Showing Posts For Rabid Dingo.7053:
I was trying out a build idea, given the new boon duration stat, for might stacking on my druid, and I noticed that boon duration affects the tooltip duration for frost spirit’s might pulse (also affects other spirits as well).
But anyway, this is what I was noticing
In the PvP lobby, running minstrel’s amulet and the 20% boon duration trait in beastmastery, the tooltip stated that frost spirit would give me over 5 seconds of 3xMight every 3 seconds.
I placed my Frost spirit, it started pulsing out 3 stacks of might, but the duration was not increased. I did have permanent 3 stacks of might, but the duration was only 3 seconds and there was no overlap (as would be expected given the extended duration).
Other notes
1. I can’t be entirely sure, but I also placed a stone spirit, and it ‘appeared’ to be giving me the extended pulse-protection duration, though it is such a small duration I can’t be sure.
2. I don’t currently have any boon duration enhancing gear on my in PvE, but using the 20% boon duration trait, I placed my frost spirit (in my home instance, if that is relevant?), and the tooltip duration was 3 1/2 seconds. However, the expected result would be 3 stacks of might with a brief period of 6 stacks during the overlap between applied might stacks every 3 seconds. I only received permanent 3 might stacks with no 6-stack overlap, suggesting that it was not being affected by boon duration.
3. I am a level 80 male norn ranger, running Beastmastery, Nature Magic, and a varied third trait line (normally Druid or Marksmanship). I’m not sure if this bug is with the tooltip or the spirit, but I thought I would mention it
That would be great. It would be nice if, during this time, we could have f2 use the pet ability centered on us, but not interrupting our own skills, or if the f2 could have a pet-family associated effect (canines – might, birds – fury, moa – taunt(?), drakes – torment, bears – protection, dragons – quickness???, pigs – daze)
So I’m a ranger main, have been since my first day playing. And I love it, I really do, but a lot of the time I feel like I’m having to abuse mechanics. And perhaps that’s a bit of a loaded way of saying what I’m about to say, but I’ve played as other classes (I have a guardian, thief, and mesmer at 80, and have played around with warriors and eles in the past), and a lot of playing those classes just feels like playing as a strong and cohesive class (I admit the guardian has some ridiculous cooldowns, and really low vitality, but moving on).
So anyway, I’m a ranger main, and I agree with soooo much on this board:
- losing placeable traps was poop, give it back please
- the sword auto shouldn’t root us (a good suggestion i saw was only having the leap animation if you actually have to gap close)
- spirits unbound was great
- breaking 25% of projectiles is weird
- Most dangerous game is really strange … why is it there
- WHaO was a mess, and while it needed the post buff-nerf, it was the wrong nerf
BUT what I aim to specifically talk about in this is spirits. They feel bugged. SOOOO bugged. What I am talking about specifically is that when they die, they hang around as corpses for 10 seconds~, pulsing away with their buffs all the while. And that’s great (it makes frost spirit 10 billion times better than that new glyph), and I have a rather tanky soldiers pvp build that abuses that quite heavily. But that’s the thing, it feels like the only way to make these little tree guys work is to abuse what at first glance looks like a bug. But, I’m not here to complain, I’m here to make a suggestion, several suggestions in fact.
Suggestion 1
Have spirits become untargetable. With the 10 second corpse delay, we’re essentailly running 10 second cooldowns on 10-70 second aoe buffs. Having spirits last the full 60 seconds (until killed with their active), but disappear immediately not only puts control of our abilities back in our hands, but also makes it a more realistic cooldown (10 seconds on a 7.5% dps boost + 3 might is great, but silly).
Suggestion 2
Have spirits spawn with ~4-6 seconds of ‘determination’ (or whatever damage immunity is called on bosses). It gives us time to use their actives, gives them a chance to pulse their ‘spirit effect’ a second time, and leaves them killable so that enemies can actually counter us in some way. (I would like to see the return of active-on-death if they leave spirits targetable. We still lose functionality because we don’t get to control our own skill, but it means, especially for water spirit, that we aren’t sacrificing a huge component of our utility skill, and it punishes enemies for being rude)
Suggestion 3
Have spirits function aesthetically, following the ranger around, but being untargetable. Even reducing their duration to 30 seconds with a 20% cooldown reduction available on trait (replacing the bonus health) to stop them being OP. The cast times on their actives could remain the same, with a similar visual tell, perhaps causing the spirit’s fist-slam animation to appear above the ranger’s head like signet activations do, to give people an opportunity to avoid or counter the immobilise, chill and SIX SECOND DAZE that some spirits are capable of. Even incorporating the new wisp visual on the druid staff-2, so a ranger has rotating, coloured wisps indicating any spirits they have active.
Questions
What do people think? Do people have other suggestions for spirit functionality? Does anyone actually use the water spirit? What are peoples thoughts on making the bleed on shortbow the default, but having a different bonus (torment, cripple, poison, weakness) for flanking?
What you should do is merge healing power with vitality and boon duration with toughness. Healing Power is too niche a benefit to truly ever feel attractive without being penalized
What scares me more about your proposed nerfs to baseline healing is that you remove any purpose of the Druid from offensive players wanting to run zerker/valkyrie/knights.
I agree with everything else you said in your post, oh so very much, and this bit here I find very interesting. What I would prefer to see is a boon intensity stat. At the moment we have condition damage and condition duration, as two ways to boost condition builds. But at the moment we only have boon duration; healing power boosts regen and heal skills, but no other boons. I think a boon intensity stat would also help break away from the beserker meta. Yes, you can still choose to run beserker stats, and yes, you can still pump yourself full of fury and might, but I feel that reducing the base of each boon to 70%~, and replacing healing power with a boon intensity stat (that also affects healing, so perhaps calling it benevolence). And a proper investment in ‘benevolence’ could give boons of 125%-150%~ of the current strength.
At the moment, people are able to build large stacks of aoe boons (Guardian staff 4, elementalist fire-blast finishers, etc), but the ability to provide these doesn’t require any deviation from a pure damage build. By reducing the effectiveness of base-boons, and making it possible to stat-build for BETTER boons, it would give motivation, especially in the current PvE environment, to not just run 5 beserkers, as having a fifth person able to stack 30% crit chance, 40~power per might stack, and 45%~ protection would be incredible, and would give better benefits to the team’s damage and survivability.
The problem I see with the beserker meta is you can still build support and control without having to make a change from beserker stats to do so. Benevolence, as a sister-stat to condition damage, would provide this motivation.
I already commented and gave my feedback on page 13, and I’m fairly happy with what I’ve said thus far. However, I missed a couple things, so here goes.
Druid vs Ranger
While the druid line gives us some access to much-needed condition cleanse, the fact remains that the stand-alone ranger is what is vulnerable, and is what needs to be addressed. Forcing us into wilderness survival for reliable condition cleanse really pidgeon-holes our build choices for offensive rangers, and the condition cleanse options on the druid (the reliance on glyphs to proc. the blossoms, the need for astral form, the lack of any proper condition cleansing on the staff 4) are a bit lackluster.
Also, while a couple options exist to deal with burst damage (signet of stone, protective ward GM, spamming every evade skill we have), as a specialisation whose sole function is as a healer, we really need consistent access, or access at all, to protection, resistance (of which the ranger has none), and weakness, because while we can signet of stone ourselves to prevent us being burst down once per fight, we can’t extend this to our allies.
Changes to Heal as One
Not directed at the druid, but rather at the recent balance updates. I thought the initial changes to heal as one, where a direct copy of pet boons was given to the ranger was an amazing idea. I did notice the obvious issues where ranges were able to stack 8 minutes of fury, and 12 seconds of 25 might stacks, and I agree it needed to be fixed. However, the way it was fixed was perhaps the reverse of what was needed. The issue that I saw was that whenever the ranger gained a buff (5 stacks of might every second for 3 seconds, for example, or the 3 stacks of might from the frost spirit), the pet gained a non-true copy, typically with extended duration, due to the shared boons trait, meaning instead of Heal as One giving back 15 stacks of might with a 5stacks/second decay rate, it was giving 15 stacks of might with a 12 second duration.
In my view, the appropriate fix would have been to the trait, and not to heal as one. If a ranger manages to stack a significant duration of high might stacks on themselves, and through the trait, their pet, then more power to them. This isn’t likely to happen, as without investment in boon and might duration the ranger doesn’t have many sources of long-duration might, meaning even if we did self-copy to 25 stacks, it wouldn’t last more than a couple seconds. The only exception would probably be swiftness and quickness, as with pet-swap, quickening zehpyr, heal as one, you could get 15+ seconds of quickness, but with shout traiting you cna already achieve permanent swiftness anyway, and the cooldown on quickening zephyr is high enough that you couldn’t permanently buff yourself with stupid levels of quickness
staff 3 must be an evade or invuln. imo, shorten the cast time, i.e. make the wisp traverse faster. so instead of a 2s channel or whatever it is now, make it 1.5. during this time, ranger needs to be invulnerable. you cant hurt wisps with physical attacks, theyre made of energy. thought this was obvious =\Staff 3 is fine but it needs an evade.
I don’t have beta but just from the style of the skill 3 , it does need Evade for defence on the staff , watching the twich feed atm and using it just gets you hurt if you have to move through AoEs to escape and the only way to safely use it is to go the opposite direction of the incomming damage , its counter intuitive to the skills design of allowing mobility when having no evade on the skill means you have less Route to move to.
needs the evade , with how fast the movement it the evade frames won’t be long.
the other problem with #3 is that when the ranger reaches the destination, if it’s shorter than 1200, he just hovers there as a wisp until the cast is complete. he should exit the wisp once he lands.
I agree with the second paragraph. You shouldn’t be hovering there waiting for the cast-time to elapse, it should end when you arrive at the target. I think the wisp is reasonably fast, so you don’t need invulnerability or evasion.
Thoughts on Staff 3
I feel it should do more than it is currently doing. Discussions regarding the effectiveness of healing power and healing coefficients aside, I feel that as an escape (or chase?) tool, it should immobilise, cripple, chill, or just something, to people you wisp through, to really make it effective at creating a range gap that lasts longer than it takes for them to walk in your direction.
Thoughts on staff in general
The damage needs to be higher, or lower with better coefficients, the healing coefficients on the auto attack should be higher, as full investment in healing power (at the expense of another stat) should actually be rewarding, even if a 10-15% reduction in base heal is made to compensate.
Thoughts on Staff 4 and 5
The 4 skill on the staff should cure more than just mobility conditions, and a 1 second immobilize is nice but it doesn’t really last long enough for us to do anything. Maybe 1.5-2.5 seconds would be more impactful.
The 5 skill is a poor alternative to reflection, it either needs more healing per bolt, or the bolts should give like 1 second of protection, or resistance, to make it a viable alternative to straight up reflection (I can see mesmers and guardians getting frustrated if a healing wall intercepted projectiles that could have been used to do several thousand points of damage).
Thoughts on glyphs
While the staff motivates druids to stay at range, so they can position most effectively to heal their allies, and while certain glyphs (the daze, for example), are good panic buttons for when distance to enemies is lost, I feel that the 300~ range on the glyphs should either be larger (360? more if necessary) or, some of them should be ground targeted (600 cast range?). It seems counter intuitive to have a ranged healer gain access to melee range utility skills exclusively. The tether in particular needs a significantly higher range, otherwise you literally need the entire enemy group on your tiny-healer face to really benefit from it.
The traited blossom is also peculiar. It gives the druid, as a ranged healer specialisation, a solid bonus heal and condition cleanse, but only if they are standing next to their allies, changing at least some of the glyphs (Glyph of Tides, and the one that cripples enemies, most notably) to have a ranged cast (600~?) would allow the druid to drop that condition cleanse and healing on their allies, rather than on their own person.
Thoughts on Ranger – Spirits
The loss of mobile spirits, and the loss of on-death effects, combined with the small range on the activated skills means outside of PVE content that allows us to stand in one spot for an extended duration (such as in boss arenas), they don’t serve a purpose, and when you do summon them, they die faster than you can activate their kamikaze-skill
My thoughts would be to make them appear similar to the staff wisps, but with identifiable features. Given their similarity to banners (passive aura bonuses to allies), it would make more sense to have them untargetable, and they don’t actively attack enemies, so aside from avoiding them when the active skill is used, they don’t pose a direct threat like phantasms, gyros, minions or elementals. Obviously the storm spirit daze duration would need to be decreased, and the cooldown may need to be increased to make them less spammable, but it would give the druid more options for support with auras, and make the active skills more accessible as they’d be centered on the ranger.
Thoughts on Ranger – Traps
The ability to lob them was great, it made them far more useful for ranged rangers (as a ranged DPS class, a melee centric skill is less useful). Even just a 360-throw range would be fantastic, especially considering the usefulness they would have for ranged druids in supplying the team with combo fields and the healing spring regen and condi cleanse.
The same should be applied to the dragon hunter, in my view. As a ranged control class, even a 360-range throw on their traps would make it easier to place them between you and your opponents to help maintain that 600-range percentage damage bonus.
Thoughts in general
The druid is good in theory, some of the skills are not as useful as they should be, or are not functioning as they probably should to stay true to what the druid is trying to be. And I feel like between spirits and traps, there is a lot of potential for the druid to provide support to their team outside of just healing with a light-beam, or dazing their own melee enemies, but it would need some reworks to create proper synergy betweem the available support utilities. Also healing coefficients.