bringing to the group, but there is pretty much zero tagging and credit happening here. Please… make the staff #1 attack have a damage in radius or something. It doesn’t have to be a lot of damage, but enough to tag the players we are fighting while we get busy with the heals. This is actually a pretty big issue for WvW players.

Asura staff is awkward at best. Please set the animations to match the staff use on the other professions for Asura. My Asura ele manages to wield a staff just fine. The Druid is a caster with ranged attacks. Holding the staff like a GS is just odd and looks weird.

I’d like to see healing scale better with healing gear. The difference between running celestial and clerics is laughably small. If we are going to be locked into a healing role, make those numbers pack a punch, else everyone will just want Revs instead of us.

Thanks!

Did not think about tagging in my long review, but this is effectely an issue also (in that sense, creating a dedicated healer spec is a non sense when the tagging system does not count healing done on allies that tagged the targets)

arkealia.2713:

Gilgalas.7860:

I found an error: Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025. Staff5 in normal formal is:
Staff5 (Sublime Conversion): 0.2

Fixed the name, but I’m still finding 2.5% (162 to 192 with +1200h.power).

Yes you are write for the number, I think I read a wrong line in my table when I corrected you.

Now, here is my general OPINION on the new pets, the druid, and the pet mechanic in general (now is probably a good time to discuss it).

Pets
Overall, the new pets are great. The reduced cast time on F2 abilities is very enjoyable: they are finally reactive ! If only all older pets could benefit from this. Thanks to the smokescale, rangers can now bring group stealth on par with thiefs, which means that rangers should now fit in the meta in the same slot as thiefs.

The bad part for new pets is, in my opinion, the Bristlenback. Why do you create ranged pets with “passive” skills that have different range (1200 and 600 here) ? It will always force the pet to use the smallest range, which 1/ will make it lose the benefit of longer range skills (safety) and 2/ will make it lose damage the first time as it will have to move from max range to mid range.

Moving to pets in general (and ranger spirits as well as other summons for mesmers, necromancers, engineers, guardians and thief/elementalist elites), there is a real problem with them and boons/heals (not speaking of IA or other things). This is once again highlighted by the healing glyph which lacks a “pet heal”, but is also true with all group buffs in general. Most group support abilities, heals or buffs, state that they only hit 5 allies, which will always exclude all the pets and summon in 5 player groups. This is extremely annoying, as it means that a player that (almost) does not use summons (warriors, thiefs, most guardians and elementalists) fully benefit from group buffs, while classes that use summons (rangers, mesmers and some necromancers) will only partly benefit from group heal/buffs, since a part of their damage output, the summons, won’t get heals/buffs. In my opinion, the epitome of this problem is the ranger trait “Fortifying bond”. Since rangers rely so much on pets, you felt the need to give them a mean to transmit boons to pets (yet they have to sacrifice a trait for this).
All summons/pets/spirits/phantasms/minions/spirit weaons should never count as allies as for skill caps, BUT they should always automatically inherit from the heals and boons their “masters” receive.

Another similar point: all summons should always derivate all their stats from their masters (possibly with a coefficient). That is already the case for some stats of mesmer phantasms and necromancer minions. Why do ranger pets use fixed stats ? They do not improve when we improve our equipement, there stats do not evolve when we chose our equipement to favour one type of damage over another …
Ranger pets should derivate all their base stats from their masters. Then, a coefficient could be applied to these base stats to improve/decrease some stats and thus adjust them, to a reasonable extent, their stats to the focus of their family (tank vs condi vs direct damage)

Now to Druids

1st, I understand that there needs to be a first and last, but I must say that I am extremely disappointed that there won’t be any other BWE between the 1st druid test and the release. Especially when I see the terrible state the druid is in at the moment.

2nd, I must say that I am not especially fond of healing, however I tested the druid with an open mind. Especially since I play a ranger, have been out of the “meta” since start and Anet statement implied there would be a need for strong heals in raid. Well, one of my ranger is even ready to turn as a druid, with an appropriate skins and so on.

In my opinion, the whole druid system is completely lackluster at the moment, for several reasons. I will explain my point below.

• 1/ The druid feels like a poor copy of WoW moonkin form
• 2/ GW2 is built around a soft trinity system that includes damage, control and support. Healing is a part of support, however support also includes protecting, buffing and debuffing. With the druid, I found an elite spec that solely revolves around healing, healing, healing. Absolutely no boon, no group cc breaker, almost no condition: a very small amount of cripple and weakness, a bit of slow (does it has any effect on NPC bosses ?), no chill, 1s of immobilize (!!!), and an amount of weakness that will have any other profession, including base rangers, laugh). Druids feels like they are singlehandly meant to heal. Not support, heal, and heal only. That is a very dumbed done role and it feels very lacking compared to diversity of support that other professions have. Druids need more support diversity: boons to maintain, stun breakers, more debuffing conditions
• 3/ The way astral force is earned at the moment is ridiculous. If the druid is not using staff, it won’t stack. If the druid is solo, it won’t stack, until using bugged Troll unguent or playing gimicky heals with pet. If the druid is in a group, it will stack in 3s at most, thus allowing the druid to almost permanently seat in celestial form. Either CA is inaccessible, either is it completely dumbed down (because 1/ I suppose the druid gameplay is meant to revolve around switching in and out of CA and 2/ the healing output in CA is so larget that sitting forever in CA holds no interest: it is mindless spam #2, spam #3, fill in with #1). Earning astral force needs a complete and thorough rework (detail below)
• 4/ All staff skills are underwhelming: appart from mandatorily providing astral force (since no other weapon succeeds in), they provide (almost) no damage and an amount of heal that is ridiculously low in comparison of what CA can do. Sublime conversion acts as “yet another projectile protection” (we already have guardians, mesmers, thiefs, and lately necromancers doing this) and that is all for staff utility. As soon as the 2s astral force stacking is done, there is no reason to stick with staff.
  Staff skills need a rework to provide increased damage (although less than a regular weapon) and much more utility to give them some real use (all the things listed in 2/ that it will make for a diversified and fun support spec) (no need of more healing, there is already far than enough in CA) (details below)
• 5/ The radius of all glyphs and healing skills is way to small. As it stands now, the druid makes the “stacking meta” even more mandatory than ever before.
• 6/ The staff and glyphs come together, yet together they are clunky: staff seems meant as a ranged weapon (why a 1200 range otherwise), especially when optimizing staff #1 may require some distance to the target, while glyphs all work on druid centered very short range, forcing him/her to stack with other players. Make glyphs apply around the current target (be it an ally or an enemy), or the druid if no target
• 7/ Ranger has a lot of regeneration sources, yet the druid does not synergize at all with regeneration. Make it so that regeneration also grant astral force
• 8/ channeling combo fields is not fun: you must entirely rely on allies to make a proficient use of them. Although I understand that combo fields are meant to promote interaction between players, one should be able to trigger a bit ones own fields. Otherwise, please turn elementalists fire fields into channeled fields so that they stop being able to singlehandedly provide perma fury + 25 might
• 9/ carpal tunnel syndrom mk. 2, a.k.a. the grenade engineer rebuilt as a healer: way too many ground targeted abilities, especially in CA. Some ground targetted skills should be replaced character targetted abilities (keep Ancestral Grace as is !)

Now, here is what I think should change in DETAILS

New pets

• All wyverns: turn “Wing buffet” into stun/knockdown. I understand it feels less like adult wyverns, however an uncontrolled knockback is extremely annoying and makes the pet pratically unusable (there is already for enough uncontrolled knockbacks around with longbow rangers)
• All wyverns: autoattack cast needs to be reduced to one second !
• Fire wyvern: change F2 A.I. so that the pet closes in on the target before triggering fire field
• Bristleback: swap “Sharpen spines” skill with “Rain of Spikes” skill. “Sharpen spines” is an uninteresing skill that could very well be baked into base attack and replaced with a new skill with more interesting effects. “Rain of Spikes” as an active skill is an interesting option, as it will allows the ranger to trigger it when it is really proficient (pet in melee range or enemies stacked). As a passive skill, it is just a waste of pet damage since pet #1 deals more single target damage when the pet is at 600 range of target
• Currently, the tiger becomes the stronger cat with its low cd F2. If that is not a bug to be corrected, the cd should be increased

All pets and summons

• Pets should inherit all their stats from the ranger with some scaling depending on pet family (i.e. 0.8 (dmg stats) – 2 (survival stats) from ranger +/- 0.3 – 0.6 from pet family)
• Pets should get all their healing and boons as exact copies of the healing/boons received by their master
• Ranged pet should have all their skills with the same range (900 / 1200), or at least all pet controlled skills

Astral force

• Many changes to allow for stacking it outside of group situation and while using other weapons too (it is way too tied to the staff at the moment)
• Astral force should not be earned off fully healed targets
• Astral force should be earned something along the lines as as:
  - 1/16 from conditions ticks (per condition intensity level, max 1.5 per second)
  - 1/2 from regeneration ticks (max 2 per second if multiple targets affected)
  - 1.5 from direct attacks or combo direct attacks (per hit. Max on tick per skill/trait per second)
  - 3 from direct heals (skills or traits), pet outgoing heals (i.e. not drake selfheal), pet heals from F2 traited with “Invigorating bond” or combo heals (per hit. Max on tick per skill/trait per second)
  - multihit skills such as “troll unguent” and “hunter’s call” should only trigger one tick of astral force (well, I consider them as oversight actually)
• When cancelling CA early, remaining astral force should be kept (I think necros would be very angry if lifeforce disappeared upon cancelling death shroud). Astral force works exacly like life force for all other points (does not dicrease out of fights, slowly decrease when CA active, does not disappear when logged of), so let’s streamline it completely. The way it works now, you feel “forced” to completely exhaust CA instead of cancelling it

Celestial Avatar

• Should also affect traits
• If cancelling CA early is changed to not drain astral force anymore, cancelling CA early should then be given a CD (just as necro shroud) to avoid players abusing effects triggered on entering CA.
• While entering and leaving celestial avatar, glyph cd should reset (since their use is so different)
• Slightly increased healing power scaling to encourage using that stat (at least rejunvenating tides and cosmic ray)
• Should grant some stability to the druid (akin to leech form) (not necessarily self renewing stacks, but something along the lines of 3 20s stacks, so that the druid can start healing quietly yet dedicated CC can take him/her off)
• All 5 skills radii made 360
• More distinct CA #1 to #4. Currently, they all look like strong heals with some little flavour. One should grant stability, another protection maybe (altough I would leave that one to staff)
• Remove the channeling on #4, or make it grant also a pulsing 1s stability while channeling (in the later case, channeling time could be increased to make it heal less as a tradeoff with granting pulsing stability)
• Longer CD on some to force druids to think instead of the mindless spam that comes off many too short CD skills
• Less ground targeted heals, more character targeted ones (healing around targeted enemy/ally
• #5 should not root, otherwise most of the effect will be lost with enemies moving out of the effect area
• #5 should be ground targettable (or even better, able to target an enemy or ally)

Staff

• increased damage, heal, power scaling and healing power scaling across the board
• much more healing power scaling for #1, #2, #5 (yet staff skills should not compete with CA in terms of raw healing, otherwise the later becomes useless in turn)
• #1 should be able to target both allies and foes
• #2, make the wisp part undodgable. Astral wisp should also inflict damage on enemies around the target. Could grant fury/power/retaliation too, or, even better, act as a light field (very fit for a orbiting light wisp)
• #2 duration should be increased to 6s, so that the wisp can complete the 3rd circle and heal/damage equally all targets.
• #2 should be able to target both enemies and allies. When targetting an ally, the target damage is converted into additional initial heal to that player. Staff #1 and #2 being able to target both allies and foes would bring more interesting decisions to the staff
• #3 correct the channeling bug when targetting a close location, make it work like other movement skills that follow the ground without requiring a line of sight (e.g. ranger/warrior greatsword movements). Could grant protection too, and blind the enemies in range (after all, a wisp is a bright light)
• #4 increase immobilize duration to 3s per target. Should also grant retaliations to allies hit (vines have thorns), and possibly bleeding to enemies.
• #5 make it able to transform all projectiles (i.e. like guardian wall)

Glyphs

• All base radii extented to 360, and 600 for “of unity” (NF) and “of the Tides” (CA) to put them in line with similar skills from necromancer shroud #4 and guardian GS #5 skills respectively
• Increase damage across the board or give the more (interesting) effects
• Make them all instant casts except “of unity” and “of the Tides”
• Glyphs should be able to target enemies / allies / the druid and affect targets around them (similar to staff skills, provides diversified gameplay)
• Glyph of rejuvenation: add the pet missing pet healing part ! (the pet should always receiver the bigger heal, whether the druid is in NF or CA)
• Glyph of empowerment: lackluster when compared to water spirit. Boost duration to 10s and maybe make it grant damage buffs along (fury and/or some might stacks for the same duration as the glyph)
• Glyph of alignment: increase conditions duration to 5s
• Glyph of unity: large boost to damage per tick and power scaling, it is too small at the moment to make it even remotely usefull in solo/small group situations.
• Glyph of unity: add an icd per target (1s probably) to the damage dealt to avoid overspike situations when the druid is being targetted by a large number of enemies. This and the above point should make for a comfortable middleground between insignificant damage and overspike

• Note: making most dual damagin/healing skills and glyphs able to target enemies/allies/the druid will make the staff fully operational as their won’t anymore be incompatiblities between staff range and glyph radii.

Traits

• Druidic clarity should also include a stun breaker
• Cultivated synergy: the druid and the pet could heal each other when in range. But that is really not the change I am most worried about
• Lingering light: the cosmic wisp should be triggered around both the pet and the druid (because it is lost if it triggers only around the druid, and (s)he is far from allies). It should be a copy of the astral wisp (i.e. also inflict damages and grant boons / or light field), however, it should only heal/damage for half the amount of astral wisp (currently the same amount). This way, we again get some middle ground: if the pet and the druid are stacked, they get the full effect just as of BWE3. If they are not, both can support allies around (i.e. pet in melee and druid at range).
• Ancient seed: should work also on knock backs (it seems to already be the case but the tooltip does not mention it) and on fears, so that it operates on all control effect types.

Traits CA forms

• Note: optional: having traits that change between NF and CA and affect differently both forms (along with CA skills and glyph changes) would bring more consistency to the druid. The suggestion below were more or less creating by inverting the names and effects from one form to the other
• Druidic clarity CA: should turn into “Star Light”: gives one of all boons while exiting CA (duration ?) (other option: druidic clarity merged with Celestial shadow to make the CA switch of this skill)
• Primal echoes CA: should turn into “Celestial symphony”: grants the CD reduction to CA skills (which should then be 10-20% baseline longer) and, upon leaving CA, grants 1 stack of 3s stability of allies around
• Live vicariously CA: shoud turn into ’ “Share vicariously” ’: while in CA, healing you do allies inflict damage to enemies around
• Cultivated synergy CA: should turn into “Deadly energy”: using a healing skill damages enemies around you and your pet
• Celestial shadow CA: if not baked into Drudic clarity, CA form if this trait should be Daylight brightness: reveal all stealthed enemies around and inflict them with blindness
• Verdant etching CA: should turn into “Bright etching”: instead of summoning a seed of life (which is a CA skill already), this skill should turn into summoning an astral wisp around the character the glyph was targeted on (assuming glyphs are made targettable as they should be, or around druid if they are not)
• Grace of the land CA: should turn into “Splendor of the suns”: while in NF, grant X% more condition damage to allies around

*Overall druid

• Needs much more support options and gameplay diversity
• Needs streamlined astral force generation across all gameplays
• Needs more synergy with all damage/healing types, even combo
• Needs more staff dps
• Needs glyphs that are compatible with ranged staff
• Needs greater scaling with healing power. At the moment, the HP scaling is lackluster while the spec lacks a lot of damage, which encourages once again to select zerker stats. Kind of sad for a spec that is supposed to be a dedicated healer
• Needs traits that change depending on whether the druid is in NF or CA.
• Melee staff animation instead of caster animation is sad, but it won’t kill me
• I would have enjoyed more vine/plant animations. Currently, the druid seems to be more connected to light/stars than to plants :/ (hence the moonkin comparison in 1/)

Note1 : the proposition of allowing druid staff, glyphs and CA form skills to target either an enemy, an ally or self and have them take effect around the target would open for really interesting gameplay options: druid could force an enemy of its mates (otherwise the enemy would inflict the druid AoE on them) or discourage enemies from closing in on an ally.
Note2: please don’t come saying glyphs should stay as they are just because elementalist glyphs have no target either. If that is the case, then please simply rename “glyphs” into something else and make it.
Note2: if having a skill be able to target both enemies, allies and self is technically difficult, then you could resort on making all these skills ground targettable (druid would then with something like 10-15 ground targetted abilities, which is quite terrible in my opinion, yet better than useless glyphs targeted on self with a riny radius)

Conclusion
Druid for the moment feels terribly lackluster, like a rushed one dimensional party healbot that does not require any thinking, and will be completely avoided out of WvW / raids / specific PvP comps). It is either avoid it outside of groups, or forget about staff and use it once in a few to run for CA while in a group. It definitely requires a strong overhaul and another 4th beta week event to test the changes. As it is now, I will clearly not use it even if it secures me a raid spot, and will stick with my ranger (with an improved pet at least). Better not raid than play a mindless and clunky spec. It is really disappointing to see the first elite spec revealed in such a bad state. Especially when reaper, tempest, chrono or berserker are so fun to play.

If I wanted to say really bad things, I would go as far as saying that raids happened to be overtuned and druid was hastily changed to provide some counter. I doubt that is actually the case, but the current implementation feels like it.

First, we will start with FACTS (incl. what seems to be bugs). Correct me if I am wrong. NF = normal form, CF = celestial form. What definitely looks like bugs is emphasized in bold

EDIT: looks like the forum sometimes transforms “5 s” (without the space) into “kitten”.

Pets
General

• The ability to go underwater is obviously tied to the pet and not to the family: tigers are cat yet they are not amphibious
• New pets active abilities F2 have a very short cast time (up to no cast time), except for the tiger which uses cat leap cast time
• New pets could not be selected in PvP (hope this is a bug)
• Except for fire wyvern and bristleback (which is ranged), new pets all have at least one skill that allows them to quickly close in on a target from 400 at least. Tiger and electric wyvern use an activated closer, while smokescale has two automatic closers

Wyverns

• Akin to drakes with less vitality. They hit for less than a drake with very slow attak animations that often miss if the enemy moves. Just as drakes, their base attack is a short range (130) AoE which can hit at least 3 enemies (tested)
• Attack 3 is an uncontrollable knockback with very slow casting animation
• Wyverns F2 create combo fields
• Fire wyvern: when activated, the F2 ability is triggered imediately at the current wyvern location, instead of telling it to go to the selected target and then only start channeling the fire field
• Electric wyvern: the activated F2 ability lacks an electric combo field fact

Tiger

• Your basic cat
• Activated F2 ability tooltip lacks a 10s cd fact. That cd looks very short (especially when the skill grants 15s of fury)
• Activated F2 ability has a 400 range, the buff it provides has a 240 range and is triggered after the leap

Smokescale

• Stats are between a bear and a wold, the skillset looks more like wolves’. The base attack damage is in the same range as wolves
• Activated F2 ability is kitten smoke field on a 20s cd
• Automatic skill #3 is a burst skill which inflicts around 10k in 2s
• Automatic skill #3 has a 750 range. When pet is set to attack within the 750 range, it will immediately use this skill to attack target. When pet is to attack outside the 750 range, it will first go to around 500 of target then will use this skill to “jump” over the last 500 => looks like their is a small IA flaw here

Bristleback

• Stats akin to devourer, as well as base attack damage
• Attacks have a 1200 range except for the AoE (600)
• Automatic skill #2 is a cone projectile AoE with a 3.5s channel. At short range, it inflicts around 10k damage (if most attacks hit target), while at long range (where the pet normally sits), it is almost useless (at most 3 attacks hit target)
• Activated F2 ability instantly grants 1 stack of bleed to the next kittens (not attacks)
• Signet of the wild active effect (or similar trait) makes grow excessively large

Devourers

• While testing new pets, I noticed that 90% of my devourers base attacks do not inflict the poison they should

Druid
General

• The word “allies” in tooltips is inconsistent. Some times it means “allies + druid”, sometimes it means “other allies, druid excepted”
• The druid spec (staff and glyphs) has no access to stability (without using another weapon or utility)
• The druid spec (staff and glyphs) has no access to stun breakers
• The druid (staff and glyphs) spec does not grant any boon
• The druid (staff and glyphs) spec has little access to conditions: 1s of immobilize every 16s, 3s of AoE cripple and + weakness every 16s (range 300), and 5s of immobilize + 5x 5s bleed on hitting CCed target with a 10s icd if investing into a grandmaster trait
• The druid spec has one blast finisher on a 12s cd in NF, and one blast finisher on kitten cd while in CF
• The druid spec has one 5s / 20s cd water field (hidden on staff #5) while in NF and one 5s / 8s cd channeled water field whin in CF

Astral force (used to trigger celestial form)

• Accumulates 2.5% for each tick of direct heals, whether they are active or passive (from traits), whether they heal for 0 (i.e. the heal activates without healing) or more. Includes the heal from water spirit activated heal
• Accumulates 0.25% for each tick of direct damages, whether they are active or passive
• Accumulates 2.5% after life leech effects (e.g. sigil of leeching). Impossible to tell whether leech effects are actually 2.75 (2.5 heal + 0.25 dmg) or just 2.5, the difference is to small. When triggered by “Hunter’s call” (horn #4), the life leech effect did not provide astral force. However, this skill still provides much more force than other attack skills since it is a multihit skill that grants 16*0.25
• Does not accumulate on combo effects (water field heals, combo damages), regeneration ticks, condition ticks, pet activities (even F2 triggered heals), the heals triggered by the trait “Live Vicariously”, the “Signet of the wild” passive heal, and the water spirit triggered heals
• Is completely drained upon cancelling CF early (F5)
• Can’t replenish while in CF

Staff

• Staff skills don’t benefit from “Quick draw” trait
• #1 lists a maximum of 3 targets, but can actually hit three targets per mode, i.e. it can in a single tick both damage up to 3 targets and heal up to 3 targets. Don’t know if it is a bug, but it seems fine to me
• #1 is quite as much a heal as an attack, however it can’t target allies
• #2 can be dodged. Dodging it also cancels the healing part. Damages target only, heals allies around
• #2 astral wisp (as well as cosmic wisp from trait) last 5s, which means they will perform 2.5 around the target/druid. The location the wisps appear at around the target/druid seems random
• #3 requires line of sight, which causes annoyance in slopes. The channeling time is the same whether the druid stands right on the target or 1200 units away. This means that, while targeting under your feet, you will hover uselessly at the same place for 2s
• #4 hits each enemy only once. I could not test it but given the former, I suppose that “number of targets: 3 + number of impacts: 7” means that it can immolize up to 3 enemies and cure from 4 up to 7 allies depending on how many enemies were hit
• #5 lacks a water field tooltip fact. It also works more like a mesmer “temporal curtain” than a guardian “wall of reflection”, which means it is ineffective against ballistic projectiles or tall enemies which projectile starting point is high (e.g. hushs rocks, fractal harpies knock balls)
• #5: enemies can be healed by other enemies projectiles transformed into heals by the skill !!!!

Celestial form

• Lasts for 20s if not cancelled early
• #2 “Seed of life” takes about 3s to “bloom” (i.e. heal and cure) after the cast is finished
• #4 is channel
• #5 roots and has a very small range (enemies move !). Tooltip lists 5 stacks of 1s immobilize, but it is actually 5 stacks of 1s vulnerability

Glyphs

• All have a range of 300
• All lack tooltip fact from trait “Verdant Etching”
• Glyph of empowerment" tooltip states allies, but effect includes the ranger too
• Glyph of rejuvenation has no pet healing component, i.e. pet will not get any heal if farther than 3 or if 5 other player allies around (both NF and CF)
• Glyph of unity: NF effect can be excessively strong. Their is no icd to the damage being inflincted. Therefore, if the focus on the druid is strong enough, it has the potential to almost instantly kill the five linked enemies. Combined with signet of stone, I can be deadly in WvW. Tried it in PvP with players relunctant to hit me, got 3 from full health to downed in a matter of seconds.
• Glyph of unity: link is broken if target moves beyond 240, and does not reinstate if target moves back in

Traits

• “Druidic clarity” removes 13 conditions, i.e. all currently existing conditions. Should be changed to “all” so that the functionality is kept if more conditions are added in the future
• “Celestial shadow”: even if they are within range of each other, the heal from the pet does not heal the ranger, and the heal from the ranger does not heal the pet. Seems ok to me, but it is a contradiction with all other skills that state “… allies” and include the ranger in allies
• “Live vicariously”: the trait is triggered only by real heals on allies/pet (i.e. heals that heal more than 0 on targets that are not full HP). All the skills/traits listed as not granting astral force also don’t trigger this trait
• “Verdant etching”: the triggered seed of life is the same as CF #2
• “Natural mender”: tooltip lacks duration fact in the trait panel
• “Grace of the land”: tooltip states allies, includes druid
• “Lingering light”: the wisp appears on the druid, whether the heal ally is close or far. The wisp is the same as staff #2 (except that it only heals since the “target” is the druid)

arkealia.2713:

For those who don’t want to do the testing and need some accurate values:
Healing Power Scaling:

Staff1 (Solar Beam): 0.02
Staff2 (Astral Wisp): 0.05
Staff3 (Ancestral Grace): 1.00
Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025

CF1 (Cosmic Ray): 0.2
CF2 (Seed of Life): 0.5
CF3 (Lunar Impact): 0.5
CF4 Rejuvenating Tides): 0.15

Glyph of Rejuvenation (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Rejuvenation in CF (both effects): 1.00
Glyph of Alignment (in CF): 1.00
Glyph of Unity (in CF): 0.05

Life Vicariously: 0.01
Cultivated Synergy: 0.2
Lingering Light => Cosmic Wisp (same as staff2): 0.05
Verdant Etching => Seed of Life (same as CF2): 0.5

Feel free to correct if I’m wrong.

I found an error: Staff5 (Natural Convergence): 0.025. Staff5 in normal formal is:
Staff5 (Sublime Conversion): 0.2.

And I will add these for damage Power scaling:

Staff1 (Solar Beam): 0.12
Staff2 (Astral Wisp): 0.32
Staff4 (Vine Surge): 0.2

CF5 (Natural Convergence): 0.16

Glyph of Alignment: 0.4
Glyph of Equality: 0.4
Glyph of the Tides: 0.4
Glyph of Unity: 1.15

Glyphs in CF: no damage

I feel like the rate at which shredder gyro triggers whirl finisher is excessive. Once every second would be more reasonable.
Especially while the hammer already has a whirl finisher on a 6s cooldown.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Some attacks are a bit unforgiving, downing me as zerk reaper in RS form dealing 29k damage is absurd. This works in single player games – name a few: God of War, Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, Bloodborne etc. but we are in a zerg where visuals blur everything. In my opinion such boss battles should be easier and the hard stuff in raids/dungeons.

Activate “effect LOD” option, it is your secret weapon against all these flashy skill effects. If it is still too bright/cluttered for you, there are some post-processor presets around that help to reduce the issue

Zenith.7301:

What’s gonna happen is that people camp ranged weapons because trying to melee in a zerg event means you will usually get 1 shot and straight to defeated with all the lethal AoE spam mobs do.

So bring your ranged weapon and spam 1. Voila, survival problems go away. Sucks if you’re melee, but that’s the consequence of putting in multiple mobs attacking at the same time and you can only dodge so many times.

It is perfectly fine to melee. It tested melee zerker and shaolin thief this weekend without issue on event bosses once I had learned their telegraphs. It just needs you to look at enemies and dodge when they cast facing you. All in all, it is a good training for raids and good thing that PvE at least requires a bit of reactivity. Btw, big frogs have really long telegraphs. It is hard to miss them.

Yet this does not discount the OP’s opinion, but I can’t add much on this point as I did not try any tanky build.

symke.3105:

I am not seeing 50$ worth of value in HOT, so I will wait for the price to drop. Hopefully many will think the same as me, so the price will drop soon after release.

I instead predict few will do so and you will end up joining later, feeling lame for paying the same price although you said it was not worth and, on top of that, being late and having missed all release opportunities.

6116 posts (except those stating the opposite opinion) of endless and useless rants always stating the same old “I am a vet, I deserve more and newcomers less”, or “The exp pack is not enough, I won’t buy it”. I must say I am really impressed (but not exactly by how bright humankind is).

Just a small reminder: for the most of us vets, one hour of guild wars 2 entertainment is around 0.01 €.h-1. If you are so unhappy with it, please, by any mean go make something else of your life.