Guild Wars 2

Leodon.1564:

Staggs.9372:

That isn’t entirely in agreement with what I’m saying since you skip 50% of the point.

I realized when I copy/pasted my post that it was not covering all the points you brought up. My post was written a month ago and I would probably make changes to it now but why bother when we end up just getting ignored anyways?

You bring up valid points and even though I have some questions on it, I feel like again whats the point? There have been hundreds of threads on this subject for weeks now and we’ve gotten no responses from Anet on it and they are doggedly/stubbornly going down the road they chose.

Edit: This is just me personally giving up on the fight. Don’t let my dejected attitude stop others from continuing the fight/discussion.

That’s the thing: there is no fight to be held. If you consider there is then of course you’re going to give up because you’re losing. It’s about stating that we still care and sharing options. Even if they aren’t talking to us, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading. If we give up on giving them good ideas, then the few who give bad ideas will be the only ones who are heard, and thus we’ll continue to have bad modifications brought to our class.

The reason why I posted this was not to get a dev’s response, but to confirm that we care, and if they don’t have solutions, we do.

Leodon.1564:

Since I’m tired of writing feedback and getting continuously ignored, I’m just going to paste below what I wrote a month ago in regards to AF/CAF that is in line with the OP’s thoughts and many others who brought up similar ideas.

Some suggestions for AF generation and CAF gating:

1. Have AF generate by a certain percentage in normal (non-CAF) mode; degenerate when in CAF mode. Wielding staff provides bonus AF generation in normal mode; decreases rate of degeneration in CAF mode. You can use this method to quantifiably set and normalize AF generation across players, instead of trying to tweak individual AF generation numbers on weapons/heals to reach desired target levels based on observation of gameplay.
2. Start AF at a full globe (tied in with the proposed change from 1 above).
   Unlike a DPS model, healers should not have to “build up” to enter into a pure defensive mode. You should be able to enter a fight between others and immediately go into CAF for some clutch healing; instead of joining the fight, DPS to build enough AF, and then go for some “clutch” healing. When a person comes at you in a 1v1 situation, he’s coming at you with all he has in the first 5 seconds of the fight. You need access to your full defensive kit to deal with that.
3. To create the “bursty” healing gameplay, use soft gating methods to encourage players to fill the AF bar instead of using hard gates, such as a 10 CD/max AF restriction. Hard gating methods, taken from DPS oriented models, are not flexible enough to deal with the time-sensitive and situational nature of a healing class. Some soft gating methods you can use instead to create a bursty healing druid are:

• Add AF cost for entering CAF to discourage players from going in and out of CAF form unnecessarily.
• Tie heal strength with how full the AF bar is when you entered CAF (e.g., 50% AF bar = 50% heals). This will encourage players to reach max AF before entering CAF to mimic a bursty healing spec but without imposing a hard gate.
• Add percentage bonus to DPS for every level of AF bar generated (e.g., 1% increase in DPS for every 20% AF bar generated) to relieve some of the anxiety players feel from having a full bar of AF but without having a reason to change to CAF. This will also help to alleviate some of the DPS loss perceived by Rangers when taking the Druid line (i.e., at least you’re getting a DPS bonus if you are not using CAF much).
• While in CAF, have total healing done feedback into refilling AF bar for increased CAF duration. This will reward players who invest heavily into healing power which is traditionally viewed as an unfavorable stat.

With the above changes, a player can be the type of bursty player you envision Druid healing to be but you leave the choice in the hands of the player. They can choose to be suboptimal healers (balanced with other healing/support classes in mind) for more constant healing, if the need arises. The above changes should also be alot easier to implement/balance from Anet’s side, as opposed to trying to normalize every combination of weapon/heal/ability for AF generation.

That isn’t entirely in agreement with what I’m saying since you skip 50% of the point.
The second biggest issue with CA is how skills must be used in a set time frame, leaving no time for targeting or strategical use. This is caused by the fact that we are forced to do as much as we can in the 15s of CA we get to avoid wasting heals, but it actually makes us waste heals because we can’t take the time to target properly with the consideration of where people are going to move and thus be when our healing skill lands. We are also extremely nerfed by any form of CC during CA because while CCd we can’t cast anything, but our AF is still degenerating… One could argue that in that case you should exit CA on CC, but with the time it takes to get into CA in the first place, you wouldn’t be able to get back into it before quite some time, so more often then not, you’ll opt to sit through the CC in CA, and then use whatever time is left to do as much healing as you can.

Swiftwynd.1685:

Id go as dar to say removal all cooldowns in CA form and adjust the abilities slightly so that each has an optimal use.

Ability one, increase area and reduce delay, this would be our targeted range heal option, consuming 10% AF per use, default best range heal.

Ability 2, reduce delay on activation and increase area. Removes condis and increases healing based on conditions removed. Terrible base heal compared to 1 but stronger by far when removing conditions. 20% of bar per use.

3rd ability would be the daze and a burst heal, and would also receive a good damage coefficient. Daze would still be 2 seconds, heal would be similat to 1.5x ability 1, but cost would be high at 30% of bar.

4 would be the most efficient healing option but would require a channel and melee range, so plenty of counterplay in pvp. It would consume 40% of the bar but would be our best burst healing and efficient healing option due to its limitations.

5 would now work while moving and would be our best offensive tool while in CAF. It would receive a damage increase and it would also cost 40% of the bar, but like ability 4 it would have a channel and only work in melee.

As far the rate of gain, i would set the default to 20 seconds to go from 0 to full, with healing and damage increasing the rate of gain. Some how it would need to be balanced to reward constant and significant healing, so that it could be useful for multiple builds, rewarsing dps buils or heavy healing power builds.

CAF would not need a time gated duration for staying in it, and it would not need a cooldown either, as the recharge is now effectively doubled to 20 seconds, but could theoretically be lowered to below 10 seconds if the druid is successfully healing or dpsing effectively.

Gotta disagree here.

My whole point is that they’ve been going at tit wrong with the whole hit/heal to generate AF. That is the one thing they don’t seem to be able to balance. If they go with natural generation, then they shouldn’t put in damage and heal generation too. If That had been a good idea, and not a nightmare to balance, then I’d have suggested to simply scale the amount of AF generated with the amount of healing done. That would solve the issue of healers, but it would also be hard to implement because of the whole calculations it would require. Also, 20s would probably be too long since we can’t go in and out of it ad lib. With that being said, this would pretty much be the only thing they’d need to balance: how long to go from none to full instead of how to generate AF to go from none to full. In other words, the whole point of my suggestion is that clearly they know approximately how often they want us to be able to go in CA, so they could just fix it according to that, and then see how it works.

Also, taking away the cool downs of skills in CA, while it might make sense if you look at revenants and thieves who use an alternative ressource instead of cool downs, it doesn’t work with the way rangers work at this time, and it would confuse more than a few players to go from a class with cool downs to a class without them when entering CA. This would make a lot of them spam 1 skill, and not necessarily the right one too. part of the reasons for AF conservation through leaving CA before it ends is to have the ability to keep that AF to go back into CA when you know you can use a specific skill, instead of having to fill up the bar again. I understand that you would rather have it without cool downs because on paper it makes it more accessible and thus more useful, but in practice it makes it more optimal to spend as much time spamming 1 skill as possible, and Arenanet don’t seem to want us to do that in order to heal.

Last thing I have to disagree with are your costs. Rounding it all to the closest 10% is poor design and would result in the use of very little skills during CA, and would badly nerf it. As of right now, during 1 CA without quickness, you can execute this combo: 4,3,2,1,2,1,3,4 or 4,3,5,2,3,4. If we used your percenatages for these, we’d be using 200% both times. Let’s say that since we don’t have to rush them out and can actually target them, we shouldn’t be able to get so many out, thus reducing it by a quarter. this would give us something like 1=7 2=13 3=20 4=27 5=30. If they go with numbers like this, they’d also have to make it so it automatically takes you out of CA when you cannot use anymore skills because of a lack of AF unless they leave the natural AF generation while in CA.

Once again these are all just suggestions and ideas, but let’s try to stay neutral and not try to get it to be particularly good for a particular play style that fits our own as you seemed to be hinting at with your opinion on the 5th skill which according to what they have done is more of a support through CC and moderate damage than a damage burst. Also, trying to change the skills themselves at this point is probably not going to happen. The best we can hope for are minor tweaks in that regard. The only thing they are truly messing up right now is the AF generation, and the lack of time to use it properly once we finally get into CA.

I actually tried this earlier… It’s crap. because we have to ground target them all and our opponent is constantly moving, most of our vaults miss, and most of our damage dodges miss too. I hate to admit this, but for the first time in a long time I just quit the game without finishing the match because I was kittened.

The condi daredevil with D/D is just better overall, and is more fun to play. It has more evades, more consistent damage, and doesn’t necessarily have to be in melee to deal damage thanks to the dodge, and the lingering condis.

Doable with D/D, doable with S/D, doable with Staff, and if you’re feeling fancy, you could maybe do it with short bow, but it would be more of a bother to play than anything else. It’s nothing complicated, just get some gear with toughness and the damgage type your weapon set uses, then build for evades and you’ll be alright.

Let’s face it: You don’t know how to balance this elite specialization which you brought into the game even though it had had very little testing. I’m guessing that you knew it was crap in its state at launch, but you couldn’t delay your launch because 1 elite spec was crap, right?

Here’s a simple solution: Make us generate AF over time, and instead of making it degenerate on its own while we are in CA, give our abilities while in CA an AF cost. If you do this, it will take away the problem of not being able to land things properly within the 15seconds we have in CA because of people’s need to move, in the way that we often miss a lot of our heals because our target simply needs to move and our heals are ground targeted and not player targeted.

I believe the reason why you made your most recent terrible alteration to AF generation was because you thought we were going into CA too often. Then simply make it so you decide how often we can enter it by giving it a fixed amount of time to generate. However, don’t back stab us by making it so we can’t leave CA and keep our remaining AF because we didn’t need to be in CA any longer, or needed to swap back to our weapon skills. What I mean by this is that we need to have the possibility to make decisions too. If you are going to set a fix time for AF to go from 0% to 100% then you must give us the choice on whether we want to fully consume it at once, or use part of it on skills, and then wait for cool downs from the form to be back up before entering it again. We need to be able to make decisions for our class to remain interesting, but I understand that you also need to have some form of control over the accessibility of some things. You have that accessibility through the cool downs of the CA skills, and their cost, in addition to control over how much time it takes to go from 0 to 100, thus time gating stuff.

I think that the reason why you are failing at balancing this right now is because you are just slightly iterating on the way things currently work instead of seeing how broken your current system truly is and the fact that it needs an overhaul.

Regards, Peter Steel.

HotHit.6783:

Staggs.9372:

I don’t think going full healing has its place in PvP, and in PvE, we already have enough generation as healers. It’s just a matter of positioning and build.

Also, how are you going to heal threw glyphs outside of CA except for the healing one?

Traited glyphs drop seeds of life, which can give you up to five heal procs of Astral Force. As a Ranger with good positioning, it’s not too much of a stretch to assume you can get two procs per glyph as minimum. It’s not much but better than most.

Fair point, it just slipped my mind there for a second.

Well here’s what I’m running: http://de.gw2skills.net/editor/?vNEQNBmOD7kSFohFsmVwgVgoFsMLYwD0D6C1pqd1+XPBg6036in6DC-ThSDABO8EAwU9nsUeMsSsGUCe8BBAq9H2T3ApmgA4CAEA4A493z9uH8+xHf8xH37v/+7vHA-e

But I think you’re onto something with the Frost spirit in addition to the Glyph of empowerment and the 15% damage during/ after CA. That would mean windows of 35% damage increase to the team which in terms of burst is just insane! Although I have had my Stone signet save my life more than once, and the glyph that heals when in CA has also save my team mates’ lives on several occasions (I’m looking at those people who move for no reason so I can’t heal them with the 2 first abilities, and sometimes they jump out of the third and fourth while I’m casting them…). I’ll give it a go and might even try to trait for spirits instead of heal on F2 abilities since I’m under the impression that that thing doesn’t work, or at least I’ve never seen it heal anyone even though I almost use it on cool down…

Also, I think that using sword is a mistake because it has literally 0 support and sends you to melee range so you’re more vulnerable, plus the auto attack can get you killed stupidly. The axe at least has a 10s weakness on it and grants might to you and your pet on it’s auto attack.

I’m guessing you took wilderness survival because of the sustain it gives you in WvW so that’s fair enough.

Regarding gear, Cleric or Magi would probably be the better choice since you don’t do condi damage, but the new support set that increases boon duration could also be a good plan if you have the time to gather it. I say this because you do apply quite a few boons to your team (even though with shouts tratied and We Heal as One as your healing skill you’d apply even more), but overall, your damage is going to be through staff so power or Precision is the clear choice. But I prefer to have high Vitality even though I shouldn’t because of all the mechanics that chop away a percentage of your health instead of actual set numbers, thus meaning that I’ll have to heal my self of way more damage with more hp, and I’ll take more damage from direct physical and magical hits. However, normal condis in WvW for instance will affect you less, so if you out range your opponents and always keep your allies between you, having more health means that when you get hit eventually, it has a lesser impact.

I don’t think going full healing has its place in PvP, and in PvE, we already have enough generation as healers. It’s just a matter of positioning and build.

Also, how are you going to heal threw glyphs outside of CA except for the healing one?

IDICERI.4268:

I got it yesterday. I spent around 325 hero points all at once though.

Wait… Did you spend those on daredevil skills, or do we need to spend hero points to get the ascended versions of our elite spec weapons?

This, regen, and condis (plus spirit procs because I hear they don’t) should all be a part of astral force generation. It would open so many possibilities to us and would solve the classe’s main issues.

I’m gonna have to say no, no, no, and no.

Astral Force isn’t that hard to generate in PvE if you use a staff (which you should if you want to enter Celestial Avatar and stay in it since this is a healing form and staff is the only healing weapon set we have). I understand however that it might be frustrating in PvP for people who trait druid to get access to the 13 condis cleanse, the superspeed and stealth, or the damage buff for team mates and self, and so this is just a matter of being able to generate Astral Force threw more than a static amount every time you deal damage or heal. However, making Celestial Avatar something that only serves as a healing tool would be a terrible idea. We already have our 1 and 2 abilities that are basically the same. If they didn’t have the cooldown they have then we’d just spam one and forget about the other. But when in Celestial avatar, you sometimes need to put out some damage because everyone is full health, but you don’t want to leave it in case some one takes a big hit before it should have ended. To save this, removing Astral Force depletion upon leaving celestial avatar could help. Just like with Death shroud, you could get in it, do what has to be done, get out of it, but keep enough ressource to have it available if needed.
Making the forme a no damage and no boon is also extremely terrible design in a PvP environment. If you can’t get stability and are basically a shining healing beacon to enemies, you’re going to get CCd to the ground and beaten so hard at every tune you’ll wish you’d picked an other class… Plus disabling the pet’s damage dealing is also laughable.

Right now, the Druid as a healer is functional and efficient. It’s just a matter of knowing what you’re doing and having the right build. The issues with the druid come when you try to mix it with other talent trees for damage dealing and quickly realize it has not been thought for that.

Only real big issue I see at this point with the druid is the absence of other support weapons than the staff. Only thing I could find is a traited Warhorn to apply boons and regen to allies, but there’s no main hand support weapon to complete it so I end up using the axe because in PvE it’s a terrible idea to use the ranger’s sword because of the auto attack that can cause your death soooo easily.

Lord Trejgon.2809:

Staggs.9372:

If you want to stick with hybrid, that’s fair enough, but in that case, if this is for raids and other instanced PvE content, remember that bosses don’t get CCd often at all. Therefor, your Druid Grandmaster is wasted.

actually as far as my testing goes said grandmaster trigger most of the time even on guys with breakbar upon any attempt of cc from you on him – but other thing is that bosses just ignore that immobilise and goes where and when they want… (andthough if you manage to somehow convince them to not run around like headless chickens then vines from your cc add even more contribution against their breakbar

only mobs I’ve encountered by far that have prooven to not trigger the perk are the ones told to be totally immune for any cc attemps – like for example mordrem tendrills (they just flash you with immune and keep shooting) also some legendary guys seems to not trigger that trait like for example both legendary wyverns in verdant brink canopy and searing effigy at the end of CoF P1….

I guess I’ll give it a try then. I was really looking forward to unlocking this while going threw the jungle, but I switched to a more healing playstyle before I did. Didn’t get around to using it because of how powerful the first grandmaster is.

On a side note, am I the only one who thinks that might should also affect healing? I mean… If they want to encourage people to play dedicated healers, then maybe we need a better reason to care for might as a buff considering how it’s the main buff we stack. Just a thought though, nothing too needed.

Only thing I’d ask to change for PvE would be that Regen generates Astral Force. However, I am aware that this would not satisfy the PvPers since they want it for the condi cleanse, and possibly the superspeed and stealth on exiting it. Plus if they play pew pew/ power ranger, they’ll also want the damage increase for allies healed while they are in CF because it is a huge advantage in team fights to have all your landing attacks do 15 more damage (25% if also under the effects of glyph of empowerment).

Since I’m maining it healer and am already rather satisfied with what I can do with it although I would love to see the axe get some healing possibility since we have no main hand weapon that fits this role even though the warhorn is useable as a support weapon when traited, I already know that the changes that will happen will either not affect me in the slightest, or make me even stronger with it. What a lot of people fail to realize right now is that a support ranger in Fractals right now, if played well, can be in CF as soon as it’s off cooldown, every time, even though he should probably pop a few useful things out of it before getting back into it.

If you want to stick with hybrid, that’s fair enough, but in that case, if this is for raids and other instanced PvE content, remember that bosses don’t get CCd often at all. Therefor, your Druid Grandmaster is wasted. In the hybrid spirit: support/condi, I would choose the increased damage output for players you heal in celestial avatar form. That would justify keeping the staff, and how supporting you are because it would be a bigger dps increase than the dps loss from you being part support.
In the same optic, you won’t be getting slowed too much in those environments so reduced movement impairing effects is not all that good, even more so when you know what you’re missing out on support-wise by taking reduced recharge on glyphs and Glyph of Empowerment which you could then chain with your Celestial Avatar form doing one before entering and one on exiting, since it’ll almost be off cd, which means that you create a huge burst window for your team, and you dish out a bit more healing which in turns generates a bit more CA force. You should probably keep both your traps, and trade your Quickening zephyr for it since it’s a bigger buff in dps overall for your group to have that rather than you applying a bit more dots for 6s.

My view on the druid after several hours of fractal farm as dps, then hybrid, then full support, is that the druid is largely underestimated because most of the feedback we see is from people who haven’t finished getting all of their traits and skills yet. Yes, it has some very poor elements to it (try being a druid healer underwater… You don’t have your staff there, and regen doesn’t give CA force, plus once you enter CA the ground targeted abilities are really difficult to use…) and doesn’t synergies very well with previous ranger options, but it is what it is, and we’ll have to make the best out of it. What it excels at this far is creating burst windows for the group, and that no matter what kind of build you play as long as you take that glyph of empowerment and the damage increase from healing in CA, but it is also a really good healer once you get a hang of it. The staff isn’t as bad as one would think, but here is not the place to talk about why, I’ll just say that if you play it right, and other players stop trying to get behind you when you’re trying to get behind them because you can only heal them that way, you can keep your team alive, and you’ll have really good access to Celestial Avatar.

So regarding your build this is what I would do to stay in the hybrid optic: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNEQNAW3fnMqAlrgtrA2sCUtgFGBDupWVzqNjraVIgpAc5CAnssHBB-TBiAABfcBACc/BAOIAlp8jU1fk+BAErSQOOCAAA-e

Please note that the GM traits on this site are not up to date, the first one gives increased damage output of 3% per stack, stacks up to 5 times, lasts 8s, for every ally (and yourself) when you heal them in celestial avatar. The second is a 3s cd "when you heal an ally their next attack heals them for x and blinds their target for 4s (lasts 6s), and the last one is up to date.

If you have any further questions, just ask

After my last unexplained crash, the launcher won’t open anymore. No error message or nothing, it just appears on the dock and does nothing. This is on Mac.

Several unexplained crashes on Mac client. The game just closes and says there was an unexpected grave error and that Arenanet has been alerted. I’m on a high end mac so it’s not just that mac’s are crap, it’s a real bug so don’t go trolling me here :p

So many posts about this everywhere… The real problem is that this is not the only problem they have right now :p There are quite a few elite specs that present massive issues so this might not be top priority.

When you think about it, it’s their first expansion so errors were predictable. I guess it will all be resolved in a week or two. Until then we just have to sit tight and try to get through the jungle without losing our minds.

Until I get it maxed out and into an instance, I’m gonna say I don’t like it. The ressource management is awful. The depletion makes no sense considering how hard it is to generate in the first place, and this is all added to a cooldown on the form. Just make it either a cooldown, or a pseudo death shroud, but don’t make it a bad version of Death shroud with a cooldown!

The staff isn’t fun to play with either. Wether it be trying to heal people with it, or just dps in general. Up till now, there has never been an instance of a weapon that was terrible damage because it had healing on it. The worst we have like that is the Guardian staff which has more utility than this one, and allowed the player to heal himself. Because yes, the Druid staff only has one skill that does that, and it’s a leap that does little healing. All the other heals it has are for people between the mob and the druid.
I haven’t unlocked all the glyphs yet, but I can already see how little use they’ll be of considering that I’ll never be able to use them in CA mode since I can’t get into it in a PvE environment and getting into it in a PvP environment only allows me to stay alive a few seconds longer.
Also, there is no incentive to weapon swap to something other than the staff while playing as a druid since doing so takes away the CA ressource generation from the Staffs 1st ability that heals in addition to doing damage which means it generates several times as much CA ressource. I actually tried playing the spec without the staff, and with something else than troll onguent, and I never got even close to entering CA.

Needless to say: I am very disappointed.
I’d happily say I’ll do my Daredevil elite spec while waiting for this to be fixed, but they messed up Daredevil too since what makes that spec what it is are the Grand master talents which will take a long time to get.

I don’t think they should’ve gated elite specs like this. We already have the masteries to grind without having to get threw these too.

This indicates how the druid was thought up. They didn’t want a class that could heal, they wanted a class that could heal in long boss encounters. I really don’t get why they make it decrease like that. It wouldn’t be broken to have it not decrease while out of combat since you’d still have to generate it again once you got out of it. However it would make it so you can use it on something else than long boss fights or mob farm rushes.
Plus the only way to get in this form right now in PvP is with both Troll Onguent and Staff. And that won’t win you the fight since the staff’s damage is really low, and the healing is mostly done to targets between you and your opponent so you’re probably dead before you hit that F5 and it works.

This has been asked for for ages now, and considering how the only occasion they had to do it they instead decided to give us another ranged weapon that focuses on support, I guess we’ll have to wait until they decide to do an other expansion and give us new elite specializations. This however does mean that we won’t get any new weapon if other classes don’t get one too…

Not very surprising considering it was finished last and was only given little testing. Thanks for the info though, I was about to get my ranger to the jungle.

And that is why I’ll take care of getting my thief threw the Jungle last… At least I can play her in PvP with the right traits… This is rather stupid on their behalf indeed, but that’s my opinion about how the whole skill and trait acquisition works since they changed it. The problem is that you can’t choose, you just go threw them all and have to take them all to get to the last.
But yeah, with this system, they could have at the very least made them tier 1 or 2. Having to get to the GM ones to actual feel like you’re no longer playing a simple thief really blows.

True that it is absurde…