I enjoy playing the Thorns Druid build with Thornshell and spamming Thorn Shield, but it suffers from some minor irritants that I think could be easily fixed. First, the damaging burst should happen immediately, rather than when the buff expires. This is infuriating in the rare cases where we might want to directly damage or hit enemies. This leads directly into my second suggestion that the damaging burst should apply some small amount of your reflected damage after all calculated spell damage is applied. The intention is not to create an overpowered single target attack; enemies should still take vastly more damage from hitting you. However, itās really annoying to deal with slow attacking trash mobs or non-attacking entities (loot lizards/constructs) with this zero direct damage skill. Please give us some modest direct damage to deal with these. Thank you.
Aaronās version of this build for this season uses storm bolts for these cases. Maybe that helps?
I did see his guide and I agree that does help, but I feel like you need to heavily invest in spell and physical damage to make a difference in higher corruption and that feels like a waste when the main focus of the build is reflect and survivability. I think adding a small amount of reflect to your direct damage with the burst is thematically complementary and something you do see in other games. Even something as low as 1% of reflect damage would probably help tremendously, though I didnāt so any maths on that.
So, more or less āRetaliation added to damageā from Grim Dawnās Forgotten Gods expansion?
Yeah, or Diablo or probably half of all ARPGs ever. But even if we didnāt get that, I think having the burst be immediate would make a difference, too.
But if the burst were immediate then it would probably kill all the tradh rather than the thorns killing them.
The burst does basically no damage, and Iām not suggesting it should supplant the thorns damage. Iām just asking for some improvements because it feels bad to use when you need to kill something not hitting you, like loot lizards, stationary objects, or really slow hitting mobs.
If you look at the tree (pun not intended) & stats, thorn burst isnāt too bad for a spammable skill in a Druid shapeshifting skill. Personally Iād probably prefer to have it changed so it uses thorns damage as flat instead of spell damage just to make it scale differently, though that would probably need thorns to be rescaled to avoid it being nuts.
Iād probably add a % of thorns damage as flat to Spirit Thorns as well for thematic reasons.
Yeah, I donāt know the best solution, Iām just hoping thereās some way it can be improved and that EHG will consider it. I agree itās a decent idea for spirit thorns thematically, too.