Guild Wars 2

The staff is suffering from a severe case of “shortbow syndrome,” though not unique to shortbow (hello 1h sword, my long forgotten frenemy).

Basically, Staff lacks damage on its 2-5 skills. The 2 skills healing doesn’t make up for it, and as with most other weapons, the 3-5 skills are utility, which may or may not need damage (seriously staff 4, what’s your purpose).

So hopefully, regarding 2 and 4, we at least see enhanced base functionality, if not more damage.

scerevisiae.1972:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

• Grace of the Land: This trait has been re-worked. Instead of its former behavior, allies affected by your celestial avatar abilities gain 3% damage and condition damage increase for 8 seconds. This buff stacks 5 times.

mostly good changes but this one i hate. With this change you have doomed every ranger to run this trait in pve or be kicked from group/guild. The original version was unique and more situational, and therefore not compulsory.

For the sake of build diversity please reconsider.

Disagree entirely.

There is nothing wrong with traits being better at things than other options. The other 2 GMs are still equally strong, and are also equally situational as well.

This is how GM traits should be designed.

So for PvP, as a damage build, what do we think, does running Nature Magic/Beastmastery/Druid work out? Marauder LB/GS:

NM: 312
BM: 121
Druid: 113

Still haven’t entirely decided yet on utilities beyond Signet of Stone, but compared to the common WS/NM/BM build being run right now, you free up your utilities and you pick up the ability to flash into Celestial Form, drop a dazeheal, and maybe channel 4 for a self/AoE heal, then drop 2, and flash out, which adds a great deal of survival to the damage build AND gives it the ability to help out some teammates. Not to mention flashing in, dropping a dazeheal, and flashing out can setup CC with Ancient Seeds, which combined with the taunt and other options really gives a lot of different options and output in fights.

That doesn’t even cover utilities either. Troll Unguent is still probably the best heal for the build, but for the 2 slots outside of Signet of Stone, now that you can reliably cleanse with Druid and don’t need WS or Survival skills, do you pick up Protect Me for another immunity, or one of the control oriented glyphs for even more CC to work with Ancient Seeds? Is Lightning Reflexes still so good that you put it on the bar, which still leaves any of the other mentioned options as a capability, or is Signet of Renewal more appealing? Spike Trap, did somebody say Spike Trap?

What about the elite? SotP for stability and fury, entangle for additional CC, the glyph for a soft anti-pressure measure and to further increase team support?

So many options now, and the fact that jumping in and then out of Celestial Form isn’t punished by the loss of all astral force is incredible. With the mentioned trait selection, you can go into form, lose all conditions, drop a lunar impact, leave form and give yourself and potentially your pet stealth and super speed, then close and Maul the person from stealth, proc Ancient Seeds, swap to LB, drop a barrage, use the pet taunt and Rapid Fire, then have Knockback Shot ready to go to proc Ancient Seeds again, and if it’s around weapon swap time, go back for another Maul, and still have Hilt Bash ready to proc Ancient Seeds again, not to mention you are probably approaching having celestial form ready again.

Regardless, there is a considerable amount of versatility in what you can accomplish with just this build alone. It’s exciting to see.

Yeah, celestial is looking really promising.

Actually, my bar was set so low that I’m just ridiculously happy that I can now go into form, drop a lunar impact, and then leave form and use my Moment of Clarity proc while simultaneously proc’ing Ancient Seeds. Not to mention being able to drop Wilderness Survival entirely now that I can flash in and out of Celestial Form without losing all of my astral force. Not to mention AoE stealth and superspeed when leaving form has all sorts of potential now.

I’m not upset about the base daze at all (I mentioned previously that I agreed with Ryans sentiment) because these are the EXACT sort of changes Druid needed so that celestial form wasn’t just an all or nothing pure healer and can now play with much more fluidity while having different types of support (that new Grace of the Land looks AMAZING).

Irenio,

These are great changes.

The astral force changes combined with the retaining of astral force have incredible synergy with traits that previously were hard to justify using during the BWE (remove conditions upon entering CF, superspeed and stealth upon leaving CF). Beyond trait synergy, these types of things enhance the ability for more damage oriented Druids to take advantage of not only these traits, but the ability to “flash” into CF, drop an important skill or two, and then “flash” out and not have as troublesome of a time regaining astral force nor as difficult of a time leaving CF and wasting remaining resource which was a double down on punishing effects in a lot of situations.

I have no criticism of these changes at all. They are pure quality changes that enhance accessibly as well as provide new playstyles that don’t jeopardize the original intent of the elite specialization.

Can’t wait to see more in the future, especially regarding those staff 2 and 4 skills.

Thanks for sharing and for quality work (you and your team).

mistsim.2748:

jcbroe.4329:

I don’t even think Druid, in its BWE state, would compete for a slot in a premade 5 man team composition in terms of pure optimization. It’s too healing pure, and it gets shut down way too easily without Stability and Mitigation.

Classic case of rangers performing too linear of a role while other classes perform way too many roles.

he’s kinda wrong, but so are you. there simply wasn’t enough time in the BWE3 to make the conclusion that druid wouldn’t make it into a premade comp. and I actually have no idea what youre basing this judgement on, considering a bunch of us were super successful running offensive hybrid builds.

I actually ran a celestial build that had plenty of stab (Enlargement + SotP), sustain (perma prot, evades), 1v1/bunker capability, heals, and utility for the team. it actually very much reminded me of shoutbow playstyle, except it had way more utility. I was also winning many 1v1’s while roaming with marauder stats.

regarding daze, the only skill that needs looking into is LI because it’s virtually spammable, and a 6s lockout is insane. equality glyph’s 4s was fine, the staff swap was fine, and hilt bash was fine.

I ran an offensive hybrid build, along with most other builds that came logically to mind. Damage was really the best way to build considering the base coefficients for healing, because doing so allowed you to take the most options you could on one build without much sacrifice.

I hope it’s clear I wasn’t stating anything as fact, but as opinion lol. If I was building a 5 man premade in the BWE, I just don’t think Druid would have made the cut (I was thinking a good 5 man comp would be thief, chrono, rev, cele ele, and then either another ele or maybe a Reaper). Cele ele seemed like it would just do enough of what Druid tries to do to justify not working a Druid into the team comp. Shoot, if I could verify Chaiths in game claim of an 800k+ outgoing healing cele Scrapper, I might be inclined to think it could compete as well.

Anyhow, this conversation is kind of moot now. Some of Irenios shared information improves Druid builds by leaps and bounds, to the point that evaluation will start for me at square 1 again. Will discuss there.

Ryan;

I’m not saying that I disagree with your sentiment or that you’re wrong, personally. I’m saying that I didn’t find Druid strong enough anyhow during the beta, and that it would be preferable to see how the other side of the table (the improvements side) gets handled before we start talking about getting rid of the only strong thing about Druid bar pure, replaceable healing.

I don’t even think Druid, in its BWE state, would compete for a slot in a premade 5 man team composition in terms of pure optimization. It’s too healing pure, and it gets shut down way too easily without Stability and Mitigation. I don’t see why you wouldn’t just run a cele ele or bunker guard over a Druid for healing/support, and cele ele + everything else that can do damage for damage.

Classic case of rangers performing too linear of a role while other classes perform way too many roles.

Here’s the thing, against any sort of half decent opponent, at least during the beta, the moment you went celestial form you were perma-CC’d and had all the damage immediately focused in your direction.

The “perma-daze” is a gimmick that looks super strong on paper and just doesn’t work in practice, mostly because celestial form didn’t have the tools it needed to work in high level PvP without having team support (support isn’t just healing for all of those that need an fyi, it involves peeling, pressuring, CCing, and mitigation), which is kind of extremely contradicting considering that as a Druid, you are supposed to be the support, not need the support.

Does the Moment of Clarity combo have potential? Definitely. But it’s also basically the only thing Druid has going for it outside of healing, and picking up Moment of Clarity means that you lose either WS or NM (or BM), and all 3 of those options are better picks (either taking WS or NM is basically mandatory for survival, and having both is preferred) than Marksmanship.

So my opinion on it is that the core issues with the Druid not having enough self support or team support in favor of just being a healbot that can be replaced by a cele ele or bunker guard any day and not be missed really needs some fixing before any sort of thing Druid had that could be considered strong and NOT a heal needs to be changed.

Aka the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and Moment of Clarity with Druid was definitely not the squeaky wheel.

Wow guys, the flaming needs to stop lol.

Mistsim is making the point that healbotting or redbarring doesn’t work well alone in a gamemode that hp gained from pure healing is, in some way, arbitrary when it tends to just melt off of targets with no defensive measures or mitigation.

I think the point that’s trying to be made, in regards to the thread, is that the Druid design in the BWE doesn’t work well in a PvP environment, at least, not as well as it would if Druid played like a proper support with the ability to provide damage mitigation (protection, aegis, stability to a degree, weakness and soft/hard CC) to teammates to protect the hp the spec heals.

I don’t think that anybody here is saying that the healing was bad or that it had no effect whatsoever. But we are saying that in high level play, the Druid as it was in the BWE was too linear and didn’t have the damage mitigation or support features for itself, let alone allies, that it would need to be worth taking over something else. All it had was healing, which in the grand scheme of things, is replaceable still by specs that bring that alongside a ton of other versatility (guardians, eles, even engis to some degree).

punahou.3986:

Aomine.5012:

punahou.3986:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

you know whats not good for the game?

having the whole population feel that berserker gear is the one and only gear type player HAVE TO WEAR.

you know know whats not good for the game?

having your PVE content so easy that DPS is all you need to clear the most basic to the most complex content.

you know whats not good for the game?

balancing PVP based on PVE

you know whats not good for the game?

going worldwide with information and then a day later reversing that same information that was promised— especially in light of other classes that are a lot more powerful and those same classes stay the apex of classes like the elementalist

these are examples not good for the game.

So apparently other 8 classes can get away from being this “unhealthy cancer of the game”, while Druid has to stay clean and start this healing/ hitting like wet-noodle trend. Well then, better stick with the cancers, which are actually the majority here.

Guess who’d be left alone if only one class has to sacrifice everything to do what everyone else could do and more.

If they want this diversity you talked about, they need to add mechanic like healing actually damage certain foes. (Like healing vs undead/ corrupted plants), while have high resistant against anything else. Otherwise your dream of “healthy GW2” will never come true.

easy fix make healing power also the stat that staff uses for damage abilities.

Id also like to see a power that damages enemies and heals allies for the damage done.

Ignoring how much I disagree with the idea, I hope you’re aware of how this isn’t an “easy fix” at all. It’s a lot more than just changing out one thing for another. An entirely new algorithm would have to be written and tested, new coefficients to assign skills to work with the formula would have to be tested and implemented, which in turn would have to make coders recode the entire weapon and then go through the design process of QA testing it with the environment again.

The amount of time, and subsequently money, it would take just to make these 5 skills on this one class special like this is atrocious and unrealistic to expect compared to just balancing the damage values and scaling on the existing weapon appropriately and making sure that hybrid/healing builds with the healing reorganization for Druid aren’t tuned in a way that makes the healing worthless (aka it still needs to be worthwhile) on damage specs.

Also depends on the weaponset. If you’re Axe/Dagger and Sword/Torch, with Quickdraw you can double evasive capabilities essentially, but the downside, especially game mode dependent, is the lack of range.

I’m also one of those people that sees the value of spike trap but doesn’t think it’s necessary. I would run Flame/Viper and leave the last slot for either Signet of Renewal or Lightning Reflexes, but that is trait dependent and also playstle preference, because if you want to run full traps, go for it, it is strong and hyper offensive, but the tradeoffs do exist.

This entire thread could have been avoided if you’d have changed the word nerf to bugfix and then posted in the appropriate forum.

Just an fyi, posting on ANY subforum about a nerf, bugfix, or any change that will hurt the effectiveness of that class is going to be met with a response like this.

Puck.9612:

Knighthonor.4061:

Honestly, i have to wonder, if many of the people here who are crying that Druid is useless outside of Raids, ever even played the Druid as a Healer at all.

because at the same time during the BWE3 as the Ranger forum was yelling about how bad and useless Druids are outside of Raids, people were on the PvP and WvW forum yelling about how strong Druids are.

lol. I played healer druid and it was awesome. Just need better self defense because as people figured it out, they started to do the “Target the Ranger” tactic which left me screwed since Toughness stat is pretty lacking on Cleric gear and the heals cant counter full target of the Druid from dps heavy enemies.

but the class was great. I left the beta with a nice memory in WvW when it was a three side zerg war ground in which I managed to heal my outnumbered team zerg and keep them alive far longer than they would without my heals. Was a great feeling of Support actually matters for once instead of it just being a byproduct of DPS zerker builds.

The only “druid OP” threads I saw were posted before the weekend. Everyone considered them a free bag after they played against them.
Damage mitigation>healing. Druids can’t out heal coordinated spikes, and it’s very easy to just target druid first and chain cc/burst him down.

100% this. People weren’t making claims of effectiveness, they were upset it takes a few seconds longer to whack through a health bar being “extended” by healing, but every “Druid OP” post was either about our traits which have little to nothing to do outside of functionality, and our healing; meaning that at that point they were asking for nerfs to the only thing celestial form and to some extent the main feature of Druid could even do.

Celestial form was in desperate need of being support oriented and not just a healbot with exclusive usage in PvE content, and 9/10 times in PvP you’d be better off picking up the traitline and then not using celestial form ever except maybe to “flash” into it and drop 2 and 3 real quick and then immediately exit.

I think that this article, while lengthy, is exceptionally accurate at expressing exactly what my impressions were and what some good and much needed changes could be.

Druid needs to be more than just a healbot.

Guess I have to leave this here as well then:

Any sort of physical hit on a skill besides 5 would be nice by the way, in order to proc Ancient Seeds. Just a QoL thing.
1 As is, should do some sort of damage (any sort of hit at all really) since it’s essentially a skill shot already to heal allies that aren’t afk, so may as well do some damage too.
2 Should apply an AoE weakness and cripple to enemies when it detonates, and needs to detonate a tad faster. Short duration of each to compensate for short cooldown, but helps with managing enemy damage and to kite because you’re a sitting duck in Celestial Form
4 Definitely should pulse AoE stability to yourself and allies in the radius. Maybe also do some damage and cripple/chill per pulse to enemies in the radius (wanted to have a knockback or pull but would overlap too much with the glyph). The damage would/could be noteable/respectable, but not as high as the 5 skill.
5 Doesn’t start pulsing its effects on use and gives enemies ample time to walk away from it anyhow, may as well let us move while using it.
Besides that, I hope it’s been heard loud and clear that staff skills need some more damage/effects, particularly and especially with the 2 skill, because the 2 skill also by extension makes the GM as weak (or as strong, if fixed) as it.

Agreed that Druid shouldn’t be top DPS and should be focused on supporting allies, but supporting allies is done through more than just a bar of 5 different ways to heal those allies, and celestial form needs a way to feel significant, so making it more significant at supporting while also reaping self benefits is the best way to do so (because right now Celestial Form screams “come and kill me right now while I can literally do nothing to you unless I allow you to easily pressure me out of celestial form and waste all of the astral force I’ve taken the time and effort to build with nothing to show for it”).

It’s also been mentioned an uncountable amount of times, but adding more damage to staff 2 and 4 in some way is a necessity for the quality of the weapon as well. Perhaps through a poison on 2 and a bleed on 4 (or just by power scaling)? The wisp itself should definitely hit enemies for the same effect the initial hit causes on the target as well.

Anyhow, none of these suggestions even remotely make Druid begin to encroach on the role of DPS and still let Druid retain its designed role of healer and support, it would just have a higher quality of play in a PvP competitive atmosphere.

Not that this wasn’t mentioned or alluded to, but its always worth reiterating seeing as how we aren’t going to get another BWE to give feedback.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback regarding the Druid. I’ll be modifying swaths of the druid (and scrapper) to fix bugs and account for your feedback this week and reviewing things like glyphs effectiveness, celestial avatar skill differentiation, astral force charging rates and some of the staff skills.

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Hopefully once the changes to the base heals and healing power coefficients get finished, you can start looking at adding some additional combat effects to some of the celestial skills?
Any sort of physical hit on a skill besides 5 would be nice by the way, in order to proc Ancient Seeds. Just a QoL thing.

• 1 As is, should do some sort of damage (any sort of hit at all really) since it’s essentially a skill shot already to heal allies that aren’t afk, so may as well do some damage too.
• 2 Should apply an AoE weakness and cripple to enemies when it detonates, and needs to detonate a tad faster. Short duration of each to compensate for short cooldown, but helps with managing enemy damage and to kite because you’re a sitting duck in Celestial Form
• 4 Definitely should pulse AoE stability to yourself and allies in the radius. Maybe also do some damage and cripple/chill per pulse to enemies in the radius (wanted to have a knockback or pull but would overlap too much with the glyph). The damage would/could be noteable/respectable, but not as high as the 5 skill.
• 5 Doesn’t start pulsing its effects on use and gives enemies ample time to walk away from it anyhow, may as well let us move while using it.

Besides that, I hope it’s been heard loud and clear that staff skills need some more damage/effects, particularly and especially with the 2 skill, because the 2 skill also by extension makes the GM as weak (or as strong, if fixed) as it.

Why is this thread full of so much flaming.

Guys, the OP doesn’t always make points in the best way, and I don’t always agree either.

But…. Celestial Form is absolutely too linear in function, to the degree that it affects the flow of gameplay on damage oriented builds that balance aside, just feels functionally awkward to use.

I spent all day refining builds and testing them in PvP matches and dueling, and I can say straight up the Celestial form needs damage and/or adverse effects on 1, 2, and 4. It doesn’t need to be great damage or anything, but I would like to be able to proc Ancient Seeds on foes I hit with CF3 and really just threaten anything while I’m in form with something other than the extremely avoidable 5 skill.

Staff as well, it really either needs more power scaling or like, poison (fits with support theme) and the wisps should definitely do the damage and/or poison that the skill does. Staff 4 also should be a much, much more damaging skill, and also a 2 second root or get some stacks of bleeding attached to it. It’s a slow moving, slow activating skillshot and does not do enough to justify the using conditions of the skill.

Before anybody tries to tell me “yadda yadda Druid no DPS, not designed to DPS,” I totally agree, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t lacking in basic usability by being too focused on doing nothing but healing. Celestial Form shouldn’t be an indicator for an enemy to be able to jump me safely. It should cause enough of an adverse effect for enemies to have to go “better be careful, I need to focus this guy but he can do X to me that isn’t something I can just walk out of like CF5.” And Staff, staff shouldn’t only do stuff to enemies by autoing (I swear up and down using staff 2 is a DPS loss and barely heals enough or scales with healing enough anyhow).

Inb4 “blah blah but healer blah blah you’re doing it wrong.” Not at all. Even on healing based specs, I stand by my statements, because CF still is awkward to use due to combat flow and nonthreatening, and staff still would need improvements.

Got finished with another long day of PvP and need to reiterate something I alluded to in my previous feedback post:
Celestial Form is super disconnected with any sort of damage oriented build at all. Not that it’s ineffective, but it absolutely interrupts the flow of combat, and on top of it, in a form that took time to build and should feel strong, is weak at everything but healing.

Celestial Form in PvP essentially allows people to get right up in your face and wreck said face, and outside of dodging celestial form 5, they don’t have to worry about you at all.

The Daze is Strong, but 5 doesn’t put out its effects soon enough when you use it, and 2, 4, and even 1 (since its a semi skill shot) need to do damage or cause adverse effects for enemies.

It really can’t be stressed enough.

Substance E.4852:

jcbroe.4329:

• 5 needs SOME additional effect, because it’s super situational as is. If it isn’t a field (tooltip didn’t say it was so I didn’t use it like one), it needs to be one, preferably a water field, and it could also cripple people passing through it or something, but definitely something in the same family of thought.

It is a water field. It’s unlisted but you can blast it with staff 3 for an easy test.

Good to know, I didn’t think to test it, I got more into build testing than mechanic testing.

Don’t know if I’ll be restating things but:
Note: Anything I don’t mention is stuff I didn’t find particularly problematic.
Traits:

• Ancient Seeds doesn’t always kick in at the time, resulting in a missed root or different location of a rooted opponent that what seems logical/intended
• Lingering Light doesn’t do enough, by extension that Staff 2 needs to be reexamined (details later)

Staff

• 2 skills needs more damage scaling, period. Staff doesn’t need to be a DPS weapon but the wisp itself is flaky as is and the lack of damage and functionality makes the skill and therefore the GM weak. Could accomplish this and retain support role by adding a poison to the hit as well as or in addition to adding an adverse effect for foes hit by the wisp.
• 4 needs more damage and/or a longer root. It doesn’t do enough as a skillshot.
• 5 needs SOME additional effect, because it’s super situational as is. If it isn’t a field (tooltip didn’t say it was so I didn’t use it like one), it needs to be one, preferably a water field, and it could also cripple people passing through it or something, but definitely something in the same family of thought.

Glyphs

• One note, the cripple/weakness glyph either needs longer durations on those conditions and/or damaging conditions too of some sort (again, if it has it, didn’t check, functionality wasn’t listed and the skill isn’t taking a valuable slot as is).

Celestial Form

• Same notes you (devs) have to add functionality to things. Celestial Form is strong, but only really at two things, Dazing and Healing, and in competitive play, it is just as much of a potential game changer for the rest of your team as it is a chance for the enemy team to reset when you throw away all your pressure to just heal. Damage, Cripples, something, please. It doesn’t even have to be good damage on skills like the 1 skill, but something more than just 4 different AoE heals with the exact same base purpose; AoE healing.

That’s all for now.

Hey guys, I stopped streaming awhile back because my setup couldn’t handle it for peoples liking, but the BWE is here, so I’m going to be streaming Druid throughout the weekend with my new setup and documenting numbers and such.

I’ll post things in a text form here at the end of the BWE but you’re welcome to join me here:

www.twitch.tv/itsJROH

The BWE isn’t live yet afaik.

It won’t be for another 3 hours (3pm EST).

I’m going to stream it asap today, but I was going to make a thread about it for visibility

I haven’t been in contact with anybody else I know in game (Hiro, Eura) to see if they will be streaming it or at what time.

But first thing I’ll do is jump into power and healing power scaling comparisons and try out some of the builds I’ve theorycrafted, though in PvP the options are either cleanse druid, NM, third line or astral generation druid, WS, third line.

Anyhow, yeah, I’ll be playing around with mechanics before I even do a match, and I’m definitely going to put up BWE thoughts and impressions on the forums with how things work and opinions on them (most people what rather see facts than what a person thinks haha).

What does ranger lack in comparison to other specs, power or otherwise?

• ways to deal with boon stacking enemies
• AoE
• Skill/Utility bar compression
• competitive team support

Basically, almost all ranger specs are damage specs that are very linear in what they can accomplish, and all other classes specs can do a lot more with a single build than ranger can.

Druid sort of addresses some of those, but only by BEING a Druid.

So really, we amplify the scope of “what needs improvements” out to where we start with the question: Are other classes performing too many functions and roles with a single build, or are ranger builds not capable of doing enough?

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

We are, indeed, reading.

We particularly take time to read the constructive and well-crafted feedback posts.

I don’t want to make promises, which as many of you have pointed out can go horribly awry for a variety of reasons, but we are hoping to make some changes to the old ranger shouts (pre-WHAO & SotP).

Is there any sort of plan to make a pass on Guard ever?

It’s functionality doesn’t seem to tie in well with anything you’d want to do in any game mode. There have been a ton of great rework suggestions over time, but really, “Guard” has only ever functioned as fodder to get regen and swiftness through traiting, and even the changeover of WHaO to a shout has replaced that usage.

Cooldown adjustments given, some of my favorite suggestions that I’ve seen are:

• makes the pet instantly travel to an area, instead of traversing the terrain (so a pet teleport)
• becomes a two part skill, allowing rangers for the second part to then swap positions with their pet
• reveals enemies walking in the area being guarded
• grants boons to allies while in the area being guarded

This skill really seems like the only skill left in need of some sort of functionality adjustment for the time being. So if shouts are being looked it, seeing Guard on the list would be nice.

Well it depends really, TU and the WS line are really strong outside of top tier metagame comps, where people are running burn guards, condi engis, condi mesmers, and venom thieves even (trap/condi rangers, condi necros etc etc, list goes on).

Regardless of that, a traited TU does have some semblance of offensive prowess too with it’s more than 25% uptime on fury. Even in top tier where the most condi oriented builds are celestial and don’t have super high outputs, TU still has the potential to cleanse poison for the full heal whereas running WHaO makes you have to either burn a dodge or wait for the poison to drop off (or use some other sort of cleanse).

Regardless of that debate (which ultimately boils down to time, place, and tier for which options to use for builds), on topic:
WHaO didn’t need a buff in healing, but ANet probably figured the ranger class is lacking a gimmick. So now we have a gimmick I guess.
On the brightside, strength runes are definitely usable now. You can make a build that sacrifices all sorts of survival to do really good damage (for a ranger). So I guess that’s a plus?

Dunno. If I build the right way with the new WHaO and do a simple pet swap and heal with clarion and zephyr’s speed, I can put out 12k Rapid Fires on squishies (Berserker with Strength Runes), so we definitely have out gimmick.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Well, at one point, there was a thread that wanted Roy to be the developer for Rangers. Consider that wish granted.

:^)

That thread was a sarcastic commentary referring to how a particular dev likes to just increase things by 400% when they feel weak (seriously, has anybody SEEN those Revenant changes).

Humorously enough, no matter how many huge percentage chunks revenant gets, it still lacks the self utility it needs to be truly efficient, at least, efficient at surviving to compete in a PvP setting.

Anyhow, back to the torches and pitchforks I guess (I don’t see how people didn’t see this coming, and the only justifiable frustrations are the ones referring to how the rest of the game is balanced at a snails pace leaving stagnant and undesirable metagames).

I’d have the same exact notes for the devs that the devs already have regarding adding additional functionality to celestial form 2 and 4, along with whatever other additional notes mentioned during the livestream.

My own notes (won’t have many before the BWE):
Staff:

• Staff 2: strong, but is there any chance of adding some damage to the wisp? It’s already an interesting mechanic, but it would be bolstered by having the wisp be adverse for the enemies allies in some way as well, and would also “double down” on how staff does damage.
• Staff 4: the tooltip is confusing. The “7 impacts” information on it doesn’t seem to align with any of the functionality that the skill actually has (I understand it hits 7 different areas in a line, but because it is a line skill and will hit anything in that line, and noyhing actually receives 7 hits, it just complicates the understanding of the skill).

Glyphs:

• General Note: putting a stunbreaker on one of the glyphs would be a nice touch, although with their lower cooldowns its understandable why this isn’t a thing.

Thats all I have for now.

I understand what you mean Chrispy, and definitely the opinion is still out on Druid until we play it.

I’m personally not even trying to make this about Druid specifically, as much as how Irenio has conceptually developed Druid and made additions to the ranger class in the past (he was the designer for the core specialization patch, and while a lot of his initial things were gutted and all of the damage modifiers disappeared, we still received Quickdraw and Beastly Warden, among other notable additions) and how he carries himself when he speaks about ranger/druid.

You can tell that Irenio is a person who understands the ranger class and has a design vision for it that hasn’t been reached, and is passionate about making the changes needed for the class to get there, and we can see nothing but quality concepts and development intentions at this point.

So yeah, it isn’t even as much of a “thank you for druid” as it is a “thank you for quality development and the reassurance that the ranger class will be developed to have niches and fight for team composition slots while you’re running it.”

For the BWE, my biggest things will be looking at damage and heal scaling, and looking at how reliable generating and maintaining celestial form is. There is lots of potential for skill combinations and rotations, but everything is contigent on this sort of information for me.

Glad to see so many people sharing the sentiments!

Don’t get me wrong everyone, the design of Druid is definitely not my own “cup of tea” either, but I definitely think the quality of its design deserves credit where credit is due.

I also think the traitline itself does wonders for build versatility, and I see signs of a throwback to GW1 interrupt rangers that it making a Moment of Clarity shutdown build seem very exciting.

Also, the staff finally alleviates a lot of builds dependence on sword or greatsword for mobility which opens up a whole new array of options and combinations, not to mention if the damage and healing values on all of the tooltips were without stats, people looking for damage builds won’t be too disappointed.

Overall I’m very pleased, even though I myself would prefer more of the oldschool ranged interrupt playstyle from GW1. The Druid seems very unique and definitely helps make the ranger class specialize in a way it previously didn’t. I’m very excited to see how a bunker/team support ranger will work in PvP, because the self sustain potential looks insane combined with the team support a Druid seems like it will bring.

Bunker guardians should be very afraid of their team comp slots right now, as should really any DPS oriented build who currently only bring damage and mobility to their teams, whereas Druid can retain its damage AND self support AND team support even with no Healing Power investment AND have some gained mobility between natural stride and staff for rotating. Not to mention the potential a healing Druid has in stronghold (GW1 Fort Aspenwood veterans should know and be afraid).

But, don’t let me derail my own thread, I just really wanted to thank Irenio, especially after all the flak I generated with that locked thread against the devs haha. He definitely deserves the gratitude

Excited for the BWE now.

Sir,

As a long time ranger player (been playing since the 2nd month of the original release of GWs), I have seen the class go through many different iterations.

Since GW2, I have made it abundantly clear that I don’t feel the class was developed well conceptually, iterated upon appropriately, or balanced to the degree it has needed to be to be competitive.

However, I saw something back in the Spring of this year that made me start to change my mind. The first core specialization reveal with Most Dangerous Game as an adept, Strider’s Defense with a sword damage modifier, and Signets refreshing Remorseless was a breath of life into the ranger class, which ultimately turned into disappointment when those changes were gutted when the actual patch dropped.

However, I learned in that time that you, sir, were the driving force behind these concepts.

Now, you have finally been able to appear on a livestream and talk about the Druid and Ranger class. There is no doubt you’ve done a great job with Druid, but this isn’t about that, as much as a thank you for being passionate about the class and its development. Not only did you do well on the Druid, but you went ahead with the upcoming balance patch and pushed for what you originally intended Most Dangerous Game to be.

I sincerely hope that you read this and know that as long as you are this passionate and will continue to push for the changes that we need, that we appreciate your work. It is the first time the ranger community is really able to publicly acknowledge and thank a dev, and after witnessing your livestream and your investment in the ranger class and elite spec branches, there is really no possible way we could lack appreciation.

I apologize if our stress as a community has caused you any negativity or pessism. We are all very passionate about the class, and for whatever reason, the workplace rules and culture has kept the community and the developers from building a communication venue, leading to less than positive opinions about each other.

I hope that the workplace culture and rules change for you in a way that lets you interact with us more, or us with you and the developers, especially at times like this, when even if we are lacking any sort of feedback, we want to send a message through saying “keep it up.”

So please; I know that the community is split on Druid because of what they wanted it to be or how unhappy they are for what it is, but don’t let a single community member make you feel like you haven’t done an excellent and quality job, and don’t let any person dissuade you.

I can’t wait to see what you bring to the development table for ranger in the future.

Sincerely,
An optimistic and very close to being satisfied player

Nothing is wrong, they just don’t don’t bring as much utility as similarly functioning builds. Power LB? Mesmer does the same with better burst potential and AoE, with boonstripping, portal, and a choice of team stealthing or moa for focusing bunkers.

Condi? Engi just does condi better. Stronger applications, AoE, and more defensive utility unless the ranger build is condi survival, in which case engi just outright teamfights better because application/cleave.

In general though, boonstripping or boon punishment has always been the biggest thing lacking compared to the next in slot option. Also, in premade vs premade, the lack of vertical mobility (aka a teleport) is a real weakness when you have people on VoIP focusing targets, and you’ll definitely need a teammate to peel for you, which isn’t really the case with classes that can just port out of the situation and/or stealth indefinitely and reset.

But, a lot of that is high level balance, and is no indicator of ranger being weak. In matchmade games that aren’t premade vs premade, people should rarely run into any issues playing ranger.

The only time ranger ever lacks is when you’re optimizing a 5 man team comp based solely on build effectiveness, in which case the obvious team comp right now is 1 thief and 4 cele eles, which is actually banned from competitive use in the community tournaments right now because its use spawned the creation of the rule where teams have to have 3 unique classes.

Well it’s Q3/Q4 release season. So, the Destiny expansion is already amazing, Halo 5 is coming out a week after HoT drops, Star Wars Battlefront drops later this year, and so does the new Starcraft expansion.
All of which ALREADY have priority over buying HoT.

So I actually encourage everybody to save their money until about a week after the HoT drops, so that they can reevaluate the features and make an intelligent consumer decision, since outside of beta testing ANets game for them, there is no advantage to prebuying HoT. Actually, prebuying a product is, in some way, bad practice, because it tells developers we’ve been sold on their promises and not necessarily the product, and that they are doing a good job and can continue what they are doing, at least from a marketing and numerical standpoint.

Seeing as how I doubt the vast majority of us think that about ANet at this point… Yeah, don’t give away your money yet.

At this point, why are we letting ourselves even debate what it could be?

Wednesday/Thursday blogs should drop, and Friday is the reveal. Time to buy a ton of alcohol to drink in either celebration or to forget an awful reveal, or make a drinking game and take a drink (not a shot, you might die) every time the devs look displeased to be talking about ranger, sigh, or have no idea what they are talking about in regards to Ranger (“most dangerous game looks really strong, it will definitely need toning down, hue hue hue”).

Honestly don’t care, let them have the AI. Better them than us (knowing full well I’m going to eat these words and be disappointed, still, form follows function, so it won’t matter to me if the function is there).

Vayne.8563:

I don’t get this. Are people saying they’re rather have the game launch delayed longer so that we can have more BWE’s to flesh out the elite specializatons. There were always going to be differences in when things are released.

To me I’d rather see the game launch on time and see the problems addressed as time goes on. Because even a long open beta, like we had with EoTM doesn’t guarantee there won’t be myriad problems after release anyway.

What is “on time?”

Until recently (recent by ANet standards), the game didn’t have a release date other than “before December 31st 2015,” yet instead of giving themselves ample development time and testing time, it seems like they are trying to make an unnecessary rush to push out a barely finished expansion by Oct 23rd because they made a poor decision to lock in to a date before development was complete, the reveals were over, and equal public testing could be done.

So “on time” to you could be this ridiculous, over the top early date, but people looking for quality content, on time would be when all of the features were polished and ready to be shipped, which is quite clearly not the case at the moment, and won’t be the case by the 23rd.

So enjoy the early half finished, half polished content, while ANet gets another 3 years of dangling promises of fixes to everything that they never fix and will just announce another expansion and build it on top of the issues instead of fixing.

It honestly depends on my availability. I’ll either be one of the first people in the mists testing setups and skills and then field testing both in public matches or private games with people, or I will be completely and totally unable to play for the majority of the weekend.

I hope it’s the first one, and even if I don’t start the thread, I’ll be there contributing and trying to help maintain a constructive conversation.

Also not entirely sure how chafed ANet will be to see my name on a feedback thread again xD we want them to read it and take it seriously, and it might be too soon for their delicate sensibilities to see my name again (not like if they had done a quality job in the past years that’d have anything to be all that insecure about, Grouch might have even stopped in and said something snarky to humiliate me and add humor, but since that isn’t the case…).

Sigh…. One BWE and the least amount of time to give feedback out of any other profession.

At least Destiny’s expansion comes out tomorrow, it should hold me off until Halo 5, which should hold me off until my rage at ANet for poor communication, development, and updates for the past and the future of the ranger class is only a simmer and not at full boil.

Not to say ANet hasn’t EVENTUALLY done some stuff right. Ranger overall might be at the best place it has beekittennce launch, even though spirits have gone full circle and then farther into the development dumpster than ever before. But, I can’t be the only one who feels tired of feeling like we’re waiting to catch up with other classes development cycle to be competitive at a high end optimal level.

I love the ranger class, I main the ranger class, and I’d develop it for free for ANet because I don’t trust them to be competent or make quality improvements, especially not in a timeframe where those improvements would make a difference, after all, even if we are going the same speed in the same race, when everybody else has a had start, we’ll never catch up.

I don’t want to be right about things either, I want ANet to prove me wrong because I’d rather be happy than right any day.

I don’t have any information on it and this will be pure speculation:

ANet got criticized by somebody who had something constructive to say about their practices that was more than the pay-it-foward circle stroke they normally receive, and the higher ups of TTH got worried that because of not saying nice things, somebody said real things, so they had the article pulled so they can still be in the running for exclusive information access and early reveal article rights.

Because why hold devs to a respectable standard and pay for a job well done when you can cup their juevos for them and throw money at the screen as they continue to do a poor job?

nagymbear.5280:

jcbroe.4329:

That’s all I’m trying to say lol. I personally don’t need or even want some over active ANet worker constantly coddling every time I or other players manage for to form a coherent idea or sentence, I want them to ACTUALLY DO something and prove to me they’ve heard any sort of feedback and intend to make meaningful changes (and not just a singular decent enough change to keep me from quitting per year).

Lightning reflexes clearing immobilize, merging spirit traits, poison master, increase of longbow damage for short range, increasing projectile speed, healing spring is now a trap triggering off friendlies, traits that use on evade mechanic, signet of the beastmaster becoming baseline. Hell, do you remember when signets had 90-180second cooldown? Even that they changed. I’m pretty sure these were suggested on the forums. Is Anet perfect? No. Are the forum users perfect? Hell no! Do you remember them calling an Anet dev responsible for dungeon content who frequented the ranger forums a double agent for posting on the thief forums? This is exeggaration of course. Anet ignoring the forums is as well. I think they do action suggestions (even if not as frequently as we would like).

Sure, those are all nice QoL changes, but they happened virtually within a bubble, meaning that while they were nice improvements, they didn’t impact the class relative to the classes standing throughout the rest of the game.

3 years later, ANet still hasn’t shown any signs of improving on their inability to develop and balance outside of a vacuum for each class.

nagymbear.5280:

jcbroe.4329:

But that’s what people want to see, what position is ANet going to take, and ANet has to decide now, are they going to be greedy soul-less developers that are out to make a quick buck, or are they going to be quality developers that gather feedback and try, in a balanced and logical way, to improve the quality of their game in that way (which also generates revenue, albeit in a less immediate way).

That’s a bit of a leap, I don’t think the reason they don’t communicate more via the forums has to do anything with moneygrubbing. I think it’s more treading on eggshells. They are so affraid to promise anything (not just them really, but most game developers), that we end up with game developer’s “having to alienate themselves” from users. I recall Nigel DeJong breaking Hatem Ben Arfa’s legs and the witch hunt that followed. And I also recall someone saying that football (the European version) was allways violent, but now there are cameras everywhere and everyone sees everything.

I find it more interesting that the end of the article states the supposed reason for the lack of communication, i.e. developers being overworked. That certainly won’t go away. Its not a choice of being greedy or considerate, its about staying in the market. Just look at how much anticipation surrounds new content (which was awaited for a looong time now). These expectations and GW2’s cash model won’t make it any easier going forward for sure.

But good luck! May these forums get the attention everyone would like it to receive.

Communication isn’t just responding on the forums or in blogs though, it’s also part of the development process and implementation.

What I mean by that is that ANet doesn’t have to even speak to players at all necessarily in order to express that there is communication. They could have simply taken feedback and made more than just a small handful of changes with it over the last 3 years, and the act of acting on it alone would be the confirmation that they are listening, which would in turn make players feel as though there is a bridge of communication.

But ANet can’t sit idly by and do neither, because without saying something to their community or developing in a meaningful way with targeted changes focusing on relevant issues based on provided feedback with actual quality to the things changed, they are essentially saying they aren’t listening and don’t care about the stances that their community cares about and finds meaningful. Not that they actually don’t care or don’t listen, but they don’t really have much weighing in their favor in that department.

That’s all I’m trying to say lol. I personally don’t need or even want some over active ANet worker constantly coddling every time I or other players manage for to form a coherent idea or sentence, I want them to ACTUALLY DO something and prove to me they’ve heard any sort of feedback and intend to make meaningful changes (and not just a singular decent enough change to keep me from quitting per year).

nagymbear.5280:

I followed the link and there was indeed an article. Good thread.

But on a more serious note let me play a bit of devil’s advocate here. Whether the article and Jcbroe’s thread holds much truth or not I think there is a lot of energy being put into something negative here. Put your hands on your heart and tell me whether any of you really think Anet will change their stance on communicating with the playerbase forum users based on this article and the referenced (closed) thread? I certainly don’t think so.

Now I’m not saying that people should not voice their concerns with a product/service as consumers. However I don’t see how the article in question is anything else than venting.

I too feel there are a lot of glaring problems with Ranger and other professions are overtaking them in a lot of aspects (which is why I couldn’t be bothered to log in for the most part of the last 5-8 months). However I wanted give a different perspective, as I don’t think there will be many people in disagreement with the article.

Oh I totally understand, but at the point it’s reached it isn’t even necessarily about the actual feedback anymore, but a community of players leveraging their position against the developers.

On that note, it isn’t even a matter of trying to get a reaction from the developers, it’s whether or not they react at all, and it doesn’t have to be an immediate reaction to have a reaction. They could take this feedback to heart and release a patch addressing it a year from now and they will have made their position clear in just that action alone.

But that’s what people want to see, what position is ANet going to take, and ANet has to decide now, are they going to be greedy soul-less developers that are out to make a quick buck, or are they going to be quality developers that gather feedback and try, in a balanced and logical way, to improve the quality of their game in that way (which also generates revenue, albeit in a less immediate way).

I don’t think any of us actually expect a developer reaction. I think that for most people, the goal is a lot more simple and immediate than that; we’ve put the ball in ANet’s court, and now it’s their move, and their are more than a few people waiting to “vote with their wallets” on how ANet reacts to things like this in either the immediate product they are selling, or any future products they try to sell.

I agree with the sentiment Eurantien.

Since I’ve never offered up my own solution to the naming though, and always say pretty much exactly the same thing, maybe I’ll take the opportunity to do so now haha. Instead of just naming every pet in it’s own name slot, why has ANet never just made the naming slots their own separate entity outside of the pet objects and allowed people to save whatever they type into those 2 slots? I mean, no, it doesn’t retain each individual pets name if you have a custom name for all 45, but if you use generic names regardless of the pet/species, then it would have been a simple enough fix along the way (around the time they thought reskinning the HoM jellyfish was important).

On a more serious note, Eurantien addresses something that I’ve found to be a huge issue with ANets coding (from what I can interpret) for awhile now, which is their overuse or misuse of inheriting. For example, remember when GS was given it’s fury on crit trait, and that trait somehow gave the same effect to the Longbow when traited with Eagle Eye, minus the cooldown?

That’s because all of the damage percent modifiers all probably inherit from a common class, but when it was initially coded, instead of using some “super” class to then extend to all of the different traits it needed to, they extended from the base class to the gs trait, and from the gs trait to the lb trait, and the lb trait ended up gaining aspects of the GS trait it wasn’t supposed to have.

The reason why this is so…. “not good,” although time efficient, is because when misused or overused, it makes it extremely difficult to go back and make future changes when everything is all tangled together like a spider web instead of having 1:1 base class to inherited class relationships, and the developers more than likely spend more time untangling and troubleshooting changes made to their own code than actually implementing new features because of it.

Nieguen.6235:

I agree with tentonhammer (cough engineer cough). It’s a shame Arenanet does not want to accept it. A communication from devs working on their respective class on constructive posts would give them more love and an even better advertisement for the whole company and the game itself.
Okay Roy is an exception with the rev because it is a whole new class, but the guys working with him and him do an amazing job by listening to constructive feedback and answering when needed.
Robert Gee started to do the same.
Why guys working on ranger and engineer do not reply or post comments, or just say “okay guys we know, we are working on this”. Communication is the key.

Agreed, and the worst part is, on top of the lack of communication, we don’t actually even know who the lead developer for ranger/engi (and didn’t for most classes outside of Gee and Roy’s transparency and willingness to interact) is. Even that basic of an association is something that can’t be made transparent to the community so at least it’s settled in the back of people’s minds that their is a workforce tasked to it so that it is actively being worked on.

It’s really poor that not all classes will be getting the same time with BWEs and feedback, and there hasn’t been a single ounce of communication on that front either. Why did the release go from a generic “2015 when it’s ready” to “let’s shaft some classes and their public testing and feedback time and release on Oct. 23rd?” What’s the rush? Where are we in the development cycle? What can we conceptually expect?

DATAMINERS generate more hype and relieve more players than the developers do, and when we see the things that get datamined, the question that always pop into my mind is “why did it have to be shown in this way, couldn’t ANet have made a blog about the stuff that already exists in some form, at least conceptually, and told us about it?”

Most people that have preodered so far, especially in advance, have been sold purely on promises and belief that they will do a good job with the expansion, but as history shows, their promises versus their implementation barely ever meet player expectations, and it certainly couldn’t be called a spotless track record.

It really is beyond frustrating.

http://www.tentonhammer.com/columns/persistent-worlds/persistent-worlds-where-profession-developer-engagement

There’s a particularly interesting nod (and link) to a locked thread that a lot of us are familiar with by now.

This is a fun week

To address both Heimskarl’s and cafard’s points;

Locking it is essentially shady moderation that boils down to forum censorship, but they couldn’t actually delete the thread and infract me due to code of conduct because I’ve done nothing wrong.
At the same time, they probably figured locking it was the safe bet with the amount of forum support it received, because since reposts are against code of conduct, they are now able to delete any post and infract any person who tries to repost the thread; at least for the near future (around the time it takes for a forum response to be considered a bump).

However, I’m sure they didn’t expect it to get crossposted to reddit, a place they can’t censor or moderate in the same fashion, and then subsequently go viral between it being highly visible, having an admittedly clickbait title, and then locking it on top of everything else.

Pretty sure they are wishing they just wrongfully deleted the thread and infracted me and let me deal with the wrongful infraction in private when they wake up tomorrow and head to work lol.

Can I just take a moment to say, in the most sincere way I possibly can across the internet, that I just absolutely love you guys and this community, seriously lol. I couldn’t even imagine a more fun, entertaining, and engaging community of people/players to be a part of.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Gah, it’s officially on page 2 now. =/

In one day that thread got more views than most of their YouTube videos that have been up for months. Wonder if they are ever going to respond to it.

Yeah, pushing 18k views on the thread alone in less than 24 hours, and no matter what page it ends up on, Reddit links directly to it, so they can’t bury it just by locking it until reddit decides to bury it now.

I also have the entire thing copy/pasta’d, in case the mods start to get a little cavalier with their thread removal because a tiny bit of constructive criticism about rangers makes ANet devs weep like babies, remove threads, and infract anybody who is something something outside the sentiment of “good job ANet.”

Of course, I could probably get infracted just for having the audacity to type something like the above paragraph, but at this point, I think it’s about time ANet stopped with their “shooting the messenger” practices and started just proving the messages wrong. It has been 3 years now after all.

bugged forum is bugged

LOL it has more views than the merged HoT price thread. The reddit community is really backing this. It’s really hard to put into words how much the ranger community appreciates the sheer visibility of the issues.

It’s been a memorable and enjoyable day

Yeah it’s pretty much guaranteed if there is a weekend event, there isn’t a reveal that week, especially after any sort of holiday weekend.

Right now the schedule will probably look something like, starting at this last weekend.
BWE
Break
WvW Stress Test
Break
Engineer Reveal
BWE
Break
Druid Reveal
Expac release

Not that I think we won’t get any BWEs at all, but the point here illustrates that there aren’t that many weeks left, ANet takes breaks after weekend events, and there are still 2 classes to announce elite specs for, so at least 2 weeks for that process.

We are 6 weeks away, 2 weeks will be reveal weeks, there will be another WvW stress test, and another BWE (at least 1). At most, ANet is going to have 2-3 weeks to even gather and implement feedback, and it definitely won’t have enough time for another round of testing and then fixing again.