It works fine, but it takes long. You clearly can’t spam Entangling Roots! We could use a way to reduce the amount of hits necessary before proc.
If they did that they’d need to give it a Rage cost.
I believe it does? Should cost 40 rage, but a single point in the node gives 30 back for a net loss of 10. That said you can cast it fairly quick if you use totem bombs, like once every 2-3 seconds depending on cycle of life procs.
EDIT: Just tried it, it doesn’t seem to be costing Rage even though the tooltip says it should. I’d guess it’s a bug.
Explain totem bombs please
I’m sure someone better than me can get more details but essentially the following:
Spriggan form - take the nodes down to 1/3 unbound garden. This lets you use thorn totem’s tree and summon “exactly” 3 totems max, but 3 per summon. Get 3/3 cycle of life so that when a totem “dies”, you get a 60% chance at a vale spirit. Then at least 1 point into valetide.
Summon thorn totem - Get 3/3 Memories of Etera. Everytime a totem dies or is unsummoned, you get 12 mana back. Since healing totem for spriggan uses this tree and you summon 3 each time, this is 36 rage, offsetting the cost of healing totem itself. Then take rotten core that “blows up” totems when they die or are unsummoned.
Summon speed is important to, so I like 3/3 Frenetic attunement in thorn totem’s tree. You already have to take 4/4 in Totem Warden, so that is covered anyway.
Basically, you spam 3 totems as fast can, blowing up 3 each time after the first set in a small triangle. Centered on enemies, it stacks poison pretty well. At the same time it generates rage and counts as totem deaths to summon vale spirits. Right now I only have 1/3 valetide, but it generally only takes 2-3 rounds of totems to get max valespirits, which takes like 1-2 seconds. Then cast spirit thorns for the entangling roots proc.
There needs to be a cost, whichever. But Rage? The nodes gives Rage back, so it would be as if it was free. But yes, there needs to have a cost.
I don’t know if the node Unbond Garden is buged or not but even with 1 point in Memories of Etera i could spam Healing Totem and regen back my Rage.
My guess is that the node doesn’t change the cost of Healing Totem even if you summon three at once: 12 mana spend - 4 x 3 Rage back = 0.
It doesn’t really matter anyway because if we use the Healing Totem for Valespirits engine we don’t have much to take in his tree in the first place.
I’m currently running around doing this, but my focus is more on minion damage and buffing that. I use entangling roots to keep up the rather massive buffs it gives to vines, spriggans, remaining totems, etc. That said it’s too early to tell if it’s “good” or not, but it functionally works.
I think valetide takes too long. It’s counterintuitive that more points in the skill makes it take longer to use. I guess it’s a bit of bonus since you don’t want to put more then 1 point in it, but still ultimately slow. I tried using cycle of life, but while it works pretty well, it’s still pretty slow and it takes a tone of points to get the thing working. 6 points for thorn totems, 9 points for the valetide plus cycle of life. That is way too much investment just to be able to use entangling roots slowly. Not to mention that spamming your totems means they won’t get buffed by entangling roots, so that aspect is removed.
All in all, I don’t like the method they used to give access to entangling roots, it’s too expensive and slow.
2 Likes
I totally agree.
But the issue is that Entangling Roots is very powerful, so there needs to be a kind of cost or gate to it.
Entangling roots cast from valetide is terrible. A direct comparison is werebear form woodland bear, requiring only half the time to cast entangling roots. 1 maul 1 entangling roots, 100% chance.
So going from my original suggestion:
Allow Entangling Roots to be cast directly from your hotbar in Spriggan Form, like it normally would be while in human form (ie: has a full cast cost to use)
Simply give players the option of replacing one of the other spriggan skills with it. IE: you remove thorn shield, or healing totem, or Vines, etc.
So few things to add, though before I do I think it’s certainly a good idea to take a look at other ways to proc entangling roots in spriggan form (and faster), or even give the ability to cast it outright. Being locked into one pseudo-viable method does create obvious limitations.
That said, one has to consider just how much you can gain from being able to get entangling roots out now at least every 4 seconds (I’ll get to why later):
- armor and cast/attack speed to totems and vines (3-5 second duration)
- the above along with an extra thorn projectile for summoned spriggan
- 10 flat physical damage to EVERYTHING except yourself for 8! seconds.
- 40 adaptive spell damage to EVERYTHING except yourself for 8! seconds. Bonus points if this is physical spell abilities, like range converted vines, spriggans, and left-over totems. These get effectively 50 flat damage for 8 seconds.
The spell itself does decent damage even when speccing for minion damage and can apply build centric ailments like poison and frostbite.
The default cone behavior is a little unwieldly for buffing though, especially for ranged companions that typically hang back behind you, so I like the Overgrown Garden node which changes the expansion to a circle radiating from you (still covers a very large area). This has a 4 second cooldown though (which at the moment seems to be ignored when procced from valetide, but I am assuming at some point it will be fixed). For the 8 second buffs this is no problem. For the buffs provided by Frenzying Thorns, the 2 points in Entrapped set the “base” duration to 3.9 seconds, so as long as you can fire off Entangling Roots every 4 seconds, the buffs are covered.
As for totems themselves, remember that when you proc valetide, at least 3 totems are still up and attacking which will benefit from Entangling Roots. I say at least 3 cause you can certainly run your healing totem count up to 6 (2x3 summons) before the bombing starts. It delays the combo, but does buff more totems for a bit until you start the cycle again.
All of the above is applicable to both a base physical/poison build and also a cold converted build. Finally here is a link that gives an idea how to incorporate all of the above (cold version).
I’m still playing around with things trying to decide how far it can go. Mono boss kill time seems a bit long, so still undecided.
That just seems like a lot of extra work to get roots to use more often.
Clever… but not something that seems very fun to play.
It sounds more complicated than it is to play. I basically throw down vines (if I need em), then just spam totems and cast thorns when I have 4 spirits. Pretty much all I need to do.
The only issue I have with that his the 60% to get Valespirit. It’s enought to work, like you said, 2-4 cast Totem and your good but is just that ‘random’ range of proc that bother me IG. It feel a little bit clunky because sometime you expect to proc but it doesn’t because of bad roll.
Because i didn’t play Minion this time I just switch to regular spam Spirit Thorns instead. But I’m a bit disapointed because I liked how ER feel and fun it was when it was smooth. 
I played werebear summon build, where you use maul to cast entangling roots and some nodes in entangling roots allow you to summon vines that are affected by nodes in spriggan form. So yeah, except for the totem part, vines and pets receive all the buffs from entangling roots that you mentioned much easier while in werebear form than in spriggan form. And for a summon build, the %hp increase from werebear form is more practical than the % spell dmg in spriggan form. Additionally, regen rage in werebear form is also easier.
So I haven’t played the new werebear yet, but even despite that I fail to see how 100% uptime on the ER buffs (that don’t stack) can possible be easier than I am already doing? Also, I started with the vine proc in ER and didn’t like it nearly as much since you couldn’t control where the buds spawned in the area and if an enemy wasn’t around, they didn’t “sprout”. Plus, I want the vines down ahead of time to be hit by ER for the buffs.
As far as rage goes, my rage is more or less 100% full all the time with my spec and LotQF.
I also wouldn’t just hand-wave away “except for totems”. I have 10 down once I get the 4 from my idol procs and all 10 get the full benefit of ER (and my summon spriggan) since they have the spell tag.
Depend on which route you choose for your nodes.
For vines build, it’s usually 8-10s to proc entangling roots, 4s is a wet dream.
For thorn totem build, it’s more viable but I heard this is considerably weaker than in 0.8.3.
Umm, druid got a total rework in 8.4. While some stuff carried over there are entirely new mechanics at play, especially with spriggan form.
And I can say beyond an absolute shadow of a doubt, using a cycle of life build to proc vale spirits you can EASILY get more than 1 ER off every 4 seconds. It’s closer to 1 every 2 seconds.
