Do you think Druid should get complete rework

[Wondrouswall.7169]

He has a reasonable concern for Cosmic Ray and Seed of Life, especially when it shows in modes such as WvW or any situation where players are constantly on the move.

A larger radius would help, but there's only so much I think Anet would be willing to budge that faster activation times and adjustments to the skills themselves would be a better alternative to resolving the issues.

Here's the skinny: Cosmic Ray takes 0.5s to cast, 0.25s for the beam to travel and heal allies at its destination, and has a 120 radius. Seed of Life is a 0.5s cast time, takes 1s to pop, and is a 180 radius.

In combat, a player without swiftness moves forward at 210 units/sec, and with swiftness (since it's common) moves at 279.3 units/s. Strafing in combat is 180 units/sec without swiftness and 239.4 units/sec with swiftness.

Even if the radius of Cosmic Ray were increased to 150 and Seed of Life was bolstered to 240, Druids would still have to aim ahead and predict where allies move in order to heal them with it.

In the time it takes to cast Cosmic Ray (assuming 150 radius) and for it to land, the player moving forward is already out of range with 157.5 units/sec without swiftness and 209.475 units/sec within that 0.75s time frame. Strafing players without swiftness would be healed but would miss the ones with swiftness by 29.55 units.

For Seed of Life (assuming 240 radius), being 1.5s for the whole she-bang would miss both players moving forward or strafing, with or without swiftness by 75/178.95 units/sec forward and 30/119.1 units/sec strafing, respectively.

The lingering issue of being able to heal moving allies where they are instead of where the player thinks they are going to be would only see a minor improvement. This is one of those cases where speed would benefit over size.

I'll take a 50% cast time reduction on Cosmic Ray with the beam travel sped up to either be instant or with a 0.15s delay at most and Seed of Life to provide the ally heal and condition removal upon creation while leaving the enemy blind at the pop that occurs 1s later. The radius can remain the same on both skills while the effectiveness shoots way up.

Edit: Clarification - examples from the center of the AOE. Otherwise, you're still aiming ahead.

[InsaneQR.7412]

It would be nice if support skills would target allies so you could enable the ground targeting bind option and heal them were the are.If all affects would take affect when they strike, it would be a solved issue IMO for cosmic ray and seed of life.

[jcbroe.4329]

@InsaneQR.7412 said:It would be nice if support skills would target allies so you could enable the ground targeting bind option and heal them were the are.If all affects would take affect when they strike, it would be a solved issue IMO for cosmic ray and seed of life.

Well you can enable a button to hold to snap AoE to target and then target the ally and this works, but it's not exactly a fluid setup.

@Thread;

I really don't know how I feel about Druid until Firebrand gets some of toolkit reduced/removed. If it isn't on ANets radar as needing it, then it's the baseline that other supportive specs need to be brought up to.

[Durzlla.6295]

I think Druid overall is ok, but please for the love of god make our glyphs effects a larger radius, should be like 600 units minimum, that or they need to up the effects potency, I’d much prefer the range though. As they are now they’re very... situational, but if their range was decent they’d be very very useful for utility.

Also, make Avatar states 1 skill function as it does underwater, IE shoots a beam at Target that heals allies and hurts enemies.

[starlinvf.1358]

When you trim it down, the only changes worth suggesting is changing the CA skills to allow its 1 and 2 skills to be more reliable on mobile allies, and maybe tweaking the CA activation and exit requirements more fluid. Right now Druid heavily underutilizes CA skills, because all its really used for now is Buff botting in Raids. If the healing skills would work better on the move, it could finally find a good place in WvW, despite the current dominance of Firebrands. A far as Traits and other skills go, its mostly in a good place.

Most of Druid's suffering comes from Core Ranger. Most of Ranger's support options have been systematically nerfed into static AOEs, whose only remaining redeeming quality is being an additive effect. If any of these skills had to compete with another support build (such as might stacking), they'd lose out completely. It also has a convoluted condition management scheme, and one that it can't even share properly with the group. This is why Stance Share Soulbeast looks so strong by comparison, despite its shared effect barely having 15% uptime.

If they Fix core Ranger's outstanding trait problems, both Especs would become a lot more fluid, and could run more inline support without having to fully specialize in it.

[BadSanta.6527]

I think Druid should get massive buffs and become pet less because as it know pet doesn’t have anything with Druid anyway

[urdriel.8496]

@starlinvf.1358 said:

If they Fix core Ranger's outstanding trait problems, both Especs would become a lot more fluid, and could run more inline support without having to fully specialize in it.

THIS.Traits need a redesign or at least an improvement, they dont have any kind of synergy with Druid or Soulbeast (perhaps there are 2 from beast mastery for SB but thats all, they nerf the benefits of traits when you use Sb mode), actually core Ranger traits are bad when compared to top classes (what a surprise eh?).