Druid Changes Were Very Bad For Competitive - Let Them Know About It

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

I already wrote all of it in the pvp section. I'll link it here so I don't get reported for double posting:

 

Druid changes are terrible.

Let them know how you feel.

Edited June 27, 2023 by Trevor Boyer.6524

[Aylpse.6280]

-deleted-

Edited June 24, 2023 by Aylpse.6280

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

6 hours ago, Aylpse.6280 said:

Honestly worried about a few things on the PvE end the more I overthink it. Loss of Primal Echos and Ancient Seeds is going to take away a lot of break bar power from Druid. Natural Stride was nice to help heal when people were moving. I also feel like "Blood Moon" doesn't fit thematically. Sword changes are worrisome, I'll have to see how it goes. It will be nice to finally dump spirits, they were very clunky and healing spring is looking like a very nice replacement.

Overthinking it is.

 

Blood Moon retains the daze on entry to Celestial Avatar, the only loss is on swapping to staff. You're entering CA frequently enough to where this basically does not matter. Ancient Seeds does not help enough with breakbars in pve (especially with large bosses that can ignore the immob of the root) to really matter either, and Eclipse provides Druid with another damage option that people have been wanting for Druid. You also gain more CC on CA3 with eclipse.

 

In the SnowCrows Help Desk discord, a public discord for asking questions and making suggestions about the site or builds, the question "what does DPS druid bench?" is asked frequently enough to where I know the answer without asking the question myself ever- around 29k, depending on damage variance. The introduction of DPS traits for druid us a welcome addition, with 1 slightly reworked trait, 1 underused trait, and 1 noobstomper trait being changed for them. The losses are so extremely minimal it does not matter.

 

How does Natural Stride help heal while people are moving? It's not like CA 1, 2, and 3 are 1,200 range or anything. You'd be faster than them without swiftness, it doesn't help or hurt your healing capabilities at all.

 

Again, how are the sword changes worrisome? The weapon is becoming way more usable across modes and might finally have some bite to it. They didn't want to buff it in pvp because of the evade frames and it is extremely bad in pve, so the changes overall help the weapon in the long term, even if the numbers aren't quite right in whatever mode.

[enkeny.6937]

I'm happy with the changes. Not the best, but the ideas are good.

So I'm a PvE player. We will see the numbers later. 

Spirits: still no uproot 😞 

When the spirits die at the wrong time can be disturbing, so this looks like a good change.

Dps traits:

-blood moon: 8 sec cd for 8 sec bleeding. Maybe in pve the numbers will be different. Hope bleeding dont use the cd.

-Nature balance is better. The speed boost is nothing in pve, you have swiftness. Duration is a bit short, but it is a master trait. Hope they will switch it with eclipse.

-eclipse: again, numbers may be different in pve, maybe conditions too. I don't think it is grandmaster level. Basicly we have a 3rd weapon slot now. Do we need 3 weapon set? For condition option we have short bow, axe, torch or dagger. Bonfire cd is long so maybe...

Condition alacrity druid will be hard for dps and alacrity rotation. It has the dps boost trait but not the damage trait. Lowering the dps by forcing the use of avatar force, not giving the condition with it, I don't like it. 

Soulbeast will be better for condi dps. Now with spike trap upgrade.

Also nice that we can drop nature magic if we want to. (Like using quick draw for pushing)

Btw nature magic changes are very nice for druid too. More sustain heal, moderate heal with grandmaster trait. Lesser guard on pet switch is bad in my opinion. Well lesser mean lower damage for pet maybe. But the problem: we will first heal the people that the pet absorbed the damage and after that, maybe we can heal the pet. Or using healing skill, it will heal the pet directly.

[Soilder.3607]

9 hours ago, enkeny.6937 said:

Btw nature magic changes are very nice for druid too. More sustain heal, moderate heal with grandmaster trait. Lesser guard on pet switch is bad in my opinion. Well lesser mean lower damage for pet maybe. But the problem: we will first heal the people that the pet absorbed the damage and after that, maybe we can heal the pet. Or using healing skill, it will heal the pet directly.

So the changes to Protective Ward that now cause it to grant Lesser Guard is actually a net buff because the damage reduction stacks with protection. The protection that Protective Ward used to give is being moved to Invigorating Bond and is going to affect allies instead of only affecting the Ranger like before. So during encounters where you are playing Heal Druid and can expect a big spike of damage to occur you can swap pets to grant Lesser Guard and then use an ability to grant protection (glyphs, stone spirit, or rely on a teammate), giving your party 66% damage reduction. That will allow a skilled druid to keep his team alive more effectively.

[RainbowTurtle.3542]

11 minutes ago, Soilder.3607 said:

So the changes to Protective Ward that now cause it to grant Lesser Guard is actually a net buff because the damage reduction stacks with protection. The protection that Protective Ward used to give is being moved to Invigorating Bond and is going to affect allies instead of only affecting the Ranger like before. So during encounters where you are playing Heal Druid and can expect a big spike of damage to occur you can swap pets to grant Lesser Guard and then use an ability to grant protection (glyphs, stone spirit, or rely on a teammate), giving your party 66% damage reduction. That will allow a skilled druid to keep his team alive more effectively.

Or just run Invigorating Bond for the (now using the ranger's healing power) healing, vigor, and (potentially) keeping protection up without a utility slot.

[Arheundel.6451]

2 hours ago, Soilder.3607 said:

So the changes to Protective Ward that now cause it to grant Lesser Guard is actually a net buff because the damage reduction stacks with protection. The protection that Protective Ward used to give is being moved to Invigorating Bond and is going to affect allies instead of only affecting the Ranger like before. So during encounters where you are playing Heal Druid and can expect a big spike of damage to occur you can swap pets to grant Lesser Guard and then use an ability to grant protection (glyphs, stone spirit, or rely on a teammate), giving your party 66% damage reduction. That will allow a skilled druid to keep his team alive more effectively.

Just to let you know that damage reduction stacks multiplicatively not in addition, so no it's not 66& dmg reduction

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

23 hours ago, enkeny.6937 said:

I'm happy with the changes. Not the best, but the ideas are good.

So I'm a PvE player. We will see the numbers later. 

Spirits: still no uproot 😞 

When the spirits die at the wrong time can be disturbing, so this looks like a good change.

Dps traits:

-blood moon: 8 sec cd for 8 sec bleeding. Maybe in pve the numbers will be different. Hope bleeding dont use the cd.

-Nature balance is better. The speed boost is nothing in pve, you have swiftness. Duration is a bit short, but it is a master trait. Hope they will switch it with eclipse.

-eclipse: again, numbers may be different in pve, maybe conditions too. I don't think it is grandmaster level. Basicly we have a 3rd weapon slot now. Do we need 3 weapon set? For condition option we have short bow, axe, torch or dagger. Bonfire cd is long so maybe...

Condition alacrity druid will be hard for dps and alacrity rotation. It has the dps boost trait but not the damage trait. Lowering the dps by forcing the use of avatar force, not giving the condition with it, I don't like it. 

Soulbeast will be better for condi dps. Now with spike trap upgrade.

Also nice that we can drop nature magic if we want to. (Like using quick draw for pushing)

Btw nature magic changes are very nice for druid too. More sustain heal, moderate heal with grandmaster trait. Lesser guard on pet switch is bad in my opinion. Well lesser mean lower damage for pet maybe. But the problem: we will first heal the people that the pet absorbed the damage and after that, maybe we can heal the pet. Or using healing skill, it will heal the pet directly.

How do you know about the 8 sec ICD on blood moon?? This wasn't mentioned in the livestream 

[LughLongArm.5460]

1 hour ago, WhoWantsAHug.3186 said:

How do you know about the 8 sec ICD on blood moon?? This wasn't mentioned in the livestream 

22:14 mark

[Gotejjeken.1267]

Druid got nerfed, there is no real way to spin that. 

Blood Moon dmg output cannot match Ancient Seeds and we obviously lose the immob there. Even if it retains the Daze, still bad because now have to blow potentially two defensive mechanisms (swap to staff for kiting then CA for daze) instead of just swapping.  Also lose the staff CD reduction which is inexcusable.

Eclipse is just a bad skill all around, ranger NEVER builds into burning dmg, only builds poison for select PvE builds and only builds bleeding for competitive, which that doesn't help.  

Alacrity on CA seems great until you realize it hard locked alac to Druid.  The compensation on spirits doesn't seem to be enough, they seem to be where banners are right now.  

What they really did was buff Nature Magic and so there will most likely be some core builds running around that got way better.  

Quickness on Untamed is fine, probably will see the current super speed builds in competitive integrate it and become better since the other two GMs are pretty trash.  

[Roadkizzle.2157]

I am skeptical if the Druid will be a better Condi fighter than it was before the patch. But I don't think it's accurate comparing the addition of Blood Moon to Ancient Seed because they aren't filling the same slot. 

The question is if Blood Moon AND Eclipse will be better than Ancient Seed...

I was skeptical if it would be and I thought it would have been better for a Condi Druid to keep Ancient Seed but to build on it. I have thought more about it. I still don't really like the route they took but I think the thought process was to tie the DPS more into the Druid mechanics...

Why should people play a Druid for it's condi DPS when they could just play Soulbeast or Untamed if they're not using the druid mechanics... But I think the real reason they got rid of Ancient Seeds is because CMC was kited by a Druid in game.

I am skeptical this will work well because anytime you spend in CA you won't have access to your weapon skills and I don't know if Eclipse will provide enough stacks to really justify that.

But I think it would have been more interesting if it was viewed as an inversion of CA. Remove the healing from the CA skills and change them into providing a lot of Condi damage. Make CA a higher DPS phase than other classes balanced by it's a limited time transformation.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

What I'm really interested in is the Untamed Quickness. I think you'll be able to swap and maintain Quickness without messing up DPS rotations so you should be able to do DPS to the level that's not too far from FS.

Unleashed Ambushes get a lot of damage buff.

Then Nature Magic looks like it should be able to provide a lot of support more or less passively without taking to much away from damage.

[enkeny.6937]

2 hours ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

What I'm really interested in is the Untamed Quickness. I think you'll be able to swap and maintain Quickness without messing up DPS rotations so you should be able to do DPS to the level that's not too far from FS.

Unleashed Ambushes get a lot of damage buff.

Then Nature Magic looks like it should be able to provide a lot of support more or less passively without taking to much away from damage.

if we get 3 sec quickness (6 sec with boon duration) then we are fine, any more will give us option to lower boon duration or easier rotation. But for other boons.... we have fury! and some might maybe... so alac healers do the others too, please! 

[enkeny.6937]

4 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Also lose the staff CD reduction which is inexcusable.

After removing the skill cd reduction traits, weapon skill cdr will be the next. It is not the problem, the problem is staff cd changes do not happens. Also I hope for some staff rework too. (place some condition damage skills on it please) 

4 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Eclipse is just a bad skill all around, ranger NEVER builds into burning dmg, only builds poison for select PvE builds and only builds bleeding for competitive, which that doesn't help.  

Historically we used torch a lot! Even with dagger buffed, torch were dominant more for damage. But yes, we have bonus for bleeding and poison, but not for burning. 
Also there are build for bleeding only for PvE rangers.

4 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Alacrity on CA seems great until you realize it hard locked alac to Druid.

That was asked by rangers. They had to do this to give options for quickness. 
alacrity soulbeast didn't worked. We knew that Fervent force rework will kill alacrity untamed too. So the lock the alacrity to druid is not a big problem, especially if we can do alac heal, alac dps, quickness dps, (heal quickness don't looks too good at the moment, but not impossible. Most likely meta fans will kick you for it 😛 ).
 

Edited June 26, 2023 by enkeny.6937

[enkeny.6937]

2 hours ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

Why should people play a Druid for it's condi DPS when they could just play Soulbeast or Untamed if they're not using the druid mechanics...

2 reason: there are people, who think (at the moment) only druid can give alacrity (as a ranger) so they do condi alac druids. 
A more valid version is because they want to use glyph, do a full bleeding build. 

So after the patch, I think full condition druid will be inferior to condition soulbeast. But for max potential, soulbeast needs party.
Druid also has a condition alacrity option. And you can't use eclipse for that build... 

2 hours ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

I am skeptical this will work well because anytime you spend in CA you won't have access to your weapon skills and I don't know if Eclipse will provide enough stacks to really justify that.

Let's ask condi necromancers about shrouds and damage. but for eclipse, you just enter avatar form, do a 5sec rotation, exit, so it will max nature's balance buff. most likely a #5, #3, spamming #2 or if quick draw is used start the spamming after #5 finished and do a second #5. still need to see the numbers but this is my best bet.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

3 hours ago, enkeny.6937 said:

if we get 3 sec quickness (6 sec with boon duration) then we are fine, any more will give us option to lower boon duration or easier rotation. But for other boons.... we have fury! and some might maybe... so alac healers do the others too, please! 

Along with Quickness it will be possible to:

Provide permanent Protection if Invigorating Bond gives high enough duration you can give permanent Protection and healing just by using Beast skills. There are some for 6 seconds and some for 12 seconds.

Plus with Nature Magic you'll be able to provide 100% Regen and it'll be 25% improved and heal when applied. Plus Fury. You'll be healing when Regen is applied, when Beast Skills are used, and more.

That'll just be adding in Beast Skills and Warhorn Skills with the normal skills and Unleashed Ambushes.

I haven't really looked into which Utility skills because I don't know how the Spirits will work.

[Dadnir.5038]

13 hours ago, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

I am skeptical if the Druid will be a better Condi fighter than it was before the patch.

The truth is that it's how most rework in GW2 goes. They change a bunch of things which will most likely lead to a result that will be neither better nor plainly worse than what you had before. The only difference is that it will temporarily interest the playerbase in some things that were otherwise ignored. 

The idea behind the druid rework look similar to the rework they did to necromancer's death magic years ago.

The old death magic offered short window of strong damage reduction and ended up with long window of medium amount of damage reduction (I mean, necromancer got some access to protection and lost 10% damage reduction against poisoned foes and 20% damage reduction that were stackable with protection. Even in term of toughness the new death magic is at loss against the old one in competitive modes). Yet, now death magic is no longer seen as a useless traitline.

This patch bring similar change to the druid in the sense that druid lose a strong single source of bleed to a few sources of conditions while in celestial avatar. It will most likely lead to a loss of burst potential but a more consistent condition pressure. The true boon of the change is that druid will be able to apply damaging conditions reliably while in celestial avatar. Hopefully, after a few month, people will see druid traitline as a good condition damage traitline despite some losses in this patch.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

On 6/25/2023 at 5:42 PM, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

The question is if Blood Moon AND Eclipse will be better than Ancient Seed...

They won't be.

As I've well laid out & explained in this thread already, the Ancient Seeds is not just an immob, it's a root. This is very important to note because between the Entangle root and the Ancient Seeds root, this is what keeps aggressive builds off you. Also, the pulse damage off Ancient Seeds is large and it is bleed damage, which is what Druid stats into. The root also serves to allow the Druid alleviate from opponent's aggression so it has time to land a burst instead of kite.

What is imporant about the root, is that it isn't a hard CC and things with massive stab output can't stop it from working. Druid vs. Ele as example, that extra Daze they are adding isn't going to do anything vs. an Ele with nearly perma stab. What the Druid needs vs. these kinds of opponents, is to stop them up with immobs and in a root, which can allow the Ranger to peel or setup a burst. Without that 20s CD Ancient Seeds root, Condi Ranger variants are going fall out of viability.

Arenanet made poor decision making when removing Ancient Seeds. These decisions were made by someone who clearly doesn't play the class. The idea of these changes were good, but the execution was awful. What Druid really needed, was just to add those condis baseline into CA Kit without needing to select a trait to use them, and just keep Ancient Seeds the way it was.

Druid will most certainly be a worse spot than it was before this patch.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

21 hours ago, enkeny.6937 said:

Historically we used torch a lot! Even with dagger buffed, torch were dominant more for damage

Burn damage output in competitive deals no where near the amount of damage that stating for bleeding does. Not even close.

[Peter.3901]

On 6/25/2023 at 6:42 PM, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

The question is if Blood Moon AND Eclipse will be better than Ancient Seed...

Any changes to ranger is for nerf, keep this in mind, Anet just don't want to see rangers, they could remove any other stuff than Ancient Seed, but they choose the only usefull one, guess why.

They want to destroy rangers to the engineer level where you can only use 2 builds and still get nerfed to oblivion.

Edited June 27, 2023 by Peter.3901

[Acyk.9671]

11 hours ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

They won't be.

As I've well laid out & explained in this thread already, the Ancient Seeds is not just an immob, it's a root. This is very important to note because between the Entangle root and the Ancient Seeds root, this is what keeps aggressive builds off you. Also, the pulse damage off Ancient Seeds is large and it is bleed damage, which is what Druid stats into. The root also serves to allow the Druid alleviate from opponent's aggression so it has time to land a burst instead of kite.

What is imporant about the root, is that it isn't a hard CC and things with massive stab output can't stop it from working. Druid vs. Ele as example, that extra Daze they are adding isn't going to do anything vs. an Ele with nearly perma stab. What the Druid needs vs. these kinds of opponents, is to stop them up with immobs and in a root, which can allow the Ranger to peel or setup a burst. Without that 20s CD Ancient Seeds root, Condi Ranger variants are going fall out of viability.

Arenanet made poor decision making when removing Ancient Seeds. These decisions were made by someone who clearly doesn't play the class. The idea of these changes were good, but the execution was awful. What Druid really needed, was just to add those condis baseline into CA Kit without needing to select a trait to use them, and just keep Ancient Seeds the way it was.

Druid will most certainly be a worse spot than it was before this patch.

Since when stab removes or ignores immob?? resistance does, not stab to my knowledge

[enkeny.6937]

9 hours ago, Peter.3901 said:

they could remove any other stuff than Ancient Seed, but they choose the only usefull one, guess why.

Oh, so nature's stride, primal echoes didn't get removed! Or you are just too focused on ancient seed nerf, that you can't realize, that the whole bottom line changed. 

Was the ancient seeds the only 'usefull stuff'? If only 1 thing is good and others are irrelevant, that is a huge problem. 

[enkeny.6937]

On 6/26/2023 at 5:21 AM, Roadkizzle.2157 said:

Along with Quickness it will be possible to:

Provide permanent Protection if Invigorating Bond gives high enough duration you can give permanent Protection and healing just by using Beast skills. There are some for 6 seconds and some for 12 seconds.

Plus with Nature Magic you'll be able to provide 100% Regen and it'll be 25% improved and heal when applied. Plus Fury. You'll be healing when Regen is applied, when Beast Skills are used, and more.

That'll just be adding in Beast Skills and Warhorn Skills with the normal skills and Unleashed Ambushes.

I haven't really looked into which Utility skills because I don't know how the Spirits will work.

Invigorating Bond has 20 sec cd. I don't think it will give 10+ sec protection. stone spirit may help.

If you are a quick dps, don't provide regen. your regen is inferior to the healers, but still use the slots for it, so if you spam regen, it has a chance, that the healers regen is lost because of it. 

warhorn also a dps loss. So let's try focusing damage and quick uptime only. 

We a aegis with spirit and white tiger, not permanent, but at least 2 source.

[Roadkizzle.2157]

3 hours ago, enkeny.6937 said:

Invigorating Bond has 20 sec cd. I don't think it will give 10+ sec protection. stone spirit may help.

If you are a quick dps, don't provide regen. your regen is inferior to the healers, but still use the slots for it, so if you spam regen, it has a chance, that the healers regen is lost because of it. 

warhorn also a dps loss. So let's try focusing damage and quick uptime only. 

We a aegis with spirit and white tiger, not permanent, but at least 2 source.

Yes. It would have definitely required analysis to determine how much DPS to give up for Concentration and Healing Power.

But thank you for pointing out the Cooldown on Invigorating Bond. That I think will completely kill any chance of this being an idea worth pursuing.

[kawaiiboy.2685]

PvE only: CMC you made heal support druid worst on June 27 patch the previous state of heal druid is more fluid and easy than June 27 patch. From spamming spirits to spamming celestial avatar that is worst because now we can't use celestial avatar dedicatedly for healing or emergency healing. Firebrand's tomes = celestial avatar see the connection? I'd say revert back the changes on spirits and nature's vengeance druid is more easy to play that way. 

Edited June 27, 2023 by kawaiiboy.2685