If you don’t like the druid mechanics that’s okay, a lot of people don’t and seem to think Druid is terrible because of their biased opinions. Most of the people who don’t are also spreading the information that Tempest is overall better when it is clearly not. I have friends in other guilds who are convinced that tempest > druid and they haven’t killed anything after the first boss.
Also warrior is only good on Large Hitboxes. It’s a niche gimmick build for Gorseval and it is very good at it. If your condi warriors are outdps-ing your engineers on other fights, then you’re playing with bad engineers, which is likely because most people can’t do the rotation in a raid environment.
I’ve still yet to hear from people who killed Gorseval/Sabetha while playing a tempest healer (I know it’s possible, just not recommended). All of you can be proud of your Vale Guardian kills with Tempest Healer, but druid is easily the better choice for any fight that’s actually hard unlike the first boss. Not sure how you can consider tempest healer a superior build when there are far fewer Gorseval/Sabetha kills with a tempest healer than a druid healer. Viable? Yes. Better? No.
It is SC though, would likely fail horribly with most of GW2’s population until everyone becomes very comfortable with the raids. But yes, the Grace of the Land uptime for a DPS druid would be much lower than a dedicated healer build.
@DuckDuckBoom
If you’re having trouble with Gorseval for lack of DPS, you should try using your druid instead for the raid DPS buffing potential. More DPS makes every fight easier. I’m not really the best at giving advice for Gorseval, especially without seeing your raid’s strat. I do kinda feel people fixate on the knockdown too much when it’s really something like orbs getting out of control or Gorseval eating too many spirits that’s causing the wipes. Knockdowns do suck though and people shouldn’t eat every one of them :/
Have any of you tempest healer converts actually killed the harder fights like Sabetha/Gorseval? Everytime I see this tempest healer hype, the player has only killed Vale Guardian with it. The one person I know who’s tempest healed the entire wing even said Druid was easily better for the raid comp.
Are there DPS builds that involve the druid spec?
Are there hybrid healing/dps builds that are VIABLE for higher end pve? if so, what are they?
Is full healing druid a good idea? why or why not?
You wonder why everyone has a different opinion on what’s best for druid? It’s cause any gear with damage or healing power works. I don’t see the point in trying to follow a guide and not be willing to spend all the gold required for it, at the point you might as well go with what you think works best. I’d personally never use your mix but there’s no reason why you can’t be successful with it.
Also, you get more raid DPS out of optimizing your composition and strategy instead of trying to squeeze out damage from your healer druid. It’s why Gorseval kills with more than 1 minute to spare on the enrage timer are possible with a cleric/magi druid. The enrage timer is hard, but it’s not so unforgiving that you have to force your druid to DPS.
Hate to tell you this, but raids aren’t any place to be cheap and they are difficult enough to warrant getting an entirely separate gear set(s) just for it. If you want to use your healing set outside of raid, just pay the extra gold for the zealot set. Or just heal with Zerker gear.
I personally think it’s pointless to mix in Clerics and Zerker gear together. I’d recommend a Magi/Cleric’s mix if you are concerned about cost. Zealot’s isn’t economically efficient and staff’s power scaling is so bad that it’s not worth gearing for damage as a healer druid. It’s awful for general open world PvE gameplay, but I just use my zealots, zerker or viper set there.
I’ve been wanting to main a ranger since release but I haven’t seen them actually ‘fixed’ ever.
Just wondering is it worth, or mainly viable, to make a ranger after HoT to run Condi w/shortbow.
They’ve never been broken. It’s a good class that attracts bad players. For some, the checklist looks like this:
Has big fluffy pet
Shoots bows and arrows
HAS A BIG FLUFFY PET
In in tune with nature
OMG THAT PET IS SO FLUFFY I’M GONNA DIE!
And thus another bearbow is born, and eventually they’ll write a concern thread about how rubbish their DPS and survivability is when they just sit on longbow trying to make their pet tank.
But if you’re looking for a class that is fun, mobile, flexible, has solid damage output, brings, is survivable and brings some buffs to the table with it, you’re in the right place. If you’re here for pets and bows, you’ll probably be disappointed
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?
It depends on your build. But for the average healer build with healing power it would be more raid DPS to stay in astral form.
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.
Builds that try to be a DPS ranger that off heal and rarely use staff are not utilizing the druid properly IMO.
If you have others dedicated to the healing role, I see no issues with a dps ranger that also brings support through grace of the land and support healing. You pop into CA, use mainly #4 (and possibly #3 and #5), leave and continue to dps.
Well I meant that if you were the dedicated healer.
I might make one later but no promises. But your “rotation” consists of applying as much Grace of the Land stacks as possible and using Glyph of Empowerment on cd. This is a usually a bigger contribution to raid DPS than actually doing damage yourself with a hybrid gear set like Zealots. The quickest way to stack this is with Rejuvenating Tides, the 4 skill in Celestial form. Other than that, for actual healing there are reactionary and predictive components of it that a guide can’t really teach you, and you just need to be familiar with the actual encounter and your own raid composition. Like, if I think people won’t take damage within the next 10s, I’ll end CAF early after my 2nd Rejuvenating tides and go back to staff to recharge it ASAP. If you are caught out of CAF and need to apply healing, you will need to rotate your CDs between staff 3, glyph heal and Fern Hound Heal or whatever other thing you bring for healing until you charge up your astral force.
But yeah, you basically need to understand that your main role is to heal and buff your allies damage. Builds that try to be a DPS ranger that off heal and rarely use staff are not utilizing the druid properly IMO. I pretty much think the ideal druid healer gameplay involves a lot of staff camping and CAF buffing. But yeah, this is just how me and my guild in particular view druids. Other playstyles/builds are viable and you may or may not have more success with them
I mean, anything works in open world. It performs well enough and kills things faster than other healer gear sets. The only place I wouldn’t use it in is Chak Gerent since it’s a pretty hard DPS check.
The general consensus is that any gear with healing power works and you may have to adjust your toughness based on your group’s raid composition. Your individual player skills and strategy matter more than the gear you wear. Also, zealots is overrated.
Just going to point out that it’s often other ppl’s mistakes that cause you take excess damage and not your own. Not always the case, but it happens a lot in raid.
One of the guilds that popularized the druid tank and healer idea even said they don’t recommend doing it. It’s also only relevant on the first boss anyways, since you don’t “need” a tank for the 2nd and 3rd boss. If you are running clerics, you just happen to be the tank on Gorseval since you have the most toughness anyways.
every bit of dps helps and have zealot’s does not hurt your ability to heal. where’s the downside?
It cost’s a kitten ton of gold for very little gain and toughness helps with survivability.
that doesn’t make it worse… what a terrible argument. i don’t want to pay for it either but it doesn’t change the fact it is better.
It’s not a straight up upgrade, there are trade offs and multiple druid builds are all viable. I stopped to think about what do I actually gain from running almost full zealots, and it basically came down to just extra staff auto attack damage. You spend most of your time in Celestial Astral Form which has almost 0 damage and zealots doesn’t affect it. When you are out of it, you are not buffing your party with grace of the land and you want to be on staff to charge it ASAP. I have stated multiple times I don’t think it’s worth it to swap off staff to S or LB for your own personal DPS. As a druid, it’s your job to heal people and you need to prioritize the following: Healing > Your own Survival > Damage. If your raid comp is having DPS issues, then you are trying to squeeze out extra DPS from the wrong player as you can easily clear the raid without relying on your druid for DPS. All the top guilds are going to release their Druid builds soon, and I know at least 2 of them did not use Zealots.
Is it “Better”? If you are comfortable without toughness and can survive without it and don’t need to tank then sure zealot’s is a little bit better. It’s not so much better that you are hurting your raid by being a cleric druid.
For the record, I do have a full zealots set and a clerics set and I use both depending on the strat and the strength of the raid.
I hope i never get some of you in a raid. There is literally no reason for a druid to run nomad’s or clerics. Their DPS DOES help and if every other kitten class can run a glass build including condi ranger there’s no excuses for a druid to not do the same.
Running zealot’s in no way affects your ability to heal or give party buffs. You also contribute far far more by doing some dps while you heal.
As for alternatives, there aren’t any that are good. Everything else is just subpar. run cleric’s until you can get zealots and never touch nomad’s.
Except that druids r meant to camp staff and the damage it does is so low it doesnt matter.
Idk, I haven’t actually tried pulling Sabetha. But I imagine the druid would smooth out the learning curve and heal unavoidable damage. All the world 1-5 kills did use a healer druid.
It’s been confirmed by several guilds (including turtledragon’s I thought?) that healing is not necessary for the entire first wing, so pure healing on a druid is likely a waste. Even in the DnT videos, watching the druid perspective was pretty cringe-worthy since she wasn’t doing much for the majority of the time. I haven’t read their breakdown of why they ran a druid at all in some instances, but since they had more than enough time to spare I’m guessing it was quality of life.
I’m sort of thinking DPS specs on other builds that can provide random healing, like viper engis are going to be the PUG comp.
You definitely need a healer for the fights. It doesn’t have to be a full cleric/magi thing, but there is a lot of damage you can’t just dodge through and having the healer lets you recover from mistakes much easier (Like not moving the vale guardian quick enough and spawning a green circle on the platform is lit up). Staff camping and buffing your raid with Grace of the Land is more raid dps than swapping to a LB or sword and auto attacking in Zealots gear. The only reason to use zealots gear is to contribute like 50k more damage over 8 minutes on your staff. Not worth the 300g+ cost which is why I don’t recommend it to people gearing a druid.
Druid DPS is nice to have, but not required. Your main role is to heal and you are in Celestial Form most of the time which doesn’t do damage. It’s more raid DPS to buff your party with Grace of the Land than to contribute damage kittenty 2k auto attacks in Zealot’s gear.
I didn’t notice it at all. It seemed fine on my Gorseval kill which was after the hotfix last night. The only thing annoying about it was that I couldn’t stack my AF to full pre fight with Signet of the Wild.
Yes, but druids make up for it by buffing their party members atleast. Spotter, Frost, Sun spirit, Glyph and Grace of the Lands are all things a DPS druid can bring that massively buff party DPS.
DPS druid is useful, i play DPS condi druid in fractals and have seen ppl play zerker druid in raids as well. There are druid builds other than healer that are PvE viable.
Plenty of people have killed the first boss with a DPS ranger, you are not forced to go heals. There’s no class that’s so bad you can’t take them into raids as a DPS.
it’s no longer usefull to speak about DRUID IN RAIDS cuz there will be no drood required in these contents now ( af doesnt pop so why take a heal spec if u cannot heal when u want)
thanks for attention
Maybe you should fight a boss other than Vale Guardian and then say that. Druid is fine and Astral Force generation is fine even after today’s hotfix.
So yeah… don’t ranger sword during Gorseval final phase lol. I don’t know why I thought that was a good idea. I just killed Gorseval in 100% zealots gear, but I think clerics was equally viable/good.
They’re both good and viable with their own set of advantages and disadvantages
eg. Zerker – better burst, survivability, ranged damage. Better on bosses that take increased damage like the Dredge Fractal final boss since they haven’t fixed it to work with conditions yet lol.
The condi one is a bit more situational, but when the situation is perfect it outshines zerker builds in long fights. It’s a bit reliant on stationary targets. The build is also awful at break bars.
Enjoying it a lot so far, feeling like my heals actually help a lot and that it’s worth bringing a dedicated Druid healer. Hard to see kitten in all the particle effects, and it’s hard healing with only ground target skills unlike other MMOs. Wish I could move the squad UI or make ally health bars more visible.
First boss. You probably need a healer for it, definitely don’t think you can do this without a healer. Didn’t make it that far, still getting used to the fight.
It should be a non issue since someone else in the group should be running toughness gear as well to move and position the boss (tank). People have run clerics gear on their druids and killed Vale Guardian without aggro being an issue.
It’s fine, you’ll need condi DPS anyways for the first boss. Just put the Druid in the same group as your condi DPS so they’ll have priority for Sun Spirit.
Also, for those complaining about toughness generating aggro: have any of you actually tried playing with Cleric’s gear: you’ll never actually get aggro cause damage done is also a very important factor in determining who actually gets aggro. I feel like a lot of ppl just read somewhere that toughness makes you get aggro and assumed it meant you’ll be an aggro magnet just because of your gear when that is definitely not true. The wiki even states that damage is the most important factor and there’s also this reddit thread that explains some of this as well.
tl;dr: toughness is only one factor in determining aggro and it varies from boss to boss. You won’t actually get aggro in clerics gear cause you’re not doing high damage.
There’s probably no need for Glyph of Alignment, Sun Spirit is a pretty big contribution to party DPS, even for non condi builds. Nature Magic and Regen is overrated IMO. Glyph of Rejuvenation > Healing Spring, Nature Spirit > Glyph of Unity, and Monk Runes > Druid Runes. I don’t think Bear pets will be used in raids, but could be wrong.
