Guild Wars 2

SW also has 2, they spawn in 2 of about 6 locations.
From memory they are
- mid lane, past the vine, best to get during vinewrath event
- top of the water course East of Blue
- between the Wolf and Tendril champs in timeout, but there anytime
- near the first battle when following the blue bull
Forget the others

Jodeldihoo.3029, got it SPOT on, well said.

Agree 100% and perhaps that’s the best way to play the Druid, know your situation and where you and change accordingly.

I too have full Zerk, condi, Heal sets, with multiple weapons for each.

I will change equipment and traits for almost all content, support for wvw, power for karka farming, speed and traps for log farming or normal world PvE, condi for HoT or SW. Weapons too always different.

I like the complexity and don’t notice to lack of DPS, they still go down and GW2 is great fun either way.

Do what you like and have fun, or find a guild or group that suits you, not the other way round.

Few points to add for new rangers out there.

If your not already doing it, to get druid all the way up, do some simple zerging in Edge of the Mists, I find it easy and fun, it gives you the coins of notority or something like that which you can trade for hero points in your home WvW map.

I agree you should get the Tiger and Brisstleback, tigers F2 does more base damage than Lynx and is faster than Jaguar. Brisstleback has good condition bleeds and is a good ranged / melee mix with Tiger.

Full zerk of course if you like doing mostly damage, you may not use druid trait if you prefer power, but if you want to heal a little than your weapon of choice is the staff.
I alternate my second between LB and GS, GS for solo content and LB if the group is melee based.
I also switch my traits on the fly, to match these second weapons.

Stat wise, i have high toughness which i find is good for low level mobs who mostly have low damage, and with this (in non HoT mind you) I simple take their hits, lay traps and move on.
Traps, for SW, HoT and some other high level mobs they don’t like condi, husk for example, so I run 3 traps, not spikes as their cool down is too long, so i use flame, glyph spike thing, vipers. Another point to remember is these high level PvE mobs tend to have more enemies per encounter so traps tag up to 5 of them and then I use my GS cleave to mow them down.

Rotation wise, drop each of these traps while using staff or GS, this forces the pet to attack as soon as the trap triggers, personally i find this works best as with my low power full healing build I still melt most things.

Some advice from my set up if you’ll indulge me.
I do, run a mix of mostly clerics and some magi, or the other way round I forget.
Anyway my point is that my toughness is high but hp low around 18.5k so I can take physical hits all day long but any condi on me and I’m hard put to survive.
I’d like to go back and balance my toughness and vitality closer to 50/50 to help survive with the condition mobs of higher level pve.

Hope that my mistake helps you

Can I add a side question that came about after reading all the replies here?
Well I’m going to anyway.
If I go “full” Heal, clerics or magi armor, tickets and weapons, my DPS is going to be lower than let’s say for example 40% of a full Zerk set…
If I bring Glyff of Empowerment, frost spirit, spotter, pet for fury or might, plus I get into CAF often with its power buffs I theoretical give say 30-40? DPS buff to 4 (fractal) of my allies??? 4*30% is not 120% anyway, therefore covering the deficit of my lack of DPS?
Plus the Heal provided by me keeping them up longer and putting down the hurt longer?
Of course you could argue that a Zerk druid has good DPS with some Heal, but in my mind they’re similar, am I wrong?

I’ve been on my druid for about 6 weeks now and I’m loving it!

Thanks Anet for doing such a good and big job on this recent patch, it’s my first since playing the game from roughly Christmas time.
The new ground target rings look awesome and the logo in the middle very cool!

All in all just showing some love and thanks for all your hard work, it is what makes this game so much better than the rest!

Thanks for this, was struggling with the same thing. Didn’t realise, follow or listen to the prompts first time after logging in after buying.

Definitely Silverwastes Chest Train, I got 5 stacks from 10 full runs.