Isn’t the Spriggan Form the Spell-based transform?
In theory it should be the heal based one because the spriggan is a healing minion.
Yeah, but a healer in an ARPG? 
I mean I like the spriggan as heal companion, especially to support the wolves, but I don’t think a more or less dedicated healer form has a place in an ARPG does it?
I could see it as support for your minions in a pure pet build maybe, but then it’s placed a bit weird in the druid tree, that leans the most towards no-pet or one-pet builds 
EDIT: Wait a second… “On hit”-Nodes don’t mean “When you are hit” but “When you hit an enemy?” That changes everything 
Then all those “On Hit” Nodes in the Druid Tree are actually useful for a caster druid O_O And I misunderstood all the “on hit”-Stuff insert Mind Blown GIF here 
I think Shaman is kind of in its own place defense wise–your best options (imo) are scaling the resistances per totem nodes, life+/%, and not being hit (let your totems soak up the damage). I get whipped pretty bad if I don’t have totems out. They seem to pull aggro fairly well, and that’s more or less how I survive anything. It is dangerous though, I don’t even have leap (no room on my bar, since I use Tornado–leap if for speedrunning).
Yeah, the Problem I have with that is that you then always have to go with at least minion health% IMHO.
I’m currently leveling up a second primalist to go caster druid, plan is going mainly poison/dot with physical damage as secondary, the spriggan as single companion, and thorn totem circle with poison nodes to add up.
BTW: How does %increased DoT/Poison work, when the DoTs are split between me and minions? Are they just split/added up as is? (20 per stack from minions, 40 from me if I have +100%, and this added number multiplied with 20%*number of total stacks?)
Maybe Eterra’s Blessing will get an instant-cast node and maybe also Regen+/Heal over Time/Protection+, so that it becomes a useful survival skill.
Interested in hearing some other people’s feedback and experiences are similar to yours. I’m level 30 with my Shaman right now and am absolutely shitting on everything with a thorn-totem setup. I have no idea how it will scale into high arena or level 95+ but right now it feels very strong, but I am using a unique 1 hander I found is carrying me… Clearly we can all agree specs shouldn’t need uniques to function but just thought you may have something in the stash to help push through the levels until you can get a ton of passive tree damage.
So the Reach of the Grave unique was actually one of my designs. It has an undead theme because I had a particular Acolyte build in mind when working on its design.
I’ll speak with the team about Shaman’s relative power level.
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Finding unimagined and creative uses for items is one of the best parts about being in a beta! 
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And one of the best parts of the genre!
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Update on my Druid Test:
Holy moly, what a difference to the shaman! 
My opinion about caster druids completely changed. I don’t know if it was because I knew more about the game and could plan better (my Shaman was my first char), but the Druid is extremely strong (compared to Shaman which is my only other Mid-Leveled Char).
My plan of focusing on Poison and Physical worked out way better than expected, I focused on healing, health regen, heal effectiveness passives because I figured without tank pets I’d need some kind of fast regeneration as I won’t have Ward Generation.
Turns out you can put % of physical damage leeched as health on amulets, so I think you could go more offensive, and focus on protections instead of health regeneration.
My skills can be seen below, and my fear of lacking synergies vanished completely. The Spriggan is Skilled towards his heals, the Entangling Roots are Skilled towards heals as well (with the remaining points put into the 100% Damage Buff which is really nice, as it works on your Totems as well), the Thorn Totems got the Circle and Poison and Poison Duration (Idea is that they stack poison stacks which won’t do much damage as I got no Minion stats, but the stacks then increase my own poison damage), the frenzy Totem increases my cast speed primarily. And as my main skill the thorn burst, skilled towards the shield and it’s buffs (including duration), as well as the “Chance to cast thorn burst when hit”. This results in massive stacks of thorn burst shields, which stack their flat armour bonus and at the same time automatically retaliate with physical damage that leeches life, while all sorts of heal auras trigger all the time from roots of me and spriggan and passives. I think ideal crafts would include more elemental protections (you can get Vitality simply through passives as druid). I avoided +health delibarately to make protections and heals more effective, as well as more flat health regen and +health regen.
Haven’t played an arena yet, and just finished a run of 20 timelines (something my shaman could never dream of achieving at the moment), and never visually lost life, I could stand within whatever and facetank anything, I only stopped because I need to go to sleep now It isn’t the fastest as I have a heavy defensive focus, but it’s a full-on tank, and I think with all the buffs and heals that also work on allies will be an extremely effective group char as well.
I’ll continue playing my shaman next and sort his passives and skills out to get a fair comparison, so far there are miles between the powerlevel of my shaman vs. druid.
PS: To the Devs: Great work on the general direction. I didn’t think I’d like a druid without Lightning, but he feels awesome to play, and completely different from my shaman 
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One interesting thing you can do with a Shaman is go permastun. There is a great stun node, the rest is stacking shocks. Should probably use a two handed weapon too but why not, elemental builds with two handers are kinda lacking. Great thing about this is even if perma stunning doesn’t happen enemies will still take a ton of elemental damage thanks to the shocks.
The thing I noticed yesterday was, that a pure miniom-based shaman doesn’t work out properly, and you are supposed to do the damage yourself with tornado and avalanche, while Totems just support you, the “You and your minions” nodes are rather lacking. Then you could take Lightning Leech as well… I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to have totems count as minions anymore. Or give them minion and spell tags or something Or give shamans more minion synergies to make totems viable damage dealers. (All those “You do more damage for each totem”-etc. nodes, and all the “After you cast a spell” “After you hit” nodes are useless for a pure pet shaman. But casting a spell without stats because you use minion stats feels wrong too)
The Primalist as a whole is designed to be a jack of all trades, you cant get away with a singular playstyle the way Mage/Sentinel can. Acolyte and Primalist are more advanced in this regard.
Also went Thorn Burst, also Druid, just using the spell on the minions instead of going in on my own (kind of a ranged playstyle). I like your approach though bc it leaves you with more defenses. When i’m leaping in for the cast speed and damage buff it gets difficult to cast it on myself bc my minions leap with me. This would fix that issue. But I’m only lvl 32 right now which is imo not enough to judge a build yet. But it seems odd that Druid, who is supposed to shape shift, seems more viable than Shaman for such a playstyle (at this point of lvling).
Yeah, at this point I’m just wondering what the general idea about each class was. Beastmaster is about Pets and Melee, with variable focus on each.
But shaman and druid both either go melee or ranged/spell, shaman could theoretically go pets aswell. Both use spells with a major physical component, the druid doesn’t get any real ranged spell (apart from temporary spriggan shapeshift) and poison/bleed secondaries, shaman lightning/cold/shock. Both get relatively little/weak pet bonus nodes, so that both have to use direct attacks if they want to be effective, while both profit highly from support-specced totems (druid with additional poisons or chill cc and frenzy, shaman with chill, shock, stun, frenzy along with totem nodes for personal buffs).
Maybe the shapeshift skilltrees will make all the difference, but the druid passives don’t even have that many shapeshift-based nodes.
With a necromancer, lich, sorcerer, spellblade and sentinels all classes have rather clear-cut differences, but between druid and shaman I can’t really make out what they are supposed to do so I’m at a loss what isn’t right for them at the moment
I love this idea and recently began leveling a Primalist, but haven’t decided what style to go yet. Do you have any screenshots of your passives by chance?
On my druid I found 4 rings that give +300 Minion armor… wearing 2 of them at arround lvl 25 my minions have still arround tripple the armor I have ^^. Helps a lot to keep them alive even if you don’t specialise in them.
Sure, will do in about 10 hours when I’m home from work But it’s really nothing special, I basically just picked Attunement, Heal Nodes/Healing Effectiveness and Protections, in that order
(And now knowing that there are general %Damage as Leech and %Physical Damage as Leech, all that heal stuff would probably ä be better invested in more protection and damage)
They are fine still with level ~45, it’s really just the endgame where they fall off, minion stats or not.
I’m 50+ and still use those rings. The Tree procc is simply great and it’s fun as a melee to whack a mole enemys who are not targeting you.
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