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.
30% cast speed is kind of nice to have though. So if I don’t venture into healing totem nodes and still get to cast entangling roots every 3-4s, I’ll take it too.
You really need to be able to summon them 3 at once for that to be efficient. And the plus side to summon actual Shealing Thorn Totem is that they also do damage. But you can try. 
Another thing to note on healing totems. The Totem Warden node grants 60% to ALL summoning speed. So not only does it let you get totems out faster (so faster cycle of life), but it also summons vines faster as well.
This is also why you can start messing with Spirit Thorns scaling, particularly the penetration node.
I really don’t know about that. I always feel that Vines takes much longer to summon than H. Totem but it could just be a feeling.
Actually I wonder how much of vines damage is poison, how much is physical. Somehow I feel that you should either play poison or cold vines. Physical vines seem meh.
And just checking, spirit thorn cast by vines can’t pierce right?
So when you convert them to cold, you “sync” the damage as it’s base physical is converted to cold and poison changes to frostbite, which is cold DoT. That does make it easier to target it’s scaling.
And the thorns will pierce if you invest in Branch Storm (this was fixed recently).
Nice, I thought the fix only applies to the penetration, not the pierce.
Personal opinion though, poison vs cold vines, which one is more OP?
I keep swapping between both right now trying to figure it out. It certainly feels like my mono boss damage is lacking no matter which I try, but I may not have figured out the right combo yet. That said, I LOVE cold in general as unless it’s a boss, it’s almost guaranteed to be frozen. And you can blanket the screen with ice vortexes blowing up converted thorn totems (tied to healing totem of course). That video I posted kinda showed it, I just didn’t spread them around.
Yeah, can’t remember if it was one or the other (or both). Either way, both effects are good and now they both work 
Maybe I’m blind but I can’t find the ice vortexes node you mention.
You have to take the ice thorn conversion node in thorn totem along with rotten core (the poison cloud node towards the top right). The Alt tooltip on the ice thorn totem node describes how it works.
Keikakijin,
Got an example/link of your werebear summon build.