Guild Wars 2

sorry, that hasn’t been my experience.

Kitty.1502:

Knighthonor.4061:

Kitty.1502:

Not really, until core ranger is fixed they will only fill niche roles.

I disagree. Its been very powerful. In fact, with a well coordinated team that follows the plan, a good Druid can lock down a spot.

With no stability and not great self survival they are easy to focus down/deal with.

not at all. mind you, I run with celestial amulet and protective ward. getting focused is an issue sometimes, but it’s so easy to just staff #3 out of there, heal to full and go back in. we have so much sustain.

that being said, I feel we need at least one small source of on-demand stability.

druid is very strong right now and it should get better once a few kinks are ironed out. the heals are real. we need a bit of on-demand stab, I hope Irenio is workin on that.

it would just be nice if someone experienced could theorycraft this build so we can discuss it. I’m not trolling, even though it may appear that way.

Ross Biddle.2367:

A thread in the mes forum, a copy/paste in the general chrono feedback thread in the mes forum, and another copy/paste into it’s own thread in the PvP forum.

You must have really gotten rekt.

yeah lol, the was wiping the entire team. and we weren’t slouches either. broken build is broken.

nah trust me. not supcutie + friend issue. I play at the top mmr, so I face people of similar caliber every day. this build is nuts. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell u that.

anyway, thanks for the bumps. make sure to keep this thread going for the devs.

nah it wasn’t just the stealth that made him unkillable. he rarely used the SR, but it just made it extra painful especially with the vamp runes lol. it was as if he was perma-blocking everything, popping shatters and wells all over the place.

I’m sure there are plenty of other broken builds, but this one really stood out today.

supcutie was running some broken kitten kitten tonight. thing was faceroll, did so much cc and damage and outright unkillable. to add salt to the wound, he ran vamp runes and was on TS with aeroxe who basically was stealthing him as needed. glad they have fun. the match was silly to me, and I tell myself it’s beta so all good.

I’m sure there are plenty of other broken builds out there, but this is the one that stood out after about 20 games today.

I’m basically making a request for supcutie to discuss the build here, and write up some constructive feedback for the devs. lets nip this in the bud before it becomes meta for 6 months.

supcutie was running some broken kitten kitten tonight. thing was faceroll, did so much cc and damage and outright unkillable. to add salt to the wound, he ran vamp runes and was on TS with aeroxe who basically was stealthing him as needed. glad they have fun. the match was silly to me, and I tell myself it’s beta so all good.

I’m basically making a request for supcutie to discuss the build here, and write up some constructive feedback for the devs. lets nip this in the bud before it becomes meta for 6 months.

supcutie was running some broken kitten kitten tonight. thing was faceroll, did so much cc and damage and outright unkillable. to add salt to the wound, he ran vamp runes and was on TS with aeroxe who basically was stealthing him as needed. glad they have fun. the match was silly to me, and I tell myself it’s beta so all good.

I’m basically making a request for supcutie to discuss the build here, and write up some constructive feedback for the devs. lets nip this in the bud before it becomes meta for 6 months.

Arahzor.1832:

• Glyphs – I say they need a buff. increase the radius on them to 600 at least, and buff the damage on those that have damage.
  .

I don’t think u understand how large 600 radius is. 360 is the range of natural convergence and it’s perfect. glyphs should go up from 300 to 360 and we’d be good.

with the right build, druid is near-impossible to kill and pin down. took me a while to figure it out. the heals and cc are real.

reaper has way too much stab. incredible sustain and damage, hard to punish mistakes.

I could have sworn I also experienced this in conquest. SoS on, still taking damage.

Constructive PVP Feedback

- all conquest, about 20 games I think
- celestial amulet with monk runes, s/wh/staff, NM/WS/druid
- me: 3k+ hours on ranger, all in conquest and wvw raids, top mmr bracket

General Impressions

- staff feels amazing, love the mobility and the combo fields. needs tweaks on two abilities
- I felt i had very good sustain, decent damage and good team support
- lack of on-demand stability is a big problem, especially against all the cc heavy elite specs
- celestial avatar energy gain seemed perfect to me. I always had it up, but often I didn’t quite want to use it because it needs improved damage output.
- it seems some weapons’ damage doesnt register on the celestial bar, at least in HOTM on the golems. couldn’t test it too well in pvp. mind having a look-see?

Staff

- #1: not bad. it’s simple and comprehensive. id like it so scale a lot better with healing power. widen the beam’s range. if not visually, at least in the code. it’s virtually impossible to heal people in pvp with this because it’s so thin

- #2: needs a lot of work. initially, I thought the wisp pulsed damage around the target, but this is not the case. its damage is so paltry that it might as well not be there. secondly, it scales so, so, so poorly with healing power. suggestion: as the wisp rotates, make it hit all opponents around the target; make it pulse damage x5. this works because the staff needs a bit of aoe damage. another option is to give it a condi component. greatly increase scaling. I wanna see minimum 500 hitpoints healed with, lets say, 1k healing power.

-#3: best ranger ability ever designed. initially I thought we’d need an evade on it, but it’s not necessary. the wisp takes off so fast that it doesn’t even matter. my one complaint is that the ranger needs to exist the wisp mode as soon as he reaches the destination. for example, if I choose to only go 600, I want to instantly transform back instead of sitting there waiting for the animation to complete. this would be huge.

-#4: it’s a lot of fun to use, but it has a few problems. if you keep the CD and function, then you must increase the immob to 2s. due to its cast animation, it’s almost impossible to hit a moving target. if you want to keep the 1s immob, then make it instacast.

-#5: perfect, don’t touch it! it’s missing the “water field” in the tooltip. keep it as a water field. if you take it away, the ability will be extremely subpar.

Glyphs

- general: these need a slight damage and range increase; some need secondary functions

- Equality: this is one of the only glyphs I use. I wouldn’t mind a slight range increase. not sure if it was bugging out on me, but it just didn’t seem to hit very often. maybe I was blinded, maybe the target had stability…but in any case it’s worth a look if you can.

- Alignment: give me a stunbreaker on this and I might slot it. in its current form, I would never use it. I have protective ward and other ways to weaken enemies.

- Empowerment: bah I really want to use this one but it just doesn’t do enough. if you gave it another function on top of the 10% increase damage, id slot it. or simply increase its duration to at least 7-8 seconds. the secondary function seems good, just haven’t had an opportunity to use it

- Tides: its secondary function is great. its damage is weak. the astral version looks beautiful. um I love that it instantly procs ancient seeds. this is amazing. hope that’s intended. I think this glyph needs to do a bit more damage because it’s very offensive, but not quite there yet.

- Unity: oh god…the biggest disappointment! I wanted to love this glyph so bad. here is the main problem: I cant connect to anyone. I’m either blinded, cc’d, people are blocking, or the tether is breaking. damage is paltry against opponents who don’t attack rapidly (reapers, scrappers, some revs). my suggestion is simple: make it unblockable and increase the tether range to at least 900 before it snaps (it should connect at 300, that’s fine). and the tether shouldn’t break when I get cc’d. conceptually, great glyph. in practice, wont even be slotted.

- Rejuvenation: I l-l-love this glyph . it scales very nicely, cd is pretty low, and its secondary is amazing

Celestial Avatar

- it needs more functions. I often had it available, but usually didn’t want to use it. it needs another damage component

- Cosmic Ray: either double the aoe radius, or make it instacast. virtually impossible to land on moving teammates

- Seed: decent, scales pretty well. decrease the time to explosion by at least 0.25s., OR increase its range by 30%

- Lunar Impact: perfect on paper. but it often doesn’t hit…maybe because everyone has blocks and stability up all the time? in any case, this is a general issue with the game itself.

- Tide: not much to say, works great.

- NC: beautiful ability, well designed. but again, the problem is our lack of stab. range on this (360) is very, very nice. all glyphs need to have 360 range

Traits

- honestly, excellent job on these. I only have beef with the two GM’s: Cosmic Wisp and the range of Grace of Land. CW seems very lackluster. GoL looks great, if not situational, but you need to at least double the range.

- Ancient Seeds is class A1 trait. extremely potent and useful. well done designing this one!

Conclusion

- Glyphs: range and function. buff them =) Equality and Rejuvenation are basically good to go; Empowerment and Tides are almost there; Alignment and Unity are far from usable. at the very least, buff their range to 360.

- We need stability. Not sure how youre gonna solve this, but druids are basically worse than the core necro, without the huge damage output. we have no access to on-demand (i.e. instacast) stab. getting locked down is rough. maybe you can solve this by making SoW and/or SotP instacast? that would be the best solution imo.

- increase damage output of avatar. I think you mentioned this. just healing doesn’t quite cut it for an offensive/hybrid druid.

- druid is gonna be a hella fun prof. it’s well designed, intuitive, there is a flow to it. but you’ll need to tweak the things we suggested, and continue improving the core profession hard (Hunter’s Call, axes, SB, shouts, old pets and spirits)

Kailee.8790:

Using druid with full clerics…. dps is pretty terrible… 200-300 per tick on staff 1, healing on staff 1 is averaging 100 per tick.

are you talking about pvp? I wouldn’t recommend cleric’s for pvp, try celestial with heal runes. damage is not too bad, but the sustain is great.

yeah, it definitely needs something.

Shadelang.3012:

With around 800 healing power in a mostly zealots/assassin’s build I was able to keep people up pretty well in raids unless they got one shot by something. (im look at you wierd boss mechanic that we never did figure out before we got kicked)

of course, that’s because some of the abilities scale great. Astral Wisp isn’t one of em.

amazing, thank you. astral wisp needs to scale way, way better.

lets get this fixed in pvp boys, I wanna test these.

that looks fun. hows your survivability with cleric? I agree, glyph of unity is virtually non-functional right now. the tether breaks too easily and half the time I’m blinded or the enemies are blocking…just cant seem to make the connections. its tether (once made) should be like 1200 range.

I’m rolling with a celestial hybrid build. it has incredible sustain and does some good damage. s/WH are incredible on the druid. and surprisingly synergize with staff way better than GS in my opinion. I actually just couldn’t make staff/gs work for me in conquest so far.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNBMhZ6keVokFsiVwhFgqFskJYw30d6Q1Jxt4acNJrAwBYEjB-TpgXAAw+DWZAA

Zatoichi.1049:

mistsim.2748:

Zatoichi.1049:

is anyone else just scratching their head right now about what direction to go with druid? Ive tried a couple different build now and it just doesn’t seem to havean identity outside of pure bunker healer

I’m playing a celestial hybrid. NM/WS/druid, sword/wh/staff, birds. decent damage, good heals, great sustain. I tried a more offensive version, and it just didn’t work without longbow.

is iut better than D/D ele though?

not in terms of sustain, but we bring more cc and heals for the team. I’m finding it really rough without stab atm, so I might need to start slotting SoTP. getting stuck inside a Chrono’s well is basically certain death.

staff #5 —> staff #3, WH #5 on top of it. it’s neat.

Zatoichi.1049:

is anyone else just scratching their head right now about what direction to go with druid? Ive tried a couple different build now and it just doesn’t seem to havean identity outside of pure bunker healer

I’m playing a celestial hybrid. NM/WS/druid, sword/wh/staff, birds. decent damage, good heals, great sustain. I tried a more offensive version, and it just didn’t work without longbow.

glyph of unity is so, so bad. the tether gets broken way too easily. and often it’s impossible to actually land the connections due to blinds and its friggin cast time! I was looking forward to this one, just cant make it work.

seed of life needs to explode way, way sooner. also, cosmic ray is outright impossible to use effectively due to its cast time and small aoe. it’s impossible to heal your mates if theyre moving frantically or evading, i.e. trying to survive in a fight. make this instacast, or double its aoe range.

SoW really needs to be instacast. ive had this issue with it since day 1.

nscarpenter.9341:

5: Sublime Convergence – Love this skill, only change I would make is make it a Light field.

currently it’s a water field, not in tooltip. please do not change this. it works great with the blast finisher.

krzysiek.9061:

3. Building astral power
I don’t know what to think about it. I understand how it works but I think that it’s easier for necromancer to build death shroud than for druids. It was easy to build it in zerg in WvW but with small, spreaded group, it was really hard to hit that cap.

I’m running a celestial dmg/heal hybrid in conquest. in teamfights, by bar fills up in under 20 secs. I’m cranking out as much damage as I can and healing when I can. I was never in a situation when the avatar wasn’t available when I needed it. I have other problems in terms of survivability…having my bar empty definitely isn’t one of them.

I thought this skill was quite underwhelming until you said this. if it keeps its water field, it would indeed be a very strong skill =)

Zenos Osgorma.2936:

Chokolata.1870:

Staff 3 is fine but it needs an evade.

I don’t have beta but just from the style of the skill 3 , it does need Evade for defence on the staff , watching the twich feed atm and using it just gets you hurt if you have to move through AoEs to escape and the only way to safely use it is to go the opposite direction of the incomming damage , its counter intuitive to the skills design of allowing mobility when having no evade on the skill means you have less Route to move to.

needs the evade , with how fast the movement it the evade frames won’t be long.

the other problem with #3 is that when the ranger reaches the destination, if it’s shorter than 1200, he just hovers there as a wisp until the cast is complete. he should exit the wisp once he lands.

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

The underlying system of combat is built around area attacks. This is why the majority of base weapon attacks strike multiple targets in the affected area, unlike other games which strike one target – the one you have selected. Our system makes things like positioning and facing far more important and engaging; this also means that the concept of ‘AoE’ is not as easy to distinguish and thus handle in different ways.

That said, we are currently looking at systemic ways to help with player pet and minion survivability.

nice to hear man. we’ve been BEGGING for this for 3 years. it’s really rough for pets in wvw (raids, zergs, whatever) and pve. in conquest, they do just fine.

and yes, please be careful with minionmancers. we only have one pet, while they have multiple which act as aoe sponges. you’ll have to treat the two profs differently. not sure if gyros, turrets and spirit weapons would need a different treatment as well. some of these are meant to die quickly, whereas our pets need to last.

I’ll post a lot more feedback later but for now:

Moon Beam fills up astral force way way too fast. just spamming it on a golem fills my bar up in under 10 seconds. whereas all other weapons fill it up dreadfully slow (by doing damage)

EDIT: this seemed to be the case only in HoTM on golems and npc’s. in an actual conquest game it appears to work as intended. wouldn’t hurt having a look though.

Photinous.4628:

TheFantasticGman.9451:

It takes too long to build astral force without healing… Pretty sure that was intended though.

This. Druid is so dependent on staff, it’s ridiculous. Please let us build AF easier by taking/doing damage other than just healing.

I don’t agree at the moment. I think u need to spend more time with it. imo, astral force builds up at a very nice rate by doing damage.

and yes, we cant seem to select the new pets in HOTM, works in pve. smokescale is amazeballs.

^yea guards are in a really rough shape atm in this meta

Guard doesn’t make any sense. We shout “Guard”, and the pet goes to X location, stealthing and giving itself protection o.O the silly design of these shouts always astonished me.

so bring axes down to 600 and make them mega strong? I’m down for that, but theyre gonna need some serious work.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

mistsim.2748:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

mistsim.2748:

I’m against the range increase for the SB. I think it should be a deadly mid-range weapon. it just goes with the theme.

If we are talking thematically, then it needs to be 1200 range. You can’t throw a torch, axe or dagger further than you can shoot an arrow from a short bow.

longbow is 1200+ range. SB should be medium range. thematically.

Here’s me thinking that LB was 1500 range. My point still stands, thematically, you cannot throw an axe further than you can shoot an arrow from a shortbow.

are we talking about axe?

jcbroe.4329:

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.

wk/remorseless/ancient seeds. I don’t think we’ll need NM unless we’re purely healbotting.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

mistsim.2748:

I’m against the range increase for the SB. I think it should be a deadly mid-range weapon. it just goes with the theme.

If we are talking thematically, then it needs to be 1200 range. You can’t throw a torch, axe or dagger further than you can shoot an arrow from a short bow.

longbow is 1200+ range. SB should be medium range. thematically.

not sure if I agree with this. ive faced some really good condi mesmers in high mmr, and theyre very effective in 1v1’s. I feel condi Mesmer is balanced atm.

niconori.7235:

Lazze.9870:

niconori.7235:

Lazze.9870:

niconori.7235:

And do we really need a second source of stability?

You wanna bound our only source of stability to an elite with an activation time? It’s bad enough not having instant stability.

Why not just kill off the class at that point.

What are you trying t say when sotw also has a cast time? having 2 stab source = same effect as instant cast stab? awesome logic.

No, I’m telling you only having one source of stability is a kittening dumb idea, and that it is bad enough that none of them are instacast.

Speaking of logic.

Then stop kittening whining and suggest instant cast stab somewhere instead of going back and forth and being unconstructive?

it’s a valid issue to bring up. we don’t have any insta-cast stability, meaning we cant use it reactively. both SoW and SotP have a cast time so unless we can these before the engagement, we can get easily locked down. this limits us in many ways.

I’m against the range increase for the SB. I think it should be a deadly mid-range weapon. it just goes with the theme.

druid’s access to daze is somehow getting nerfed for sure. with Mesmer runes, we can throw out multiple aoe 3-4 second dazes. we’re the new lockdown Mesmer essentially.

^well said, I agree mostly. from my experience so far though, mesmers are much more manageable after the stealth nerf. resultantly, power rangers are in a pretty good spot because previously there wasn’t really a reason to bring one over the Mesmer. post-patch, I actually prefer power ranger’s survivability.

I haven’t seen any successful guards since June 23rd, burn cheese aside. staff eles make better bunkers actually.

well some of those are our bread and butter. like I cant run without QZ and SoS on any power build. when I was theorycrafting an offensive druid yesterday, guess what ended up on the utility bar once again?

I think the heal is going to be flexible. but i’ll be surprised if people are able to make more than 2 glyphs work. I’m going with unity, equality, qz and sos (in conquest). also this is exactly why traps and shouts are so hard to work with. but I would love it if the druid is survivable enough so I don’t have to roll with SoS any longer.

Justine.6351:

mistsim.2748:

runeblade.7514:

mistsim.2748:

Justine.6351:

mistsim.2748:

nomad in wvw for full healbot. in pvp, likely it’s gonna have to be celestial with healing power runes. cleric stats will get us blown up because we don’t have enough on-demand prot.

I foresee celestial stats being extremely efficient on the druid because it will allow us to do damage, support and possibly win 1v1’s.

Clerics is toughness.

I know it is, so is settler. both of these stats have been useless in spvp for a long time now. 3k armor doesn’t really do much when you only have 15.9k HP and bad protection uptime.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protective_Ward

having it on cd for 11 seconds out of 15 isn’t exactly on-demand prot.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Companion%27s_Defense
On demand.

omg, how is it on demand? you have to dodge roll, which is a big requirement. you need to not be cc’d and have endurance. when youre getting kittened on by a thief or Mesmer out of stealth for 10k+ on 3k armor, how will you react to that?

on-demand means you press a button and it appears on your bar instantly. eles have it, guards have it. thing is, without enough HP buffer, even on-demand prot wouldn’t cut it for us as I explained with the cleric guard example.

runeblade.7514:

mistsim.2748:

Justine.6351:

mistsim.2748:

nomad in wvw for full healbot. in pvp, likely it’s gonna have to be celestial with healing power runes. cleric stats will get us blown up because we don’t have enough on-demand prot.

I foresee celestial stats being extremely efficient on the druid because it will allow us to do damage, support and possibly win 1v1’s.

Clerics is toughness.

I know it is, so is settler. both of these stats have been useless in spvp for a long time now. 3k armor doesn’t really do much when you only have 15.9k HP and bad protection uptime.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Protective_Ward

having it on cd for 11 seconds out of 15 isn’t exactly on-demand prot.

I used to run a cleric guard in raids back in the day. he had perma prot and multiple sources of on-demand stab. I played him well. but then they drastically upped everyone dmg output to resolve the stagnant bunker meta. now we have mesmers popping people for 11k+ with a good combo. for a cleric ranger without on-demand prot and stability, I don’t think it would end so well.

this is why I was suggesting that ranger becomes a high HP prof, so we can use these amulets. but this didn’t gain much support because i guess most players don’t understand how poorly low HP builds do in high mmr pvp.

try it and let me know. personally, I’m going straight for celestial amulet with healing power runes. in wvw, it will be easier to fiddle with the stats.

^indeed. s/t a/d combo has always been clumsy. I would also like a more comprehensive, two-handed condi weapon. something that spams condis, like engie’s pistols.

I think unity and equality are must-haves. rejuvenation is the obvious choice for pve/wvw raids, maybe even SH. but the rest need a little sumthin more. we’ll see this weekend.

Puck.9612:

but it was made pretty clear yesterday that his good ideas are being stifled by his supervisors with little thought to how they will actually perform.

/shakes fist, possibly @ Roy