Guild Wars 2

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Honestly? I don’t even bother with avatar anymore. I’ve turned into a selfish healer. Number One in my book is me and my pet. If others get healing, indirectly, good for them.

My survivability and healing ability goes down, even in full cleric’s gear, if I switch to avatar form . . . and that’s beyond ridiculous.

The combination of Guard regeneration, Troll Unguent, Solar Beam, and Wisp does it better and more consistently.

Hope admitting that doesn’t get those abilities nerfed.

Great, you said them out loud. Hotfix inbound.

Taking damage to build AF works for me anyway. Since I’ve spent the past 3 years banging my head into the wall.

>.>

As I said elsewhere, every time I see the “new build in 10 minutes” notice, I cringe.

Because they’re about to take something else away from us.

The reasoning is the same as it has been for 3 years.

Rangers (and now Druids) can’t have nice things.

Or, y’know, if they’d split how skills work b/w pve & pvp.

I like your ideas, but they’re not listening.

They only have eyes for esports & the upcoming leagues.

Hence all this knee-jerk nerf hammering.

The Kodan seek balance. Anet does not.

I’d say the crux issue with Druid is the continual knee-jerk nerf hammer that keeps giving us concussions.

They’re not listening.

Photinous.4628:

So, in summary, Roy did it to us again.

You’re not wrong.

I’d LOVE the reasoning behind this. But I’m 99% sure it was b/c of pvp.

Like most every other nerf we’ve gotten over the past month.

I’d bet every gold I have that this change was pvp based.

And for their next trick, they’ll make Ancient Seeds worthless.

Kain Francois.4328:

Yet they nerfed something we were genuinely happy with.

And that, in a nutshell, is how they balance our class.

Next patch – AF now only generates when the druid is in downstate. Also, we reversed the smokescale’s F2 again just for giggles.

I know it’s popular & common in an MMO to say “the devs hate this class or that class”… but I’m really beginning to believe Anet hates rangers.

Senseless nerf after senseless nerf.

I just logged my cleric/zealot Druid in to test it.

This change completely destroys us & our ability to do what we’re designed to do.

But…that’s become par for Irenio’s course.

Lethal Njection.8741:

I finally started to enjoy healing druid in stronghold…….. Well congratulations Anet, you officially put the final nail in the coffin for this elite spec. There’s no way the devs are balancing for the same game I play.

One wonders what they’re balancing it for at all.

FriendlyInvader.3126:

oshilator.4681:

I cringe every time I see “new build available in 10 minutes” b/c I’m afraid something ELSE will be nerfed.

Your fear is well placed.

And justified, as the build a few minutes ago nerfed AF gain yet again.

I’m honestly beginning to wonder if they’re just making random changes to mess with us.

Clearly we had something useful.

And that just isn’t allowed.

Thanks for making us useless in Raids and pretty much everywhere else, Irenio.

Great Job. A+.

GG Irenio.

Way to screw us again.

Sigh….. another build, another nerf.

I use cleric trinkets & zealot everything else.

Works fine.

khani.4786:

It must be the tooltip got removed. I just tested and it IS a blast finisher, it just doesn’t say it is. Let’s hope the removal of the tooltip is the bug.

Can confirm. Let’s hope it’s a tooltip oversight & not a coming nerf.

It’s no longer a blast finisher.

Thanks for another nerf.

Edit – It does still blast fields. That fact just seems to be missing from the tooltip.

I cringe every time I see “new build available in 10 minutes” b/c I’m afraid something ELSE will be nerfed.

And while the change to AF generation being built with regen is wonderful, could someone in charge at least INCLUDE it in the notes?

Edit – Lunar Impact is working as a blast finisher. The tool tip just doesn’t state it for some reason.

Sigh… another pvp’er gets destroyed in 1v1 & cries nerf.

Hopefully the devs won’t listen this time.

Completely disagree with the OP here.

It’s about time we got something that requires actual skill to beat.

Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system, did you have anything productive to add?

These sound like fixes.. not nerfs.

.. could we PLEASE do something about Cosmic Ray?

It’s too clunky to use effectively in the middle of fights.

Why not make it a cone (similar to guardian staff) that’s a spammable heal?

Or, really, anything else.

Shadelang.3012:

The wyverns are kinda a dissapointment for alot of us. But it was something we saw coming since they were first shown. We KNEW they had slow as hell attack speeds. We just didn’t realize how bad until we tried them in game. It almost feels like this pet is supposed to have two or three times the standard melee range. Like its attacks are supposed to be slow but all have wide cleave ranges. But somehow that didn’t make it into the game.

In all honesty I wish we had made more of a scene about it before HoT released. Because I don’t know how well we can expect them to ever get changed when devourers STILL have the old longbow projectile speed. The one that was changed with read the wind because the longbow was UNUSABLE and was considered the weakest weapon in the entirety of guild wars 2.

The only way the wyverns (or, really, anything to do with us) gets changed is if pvp’ers complain about it.

What saddens me the most is it’s obvious a lot of thought went into the design of the wyverns & how they look…

But next to no effort was, seemingly, put into programming their AI.

Give us back ground targeting please.

I’ve named my fire wyvern ‘Nearsighted’ & my electric wyvern ‘Farsighted’.

Sadly, both are fitting.

Could we maybe get the F2 skill that the enemy electric wyvern mobs seem to have? That sweeping laser? And give it a short stun?

Prophet.1584:

the main problem i can see with the druid is that power builds and healing tend to not mix well.

the staff and the druid traits, imho, should be more of a hybrid set allowing for condition application as well as some power damage. if staff dps stayed where it is and also applied some conditions and CAF also applied conditions while healing allies I think most people would have been happy.

I’d be in favor of adding a burning tick or two at the end of Solar Beam’s last pulse.

As others have probably pointed out, it does blind if you combo on it with a whirl finisher.

Offhand axe, anyone?

OGDeadHead.8326:

Glyphs are fine as pbaoe. Traited version could activate condi cleanse faster though.

And perhaps a wider radius. But you could say that for all the glyphs.

Kodama.6453:

Tragic Positive.9356:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Ele has to press 1 button and 5 targets are on fire and blind. Each target has an 8s CD.

You can have 100 people running over your #1 spam and 100 blinds will be applied on a 12 second cooldown.

That’s what the balance is about.
You’ll usually have only 4 other people in party, but you’ll have 25 other people in WvW. That part of balance had to be taken into consideration making it only fair to be nerfed this way.
Powerful at masses, weaker at solo play. For solo play you’ll usually get Roots for more disruption anyways.

Methinks.

Exactly this. I see the argument by Heimskarl and I can understand it. It seems unfair that the Blinding Ashes blind is aoe. But Lingering Light has a second effect (healing on proc) and like already said the problem here is the sharing. Elementalist can just make himself a blind source with set CD. Druid is able to make any ally around him a blind source, which is much more powerful in large scenarios. And that’s just what makes the balancing difficult.

Honestly hadn’t thought about it from that angle. It makes a lot more sense now.

Eurantien.4632:

I honestly was expecting full pet control to be the elite specialization. Isn’t that sad?

I was expecting our specialization to be elite.

But the recent nerfs took care of that.

(And before anyone asks/accuses, I was in favor of the smokescale’s F2 being the smoke field.)

I named my fire wyvern “Nearsighted” b/c no matter where he is when I hit F2, he always drops the fire field on top of me instead of the mob he was attacking.

Thanks for the update.

Can we talk about Lingering Light’s overkill adjustment now?

Irenio -

Thanks for giving the Smokescale back it’s F2 smoke field. Much appreciated.

Now, can we talk about maybe reducing the ICD on LL’s blind by 2-4 seconds?

I love watching Forum PvP.

+1 to the OP.

This trait really needs to be fixed (note: I said ‘fixed’, not nerfed).

Awesome to see this get changed back to a good utility we can use.

It’s good to see that they changed this back to the smoke field.

Almost gives me hope again.

Tragic Positive.9356:

oshilator.4681:

mistsim.2748:

kevvy.5081:

mistsim.2748:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

This is the main reason I wanted Smoke Cloud on the F2.

why? just get a thief.

Could say the same thing to you. Want DPS and shadowstep to your dying target to down them? Just get a Thief. Why play Ranger for that?

the Smoke Assault F2 is just more user-friendly. druids right now don’t need more utility. they need more damage if anything.

I’m beginning to doubt you’ve even played Druid.

Not being a brain-storming type doesn’t mean he wasn’t playing one.
… But you got a point. Druid is currently the best unique-DPS buffing aspect in the game.

Spotter (7,5% crit), Frost Spirit (7,5% Raw Damage), Glyph of Empowerment, CAF 15% boosting and out of CAF Verdant Etching glyph interaction (Heal + Empowerment).
And can bring 25 Vuln.

There’s nothing on par with it, yet. Argument of “druid needs more dps” is not really correct.
A PvP cleric BM is something completely different. That’s what I’m currently playing around where burst timing is crucial. That’s my preference.
If I had smoke field I’d be playing much more interesting hybrid s/wh + shortbow blinder. That would be amazing, I have to admit. It’s a pity I haven’t got to play it on live and on beta only.

And that’s the whole point. The smokefield being on the F2 brings a lot more options to the table.

mistsim.2748:

kevvy.5081:

mistsim.2748:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

This is the main reason I wanted Smoke Cloud on the F2.

why? just get a thief.

Could say the same thing to you. Want DPS and shadowstep to your dying target to down them? Just get a Thief. Why play Ranger for that?

the Smoke Assault F2 is just more user-friendly. druids right now don’t need more utility. they need more damage if anything.

I’m beginning to doubt you’ve even played Druid.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Sina.9208:

“General Bug Fixing, Polish, Balance, Performance, Etc.

As we continue to monitor Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ on live, we’ll keep pushing out bug fixes and polish and performance updates. We’ve reached a point where these will come bundled together in larger, less frequent updates as we prepare for the activation of additional expansion features. We’ll also be releasing limited balance updates to fix really key game-breaking issues. Once every quarter, we’ll release a new, major balance update to shake up the meta for the next quarter."ú

This is from the blog post, aka nothing will change for a LONG while

Sadly, I think the ranger/druid community expected this. But at least they stopped with the day-to-day nerfs.

For now.

mistsim.2748:

oshilator.4681:

mistsim.2748:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

This is the main reason I wanted Smoke Cloud on the F2.

why? just get a thief.

Can you even see past your own nose?

Or do I need to dumb down the reasons (AGAIN) why the smokescale change was inexplicably stupid?

the more you wear out your soft little finger pads, the better for me I guess. it’s obvious that me, and many others, don’t agree with you. so we’re just wasting our time deliberating. obviously the best solution is that our prof gets to select the smokescale variant.

Ah, that’d be a “No” to my first question, then.

And from what I’ve seen, the majority of folks here want the change reverted.