Guild Wars 2

Well considering I got matched with you on my Druid last night perma (post nerf) with celestial, you may see how good it’s support is.

Yes Druid is much easier to lock down and kitten up than a bunker guard in the older meta, but the healing it brings is dramatically higher. Based on post game stats, I’d have 3-4 times the healing to allies as a cele Druid compared to a cleric guard with twice as much healing power.

Druid condition removal is relatively low, and it’s weak to CC, so that keeps it from being god mode imo. Lingering light nerf was slightly too harsh though. 8 seconds and a bump on heal value would’ve been spot on.

Yeah dedicated support builds are falling out of favor so were progressing towards another cele everything with 2 marauder meta like most of the past year and a half. Minstrels was the only decent new amulet they added, leaving us with horrible new star combos that won’t ever get used.

Id prefer a meta where tanky supporters support glass builds that deal the damage but can’t take it, but as always, it’s just more efficient to run 3 cele bruisers and 2 marauders on each team since the cele builds all AoE heal eachother while having relatively good damage. At least cele Druid has low damage on staff to compensate being forced to run cele, since it’ll instadie without vitality.

The build that I find (arguably) the best doesn’t even take water, so I’m not too bothered by this. Still powerful auras is in an odd spot where the other water traits are too synergistic with arcane, and therefore disynergistic with tempest, so I think it’d be better if powerful auras was merged into elemental bastion, although that could potentially be overpowered with fresh air and elemental shielding all in the same build.. so…

Fire D/D ele is still strong in 1v1s, but doesn’t bring the damage or utility to teamfights as well post-HoT, since its still limited by the longish ramp up time for might stacking, and things like dragonhunter trap bombs can burst it kind of easily. Stone heart ele works a lot better since it can whether the burst, but the damage isn’t there at all. Fresh Air Cele tempest with D/F is a bit odd, but I feel as though it fits the current meta better since it doesn’t need mightstacking to put strong AoE on a point, and the auraheal support is a lot stronger than most people expect, while earth focus 5 helps it whether bursts.

long live the new cele meta, which is totally what we all wanted, meanwhile stuff like a 4-stat zealot amulet languishes in non-existence for all time.

While I hate the passive procyness of this trait, its a larger issue considering this is now the only viable GM trait for druid in pvp since lingering light got “shaved”.

Yeah the ele warhorn skills in particular sound quite fartworthy.

glaphen.5230:

nearlight.3064:

TheDevice.2751:

A tempest can take out 20k hp in under 3 seconds while not even using all his healing.

Daredevils cannot be seen nor can they be hit and if they do get hit they reset the fight.

There is so much wrong with the balance of this game and reaper has gotten the short end of the stick. The only ELITE SPEC IN THE GAME not allowed to be in competitive pvp.

Great work.

Again my theories about this development team are always on point. Anet takes so much time trying to make sure necromancers are not too strong. Meanwhile, its sky’s the limit for their favorite professions.

Has anyone actually SEEN the aa on reaper gs? Has anyone actually seen this catastrophe? Just remove it lol. Like just remove the skill entirely nobody is going to use it, its pointless.

Oh well of course unless ur pve…………………….. great work.

I GUARANTEE there will never be a reaper in pro tournament play. Never. Not ever.

How in any universe are anyone calling reaper op? Lemme make a tempest real quick. Or lemme make a daredevil or guard. I’ll drop any reaper under 30 seconds.

Just wondering, why do you think Tempest is overpowered? The general forum consensus is that its underpowered, though I’d agree that most people are underrating it by judging it too harshly on paper than in practice.

You can get nearly permanent Shocking Aura for your entire team while kittenting out the massive AoE damage of Overload Air.

Yeah, but earth traits just function better than water for tempest (for defense and sustain), and I don’t view that shocking aura as powerful as it could be without protection.

TheDevice.2751:

A tempest can take out 20k hp in under 3 seconds while not even using all his healing.

Daredevils cannot be seen nor can they be hit and if they do get hit they reset the fight.

There is so much wrong with the balance of this game and reaper has gotten the short end of the stick. The only ELITE SPEC IN THE GAME not allowed to be in competitive pvp.

Great work.

Again my theories about this development team are always on point. Anet takes so much time trying to make sure necromancers are not too strong. Meanwhile, its sky’s the limit for their favorite professions.

Has anyone actually SEEN the aa on reaper gs? Has anyone actually seen this catastrophe? Just remove it lol. Like just remove the skill entirely nobody is going to use it, its pointless.

Oh well of course unless ur pve…………………….. great work.

I GUARANTEE there will never be a reaper in pro tournament play. Never. Not ever.

How in any universe are anyone calling reaper op? Lemme make a tempest real quick. Or lemme make a daredevil or guard. I’ll drop any reaper under 30 seconds.

Just wondering, why do you think Tempest is overpowered? The general forum consensus is that its underpowered, though I’d agree that most people are underrating it by judging it too harshly on paper than in practice.

Fluffball.8307:

“Just a bit off the top.”
/barber cuts your face off

If this was reddit, I’d give you gold my friend.

Also isn’t the radiactive ranger named “The Guardian”?

Wow. The gutting is strong with arenanet.

Time to bandwagon to ancient seeds and run aggressive CC decap druids.

ReaperJr.5967:

nearlight.3064:

ReaperJr.5967:

nearlight.3064:

For cleanses on air/earth tempest cele builds I generally run diamond skin and soldier runes with all shouts to help with the cleanse. Earth focus 4 has a 16 second cooldown with geomancers freedom (which reduces chill duration go figure) and that clears 3 condis in addition to being a reflect and blast finisher.

With this setup I’m able to manage conditions well enough to sustain myself, and diamond skin lets me handle 1v1s against condi duelist builds to the point of it being unfair for them.

The main issue with condis is when you’re fighting things like power reapers that apply a lot of chill but deal physical damage so they can break your diamond skin, but in general I’m not as afraid of the damaging conditions themselves as much as I am for power builds with high debuff pressure.

You can run water instead of air for powerful auras, which is strong for healing and sharing shocking aura, but as a tempest you don’t benefit as much from the water swap since you don’t have arcane, and this build will actually want to use water overload at rare times.

Thanks. I’ve tried the build you mentioned, and 1v1 on side node wise, it’s really good. Problem comes when the teamfight happens. Idk if it’s because of my mmr or what not but people adapt real quick lol. I’m always the first to get focused down. And I can’t really escape since I don’t have LF/FGS/RTL anymore. Especially if I get cc-ed.

Reapers are especially hard to deal with. It was really fun but I compared it to a traditional might stacking d/f earth/water/Arcana ele and.. it’s still no good.

I guess it depends. Yeah its not very intuitive to play and you have to watch your positioning carefully. You can’t overload if you’re focused, and dragonhunters/chronomancers will shut you down so you have to kite around their AoEs.

I run it in a somewhat organized 2-point comp and we do great with it, I can hold a node for a surprisingly long amount of time as long as I’m not being focused by those with tons of chill..

I’m switching off and on between it and cele druid to be the point-holder semi-healer for my team that also does decent damage. I do way more damage with tempest though, but generally more healing with druid, as you can imagine.

Thanks for the tips but i think i do know how to play ele considering its my main. Been playing it for 2 years. I guess the difference lies between our teams? I was testing it in solo queue while you had an organised team. Easier to coordinate them supporting you and vice versa.

Fundementally the build itself is weak to cc and focus fire though. Ill test it out more and see how it goes.

Yeah right now with the power creep of the new specs, solo queuing on any build is rough tbh.

And personally I’d say that tempest plays so differently from base ele in terms of thought process and tactics that base ele experience is more detrimental than helpful to playing tempest.

vanderwolf.7084:

also just a question…but is power Reaper useful without Spite?

Like is…soul reaping/death/reaper or soul reaping/blood/reaper viable? or do they just lack the punch?

My current build is death/SR reaper but I use crusader amulet over marauder so I can have a bit more tankiness and the crit substitution to be able to hit like a truck without needing spite might to do it. Valkyrie probably works with this setup as well with even more damage, but less sustain, so I should try that out as well.

‘m trying to find the good in reaper since the Blighter’s Boon nerf, but its few and far between. The best thing I can find in it is chill spam crit substitution for tankier amulets that don’t have precesion but do have ferocity.

Jekkt.6045:

each shout heals allies if you play with aurashare. if you don’t then it doesn’t heal anybody but yourself iirc.

and while damage might be damage it doesn’t mean that you will drop somebody with it, especially now when half of the people you meet in queue are druid or dragonhunter.

Are we playing the same game? You don’t need powerful auras for shouts to apply auras to allies, 3 shouts do that as a baseline function of the skill and with elemental bastion it heals them.

I don’t know about you but I’ve had death breakdowns that show taking 10K damage from 12 hits of overload air from fighting cele tempests. It hits so hard because of the HC damage mod, and because it stacks a ton of vuln quickly, so it doesn’t need might stacks to be effective.

Try playing a build before you discount it. I was skeptical of this trait spread too at first.

Jekkt.6045:

nearlight.3064:

I run celestial tempest (fresh air) with full shouts with soldier runes and it works great.

And no Jekkt my damage is quite good, I’ll typically have over 400K physical damage at the end of most matches, which is way more than I ever got on Mesmer builds or necromancer builds to put things in perspective.

Minstrels is viable, but it gives your team a rotational disadvantage because you’ll be useless at pushing points since you do no damage.

you have 400k damage because it’s aoe from the air overload. don’t let the numbers fool you. if you break it down to actual damage it’s not that much anymore. i usually also have 100-150k damage on minstrel.

while your build is totally selfish (assuming you’re playing earth air tempest) apart from water overload and wash the pain away, something like a celestial druid is 2x more useful and will deal a similar amount of damage. there is also nothing tanky you can kill on celestial fresh air tempest.

Nah I do like twice as much damage on tempest as I do with cele Druid, but Druid does more healing as you can imagine. Damage is damage, and the ApE from overload air spam is enough AoE pressure to really turn fights while I have high sustain, so I can do more than just holding a nose until I get focused and killed.

Don’t forget that each shout heals allies and removes a condition, that support is pretty decent.

I run celestial tempest (fresh air) with full shouts with soldier runes and it works great.

And no Jekkt my damage is quite good, I’ll typically have over 400K physical damage at the end of most matches, which is way more than I ever got on Mesmer builds or necromancer builds to put things in perspective.

Minstrels is viable, but it gives your team a rotational disadvantage because you’ll be useless at pushing points since you do no damage.

I use it for open world PvE where I run a condi tempest build to get hero points. But thats literally the only place where I’d use it.

ReaperJr.5967:

nearlight.3064:

For cleanses on air/earth tempest cele builds I generally run diamond skin and soldier runes with all shouts to help with the cleanse. Earth focus 4 has a 16 second cooldown with geomancers freedom (which reduces chill duration go figure) and that clears 3 condis in addition to being a reflect and blast finisher.

With this setup I’m able to manage conditions well enough to sustain myself, and diamond skin lets me handle 1v1s against condi duelist builds to the point of it being unfair for them.

The main issue with condis is when you’re fighting things like power reapers that apply a lot of chill but deal physical damage so they can break your diamond skin, but in general I’m not as afraid of the damaging conditions themselves as much as I am for power builds with high debuff pressure.

You can run water instead of air for powerful auras, which is strong for healing and sharing shocking aura, but as a tempest you don’t benefit as much from the water swap since you don’t have arcane, and this build will actually want to use water overload at rare times.

Thanks. I’ve tried the build you mentioned, and 1v1 on side node wise, it’s really good. Problem comes when the teamfight happens. Idk if it’s because of my mmr or what not but people adapt real quick lol. I’m always the first to get focused down. And I can’t really escape since I don’t have LF/FGS/RTL anymore. Especially if I get cc-ed.

Reapers are especially hard to deal with. It was really fun but I compared it to a traditional might stacking d/f earth/water/Arcana ele and.. it’s still no good.

I guess it depends. Yeah its not very intuitive to play and you have to watch your positioning carefully. You can’t overload if you’re focused, and dragonhunters/chronomancers will shut you down so you have to kite around their AoEs.

I run it in a somewhat organized 2-point comp and we do great with it, I can hold a node for a surprisingly long amount of time as long as I’m not being focused by those with tons of chill..

I’m switching off and on between it and cele druid to be the point-holder semi-healer for my team that also does decent damage. I do way more damage with tempest though, but generally more healing with druid, as you can imagine.

It depends. Blighters boon works I guess if you use spite, Onslaught if you dont, and deathly chill if you run condi.

jcbroe.4329:

Somebody posted up a celestial glyph build to metabattle recently: http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Druid_-_Celestial_Avatar

I guess that would be my starting point as well, but I don’t agree with all of the choices.

What would you change in that build? I’ve been running a very similar version of this build (differing with sigils and one trait) and I like it a lot, but I’m not entirely sure that the mightstacking is worth it when you could make your build slightly more healing and control focused. In general I miss the taunt the most, but the extra might seems to necessary. I also feel like I have trouble dealing high damage even with a lot of might, unless I’m catching people in the torch fire field, but the pet makes up for that. I totally need to test out more variations, by I’m interested to see how you’d want to change it.

For cleanses on air/earth tempest cele builds I generally run diamond skin and soldier runes with all shouts to help with the cleanse. Earth focus 4 has a 16 second cooldown with geomancers freedom (which reduces chill duration go figure) and that clears 3 condis in addition to being a reflect and blast finisher.

With this setup I’m able to manage conditions well enough to sustain myself, and diamond skin lets me handle 1v1s against condi duelist builds to the point of it being unfair for them.

The main issue with condis is when you’re fighting things like power reapers that apply a lot of chill but deal physical damage so they can break your diamond skin, but in general I’m not as afraid of the damaging conditions themselves as much as I am for power builds with high debuff pressure.

You can run water instead of air for powerful auras, which is strong for healing and sharing shocking aura, but as a tempest you don’t benefit as much from the water swap since you don’t have arcane, and this build will actually want to use water overload at rare times.

Drekor.5217:

Dead.5829:

My point was referencing his favoring of the cele reaper build, so it supports yours :P

Hopefully the BB nerf is the beginning of a change to other systems such as more boon generation in other spec lines.

Hahahah… no. It was just a BB nerf, the end.

It’s not necessarily the end, we have to adapt to the new world of the game by exploring new options and synergies instead of mindlessly tacking reaper onto an old meta build.

Condi builds are better than ever with reaper for he chill spam, and many various types of power builds (Knights specifically) get a lot out of going reaper with reaper’s onslaught.

Tomiyou.3790:

nearlight.3064:

I’d argue that tempest is much more viable than base D/D ele in the current meta. D/D ele is still the king of slowly winning 1v1s, but that doesn’t matter when the meta has become so teamfight oriented that coodinated dragonhunter trap bursts can almost one shot a D/D ele if it doesn’t react enough to avoid it, which is difficult to do.

Tempest on the hand works a lot better because it has a a very strong teamfight presence with air overload spam that outclasses what base D/D ele can do, while using shouts/auras to sustain itself and its teammates. Being able to have so much shocking aura and so much protection (40% damage reduction) uptime is insane for survivability. Furthermore, wash the pain away is an amazing heal if you position it correctly to heal allies on a point.

OP, you may not be building your tempest correctly. The old water-arcane synergies don’t apply here anymore, the best builds are a total 180 of that playstyle and trait spread, and you can’t get by with doing specific rotations over and over again.

Link your build? I’m desperate to find something, that will feel rewarding to play.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_Celestial_Auramancer

Yeah, I kinda wrote the metabattle page for it.., so the formatting is still kinda bad since I don’t know how to edit things properly, but yeah, true credit goes to phantaram for discovering this combo first while I spent most of my beta time playing with the slightly inferior water variant of the build thats also listed.

I plan to touch up the usage section with more tips on positioning with overloads and some nice stuff on shouts and projectile hates (theres a lot of depth) but this should get you started. Let me know if you have any questions, and try soldier runes if you have trouble maintaining diamond skin, which can happen since solo queue is more fulled with condi builds than the higher tier MMR bracket I play in.

Ragnarox.9601:

If you bring it down to 16 sec traited and curing 1 condition ppl might use it over Shelter.

Nah, this trap is fine where its at. it heals you like 9K total, thats twice as much as shelter with no healing power, the trap is perfectly competitive with shelter.

Thank you Karl I can go prove to my friend that I was right now!

And nice work on dragonhunter and tempest by the way. I’ve been having the more fun with ele/guard these past few days than I have been in the past few years!

Mcrocha.3891:

nearlight.3064:

I was just comparing what they offer in terms of supporting and dealing damage in a teamfight, and cele tempest just works better than a druid if you build it right, and I’ll be free to explain more seperately so we don’t go too offtopic. Personally I think that marauder’s support would be too low with the numbers you’d get on staff, making it an infeccient weapon choice with that stat spread. Longbow damage is great as always, especially with the mightstacking, but I just don’t see the point of running druid if you aren’t going to focus at least partially on healing power, which as I’ve stated is hard to do due to crappy amulet choices.

It’s free heals why not run it? Gives a roamer the outs it needed to be competitive with thief/Mesmer. Also Druidic Clarity+Celestial Shadow is absolutely god mode.

Well I mean, thats what I ran in the beta and it worked almost too well. Just now, I don’t think it would be worth it since they changed the healing values and scaling, and It honestly feels like you’d just be using staff as a mobility stick instead of for healing people in teamfights since you’d probably be on longbow most of the time.

I was just comparing what they offer in terms of supporting and dealing damage in a teamfight, and cele tempest just works better than a druid if you build it right, and I’ll be free to explain more seperately so we don’t go too offtopic. Personally I think that marauder’s support would be too low with the numbers you’d get on staff, making it an infeccient weapon choice with that stat spread. Longbow damage is great as always, especially with the mightstacking, but I just don’t see the point of running druid if you aren’t going to focus at least partially on healing power, which as I’ve stated is hard to do due to crappy amulet choices. Note I’m not praising celestial druid either, but I just feel like its too hard to focus on both damage and healing at the same time, so I don’t really know what to make of it.

Too busy to go test this, but does this skill heal allies with the active? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t since the tooltip doesn’t indicate it. Someone told me that dragonhunter does better group healing than a druid because of a skill, and I just need to gather some evidence to lay down some cold, hard, truth.

If we had a 4-stat version of a zealots amulet that gave healing, power, precision, and viatlity, I’d use that in a heart beat over celestial. I’m running sw/torch because the burn deal some damage, while focusing mostly on healing and mightstacking. Theres just not enough offensive options for healing power amulets. Settlers sucks because with no HP you’ll melt in teamfights, and cleric/magi/minstrel have crappy offensive pressure, so I just feel forced into celestial to have enough health to survive DH trap bursts while still being able to heal people and do okay damage.

Even then I feel like most of damage comes from the pets instead of me, which I guess is fair.

Overall I’d say that tempest (my other post-HoT main) fulfills a better temfight carry role on a team than druid. Druid has way higher healing over the course of the game and better mobility, but tempest just outdamages it with overload air spam.

Dead.5829:

He was probably working from what he’s used to and trying to translate his old build to new functionalities. That he favored it for (very) short periods of time doesn’t mean much.

Yeah but still my point is, we can’t just add reaper to the old build and expect it to still be good. The old syneries are broken, so we have to discover new ones. The problem is that the blighter’s boon nerf may overlimit build diversity more than it should.

ReaperJr.5967:

Supreme.3164:

ReaperJr.5967:

Supreme.3164:

Some people like to play the doom and gloom hero no matter what, they just need gw2 meta build to show them the meta tempest build and you’ll see them glorify tempest with open threads..just wait 2-3 weeks and you’ll see…I mean just watch dragon hunter and all the ex-gloom and doom prophets now singing about Anet everlasting glory…lol

P.S – @ReaperJr.5967…so marauder staff would survive even without tempest? wow….such bold statement, pls prove it with a video how you gain same sustain/damage of marauder tempest staff..GL

You obviously don’t play ele. And the burden of proof is not on me.

Not only I play Ele but I can confirm also that my knowledge of the class far exceed yours, for this very reason I’ll be always very vocal against excessive buffs to the elite that would bring the ele back to FOTM status.

ESL Tournie has showed to all of us that those who claim tempest is bad as elite, have various L2P issues, if ESL players can land overloads with ease at that level and you can’t ….then guess where the problem lies…

I have not switched to core ele since HoT launch, having success everywhere using various trait set ups , no profession/elite has proved to be an impossible fight…and I simply adore the warhorn, it suits me just too well; this doesn’t stop me from using all other weapon set with tempest.

The addition of invigorating torrent was the last thing tempest really needed, it’s now viable, strong ..but not broken OP as it was pre oct patch d/d fire ele.

The truth is I’m glad that for once ele got a viable spec that actually require a min of skill to play effectively and not something like the old fire d/d ele with RoF spam that any newb could run in soloq and do good with, while not having full knowledge of the class

The “big” guys like tempest, one even won the last ESL tournie so.. tempest is bad? nahh..it’s a L2P issue

I almost took you seriously. You should add me up for some good old marauder mirror duels.

Jokes aside, landing overloads isn’t the problem. Never was. What you just said only proved that you’re inept at even realising what the issue with Tempest with.

Tempest, on its own, isn’t bad. Tempest, when compared to other elite specs, is. Why? Because tempest offers nothing the traditional ele cannot offer.

As for people who won ESL with tempest, it’s because they are better than their opponents. Either that or they are testing strats involving tempest in tournament settings, and it worked. That does not necessary mean tempest is good. Quite the contrary.

Well I mean its totally true that tempest isn’t as differentiated from base elementalist in terms of role and what it can do for a team compared to say ranger vs. druid, however I’d still argue that its differentiated by being a completely different playstyle than base ele. The old synergies of water-arcana don’t work well with the concept of tempest, so the most viable builds for tempest use air and earth instead, which I think is amazing, since everyone had been lamenting being forced into water and arcane until the end of time.

I’d also argue that Tempest just fits in with the current meta a lot betterbase elementalist. Fire D/D ele can’t survive dragonhunter trap bursts very well, so almost all of the people still playing base ele have swapped to stone heart builds to handle it. Tempest handles this better by being able to run focus and earth traits and having higher personal and comparable group protection uptime, and Air overload is extremely high AoE damage and vuln stacking that doesn’t even need mightstacking to do work with cele stats (I’ve taken 10K from other tempests in celestial from the death breakdown with air overload), unlike base ele which needs to slowly accumulate mightstacks to be effective. Wash the Pain Away and the shouts that apply healing auras provide so much healing that we really don’t need water traits at all to output good healing with tempest.

D/D ele might still be a bit better in 1v1s, but the new meta is so teamfight oriented that being great in teamfights is a lot more important than being a good duelist, and even then, fresh air diamond skin tempest can still hold 1v1s relatively well.

I’d argue that tempest is much more viable than base D/D ele in the current meta. D/D ele is still the king of slowly winning 1v1s, but that doesn’t matter when the meta has become so teamfight oriented that coodinated dragonhunter trap bursts can almost one shot a D/D ele if it doesn’t react enough to avoid it, which is difficult to do.

Tempest on the hand works a lot better because it has a a very strong teamfight presence with air overload spam that outclasses what base D/D ele can do, while using shouts/auras to sustain itself and its teammates. Being able to have so much shocking aura and so much protection (40% damage reduction) uptime is insane for survivability. Furthermore, wash the pain away is an amazing heal if you position it correctly to heal allies on a point.

OP, you may not be building your tempest correctly. The old water-arcane synergies don’t apply here anymore, the best builds are a total 180 of that playstyle and trait spread, and you can’t get by with doing specific rotations over and over again.

Well that’s assuming the old blighters boon. And nos clearly didn’t favor it that much when he decided to run a soldiers build instead.

Knights works well too

That’s all well and good, but the relatively minor increase in damage doesn’t make up for your much weaker sustain for the reasons I mnetioned.

Thanks for the Math though, I appreciate it.

Laraley.7695:

nearlight.3064:

Kirk.3086:

Druid—Astral force no longer degenerates out of combat.

much interesting.
Revenants should sucks with 50% of their energy, but druids now too op (cos energy regen too high, and they always prepared to hard fight)…
Why we have only 50%? Much better to get 100% after f1 swapping (with low decrease out the fight to 50%), cos rev can’t regen energy goot at the fight (except herald with 0 energy cost).
Or all weapon attacks should be free from resurse/ Everyone can spam his board, except rev….

Well with druid its different..

You now start out with full astral force (that might be a little strong) at the start of a match, and it doesn’t degenerate if you end it early. Howerever its still balanced because aside from having it instantly available at the start, the build up time feels a bit slower than it should be, unless you’re staff autoing in teamfights with troll unugent up.

I don’t agree. Druid can get up to full hp within a few sec into astral form. If they’re gonna have it avialable every time it’s off cd (that’s what I’m getting from your post) as long as they keep their astral force up, it’s going to be insane in duels especially. The problem with this is also the fact they can just run power + druid and have insane amounts of healing.

This is not an issue in pve at all. However, in pvp it could be a lot of problems.

Hmmm I need to do some more testing for sure. Maybe I should record how often I fully charge cele mode per match to get some hard data? The Druid build I’m running (credit to infantrydiv) is celestial with some mightstacking and tons of healing. I can heal allies for 350K-400k per game if I’m in a lot of teamfights, which is much higher than anything I get on other classes (though tempest has gotten the closest with the right setup). In a teamfight astral force build up feels plentiful enough to work well, but in smaller fights, or when I’m holding a node against many people focusing me, it’s a lot slower, as you’d expect, I should try to log numbers on usage per game though to get a sense of how good it’s usage can get though. Also worth mentioning that you lose half of your remaining CAF if you end the state early.

I disagree that marauder Druid is worth running since they rebalanced the heal scaling after the first beta. In the first beta it worked amazingly well, now it’s much weaker since the heals are a bit too low, such that you’re kind of forced into celestial on Druid, or an even more heal power focused amulet, in order to feel effective.

I did see one really good ventari herald the other day that could potentially compete with Druid. The ventari skills just don’t feel as fun or fluid to use compared to the highly mobile beamshooting staff though imo.

Kirk.3086:

nearlight.3064:

Kirk.3086:

Druid—Astral force no longer degenerates out of combat.

much interesting.
Revenants should sucks with 50% of their energy, but druids now too op (cos energy regen too high, and they always prepared to hard fight)…
Why we have only 50%? Much better to get 100% after f1 swapping (with low decrease out the fight to 50%), cos rev can’t regen energy goot at the fight (except herald with 0 energy cost).
Or all weapon attacks should be free from resurse/ Everyone can spam his board, except rev….

Well with druid its different..

You now start out with full astral force (that might be a little strong) at the start of a match, and it doesn’t degenerate if you end it early. Howerever its still balanced because aside from having it instantly available at the start, the build up time feels a bit slower than it should be, unless you’re staff autoing in teamfights with troll unugent up.

Lol. healing without force with 0 problem. just got staff cd. Astral force at the fight get from 0 to 100% for 10 seconds or faster. If you use 3-4 glifs, you can easy condy remove from passive.
Yeah, they are different, sucks ventari and facerollind druid with overhealing…
Try to play engj healer/sup/buffer. Much harde, then druid…

I think there was some English here, but I’m struggling to decipher it’s meaning.

As a pvper whose forcing myself to glide off cliffs and die from gliding latency to get my tempest shoulder skin, I polietely disagree.. some people don’t have the time to grind for masteries to get mastery gated hero points, nor the pve skills to solo champions.

Kirk.3086:

Druid—Astral force no longer degenerates out of combat.

much interesting.
Revenants should sucks with 50% of their energy, but druids now too op (cos energy regen too high, and they always prepared to hard fight)…
Why we have only 50%? Much better to get 100% after f1 swapping (with low decrease out the fight to 50%), cos rev can’t regen energy goot at the fight (except herald with 0 energy cost).
Or all weapon attacks should be free from resurse/ Everyone can spam his board, except rev….

Well with druid its different..

You now start out with full astral force (that might be a little strong) at the start of a match, and it doesn’t degenerate if you end it early. Howerever its still balanced because aside from having it instantly available at the start, the build up time feels a bit slower than it should be, unless you’re staff autoing in teamfights with troll unugent up.

Laraley.7695:

Nocta.5274:

Laraley.7695:

Can someone tell me how they nerfed it? Or direct me to the changes, please?

Edit: Nvm, was totally blind.

I don’t think the change was neededd at all, they totally killed the trait with it.

You don’t think it was needed ? Have you seen the go4cup ? oO

Stick a Herald next to a reaper, and he’s 100% of the time in shroud, the bar was never going down. :o

No, I don’t think the nerf was needed in this form. Adding some limitation to it, sure, but basing it on necro’s boons only? How does a necro get boons really.

By running spite and autoattacking in deathshroud, thats the only guaranteed way to consistently proc it now, so you can’t really use it to build life force (the main draw of the pre-nerf version), only heal in shroud for a trivial value. Yeah theres siphoned power which helps, and some minor boon sources on really long cooldowns elsewhere, but you can’t use the trait to generate life force relaibly anymore, making reaper pigeonholed into soul reaping more than ever before to have enough life force management, and even pigeonholed into spite just to use blighter’s boon.. so reaper now has very kittenty build diversity in terms of traitlines.

Yeah you could run soldiers wilth reaper/SR and death or blood, but at that point you’re better off running the 15% attack speed trait, which should let you stomp faster if it works like the mesmer-scepter trait that gives the same type of bonus.

Okay thanks for the explanation. I tried it briefly and while maintaing might was a tad easier to do, the autos on axe were more like tickling the opponent than throwing an axe at their face… so yeah hahaha.

This has been the druid build I’ve felt the most useful running. I’ve seen other better rangers than me (got matched against eurantien today.. it hurt) running cele builds with longbow and ancient seeds that force decaps like hell, but I kind of prefer your setup for more condition pressure, surviability (protective ward is huge), and blind spamming.

Lots of people have been playing celestial signet reaper by dropping curses for reaper and thinking that signets and dhuumfire will let them do work. But no, this is suboptimal for several reasons.

1. You don’t get any significant mileage from the healing power on celestial.

2. You need to spam weakness to stay alive as a necromancer with celestial stats, akin to elementalists/tempests/scrappers spamming protection. You have to lose your weakness to get reaper, so you’re sustain plummets.

3. Signet of Vampirism is a kittenty excuse for a heal skill. No one ever touched it before the signet traits got merged and buffed to faceroll mightstacks. Its cast time and cooldown are too long for the low healing it gives you.

4. Blighter’s Boon nerf- this was the one thing giving cele reaper the illusion of being good, and post-rebalance, healing 183 health per autoattack in shroud (up from 139+ally boons) isn’t worth it. Don’t let the 330% heal value buff scale number in the patch notes fool you, its still a really crappy heal when only you can provide the boons for it! Thats even lower than the healing values at equivalent healing power for unholy sanctuary of all the useless things under the sun!

5. Builds with 1200 power can stack might just as fast as a celestial build can and canhave similar damage output. Anything with 25 might will hit like a truck.

You can’t just slap reaper on the old “meta” build and expect to wreck face. The synergies don’t apply, and celestial necromancer relied on a specific set of synergies to get bye. Soldier’s reaper and carrion chill spam forever reaper are both much better in the current metagame in my opinion. The only things that can succesfully run celestial right now are versatile healer-dps builds such as aura-spam tempest and druid, and mightstacking builds with high tankiness and mightstacking such as scrapper (from protection/adaptive armor).

braces self for the wave of "nhuh nearlight, you’re such a scrub and you’re so wrong qqqq

So you think it would be viable to run axe over sword for more might and bleed?

I just hate how they made it so you need to run spite to get any use out of it at all, but thats just me.

Yeah I’m kind of sad since this shifts the viable builds from soldiers towards celestial.. but it also makes deathly chill a more desirable alternative to the trait for celestial builds..

Tempest needs the warhorn skills to be buffed considerably and some relatively minor tweaks to traits (stability on overload merged with minor traits) lucid singularity buff and a larger heal value on rebound when you use it to take a lethal blow.

I’m spending my time leveling tempest track for the shoulder skin (hate the reaper hood) but I’d dare to say that reaper has the easiest time in soloing the new content of you run MM with some healing power and transfusion to heal your minions and rise.

In pvp soldiers reaper (and carrion reaper) is bae.

I can tell you right now that damage oriented builds will make great use of it. Basically you need to focus on using overload air with fresh air as much as possible. It may be more viable than seeker staff ele in the content since the overloads you can move with channeling, helping them land on the more mobile mobs more often.

infantrydiv.1620:

nearlight.3064:

Tried this build out real quick before I get caught up with real life. I can already tell that it has much greater potential than most of the other WS oriented Druid builds I’ve seen so far.

Also why did you put damage oriented sigils on staff? I feel like transference would be invaluable on staff.

For one, Blood sigil procs Lingering Light on yourself, meaning a blind and 700 healing. For two, Air and Blood do a lot of damage at 25 might stacks, and I like the amount of ranged pressure staff can output when fully might stacked.

Basically I prefer having higher single target damage at ranged, because Staff is exceptionally good at pressuring a target across the map: You can chase them with #3, immob with 4, while doing lots of damage with Staff auto.

Transference might be a good choice if you are trying to heal more, especially if you always remember to enter CA while in staff, so that it still applies, but air/blood are always immediate value on a build that has a decent crit chance.

Duly noted. I’ll probably default to transference/air then just because the group I usually run with generally either expects me to be playing hybrid support or point holder role so I think that will help me be slightly more versatile.