Druid Overhaul Feedback

+1!!! absoulutly right! although you can do via the vale spirits but this is gated behind thorn totems playstyle…

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You can also proc vale spirits every 5 casts of Spirit Thorns. With how fast you cast them, it procs often enough. Also, with totems you have it up almost the entire time.

Tried out a Bleed Bear and getting into the 70s I did not feel the damage was great. Changed to a cold melee build, but without swipe being able to change to cold like it does to lightning, you waste a lot of stats and just can’t reach higher. It’d be nice if swipe had a node that did both lightning or frost based off your highest melee/spell/etc elemental %.

Spriggan…hmm where to start.

I am doing a bullet hell type build basically utilizing spirit thorns and nodes to proc spirit thorns from totems. It is going well…but I then realized I had a shaman laying around at the same lvl (75ish) and simply added spriggan form and spriggan to my shaman and it out performs it with the exact same gear. Shaman will allow you to abuse the end passive that adds % spell damage per active totem (technically, you can have 9 healing/thorn and use an idol to summon 5 more thorn totems on hit). You also get more adaptive spell damage and other perks from the shaman tree (haste when you summon a totem for example or elemental/physical resistance per totem). It also allows me to add maelstrom to my build for frenzy and more haste all while being in spriggan form the entire time. And, if need be, I can drop ice thorns for avalanche if I need a heavy boss hitting skill.

All in all, Spriggan form seems to scale best with Shaman Mastery imo. Yes, you do lose a ton of crit by not going Druid, but really it’s semantics after you hit 50% when I have far more adaptive spell damage making my attacks hit harder. Plus, with how maelstrom was changed it cleans up most mobs doing 12-20k per hit.

Absolutely love Werebear, its my highest level and most successful build.
However i’m outraged that there isn’t any meaningful synergies or even interactions with companions.
The fact that summoning the Bear as a Werebear doesn’t bring anything new or interesting to the table is a HUGE missed opportunity.
I’m also saddened that the companion abilities are locked away for Werebear as they lack any way to trigger them.

Do you though? Since Swipe is a melee skill, it’s base damage it minuscule (2 phys) & you’ll be gaining all of your damage from your weapon (melee cold from the Ancestral Weaponry passive with a 2h mace & a prefix). You’d be missing out on a few idols that have “on cold hit”, but I think that’s mostly bleed (phys).

So…I’m making a “Llama build” :joy:

I am, in theory, making a health regen > cold damage build with the 2 pc shattered lance set bonus (while dual wielding 2x shattered lance swords). From there, using last bear’s set gloves for the 3% increased health regen per point of strength and a call of the tundra helm since I have one laying around with +4 to warcry. Geared, in theory, I should have over 250 health regen per second (not including spriggan minion for more).

Anyway, it functions but I just can’t get it to work the way I thought it was going to unfortunately.

Good morning developers.
I will present below a series of suggestions that will bring improvements to the Spriggan Form, expanding the possibilities of constructions. Suggestions will be presented from the Spriggan Form skill tree NODES and passives:

DRUID PASSIVE:
Primal shifter- the buff is mediocre. Add mana/rage regen gain for 5 seconds equal to Spriggan’s belt.
Tiger shift – Allow 10 points to be possible.
Reincarnation – useless, switch to a buff for minions like Poison, Bleed, damage, attack and cast speed.

SPRIGGAN TREE
Huntersbane (Bad location. Connect to Creeping Underbrush): Vines can cast and projectile can pierce 100%.
Wonderfull Garden (new node, linked to Creeping Underbrush). Increases the maximum vine limit by 3 for each point. Increases the number of vines summoned by 3 for each point. Maximum 5 points. By allocating 5 points, you summon the maximum number of vines.
Stinging Bramble (bad location, turn on Rose Meadow and allow users to choose Damage over time builds).
poIson-bleed-duration (New node, link to Stiunging Bramble and Nightshade): Increases bleed and poison duration
Bulb Growth: Add: Whenever an enemy attacks you you have a chance to gain 1 Rage: 33% per point.
Barbed Thicktet: Anyone with thornshield deal inc. damage and chance to bleed (remove restriction for ally).
REMOVE the entire totem part as it is not consistent with the Spriggan. Instead, add a skill that uses Entangling root tree. With poison, bleed, ice, etc.

Yeah,I find that quite a lot. Welcome to the club of perpetual disappointment, it’s a good preparation for parenthood.

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I like Werebear but with a caveat.
The animations and the model look nice, better than hilarious looking D4 Werebear or WereRat model.
But it needs fine tuning for Maul and Rampage.
Maul = change how the mini leaps targeting work (so it misses enemies less) and maybe add a passive which makes you slam on place without jumping around.

Rampage = re-introduce the gutted direction change while channeling

General note: Bear main slam ‘Maul’ needs IMO better dmg scaling to make it attractive vs Earthquake. Either increase base scaling or introduce/rework nodes which give nice flat or more damage depending on weapon type or similar.

Spriggan:
Model looks okayish/not great but animations could get a rework.

Swarmblade:
Rework model and animations. It does not look like a Druid form ,where you transform from human, it is just pooof and you’re a floating bug.

Disregard my entire thing about hotbars. I must have been having a fever dream, it does save the forms’ bars separately today. Glad some other people are feeling some hybrid shenanigans are fun.

I am an avid swarmblade main now and love the armblade builds, both poison and frostbite are extremely strong with giving a whole heap of skill expression to take those builds to the deep endgame. However, it’s apparent to almost everyone who has tried it that the locust stuff really falls short in power and build cohesion. Over half the tree is dedicated towards the locust and swarmstrike interactions but the nodes are heavily diluted and spread far apart on the tree itself making it increasingly impossible to make builds viable in the endgame.

I think another issues with the swarmblade tree is just how many 5 point nodes there are. It’s hard enough to have powerful 5 point nodes forcing your hand in regular trees, let alone in a transform that has to sink points into just being able to have other skills worth specialising (maelstrom, tornado etc).

It’s also significantly harder to stay in form than the other two. For the armblade builds you effectively only have a crit set up (which is antithetical to being heavily ailment focused) or using eterras path + garden of rage set up. Both are heavy investments in your gearing and you can still get popped out of form, especially in the monoliths with CSA modifiers or no rare enemies.

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Pass on the parenthood thing.

Tho I do remember discussions about avoiding builds made by you and someone else a few months ago. For sanity.

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Played all the forms to some degree, and I think the main glaring issue for me is that werebear has taken over the role that spriggan should have had, which is the nature summoner.

I think my first successful build was a “Big vine slapper” sprig build before the rework way back when I first started playing, and it feels kinda sad that now the most popular vine build is werebear to summon vines. Getting to summon 6 vines in a single maul, that also throws out entangling roots to buff them to the moon vs having to self cast them and then do some weird totem summon dance to try and get out entangling roots on sprig. Sprig feels like it has fallen to the wayside as a subform you just spec to either generate rage, or spec to get its skills then proc the vines any other way then being stuck in slow clunky sprig form.

Im also pretty bummed that the locust stuff is so underpowered, I really wanted to live the dream of having a swarm of pissed off bees attacking for me, but while their damage can be made passable, in my experience they just die to anything that looks at them wrong.

All in all werebear feels like an extremely fun character that synergizes and borrows from all the other forms but the same is not given to the other two. They are extremely rigid in how they can be played and it feels bad.

I’ll try to sum up my thoughts on the druid sofar.

Werebear: haven’t tried it yet

Spriggan form:
I like: the looks, spirit thorns, the vines and shield, the theme.
I don’t like: healing totem feels like a shaman skill not a druid one. Maybe turn the visual into a blossoming flower or something.
Getting 12 vines up takes too long
Please fix that in small spaces you only get 1 or 2 vines/totems, let them be stacked on eachother if there is not enough space, every cast should always give the max amount.

Swarmblade:
I really like this form, it’s the first thing I tried and what kept me invested. The tree gives interesting options with the options for maelstrom and tornado.
I like: the way it looks, the closing distances with the dive skill, the feel of a speedy melee slasher
I don’t like: don’t know if you noticed but the blades on the arms, the sharp side, is downwards/to the back but the slashing animation moves upwards/forward so the swarmblade attacks with the blunt side of the arm instead of the blade. It does damage, numbers pop up so all fine but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Like many have already stated the hive mechanic is so clunky. Get rid of the hive, it slows the combat down. Let the swarmblade call upon its locust, something like a ramp up skill that over time summons more locust, first sec 3 next sec 6 more appear etc. which scales with the current hive placement speed node on the tree to speed up the process. This would also solve the awefulness of having hives behind you and locust being already dead before they reach the second or third pack you’re already on. Let the call for locusts always have them appear near you.
The locusts, ok this annoys me to no end. Why do they have a duration? They are tiny squishy minions already and still they die for no reason after a duration. At the very least give a node to increase their live duration or let the duration scale with minion health or a node that removes the duration but lowers the amount of them to prevent too many minions on the screen or put a max cap on them. It’s difficult to multi-form using locust, because they are useful for at most 1 pack of enemies and it leaves so little room to do anything in the other form before having to go back to swarmblade for new locusts.
The placement of the big locust note feels to be in the wrong spot. When going for a cold locust version it’s nearly impossible to also get the big locust node.

Multi-form feedback:
I like: the way you’ve implemented it is quite good, it’s easy to change forms it works well
I don’t like: please remove the cooldown on changing forms, it serves no purpose it only frustrates. I want to throw down 12 vines, 6 totems in spriggan form go into swarmblade form, get the locust out and go back to spriggan form to shoot some spirit thorns before having to put new vines and totems down, this is difficult because you’re stuck in swarmblade form too long.

Hope this helps.

I am sadly a bit disappointed. I was thrilled by the multi-form prospect, but it just doesn’t deliver. The only synergy that I can find is maelstrom, otherwise there is nothing to bind the forms together, nor is there any common focus available that benefits all forms (or 2 forms if you go melee bear / swarm) in a meaningful way. Maybe summoning / minion is better, I haven’t tried that.

What’s the point of swipe/serpent strike with multi-form if you can only use it in one shape? How exactly will you be able to leverage poison builds in bear form if you use serpent strike? Why use Tornado with Swarm if it’s wasted as soon as you go bear or spriggan?
Why can bear scale with lightning only while swarm/spriggan can scale with cold only?
Why can bear swap in swipe, warcry, entangling roots and fury leap while swarm gets thorn totem, serpent strike, and tornado? How did you guys build your multi-forms when you designed this system?

The system as you have built it just doesn’t value multi-form. The only nice synergy is the shapeshifter subtree in the druid passives, and that one is a bit weak for the points and opportunity cost. The skill synergies, like bleed bear to swarm storm, are quite frankly really clunky and not even close to good enough to compete with single forms (EQ bear comes to mind).

Oh, and maelstrom… The investment needed for that one to take off is INSANE, and the maelstrom tree is too expensive for limited clout on its own already. Putting points into bear maelstrom, then swarm maelstrom, adding maelstrom idols, adding extra mana for maelstrom and also reducing maelstrom cost, adding maelstrom duration. It’s a lot just to get started and it also locks you into hammering the movement skill every 0.2 seconds and switching forms in between. If you want that to be the common denominator you need to add some serious boosts/alternate use cases to the spell in both the form trees and the maelstrom tree.

Note: I have been trying to make a fun bear / swarm build that doesn’t suck. I am an average player, not an expert.

EDIT: And also, the bear + vines from spriggan tree is not a good fit. The vine stuff (or just rage regen in some other form) should either go into the bear/fury leap/entangling roots tree (freeing up one skill slot from not having to skill for spriggan), be a result of swapping forms from spriggan/swarm to bear, or if it’s unintentional, just go away (thus killing the EQ build). Putting points into spriggan just so you can play bear the way you want to doesn’t feel like proper design at all.

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I wonder if a spriggan/Swarmblade hybrid is possible, since they can both focus on poison. It would mean mixing a melee & whats meant to be a caster, but it’s an interesting idea.

I liked the idea of trying to build a bear/maelstrom build, but it looks like Swarmblade & locust swarm do the same thing I wanted to do, with much more damage. The problem I have is that I hate having to manually summon hives all the time. I’m not sure why, but for some reason the pace at which the locusts come out (staggered slowly) seems to kill the whole idea of a locust swarm build for me.

Idea for uniques or druid affixes: “you transform into x while you execute skill y”

Let’s say the skill is serpent strike. So while I execute the strike I transform into swarmblade for that duration. So I could spec swarmblade with nodes that benefit serpent strike. Since I’m in human form when I’m not using the skill, I could also spec warcry for some nice interactions. In addition, I could get some Mana for transforming back into human form.

I think this would open up a range of new possibilities and increase build variety.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean. I get the basic idea of “x ability shifts you into y form”, and I like the idea in general…but in the example you gave, there is already a talent node for Swarmblade Form that lets you benefit from Serpent Strike while in bug form.

Aside from that, each form already has nodes in each that let you do something very similar to this by changing your human form button into another shapeshift button, and I think it might be easier to expand upon this with the talent trees instead of affixes, which would also prevent the bloating of primalist only affixes.

You could try a minion hybrid build, Vines into Hives into Healing Totems could work with some synergy, as they are all minion based and you are basicly their cheerleading team :wink:

It would be kind of D4 Druid where you transform into the form only for the duration of the skill.