Gotejjeken.1267

Immob was that utility from the outset but was more important for the dev's to LARP as Twilight characters, and so now Druid is pure support with a minor amount of Daze ability. Meaning before, you could build into Ancient Seeds even with a support and benefit from the lockdown off the CC's without really worrying about the actual bleed damage it put out (and it still put out decent damage even with low condi damage). Sure, it competed with Lingering Light, but you at least had an option. Now if you turn into Robert Pattison and take Eclipse, you need to build into condi damage for it to basically do anything, and a support obviously isn't going to be building for condition damage. Especially not if that trait also competes with the alac trait which will be taken 99% of the time anyway because of how strong alac is. In addition, Blood Moon took the place of Primal Echoes, so you lose the Daze utility off staff and all the CD's, which include #4 for immob and #5 for wall.

Good points--as kinda alluded to in my original post, there really was no reason to get rid of the serpent strike animation for another generic leap. It just doesn't fix the problem of sword having no defenses (outside the now generic leap evades), being engage only, and pretty easy to get CC'd out of the leaps. Also, hybrid weapons are why I brought up MH dagger, as it is exactly that. And no one uses it because it does literally nothing well. Hybrid is really something I feel they should stay away from, but for Ranger they seem to want to hybridize most of our MH weapons. MH Axe has splitblade and random bleed on winter's bite, otherwise it's pretty much power + utility (chill, weakness, might) weapon. MH dagger also has bleed on it for whatever reason, but again is power + utility (poison, quickness, vuln, and soon to be slow). MH sword falls into this same category of power + utility (poison, cripple). (I don't really consider poison a condition for this purpose even though it damages, because it really shoudn't IMO--whole different discussion there though). Shortbow makes sense as a condi weapon because it has bleed on its auto. As a tangential, this is why it makes way more sense to make Staff a condition weapon so we at least have two dedicated ones. Really, in the end, I'm not sure why sword just doesn't have a shadow step. We're similar to thieves in our role and they already pass out teleports like candy--so just have serpent strike shadow step to enemy and keep the serpent animation. Doesn't really have to have a return component, they could leave it as a flip skill and fix hornet sting so it doesn't suck.

Boxes in general always contain majority trash and everything in WvW is a ticket grind--this is nothing new. What they probably should do is add a random amount of skirmish tickets to the actual boxes so you can open them and not be punished too much if you buy the infusion as you make tickets back by opening the boxes. That's not gambling enough though, so they won't. I just bought the infusion as have the only set of lege armor I want, enough for two confluxes, and 20k to spare...

They couldn't give us rando utterly useless traits like 'Lesser Guard' if you could hide the pet, now could they?

Right, but since this tool is player generated, I figured it'd be a good update for it. As right now if someone chose our guild by looking at that list and the number of flips we do, they may be surprised or frustrated that it isn't a huge guild but essentially a group of 5 carrying havoc. I guess an analogue would be a tool for kills by guild. Such a tool may show a guild with a high number, but they may be on a certain server that likes to SMC/spawn camp and so would not reflect a 'fight guild' or similar that would be expected of such a tool.

You would really miss OG sword--quickeness + the sticking potential it had was unmatched. And as a bonus you could fairly regularly yeet yourself off a cliff.

Is there a way to put active guild size on there too? As I run with DARK (Shattered Darkness) and its usually anywhere from 1-5 of us nightly; to see us that high on the rankings is fun since we are purely havoc. But maybe that's why too because as havoc we're always moving from one obj to another, but I mentioned guild size as we obviously couldn't fend off or even fight a zerg. If there was a way to tell how many guild members were active in WvW it'd help a lot to organize upcoming alliances. Because then you could ally with similar sized guilds or maybe a larger one would take on a smaller one if the smaller one is doing a ton of work in helping win the matchup.

And once they fix F2's so you don't have to spam the crap out of them if you try to use them manually.

Zephyr Speed was always weird with merge/unmerge because it never did line up properly timewise with merging. But yes, it should still be an option. Put it on Oppressive Superiority and give it a 10s ICD not 15s so it actually lines up with the merge. Then you can either get it on swap if you take Eternal Bond or get it on merge with Oppressive Superiority.

Hammer/GS or Hammer/Sw/Wh will be my gotos. For competitive that is.

I have never noticed this until this evening in WvW. Have pet unmerged, mount, dismount--pet is merged with me and if unmerge it will go on CD. That ruins a LOT of openings. Has this been like this a long time? I mainly play Druid so didn't notice it until I started roaming on soulbeast more. Seems like a bug to me, definitely screwing with my flow.

I mean pretty much. You can throw a Siege Turtle bubble up and people run.

Wish it was even that sensical..they are seemingly just reducing the CD of Spike Trap only in PvE and Healing Spring in all mods (thank god). THE PvE trap in Frost Trap isn't getting touched in any mode, apparently neither are the others (i.e. Flame or Viper).

"Getting boon stripped at range is not fun" ~ A Dev

Should have always been just a percentage. As in, you go down and rally then you get a percentage back, just like you do health--if you die, die, then all of it can go. This is with the Natural Mender change in mind where now we get it after intervals--probably the best change to happen to Druid in a long time, as before it was very hard to regain AF at all.

At some level I think we agree--I'm coming from the point of CA is defense/support and really shouldn't have random condis and your point is staff is pure support outside the kiting ability it gives and shouldn't have condis. I think they'd be better on the staff as at least you can use that offensively, trying to use CA offensively is almost always a death sentence unless you are combo'ing into ancient seeds, which now isn't a thing. If staff #3 did burning instead of CA #5, you could use it offensively to burn while also healing, or defensively to just kite / heal (similar to ele's burning speed). For CA #5 you have to go in the middle of whatever and start channeling...sure a lot of times it works but more often than not you get dogpiled by staying in the channel too long. I also don't think we have plenty of other condi weapon options if you are listing torch as an option then saying it stinks. As the only other (pure) one outside that is dagger and both MH and OH have some serious issues...for instance OH they never did bother increasing the evade range after getting rid of OH Training like 6-7 years ago. I'd also argue Druid is directly weaker in condi damage by the sharpening stone nerf alone--yes, it's the same stacks but not the same uptime. These changes continue that but obliterate the bleed build. Anyway, at a base level if I personally want a condi spam build I'll just go condi soulbeast. You get practically every one with way better damage when merged and now better immob thanks to prelude lash. With the addition of slow to MH dagger it really could just be a straight upgrade as the only thing druid had was the immob/bleed build and any way you cut it this general purpose condi they are moving towards is serving no one.

Just for the record, having two separate sets of patch notes between a livestream and the forums is more than a little suspect. Forums should have the complete notes THEN the livestream explaining the rationale behind them. As to the outside it may appear as if devs are just making and showing off rogue changes on the livestream that have yet to be fully cleared for patch notes on the forums. Or that the changes are cleared but the aim is to hide some of them in a VoD to avoid discussion for those who only read the forums. It is also not hyperbole, but across the board I feel this patch may be magnitudes worse than the February 2020 one.

You mean cover condis....right? I have yet to meet these so called 'good players' that agree with all the pigeonholing to support Druid has been getting...sounds more like shilling. Power makes zero sense on Druid, it doesn't have the modifiers for it, nor is it built in any way for it. Even anet with its trashfire balancing realizes this as they're adding rando condis to CA skills, not scaling the power up on it. They in fact didn't scale the power on anything Druid related in these upcoming patch notes, that should tell you something. And no, before it gets brought up, random might generation on a few skills doesn't mean 'power related' as might works with conditions too.

Eclipse should just affect the staff and retain ancient seed functionality, with the change here being ONLY player CC triggers the immob. So no more random immob off ally CC'ing and also no pinwheel of stupidity the new CA form + condis is.

To see a preview, use MH dagger on soulbeast. You can engage, but cannot disengage, have no evades, and have no block like GS. So...you die. From what I understand they're also shortening the leap on #2 (in the name of the deeps), meaning you REALLY have no way of disengaging. Even if you hit into smoke field you're gonna go like 3ft and get AoE CC'd to death.

Right, and no one is going to stand in CA to spam condis. They slapped on 5 different condis as they have no idea what they are doing in terms of balance. I say this unironically, because I really want to see a dev stand in CA form spamming #1 to get some vuln when there tons of better ways on Ranger alone to get vuln. We HAD a very viable condition build in bleed/immob, that got replaced with random condis all in the name of and I quote 'creating a viable DPS build for Druid'. Which...I agree none of this is power druid focused; maybe they meant condi dps, but 1s of burning per pulse on CA #5 for instance isn't going to do nearly as much as ancient seeds did, and you are also rooted while using it. The only component that has power--the ending burst--, they didn't buff... Anyway, #5 is the only viable damage source I can see here. CMC mentions #2 for damage because it has poison, but I'm guessing the poison occurs on seed blast, which means you still have to combo it and you can't stack the poison to get the damage... There is definitely a reason this wasn't showed off on a golem at all, and only the tooltip discussed. EDIT: Also, yes, staff is a MUCH better place to put these random condis. Seriously, vuln on the auto (3 stack every 5 sec or something as even then no one is going to auto to get vuln), AoE poison on #2, burning on #3, and #4 already has immob. If they wanted to go all out then reflect or something on #5 but it's perfect really as-is.

That much is clear. The sharpening stone nerf was a precursor, but removing Ancient Seeds pretty much kills the current iteration. I'll probably have more thoughts later, but at current time as a starter I'll just leave it at there is no Ranger dev and I have little desire to play after this goes live. Anyway, few initial thoughts as pertains to roaming / side-node / dueling... Druid changes are done out of spite and nothing else. Leaving Ancient Seeds aside for a second, nerfing BOTH Primal Echoes and Natural Stride is ridiculous. As a roaming Druid there was an off chance you'd take either because of the Staff CD reduction and the mobility Natural Stride gave, now they both are generic and super hardlined to support. The Ancient Seeds removal is just...awful for lack of a better term. Avatar form is for support and is to enter and leave quickly, as you are essentially a sitting duck. To put condis on the skills is so far out of touch it's unreal. It shows how bad the devs are at their own game as Ancient Seeds was already on a 10/15s CD in competitive modes--so you weren't dying to Ancient Seeds unless caught out. There is zero comparison to other classes because you can't pump condis while in avatar because the point of avatar is not offensive, its defensive. As in, there is zero stab there outside of #5 so if you stay in it long, you will just get CC'd and die. Also, don't know who on the Dev team was into Twilight, but Blood Moon and Eclipse as naming conventions on a Druid...really? Finally, it's clear they have no plan for Untamed, as they don't address its crazy mechanical complexity, and instead of rework it, lie and just replace Fervent Force with utter nonsense. As in, Unleash on weapon swap should be baseline, not a trait--and even with that ability most unleashes are straight up useless, so it is nothing but a nerf. Finally, two leaps on sword is going to do nothing when it still has no defense. You can be mobile all you want, but really easy to just get CC'd out of either leap and die. As, they did zero to up the damage of sword #1 and the animation change a few years ago nuked all its DPS potential. Moving Serpent Strike back to where it was before they changed it last time is the definition of a non-change.

Taking them off auto-attack is a start. Yet another keybind is probably in order here--could even be the same keybind as leash/unleash, but while ambush is up it uses that instead of changing state. Still has the potential to be confusing, but at least won't randomly burn ambushes because auto-attack is on. Then, ambushes should be per weapon and not a global CD; if they have to tie the reset to weapon swap so be it. That is, should be able to do them back to back--guessing reason can't at the moment is raiders running identical sets for weapon swap effects would also get double ambushes. Guess if they tied the ambush CD to per weapon type could prevent that?

Or just put the Stab back on DT...

Tell me you don't play Druid without telling me you don't play Druid. The Natural Mender change wasn't about support Druid at all, it was streamlining how Astral Force is generated. It was a huge handicap to be downed / defeated and have to run back to fights with empty Astral Force, when you can just switch to Soulbeast and be immediately ready to go. But yes, you can give Ranger the aura spam of ele, second health bar of necro, or mobility / stun chains of Warrior and we'll go back to manually generating AF.