Current Problems with Druid

[Bastrii.3047]

So! The changes to Druid have been a mixed bag; the Damage Druid abilities are amazing. It finally feels like you can be an actual threat and not an annoyance with Druid. But on the far side, Alacrity Druid is faltering hard due to how poorly designed it is.

The problems:

Before the spirit rework, Alacrity was maintained by running Spirits. You click a button, and your spirits produce Alacrity. It wasn't a great system. But it worked, and even Core could function as an Alac DPS. Now, Alacrity is tied to Celestial Avatar. This is a horrible change, for these reasons:

1. Celestial Avatar is the Druid's main healing source. By tacking an essential boon onto Celestial Avatar's abilities, you turn the main source of healing into a 100% required to spam ability to upkeep a single boon.

2. To apply Alacrity, you have to waste Astral Power + wait 7.5 seconds. You do not have Glyph of the Stars available for emergency downs during this time, your team is going to suffer damage during critical heal periods, and your healing is going to tank because you are constantly wasting CA just to apply this boon.

3. The cost far outweighs the benefit. Some Streamers have even abandoned Grace of the Land entirely, instead opting to have an Alac DPS in their party while they apply healing for an entire raid... alone. (Check out Mukluk on youtube). This is very poorly designed.

The current rotation for Support/Heal Druid right now, to apply boons, is:

F5 to Enter Celestial Avatar
Spam1-5 immediately to build up Alacrity. These are very important abilities by the way.

Swap Pets constantly to upkeep Spirited Arrival/Clarion Bond. Or just abandon Spirited/Clarion and run literally anything else, because swapping Pets is a TERRIBLE idea when you need certain buffs/abilities available.

Constantly spam your Pet's abilities to upkeep Invigorating Bond. This is required. This is also terrible in several important fights.

Use Stone Spirit off of Cooldown constantly. Despite the fact that this gives Aegis, which is very important on several fights. You need to upkeep protection constantly and Stone Spirit can't do it with 100% Concentration gear. This is why we bring Invigorating Bond to just barely maintain 100% uptime.

Now, compare this to Healer/Support Renegade. Have 2 buttons on autocast and you basically upkeep permanent 20 Might and Alacrity for you and your group. I hate to bring up Renegade, but it's a good example of what Alacrity/Heals should be. Even Firebrand doesn't have this many buttons to spam, but that's my opinion - I hardly played it.

The problem isn't that there's too many buffs to maintain. Really, that's a different conversation. The problem is that there's so many buttons to hit just to apply the buffs, and the rotation is so wild and varied, that even I have issues both maintaining focus on my cooldowns and the damage fields appearing all around me. Now throw in the fact that you have to be on the lookout for downs, you have to be aware of mechanics, and you can start to see the problems cropping up.

There is just too many things to keep an eye on. Too many buttons to hit to do your job.

My proposed changes:

Don't revert the Spirit changes. They're cool, intuitive, and fun to play with. But do make changes to reduce the amount of button spamming. I highly advise making Alacrity a passive effect for Druid, when they use their staff. Staff 2 and 3 is perfect for this. Simply tack the Alacrity trait onto Live Vicariously, the minor trait in Druid. Allies in Astral Wisp's range could gain 1 second of Alacrity (2 at 100% BD) per pulse. That's 6 seconds of Alacrity. That's self sustaining. And allies you pass through and within range of the healing pulse of Ancestral Grace could instantly gain 5 (10) seconds of Alacrity. This is huge for your team, and it also means that you don't have to stress about spamming Alacrity abilities in CA.

Finally, Grace of the Land. I feel as if Grace of the Land could be the final variation of Celestial Avatar. If Eclipse is damage, and Lingering Light is healing, then Grace of the Land could be your defensive option.

Grace of the Land: Your Celestial Avatar abilities are defensively augmented. Convert 20% of your outgoing healing into Barrier generation.

Cosmic Ray: Protection, 2s. (4s)

Seed of Life: Vigor, 4s. (8s)

Lunar Impact: Aegis, 6s. (12s)

Rejuvenating Tides: Resolution, 1s x 5 (2 x 5 = 10s)

Natural Convergence: Resistance, 3s x 3 (6s x 3 = 18s) Final Pulse: Stability, 4s. (8s)

And another change I would recommend making: Druidic Clarity.

Old: Removes 3 conditions from you and nearby allies when you enter Celestial Avatar.

New: Entering Celestial Avatar breaks Stun and removes 3 conditions from you and nearby allies.

[Beddo.1907]

I've player the new Druid and I can say that you can have high CA heal uptime and keep all boons topped off... but it's kitten awful to play. The sheer amount of work to do your job is too high and every mistake piles up, giving you nearly no breathing room. On the other hand when I don't have to bother with alac rotation and pet traits and instead focus on just healing, keeping up boons with 1-9 buttons and some DPS it's perfect. (spirits are in the best mechanical state since a long time in my opinion and should stay that way, +/- some number changes)
The pet trait boons should stay as OPTIONS, but not as a main part of your kit when combined with another skill. If I don't want to use X to keep up a certain boon, I can just use a pet trait instead or the other way around.
And so this is what I think should be changed as of right now:
-Alac not being tied to glyphs, spirits, pet, CA or any other cooldown and instead placed onto something we can do naturally without wasting important cooldowns and forcing X weapon/skills. Not 100% sure about tying it to staff, since it forces you to play it and camp it 24/7 and alac trait being a minor.
-Just buff the boon durations and might stacks to the optimal level with boon duration gear, so you can pick the way you want to provide a certain boon, instead of having to pick both at the same time to keep up.
-Fix the countless pet bugs, like certain pet skills not triggering traits or auto skill not working with traits.

This is the priority in my opinion, since we can't fix everything at once and wait few years for it to be ready.

[Mic.1897]

Healer Alacrity Druid is amazing pls leave it alone

[pengefinchess.8452]

Yup i hated the rework initially but quite like it now… change can be an annoying thing sometimes ;p. We are essentially back to the time of when we druids were might providers and every time CA was up u went into it and used the heal skill for might generation. Yes its abit spammy but with water fields and blasts, were ok for healing, its just a very different playstyle from prepatch.

[Mauti.3520]

No, just no. Please. No.

Alacrity on CA is fine, maybe a little bit too stingy still (Wouldnt go over 1.25 secs baseline though) and the radius a bit too small (360 as on Tempest please?).
Camping staff would make the Alacrity application, uptime and gameplay so much worse and would kill any form of Alacrity DPS Druid right away. Jeeez, you barely have any leeway to ever swap to an offhand weapon set with 100 BD ever, just camp staff.

The proposed buffs to Grace of the Land and Celestial Avatar are ludicrous. What's the point? Making Druid so disgustingly overpowered every other Healing Spec quits?
Lmao 12 seconds baseline Resistance with 0 Boon Duration on Avatar 5 (It pulses 4 times btw, not 3 times)
Barrier has anti synergy with gaining Astral Force btw. So the last thing you want is a barrier topped off party once you leave it.

Pets are fine as a source of boons. One could debate about the boons on pet swap though. pet swap should be reserved for bringing an actual 2nd utility pet or even revive the pet (Yes, they can still die pretty easily some times). Using the Ability of your first pet for boons is good. It's the class mechanic and boons have to come from somwhere. 

Spirits are fine.

Druid is fine. It's better everywhere in the game except at afking.
There could and should be some nudges, some tweaks, bit qol that's it.

And please don't get me started on Mukluk. I like him. But that man has discovered that playing the most broken force multiplier and utility compressed role in the entire game (Heal+Boon) needs trade-offs in it's design and power budget.
And they don't seem to like that and prefer running a completely reactive Healer instead. WHICH IS FINE. The game absolutely completely SUPPORTS this way of squad building.
You don't need to role compress Alacrity or Quickness and tons of boons into your healer, that is OPTIONAL! Always has been. But if you WANT to do that you have to use and give up something. Every boon dps and boon heal in the game has to do that.
Boon DPS sacrifice a good amount of Damage and or potential Utility while Healers have to give up a good amount of Heals and decide between Utility.
We can't have it all.

 

Edited July 27, 2023 by Mauti.3520

[AlexndrTheGreat.8310]

With the trend that Anet has been going, alacrity on CA is how it will be. Getting alacrity away from strictly utilities is probably the healthiest option so we’re allowed to actually take utility for utility. Also not tying it to weapons seems to be how they’re going seeing how Chrono shield is no longer required for their build.

I do think that there could and should be at least 1 utility option that applies the boon. Maybe 1 glyph for Druid, 1 well for Chrono or Specter, stuff like that similar to Firebrand having 1 mantra for quickness. At least have that 1 extra source where if you want to dedicate a single utility to having an extra backup source would be nice.

I also think Ranger and Druid is in a much better spot with group healing outside of CA after this patch. We still have strong AoE heals with the glyph and water spirit, we continue to have traits that do healing from pets and pets themself doing healing that now scales off our healing power, in addition to falling back to staff which is dedicated to heals. I don’t feel like Druid is terribly lacking in terms of group healing outside of CA.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

14 hours ago, Mauti.3520 said:

Camping staff would make the Alacrity application, uptime and gameplay so much worse and would kill any form of Alacrity DPS Druid right away. Jeeez, you barely have any leeway to ever swap to an offhand weapon set with 100 BD ever, just camp staff.

...

Boon DPS sacrifice a good amount of Damage and or potential Utility while Healers have to give up a good amount of Heals and decide between Utility.

We can't have it all.
 

Camping staff accomplishes the 'tradeoff' you are alluding to here, even though anet is intent on getting away from that (see soulbeast being able to swap pets now).  

Basically, if you want to provide alac you would have to camp staff, and thus alac / DPS wouldn't really be a thing.  It probably shouldn't be a thing anyway as being able to heal AND provide boons like alac and / or quickness is what's getting this game in trouble fast.

Healing really should just be its own investment and alac/quickness only on the DPS side of things.  

Since Untamed has quickness, then Soulbeast would get alac (via stance share) and Druid just focus on healing / control.  

Otherwise, alac just needs to pulse while you are in CA like the rev mechanic does.  I don't like that for reasons above, but it's better than using your CA abilities just as alac generators which no amount of spin makes a good idea.  

[SoulTermination.2764]

On 7/26/2023 at 3:59 PM, Bastrii.3047 said:

So! The changes to Druid have been a mixed bag; the Damage Druid abilities are amazing. It finally feels like you can be an actual threat and not an annoyance with Druid. But on the far side, Alacrity Druid is faltering hard due to how poorly designed it is.

The problems:

Before the spirit rework, Alacrity was maintained by running Spirits. You click a button, and your spirits produce Alacrity. It wasn't a great system. But it worked, and even Core could function as an Alac DPS. Now, Alacrity is tied to Celestial Avatar. This is a horrible change, for these reasons:

1. Celestial Avatar is the Druid's main healing source. By tacking an essential boon onto Celestial Avatar's abilities, you turn the main source of healing into a 100% required to spam ability to upkeep a single boon.

2. To apply Alacrity, you have to waste Astral Power + wait 7.5 seconds. You do not have Glyph of the Stars available for emergency downs during this time, your team is going to suffer damage during critical heal periods, and your healing is going to tank because you are constantly wasting CA just to apply this boon.

3. The cost far outweighs the benefit. Some Streamers have even abandoned Grace of the Land entirely, instead opting to have an Alac DPS in their party while they apply healing for an entire raid... alone. (Check out Mukluk on youtube). This is very poorly designed.

The current rotation for Support/Heal Druid right now, to apply boons, is:

F5 to Enter Celestial Avatar
Spam1-5 immediately to build up Alacrity. These are very important abilities by the way.

Swap Pets constantly to upkeep Spirited Arrival/Clarion Bond. Or just abandon Spirited/Clarion and run literally anything else, because swapping Pets is a TERRIBLE idea when you need certain buffs/abilities available.

Constantly spam your Pet's abilities to upkeep Invigorating Bond. This is required. This is also terrible in several important fights.

Use Stone Spirit off of Cooldown constantly. Despite the fact that this gives Aegis, which is very important on several fights. You need to upkeep protection constantly and Stone Spirit can't do it with 100% Concentration gear. This is why we bring Invigorating Bond to just barely maintain 100% uptime.

Now, compare this to Healer/Support Renegade. Have 2 buttons on autocast and you basically upkeep permanent 20 Might and Alacrity for you and your group. I hate to bring up Renegade, but it's a good example of what Alacrity/Heals should be. Even Firebrand doesn't have this many buttons to spam, but that's my opinion - I hardly played it.

The problem isn't that there's too many buffs to maintain. Really, that's a different conversation. The problem is that there's so many buttons to hit just to apply the buffs, and the rotation is so wild and varied, that even I have issues both maintaining focus on my cooldowns and the damage fields appearing all around me. Now throw in the fact that you have to be on the lookout for downs, you have to be aware of mechanics, and you can start to see the problems cropping up.

There is just too many things to keep an eye on. Too many buttons to hit to do your job.

This precisely is why I now loathe my druid, which sucks because I used to adore it. Alacrity tied to CA means I have to use it every single time it's full instead of when people actually need healing because it's got a kitten-poor duration; the radius is ridiculously small so when people are dodging crap they get out of range and now their duration is even shorter; even with 900+ concentration each application of alacrity is less than 2 seconds so no matter how much I spam my skills I rarely get it over 20 seconds... it feels like a gigantic clusterf*ck. And that's not even getting into all the other boon mess, this is just alacrity. It's awful.

[Sansar.1302]

It is like Alacrity should not exist.

[aetemes.2603]

Lol...you want alacrity base on staff..while chronomancers shield gives freaking might??? The jokes!!!!!