Guild Wars 2

With the boon duration you get from Rune of Durability + Nature Magic you already have permanent swiftness just from WHaO. There’s no need to take Natural Stride then, and you can easily get more condi removal from Verdant Etching instead.

jewishjoyride.4693:

Maul has a 3/4 second cast time. The auto attack chain takes 1 3/4 seconds to complete. This doesn’t take in to account after cast, which only makes the whole thing take longer. You can manage 2 mauls and 3 auto attack chains before weapon swap comes off cooldown. 11 attacks total. An opening strike every 1 1/2 seconds would be about right.

Is it possible in a party to hit that? Maybe. Is it practical? Not very.

Your assumptions here are incorrect. You can manage 3 mauls because of quickdraw. If you actually take the aftercast into consideration the rotation goes:
Weapon swap —> maul —> first 2 parts of auto chain —> maul —> full auto chain + swoop —> maul —> weapon swap. The rotation changes a bit depending on alacrity/quickness uptime, but basically just spam maul every time it is on cooldown even if it means disrupting the auto chain before the final hit.

You don’t really need to hope for the best. With quick draw and two-handed your weapon swap cooldown aligns perfectly with 3 mauls. The first maul is a remorseless proc from the weapon swap fury. The second one you need to get lucky with either revenant pulsing fury or two-handed training granting you there. The third one you can get fury from weapon swap with clarion bond, which also gives you quickness for the first rapid fire when you swap back to longbow.

The three mauls are ~60% of your total damage in greatsword, so doing 25% more damage of each of them is a 15% damage boost while getting 2 is a 10% boost and then you need to increase this number a bit from the first strikes on the auto attacks/swoop.
The real reason why remorseless isn’t that great in a group where you don’t need the additional vulnerability. Remorseless basically does nothing for longbow because of the numerous small hits, while Predator’s Onslaught is a 10% damage boost to longbow skills as well.

The problem about them is that they only have two dye channels. If they had 4 that were thought out a bit more they could potentially be very awesome =(

I think you are not giving Spirit of Nature the credit it deserves. With Monk runes and 1200 healing power it is over 600 healing per second, on top of regen already being more than 400. That’s more hp/s than any other class can do with their healing skill. I just don’t feel like Glyph of Unity is very necessary since you only get the increased healing while in CA, and if you are running a healing build you already heal up everyone to max in no time with CA skills. Also, you say Unity has a larger radius, but it is only 600 tether range, 400 initial range compared to the 1000 range of spirit (only passive effect). The lower cooldown is incredibly nice though.
Overall I think spirit is a lot better because it gives you a lot higher sustain during the downtime of CA, wihch is where you actually need the additional healing.

For Untethered, I did exactly that because the Dulfy guide said the same thing. Walked up one side, killed all the mobs and walls without getting hit by either vines or mobs. Glided down, repeated for the other side, still no luck. I don’t know if it erroneously counts pets as getting hit?

Can confirm, exactly the same issue with “Avoid traps”. Same thing goes for “Untethered” during Bitter Harvest.

Just a small correction, Spirit of Nature does scale with healing power now and fairly decently at that (0.15/s). That means that for a mobile fight where the spirit survives even just 30s that’s a 4.5 HP scaling. On top of that it has the 95% damage reduction, 28k hp with the trait and the heal ticks on itself so it is pretty much invulnerable unless it gets actively targeted by the boss. Of course there is still the problem of being immobile…

Nature’s Vengeance is a trait that makes ranger spirits pulse certain boons. The tooltip states that the duration of the boons is increased by boon duration (very evident since nature magic gives you 20% boon duration from a minor trait). However, boon duration does absolutely nothing for the boons.

I managed to fix it! I had already done what you suggested and that didn’t work, but I did a system restore and launched the client directly from the gw2.exe without the /clientport 80 and that seemed to fix it. Interestingly enough, launching from gw2.exe did not work before the restore as I had already tried running from the /clientport.

I have, and to no success. I had to install the game through a shortcut with the path “C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2\GW2.exe” /clientport 80 because of some issues I had previously, so possibly connected to that?

My launcher does not seem to update at all, and it is not just a case of high load on the server here, check out the picture. Anyone else having the same problem?

Regarding your second point, with all the traits that activate on pet f2 skills you definitely want to have full control over when you use it. Having the taunt and blind randomly go off on a timer would suck really bad.

The vast majority of damage from longbow comes from rapid fire and barrage. The auto attack damage is incredibly low when you are stacking and you want to minimize the amount of time spent camping longbow for that reason. The 10% increased attack speed does not allow you to cast anymore rapid fires or barrages between weapon swap, so it only increases the damage of your auto attacks, whereas Predator’s Onslaught is a damage modifier for all the longbow skills, plus it also works for S/A.

It seems interesting, but I don’t think it will work too well. The dazes have rather long durations so you are wasting a lot of the potential damage of confusion by the enemy being unable to cast any skills, and druid has no other way of applying confusion (except unreliable pet). If the confusion on interrupt did not have an ICD I could see it being very strong, but with the high spammability of the dazes you aren’t going stack much confusion at all.

I feel like everyone here who says that poison doesn’t do enough trap does not realise that Viper’s Next hits three times per pulse for a total of 9 poison stacks, making it the hardest hitting trap of the lot. With 1800 condition damage, Poison Master and Trapper’s Expertise the trap alone will do 10188 damage. Compare this to 6022 damage for Flame Trap and 9360 with Spike Trap (assuming you take Hidden Barbs; otherwise it is 7800). Basically, the trap hits REALLY hard, the cooldown is only 5s longer than Flame Trap and you can use sword #2 to get ~50% uptime of weakness from the leap finisher.
If condition removal wasn’t such a big problem in pvp, poison build would be very strong yes, and you aren’t nearly as reliant of keeping your enemy within the bonfire. The condition removal from druid MIGHT be enough, but if it isn’t you lose a big chunk of your damage. Still, I think it is definitely worth testing once HoT is released.

Sandzibar.5134:

Quick draw is also triggered by moving to CA form, but none of the CA skills benefit from the cooldown reduction proc mechanic.

Triggering quick draw when activating CA should be intended, it works like that with anything that changes your weapon skills, including picking up environmental weapons or going into water.

Celestial avatar occasionally randomly ends (unrelated to SotW bug).
I’ve only ever seen it happen when I spam-click Natural Convergence just as the animation for Lunar Impact finishes, but it only happens during combat with things that have interrupts so there must be some other element to it as well.

Aeolus Skylla.5037:

My pet is completely disabled. It’s acting like I have my pet hidden, but it won’t let me reactivate it. Happened when I went to Heart of the Mists, then back to the PvE world.

Also should be noted my pets aren’t disabled in Heart of the Mists, but I can’t pick the new ones.

This one is caused by selecting one of the new pets in pve, going to heart of the mists where they are blocked and then logging out. Upon attempting to reenter pve the pets end in the locked state. Reproduction rate: 3/3 so far.

I think I possibly found the cause of the bug causing Celestial Avatar to end prematurely (especially in pvp). Every time I have experienced this bug it has been when trying to do the combo of Lunar Impact immediately followed by Natural Convergence to proc the Ancient Seeds trait while they are dazed.
It seems like queuing up Natural Convergence while Lunar Impact is still casting, then getting Lunar Impact interrupted and pressing Natural Convergence again is what does it. Reproduction rate somewhere between 60-80%.

General
The overall feeling of the druid specialization is pretty good. It is definitely fun to play and visually appealing. I like that by properly utilizing the traits it is possible to build astral force in a reasonable time even without locking you into staff. However, with the sole exception of Moment of Clarity increasing the duration of all the dazes there is no synergy with any of the other ranger traits at all. I am not sure what can be done about this, but currently druid adds nothing to either direct damage or condition damage builds. Unless we get some synergy with the core specializations I don’t really see druid getting much use which is a shame for how fun it is.

Astral Force
Generating this is way too easy when surrounded by a lot of allies and way too hard when playing alone. One way to solve this would be to increase the amount generated when casting a skill that heals an ally, but only apply the heal once per skill. This could also fix the problem with Troll Unguent basically generating the full bar.
Generation with staff is probably a little bit too strong. If not using staff, Verdant Etching and Cultivated Synergy generate at an acceptable rate, but trying to generate astral force purely from damage is much too slow.
Losing all astral force when getting downed is annoying since right after rallying is the time where you need healing the most.

Staff

• Weapon identity: The staff is to use, but a bit under-tuned. The feeling of a position based weapon has been captured pretty well and lining up the auto attack to get the most out of it is fun. Quick Draw not working needs to be fixed.
• Solar Beam: This skill is mostly fine. The heal isn’t too big, but it charges up astral force really quickly which is fine. The damage is a little bit on the low side for the main damage source on this weapon. The beam has some functionality issues with obstruction. An example is the urban battleground fractal, after defeating siegemaster dulfy I was unable to hit the gate with the staff at all.
• Astral Wisp: Incredibly unreliable against moving targets which makes it frustrating to use. If you cast it on an enemy in pvp they can just make a small sidestep whenever the wisp is close to you and it is nearly impossible to “catch” it for the healing. Either increase the speed at which it rotates, increase the radius of the wisp to make it easier to touch, or consider having two wisps spinning simultaneously (while still keeping the 1 second interval between healing).
• Ancestral Grace: Fun skill, I really like this one, but it feels like it is missing something. The healing amount is fine and the distance traveled is good. Some damage when you land would help with the staffs very low damage, but it might make the skill too strong. I would be fine with a bit lower heal as a trade-off for some damage. One functionality I would love to see on this skill is to allow it to go up ledges, essentially turning you into an Infiltrator’s Arrow. Also, the skill currently locks you in animation if you use it at short range.
• Vine Surge: Currently the worst part of the staff. It is really hard to land against anything that moves which would be fair enough if the reward for landing it would justify it. The immobilize has a too short duration and the damage is too low. Perhaps make the damage scale in the same way based on distance that revenant Coalescence of Ruin does.
• Sublime Conversion: At first I didn’t understand why the skill doesn’t convert the raw damage number into healing to make it work kind of like a reverse reflection, but then I noticed that the skill is actually also a water field. If the water field part is intentional then I think the skill is alright, otherwise I would like to see the healing scale based on the damage of the projectile it eats.

Celestial Avatar

• Cosmic Ray: The healing is fine, but it is way too hard to land on anything that moves. Either allow the skill to automatically cast on a targeted ally or increase the radius.
• Seed of Life: The healing and condition removal are fine, but the time for the seed to pop is a bit too high.
• Lunar Impact: The daze is too strong. With Moment of Clarity it is a 6 second daze that is fairly spammable. The daze duration needs to be reduced to 2-2.5 seconds base. It feels really weird that you call down an impact that still affects enemies, yet doesn’t do any damage. I would like to see a small damage scaling on it, probably something in strength to the glyphs.
• Rejuvenating Tides: Amazing skill and fun to use.
• Natural Convergence: This skill feels so bad to use due to being locked in place. I would like to be able to move while casting this. As compensation for the buff maybe the slow should be added to the final hit instead of applying on every pulse.

Glyphs

• Glyph of Rejuvenation: This skill is fine in normal form. However, the Celestial Avatar version of this skill punishes you for using it along with Glyph of Unity as you do less healing to yourself and therefore less to your ally. It is weird for the skill to do overall less healing like this.
• Glyph of Alignment: The normal mode of this skill is fine. The Celestial version is really lackluster. There is already a ton of condition removal available in from both Celestial Avatar and glyphs in general with Verdant Etching. The skill would feel a lot better if it applied boons to allies instead of removing conditions.
• Glyph of Equality: Great skill.
• Glyph of the Tides: Once again the normal form is fine, but for pve it will be taken for the pull not the push. The pull on the Celestial version has a much too short radius; if anything is without the range to actually be pulled you can already hit them with AoEs. Increase the radius to 450-600 to make is similar to Temporal Curtain / Binding Blade.
• Glyph of Empowerment: The effect is fine, but why is this the only glyph to not have any immediate effect? Make the normal version do the same damage as all the other glyphs and the Celestial version apply the same healing.
• Glyph of Unity: Very fun skill and highly unique. Makes for some interesting decision making when fighting against this skill. However, why is the instant damage lower than all the other glyphs? Increase the damage to be on par with the non-elite glyphs.

Traits

• Celestial Being: Nothing much to say about this, it unlocks the new mechanics.
• Cultivated Synergy: Great trait.
• Druidic Clarity: This trait feels a bit bland with all the condition removal already available. I think adding a stun break on casting Celestial Avatar with an internal cooldown would make it able to compete with Cultivated Synergy.
• Primal Echoes: The trait is fine, but it currently suffers from the staff being underwhelming. On a side note, I love the 8 second internal cooldown to make it work on every weapon swap if you are using Rune of the Warrior, I would love to see this on the Skirmishing weapon swap traits as well.
• Live Vicariously: Fine minor trait, but the healing power scaling is a bit too low. Currently, even if you spam one heal on five allies every second while tethering with Glyph of Unity in Celestial Avatar (best case scenario) it is still weaker than regeneration, both based on base number and scaling.
• Celestial Shadow: Fun trait, not very useful in pve, but in pvp it has potential. Take this trait and the Scrapper and Reaper on your team will love you.
• Natural Stride: Good for open world pve, not much else. I think that is fine.
• Verdant Etching: Really nice trait, this trait is the sole reason why I don’t feel locked into staff in order to generate astral force. Like Seed of Life the blooming time of the seed needs to be lowered though.
• Natural Mender: Fine trait, I like that the stacking mechanic, but I don’t like that it is only outgoing healing. It would be nice if the trait also increased healing you did to yourself – especially since we are encouraged to heal ourselves to heal our allies with Glyph of Unity.
• Ancient Seeds: Fun and strong trait, but possibly a little bit too strong with how easily available dazes are. Increasing the internal cooldown to 15-20 seconds would probably make it feel less un-fun to play against.
• Grace of the Land: I haven’t actually tried this trait, but I like the idea of protection against conditions. Ties well with Druidic Clarity to ensure that you can focus on helping your allies with conditions when under heavy pressure.
• Lingering Light: This trait has the same problem as Astral Wisp. Also, I don’t like having a grandmaster trait that literally does nothing when playing alone. I would like to see the wisp heal yourself at a reduced rate to make up for the fact that you don’t have to be touched by it.