the only thing that concerns me, and we’ll see proof on the 17th, is that if raids are structured like high end fractals (80+) then we’ll see most mobs having very high toughness making power builds and buffs to power very weak. In that case frost spirit and GoE would be less useful but make GoL much stronger. if people where more condi focused it would also make sun spirit and storm spirit better since vuln effects conditions now.
Without having checked the numbers, I suspect power is more efficient for a secondary function of a ranger over condi. The problem with condi is it loses massive damage boosts very easily. Not keeping the torch rotation up, not using condi duration food… just using healing food instead of condi food drops your damage about 20%.
I’m no math guy, so I’ll let others chime in with facts though.
without having done the math myself either any druid build is going to sacrifice a ton of dps just by gearing into healing power. ferocity is needed to maximize power dps, and now expertise is needed to maximize condition dps. the loss of the bonfire/quickdraw combo is a big loss to condi dps as well.
questions about your builds:
does water spirit healing generate AF? if it does that might be a great way in a spirit build to generate AF and provide permanent regen in addition to the other boons.
with only 1 or 2 glyphs on your bar is it worth it to take Verdant Etching over Natural Stride?
since we don’t have ascended zealot’s trinkets yet are you looking at going in with exotics? edit: i’m actually looking at going clerics trinkets with zealots gear and weapons. it works out to be about 300 less power and 10% less crit chance but more healing power.
Honestly I prefer the ranged set over the melee as well. I also think we need to look at how many hard CC’s we have when making builds for anything in this new content. Breakbars are a real thing and once the mob is broken you get bonus damage. A bunker healing ranger could definitely see use as a breakbar killer in addition to healing and buffing the team.
(edited by Prophet.1584)
it just looks like a brown lump on my rangers shoulder, probably left there by Nevermore…
+1 for this, i like the idea
Healing power does not really scale that great. You get more mileage out of toughness, being able to reduce damage to heal your self up. Your allies would get the same.
Here is what I am running . I find it very well rounded, being that the build can tank, heal and dish out burst when stacking might.
just a thought on your build, unless your setting yourself up to be both the tank and the healer of your group I wouldn’t devote as much to toughness. A lot of mobs in the new content seem to key off toughness and you’ll pull aggro even though you’re not doing the most dps.
this is what i’m looking at running, low healing power but a lot of outgoing healing modifiers from the food, runes and weapon sigils. it’s at +42.5% outgoing healing not including any natural mender stacks. Natural mender would further improve outgoing healing.
edit: if you want a bit more healing power over dps you can add clerics or zealots in the head, chest and leg armor slots.
(edited by Prophet.1584)
i’m working on viper gear for my ranger and this play on your build. should technobable be affected by MoC? it doesnt seem to update the tooltip in game. any thoughts/opinions on these changes?
Give us back ground targeting please.
I don’t think that that’s a good idea. Better to buff the traps, give them a stunbreak, boon stripping, lower cooldowns, and make shortbow a good condi weapon at range. Dragonhunters would still have advantages that we wouldn’t, like the ability to pull enemies onto their traps and their virtues, which are essentially utility skills in their own right.
that’s a pretty good point there, one i didn’t even think of. ranger has no mechanic that would let us force an opponent into our traps. I doubt they’ll ever give us ground targetting back but if we could go back to the 1200 range shortbow we used to have it wouldn’t be so bad.
i’d also look at DH, i’ve found it a lot of fun and a very similar play style to lb/gs dps ranger. for the time being i’ve abandoned my ranger, i’m planning on stat switching his gear to prep him as a main healer in raids but guardian/dh has been a king of pve for so long. and yea it’s kind of hard to switch back when you see how easy it is to kill things running other classes.
I, personally, don’t mind that our traps are condi instead of power, it differentiates them from what they’ve done with DH. That being said though I think the conditions stacks on the traps need to be brought up to bring the damage in line with what you get from fire. also each trap should provide, instead of boons like DH, a cover condition of its own like spike trap.
I like your idea of pulsing weakness with poison trap and the cd of spike should be lowered a lot to make it worthwhile competition for fire.
a stunbreak alone wouldn’t make me slot frost trap. if it was a stunbreak + multi boon strip then i’d be forced to consider it.
I dunno Druid seems really strong to me. I’ve played a really wide variety of power based builds now in pvp. Lots of time on Axe/Torch for condis in open world pve and fractals.
And I’ll just say, if you’re having a hard time generating astral force then you’re probably spending faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar too much time in celestial avatar form. Go in, use the skills you need, then get out. Rejuvenating tides is really really strong for those times you’re just flashing Avatar Form. If you exit the Form before your cast is complete, the rejuvenating tides will finish casting. It won’t keep healing, but the water field DOES stick around, and it will continue to apply Grace of the Land.
it’s less about PVP or even WvW and more about PvE. I think druid is decent for pvp and wvw. it makes a really strong power bunker.
I don’t mind being a healer or taking on the healer role as some do, but, we need to be THE healer in a raid group. For druid to have a place it needs to provide healing strong enough that the rest of the group doesn’t have to worry about heals. Right now with targeting as it is and healing power scaling I don’t think it does that.
Revenant, guardian and warrior provide a ton of useful boons. Having one more profession that offers the same things doesn’t really help so I really like the application of GotL and GoE along with Frost spirit. we need more of that kind of team buffing ability. something seperate from boons and conditions that helps the whole team.
i’ve got a DH that seems to be a better version of the dps ranger and i’ve got my druid fully unlocked and geared waiting for raids if they are needed, we’ll see what can be done with it before raid launch.
as a side note, i don’t WANT to be dps we HAVE to be dps. doing damage is the only way in which we are credited with taking part in any content.
the main problem i can see with the druid is that power builds and healing tend to not mix well.
the staff and the druid traits, imho, should be more of a hybrid set allowing for condition application as well as some power damage. if staff dps stayed where it is and also applied some conditions and CAF also applied conditions while healing allies I think most people would have been happy.
what i would like is for every profession to have some degree of transparency not just us. And like I said the devs don’t need to ask us for permission to fix the game they created but being the people who are out there putting these professions through their paces every day it would be nice if some of our feedback where taken into account before making huge changes.
Druid will see uses in pvp and wvw i’m sure, the place where i think some people are feeling it is lacking is in pve. if you don’t designate yourself as a healer then taking druid hurts your dps in both condi and power builds.
and aB i agree with you, as a programmer myself i know how slammed days can become just scanning lines of code to fix simple bugs let alone big ones that can span multiple systems. It would be nice though if the top rangers on the leaderboard from wvw,pve and pvp could check out changes prior to go live. then OP stuff wouldn’t hit live so that people wouldn’t freak out because “rangers can’t have nice things.” It could hopefully also prevent huge nerfs like WHaO that made little sense because to get the benefit fully you had to trait poorly.
also, these forums have gotten pretty venomous. any change is met with an outpouring of hate until some people actually use it and see that it might be decent or not. if I where the ranger dev i wouldn’t want to come in here and talk to most of the people in here either…
Transparency would be nice, not so much the Devs looking to the community for permission to make changes, but informing us of things that you’re looking at changing. Both nerfs and buffs, so that the community can provide feedback.
Maybe that would prevent some of the knee jerk “fixes” that had to be put into place. And it could prevent some pretty bad nerfs like lingering light and the smokescale change.
edit: it would be nice as well if there where a community group of pvp, pve and wvw players from each profession to beta test or comment on changes. It wouldn’t even have to be open to the whole community but if the “elite” players from each game mode where brought in those decisions it would make a huge difference. People who consider that class their main.
(edited by Prophet.1584)
Without a blind on it like blinding powder, this skill’s only purpose is to provide stealth if you happen to have a staff or greatsword, basically.
actually it’s kitten invuln for your pet as well as a blastable smoke field. Enjoy!
5 seconds became kitten for some reason….
we got the smoke field back, yay! -.-
condi ranger is better dps on everything but structures as long as the fight goes more than ~20s. If you’re going to go condi food is really important and so is viper gear > sinister. You really need the condi duration to make the most of your dps. Another big part of that playstyle is making use of quickdraw for bonfire, it cuts the recharge time down to ~6s so you get a lot of burn stacks.
I don’t think it comes that close to engi just because they can apply multiple conditions in the same rotation and our build tends to put burns on primarily with a few bleed and poison stacks. sinister engi dps was something crazy like 20k+ where sinister ranger was around 17k+.
Yeah, but in practice that engi DPS will never be realised. It was calculated without aftercast and with perfect rotations, as said above, that is 46 seperate actions. Very few people could do that. Ranger rotation is simple and anyone can master it, so the difference is not big. Not worth worrying about anyway.
very very true.
that optimal rotation is the main reason why i don’t play engi, i can’t dance on my keyboard.
really like the cosmic ray idea, it’s like our pets sniffing out the wounded for us lol it would have been cool as well if we had a spammable heal that centered on the pet but did not involve the pets F2 skill. like putting CAF2 centered on the pet so everyone in melee range with the pet gets the benefit.
condi ranger is better dps on everything but structures as long as the fight goes more than ~20s. If you’re going to go condi food is really important and so is viper gear > sinister. You really need the condi duration to make the most of your dps. Another big part of that playstyle is making use of quickdraw for bonfire, it cuts the recharge time down to ~6s so you get a lot of burn stacks.
I don’t think it comes that close to engi just because they can apply multiple conditions in the same rotation and our build tends to put burns on primarily with a few bleed and poison stacks. sinister engi dps was something crazy like 20k+ where sinister ranger was around 17k+.
If staff applied conditions in addition to having its current dps and healing utility it would be a much better weapon.
I simply don’t use the staff, even a zerker staff seems weak to me. I have it as my second weapon but only because I’m trying to like it. I love the long bow and may just go back to my staples or I may try longbow, axe/warhorn.
I tried as well but LB/GS just brings so much more. LB 4 and GS 5 and GS 4 break bars really well. they bring so much more damage too. it’s a shame that you can’t use GoE without slotting druid but I think i prefer frostspotter or sinister ranger to anything druid brings right now.
There is one huge difference that people don’t understand.
Druid is not supposed to be the healer. He is supposed to be a healing support. And that part he fits as good as he can. If you can’t adapt to that – that’s nobody’s else fault. Druid is supposed to bring sustain and utility. Not to mean unstoppable 4K healing per second cleansing nonsense.
If your party keeps making mistakes more often than once every 10 seconds – your party is cursed to fail any content you are in.
If you can’t understand that people are responsible for their own HP and “healers” are only meant to cover mistakes and damage that simply can’t be avoided (out of energy when people already dodged some of the attacks or pulsing dmg aura from raids) – than it implies that you just might have a wrong idea about this game.
Because your goal in party is not to heal. Your goal as a druid in party is the same as everybody’s else. To defeat the content. If your healing is not needed – don’t use healing traits from druid and go the full booster that is incredibly powerful.
while what you said is true the druid really doesn’t accomplish these goals. In order to provide boons you must use up utility slots and a GM trait. In order to provide a damage buff you must be able to get into CAF often and spam heals to proc GoL. You must also use a utility slot. The heals themselves so far have been decidedly underwhelming. The boons and buffs can be provided by a core ranger other than GoL.
What would be the purpose of bringing a druid in raids as opposed to bringing a core ranger? The only thing you would lose is the GoL buff but you would gain substantially more dps, that ranger wouldn’t be forced into staff so could bring a LB for dps and s/wh for team buffs and blasts. i’m sure someone will do the math but to me it makes less sense to bring a druid for GoL than it would to take a sinister druid with GoE slotted along with frost spirit, spotter and flame trap/sun spirit.
Druid is not supposed to be the healer. He is supposed to be a healing support. And that part he fits as good as he can. If you can’t adapt to that – that’s nobody’s else fault. Druid is supposed to bring sustain and utility. Not to mean unstoppable 4K healing per second cleansing nonsense.
This game doesn’t work on a triangle Tank>Dmg>Heal setup and never will. Druid in a party/raid doesn’t mean a Healing Power, Healing Power and Healing Power build. It means a Support that helps the raid recover from mistakes and damage that can’t be mitigated. And that he does. Druid is a good specialization that fits into GW2.
If your party keeps making mistakes more often than once every 10 seconds – your party is cursed to fail any content you are in.If you can’t understand that people are responsible for their own HP and “healers” are only meant to cover mistakes and damage that simply can’t be avoided (out of energy when people already dodged some of the attacks or pulsing dmg aura from raids) – than it implies that you just might have a wrong idea about this game.
Because your goal in party is not to heal. Your goal as a druid in party is the same as everybody’s else. To defeat the content. If your healing is not needed – don’t use healing traits from druid and go the full booster that is incredibly powerful.
If the unavoidable damage is high enough that a druid is needed to assist in healing then the Druid heals need to be much higher. if not then a few blasts of a water field would do all that a druid could to sustain the party with a lower party wide dps loss.
Druid’s goal should be to party heal as well as provide some sort of utility or dps. condition damage on the staff would have gone a long way towards this, power builds need power/prec and ferocity to function well. condition builds just need condition damage. Even a hybrid staff setup would have helped! CAF needs to do more than just heal if the heals aren’t going to be game changing. it needs to apply boons or not give up all damage completely. if we can buff the party through more than GoL or if GoL duration is increased then maybe it would be worth it to go into CAF at all.
for pve or pvp? i’ve had some success with a condi bunker druid using apothecary, it’s really tough to kill.
for pve play core ranger.
for druid to work:
Druid heals need to be increased dramatically. they need to hit hard enough that it makes more sense for DPS players to slot dps skills or trait for more dps rather than personal healing/defense.
CAF form needs boon application besides GoL desperately. To be a part of the game as it has been designed we need more than personal boon application. CAF 4 should apply defensive boons at the same time that it heals, even in such a small space. CAF 5 should be dropped and reworked into something useable, apply resistance or something. CAF 1 should include 1 3-5s stack of might, CAF 3 should apply multiple boons along with being a blast finisher. CAF 2 is good as is but could also include regeneration or resistance on a short duration.
The staff should be a hybrid weapon, each skill should apply a condition of some kind. forcing the Druid into the healing role, it needs to be understood that we can’t provide amazing dps but we should be able to bring something. Being forced into choosing staff in order to properly generate AF means this weapon needs to serve both roles so it can be used in multiple builds. skill 1 should apply 1-2s burns, skill 3 should apply blinds/cripples, skill 3 is good, skill 4 should have the healing increased, skill 5 should have it’s duration increased.
for core ranger to see an improvement:
remove the leaps on swords and make them evades OR increase the dps on GS to make it on par with sword.
spirit actives are horrendous and need to be reworked, the ranges are too short. the trade off for killing the spirit and putting the skill on cd is bad, why would i trade a short duration frost field for a 10% increase in damage? spirits also need to be made invulnerable, increasing their health isn’t a fix anymore with the amount of power creep and aoe spam that has been introduced. they die before they see any usefulness in pvp. in pve they draw aggro and die just as quickly.
SB needs it’s damage increased, it needs positioning removed from the bleed application of SB 1.
LB is ok
GS is ok now that some of the bugs are fixed
axe is in a strange place
OH axe, dagger and horn are in a good place
I think it will be too late for a lot of the older rangers. To me the LL change wasn’t a deathblow but I hate being nerfed into oblivion with no warning due to pvp players thinking that the ranger has something strong. I split my time between PVE and PVP exclusively and I can see that these two forms of the game can’t be balanced well.
Druid in general needs a rework, it’s something i’m seeing more and more as I play it more. Sure there are roles we’ll be able to shoehorn it into but I don’t think the healing will be needed at all. The content so far, even 90 scale fractals, don’t require any healing beyond what each person brings. Unless raids are a huge level of difficulty above that healing won’t be needed from druid. so why bring one, GoL and frost spotter are still excellent buffs. It’s really nice that GoL effects both condi and power damage but with the super short duration we’d have to spam CAF heals to keep it active on the dps team. that means you’re now reducing the potential dps of the group by 1 man, something the buffs won’t make up for. why not bring an ele or guard who can heal as part of their rotations, provide aegis and team buffs and still bring some of the top dps.
the one thing i wanted from this patch was for ranger to not just be viable in PVE but to have a defined role. i’m ok with a healer role if a healer is needed, it so far seems like it won’t.
what trait setup did you use for these tests? pet’s that apply conditions would have their dps increased by including hidden barbs or sharpened edges. it would be good to share that so if people want to test and compare results they can do it on a standard.
Zealot’s is too expensive for me. I’m looking at a mix of clerics and zerker gear, with food and oils I think we just need to hit around 1k HP. more than that won’t really be necessary for now.
In guild wars 1 there was a pet that was only available after you completed the story of one of the expansions. There are other pets in this game that require you to be a high level in hall of monuments.
For Christ’s sake, some things are supposed to be hard. You are supposed to have to put in effort to get them. That’s what makes showing them off worth it. What’s next, are you going to ask for free legendary weapons?This desicion is unaceptable,
i am a wvw player i dont want to waste my time in pve watching ppl failing the event again and again and beeing forced to wait and search for a map where an organized party is killing the boss so i can go and get my pet.
Why are u forcing me to play an event over and over again, just to get my pet, this is not nice to your Rangers, and sorry but i am raging right now.
today from 6 am until 2 pm i was trying to get my tiger and e v, but nope no one no map no organisation could do it.
II want to go and play wvw not camp a pve map for an event i dont like to get acces to my class proffesion skills.
No other klass has to do that kind of thing.
Pooor design and a good reason to give a bad review on metacritics
agree 100% some things are supposed to be hard to get. One of the greatest things I remember when playing WoW as a hunter where the epic hunts for rare pets that had unique abilities and skins.
There isn’t a single pet in this game that we can’t do without, there’s always an easier “version” of the same pet. If you don’t want to put in the time to get the hard to find ones then don’t.
I like the tag idea coupled with this. If nothing else maybe add a new color to the commander tag to represent healers. I for sure don’t have 300g to shell out but i might have to for raids etc.
Just a suggestion – Without recoding a targetting system to allow players to target low health player or massive UI changes what about adding a ground ring effect to CAF skills.
-Only friendly players in our party/squad/team could see the effect
-The ring could exist moments before the spell hits
This would let players know where heals would be hitting so that they can stay in them when needed or dodge into them in emergencies.
What do you think?
rabid bleed druid sb/staff
your post made me curious about what could be done with sb and staff
Irenio, a few suggestions.
1. fix out of combat degeneration of AF, it is really far too fast.
2. let our AF bar change with how much Healing Power we have. If someone wants to be a stronger, more dedicated healer then they should be able to remain in Astral Form longer than a zerker.
3. provide more scaling with healing power. There still seems to be too little difference between when running zerker gear and slotting healing power. Also, full investment into healing power as a stat seems pointless as the gains beyond ~70-1,000 healing power seem negligible.
4. CAF #1 should have a wider range, similar to the aoe size that CAF #2 is now. it should also come with some form of condition added to it. I like the idea that was previously suggested of adding a very short duration burn to it, something like 2s.
5. CAF#2 and 3 need to do more healing but have longer cooldowns. #1 should be the only spammable skill, the others should be situational. #3 should be for big burst heals or when the immediate CC is needed. #2 should be for when allies need cleansing or a moderate heal is needed.
Those changes would create a differentiation between a zerker druid and cleric druid. They would make each skill have a purpose in a rotation and increase the skill cap for druid over mashing buttons over and over.
Will there be more elite specialisations?
Seems like other proffessions get an elite spec which really builds upon what they already have where as druid is just like a complete new proffession nearly.
Thanks for the answer though so i can stay as standard ranger with bow/swords etc?
They say there will be but I wouldn’t look for them anytime soon
btw someone in my guild linked an upgrade remover that they got from one of the new merchants. I don’t recall the name but that should make changing over gear a little less costly.
I would even argue going berserker over assassins is better since you have perma fury uptime on this build with high base precision. netting you about the same on your build without fury.
for sure, i was just thinking that with strength sigils on the more crits the more might stacks you can keep up. zerker gear and weapons would be just as good really with a slight loss on crit chance. I also looked at celestial trinkets, you could get some vit and toughness as a cushion when needed and still do pretty close to zerk dps numbers.
something like this?
edit: you can swap the trinkets with Clerics or celestial as well.
(edited by Prophet.1584)
^you’re so, so, so tough with minstrel, all the blinds, heals, and dazes that you just don’t need SoS. at least from my experience. another stun breaker maybe, but not SoS. that being said, I did not test this one in a high mmr environment.
Minstrel may make a huge difference, i’m so used to the old stat combos that I usually slot Marauder without even thinking about it
i’ll definitely be trying it out.
I made that exact same trapper build and had a lot of fun with it. DH, Reaper and Chrono seem really really overtuned right now so take losses to them with a grain of salt. Hopefully by the time seasons start back up they’ll have toned them down a bit.
The first build I haven’t tried in pvp yet but i can see where you’re going with it. It looks like you could use something like that in pve too just swapping WS with Skirm for spotter and QD.
that full glyph build looks interesting, I depend on SoS so much that I would hate to lose it, I might give that a try though.
not quitting my ranger ever, i’ve got too much invested on this toon to make another my main. I’m still working on ways to make druid work for me so we’ll see if that gets any play.
I never expected Druid to be the dps machine ranger is but I wanted the healing to be as high as the dps is on ranger. they need to look at the healing power scaling better, that would also let us generate more AF and get into CF more often.
use gw2skills.net and save the link for your build, i’ve done it for a few of mine and I can tweak them as i see fit. During BWE3 I was really excited for druid and saw a lot of potential there but after these last few changes I think I may main a different class. That being said, I’ll be keeping my ranger in his standard spec. The healing on druid, tbh, is terrible now. the multiple gates behind Astral form, the difficulty gaining AF when using any weapon but staff, and the out of combat decay make it all but worthless. the real shame is that Grace of the Land, Glyph of Empowerment and Frost Spirit are likely the best buffs available in the entire game and they most likely won’t see much use at all being trapped on an extremely poorly tuned profession like druid.
this is my opinion mainly based on pve and pve, i haven’t run druid much in wvw.
berserker runes look pretty amazing for a carrion trap build
DH runes could work for a hybrid trapper/power trap build
scrapper runes look flat out amazing for pvp on any class
the rest look pretty bad, reaper runes may be good but i haven’t really theorycrafted chill on reaper.
tempest and druid runes just look plain stupid, like no thought went into them at all…
it’s nowhere close to unplayable. they just need to reduce our dependency on staff. if they want to keep the energy decay, they should allow us to gain it quicker. if they leave energy gain as is, take away the decay. very simple change.
otherwise, avatar was made a lot stronger in pvp with the NC stab and SoL blinds.
I only got about an hour to play before work and wasn’t able to unlock the elite spec. Does healing or using the staff make any difference?
that’s it….
Check the link in my sig mate, lots of builds there, a good starting point to find something you like playing. If you like glass LB/GS, you can throw in a couple of Valk/Cav pieces to up your defence a bit too.
… Can just stack your traps and rub hands together in corner waiting for some poor soul to step on them.
Or, even better, roam with a mate (DH), both drop a bunch of traps on a spot, then drop a guild banner on top of it, sit back and wait for the bait to work
You Sir…I like the way you think!
it’s always fun when other profession mains pay us a visit -.-
why are these visits always calls for nerfs….
Can someone link info thread here please. Ty.
yes please, i’m sitting on 210 on a maxed ranger which should be enough but I have 7 other alts that I’ll eventually work on as well.
