Alac tied to CA issue

[Acheron.1580]

One huge problem I see coming up is that when downed, the druid loses all CA bar. Given just unlucky timing, you could end up getting stuck in a loop of struggling to get your avatar back up, which is going to be a bit of an uphill when your alac drops.

[Beddo.1907]

I doubt there will be that big of a downtime with all of small healing we will have. Just Regen with WH trait should get back CA in a reasonable time. (Also there might be alac overtime? Didn't see any numbers yet.)

Another thing: it's hard to defend getting punished for being downed.

[Acheron.1580]

I mean yea ideally you just don't go down but stuff happens. I'm just saying that for a mechanic that is important for your buff uptime it's lame that you lose your bar at all

[Gotejjeken.1267]

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.  

[enkeny.6937]

Well, if you gives alacrity you should be heal alac, you should be able heal enough to restore you health and AF.
Because you use grace of the land, you should be in celestial form time to time, so you will loose weapon skills then. You can't use eclipse so you have no direct condition damage from CA skills. Blood moon has 8 sec cd, so you only apply 1-2 stack of bleeding at full up-time, and I'm not sure nature's balance will will give use a decent damage too. So condition alacrity build is.... not looking good. Sadly. 

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

Just now, enkeny.6937 said:

Well, if you gives alacrity you should be heal alac, you should be able heal enough to restore you health and AF.
Because you use grace of the land, you should be in celestial form time to time, so you will loose weapon skills then. You can't use eclipse so you have no direct condition damage from CA skills. Blood moon has 8 sec cd, so you only apply 1-2 stack of bleeding at full up-time, and I'm not sure nature's balance will will give use a decent damage too. So condition alacrity build is.... not looking good. Sadly. 

They aren't complaining about the fact that you should be using CA. They're saying that if you go downstate, you end up losing your energy and can end up being in a cycle of revive-downstate-revive-repeat where you might be able to bring things back but alacrity just tanks.

[enkeny.6937]

3 minutes ago, RainbowTurtle.3542 said:

They aren't complaining about the fact that you should be using CA. They're saying that if you go downstate, you end up losing your energy and can end up being in a cycle of revive-downstate-revive-repeat where you might be able to bring things back but alacrity just tanks.

 

5 minutes ago, enkeny.6937 said:

you should be able heal enough to restore you health and AF.

I mean, if you are condi alac then this problem may be valid, if this is a problem with a heal alac, they 1) you will be wipe soon, because others also down or 2) your build has some problems, because as a healer, you should be standing. 
We will see the numbers, but we have to leave CA with 30 sec alac on everyone, after 8-10 second we can renew the alac, so going down at that time, we have more then 10 sec to rally and still has time to restore AF. If your staff, regeneration, healing skill, 2 dodge not enough to survive 8 sec as a heal alac, then I think the problem is not that alac is tide to CA. 

So I think the cycle of revive-downstate-revive-repeat should not be a thing as a healer. (and if you play condi alac, and it happens, blame the healer 😛) CA is very potent heal, but hardly the only source of heal.

[shib.1369]

It all depends on how high the baseline alac output is. We know too little to draw any real conclusions.

I do however think your concern is valid.

[enkeny.6937]

5 hours ago, shib.1369 said:

It all depends on how high the baseline alac output is. We know too little to draw any real conclusions.

I do however think your concern is valid.

at the moment it is 1 sec alacrity. This trait was shown on the stream.

[shib.1369]

40 minutes ago, enkeny.6937 said:

at the moment it is 1 sec alacrity. This trait was shown on the stream.

Missed that, thank you!

Then I'm a bit scared 

[Celeste.9135]

This isn't just an issue of downstate = no alac although that is a valid concern. It's also an issue where if the alac uptime is too stingy then Druid will struggle to ever use CA reactively for actual healing which is something I'm worried about. With alac on spirits and might generation so widespread across the party this wasn't ever usually an issue lately with the old GOTL, I'm worried that new alac GOTL will have a "need to spam on cooldown" playstyle much like tempest overloads currently that leads to an unpleasant gameplay loop.

[Flapjackson.1596]

CA won't be used reactively and the loss of healing your spirits means the capacity to generate astral energy will be much lower. Especially in double healer comps that the average group runs. On some fights without damage aura you may not have a lot of incoming damage, which means your might and alac falls off. 

The better your team is at performing and avoiding damage, the worse your capacity to enter CA and give alac will be. These singular traits that give alac are not good ideas and just reinforce how problematic alac/quick are to the game.

[Acheron.1580]

I can't understand how we've been down this road before with revenant having way too little alac or quick duration and requiring near 100% boon duration just to be effective, or with warrior banners after the remake with those abysmal boon uptimes, and then they continue to repeat the same mistakes yet again. These dev's really don't understand this game. They even called Natural Convergence a trait as an example.

So here's my beef. Supposedly Lingering Light reduces the cooldown for getting back into CA form, which almost sounds like it could fix this issue if not for the fact you can't take it with Grace of the Land, and if you are condi alac then too kitten bad because you can't take it, or Eclipse because again you are forced into Grace of the Land. So really what they are saying is you can't do condi alac druid, not possible, and the entire point of the massive nerfs to heal scourge was so that they could give alac, so there's no point even bringing up the idea of a pure healer without alac because same boat. So exactly what is Lingering Light for? Are they hoping natural mender buff is going to carry the weight of needing to be in CA often? Even at 1 second duration I have a hard time believing you can keep it up between CAs, it feels like by the time seed of life even has detonated, the alac is gone before the next one can.

Edit: Maybe Lingering Light is not for PvE. I'm not entirely sure you wouldn't want to provide Alacrity anyways but I guess maybe that was its point?

Edited June 12, 2023 by Acheron.1580
I forgot about pvp/wvw again

[Acheron.1580]

4 hours ago, Flapjackson.1596 said:

CA won't be used reactively and the loss of healing your spirits means the capacity to generate astral energy will be much lower. Especially in double healer comps that the average group runs. On some fights without damage aura you may not have a lot of incoming damage, which means your might and alac falls off. 

The better your team is at performing and avoiding damage, the worse your capacity to enter CA and give alac will be. These singular traits that give alac are not good ideas and just reinforce how problematic alac/quick are to the game.

This is the big issue I have with this patch. All they did was swap forced utilities for forced use of other mechanics that for dps are probably not as significant as for a healer. I believe HB is as strong as it is because you can provide quickness without sacrificing cooldowns that provide stab and aegis so you can actually play smart. 

[Celeste.9135]

18 minutes ago, Acheron.1580 said:

 I believe HB is as strong as it is because you can provide quickness without sacrificing cooldowns that provide stab and aegis so you can actually play smart. 

This is the crux of the issue. It's the problem of shoehorning alac and quickness into builds that were never designed with them in mind in the first place. Firebrand and Renegade in their height got to press their designated quckness and alac buttons while being free to do other things, where Tempest is forced to hit every single overload (except water don't do that) and not be able to reactively attunement swap in order to provide alacrity. Now Druid will share the same bad design with Astral in a way I do not believe will be similar to might on GOTL considering anet's history with these 2 boons. 

37 minutes ago, Acheron.1580 said:

All they did was swap forced utilities for forced use of other mechanics

You've hit another point that is far more widespread an issue across the whole patch as well. The proposal was in my understanding, to improve boon provider gameplay by removing the spam utility skill gameplay loop. However all this patch seems to do is trade one spam for another, across every single class that has been touched. Specter and Druid both relying on their transforms to do so which in my opinion will be far more problematic than spamming utilities, unless sufficient duration of alac is given which as I've said I doubt will be the case. 

If all we're doing is trading spam x for spam y, then what is the point of this change? We gain utiltiy skill freedom while losing profession mechanic freedom? Surely there is a better way.

Another example of this issue would be the change to Invigorating Bond possibly being responsible for Protection uptime (without knowing exactly if a spirit will be able to offset this and the similar previous badly designed rework to Verdant Etching having the same effect on Glyphs). If our pet skills need to be spammed to keep Prot on the sub group then Druid loses access to on demand CC that helps it compete with Mechanist. We may be be spamming our utility skills for boons still instead of using them for their actual mechanical effects with new Spirits ultimately changing nothing and having even less freedom in our gameplay loop. 

Obviously it may not be this bad but without the numbers it's impossible to know and I cannot help but worry. Anyway this is coming from someone who enjoyed Ritualist gameplay from GW1 and I actually liked babysitting my Spirits on Druid so who knows maybe it'll be better but my fear is that the class will be even more spammier with the new design.

Whatever way efficacy ends up being, it feels like this balance team keeps falling into the same mistakes time and time again without understanding the actual issues players have.

[enkeny.6937]

Be more optimistic! (I know, this is the ranger forum, but...)

1) there was a lot of post like: "GotL should provide alacrity!"  we aked it, we got it. Actually, I think it is not a problem (yet)
2) Let us assume that after we leave avatar form, we applied 30 sec alacrity to everyone. we have 8 sec cd on avatar, but still timing a heal is not that hard. if you don't have to heal in this 30 second you can burn for a refresh, If you need to heal like crazy, you don't have to watch alacrity uptime. It is also enough time for some nap time (down state).

3) we have to start the fight in avatar form! - ok that's a problem... 🙂 
4) bit off: condi druid has no role. condi alacrity druid should be a thing - or not for some holes in roles - but for a pure dps, I think soulbeast is far better. cSB got the superior spike trap (if only the cd is reduced) triggering Twice as Vicious with 6 bleedings. 
Ok druid will apply a lot of burn, extra some poison and a bit of bleeding (blood moon is 1 bleeding, 8 sec duration, 8 sec cd! ), plus the multiplier. (5 sec duration ~75% uptime at best if it is not stacked by duration) 

I wish condi druid will be not popular, so they will see this problems and makes some changes after. Like switching eclipse with Natural Balance, increasing duration to 10 sec. your master tier will looks like: apply super speed and stealth or protection or conditions, grand master tier: alacrity access, more CA access, more damage. 

[Beddo.1907]

38 minutes ago, enkeny.6937 said:

2) Let us assume that after we leave avatar form, we applied 30 sec alacrity to everyone. we have 8 sec cd on avatar, but still timing a heal is not that hard. if you don't have to heal in this 30 second you can burn for a refresh, If you need to heal like crazy, you don't have to watch alacrity uptime. It is also enough time for some nap time (down state).

If the duration on stream was before constitution, then one Rejuv tides with cons gives 10s of alac and after that you farm spare duration.

40 minutes ago, enkeny.6937 said:

3) we have to start the fight in avatar form! - ok that's a problem...

Natural mender should resupply the energy for CA and healing shouldn't be too necessary that early.

Condi druid might get a buff if needed, but I doubt it would get alac.

[enkeny.6937]

2 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

If the duration on stream was before constitution, then one Rejuv tides with cons gives 10s of alac and after that you farm spare duration.

Natural Convergence another 10 sec, Seed of Life has no casting time so you can spam during chaneling the other 2. 

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

8 hours ago, Beddo.1907 said:

If the duration on stream was before constitution, then one Rejuv tides with cons gives 10s of alac and after that you farm spare duration.

The duration on stream was shown in the tooltip- 1.25s per pulse. Since this was in the PvP lobby, it's somewhat safe to say it will likely be increased, but even with max concentration at that value one CA4 gives 10s like you said, one CA5 gives 8s (3 pulses then the black hole gives a boon, you can test now with might if you don't believe me), and spamming ca2 for even more during both of these. CA4 and 5 will also be giving might, so you won't be avoiding using these.

For the sake of argument, let's say the pvp value is half the pve value, so 2.5s per skill/pulse, to help along the adps variant. That's 5s with max BD, meaning a whopping 25s of alac with one CA4!

It could easily be a baseline of 1.75-2s though (as 2.5s is a lot with how easy it is to generate), so 3-4s for a still impressive15-20s of alac.

Safe to say alacrity generation itself will probably be fine, but I can see the healing/survivability being a concern. However, this is a good time to learn about Glyph of Unity!

When used in CA, you heal every time... you heal yourself. This also applies with regeneration, and you heal up to 5 targets. You also heal every time you heal someone else through Live Vicariously, meaning more healing when you heal. Basically, this skill is a huge healing increase, since every time you're healed you heal the people you are tethered to (as well as yourself) and every time they're healed you heal yourself. It's a neat little feedback loop almost, and very useful for keeping yourself and others alive.

Without the need for 3 spirits, you can comfortably take this skill in many scenarios, even if you need healing spring. Just be sure to upkeep prot and might, although sun spirit (the spirit gaining might as shown on stream) may not be needed depending on the CA4/5 might values as well as the Invigorating Bond values.

[Flapjackson.1596]

One concern I have with this change is alac application may be fine, but the ease of entering CA will be slowed with our healing spirits and with alac being a priority we will see an increase in situations where CA is not available for emergency healing. 

This will decrease Druids value as a responsive and flexible healer.