Guild Wars 2

Staff #1 is in an excellent place currently damage-wise, in my opinion.

Regarding astral force generation:

Initially I thought pure staff AA damage was generating astral force a ton faster than the other weapons, but after doing more testing I’ve realized the reason staff is filling the bar so quickly isn’t because of damage, it’s because of the properties of Solar Beam and how it interacts with the pet.

The game apparently believes Solar Beam is healing your pet whenever the beam passes over it, despite no green numbers popping up and the pet being at full health. This counts as healing and generates the bar rapidly. When the pet is out of the way of the beam, the bar doesn’t gain any astral force because the damage to astral ratios are so low. I’m not sure if the “healing despite being full health” is intentional or not, or whether it’s a bug.

I feel the damage to astral force ratios could use a significant change, because it makes celestial avatar almost irrelevant if you’re not running staff on your Druid. Astral force generation on non-staff weapons needs to be boosted significantly. Like double, if not triple the current ratios. With the staff “healing” the pet, I filled the bar in under ten seconds if I did it right. In comparison, it took me over a minute to fill the bar using all the longbow weapon skills. That’s not viable for non-staff Druid builds. At all.

These are my initial thoughts. Haven’t tried the new pets out and haven’t looked at the traits. Will give more critique as I move along.

Quick question:

Is this thread specifically about the Druid, or can we put feedback regarding the new pets here as well?

What if boon sharing between ranger and pet was baseline for the class, and the ranger got 50% of the boon stacks applied to the pet, which could then be increased to something like ~75% through traits?

That would prevent the ranger from becoming the minute-long boon machine that apparently everyone and their mother fears, but at the same time make pet/ranger synergy actually matter more than it does now.

Thoughts?

JKLeetro.6935:

My thought on this:

Guard – 15 Second CD w/o trait
Guard is no longer ground targetted AOE instead pet will remain near the ranger and only attack the target that is within 600 radius of ranger.
Pet will not chase the enemy unless ranger directly orders to which will end Guard discarding remaining time.
Pet guards an area pursing cripple for 1 second per second.
Pet and ranger gains protection for 1 second per second.
Pet casts (instant cast) taunt for 2 seconds on any enemies attacking ranger. (10 seconds ICD)
No stealth on the pet, but grants ranger stealth for 3 seconds.
Enemy’s point-capture contribution is slowed.

Guard should act as a mean for the ranger to protect him/herself during the cast. So pet should make any enemies trying to bypass the pet to go straight to the ranger during the effective duration. To compensate the effect should only last for 10 second.

Agree with this entirely, +1.

Some additional thoughts:

Protect Me!:

• Also becomes a PBAoE with 600 range around the ranger.

• Pet gains pulsing Aegis and Protection every two seconds for a six second duration (same duration that it currently has).

• During this time, pet takes all damage directed at ranger and any allies standing in range of the shout.

• Cooldown: 30 seconds.

• Duration: 6 seconds.

This essentially makes “Protect Me!” a party-wide block, which will further compliment the Ranger’s utility. Pretty straightforward, and the pulsing Aegis won’t help if it’s under fire by a ton of AoE or intense burst.

Search and Rescue!:

• Becomes ground-targeted. Range is 1200, target area itself is 400 in diameter.

• Pet gains 5 seconds of swiftness, pulsing stability every three seconds as it runs towards the targeted area.

• Pet will revive all downed allies in targeted area, starting with ally closest to the center of the circle.

• Cooldown: 75 seconds.

• Duration: 10 seconds if you’re including the pet’s travel time to the target area, 5 seconds if you’re not. Having the downed allies be closer to the pet’s starting location should naturally give your pet more time to resurrect them.

Knowing where your pet is actually going and knowing it has a fair chance of getting there in the first place will do wonders for “Search and Rescue!”’s viability, in my opinion.

Sic ’Em!:

• Movement speed bonus becomes super speed.

• Pet gains three stacks of stability upon activation of the shout.

• Ranger gets five stacks of might and three seconds of swiftness. Stacks with Resounding Timbre.

• Range of the shout is unchanged from 2000.

• Duration: unchanged.

• Cooldown: 30 seconds.

Not changing much here, the stealth reveal is the critical component of the shout and I’d rather not see it changed. More focused on giving the pet more opportunity to get there and making it easier for the ranger to follow up behind.

As this is focused more on the pre-SotP/WHAO shouts, I won’t comment on “Strength of the Pack!”. I think it’s fine anyway, really. And WHAO has it’s own thread.

My personal opinion is that all of the shouts should be viable untraited. Resounding Timbre should stack with them and improve upon them, but it should not be necessary to take the trait to make the shouts worthwhile.

Repeating “Nobody at Anet mains / secondaries the ranger,” “Anet hates the ranger class,” “It’s been this way for three years,” etc. etc. ad infinium does not help the situation now and it won’t help the situation in the future. It does not constitute constructive criticism.

I understand perfectly that tensions are running high. But constantly saying “fix it NOW!” without describing what needs fixing will get us nowhere. I urge everyone to take a step back, vent, and then come back when emotions have cooled.

As for dumping ALL feedback here or keeping it specific to WHAO, I would personally suggest keeping it related to We Heal as One, as that is the title of this thread and I believe it would be more prudent to focus on one thing at a time, instead of overwhelming any developer reading this with a list of complaints a mile long, and further obscuring focus.

Obviously I’m not the boss here, I’m just a player. But until a developer/red post/Wolfey tells me otherwise, I do suggest keeping discussion and brainstorming related to the topic this thread was made to handle.

To Wolfey, and Gaile: Thank you for caring, and I will take your word that developers are watching this and having back-room conversations.

Commenting again because I realized my last posts didn’t actually offer any possible solutions regarding WHAO balancing.

The balancing of We Heal as One, in my mind, depends largely on what the balance team feels is the “overpowering” issue of the skill as it existed on September 29.

Disclaimer: These are all logic-based solutions. I obviously don’t know how hard they are to implement via coding, and some may be harder than others. I am making a kittenumption in that I am considering all options to be possible. If I give any developers a headache as they mull these over (if they even read this post at all), then I apologize.

If the issue is the perma-quickness:

• Consider removing quickness from the list of boons that swap over from the pet when WHAO is used.

• Uncap might stacking.

• Cap movement-based boons (swiftness) at 30 seconds. If impossible to alter hard caps based on boon, apply the 30 second cap across the board, sans quickness, which will be removed from the table entirely.

If the issue is the sheer duration of the boons:

There are multiple options.

Option A:

• Hard cap all duration-based boons (fury, protection, regeneration, resistance, retaliation, swiftness, quickness, vigor) between 10 and 15 seconds. WHAO has an untraited 20 second cooldown. This will allow the swapped boons to expire before the skill comes off cooldown and reset their timers, preventing the minute-long durations that (I assume) were the issue.

• Uncap might stacking.

Option B:

• WHAO swaps between 50% and 60% of the boon’s remaining duration on the pet. So if you’ve managed to stack a 10 second protection boon onto you pet, when you pop WHAO your ranger gets between 5 and 6 seconds of protection, depending on the numbers that are ultimately chosen. This makes choosing when to pop WHAO very important in order to get the maximum benefit. It also opens up a fair amount of counterplay, as if another class identifies that the ranger is trying to stack boons, they can attempt to interrupt them or prevent the WHAO usage in order to reduce the ranger’s efficiency and ultimately hurt their boon upkeep.

• Again, uncap might stacking.

You’ll notice that I continuously say to uncap the might stacking. The reasoning for that is: in a game where a warrior can easily give 25 stacks of might across an entire party, and where an elementalist can continuously blast fire fields for area-wide might, there is, in my humble opinion, absolutely no reason to limit the ranger’s might stacking capability.

This is in part because the ranger has to waste a heal, an ultimate skill and pet swaps in order to get those 25 stacks of might, all of which have their own cooldowns and negatively effect the ranger if they use it at the wrong place or wrong time.

25 stacks of might also do not last long enough for more than one powerful burst of damage (the longbow #2 skill, Rapid Fire), which also has multiple forms of counterplay that I mentioned in one of my previous posts (again, to recap: reflects, invulnerability, blocking, and basic dodging, the last of which I actually forgot to mention prior). The only way to get those stacks to last longer is to trait for boon duration, at which point you’re hurting your damage and reducing your overall dps, might or no might.

All I want is for them to remove the might cap, because there is legitimately, absolutely no reason for it when several other classes can give 25 might stacks to an entire party.

Another solution is, why not just remove quickness from the boons that are copied over? Is that hard to code, is that not a thing?

Alright, I’ve managed to vent all my furious rage for now so I’ll try and keep this relatively constructive.

Today is Thursday morning, so I can say that roughly ~36 hours ago, the Tuesday balance patch went live and the the initial WHAO changes entered the game.

36 hours.

THIRTY.

SIX.

HOURS.

Gaile, I know you’re reading this thread, and I really do appreciate it. Thank you for attempting to communicate with us, and forgive me for directing these rhetorical questions at you.

How long did it take for icebow to get nerfed?

How long did cele d/d elementalist run rampant in the PvP arenas?

How many stacks of might can a warrior give, permanently, to their entire party?

Are rangers autoattackers, or do they primarily use their 2-5 skills to do their damage?

The main cause for my ire in this situation is, more than anything else, the sheer lack of logic demonstrated. What is wrong with a ranger being able to stack might in the first place? My warrior can stack upwards of 15 stacks of might using only his weapon skills, and he doesn’t have to gut his build for it. And he can give it to the ENTIRE PARTY!

For my ranger, before WHAO was nerfed, in order to get 25 stacks of might, I would need to:

• Use my Jungle Stalker’s F2 skill, Mighty Roar, which puts it on cooldown for 25 seconds.

• Swap my pet (which puts it on cooldown for 20 seconds) to procc Clarion Bond which has an ICD of 30 seconds. A combined 50 second cooldown.

• Use Strength of the Pack which has an activation time of 1 second and a cooldown of 60 seconds.

• Attack my target to build up might stacks. We’ll say this takes ~5 seconds if I’m saving my Rapid Fire and Barrage.

• Use my healing skill We Heal As One (1 second activation time, 20 second cooldown) to transfer my pet’s boons to myself and gain 25 stacks of might if I do this entire rotation properly.

• Use LB #2 Rapid Fire to deal ~15k damage in full Berserker gear if all shots land on the target. This is assuming I have LoS and the target does not have anything that would utterly ruin me, such as:
  * Any skills or traits utilizing reflect.
  * Any skills or traits utilizing block.
  * Any skills that utilize invulnerability, which doesn’t include the Warrior’s Defiant Stance ability for some reason despite Defiant Stance doing essentially the same thing with the added bonus of using their damage to heal you.

If, at any point, Rapid Fire and, to a lesser extent, LB #5 Barrage are somehow negated, I am out of luck. That was my entire burst. The might stacks did not last that long without you removing all damage from your build (this is how you get perma-quickness by the way), and might doesn’t even stack duration anyway.

I am going to be perfectly honest with you here, Gaile, because honesty is what you need right now, and I truly do ask you to forgive my bluntness. I love Anet and I love Guild Wars 2, but whispering sweet nothings and saying “It’s alright” and “You’ll do better next time” will not help solve the problem.

In my own, sincerest opinion, this smells like developer incompetence.

This smells like people who do not understand what the Ranger is capable of and what it is NOT capable of. This smells like people who are balancing a game based on hearsay and not solid numbers and information. And, most importantly, this smells like people who do not understand their playerbase.

If any of the developers even so much as glanced at the Ranger subforums, they would understand that things here are tense. There are many people here who feel ostracized and feel the developers, in no uncertain terms, simply do not give a flying kitten about them. Are some of them overreacting? Probably. Are there also legitimate concerns based the iffy track record of the profession they love? Definitely.

What the developers did here was multiply the “They hate the Ranger” issue by a factor of ten. They did not wait to gather data on how the WHAO change might have effected the gameplay environment. They did not wait to see how players would use it. Within hours of the change going live on Tuesday, Ranger players had already isolated the “perma-quickness build” (if it even deserves the term “build”, which is highly disputable in itself) that the balance team feared so much as extremely niche, and determined that it was not worthwhile in any scenario.

As someone else said, the balance team took a sledgehammer to a situation that needed a scalpel.

And regarding the “They hate Rangers” issue:

As an analogy, what happened here is the equivalent of a small child’s perceived bully placing a fun toy before him in an act of goodwill. “Here,” the bully says. “This should be fun to play around with!” Tentatively, the child reaches forward and runs his hand over the toy, thinking of all the fun he could have with it. After allowing the child a moment of happiness, the bully reaches down and snatches the toy away, walking away and leaving the child with nothing. The other children in the background are happily playing with their own toys, either unaware or willfully ignoring the situation.

This is how the players of this subforum think of the issue. They are the small child, the one tormented by the bully. The background children are the other classes they believe Anet “favors”, most notably Elementalist, Warrior, Mesmer. The toy the bully takes away is the buffed WHAO. And the bully is you, Anet.

I do not know whether this mindset is based on truth, a circlejerk or some strange, spoiled entitlement issue. Perhaps a combination of all three. But I also believe that the fact it exists at all merits some… concern.

As I’ve looked over the staff skills, glyphs and traits, and judging from what Irenio said on the stream concerning positioning, I’m starting to see a theme to the Druid’s playstyle, in that it’s supposed to be a highly mobile healer, which will primarily be augmented via Natural Stride and Ancestral Grace.

To that end, I would like clarification regarding CC effects on the Druid while in Ancestral Grace’s wisp form. Is it interruptible while the Druid is in transit? Can the wisp be locked down by immobility/knock down/cripple? I would definitely suggest clarifying the status of CC on Ancestral Grace’s tooltip.

I do believe that the Druid should be invulnerable to all CC and direct damage while in transit (i.e., while under the effects of Ancestral Grace). Condition stacks should still tick down but cannot be freshly applied during the skill’s duration. If this is too overpowering, maybe increase cooldown to ~15 seconds or decrease range to 1000?

The benefits to this would be to keep the Druid mobile as they use Ancestral Grace to move to or from their allies, use their heals or glyphs, and then move to the next person in need once Ancestral Grace comes off cooldown.

Counterplay to this? Prevent the skill from being usable while under hard crowd control. This allows enemies to engage in a sort of “whack a mole” fight with the Druid as they try to predict where they’re moving while a wisp, and then attempt to lock them down and keep them there before Ancestral Grace comes off cooldown. The Druid will be forced to pick the right time to use the skill so they don’t blow a critical escape when it is most needed.

Regarding the glyphs: I lean towards agreeing with the others who are saying their range might be too low, but I will take a wait and see approach with this before commenting. I want to see how they play with the rest of the Druid’s skillset before deciding they need alteration.

Off topic: I really do appreciate your work, Irenio, even if some others don’t get it. Thank you for caring about the Ranger, and I eagerly look forward to providing you with ample feedback on both the state of the base Ranger and the Druid; it’s far and away my favorite profession in the game and I want it to be the healthiest it can be!

Levetty.1279:

No, all it can do is heal. It has poor access to blind, no access to aegis or prot, can’t stack might or provide constant fury, nothing unique like alacrity, its projectile defense is straight inferior to reflects.

Only real advantage it has is it can still bring Frost Spirit and Spotter, things that are going to go out of favour due to what other classes can bring once hot launches.

Levetty.1279

And it won’t unless they change it to be able to do mroe then heal spam.

Natural Convergence

• Channel your celestial powers, pulsing cripple and slow. Once the channel ends, any foes still within its radius will be trapped by a black hole, immobilizing them.

Lunar Impact

• Call down a massive lunar beam to heal allies and daze foes. Combo Finisher: Blast

Solar Beam

• Fire a concentrated beam of light, damaging the target foe and healing allies inside of the beam.

Ancestral Grace

• Become a wisp of natural energy traversing to the target location. When you reach the target, heal nearby allies.

Vine Surge

• Send forth vines that immobilize enemies and cleanse conditions from allies.

Glyph of Alignment

• Damage and apply conditions to nearby foes.

Glyph of Alignment

• Heal and remove conditions from nearby allies.

Glyph of Equality

• Daze nearby foes.

Glyph of Equality

• Heal allies and recover from stuns.

Glyph of the Tides

• Push nearby enemies away from you.

Glyph of the Tides

• Pull nearby enemies towards you.

Glyph of Empowerment

• Increase outgoing damage of nearby allies.

Glyph of Unity

• Tether yourself to nearby foes. Whenever you take damage, deal damage to the foes tethered to you.

Druidic Clarity

• Becoming celestial avatar removes conditions from you.

Primal Echoes

• Reduces recharge of staff skills. Daze nearby foes when you swap to staff.

Celestial Shadow

• Grants superspeed and stealth to nearby allies when leaving celestial avatar form.

Natural Stride

• Reduces the duration of movement-impairing conditions. Your movement speed is increased as long as you have none of these conditions.

Ancient Seeds

• Striking a stunned, dazed, knocked down, or launched foe summons roots to entangle them.

Grace of the Land

• While you are a celestial avatar, your allies gain reduced incoming condition damage.

I understand that you dislike the Druid. You are completely entitled to your opinion and I respect it. But there is a difference between constructively criticizing and spreading misinformation, which you are doing in the bolded portions of your quotes. Misinformation is not helpful, and it will not aid Irenio as he attempts to balance the Druid based on player feedback in the coming weeks. It will make his life more difficult as he attempts to dissect the good criticism from the bad, and the longer it takes him to do so, the more likely we are to get an elite specialization that is not up to our standards.

You are free to constructively criticize the Druid’s skillset and all parts therein. You are free to claim there is too much healing in the Druid’s skillset. You are free to claim a glyph is underpowered, or the range on a celestial avatar skill is too low. You are free to give an alternative that you think will perform better. I encourage all of it.

But for now, I will politely ask you to not spread faulty information concerning the Druid and what it is capable of doing in its current iteration. Thank you.

Olcon.9506:

In my opinion, Rangers have gone so long without any true official theme for their profession (am I an archer? Am I a beastmaster? Am I a shamany spirit-summoning nature dude?) that some Rangers have been forced to come up with their own personal theme as to what they want their profession to be.

Almost undeniably, that personal theme has been DPS support. "Range"r, they say, it’s in the name! So they wanted Druid to support that theme they had spent long and hard following. They wanted the Druid to put them into the meta – the BERSERKER meta.

The issue here is that Anet absolutely hates the berserker pve meta, and for good reason: there is no variety. This game is balanced 80-20 in favor of PvP. PvP and WvW are vibrant places with multiple build options for all classes and the environment isn’t nearly as stifling for creativity as PvE is. I believe Anet wants to move the creativity of those two game modes into PvE, because whether they like it or not, all players start out in PvE. It’s the main mode in GW2.

Those players who strictly play PvE won’t realize this because they’ve never experimented with the other two game modes. They only see berserker, while Anet is looking – and designing – past the berserker meta.

I think this is where the disconnect happened, and is continuing to happen. The players are completely rigid; they’re confident that berserker will survive into HoT and remain the stable meta. Anet put the Druid in front of them – an elite specialization with a literal kittenload of healing – and the players immediately saw it as useless because healing power has no place in a meta where the best defense is a good offense, and active defenses take care of everything else. And because the Druid is primarily healing power, they can’t see past the wall of “uselessness” to gaze upon everything else the Druid brings to the table: the “control” portion of “dps, control, support”.

The Druid is two parts support, one part control. The perfect complement to the soft trinity Anet failed to deliver in the core game, but is now trying to reintroduce in HoT – because while they said they were going to get rid of the “hard trinity”, aka classes being locked into a specific role, they never said anything about getting rid of trinities altogether. Anet wants a “soft trinity” of dps, control, support, with every class having something to contribute towards each facet.

The base ranger class is overwhelmingly specialized towards dps, but people failed to recognize that through the mire of bugs, kittenty dev communication, iffy design practices and pet issues. So, again, when people saw the Druid with literally no dps, an elite specialization overwhelmingly leaning towards defensive support and control, they claimed there was no synergy with the base ranger at all, despite the Druid absolutely what the ranger needed more than anything else. Dps, support and control had all been met in the same class, finally. Soft trinity intact. Now the issue is getting the base profession up to speed so the dps portion can catch up to the other two, while keeping the Druid relatively stable and well-designed so we have options going into HoT – which will hopefully finally provide other options than berserker. To that end, I have faith in Irenio. If anyone can walk this tightrope, it’s him.

I’m literally going to just copy paste this across everyone of these “oh woe is me no dmgs ;(” threads from now on instead of bothering to type a reply.

I mean, all the threads are the same. Why can’t I spam the same thing, either?

In my opinion, Rangers have gone so long without any true official theme for their profession (am I an archer? Am I a beastmaster? Am I a shamany spirit-summoning nature dude?) that some Rangers have been forced to come up with their own personal theme as to what they want their profession to be.

Almost undeniably, that personal theme has been DPS support. "Range"r, they say, it’s in the name! So they wanted Druid to support that theme they had spent long and hard following. They wanted the Druid to put them into the meta – the BERSERKER meta.

The issue here is that Anet absolutely hates the berserker pve meta, and for good reason: there is no variety. This game is balanced 80-20 in favor of PvP. PvP and WvW are vibrant places with multiple build options for all classes and the environment isn’t nearly as stifling for creativity as PvE is. I believe Anet wants to move the creativity of those two game modes into PvE, because whether they like it or not, all players start out in PvE. It’s the main mode in GW2.

Those players who strictly play PvE won’t realize this because they’ve never experimented with the other two game modes. They only see berserker, while Anet is looking – and designing – past the berserker meta.

I think this is where the disconnect happened, and is continuing to happen. The players are completely rigid; they’re confident that berserker will survive into HoT and remain the stable meta. Anet put the Druid in front of them – an elite specialization with a literal kittenload of healing – and the players immediately saw it as useless because healing power has no place in a meta where the best defense is a good offense, and active defenses take care of everything else. And because the Druid is primarily healing power, they can’t see past the wall of “uselessness” to gaze upon everything else the Druid brings to the table: the “control” portion of “dps, control, support”.

The Druid is two parts support, one part control. The perfect complement to the soft trinity Anet failed to deliver in the core game, but is now trying to reintroduce in HoT – because while they said they were going to get rid of the “hard trinity”, aka classes being locked into a specific role, they never said anything about getting rid of trinities altogether. Anet wants a “soft trinity” of dps, control, support, with every class having something to contribute towards each facet.

The base ranger class is overwhelmingly specialized towards dps, but people failed to recognize that through the mire of bugs, kittenty dev communication, iffy design practices and pet issues. So, again, when people saw the Druid with literally no dps, an elite specialization overwhelmingly leaning towards defensive support and control, they claimed there was no synergy with the base ranger at all, despite the Druid absolutely what the ranger needed more than anything else. Dps, support and control had all been met in the same class, finally. Soft trinity intact. Now the issue is getting the base profession up to speed so the dps portion can catch up to the other two, while keeping the Druid relatively stable and well-designed so we have options going into HoT – which will hopefully finally provide other options than berserker. To that end, I have faith in Irenio. If anyone can walk this tightrope, it’s him.

Concerning the synergy with pets issue, Cultivated Synergy opens up some interesting potential for “proxy” healing, especially is you’re going with the classic “pet tanks, I pewpew” approach.

Edit: I agree that Glyph of Rejuvenation could use some love to make it stand out from the other healing skills, especially Healing Spring and the buffed WHAO. Remember that we don’t know what stats, if any, he was using during the demonstration on the livestream, so I’m still taking a “wait and see” approach for now.

I agree with the need for at least one more blast finisher. Although the wiki says Lunar Impact is actually a blast finisher, which I wasn’t aware of. Not sure if they mentioned it on the stream either, I’ll have to rewatch.

Modifying this for condi is possible as well, as might affects both direct damage and condition damage. I chose power because of the WvW/PvP potential mainly, and how the ranges of the staff and longbow compliment each other.

When I’m done with my other support/might theorizing I’ll definitely look into seeing how to modify this for condi/shortbow. Might work as a bunker or sustain/attrition hybrid.

Levetty.1279:

Olcon.9506:

The off-dps support builds I’m working on will allow the Druid to help with might stacking and boon duration, fwiw. Not as good as a warrior, obviously, but to say that the Druid will be able to only heal and do nothing else is pidgeon-holing yourself in a depressive 4×4 box in the dark. It’s like everyone is completely forgetting about the glyphs and the ranger’s utilities that already exist.

Have some creativity, guys.

Unless it can provide 25 party wide might by itself it isn’t needed to help with might stacking.

I’m confidently thinking 25 personal might stacks will easily be possible over a period of 5 seconds, quicker as the player gains practice with the rotation. For party wide might stacking? That’s still up in the air currently, but a Celestial Avatar in the thick of it could possibly do it under the right situation with a perfect rotation and build.

Like I said, it’s no warrior. And I need to experiment heavily with runes and check ICDs, cool downs and trait/skill interactions, none of which I have access to until next week.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was an alternative to Phalanx Strength? If an elite specialization could both heal you AND pump you full of might? I’m cautiously optimistic I may be onto something.

I’ve been eyeing Zealot’s for certain builds, but for straight up support, I agree with kornfanxxx.

The off-dps support builds I’m working on will allow the Druid to help with might stacking and boon duration, fwiw. Not as good as a warrior, obviously, but to say that the Druid will be able to only heal and do nothing else is pidgeon-holing yourself in a depressive 4×4 box in the dark. It’s like everyone is completely forgetting about the glyphs and the ranger’s utilities that already exist.

Have some creativity, guys.

@Lome

Yeah, I agree. The support part in this is is more the healing and less the might building. The personal might is more there to offset your DPS decrease as you’re not taking the optimal full zerk power build. We won’t know the staff AA’s true damage until next week anyway and this build relies on that to be viable, as you’re primarily going to be using the staff to keep up healing.

Basically, off-dps healer boosted by might. Might be relevant in HoT content but probably not old dungeons, fractals, etc. This was more an experiment to show it’s possible.

The close range variant I’m considering will probably have more viability in old content, as the rest of the party will be in range of Altruism’s might buffs.

Decided to make this into its own thread as I feel it warrants it.

Tentative setup here, critique more than welcome.

This build may or may not stack personal might faster than a warrior. Needs testing in the next BWE.

Beastmastery:

Minors:
Pack Alpha
Loud Whistle
Pet’s Prowess

Majors:
Companion’s Might
Wilting Strike
Zephyr’s Speed

Marksmanship:

Minors:
Opening Strike
Alpha Training
Precise Strike

Majors:
Clarion Bond
Brutish Seals
Remorseless

Druid:

Minors:
Celestial Being
Live Vicariously
Natural Mender

Majors:
Primal Echoes
Natural Stride
Ancient Seeds

Weapons:

Berserker Longbow
Berserker Staff

Utilities:
We Heal as One
Signet of the Wild
Signet of Stone
Signet of the Hunt
Strength of the Pack

Pet:
Jungle Stalker
Red Moa

Armor:
Zealot’s

Runes:
Superior Rune of Altruism

PSA: Altruism runes synergize a bit too well with this build. Like to an excessive degree. I was kinda shocked as I read over the tooltip.

The idea behind this is a combination of disgustingly selfish might stacking through opening strike, signet and F2 abuse. Keep pet on passive initially. Pop Stalker’s F2 for five stacks of might. Switch to Moa. Enter combat, pop opening strike. Use Moa’s F2 to regain opening strike, switch BACK to Stalker, set pet to aggressive. Pop all signets, pop SotP, use WHAO. Switch to staff, proceed to Venasaur your way to victory.

Haven’t done the math yet, but I’m preeeeetty sure that puts you at 25 stacks. Maintain might by swapping pet when available and using signets as they come off cooldown.

Druid traits are there to both boost your staff skills and provide a safety net in case enemies get too close, as you’re not carrying any melee weapons. Longbow 4 + Ancient Seeds is a hilariously trollish combination. Celestial Avatar is an “oh kitten” button and astral power should build up relatively quickly between the staff AA and the heals.

Additional note about the runes:

As it stands, this build uses the Altruism runes in a purely selfish manner to maintain your boons and boost the might and fury stacking. I believe it would be very possible to change some things and turn this build into a sword-swinging, heal-flinging, group-might-building close range maniac.

Again, constructive criticism and edits more than welcome. This is my first time theory crafting.

You people seem to be arguing the fact that space and celestial objects aren’t part of nature, and that the water and earth elementalist attunements aren’t actually a thing. Do you even human lore?

Disagree 100% with the OP. The more I look through the Druid’s traits and abilities and discover how it synergizes with the rest of the ranger (because it does), the more I come to the conclusion that this is exactly what the ranger profession needed.

Ganathar.4956:

Olcon.9506:

To piggy-back off what ItIsFinished is saying:

Meanwhile, in the other profession subforums:

-The elementalists are claiming the Druid outperforms both the water and earth attunements.

-Engineers are muttering both about the Druid’s lockdown potential and also Irenio’s apparent favoritism. (I actually feel for them on this one and hope they get some support, I’ll readily admit Irenio seemed waaaaay more enthusiastic about the Druid than he did the Scrapper. Hopefully he gives our engineer brothers some love, god knows they need it just as much as rangers do.)

-The thieves have listed the Druid as their number 1 kill priority and may or may not be having a nervous breakdown.

-Nothing about the Druid in the warrior subforum, which isn’t exactly shocking as warriors and Druids are literal polar opposites. I’m a little surprised they haven’t put together a “how do we kill this thing” thread, though.

-Mesmers are eyeing the Druid warily but aren’t really concerned.

-Necromancers are muttering about the Druid’s “Life Shroud” and how it retains its utilities when the Death Shroud does not.

-Revenants are outright questioning Ventari’s relevance.

-And lastly, the poor guardians may or may not be having a profession-wide existential crisis. Their main Druid reaction thread is blatantly questioning the guardian’s continuing viability and there’s even a second one asking Irenio to redesign the Dragon Hunter. Granted, that second one may very well be a joke, but something tells me they might be serious.

From what I’ve seen and browsed, most, if not all of the other professions (at least the subset of players that post of the forums, which, granted, is a small amount) agree that the Druid is a top-tier elite specialization that could very well shake up the PvP and WvW scenes, and none of them are writing it off as worthless or a “pile of garbage”. I myself am 100% going to be pulling my ranger (my first character! squeeeee) off the shelf and experimenting heavily with the Druid and what it has to offer.

So yeah, it might be you.

I was really concerned at first that druid would end up being a pretty bad elite spec, but after the reveal I really like it even though I’m not much of a healer fan. Most of the complaints from other profession forums are 1-dimensional and do not take into consideration every factor that is needed for balance.

For example, a staff ele can do enormous damage while doing some healing and giving boons at the same time. They even have a little bit of CC that will hopefully become more useful in HoT content. Also, necromancer’s shroud has a second health bar and thus doesn’t need to have utilities accessible. While some would argue that celestial form’s healing is the equivalent to the 2nd life bar, I would ask them how I can deal damage equivalent to that of death shroud.

Fortunately, most of the posters were reasonable and quickly pointed these things out in the druid-related threads of other profession sub-forums. However, the guardian sub-forum seems to be somewhat of an exception.

Personally, I am really happy that you guys are finally getting something good after so many years and I hope that you enjoy it. Irenio should also keep up the good work with the ranger balance changes, because more will be needed for sure.

Oh I completely agree with you, don’t worry. My post was more of a humorous poke at the varying reactions of the other professions and how they were initially polar opposites of ranger reactions. A lot of rangers were eyeing the Druid like it might shank them in their sleep, and meanwhile everyone else is overreacting in the complete opposite direction. The guardian posts alone were out of this world.

I found it all pretty funny, truthfully.

Tentative setup here, critique more than welcome. [F]irst time theory crafting, be gentle.

May I present: My Beams Bring all the Boys to the Yard Backline Power Druid. Name is a work in progress.

Beastmastery:

Minors:
Pack Alpha
Loud Whistle
Pet’s Prowess

Majors:
Companion’s Might
Wilting Strike
Zephyr’s Speed

Marksmanship:

Minors:
Opening Strike
Alpha Training
Precise Strike

Majors:
Clarion Bond
Brutish Seals
Remorseless

Druid:

Minors:
Celestial Being
Live Vicariously
Natural Mender

Majors:
Primal Echoes
Natural Stride
Ancient Seeds

Weapons:

Longbow
Staff

Utilities:
We Heal as One
Signet of the Wild
Signet of Stone
Signet of the Hunt
Strength of the Pack

Pet:
Jungle Stalker
Red Moa

The idea behind this is a combination of disgustingly selfish might stacking through opening strike, signet and F2 abuse. Keep pet on passive initially. Pop Stalker’s F2 for five stacks of might. Switch to Moa. Enter combat, pop opening strike. Use Moa’s F2 to regain opening strike, switch BACK to Stalker, set pet to aggressive. Pop all signets, pop SotP, use WHAO.

Haven’t done the math yet, but I’m preeeeetty sure that puts you at 25 stacks. Maintain might by swapping pet when available and using signets as they come off cooldown.

Druid traits are there to both boost your staff skills and provide a safety net in case enemies get too close, as you’re not carrying any melee weapons. Longbow 4 + Ancient Seeds is a hilariously trollish combination. Celestial Avatar is an “oh kitten” button.

Thoughts?

ninja edit: pls forgive kitten formatting, am on phone.

The skill balance panel earlier today made WHAO absolutely rediculous and, coupled, with the not-unsubstantial damage on the staff’s autoattack and the range of its heals, has me convinced that a backline power-based offensive support Druid might be possible.

For those unaware, WHAO now shares boons between the ranger and pet. All boons on the pet goes to the ranger, all boons on the ranger go to the pet. This is in addition to the heal, obviously.

Will be experimenting with this and reporting my findings. I’m a rookie at theorycrafting though so any help would be appreciated!

To piggy-back off what ItIsFinished is saying:

Meanwhile, in the other profession subforums:

-The elementalists are claiming the Druid outperforms both the water and earth attunements.

-Engineers are muttering both about the Druid’s lockdown potential and also Irenio’s apparent favoritism. (I actually feel for them on this one and hope they get some support, I’ll readily admit Irenio seemed waaaaay more enthusiastic about the Druid than he did the Scrapper. Hopefully he gives our engineer brothers some love, god knows they need it just as much as rangers do.)

-The thieves have listed the Druid as their number 1 kill priority and may or may not be having a nervous breakdown.

-Nothing about the Druid in the warrior subforum, which isn’t exactly shocking as warriors and Druids are literal polar opposites. I’m a little surprised they haven’t put together a “how do we kill this thing” thread, though.

-Mesmers are eyeing the Druid warily but aren’t really concerned.

-Necromancers are muttering about the Druid’s “Life Shroud” and how it retains its utilities when the Death Shroud does not.

-Revenants are outright questioning Ventari’s relevance.

-And lastly, the poor guardians may or may not be having a profession-wide existential crisis. Their main Druid reaction thread is blatantly questioning the guardian’s continuing viability and there’s even a second one asking Irenio to redesign the Dragon Hunter. Granted, that second one may very well be a joke, but something tells me they might be serious.

From what I’ve seen and browsed, most, if not all of the other professions (at least the subset of players that post of the forums, which, granted, is a small amount) agree that the Druid is a top-tier elite specialization that could very well shake up the PvP and WvW scenes, and none of them are writing it off as worthless or a “pile of garbage”. I myself am 100% going to be pulling my ranger (my first character! squeeeee) off the shelf and experimenting heavily with the Druid and what it has to offer.

So yeah, it might be you.

Remember, guys, that the healing and damage shown on the stream was from a Druid with no additional stats. It was pure baseline, they said it straight up as they were covering the autoattack.

I feel that’s an important point to make because it provides options. I can readily see hybrid builds taking Druid solely for the Celestial Avatar and survivability and lol-ing their way through damage and condi stacks. A Druid actually specced for survival and healing power will be a legitimate bunker in sPvP. Point caps for days.

Granted, taking Druid for the survivability and healing would mean giving something up in return and thus makes current specialized ranger builds suboptimal. I also don’t see Druid having much use in existing old PvE content where the Zerker meta will continue to live on.

The raids will be interesting, though, because Anet has stated multiple times that there will be instances of unavoidable damage. How often that happens and whether it’ll actually impact the “MOAR DMGS!” meta obviously remains to be seen.

What do I see, though? I see a 5 man group with survival/healing specced Druid support sneaking objectives from the zergs in WvW easily. I also see meta-changing potential in PvP. The team fights, the bunker builds. Oh my god, if the numbers I saw today don’t change that much between now and release, it’s going to be absolutely terrifying.

I’m wondering if all the people complaining even watched the same stream I did. For YEARS all this subforum has complained about is “we’re not in the meta”, “we don’t have a place”, “people don’t want us because we’re a selfish class”, “the devs don’t listen to us”, “we’re bogged down by our pets” etc. etc. ad infinium.

The Druid gives the Ranger legitimate group support across multiple game modes and is frankly probably the best elite specialization they’ve revealed. They truly did save the best for last. You don’t even need to take the staff, you can spec into Druid for the celestial mode (WHICH IS A BRAND SPANKING NEW CLASS MECHANIC NOT BOGGED DOWN BY YOUR PET HELLO IS ANYONE THERE?) and give yourself crazy amounts of healing that’s affected by your traits WHILE you continue to carry two weapon sets and two other trait lines to help those weapon sets or your pet.

???

What are you guys even complaining about? I see this and I see my ranger taking his longbow, axe/torch, sword/dagger whatever into a dungeon, laying down dps (which Irenio said does fill the celestial bar so you’re not locked into healbot btw) , and then seeing “oh kitten that thief over there is getting pretty low on hp lemme just HEAL HIM BACK TO FULL HEALTH real quick!”, switch over to your God of Healing™ class mechanic and then make him good as new. Then you switch out of your celestial mode after topping off everyone else in the group because why the hell not, and go back to being a ranger and outputting a not-insubstantial amount of dps, which is further complimented by your new smokescale literally teleporting around the battlefield, during which it can’t be affected by AoE.

And then, to top it all off, the developer that designed this legitimately overpowered specialization outright declares the death of the berserker meta at the hands of the Druid, announces that he’s been reading and taking note of the ranger forum’s criticisms for probably the last year (!!!!), and says he can’t wait to put down a red thread and interact with you guys, and that further details about the future of the base ranger class will be discussed later on during the balance segment of the presentation.

And all you guys do is say kitten like

Atherakhia.4086:

What this change did was effectively removed Rangers from the game.

“Rangers aren’t meta qq” says the ranger subforums.

>Irenio picks up that mic like a kitten motherkittener. He’s hyped as kitten, you can hear it in his voice.
>heals everywhere
>Druid can single-handedly keep an entire raid team alive if played properly
>Massive support potential in WvW
>probably surpasses Guardian as a pvp bunker
>immobilizes out the rear end
>celestial avatar mode is the water attunement on copious amounts of steroids
>PERMA-SWIFTNESS AS A TRAIT FOR PVE
>absolutely guaranteed meta
>new pets
>WYVERNS
>SMOKESCALES THAT DROP SMOKE FIELDS AND TELEPORT
>“I’ve been going home and reading the ranger subforums almost every night and have been reading your criticisms of the base ranger class,” says Irenio. “I haven’t been able to communicate with you guys as I’ve been under nondisclosure for almost a year. I look forward to working on the base class with you guys in addition to the Druid.”

“omg our elite spec is so bad qq” says the ranger subforums.

My norn main shares the cultural viewpoints of his race and as such is decidedly neutral on the matter, as he believes everyone should be judged based on their individual merits, and that judging people based on things they have no control over and haven’t done is laughably stupid.

So, sylvari is friendly? All good, how’s it going tree-bro?

Sylvari frothing at the mouth and trying to stab allies? Tossed salad for dinner!

I find this awesome for two reasons. 1, it holds up to lore. 2, it sets a precedent.

Lore’s important, obviously, because it adds immersion to the game and ties you to your character more. It IS an RPG, after all, so treating all races the same even when the lore states that sylvari are freaking dragon minions would be the “bad design”, imo. If this wasn’t a thing I’d actually be pretty annoyed, so it’s nice to see that Anet cares about the lore of GW2 and ties it in to actual gameplay.

But what’s even sweeter about this is that it sets a precedent for future expansions if we assume one elder dragon = one expansion.

Maybe the next expansion has us facing Kralkatorrik down in the Crystal Desert or somewhere in Ascalon. Perhaps there will be a more charr-centric storyline? Maybe human-centric if we find some way to finally bust down into Elona? Perhaps it’s revealed that your human PC is actually of Elonian descent and you must lead your people (maybe the Pact or whatever faction exists at that time, if the Pact doesn’t survive) through the Crystal Desert, and Alain’s “prophecy” wasn’t actually the ramblings of a crazy man?

What about Jormag? Maybe only a norn character can damage Jormag’s tooth in Hoelbrak and other characters won’t even get that part of the story. Maybe they can see the Spirits of the Wild as they’re marching back into the Far Shiverpeaks, but to all the other races, they’re invisible?

I’m sure there could be asura-only stuff when dealing with Primordus, but I can’t think of any specifics because I don’t play short people. Sorry for being a bookah!

But my point is: the really cool thing, for me, about what Anet’s doing with the sylvari is that they haven’t removed race-specific features from the table. With HoT, they’re making it so your race actually matters and impacts the story in a pretty significant degree and it sets a precedent for such features to come back in future content. Remember how the second part of the PS was your character being a generic soldier-dude/dudette and how it threw all your character’s part 1 race-specific dialogue and mannerisms out the window? I can’t be the only one who hated that.

More options = good! More replayability = good! I’ve actually made a sylvari character, despite not even glancing in their direction previously! That’s GOOD!

Forgive bad formatting or spelling mistakes in advance, I’m typing this on my phone.

Issues I’ve recognized from what little I’ve experienced and what I’ve read:

The event forces players to compete against one another, not cooperate:

This is a big one because it runs contrary to what I, and probably many others, enjoy about this game. In standard dynamic events, your fellow players are welcomed because it’s a purely symbiotic relationship. Events get done quicker, loot is better, and there’s no leeching of experience or rewards.

In this Mordrem event, players are competing against one another. Each person has their own individual buff that counts the number of events completed, which compels players to “tag” events and then escape to the next to maximize rewards. People are insistent to get there before everyone else because they want their loot, kitten it!

Possible solutions?: Instead of having an individual buff showing how much you’ve completed, why not make that buff map wide? Track the progress of how many events have been completed overall, and then give out bonus rewards to everyone based on how long they’ve been in the map. Since the event started? Max rewards. For 15 minutes? 60% rewards. 5 minutes? 10% rewards. That prevents leeching and piggybacking, but still pushes people to work with each other, which is what GW2 events are all about.

ninja edit: literally Gold/Silver/Bronze, with diminishing rewards as you go down the tiers.

Monetary prerequisites lock new players out of the rewards:

This one is fairly simple, and I’m not sure why you guys didn’t consider it before you released the event. Who expects a level 20 free player to have ten gold on them? Really? They shouldn’t be in there. If needed, boost the bloom cost a fraction or two, but at least make it possible for new players to get the best reward if they put a ton of effort in. That, or just have the mobs drop money.

Mordrem give no drops:

I understand why you guys did this, actually. From what I can tell (and I’m probably wrong), this event was based on Scarlet’s invasions during S1. People farmed the champions for loot bags and didn’t bother actually doing the event. To counteract this, the Mordrem drop absolutely zilch.

I do think this was an overreaction, especially because this event was supposed to entice new players and it’s the first event in the game since it’s gone free to play. Why not have them drop experience? Money? I understand that you wanted to prevent people from farming excessive amounts of gold during this event and flooding the market with currency. In that case, why not have champions drop blooms that scale negatively depending on how many people are currently completing that particular event?

What I mean is, if only five people are there killing that champion or doing that event, and they manage to somehow do it, reward them with something like 5 blooms. As the number of people increases, the rewards lessen, because obviously it’s going to be easier to kill that champion or complete that event. Everyone there gets one bloom. This will encourage people to spread out across the map instead of zerging everything down at a rapid fire speed.

If nothing else, at least have killing a spawner or completing a localized event reward you with like a bloom or three, like it currently is with the remaining Toxic events and Spore Samples. Spawner on the hill? That’s fine, just dump the rewards right into the inventory or give them through a chest.

That’s all I got currently. I do appreciate you guys recognizing that there’s something wrong, it takes a lot of balls to admit you goofed up and many developers would rather just push it under the rug and feign ignorance. +10 respect, Anet.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Shatterer is a level 50 event, I believe. So, OP wasn’t too low level. But if OP parks his toons at that event and only does that one event, they could have the DR issue like Opie probably has.

Yeah, at the time the toon was level 59, which is 9 levels above Shatterer, so if those kinds of limits are in I don’t think I triggered it.

Quick googlekittentells me DR stands for diminishing returns and, though it technically would be possible, I don’t think I triggered that either. The now-63 is a warrior that I’ve been leveling the “standard” way, by which I mean slowly working towards map completion by doing hearts/vistas/hero points, doing dynamic events when I see them, and occasionally joining an EotM zerg.

Basically, I don’t park the toon on the Shatterer spawn and wait for the dude to come along. When I see it, I join in and pepper the thing with longbow shots from the hill like everyone else does. And on top of that, the day before yesterday was actually the day I came back from a pretty long hiatus and re-installed, and yesterday was the first time I had done the Shatterer event in literally a year.

So if DR really did kick in, it picked a pretty strange time to do it haha!

Just completed the Shatterer event around ten minutes ago, but the chest didn’t drop after he was defeated. Did it on a level 59 alt so I probably didn’t miss out on anything good. I know at least one level 80 reported the same problem over local, though, so he could’ve missed out on some good drops or something… which isn’t fun, and also leads me to believe it isn’t an issue with my computer/client side.

Did the event yesterday too but the chest dropped that time, and this is the only time I can ever remember it happening, so it’s fairly recent I think. I believe the 80 reported the glitch happening yesterday as we talked about it but I obviously can’t confirm that.

Not sure if this has happened to anyone else or during any other world boss events, but I figured I would put up the thread since nothing turned up in search.

After skimming the developer responses from the CDI, and assuming that what they’ve hinted at there has carried over to the Druid and formed the basis of its specialization, I think I have an idea as to where they’re going with this.

All the elite specializations so far have focused on enhancing the existing class mechanics, right? So instead of providing an alternative to the pet by creating permanent Stowing, I think they’re going to build off its permanent presence.

My idea:

-The aspects will be tied to pet family. One overarching aspect, with associated buffs, per family. So having a feline out would give you the Feline Aspect, no matter if you used a jungle stalker or a jaguar.

-This allows you to continue to use pets in builds for their specific command skills. Creating an aspect per pet, i.e. “Aspect of the Jungle Stalker” and “Aspect of the Jaguar” would be both too time intensive and also potentially remove pets completely from play, as I doubt they’d give literally every single pet an associated aspect.

-Immediate powerful buff/effect upon swapping pets (possibly PBAoEs included, judging from those datamined images?), followed by a constant, less powerful buff afterwards. This solves the issue on how the pets and aspects will work together and how the F binds will work. F4 now swaps both your pet and aspect, everything else will probably stay the same.

-The precedent for two aspects already exists in the Revenant. I haven’t been following its development closely as I just got back from a real long break from the game, but I do know there are multiple Legends available to it, but they can only equip two at a time, correct? Same thing here. Multiple aspects to choose from, two equipped.

-The Druid trait line now becomes about the pet buffing the ranger. This forms a nice reverse of Beastmastery, which is all about the ranger buffing the pet, while at the same time potentially opening up some interesting build options. I wouldn’t really know about that though, I’m not a theorist. The lore for “druid” fits into this nicely as well, as the druid in many different literature and games has always been a “man of nature”, benefiting heavily from its fauna and flora.

-The pet now becomes a “buff machine” with a command skill, which counteracts the notorious AI and the issues many people have had with it, and how it seems to fight against the ranger’s potential. Don’t like the pet and still think it’s bad? At least it now has some powerful buffs for you.

-Potential downsides would simply be the Druid specialization becoming the go-to choice for rangers. Many of the other classes have been having that discussion too, though, so I suppose we can cross that bridge if we ever get there.

Obviously, this is all 100% speculation. The CDI was a year ago and everything could’ve changed between now and then. I’m probably dirt wrong. But if this holds any merit at all, we may very well become Udyr plus vicious snarling beast.

Thoughts?