Guild Wars 2

zetherin.8372:

I want BWE3 Druid back so I can have fun again on the Druid.

Look, ANet has become like all the other MMO companies out there.

This expansion proofs that Guild Wars is no longer about fun and choices, but about how to stretch content and gate stuff behind mindless grinds. Sounds familiar?

This happens, when passionated developers become businessmen. When the desire to create something awesome becomes the desire to create profit.

This expansion is not about fun, it is about making the most coin with the least amount of content possible.

Sorry, the BWE3 druid is not coming back, it was there to hype people to pre-order the expansion.

It worked, you spent your money.

oshilator.4681:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

It is just bait and switch, I am surprised that people are surprised.

1) Druid was not ready for release nor have the pets been.
2) BWE3 druid version was a fake version to make the druid appealing so that rangers would buy the expansion. New pets were overpowered and actually useful.
3) After release, nerf everything to the ground, because people got the expansion out of hype already.

This has happened a hundred times before in MMO releases. ANet just adapted to the common standards.

Logic fail. If that’s the case, then why was Ranger the only class that this happened to?

And how does only doing it to one class benefit them?

Logic 101 for absolute beginners:

All classes but ranger had a working concept.

Druid concept was alien to the game, didn’t work and was pushed back.
The concept of a dedicated healer still didn’t work at BWE3, but was implemented way overpowered (in a way that would trivialize nearly all content for the druid player as he was nearly immortal). But it was better to do so than to show-cast a totally broken concept.

After release, druid is nerfed so that it is more or less useless, because the DEV’s are back to the drawing board and have to start over.

Knowing ANet and the ranger history though, they will probably just put some band-aids around the druid which will still fail, the ranger as profession will get mainly ignored by the DEV’s and the players and we are back to the same ol’ same treatment we had over the last three years.

It is just bait and switch, I am surprised that people are surprised.

1) Druid was not ready for release nor have the pets been.
2) BWE3 druid version was a fake version to make the druid appealing so that rangers would buy the expansion. New pets were overpowered and actually useful.
3) After release, nerf everything to the ground, because people got the expansion out of hype already.

This has happened a hundred times before in MMO releases. ANet just adapted to the common standards.

Rule #2 of MMO’s: Exploit early, exploit often.

This is how it works. People farm the kitten out of spots that will give them unnatural amounts of XP as long as they can.

ANet will fix it a bit later, so leveling masteries will be a real pain in the back fo all non-exploiters.

Waiting will cost you nothing and will only make this mess of an expansion better.

A clear win/win!

You can always try my leveling guide.

It’s in my signature.

Since when have work-arounds become solutions.

It is a band-aid for if you really want to get enough AF to somehow use your new profession mechanic, but it is not a fix to make the mechanic worthwhile.

Druid is the worst one-trick-pony of an elite specialization in game. And when you really need to do that one trick, chances are high, that it is on cooldown or not available because you do not have enough AF.

What is a healer good for if he/she can’t heal.

I dunno, while I really want to try the new HoT stuff, I am actually happy, that I didn’t buy the expansion early on.

The voice of reason in the back of my head has proven to be right. This expansion is a stunt pulled off by ANet and is pretty much against all my personal standards in every single way.

I have bought over 50 MMO expansions in my life, good ones and bad ones, but there has always been one expansion of a game that made me stop playing that MMO.

Too bad that it looks like for GW2 it is already the first one.

This is by far the worst druid design I have ever seen in any computer game in the last 30 years.

This must be the most gated short duration class mechanic I have ever seen in a game ever.

Bad

Game

Design

Yeah, this and the fact that that there is no gear grind but the new ascended items are better – ANet at least got some humor.

Because this is all just a big joke.

Thank god we only had one beta weekend. Look how great the druid works, obviously more testing would have just been a waste of time.

This is a really sad joke.

Nicknobreak.7543:

Obviously this isn’t intended. Otherwise it would have been clearly stated in the patch notes. I know we’re all a bit paranoid because, “Oh geez, here we go again, Anet hates rangers” but this is obviously some kind of error that will get fixed.

Sure.
You think it is a bug, but knowing ANet for quite some time, this will become a feature of the druid…

So chronomancer it is then for me.

Zatoichi.1049:

can we get a bit of an update on more changes before we go live tomorrow?

You will get a complete update on all changes in a few hours, why would you ask for a bit of an update of information now?

It is not like the expansion is weeks away…

212 on my ranger, missing two in WvW I just was too lazy to get. If I feel the necessity to get them, it will be done in 15 mins…

For now, HoT looks like very little content on very little space which has to be repeated to death to fill your masteries so you can see a bit more of the little content. With a hefty price tag on top.

I might be wrong, but for now, I am on the let’s wait and see side.

I am too old and experienced in the MMO genre to get hyped just because.

skcamow.3527:

This guide will probably prove most helpful. It really should be a sticky, I might request that. There will likely be some changes come Friday and it appears Kai is going to be actively updating it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-The-Leveling-Open-World-Compendium-1

I will keep it up-to-date, but I do not expect too many changes to the core mesmer. Tomorrow we will know for sure… ^^

TJgalon.5012:

Since you make the idea so easy, then it might not be at all. I learned that the hard way when it comes to any kind of coding,

Then they should take out the feature. If they cannot fix it after being live for three years, they have some serious issues, be it ressource management or coding.

You know, it is probably just very low priority, like it feels with most stuff for rangers. Three years to make pets viable in PvE, with the same move, Blizzard did years ago for Diablo3. This is not even creative, it is just a very late copy and paste.

Now the minion fix is nice, it is just late, like all fixes to the ranger.

MMO Rule #1: Never play on a patch day!

If you do, don’t complain.

Behellagh.1468:

So no more pile of NPC fighters in the first minute of the Giant at Nageling. What about non-targeted AoEs? It would certainly make the NPCs more durable.

This is a pet change, not an NPC one. They will still all die…

Gaile Gray.6029:

Remember, you’ve seen that many designers are actively reviewing professions. So don’t give up hope, and be sure to keep in mind that the devs have to look at the big picture as well as the small. There is a lot of careful and critical review taking place, and I have a feeling there will be other changes in the future. (And no, I don’t know what they are, but I’m glad that the professions are getting so much attention these days, and this change seems a really great step in the right direction!)

It is just that the steps ANet takes are so, so random.

Like we get healers and tanks now, and raids and stuff.

While I really like the pet change for my mains being mesmer, ranger and necro, you can never be sure that there won’t be some very questionable change ahead, like let’s say the NPE or the trait change back in the days.

I will embrace the news, but I will not trust the decision making of ANet. It is just too confuse…

Fizz.8763:

How will this work with Phantasmal Defender?

Ssshhhh!

It might make it useful.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I thought my fellow rangers would like this news.

Any bit of help is very welcome…

What do you mean, I will actually have to micro manage my pet in boss fights now?

This is getting to complex for me! Maybe I should roll a warrior…

Who cares about PvP anyway.
Pets die in PvE because of insane damage from bosses. If they die in PvP it is working as intended. (Maybe they can look at zerk vs. zerk in WvWvW, but hey, for now, pets might work in PvE – yay!)

Is this the Diablo III Patch 2.1.1 for GW2 finally.

Thank the six gods…

I don’t think the staff or the glyphs have been designed to work as either direct damage or condition tools. That is why they fail in both regards.

The staff and the glyphs have been designed to be healing tools in the first place, the damage is just there to make them look less crappy if you are not healing.

Let’s face it, the druid is there to be the dedicated healer in raids. In every other disciple you will find a profession that can do the other stuff better or offers more.

People try to ship around the limitations, but whatever you try, the druid is about healing, not damage.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Yes, it absolutely does. +1

Edit: That would also solve a lot of the Ranger/Druids lack of AoE damage for PvE also, since you could just ‘wave’ the beam around to tag things.

I think the cooldown on CAF was introduced so this wouldn’t get abused…

What has CAF CD got to do with AoE damage? They put the CD there to stop abuse of Druidic Clarity and Celestial Shadow.

What do you think would happen with an untargeted beam that would heal and damage everything in the way while wielding it ferociously in a group of mobs and allies? You’d generate enough ressources for CAF in a second… Instant CAF so to say.

But the staff does not work like that, as yet, that’s what is being asked for.

And that is why I said, it might be possible to implement, and maybe it is even the plan. With a cooldown on CAF, it doesn’t really matter how fast to generate AF.

Sorry, I should have explained it a bit better.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Yes, it absolutely does. +1

Edit: That would also solve a lot of the Ranger/Druids lack of AoE damage for PvE also, since you could just ‘wave’ the beam around to tag things.

I think the cooldown on CAF was introduced so this wouldn’t get abused…

What has CAF CD got to do with AoE damage? They put the CD there to stop abuse of Druidic Clarity and Celestial Shadow.

What do you think would happen with an untargeted beam that would heal and damage everything in the way while wielding it ferociously in a group of mobs and allies? You’d generate enough ressources for CAF in a second… Instant CAF so to say.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Yes, it absolutely does. +1

Edit: That would also solve a lot of the Ranger/Druids lack of AoE damage for PvE also, since you could just ‘wave’ the beam around to tag things.

I think the cooldown on CAF was introduced so this wouldn’t get abused…

Yunni.8296:

I wanted to thank you for this guide. As a returning PVE Mesmer it was very helpful to me.

Thank you for your feedback. I am always happy when people let me know that the guide was helpful and for any positive or negative feedback.

While there are not too many comments on the new guide, at least the number of views seem to be a fairly safe sign that the guide is still popular.

I will keep it up-to-date and alive as long as GW2 is around.

Edit:

Just out of curiosity, I checked the views of the three different incarnations of my guide, here are some numbers:

1) Lazy Kai’s Guide to PvE/Leveling Guide: 150231 views
2) Kai’s Complete PvE Compendium: 126816 views
3) The Leveling & Open World Compendium: 6638 views

Actually till this very moment, I have never realized how popular this guide is. Getting close to 300k views? I am speechless.

oshilator.4681:

Otaur.9268:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ve been some changes to Druid staff, glyphs, traits and Celestial avatar skills.

One change I can mention is that Ancestral Grace will now end as soon as you reach your destination rather than having to wait out the animation. We weren’t able to do this before with point-based movement, but an awesome programmer threw together a way for us to script it in.

As Belzebu calls out: You’ll have to check out the rest of the changes on the 23rd!

Why the secrecy with the Druid changes? Every single change to the other professions elites have been discussed… With the exception of Scrapper. Karl McLain has released changes from BWE3 for the Daredevil and the Dragon Hunter… So sealed lips is not mandatory at this time…

Perhaps it’s because they know we’re either not going to like the changes or they didn’t change things enough to make Druid more effective.

I wouldn’t be surprised by either.

Well, they cannot be very happy with what they got right now, otherwise they would let us know…

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

As Belzebu calls out: You’ll have to check out the rest of the changes on the 23rd!

Holy mother of the six gods!

While the other professions get severe testing and clear feedback from the DEVs on the changes, all the rangers get is that? Wait till launch, wait and see what your specialization will be? Well thank you I think.

It is true, rangers are second class citizens.

Knighthonor.4061:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

StickerHappy.8052:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

StickerHappy.8052:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

It is hard for mesmers to play other classes, and for once, I had the hope that druid would be complex enough and fun enough to actually feel worth it.

What we got is a healer, that is just spamming heals in the hope that they will heal the right person (like hey, I want to heal the tank in my group but for whatever reason, I was healing all the others that were standing around perfectly fine)

Wow, let’s see, healing is just spamming your buttons, but maybe damage is more interesting.
Wait, druid got no damage. Nevermind…

Who is impressed by that?

What do you mean hard to play other classes as a mesmer?

Because mesmer is the most awesome profession in game.

I know but It is not hard to play other classes tho, that is such an elitist statement.

Sorry, not being an English native might have caused some trouble with the connotation of what I intended to say.

What I had on my mind while typing:

“I enjoy the complexity and situational awareness of playing a mesmer so much, that I personally have a hard time playing other professions.
As I am a great fan of druids in many other games, I for one hoped that we might get a complex specialization that would get close to the playstyle I like as individual.

Unfortunately, I got dissapointed."

Didn’t want to come over as an elitist, as I am very bad at being elite.

Please post your build.

i notice a trend with these kind of threads. Please post your build.

Bearbow without spotter and no frost spirit. That is what you want to see?

StickerHappy.8052:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

StickerHappy.8052:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

It is hard for mesmers to play other classes, and for once, I had the hope that druid would be complex enough and fun enough to actually feel worth it.

What we got is a healer, that is just spamming heals in the hope that they will heal the right person (like hey, I want to heal the tank in my group but for whatever reason, I was healing all the others that were standing around perfectly fine)

Wow, let’s see, healing is just spamming your buttons, but maybe damage is more interesting.
Wait, druid got no damage. Nevermind…

Who is impressed by that?

What do you mean hard to play other classes as a mesmer?

Because mesmer is the most awesome profession in game.

I know but It is not hard to play other classes tho, that is such an elitist statement.

Sorry, not being an English native might have caused some trouble with the connotation of what I intended to say.

What I had on my mind while typing:

“I enjoy the complexity and situational awareness of playing a mesmer so much, that I personally have a hard time playing other professions.
As I am a great fan of druids in many other games, I for one hoped that we might get a complex specialization that would get close to the playstyle I like as individual.

Unfortunately, I got dissapointed."

Didn’t want to come over as an elitist, as I am very bad at being elite.

StickerHappy.8052:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

It is hard for mesmers to play other classes, and for once, I had the hope that druid would be complex enough and fun enough to actually feel worth it.

What we got is a healer, that is just spamming heals in the hope that they will heal the right person (like hey, I want to heal the tank in my group but for whatever reason, I was healing all the others that were standing around perfectly fine)

Wow, let’s see, healing is just spamming your buttons, but maybe damage is more interesting.
Wait, druid got no damage. Nevermind…

Who is impressed by that?

What do you mean hard to play other classes as a mesmer?

Because mesmer is the most awesome profession in game.

It is hard for mesmers to play other classes, and for once, I had the hope that druid would be complex enough and fun enough to actually feel worth it.

What we got is a healer, that is just spamming heals in the hope that they will heal the right person (like hey, I want to heal the tank in my group but for whatever reason, I was healing all the others that were standing around perfectly fine)

Wow, let’s see, healing is just spamming your buttons, but maybe damage is more interesting.
Wait, druid got no damage. Nevermind…

Who is impressed by that?

The druid is one-dimensional, while people expected complexity.

Of course it feels boring.

Torvic.8256:

Either by sheer force or by the heroes eventually quitting the fight due to either exhaustion or despair (or both)?

After all, even with the best case scenario of Mordremoth’s defeat, there are still so many more elder dragons to defeat afterward.

Good riddance!

At least we would no longer have to worry about the horrible story telling…

Hahahahahahaha, nope!

For whatever reason, the DEV’s just don’t want rangers to use the sword.

Look at the choices you have:

1) Turn off auto-attack and spam 1, 1 and 1 again (yeah, exactly)
or
2) Get locked in place like in an old fashion game like WoW.

Look, I play on a notebook and I really don’t want to kill my “1” key. Especially not for PvE.
And what is all the action combat good for, if you feel like 2004 in WoW when you play with a sword as a ranger?

But no, this is working as intended, as the ranger pets, and the spirits, and the shortbow, and half of the utility skills that are utterly worthless.

Why do I play my ranger again?

In a game that doesn’t need healers in PvE unless you enter raids where you have to be actually really good at healing otherwise you won’t get a spot, this is a reasonable worry.

You can ask if it is ok to heal some pug dungeon groups, but most of the time, people will rather want to finish the dungeon as fast as possible, so a dedicated healer is more a burden than anything else.

Get used to the skills, play some bigger events like Tequatl in random groups, where people take a lot of damage to get a feeling for your healing capabilities.

Other than that, maybe join a guild and convince them that a skilled healer has value somewhere in GW2 and they better let you train.

Seriously, for the people having a hard time with reading comprehension and comparsion, I edited the one part that could have been seen as a misquote if you really really wanted to do so for the sake of pointing it out.

Hope this will help.

If we have learnt one thing from history, than that it is constantly repeating – for people are unwilling to learn from mistakes others did.
In the end, every new generation – on a philosophical approach – must have the right to repeat the mistakes of the former one.

This seems to be also a rule in game development. We see it right here right now with the druid specialization in GW2. This is just a giant deja vu. It is the same flawed logic like back in 2004 to 2007.

But let me be more clear, I will give you some context:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

The problems core and origin is the approach of GW2 to be a raid centric game. If people like it or not, if they are in denial or blind doesn’t matter, the new raid needs the trinity – tanks, healers and damage dealers. We are back to the good system of old, like in most other MMOs.

Now as we have dedicated healers and tanks, the fundamental question is, what are they supposed to do.

Irenio went with the approach, that the druid should be a healer, in fact the best in game. This comes with a prize, the damage of the druid will be subpar.

This is a common argument written below and Irenio both pushed them into the discussion with his statements above:

Player argument 1:“You can heal, why do you think you should do as much damage as a class that is specialized in damage and can’t heal?!”

Player argument 2:“If you don’t like playing a healer, play a different class, but if you are a class that can heal, you should heal!”

This was common game design a decade ago for druids in WoW. Their damage was bad even if specced and equipped for it, their healing was great and that is what the other people wanted.
Noone played a druid, groups/raids waited for hours to find a healer.

We are at this point right now with HoT in GW2.

So let me get to the points made:

Druid is the strongest healer right now in the game by the statement.

This has two consequences both not in favor for the game:

Consequence 1: The endgame is designed around and needs the max amount of healing available, which will pigeon hole all rangers/druids into the healing role, as a druid is absolutely necessary to beat the content.

Consequence 2: The healing of other professions is good enoug, which makes the superior healing of the druid totally useless. In fact, druids will offer less than other healing classes, as they are so focused on (over)healing, that they are becoming second choice.

Druids should not be the single best healers in GW2, unless you want to enforce “LF1M Druid all healing gear ascended” on raids and challenging content. (consequence 1)
If the healing is not needed, what is all this healing good for? Noone will care. (consequence 2)

If you have to have healers, all healers should be on the same level. This gives choice to groups, and diversity to the game.

Now to the “if you can heal you shouldn’t do damage” argument:

If you have a ranger, and you want to play as damage dealer in raids, how can this work.
Even in the best ascended zerker gear with the best trait setup, the ranger is only average in damage. And that is the situation before the addition of the revenant and the eight other elite specs.

So if you play as a ranger, you will not only have to compete for a damage spot with all other vanilla professions, but also with all other elite specialization. How will a vanilla ranger compete against that? Its elite specialization will actually hurt the ranger’s damage, that is not an option.

What you literally say Irenio – and I will write it here for you as clearly as possible – is:

If you want to play anything else than a healer in raids, you better reroll another profession!

Wow, the “if you don’t like healing roll another class” argument for GW2, for a base profession that is all about pewpew?
Good luck rangers, enjoy being subpar in all of the PvE game outside of healing raids. This is the cost for introducing raiding.

- Druid is pigeon holing ranger into a healing role for raids. How is this helping the ranger profession?
- This will not work. Players will get angry because they can’t find a druid healer and will call for a buff of other healers and then just not care about druids as healers. How does this help the ranger profession?
- Rangers will be the worst choice to pick as a profession for everything outside of raid healing in PvE. How will this help the ranger profession?

To say it with the words of Trahearne: This won’t end well.

Druid being a supreme healer with subpar damage won’t work. The concept is a 100% flawed.

Look, the other game has overcome this problem, at least when I left seven years ago, druids were great damage dealers, great healers or great tanks, depending on how they geared and specced.

You should rethink your mindset on the core design of the druid. It is bad for rangers, raids and GW2 in general.

Thank you.

Wow, as if giving up a traitline with damage potential for the druid traitline wasn’t sacrifice enough, now you want us to give up useful stats to become somehow efficient healbots for the new content.

I am not entirely sure if this is the way to go.

Choosing druid is a damage penalty already, forcing healing power on us is just like kicking a guy on the ground in the face…

People told me to post this here, so here we go:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Some people might disagree, some might be against any additions, but I for one – and from what I have seen on the forums and ingame – many others feel like the way that druid is centered around healing is probably hurting the ranger as profession more than helping it on the long run.

The problem, with only three weeks till the launch of the expansion, time is the fire in which we burn. There is only so much you, Irenio, can do before the druid goes live. To be honest, I have been going through a lot of feedback on this forum, but I could harldy read it all, so my idea might have been brought up before (even several times). This would only proof my point though, there is a fix, which is realizable in the short amount of time left.

Here we go:

1) Staff: Leave staff alone, besides some minor adjustments it seems perfectly fine for the role it was inteded to fill. Play a bit with the numbers, but overall just leave it the way it is.

2) Traits: They are OK, they are good enough for launch. Same as staff, fool around with some numbers if you need to.

The exceptions to 1) and 2):

Here we go, something has to happen after all.
- Lower the amount of astral force gained from healing to 1.5, raise the amount of astral force gained by damage to 1.5. Nature is all about balance, be it life and death, day and night and healing and damage. Make astral force a thing for every ranger player (stay with me if you don’t want to heal all the time in this matter).
- Wisps are pure light, as many have suggested before, they should cause damage to foes as they do cause healing to allies – nature is about balance, you remember. Give them some burning condition on hit, that should do the trick.

3) Avatar: Now things get interesting. Keep you healing avatar as is, BUT, add weapon switch to it. It would work like a regular weapon switch (with cooldown) which would give you the option to switch only once while in avatar form (will need some minor adjustments to astral force consumption).
When you weapon switch in avatar, you will recieve a different set of weapon skills, which will be focused around damage (on the level of sword) with boons that are related to nature for your allies. This would include, but is not limited to vigor, protection and quickness.

While the damage in your second avatar line won’t be any higher than normal (it offers some burst though) you will offer group utility, which will be very welcome in groups. As a trade off, make all the attacks melee based (with one gap closer), risk vs. reward so to say.

This would also correlate with the former design of the druid of having more than one aspect. Call the second one “Aspect of the Wild” give it a shiny green glow and tadaa, the druid specialization got some more complexity, something for people that don’t even like healing and feel even more druid than what it is now.

Things to considerate:

4) Glyphs: I am not very happy with the design of the glyphs in general. Aspect of the Wild could get new effects on the glyphs, but as it is for now, I see harldy any use for them anyway. They need a fair amount of rework after launch, maybe then a third functionality will be realizable.

5) New skills: We need five new skills for Avatar of the Wild, melee with boons, one gap closer. Better than adding all the damage to the existing avatar, as it would be hard to balance, better than to start from the scratch. If you need inspiration, I may be able to help you.

6) Balancing: This is an ongoing process anyway.

I am fairly sure, this would work. It won’t limit the existing concept and actually adding a controllable second layer for players that don’t like it.

Tigaseye.2047:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Make astral force a thing for every ranger player (stay with me if you don’t want to heal all the time in this matter).

I didn’t play the Beta.

If I could have just copied an existing character, I probably would have, but I couldn’t be bothered to make a new char to test their game for them, for free.

So, I can’t really comment on all the details; but, I will say that I don’t think adding Astral Force to core Ranger would sit well.

Rangers are supposed to be earthy and real.

They’re not supposed to be a strongly magic class, in theme.

They may have some magical aspects to their attacks and abilities but, thematically, they are not supposed to be powered by magic.

For the players who already struggle to understand the odd blend of Ranger and Druid, here, I think that would be more than a step too far.

.

What I mean is to make astral force something for every playstyle. It would be exclusive to the druid specialization, but work for both – players that like support and players that like to do damage.

I do not intend to put the mechanic on the core players, what I intend is to make the mechanic useful for people who didn’t create a ranger for becoming a healer.

All it needs is five new skills.

Optionally some new effects for glyphs.

They can simply recycle some Norn shapeshifting animations if they need to for the animation. Most people wouldn’t even know, how often do you see shapeshifted Norns anyway.

Some people might disagree, some might be against any additions, but I for one – and from what I have seen on the forums and ingame – many others feel like the way that druid is centered around healing is probably hurting the ranger as profession more than helping it on the long run.

The problem, with only three weeks till the launch of the expansion, time is the fire in which we burn. There is only so much you, Irenio, can do before the druid goes live. To be honest, I have been going through a lot of feedback on this forum, but I could harldy read it all, so my idea might have been brought up before (even several times). This would only proof my point though, there is a fix, which is realizable in the short amount of time left.

Here we go:

1) Staff: Leave staff alone, besides some minor adjustments it seems perfectly fine for the role it was inteded to fill. Play a bit with the numbers, but overall just leave it the way it is.

2) Traits: They are OK, they are good enough for launch. Same as staff, fool around with some numbers if you need to.

The exceptions to 1) and 2):

Here we go, something has to happen after all.
- Lower the amount of astral force gained from healing to 1.5, raise the amount of astral force gained by damage to 1.5. Nature is all about balance, be it life and death, day and night and healing and damage. Make astral force a thing for every ranger player (stay with me if you don’t want to heal all the time in this matter).
- Wisps are pure light, as many have suggested before, they should cause damage to foes as they do cause healing to allies – nature is about balance, you remember. Give them some burning condition on hit, that should do the trick.

3) Avatar: Now things get interesting. Keep you healing avatar as is, BUT, add weapon switch to it. It would work like a regular weapon switch (with cooldown) which would give you the option to switch only once while in avatar form (will need some minor adjustments to astral force consumption).
When you weapon switch in avatar, you will recieve a different set of weapon skills, which will be focused around damage (on the level of sword) with boons that are related to nature for your allies. This would include, but is not limited to vigor, protection and quickness.

While the damage in your second avatar line won’t be any higher than normal (it offers some burst though) you will offer group utility, which will be very welcome in groups. As a trade off, make all the attacks melee based (with one gap closer), risk vs. reward so to say.

This would also correlate with the former design of the druid of having more than one aspect. Call the second one “Aspect of the Wild” give it a shiny green glow and tadaa, the druid specialization got some more complexity, something for people that don’t even like healing and feel even more druid than what it is now.

Things to considerate:

4) Glyphs: I am not very happy with the design of the glyphs in general. Aspect of the Wild could get new effects on the glyphs, but as it is for now, I see harldy any use for them anyway. They need a fair amount of rework after launch, maybe then a third functionality will be realizable.

5) New skills: We need five new skills for Avatar of the Wild, melee with boons, one gap closer. Better than adding all the damage to the existing avatar, as it would be hard to balance, better than to start from the scratch. If you need inspiration, I may be able to help you.

6) Balancing: This is an ongoing process anyway.

I am fairly sure, this would work. It won’t limit the existing concept and actually adding a controllable second layer for players that don’t like it.

Let’s face it, Irenio seems to be in a very weak position compared to let’s say Roy.
He is just not in power in regards to decisions made for the ranger.

We know that the druid specialization had more than one aspect but it was cut down to what we have now, healing only, totally unrelated to the ranger profession, totally artifical and totally niche. Irenio even said that he was working super hard for the last two weeks before reveal to make the druid somehow working, but the question is, what has he done since the announcement of druid ages ago. What was his vision of the druid. We will never know…

Then we had the “We Fail for One” fiasco. It is like Irenio got slapped in the face by Roy for doing something by himself.

It scares me to think about what will happen to the druid specialization after the beta weekend. It will get butchered, it will be even more useless in 99% of the game and it will just stay that way till, well, till forever.

What’s next is a lot of rangers complaining, a DEV not responding and probably abandoning the profession and we will start at zero with the next expansion.

What a bright future.

I stopped playing WoW in 2008, but they managed to get raids done with different difficulty levels and rewards back then.

Now, 7 years later, ANet has to overcome this huge and monumental, totally unique problem to open raids to both hardcore players and the casual crowd but can’t find a way it seems.

At least one member of the ANet team should have played WoW, so they could skip on the first few years of abysmal raid elitism and casual bashing.

Ah, who am I kidding, if someone can implement something as old and common as raids wrong, I am sure ANet is our best bet…