Let’s be brutally honest: ANet doesn’t know how to fix certain bugs or issues. Instead, they’ll make the ability in question moot . . . or ignore it.
It’s not that they don’t know how, it’s that they don’t care and just choose the easiest path of least resistance.
I wouldn’t doubt for a second that they simply copy/pasted the code for Lingering Light’s 12s cool down because it was super simple and would make the problem disappear.* Whether or not it left the trait in a usable state is frankly irrelevant to them.
*May not be true but would explain the otherwise arbitrary time value and unnecessary, massive nerf to the only pet that was ever used with it.
God forbid you have to put in effort for the shiny stuff. “Play how you want” doesn’t mean you can get everything doing whatever you want. Don’t like dungeons? No dungeon armor for you. Don’t like raids? No raid rewards. Why should you be able to get raid rewards without doing the raid?
What’s this “no dungeon loot without dungeons” biz?
It didn’t need a 12s cooldown though. 4-5 would have prevented the exploit spam while keeping it viable with birds.
This is just another hamfisted, lunchbreak ‘hotfix’ akin to the butchering of WHaO before it got punched back up or with what they did to Lingering Light.
It probably has to do with birds as I would trait this and keep almost 100% blindness on targets which is kinda OP.
Doubtful as it wasn’t OP for the months and months it’s existed.
No one’s complained about Ranger pets since they fixed the glitch with BW that let it bypass virtually every defense mechanism.
Literally the only change the trait/pet combo ever needed was maybe some kind of visual distinction between the birds’ auto attacks and the F2 attack so an enemy could know when to dodge.
I kind of dislike what they did to its hp pool, it feels rather squishy.. :/
However, not sure if any of you noticed, but it seems like bristleback’s f2 targeting was fixed. It actually hits enemies that are higher or lower now. So, that made the pet slightly more usable at least..
Ah, looks like they did. Well kitten, there goes my sure fire way of killing the veterans in Auric basin lol.
Lucky they only nerf the HP, maybe this was intended due to how INSANE POWERFUL the F2 is.
I mean, ya know, unless the target isn’t on basically the same Y axis as the pet…
Read his entire post. Bristleback is about as he said risk-reward and skillful play, you don’t use F2 without hard CC.
You can CC someone for days and it won’t matter if they are a few degrees lower or higher than the pet. The skill is effectively useless on a target that isn’t on a level plane with the pet.
Are there any builds that can spam blind quicker than 4s? Just thinking about “balance”.
(Any class)
You can’t even spam it on cooldown in most situations anyway.
Players move around too much and birds have such low life pools that they either die or get swapped out frequently when a lot of aoe’s get thrown around.
Like I said above, there is no “balance issue”. Rangers were nearly non-existent in serious pvp prior to the druid while having months and months of the old GFtE.
moving spirits = dead spirits = cleave bait = No effective spirits = easy to kill = no buffs = wasted Utilities.
its more effective to just use smart placement get ahead of the front lines or plant it on the front lines but not in the Monster mash we call a zerg be it in pve or wvw or Pvp.
it was removed for a reason because the trait Damaged the use of spirits now with this current meta of tempests, d/d eles and Rev/daredevills and reapers increased amount of Aoe and cleaves means it was Removed because the trait was no longer Viable.
While there may be truth to the pvp element, spirits almost never die in pve now and they are 1000% worthless in WvW zergs no matter what traits we have on.
@Tragic Positive.9356
How people doesn’t enjoy it at all?
I love it, as much as I loved Monks in GW1. Speak for yourself.
Cool beans bro.
The rest of us who rolled Ranger to play a Ranger aren’t so thrilled, especially after waves of nerfs meant to make using Druid as obtuse and unpleasant as possible.
Each of the outfit bundles that has been released has included one token for acquiring a single skin from the Immortal Weapons skins set.
There are 16 different types of weapons.
It would not surprise me if they have another 14 outfits and glider types already in process, all with the aim of being released in these overpriced bundles.
I fear that you are right about that… I really want a different glider, but if they are gonna be exclusive to more bundles I wont be getting them, as I cannot justify it with wanting only that one item and not the others. Guess I will have to make do with the boring basic glider for a very long time still…
The exalted glider as well as the wings were released as solo pieces but it does look grim.
Maybe they are just talking to the team that deals with this stuff and that is why we haven’t gotten a response. Stay positive people.
The only thing I’m positive about is that this is the future of GW2 armor.
Sets will be added every 6-8 months or so, one or two at a time and every new outfit is going to come as part of some bloated “appearance pack” until we can finally collect every Immortal weapon and have more gliders than we could ever want.
There are 16 Immortal weapons, 2 packs down, 14 to go…
PO is better in any situation that isn’t perfectly set up with ideal rotations and procs, but if you’re going to go that far to min/max, you might as well just be going A/T Viper’s to be completely honest.
Yeah, we should be able to buy pieces – or at least to choose which sections are shown via the outfit panel. I hate hats/helmets quite a lot, and most gem store outfits include hideous ones. (Also, Guild Wars 1 sold outfits, and you could choose which parts you used. Come on, Guild Wars 2, catch up already…)
You can turn off outfit headgear by turning off your armor’s helm.
Uh… really? Hasn’t work for me any other time; I’ll need to try it again when I get home. I’ve also never seen anyone in an outfit minus the helmet, but maybe I just haven’t been paying enough attention.
You have to toggle your helmet in the equipment menu. It will then affect the visibility of the hat on the outfit.
I think most leave it on since many of the outfits don’t look so great without the hat.
The druid itself also doesn’t deal 0 DPS no matter how kittenty cleric/magi staff DPS is. You also have your pet too which is unaffected by your gear DPS. Now, in scenario where it barely breaks even: what do you lose from it? You’d do the same DPS anyways but you get the QoL from having a druid constantly healing people. People would maintain higher uptime on their scholar and have to worry about their health less allowing to play more aggressively and put out more dps safely.
It was more in response to Renn (see above) that said that “the buffs to increase damage that the Druid can put out the team, surpasses the Druids possible DPS – BY FAR.” – I’m not sure I agree with that?
You would need to calculate out the maximum amount a viable heal build could do vs the optimal zerk/condition builds do to really figure it out.
I have no doubt that the dps builds will be putting out much more damage than the druid ever could and buffing that much higher dps at the cost of the druid’s personal damage (pet will still be attacking) is probably a large net gain.
With the size of GW2 Esports scene, my guess is if they aren’t sponsored at all (I honestly haven’t looked to see if they are), that the money put up as prize money comes from their marketing budget. $200,000 is pretty easy to come by if they cut some web ads on certain sites for a few months. That or NCSoft HQ is putting in the money from their marketing budget.
They explicitly list Alienware, Corsair, Nvidia, and Sennheiser as “partners”. Arenanet is also self publishing at this point so it’s highly unlikely that NCsoft wold foot any of the bill.
When the wedding dress came out at 1k gems i recall saying something along the lines of: “if this is successful, we can expect all new outfits to be priced like this”. Looks like i was wrong though(in the bad way) and they took it one step further, cranking it up to 2k gems for an outfit now instead(and even adding a fake “discount” to trick you to thinking you’re saving money).
The wedding dress was 10 different styles though. Most Outfits are 2-2.5 at most with some being only one.
Whether it was worth 1,000gems on it’s own is debatable but it was fine to charge more for an outfit set that took a significantly greater amount of time and designing to make.
This is a basic 700gem outfit with 1300 gems worth of other stuff added on and no other option available.
I’m willing to bet they made it(and strider and viper sets) a gem store item specifically because it’s the kind of thing medium armor users have been asking for more of for three years. “Here it is! That’ll be ten bucks. :^)”
The sad thing is I was perfectly fine with shoveling $10 at them for the outfit.
It’s nice that we finally get a good medium armor not made by someone with a trench coat or “giant linebacker shoulder pads” fetish and was willing to pay 1/5 of the entire xpack to get it.
Buying an obvious cash grab package full of crap I don’t want and won’t use is another matter….
Whomever they hired for the most recent bundles does not understand price discrimination. Anet isn’t going to get more money by only selling bundles. They’re getting less.
Yes because it is not like they have the data to back up what they are doing. Oh wait, they do.
Anet is fully capable of making bad business decisions just as any other company. Pretty sure SE had “the data” that said the original release of FF14 was gonna do great just as Wildstar had “the data” that told them that what they were doing was the right idea.
If Anet had magical “data” that made them immune to failure, GW2 would be the most successful MMO of all time and they wouldn’t need to try to penny pinch people with forced packages in the first place.
On this change. I remembe reading before that druid was meant to be a burst healer NOT a sustain healer. Ventari revenants and things like aura tempests are the sustained healers.
If that is there plan. Then we should be making suggestions on how to make that a reality.
How do we make druid a burst healing class while still having ventari revenants and aura tempests be MORE effective as sustain healer. And no buffing those two through the roof isn’t the awnser.
CAF from what I understand is meant to be a rare thing. Something you use ONLY when things are going badly. When without it your team is guaranteed to die. Its supposed to be on the level of an elite skill.
The problem with making CAF a rare, burst heal is that they want to force us to use healing power. Outside of CAF, healing power is worthless. We sabotage our own build 90% of the time to get more out of the other 10%. This is not good design.
the penalty is already there and if you play druid you already should know this: Our heal skills do not directly heal us. The only one that heal us is the CAF#4.
…wut?
¯\(?)/¯
You can’t heal yourself very well if you’re being focused and trying to heal a teammate. But, in all honesty, lack of stability is already pretty crippling to CAF. There is no need for all of this, especially when we have reapers using shroud constantly, which gives them obscenely high effective health and stability. I never have half the problems with druids that I have with reapers and heralds.
Just to be clear, I don’t personally think that simple 15s in and 10s out Avatar actually needs a penalty.
The point I’m trying to get across is that Anet thinks it does. The fact that they take no more than 24-48 hours to nerf anything that lets people effectively ignore the AF bar is plenty telling of this.
If we are going to get rid of Astral Force, something else will end up having to take it’s place mechanically.
There are already big drawbacks to being in CAF… Damage and no access to “oh crap I need to move” ability… It’s easy to force a player out of CAF form.
Again, I realize that it wouldn’t be over powered to remove AF. It’s Anet that thinks this.
On this change. I remembe reading before that druid was meant to be a burst healer NOT a sustain healer. Ventari revenants and things like aura tempests are the sustained healers.
If that is there plan. Then we should be making suggestions on how to make that a reality.
How do we make druid a burst healing class while still having ventari revenants and aura tempests be MORE effective as sustain healer. And no buffing those two through the roof isn’t the awnser.
CAF from what I understand is meant to be a rare thing. Something you use ONLY when things are going badly. When without it your team is guaranteed to die. Its supposed to be on the level of an elite skill.
The problem with making CAF a rare, burst heal is that they want to force us to use healing power. Outside of CAF, healing power is worthless. We sabotage our own build 90% of the time to get more out of the other 10%. This is not good design.
the penalty is already there and if you play druid you already should know this: Our heal skills do not directly heal us. The only one that heal us is the CAF#4.
…wut?
¯\(?)/¯
You can’t heal yourself very well if you’re being focused and trying to heal a teammate. But, in all honesty, lack of stability is already pretty crippling to CAF. There is no need for all of this, especially when we have reapers using shroud constantly, which gives them obscenely high effective health and stability. I never have half the problems with druids that I have with reapers and heralds.
Just to be clear, I don’t personally think that simple 15s in and 10s out Avatar actually needs a penalty.
The point I’m trying to get across is that Anet thinks it does. The fact that they take no more than 24-48 hours to nerf anything that lets people effectively ignore the AF bar is plenty telling of this.
If we are going to get rid of Astral Force, something else will end up having to take it’s place mechanically.
the penalty is already there and if you play druid you already should know this: Our heal skills do not directly heal us. The only one that heal us is the CAF#4.
Still don’t see what’s the problem here deleting the AF generation piece of crap.
When the druid is in CAF does not do any damage, only heal and CC. There is no AF, just a cooldown like now.
True, but evidently being able to go into CA for 15s every 10s is producing too many bunker builds that are crapping all over Anet’s Esportz pipe dream or overheal regen would still be a thing since it basically bypassed the AF ar anyway.
AF is Anet’s hamfisted way of slowing down our use of CA heals and literally everything they do to make it “balanced” in pvp cascades through the rest of the game in terrible ways.
About the only way I can see AF getting removed is if they replace it with some kind of penalty to being in CA mode.
Something that actively incentivizes jumping in, throwing out a lunar impact and then hopping out to avoid lingering for too long.
The problem with this idea is there isn’t much you can do that will prevent bunker abuse in pvp but maintain raid viability.
Anet created a sub-class that can only really ever exist in 1 game mode at a time and probably only ever will since they have absolutely dug their heels in on splitting pvp/pve functionality in most cases.
If that wasn’t enough, the no CC strat excludes players from properly using their skills. Eliminating a vast number of viable combat options.
The no CC exploit is probably one of the main reasons people are even getting the event done in the first place.
It’s not an exploit….
It’s a strategy. There’s a huge difference between an exploit and playing the content as it’s designed. Sadly the content is pretty poorly designed when it comes to removing skills from being used. The idea that any form of CC in a boss fight is bad…poor form. Almost as poor form as removing Stealth as an option on Mai Trin fractal.
People are deliberately not CC’ing during the break bar window in order to keep the gerant frozen in place and locked in a single attack to burn it down with dps. A much easier proposition than trying to do so as it’s running all over the place.
It not only works in a way not intended by the developers (break bars are there for one reason) but it also bypasses other elements of the fight by locking it in the ‘falling ceiling’ attack.
It’s just as much an exploit as the old Fiery Greatsword #4 run in place ‘tactic’ was effectively an exploit.
What needs to change is players need to understand why changes are happening and anet being there every step of the way. I hate to include league into this, but they do a very good job of this with videos about what is problematic, and may change because they are problems and what directions they are heading in. It’s a very good way to communicate without actually stopping into the forums and communicating. It also allows players to see that they have picked up things from constructive posts. Doing something like this allows the base to feel they have a say which is basically what every class area complains right now, that they don’t and that they are underwhelming.
Anet actually used to do this. They would put notations in their balance posts during GW1 that would give a general idea of why they balanced the way they did.
Lets face it its a Poor design for a healing class the person who designed it should be ashamed.
That goes for the whole class.
Can you tell me how Staff #4 fits the astral theme?
It’s a mashup of several random ideas glued together without proper testing behind it.
With the balance changes it became obvious.
What do you suppose changing 2 out of 3 grandmaster tier traits mean if not a fail of design from Developers’ side?
Between staff 4, the one leaked “aspects” trait from a while back, and the druid gear being covered with animals, it looks like we were supposed to get a much more archetypal “Nature Warden” type of druid.
I have a feeling that either they just couldn’t make it work or they realized that raids needed a healer and that they couldn’t make Rev or Ele strong enough for the role without breaking pvp so they created the star pew pew druid we have now.
So you don’t know how to play a Druid effectively then.
Got it.
We can’t build AF by overhealing anymore and he was dueling a class that is designed to hit with the kind of damage that you can’t simply face tank and you say he was doing Druid wrong?
What, in your clearly expert opinion, was the correct amount of hits he should have purposefully eaten from a thief to allow for AF generation through self heals?
While I would like to think that Druid wasn’t nerfed BECAUSE of its strong place in PvP, (and the many PvP forum complaints) it most likely was. It was too strong of a bunker, and Arenanet is actively nerfing bunker builds right now because they are less exciting for viewers to watch. I prefer playing a bunker in PvP (old Bunker Guard here), but as a whole, PvPers and viewers seem to want fast, exciting action and not skillful support/defense.
2 Simple silver bullet solution to the problem:
A: Change Celestial Avatar heals so they either no longer affect the caster or severely reduce their heals.
B: Create a massive penalty to being in CA mode such as taking double damage or double duration of hard CC’s.
Either would effectively remove the concept of a solo bunker while preserving the team heals aspect of the class. These would probably need to be pvp only effects to preserve the viability of Druids in raids but it would work.
Just in case this isn’t a troll post, I’m sorry, but it really wouldn’t work. Either of those changes would completely destroy Druid against even vaguely coordinated teams.
They’re just general concepts. If people want easy AF generation or complete removal of the bar all together then it will need to be replaced with something that makes going into CA a risk and thus breaks the viability of solo bunker builds.
Anet isn’t going to allow bunker builds for esports sake and giving unfettered heals on a class with already excellent suitability allows for just that.
Edit: Just to make it clear my suggestions were made with the assumption that the AF bar was completely removed and we simply got 15s in and 10s cooldown.
While I would like to think that Druid wasn’t nerfed BECAUSE of its strong place in PvP, (and the many PvP forum complaints) it most likely was. It was too strong of a bunker, and Arenanet is actively nerfing bunker builds right now because they are less exciting for viewers to watch. I prefer playing a bunker in PvP (old Bunker Guard here), but as a whole, PvPers and viewers seem to want fast, exciting action and not skillful support/defense.
2 Simple silver bullet solution to the problem:
A: Change Celestial Avatar heals so they either no longer affect the caster or severely reduce their heals.
B: Create a massive penalty to being in CA mode such as taking double damage or double duration of hard CC’s.
Either would effectively remove the concept of a solo bunker while preserving the team heals aspect of the class. These would probably need to be pvp only effects to preserve the viability of Druids in raids but it would work.
What the… Are you crazy?! Are you seriously suggesting something this stupid?
I’m glad the devs dont come pick up ideas from this forum. Christ.
Maybe not such serious penalties but obviously gating CA behind astral force is a unfeasible concept and creating a penalty to being in CA is the only way to prevent bunker builds that Anet clearly doesn’t want in pvp.
It’s difficult AF generation or penalty to being in CA mode. You can’t have neither.
Edit: Just to make it clear my suggestions were made with the assumption that the AF bar was completely removed and we simply got 15s in and 10s cooldown.
Less people around? probably related to the 4 big games that came out last week + raids.
We’ll be back to normal eventually.
I doubt it, it was dying before those games were released, the only way to save this sinking ship now is to nerf it into pew pew so that people return to the maps to finish their achieves and gear grinds.
Funnily enough when people were asking for nerfs after the first couple of days I said Anet would have to, not because people couldn’t do it now, but when there is no one around to do it, people can’t do it alone.
Unfortunately no one took me seriously, how dare I suggest the maps ever get less populated…
^
There was the big merged thread where most of the posters were singing the praises of harder content. People were pointing out that the difficulty was too high for the average player, but were told, No. Hard content is better.
Well, we will see if it’s truly better.
Hard isn’t necessarily the problem so much as the content was made for big groups to look amazing on launch “for the cameras”. None of this was made to last months down the line without heavy tweaking.
The content isn’t impossible with much fewer people but it does feel much less fun. Events don’t scale well mechanically with the overabundance of CC and big hit skills that no longer have a zerg to diffuse their attention and if people aren’t having fun they will leave just the same as if they couldn’t do it at all.
The Blighting Tree event in VB is a great example. I did this earlier today with maybe 8 people and it was a hot mess. It didn’t take significantly longer and we did succeed but it was beyond annoying. You couldn’t stand anywhere without eating 8k+ sniper shots or rider knock downs simply because there wasn’t enough people to spread out the attacks.
While I would like to think that Druid wasn’t nerfed BECAUSE of its strong place in PvP, (and the many PvP forum complaints) it most likely was. It was too strong of a bunker, and Arenanet is actively nerfing bunker builds right now because they are less exciting for viewers to watch. I prefer playing a bunker in PvP (old Bunker Guard here), but as a whole, PvPers and viewers seem to want fast, exciting action and not skillful support/defense.
2 Simple silver bullet solution to the problem:
A: Change Celestial Avatar heals so they either no longer affect the caster or severely reduce their heals.
B: Create a massive penalty to being in CA mode such as taking double damage or double duration of hard CC’s.
Either would effectively remove the concept of a solo bunker while preserving the team heals aspect of the class. These would probably need to be pvp only effects to preserve the viability of Druids in raids but it would work.
Edit: Just to make it clear my suggestions were made with the assumption that the AF bar was completely removed and we simply got 15s in and 10s cooldown.
“Minions weren’t exploding in raids as we had hoped and we are reverting our change to non-targeted skills. All damage will now deal the full 100% in all game modes.”
Cause ppl were suggesting it. Try reading the thread before breathing… I mean posting.
People are questioning the logic of preventing OOC generation by nerfing staff one while then turning around and making it so that every regen source fills it effectivly generating more than the staff spam ever could OOC.
The only person even discussing it is you in a post that seems to be arguing a position never even presented aside from one person suggesting that the new regen generation is “WAAAAAY to much astral force gain”
I disagree with nerfing other astral force regen in order to give us a pointless out of combat autoattack back. If I were to chose between staff autoattack or heal/regen for ooc astral force regen, I’d choose heal/regen.
If you want to talk about clunky, it’s the fact that staff AA could be used to regen AF OOC. To use a Druid to its max potential a player was forced to make use of this mechanic. So yeah, I’d rather just use a heal than have to aim my staff at my pet for a 50% chance at some AF regen.
Or, ya know, we could have both and the game wouldn’t explode.
Why you people keep pretending like this was some switch flip and we can only have one option is beyond me.
Try getting a list of examples that number in the double digits before you start throwing around words like “culture of Anet employees harassing and bullying the players”.
So…I need an entire compendium of examples to defend what I say? There’s way more than a few. Instead of challenging the examples I brought up, you defend Anet’s stance and lack of apology or accountability?
That’s what “a culture of _” means. Two or three examples isn’t even a trend.
Feel free to actually learn the meaning of terms before using them.
The bigger picture that nobody is paying attention to here is the the culture of Anet employees harassing and bullying the players. Despite the fact that team leads and people you EXPECT to be protecting the customers are the ones involved.
lulwut?
Try getting a list of examples that number in the double digits before you start throwing around words like “culture of Anet employees harassing and bullying the players”.
