Guild Wars 2

And the Celestials resemble random animals. You’re focusing too much on what druid spirits looked like.

If Celestials have a connection to cosmic forces and looked like pigs and rats then why does the druid spirit resembling an astral oakheart make them incompatible with the same cosmic forces? Especially when there is no lore about what sort of powers the druids had.

Here are some druid quotes.

“All that exists is all that must be.”
“Time moves neither forward or back. Time is the lens of perception.”
“The spirit beholds the truths that the eye cannot see.”

“It is not often that we allow mortals to witness our rituals, but we see in you the seeds of the divine. To be divine is to realize that we are all one. That the self is an illusion. Through this do you understand your own immortality. Through this are you freed from the illusions of the flesh.
Do not rush your understanding of these mysteries. Allow them to take root and mature gradually within you as the seedling in the soil.”

They clearly worked with concepts that went beyond simple animals and plants. They spoke of time, immortality, divinity, and spirit. And most of all they spoke of a unity of all things, which would make their view of the cosmos as a whole being a part of “nature” perfectly thematic.

Scenario 3 is that the content will be difficult that you’ll need a lot of healing to complete them but won’t necessarily need a DEDICATED healer if everyone else would be willing to spec into a hybrid damage/heal role and cover one another.

Which means it might be optimal to role with a dedicated healer so that the rest of the party can focus solely on damage, but it won’t be required to do the content if everyone is willing to make the damage sacrifice by bringing a few pieces of Clerics gear along.

Even then the druid isn’t a true dedicated healer. It’s a hybrid that can be built for heavy healing, but still deals damage with standard attacks. Just like every other support build in the game druid will be doing DPS and control when healing isn’t necessary.

It is possible the druid spirits and the celestials are a case of convergent evolution. Both could have gone through similar rites to transcend their mortal bodies to become immortal spirits with the Celestials attaining a position in the heavens and druids not wanting to leave Maguuma.

If so then the druids would have had similar magic to what the Celestials used to ascend, and the current GW2 druid is simply using the same powers the druids held before finally becoming spirit beings.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Sure, it does work and is useful, but that is hardly synergy.

Synergy would be your pet dealing additional damage or crippling foes with the wisp attached, or shadow stepping to your target when you use Vine Surge.

healing your pet also builds up astral energy doesn’t (APPARENTLY “DOESN’T” AND “IT” CANNOT BE NEAR EACH OTHER OR IT GETS CENSORED SO I PUT THIS HERE TO MAKE SURE THE FORUM DOES NOT CHANGE MY WORDS INTO KITTENS) it? So by catching your pet in a Solar Beam you are both restoring the pet’s health and building up your astral energy so you can enter the Avatar State.

I feel this counts as synergy. What you describe isn’t so much synergy between unrelated skills as it is extra skill effects.

Though I would like to see a pet skill on staff.

A lot of people in this thread are talking about GW1 druids as if the celestial theme absolutely does not fit with them. I find this funny seeing as we know NOTHING about the druids of GW1 as far as their beliefs, rituals, and magic is concerned.

All we know is they were worshipers of Melandru who left Kryta and eventually shed their mortal bodies to become spirits. There is nothing there that says they only used plant and animal magic. Nothing at all. Not one scrap of lore. So how can you tell me they absolutely did not utilize celestial magic when there is no lore that says they didn’t?

Druidism in GW1 is a massive blank spot. The GW2 druid gives us an idea of what sort of magic they might have used before shedding their bodies. There is no lore that says the GW2 druid is wrong. There is no case to be made about lore conflicts.

You do realize druids can still access their ranger weapons and utilities right?

neurosis.6350:

Okay, guys. I see your point of view.
Despite of our different imagination of what natural spells are (I still think that Solar\Lunar spells are kinda astral spells :P) all I want is possibility to damage in Celestial form. You know, I’ve been playing Ranger from the very beginning and I’d like to see another damage skills since I play most of the time alone. I would realy appreciate that my Ranger would get another skill set with another weapon and visuals just to do story\exploring alone. Why do I want to damage in Celestial form? Because I don’t want to just pass through such cool spell (despite even that it not meets my expectations of more natural tree-leafy-spirit-whatever form). Since my druid have it why can’t I just use it to dps to?
Make it just a li’l bit more powerfull than staff. I’m OK with that I won’t play as DPS in Raids as druid. But I’m think that it’s unfair to take our opportunity to deal damage in Celestial form.
It’s like to have a big candy but you HAVE to eat it with wrapper

Check out the druid forum. There are a few threads talking about offense oriented druids with both power and condi builds.

Celestial form is a REALLY strong sustain set up that we get for free just by speccing druid. That’s what is so great about it. You can build your druid to focus on damage and control while still having the celestial form to fall back on to heal back up or whip out some strong group support in team fights. Rangers have always been weak in team situations and now we have an option to bring team support in addition to what we normally bring without giving up all that much.

Know how every ranger has to spec into Wilderness Survival for the condi cleanse? You can drop that and take Druid. Take Druidic Clarity and now entering Celestial Form cures ALL conditions on you when activated. Which itself has it’s own condi cleanse skill. Still worried about conditions? Take Verdant Etching to cure even more by using Glyphs. Or, if you feel you can handle condis without it, take Natural Stride and get perma swiftness movement speed without using a single skill to maintain it. Like Longbow 4? Good. Because with the grandmaster trait Ancient Seeds you can lead with the knockdown and then strike your target with Rapid Fire to immobilize them. Pretty much forces them to eat that Rapid Fire.

Druid doesn’t have to be a healbot unless you make it so.

I’d flip your Stone Spirit idea around. Protection on proc and the 10% damage reduction from the trait.

Reason being 10% reduction on a 70% proc chance is pretty lackluster. The spirit wouldn’t be close to useful to take without the trait to a degree I’m not comfortable with.

Weakness and Blind on passive for Storm might be interesting. Personally I’d prefer my idea of having Storm cause a small lightning bolt of direct damage as it’s passive proc so we have another unique team wide DPS increase. If we get that we can then change Frost Spirit to proc Chill or Vulnerability which is far more mechanically interesting and thematic than a straight 10% DPS boost.

Main reason I want to change Frost is just to make it less boring. I’d rather get the DPS increase from bolts of lightning on Storm. Storm’s active is also potentially useful for a direct damage point of view so it just makes more sense. Besides, Storm Spotter sounds cooler.

Indeed. Some people keep talking like the druid can ONLY be played as a healer. They will weep when they meet a Remorseless Druid or Mad Seeder. Druids are all about life, and a big part of life is ending it!

Ranger got support stuff from Guardian and Guardian got ranged damage and traps from Ranger. Seems like a fair trade to me.

How is healing not synergy? Synergy is when two entities/mechanics play off one another to create a more effective end result. Having more options to heal the pet keeps the pet alive longer so that it can survive battles and remain useful. The pet dying has been a big problem of rangers for a long time and now we have more tools to manage it.

Druid also works really well with pets by giving us more access to immobilize and control effects. Rangers have always mixed hard and soft control to help the pet hit more frequently and set up pet bursts. Druid will be even better at that than base ranger.

The thing about the GW1 druids is that we know next to nothing about their practices, rituals, or magic. All we know is their ultimate fate of becoming one with Maguuma.

Beyond that we don’t know what sort of magic they had. Were they rangers? Were they monks who worshiped Melandru? Shoot, for all we know they could’ve been necromancers.

Now we have a general idea. Like druids in real life and several other fantasy settings they used magic that reflected their view of nature. Contrary to what most people think “nature” is not limited to Earth/Tyria. Nature is all that exists naturally, which includes the sun, moon, and stars and all the celestial bodies of the universe.

Historic druids paid close attention to the celestial bodies. They watched and charted the stars and kept track of important celestial events like the equinox which was considered a deeply spiritual event. Druids in Tyria seem to have had a similar reverence for the world beyond ours and used it’s power to help defend Maguuma. And as they grew more and more powerful with the celestial magic of nature they finally reached a point where their mortal bodies were no longer useful and shed them, becoming spirits of nature.

Every character in the game has an effective self heal skill that would allow them to recover from damage that can’t completely avoid. As long as we all have strong self healing potential a dedicated healer will never be entirely MANDATORY and so the trinity will never be a hard rule.

However having someone who has a heavy healing build allows other players to focus entirely on DPS without worrying too much about their own health bars. In this way a healer can be very useful to a team but not mandatory to succeed.

The problem was that until now most of the game’s healing options were just far too weak to make any noticeable difference on the team’s health pools and were outright inferior to self healing. Now that healing specced characters can provide more healing to the group than pure self healing would provide they can actually find a role in a group, but that doesn’t mean the content will be impossible without a healer like in a trinity game.

Just write your pet names on a sticky note and leave it by your desk like I do. I can easily keep track of the names of all my relevant pets and just take three seconds to type in the name upon switching it out.

Another trick. If you use amphibious pets you can have two for aquatic use. These will automatically apply their names to the equivalent land pet no matter how many times you swap them out. I do this for my main drakes so I never lose their names while playing with other pets.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Druid-is-a-Mockery-of-Guardian

It has begun.

Rangers are some of the best duelists in the game. I doubt changing one trait line and having a support weapon will completely invalidate your ability to defend yourself.

Especially now that pets have a condi damage stat. Your pet just became more lethal in a 1v1 scenario than ever before AND you got a huge number of new ways to heal it to make sure it won’t die.

Really ranger is the best profession to get a healing elite spec. Unlike any other profession out there we are NEVER alone and can always benefit from the ability to heal others.

Mavander.3208:

The question I have for Irenio is: What if I want to be a dps druid?

Remorseless Druid looks like it will be rather good. Druid gives a lot of dazes to proc Moment of Clarity and a lot of immobilizes to keep the enemy in place for a Maul. Condi druid is also looking promising with traps or just straight up bleeds.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Ehecatl.9172:

Add Runes of the Mad King to this plus the new bleed spam pet. We’ll make a kill zone of thorns and death.

Yeah, was thinking this too; The Ancient Mad Druid haha! That is gonna be crazy good.

Yes! Let the blood of our enemies fuel new life. Let the birds feast on the dead as they hang rotting beneath the rising sun! It is the dawn of a new era. The time of the Mad Druid has come!

The other thread has had threads about WHEN the druid would be released merged with threads about actual feedback. Most of the first half of it is incredibly frustrating to read because it isn’t relevant to the druid at all as is mostly content from before the druid was revealed.

Nike.2631:

Also consider on the Lone Pine what happens when you cast Entangle followed by either glyph… Boom: instant 5 target Ancient Seeds with its FX hidden under the Entangle briars. They specifically called out that if you trigger Ancient seeds with an AoE it procs on everybody before going into ICD. Bleed-o-rama with hidden barbs dialing it up even further.

Add Runes of the Mad King to this plus the new bleed spam pet. We’ll make a kill zone of thorns and death.

Druid seems to provide us with a lot of mobility options beyond swiftness spam which could be really helpful. Staff has a 1,200 range movement skill that can basically auto position you in a good spot for a Rapid Fire.

Druid has a ton of healing, true, but more importantly it brings a TON of utility that can potentially compliment a lot of playstyles rangers already have but are just shy of being meta viable.

Holy biscuits! Heal as One may well be our strongest heal now. Imagine how easy it is for rangers to get 25 might now that we can just copy it from our pet!

That plus the condi damage on pets… Oh man. Our condi damage dealing friends are going to be lethal now if we take the 700 condi damage base from the new pets and assume the others will have AT LEAST this. 700 condi damage with 25 stacks of might we can maintain permanently…

Power rangers with a condi pet could be the new meta.

Celestial certainly seems to be thematically appropriate.

So far there’s already two solid builds for druid on the ranger forum. One that is a Remorseless Melee Druid for damage and lockdown control and another that’s a point control trapper druid who uses the druid’s incredible control skills and that pull to keep the enemy in your traps. In fact druid addresses all the issues trapper ranger has had in the past including mobility, condition management, sustain, and ranged pressure.

That plus the healing support bunker build makes three builds that look very promising. And the druid has only been revealed for less than a day.

But you can give your pet DINO MIGHT with Companion’s Might and Fortifying Bond.

Might stack your dino for MAXIMUM DINO MIGHT.

To StinVec.

Remember that in SPVP all pets are automatically unlocked for all rangers, even the Hall of Monuments pets that you are suppose to unlock from GW1. It seems probable that the HoT exclusive pets will be available in SPVP but if you want them in the rest of the game you need to buy the game and go tame them just like everyone else.

We’re going to be entering Maguuma itself and there’s no indication that the druids from GW1 are dead. It seems entirely likely that our rangers have been contacted by the spirits of the ancient druids and taught how to utilize their power, of which we, as Konig said, know absolutely NOTHING about. As to why they chose us, rangers are already capable of using nature magic and channeling nature spirits. They already have a deep respect for nature and a reverence for the creatures of Maguuma, and have come to Maguuma to defend it from a creature that seeks to corrupt everything the druids gave up their mortal lives to protect.

Rangers becoming druids makes perfect sense from a lore perspective, and what exactly druids were capable of was a massive blank spot in the lore until now. Obviously the druids of Maguuma were astronomers in addition to gardeners, which perfectly fits in with what a druid is in history and many fictions.

I agree. Great job to Irenio. Even if the druid is undertuned on release I’ll still be playing it due to all the neat mechanics and skills it has and how well a lot of the traits and utilities work with base ranger set ups.

Aomine.5012:

Wait, hold on there.

What do you mean by “Versatility of the glyphs with synergies”, when all of them are PBAOE short range, while all staff skills are 1200 range?

Where’s the synergy?

Plus that 10% damage bonus Glyph is even worse than Frost Spirit.. (only 1/4 up-time, netting a 2.5% damage increase over 20 secs)

Elementalist staff is also a 1,200 range weapon but is best used in melee range because of how much easier the AoE moves are to land.

Not every long ranged weapon is a ranger longbow that is only effective at max range. Seems like the druid will be a skirmishing focused specialization with high mobility and short range AoE effects while still being able to tag an enemy at max range. In other words a very versatile set up for a class that is suppose to boast amazing versatility.

Ha! I was just thinking of a build like this. You fellows move fast with your theorycrafting.

I’d probably go with Flame and Spike trap together and Healing Spring to maximize traps. Then Glyph of Tides for the pull. With Healing Spring’s condi cleanse you wouldn’t need the cleanse from Verdant Etching, so I’d grab Natural Stride for constant, effortless perma swiftness and reduced movement impairing effects. That plus Ancestral Grace means you’ll be incredibly mobile with your trapper in case you need to rotate or return to point after a respawn.

I am gonna have fun with wyverns and dinosaurs. This is a glorious day.

If the druid didn’t have a pet we couldn’t be druids with dinosaurs and wyverns at our side.

I think that explains everything.

All of my hype for the new dinosaur pets. I AM SO EXCITED.

I love the way that sounds. “The Remorseless Druid”. Sounds like someone messed with the wrong druid’s grove!

I’m personally considering a trapper druid set up. With all those methods to immobilize foes it won’t be hard to keep someone in your traps for the duration. Combine that with all the healing you get from the staff and traits and the trapper druid’s sustain problems could be a thing of the past. Plus staff has the range needed to deal with long ranged opponents, and Sublime Conversation is basically a hard counter to projectile users.

Druid looks really interesting and is a completely new playstyle rangers had no access to before. I am excited for it. Love the new pets too, will definitely be using them.

Oh wow. This looks like it’ll be really interesting to play. And I LOVE these new pets! Totally going to run with a fire wyvern or smokeskale. I can’t wait to play it!

All the racials suck. Which kind of sucks in and of itself.

If we can’t use racials in competitive PVP why does it really matter if we can find creative racial builds for the less competitive game modes?

My charr elementalist will almost certainly be anti-Sylvari. He’s very distrustful as is and wouldn’t want someone that can lose control at any moment right beside him.

My charr ranger is on the fence since obviously you don’t want someone that could fall to the enemy near your base but he also isn’t as quick to choose the militant path as my elementalist.

My Sylvari characters will obviously be pro sylvari.

I agree with the OP. Endlessly pessimistic posts aren’t going to encourage Anet to communicate with us. Any dev that might consider posting here knows that if they do they’ll just get spammed by a hundred “NOT GOOD ENOUGH!” posts and more complaints that aren’t even related to the original topic the dev was responding to. We’re really just hurting ourselves at this point.

Druids are awesome. I will be glad to become a druid.

Well, it IS possible the druid might have a playstyle that meshes well with spirits rather than having a trait that directly buffs spirits.

For example the auto attack could be fast or a multi-hit skill that procs the passive spirit effect frequently like the shortbow. It could also have skills that grab and pull enemies to specific locations or block movement so we can protect the spirits more effectively.

Substance E.4852:

That was my point. The very little we do know is basic stuff. There’s virtually no hard details just as there’s very little of any had details on any of the British Isle cultures prior to the Roman arrival.

Pretty much anytime someone says “Druids were/did ____” it’s something that got tacked on, most likely in the modern era.

Sorry, I wasn’t responding to you. I was responding to Durzlla’s response to me and didn’t see your post until I sent mine!

I agree with you on what you said.

In a 1v1 the ranger’s pet really shines. We have so much soft control that we can pretty easily get the pet to land it’kittens even without taunt, and the extra damage and control the pet brings can make a big difference in a duel scenario.

In larger scale fights the pet’s impact becomes less noticeable and their vulnerability to excessive cleave and AoE makes them a liability. This coupled with rangers providing less team support than other professions and having less mobility than a thief means we can’t easily fit into any of the major roles in a big enough way to make us an attractive option.

I am aware of that, but what you described isn’t very different than many religious groups. They weren’t any more tied to nature than any other tribal shamanistic caste you might find. In the myths the word druid was basically synonymous with sorcerer.

And I am aware most of the information comes from Roman observers and are probably heavily slanted toward demonizing them. I’d still like a source in case he’s read something I have not, but I’ve never read that they wore animal skins to become one with animals. A LOT of what we imagine when we think of druids in fantasy was fabricated fairly recently and has no basis in historical truth.

Do you have a source for that, Knighthonor? Because I can’t recall reading any myths or informative documentary pieces about the druids that said they wore animal skins to become one with animals.

The only thing druids did with animals was sacrifice them. Druids were prophets and healers and wielded magic in general. They weren’t any more focused on nature than your typical wizard.

Like I said I could see us transforming into a nature spirit with our elite. Actually I’ll be a bit disappointed if we don’t simply because that is one of the very few things we know about druids being able to do in GW1.

I’m with you that it won’t be the new class mechanic or a staple of the elite specialization though.

Durzlla.6295:

If Anet is trying to go for the high fantasy Druid like WP was suggesting, then we will get shapeshifting since that has ALWAYS been a key point of Druids in fantasy. It all depends on whether or not Anet is going full on spell casting or if we are going to totally embrace high fantasy Druid.

And judging by how close GW2 ranger is to DnD ranger/Druid, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if our elite glyph was a shape shifting skill.

Shapeshifting isn’t ALWAYS a part of the druid class in fantasy. It’s a common aspect of them in a few very popular games but it isn’t universal.

GW1 druids were nature spirits and did not shapeshift in the game, Warlords Battlecry series druids are nature casters and summoners, Might and Magic franchise druids are nature mages who mainly use elemental spells, Magicka druids summon treants and use elemental spells, etc.

Now you may be able to argue MOST games have druids as shapeshifters, though that would be hard to argue as I doubt either of us have played every game in which druids appear, but it’s certainly not a universally agreed upon rule.

It is, however, GW2. A sequel to the original with some carry over with many skills that are references to GW1 skills. Spirits are meant to be like that, and changing them into auras would ruin what they are thematically.

Stationary isn’t impossible to do. Turrets are stationary and before they got absolutely GUTTED by Anet they were a dominating force in point control and were quite powerful in Team Death Match. I even saw them have use in Stronghold for protecting the supply area from the enemy team. Banners are stationary but work well because they can’t be destroyed as you mentioned. As long as our PVP Game modes have points that need to be defended stationary is perfectly viable.

Their survivability is an issue, I agree. Which is why doubling the range of their passive effects and making their actives teleport them to a designated area would be such a huge boon. Keeping them out of harm’s way but still letting them be functional is the best way to keep them alive long enough to be made useful without completely removing all counterplay to them. Making them too tough to kill or untargetable would just get them nerfed into the ground as the masses cry OP.

I’m sure when we go after Jormag there will be special narrative benefits for norn characters as well. Maybe they’ll hear Jormag’s voice trying to tempt them to become Sons of Svanir or have special dialogue options with the sons.

Likewise asura will probably have story important bits with Primordus if we end up visiting the old asuran ruins.

Just because Sylvari are being treated to a unique perspective on this story doesn’t mean future stories won’t benefit other races.

Huh, I hadn’t considered a ranger dragonhunter duo. Both with trapper runes will be incredibly aggravating to fight. Gonna be great.