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.
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):
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.
Look, I know it’s easy to cast entangling roots with totems, but without totems, it will take extremely long to even cast entangling roots.
Basically valetide is pretty useless for non-totem builds like pure vines or thorn shield.
I don’t know why you wouldn’t use Totem if you make a Vines Minion Build except the ‘I don’t want to’ reason. But yeah, we all agree with you -even Vyrzeden I think- that you can’t use ER that much with just Spirit Thorns so I don’t really get your point here. ^^’
5 points in overgrowth, 5 in creeping underbrush, 1 in garden of rage, 1 in great vine, 1 in rose meadow, 3 in spiritwhisperer, 1 in valetide. That’s already 17 points. Assuming you have the relic that +2 spriggan form, and horned staff, you’ll have 23 points to spend. If you want to use totems to cast entangling roots, 3 points in cycle of life is a must, so that’s 20. With 3 points left, I don’t see how only 1 totem summoned and dying at a time can generate vale spirit efficiently.
If you want ranged vines, things are even more complicated with 2 points in nightshade and 1 in huntersbane.
Well my point is that werebear has a much friendlier way to cast entangling roots, a skill that should be more of a signature skill of spriggan form. The way dev designs valetide, it’s easy to say that the only sensible way to use it is to go with healing totem thorn totem. Any other direction is possible but ineffective.
I agree that you can’t possibly take everything and something has to lose out (or at least be less effective). For me, I decided vines loses in terms of adding skill points directly, but 40 flat adaptive spell damage and up to 50% attack/cast speed does help close that gap.
As a side note, another unique that helps with getting the skill points is Raven’s Rise. Spriggan form has both the minion tag and spell tag, so it’s gets +2 (along with thorn totem and summon spriggan). There is also Valeroot in a pinch.
Also, taking huntersbane allows you to focus a bit more on spirit thorns nodes for scaling vines which does help as well since those are along the way to valetide.
Yup, and I said as much in one of my earlier posts. I absolutely agree there should be more/better ways to interact with valetide and ER than currently available.
Actually, if you don’t venture into healing totem nodes at all and have 3 points in cycle of life, how fast is it to proc entangling roots? If it’s around 4-5s, I’ll take it for my poison or cold vines build too.
And another question, thorn shield can cast eterra’s blessing and its ancentral renewal node can summon healing totem. Can this totem proc cycle of life?
Creeping Underbrush seems very useless for Spriggan when you can summon 3 (or 1 Great). So 2 pts just for getting Garden of Rage is enough if you want to regen your Rage with Vines. Ranged Vines seems also more usefull than 5 overgrowth (because they become ‘spellcaster’ scalling with added Flat Spell Damage + no DPS lose if Targets move a lot).
For now i have been toying with a Spriggan/Human Dual Form: Summon Vines and H. Totem then switch to Human, summoning Thorns Totem & Warcry against Boss or Spam ER when i need to. And go to Spriggan to rinse & repeat. I like it so far because i can also ‘jump’ with Fury Leap and gain some point because i don’t need to worry about Mana or Rage.
For the Healing totem of Eterra: It doesn’t gain anything from the Spriggan Form Skill Tree so no it shoudn’t work.