Hello again forums, I am back for a moment.
After the complete abandonment of necromancers, I decided to give the new patch a solid look from a druid perspective, and test out the new stuff they got.
Visually, the new forms look nice, the swarm form is sorta removed from the dominant humanoid shape, but it works out.
combat wise, i enjoy being able to stay shapeshifted forever, however i found it frustrating that the spriggan’s ability to utilize it’s external skill (entangling roots) required far more investment than both swarm form and werebear (serpent strike and swipe respectively) as well as it’s reliance on this external interaction so as not to waste skill specializations (since you can’t naturally cast external skills while shapeshifted)
on a related note, although my testing on the swarm form has been minor, considering the new-ness of the form itself, it struck me in such a way that implied it was intended as a secondary form to both spriggan and bear, but can’t be focused enough to adequately support either one. to explain, if i’m building my spriggan for spell power and attunement, most of those stats will be wasted on swarm form, if i build for vines, then i can go for locusts in swarm form, but they’re a less reliable minion type that (for reasons unknown to me) don’t naturally scale from minion stats, and investing in the talents that allow them to scale from minions stats takes you down a completely different branch than the side of the talent tree all their other stuff is on.
likewise if i built for full werebear damage, then i could benefit from the top or bottom branch slightly in swarm form, but now there’s these unsupported locusts existing as a somewhat dominant part of this off-kit.
i like the idea of swapping between shapeshift modes, but swarm form looks to suffer from a jack of all trades handicap. (also it’s just really squishy)
the marginal updates to the spriggan (pet) are neat, but i do miss the feminine model.
also i found it strange that druids seem to be better at pets than beastmasters right now, as their primary pets are about as strong, but the druid also gets to deal damage and constantly spam out secondary temporary pets… seems like a conflict of interests.
that’s all the commentary i have for now, i plan to give it a few more hours tomorrow, then i might report back with any updates in observation.