Guild Wars 2

Here are two examples of computer programs that are difficult to create:

1. A computer program that literally creates cupcakes out of thin air.
2. A computer program that doesn’t have bugs.

2 is harder than 1.

Being an MMO also makes this even harder, since you can never reproduce the game that players actually get to play particularly well for the benefit of testers. Even if the game had a PTS, that would have orders of magnitude fewer players than the actual release.

For those complaining about ‘bias’, this is what a (mostly) unbiased review looks like (there’s actually a very slight positive bias throughout). Literally any piece of writing that seeks to convey an opinion is going to be ‘biased’.

It seems like the standard principles of judging review quality are being applied here: if you agree with a review, it must be good; and if you don’t agree with a review, clearly it’s bad and must have been paid for by someone with an agenda.

As always, this is bullkitten. People have different tastes and different priorities. Some people will like Heart of Thorns, some people won’t. I’m perfectly happy to get a strictly quality over quantity deal, and I knew ahead of time that that was what was being offered.

The difficulty seems fine to me, and possibly even too easy in places, and I really don’t see a problem with having to call for help in map chat to do some things. There are a couple of annoying flow-breaking mastery requirements in the storyline, but I’ve dealt with far, far worse in other games.

Masteries also seem fine. I’ve picked up all of the low-hanging fruit from the HoT mastery trees already, and that gives me plenty of options. The remaining masteries provide some cool long-term goals, and they seem worth pursuing, depending on what stats the relic weapons allow.

But really, if all you care about is seeing the story, then you are not the audience that any MMO is intended for. Solo content is not meant to be a major part of the game, it’s just there to make being between guilds a little more bearable for people in that situation.

If you want to skip ahead, you should be able to activate the first step of the expansion in the story journal, and then there should be one of the usual green instance markers just outside Red Rock Bastion in the Silverwastes.

Note that the expansion storyline continues directly from episode 8, and follows on from plot threads that were introduced in episodes 5 and 6. The second half of LS2 has some important reveals that you might not want to spoil, and you can’t get past the opening cutscene of Heart of Thorns (or even some of the trailers) without spoiling at least one thing.

There’s plenty of really good content here, even though there are only four maps. But what you’re missing is that all of the new content caters to the same, comparatively narrow, selection of tastes.

Sure, you can’t have something for every taste, otherwise you’ll just end up with everything being crap. But this goes a bit far in the other direction.

When people complain about grind, they aren’t complaining that they have to actually put some effort in to earn something. What they’re saying is that there is lots of content that they don’t want to do standing in between them and what they do want to do. And that’s pretty unsurprising when the only content available is basically non-instanced casual raiding.

There’s also a certain irony to having to basically raid for the right to do solo instances.

As for the thing about CoF P1, you are reminded of game design 101:

If a player is given the means to comprehensively sabotage their experience of the game in order to ‘win’ more often or more easily, they WILL use them.

HawkMeister.4758:

I´m trying to figure out if this Verdant Brink map I keep hearing about, is indeed all the new PvE content in this expansion.

Ah, OK. That’s easy to answer. There are four story acts, each of which corresponds to its own map.

I frequently drop below 30 fps in expansion areas and failed this a few times, but the only problems I really had were:

1. Getting disorientated during the cliff scaling part.
2. Temporary brain failure during the gliding part.
3. Some sort of bug that locked out progression after dying sometimes.

The amount of content seems OK to me. If you’re trying to decide whether to buy or not, the main thing you need to be aware of is that virtually all of the PvE content is delivered in the form of ‘actions’ similar to Dry Top and the Silverwastes. If that sort of thing isn’t to your taste, you’re kind of shafted at the moment.

I think it’s overblown to claim that you’re being asked to stump up 400 hero points simply to play the game, even if you’re primarily in a PvP environment. And I don’t think they should be a day-one unlock.

Otherwise, though, they really do need to come up with a better way to handle hero points for WvWers and more ways to get hero points. There’s a 2600-post thread on the subject that’s been merged into a giant megathread for the express purpose of easy reading. It’s up to you what you want to do in the meantime, but there’s a good chance that this will be changed.

MyriadStars.5679:

This is a really convenient excuse.

As I said, threads with feedback get merged so that the devs can skim the feedback and get a feel for what needs to be done. “Thanks ANet” threads aren’t feedback.

There was one thread that got locked, but you can see for yourself that someone was just spamming it with utter kitten.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Pop a teleport to friend. Problem solved.

I have seen literally one of those since I started playing. Is there some source of them that I don’t know about?

MyriadStars.5679:

Why aren’t they merging threads titled “thank you” into one? These threads are pretty much empty.

Because they don’t need to.

The purpose of merging threads into one is to make sure that the devs can skim all of the feedback on a subject. Because, you know, if a lot of people don’t like something, that implies that perhaps something will need to be done. The devs might like to see “thank you” posts, but they’re not going to inspire debate (so they’ll fall off the front page naturally on their own), and they don’t imply the presence of anything that actually needs addressing.

You are literally just trying to find malice where there is none.

Have a look at the front page of the game’s subreddit — looks to me like the moment you leave ANet-controlled space, people actually get a bit more positive (although in theory, upvotes and downvotes aren’t supposed to be like/dislike buttons — people just tend to use them that way in practice anyway).

MyriadStars.5679:

Besides, Anet has been trying to find reasons to delete/merge threads with negative comments, while leaving positive threads untouched even if those threads are pretty much empty with one or two lines only. Even so, the forums are still filled with negative threads.

No, they’ve been merging threads that are all about the same one bloody thing into one thread. That’s perfectly reasonable. The moderators don’t engage in shady practices like you claim, because it would completely defeat the point of even having official forums if they did.

Please also note that neither /r/GuildWars2 nor /r/mmorpg, neither of which are under ANet’s control, have even one rage thread about this on the front page at the time of this post.

IIRC, last time we tried to figure out how populated the game really is, we came up with an answer of something like 2.5 million. A 2600-post thread is a significant event, but a self-selected sample of less than 0.1% of the game’s population tells us nothing.

Also note that that thread is going to include a tonne of debate and mudslinging, which will bump its post count far higher than you’d expect a thread to ‘naturally’ obtain.

tonyajc.2618:

Except it didn’t. This is a usual case of, the loudest people are the ones not happy, but there are way more happy people. When you make an MMO, you can never make everyone happy. Some want everything at once, others like me, want to enjoy what the game has to offer at a pace. It’s not even a super slow pace, it’s actually nice.

We don’t know how many people are unhappy vs. the number of happy people. We can’t infer anything about people who don’t say anything. I don’t think ANet particularly deserves a disaster here, but you’d still have a hard time convincing me that this isn’t a disaster, and you’d also have a hard time convincing me that they didn’t make mistakes that contributed to this being a disaster.

Sicarius.4639:

Don’t all masteries take the same amount of xp?

The manifesto represents what they want to do, and what they thought they could do with an open-world MMO in 2010. While I presume that much of what they want to do has changed, I would kind of hope that, five years on, their views have evolved a bit.

The higher-tier masteries with higher MP costs also require more experience. As far as I’m aware, it’s strictly in proportion to the actual number of mastery points a given mastery will cost, so, e.g., Glider Basics costs the equivalent of two level-ups, and Updraft Use costs the equivalent of four.

Tier one masteries take about 500k xp each.

The level-up requirement for a level 80 is something like 250k, and you get a fixed percentage of that number per event. So, basically, 1 Mastery Rank takes about as much effort to earn as two levels.

Even on only a few hours each week, I can’t say I see this being too much, even without boosters.

The content that’s provided for you to ‘grind’ for your masteries is meant to be fun in and of itself. If it’s really not to your taste, that’s one thing, but you do need to be able to enjoy it for what it is. If you just regard it as a chore that you have to get done before you can move on to the ‘actual fun’, you’ll just mindkitten yourself into hating everything.

I don’t recall having too much trouble finding events to do — sometimes I’d see a map and think “nope, this is a non-starter”, but even then, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been in the jungle and felt like I had no way of amusing myself there.

8/10. Exceeded expectations, keep it up. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, but I’m happy with the present situation provided that improvements are forthcoming. Or, in other words, I’m not looking forward to farming lots of hero points on all of my alts.

On the whole, I agree with quite a few of the complaints that have been made, but I was lucky enough to avoid the absolute worst of it, and even if I hadn’t been, I don’t think the outrage threads we’re seeing are anywhere near justified for the most part.

I don’t think the number of hero points required for an elite spec can be much lower than 400 without turning them into a virtually free unlock, and I don’t think they should be a virtually free unlock — if you don’t agree with this, I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree, it’s not a topic that we can have real debate over. But I’d certainly be in favour of adding a lot of new, alternative ways to get those hero points.

Note that in the case of the champs and the ‘forced grouping’, I’m not convinced that those hero challenges aren’t bugged — at least some seem to spawn vets every time.

Eponet.4829:

All I want is an official addition to the story journal that will tell me which masteries I need to unlock for the full storyline so that I can finish them before I start, thus avoiding the flow breaking mastery grind between each chapter.

If you look at the masteries tab in the hero panel, there’s a green star next to all of the masteries you don’t have that will be used in the main storyline.

What sort of efficiency are you looking for?

The most hassle-efficient way to deal with masteries is to stop worrying about getting to any specific piece of content right now and just do whatever looks most fun at any given moment.

If you want the most time-efficient way, you should recalibrate your brain until you don’t.

nikdik.1934:

This is supposed to be a grind-free game. Why are you defending A-Net for falling back on their promises?

No, this never has been, is not, and never will be “supposed to be a grind-free game”. Arenanet have just gone on record as saying that they don’t like grind. That’s it. That’s all they said and all they meant.

One of the necessary ingredients for a genuinely grind-free MMO is a magic reality distortion field. The best you can do in the real world, where such things sadly do not exist, is to try and disguise the grind or make it a bit more palatable. Clearly, you do not think ANet have succeeded in this. Plenty of people agree with you, plenty of other people don’t. Time will tell whether or not there is actually a problem here, but blind outrage helps nobody.

This is not about entitlement or free-handouts. This is about holding a company responsible for lying to customers. People have every right to be mad at A-Net right now.

ANet were quite explicit in interviews as early as January that masteries exist primarily to gate content so that players don’t consume it too quickly. If you failed then to understand what was going on, that’s your problem (but ANet will still refund you your purchase if you want).

Kristine Heath.1483:

citation needed.

So, he has to provide evidence to back up his point of view, when you have no evidence to back up yours.

Sounds legit.

I reported this already via the in-game reporting tool, but I have further information to add.

During the story instance immediately before the storyline requires Exalted Lore, being killed causes the special set of skills you’re given for that instance to stop working — you can use the skills a few times, but they suddenly start failing to do anything after some time. It might be related to how you get killed — I seemed to do fine after respawning on one attempt.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Just nerf them to 55 health and give em regeneration as well

I was trying to be a bit more subtle about it than that xD. Especially since phantasms can already get regeneration from a trait.

Joking aside, I’d also be concerned that a protective spirit type mechanic would leave us in the situation where all minions would survive exactly the same amount of time in any given fight, no matter how fragile or beefy they were supposed to be.

I’m still worried about how this 95% thing will interact with lifestealing enemies, unless PvE enemies using lifesteal against ranger pets was specifically addressed at some point without me hearing about it.

Rutee.1058:

Condition: Minion

Minions are last in the target priority line to start with, aren’t they? I’d think this is a thing the game’s /already/ checking.

The bit that’s hard is telling who a player has targeted, not telling whether or not an attack has hit a minion.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Why not give all minions Protective Spirit? For PvE, they already have a massive health boost, seems unnecessary.

I spoke to my phantasms about this, and they said that it’s a great idea. In fact, they felt it was such an amazing buff that they’d happily take a 90% nerf to their maximum health pools as compensation.

Rutee.1058:

…don’t you already?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Piercing_Shards

Or any other similar skill.

Checking what conditions a player has is much simpler than checking who their selected target is, since conditions are figured out by the server, whereas players’ targets are figured out by the client.

Figuring out who the player’s target is is clearly a thing they can do, as evidenced by the mechanic seen in fractals, but doing any given thing in a fractal is orders of magnitude cheaper than doing the same thing in WvW.

How will this change affect armour-ignoring damage that doesn’t come from conditions, such as retaliation and (most importantly) lifesteal?

From what you’ve said in the OP, it looks like PvE enemies with significant lifesteal attacks will still be able to inflict full damage to pets with them, while also receiving the full amount of healing.

At the same time, this patch will make it much harder to follow the current advice to leave pets to die and make no effort to revive them when facing anything with significant lifesteal.

That sounds a bit worrying to me.

RSLongK.8961:

Make pet dodge with the player is THAT hard/game breaking?

That’s not an effective solution to this problem, although it probably would be helpful anyway for other problems that come with AI-dependence, like not being able to put the designed-in counterplay to certain skills into practice in PvP.

I’d imagine the sensible approach to nerfing dungeon gold would be to implement stricter time gates rather than nerfing the reward per run. If that’s the approach they go with, I’m not sure any ‘replacement’ for the dungeon gold is needed.

Holland.9351:

Not many people would pick this trait if it was a choice rather than a minor trait that comes with every single druid build.

If it must exist in the form it’s in, it can’t not be a minor trait, because there is no playstyle change you can realistically make to take advantage of it. But my preferred answer would be to invent something else.

As a radical surgery option for rangers, you could have pets who act friendly to everything until given an order to execute, then they try to execute that order until it’s done or its ‘morale’ (i.e., health) runs out.

With pets being beefier than illusions, this should be pretty reasonable on its own, while also completely negating situations like Jade Maw and certain fights where pets are basically a liability.

Mesmers can have something else devised for their illusions’ counterplay.

Aidenwolf.5964:

If this class as constituted is good enough to main heal raids then raids will fail. Many seem to want Druid to be a hybrid damage / healer but if you’re able to main heal a raid hybrid then raids were a waste of Anet’s resources.

What you’re saying here really strikes me as if you believe that the only ‘correct’ raids are ones that look like the ones you’ve already played, where healers apparently have to devote all of their time and/or mana to healing once they’re actually in a fight.

But it’s self-evidently true that there’s more than one way to make any given thing work, especially something as complex as a raid. While not following your demands might result in raids that aren’t to your taste, they won’t automatically end up any worse than that.

Healing itself doesn’t need to be a thing for raids to be adequately challenging. Healing is just one bullet point in a much longer list of things a group needs to get right in order to clear any given fight.

FFXIV’s healing meta usually calls for at least one healer to DPS, and sometimes even spend most of their time DPSing, and there are even raids that are virtually impossible to clear without healer DPS.

cafard.8953:

Don’t you guys have the impression that the reaction around here is very much like the kneejerk people were ranting about for WHaO? The spec has barely been tried out for a couple of days, yet it’s already being branded broken, useless or OP, in its entirety or in details. It’ll take weeks at least for people to get the bigger picture after the meta adapts around the new specs.

I’m not massively worried about how effective the druid is right now. That can come after it feels like the spec is fun to play and can execute its role in a way that gives people a clear reason to desire that role.

I’d like to be proven wrong, but I do not think that the amount of work needed for this spec to really work is actually feasible before the expansion launches. The problems with it are just too big and too fundamental.

Honestly, I think it might be worth holding the druid back until after launch, just so that the first ‘official’ outing of the spec doesn’t sour everyone’s opinions towards it.

Hopefully, my other posts in this thread show why I’m so pessimistic about this. Ultimately, the spec is struggling with the burden of having to be a good healer, a good fit for a game that has been traditionally designed around eschewing healers, and a good Guild Wars 2 design. It might be really cool in some game modes, but this really doesn’t seem to cut it.

OGDeadHead.8326:

First of all, this shouldn’t apply to pvp – at all.

Counterplay means that you have the option to change how you play so that the thing you are countering is less effective. In the case of AI, the counterplay should be to focus it and destroy it. Not to just keep spamming AoE attacks at your original target until the AI dies on its own.

Hmm… How’s this for a Glyph of Unity 2.0?

“A web of astral energy connects allies and enemies together within the area. Whenever damage or healing is attempted by those within the web, a portion of that damage or healing propagates throughout the web as a surge of energy, damaging enemies or healing allies.”

The effect would be triggered by activating a damaging or healing skill within a radius of the druid (this could just be ground-targeted, but that limits counter-counter-play in PvP).

The actual damage or heal amount caused by the glyph could be calculated by simulating the damage or healing the skill used would cause to a single hypothetical target, so in addition to granting a clear, cool substantial damage buff to allies (this does have to compete with “Feel my Wrath!” and Time Warp, after all), this would bypass armour and add some extra up-front damage to conditions.

Presumably, the final output of the glyph is exclusively either damage or healing, depending on which form you’re in. Regardless of form, both damage and healing should still be valid inputs, however.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

• Natural Mender only helps healing focused builds, which is not the majority of them. It is a useless trait for the majority of builds.

Still of the opinion that natural mender is crap even if you are healing-focused, myself.

I said it two pages ago: if you want small heals to lead into big heals, you need to go about it differently. Healing isn’t about slinging green numbers around, because ultimately, anyone can sling numbers around. What is even the point of expecting healers in content design if all they are is just another kind of number-slinger? Healers shouldn’t even be considered if you can’t answer that question. Otherwise, you’re just regurgitating ancient MMO tropes, and we’re a lot better than that.

A proper healer might be able to get some benefit out of Natural Mender, but it has no effect whatsoever on what they do or how they play, since a proper healer should be focusing on getting the right heals out to the right people at the right time, not on just spamming green numbers.

Gilgalas.7860:

Linking here for feedback two different threads that deal with an extremely important UI concern related to healing in GW2.

This is definitely something that needs to be considered as well, yes. Perhaps the fix to natural mender could include a component that helps, like tethers to allies when they take damage or something?

smalls.2463:

This bugs me because the druids will just continue to use zerkers and still heal pretty much the same. I suggest the base heal value be decreased and the scaling for each ability be increased so that having healing power primary is an absolute must to be a good healer. Otherwise this is gonna zerker healers and thats sounds kittening stupid. Please change this.

Please don’t.

It is not ‘kittening stupid’ for a healer to want to gear to improve their DPS. Damage-dealing is part of what all good healers do, because if they didn’t, they’d end up spending whole swathes of their time standing around looking like pratts.

This would just waste a load of ecto, and it would actively harm both build diversity and the viability of druids.

I only have a little playtime logged so far on druid, but that has convinced me that there are quite a few ways in which the overall ‘dynamic’ of the druid is off.

Healing to build up astral force to unlock bigger heals isn’t interesting enough to make a healer class work. Healers make decisions, that’s what makes them healers and not HPSes.

Worse, since you still get the AF gain from healing even if your heals are unnecessary — or even lost completely as overhealing — this design rewards healers for atrocious play. If nobody needs healing, your healers shouldn’t be healing.

It might be better if astral force built naturally out of combat but could only build in combat by damaging enemies. This would avoid encouraging poor play, and it would avoid the current problem of players overhealing their pet to make sure they start the next fight with a full tank.

But I think more is needed. A better version of the astral force/celestial avatar dynamic might be as follows:

1. Assuming celestial avatar form is limited by a medium-long-ish cooldown and just instantly fills your AF to full.
2. While CAF is off cooldown and you’re in combat, you naturally build AF.
3. You build extra AF by dealing damage and while there are nearby allies below 75% health.
4. Having AF before using CAF substantially lowers its cooldown, and the cooldowns of its associated skills, in proportion to the amount of AF you had. There could instead be different buffs, provided that they support a healer dynamic rather than an HPS dynamic.

As I said above, healing is about making decisions. You can’t choose when people are going to need healing, but you can choose when you respond. This proposed design is essentially a form of the classic “heal these people now, but at heavy cost” vs. “heal these people more slowly, but do so cheaply” dynamic between spot heals, spike heals, and heals over time.

The other comments I’ll make:

• The roles filled by wisps and staff autoattack are already incredibly well-trodden ground in GW2, especially with all the self-heals players bring along.
• Natural Mender is an HPS trait, not a healer trait. Healing is about delivering the right heals at the right time, and this trait does precisely nothing to change the way that a good healer would play.
• Natural Mender could be replaced with the trait that enacts the dynamic I described above.
• Staff autoattack could be replaced with a straightforward damage skill, and probably an extremely powerful one — after all, you do take a substantial DPS loss to become a druid in the first place, and you’re sacrificing DPS to use the extra tools that druid gives you.

Palador.2170:

Given that raids are not intended to be for the majority of the players, isn’t it more honest to say that “Making a raid mode version is not FREE”? I think we can all agree that making a good raid costs more than making a standard story segment, despite the fact that fewer people will play it.

It’s likely that raids are actually pretty close to free, and story raids could conceivably be done for free as well, but likely not for a while.

When managers, developers, and beancounters talk about how expensive raids are, they’re talking in terms of how many headaches they and their teams are going to have, or how much money they’re going to spend.

But as players, the only cost we’re really worried about is ANet cutting other potentially cool stuff in order to keep things within some overall money/headache budget for Heart of Thorns as a whole. And I don’t find this very likely. Budgets are really determined through lots of stakeholders’ meetings etc., and it’s likely that ANet were given additional resources specifically to develop raids with because they were able to make a decent business case for raiding. They aren’t coming at the expense of other content or features.

I also believe that similar reasoning should be applied to any other feature or piece of content you don’t like.

Aomine.5012:

Ranger has sub-par damage (5th)and subpar offensive and defensive support.

I specifically addressed that in the post you just quoted. It doesn’t affect my point.

Bring in Druid doesn’t change any of that.

None of the playtesting by theorycrafters etc. that you’d need to justify that claim has happened yet.

I’m cautiously optimistic for the time being.

There are probably numbers that need to change — I feel like glyph of empowerment should provide something like +33% damage, for example, in order to justify slotting it. Ranger skills for boosting a group’s DPS are a lot more limited and usually riskier, so I see no reason for them not to be much stronger.

Otherwise, defensive support is a legitimate, accepted thing already, and healing is, in theory, an entirely valid form of defensive support. Whether it works in practice depends on how things are tuned — if things do too much damage or there are too many control effects, then players will still have to avoid as much damage as possible and there’ll be no value to bringing a healer.

Dodges, self-defence skills, and self-healing skills don’t invalidate healing. Every single one of them either imposes a cost to DPS, imposes some sort of risk, or is simply too limited to use all the time.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

So your answer is that you got to be better than the other players, otherwise you won’t get a spot?

You bring the player, never the class. That is how it always has been done since long before even Prophecies was released; that is how it is done now; and that is how it always will be done long after this game shuts down.

The ranger isn’t garbage tier as a DD, and the druid shouldn’t be garbage tier as a defensive support. Damage-dealing and defensive support are both useful roles, so if you play ranger well in either or both of those roles, any good group will consider you as a ranger.

If you lose your raid spot, it’s because you don’t deal enough damage or provide good enough support. Not because the ranger is somehow incapable of such things.

Sandpit.3467:

Why would anyone that wanted to roll a ranger ever want any of this junk?

Why wouldn’t they? It’s something they couldn’t do before, and it should be fun to use.

Sandpit.3467:

Why does ANet HATE rangers?

Given that there are equally reasonable arguments in the wild to the effect that ANet hates warriors, guardians, mesmers, elementalists, necromancers, thieves, revenants, engineers, chocolate, fun, balance, and America, the obvious answer is that they don’t hate you, you just don’t like what they’re doing.

Ashen.2907:

poster in a different thread just completely plagiarized your post. He took it in its entirety posting it as his own. Truly a low act worthy of ridicule and shame. Sorry you had to be on the receiving end of this sort of morally bankrupt act. You might want to reach out to a moderator. Here is the post:

But… didn’t that other guy post first?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The druid trait line is a one-trick-pony. Strong healing is all it has to offer. If you don’t want to go for healing, there is literally no reason to spec into it unless you want to be less efficient in what else you want to do.

• Glyph of Empowerment, at least once it gets buffed. Nice, unique damage boost on top of spotter and frost spirit.
• Glyph of the Tides: nice utility for trash — and, of course, adds. And druid does get a handful of extra AoE damage skills.
• Glyph of Unity: it might be niche, but people will be combining this with illusion of defence and protection to kick major kitten .

Rangers currently have credible damage and the druid will still have credible damage. A good ranger will justify their slot far better than a merely-decent member of any other profession, even if other professions “do more damage” on paper.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

We will see, but I am sure that all raid encounters are designed to work without a druid. They might be easier with one in the beginning, but as soon as they have been beaten, the ranger/druid will drop out of the meta again.

What I said is that all future content should be designed in a way that takes the druid into account, not that all future content should require a druid. There’s a difference.

Ultimately, however, healers are an accepted part of the current metagame for dungeons and fractals. The druid fulfils the same role with a different emphasis and playstyle. Sometimes it will be preferred over chrono and guard (both of which emphasise pre-empting and mitigating or negating hits over fixing people back up once they’ve landed), sometimes it won’t. How content is tuned will decide this. If it works well enough, then beastmastery will be a small price to pay.

Just as with the other healers in GW2 (and, to a lesser extent, going right back to Prophecies), there are plenty of self-heals and self-defence skills out there so that groups that want to run without a healer have at least a shot at succeeding.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The druid trait line has very little to offer for anything else but healing. So as long as you choose it you run at 2/3 of your potential for damage. Other classes can trait three lines of choice and still off-heal perfectly fine.

1. Your specialisations don’t represent a third of your parse each, that would be absurd.
2. Your individual parse doesn’t matter, all that matters is the difference you make to the group’s collective DPS.
3. Glyph of the Tides (which teleports enemies to you) and Glyph of Empowerment both directly improve your group’s DPS.
4. Healers have always been an accepted part of the dungeon/fractal meta — it’s just that historically they’ve had a very different playstyle to most other MMOs, concentrating on pre-emptively mitigating and negating damage rather than patching people up after the fact.

Seems like it has a reasonable shot at being credible. And that’s even before bringing up the most important point:

All future content must now be designed to take the druid’s capabilities into account.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

This is not about how good druids can heal vs. others.

Don’t try pulling that on people. You expressly stated in a post supporting your claim that other professions can heal just as well without sacrificing as much.

phys.7689:

Since this was moved to druid forum, but is actually about required healing, i guess this proves anet sees druids as being required healers.

Seems like a pretty indiscriminate merge to me — they’ve bundled up the druid crunch thread, the druid lore thread, trinity threads that aren’t related to druids at all, and probably some zerker threads (which have nothing to do with druids or trinity) — so I don’t think you can really read too much into it.

phys.7689:

For their goals it has to be more than that. Because you could still succeed with skilled zerkers using rnged attacks and kiting. Which would be faster than having two players with low dps.

Remember that the “zerk DPS meta” problem isn’t really about metas or DPS or zerker gear. It’s more to do with people not being seen to engage with fight mechanics, and, to a lesser extent, people actually not engaging with fight mechanics. Among other things. I can claim better understanding than the ‘zerkernerfers’, but not perfect understanding.

The strategy you propose there? You’re still engaging with the fight mechanic if you do that, and it would be very difficult for anyone to claim otherwise.

phys.7689:

There is no depth to guaranteed dmg and heals. When i play a trinity game i have no idea how much the healer is healing. I just avoid the avoidable attacks.

Mechanics can be simple without losing their effectiveness.

If the boss throws out targeted attacks faster than players can dodge them? You have to adjust how you play to deal with that. All of your options have tradeoffs associated with them — do you bring a healer? Do you co-ordinate everyone so that most players are at range and one player ‘tanks’, using VC and swapping tank whenever that player takes a hit? That’s depth. There’s counterplay, there are different styles of counterplay. You need to think about how you want to approach things.

Even “everyone in the raid loses a massive chunk out of their hitpoints” can still be effective. On its own, it’s pointless, but as one part of a larger whole, it can work extremely well.

phys.7689:

Its not gw2 combat with unavoidable dmg.

I don’t think this follows.

If the unavoidable damage comes from targeted attacks, then you still have counterplay — make sure those attacks are targeted away from people who will be seriously hurt or killed by them. You can also use things like protection, slow, weakness, and the mesmer’s damage intercepts to make them more manageable. There’s nothing unreasonable here.

And if you look at the basic raid problem — which I’ll phrase as “Deal at least x damage per second for y seconds, while also dealing with the following mechanics: …”, needing to direct unavoidable damage at the people best equipped to deal with it and to patch people back up after unavoidable damage are just extra mechanics to use.

While no particular mechanics are essential in the design of a raid — and certainly not tanking or healing — each objective you have in a fight design is another opportunity for your objectives to come into conflict and ultimately make things more challenging and enjoyable.

Remember that the ultimate point of any challenging piece of content is how it feels to attempt it and how it feels to beat it. Fun is everything, and potential ways to make things more fun shouldn’t just be left on the table because you talked a load of kitten about them in a video once.

phys.7689:

Its not about profession its about waiting for a healer.

The post I originally responded to was arguing that ten thieves should be able to do any raid.

Which looks like will be whats going to happen

Played well, a healer is like any other kind of support, and true supports are already in the game and commonly used. From this, it follows that enough people will be willing to play healers to easily fill up any groups that end up needing them.

phys.7689:

The total population isnt important, whats important is the ratio of people who want to heal to people who dont want to heal

Support has always been a major part of the game, and druids don’t break from the way other supports work — they also have fair damage and ways to support a team offensively.

Having professions and specs that are expected to support their groups by literally filling up bars shouldn’t really be a big deal.

Some of the things they said in the manifesto were, quite frankly, horsecrap, and I’m glad to see that they’re starting to realise this.

phys.7689:

Based on these games i would say less than 10% of players want to heal, or else the group finders would fill quickly.

At least in FFXIV, it’s tanks that are the problem, not healers. It’s not even unusual for healers to see half-hour queues, even on the weekends for expert roulette, while tank queues are instant.

The recent census claims that 19% of players level 30 or higher play healers, but we have no way of telling how they figured that out.