Tree's Thoughts on the Tree Form (& Other Druid Skills)

[Tree]

With both the Shaman & Beastmaster threads completed, I wanted to make sure Druid had its fair share of feedback. It had a big rework in Patch 0.8.4, so the passive & skill trees are more “modern” than the other Primalist masteries, but even then, it’s held back by how outdated many of the Primalist skills are. The transformations have pretty hefty skill trees, but there are some interactions that are much more optimal than the others (an obvious example being the Spriggan Form having tons of Thorn “Healing” Totems and scaling with the “Cold damage per active totem” idols). Ideally, there would be some ways to make the interactions a little bit less obvious while buffing some of the lesser-used interactions.

PASSIVES

Druid is a good example of being tanky without requiring the Beastmaster Aspect of the Boar, as it has multiple passives that help provide important defensive benchmarks. The Mastery Bonus providing a solid 20% Health and Mana means that flat Health investment, like as shown in the passive tree, is very beneficial to make the most of its percentage increases. There is something that I have to bring attention to, though. Remember how I mentioned that Shaman has 7 10-point nodes which provide little helpful bonuses? Druid has a grand total of NINE 10-point nodes! Even worse, there are a ton of 8-point bonus thresholds that make it impossible to min-max your stats with gear investment to hit specific breakpoints.

It is a weakness that many of Druid’s skills are dependent on both Strength & Attunement, making it difficult to not feel like you need to invest in both stats, especially when the 8-pt Attunement bonus is a hefty Critical Avoidance buff. Additionally, depending on the type of build the player has in mind, the passive tree has numerous “mandatory” nodes. For builds that rely on Crits, there is Rageborn; for melee builds, there is Impervious, and builds incorporating a companion have Eternal Nature. It makes it easy to path out while you’re leveling, but makes it more difficult to incorporate passives / skills on other trees.

Primal Shifter requires its own paragraph, as it’s an interesting concept, but requires some clunky gameplay as maintaining the buff mandates the player transform between forms constantly. Ideally, the main node should have half the points while doubling the length per node (4 points for a maximum of 16 second buff compared to needing 8 points). Tiger Spirit is a clunkier version of Beastmaster’s Aspect of the Lynx, especially as there are fewer minions that can take advantage of Druid’s capabilities, and even fewer that can have some use with multiple transformations (or wouldn’t be in an immediate disadvantage if the player is in Human Form).

Cooldown (& Cooldown Reduction): Cooldown Reduction is a fun stat to stack all-around, and the fact that Druid class has access to its own “Cooldown Reduction while transformed” affix means that the developers want players to have fun with lowering cooldowns as much as possible. The obvious implication is that you want to reduce the cooldown between transformations in the event that you can’t maintain 100% Rage form (which may apply if you’re not able to do things like stack Crit chance high enough to maintain Rage on Crit); this is a positive development so that a player isn’t feeling useless if the Druid can’t maintain a permanent form.

The other big implication of cooldown reduction is maintaining temporary buffs. Last Epoch really likes having temporary buffs with cool sounding names, almost to the point where people just look past the name and think, “oh great, another thing I have to keep up.” While keeping up buffs is tiring for a lot of players, I tend to view it as a fun baseline to work around, such as “I’m capable of maintaining 3 stacks of buffs in this time period, with the chance to stack more depending on what I’m fighting.” Examples of this include Swarmblade having Maelstrom stacks per Dive, or Werebear Form stacking multiple Wild Command buffs by using Fury Leap (note: I’m currently working on a build that uses this mechanic). It’s a shame that sub-skills within a skill do not use Cooldown Reduction (like the nodes that allow you to reset Fury Leap), but with maybe a little more leniency on some buff-stacking, this could end up being a really cool concept that makes players excited to try out particular builds.

[Tree]

MINIONS

Summon Spriggan: You can almost-seriously remove every single node in this tree except the +8 Crit Chance & 72% Critical Avoidance (which is just awkward enough to require a Huge Idol to get both you and your companions to 100% Crit Avoidance) node and nearly nobody would notice the difference. Its Spirit Thorns are meh in terms of damage potential and are honestly more efficiently used for Poison / Frostbite stacking through all the cast speed stacking you can accomplish with Entangling Roots + passive nodes. Then (outside the flat Reflect damage, which is… well Reflect damage, I wish having multiple Spriggans can stack this bonus) all you get is two long-cooldown abilities in Vines (which don’t even scale with your own vine bonuses, ew) and Ensnaring Roots (which requires way too much point investment in order to feel useful). The flat healing bonus within the Roots subskill would be pretty useful, especially with just a single minion healing effectiveness Adorned Idol, but EHG seems to be obsessed with sub-skills with way too long of a cooldown and then forcing us to pay even more skill points just to give it a reasonable cooldown.

Locusts (and Bees!): I don’t know how the team missed the fact that people would want to combine Locusts and Bees to make an Insect-Swarming build, and yet you went out of your way to make it them the most anti-synergistic minion pairing possible. Locust Swarm – a great way to make use of the available Locusts - is a strange combination of Physical & Poison, while Bees are strictly Physical damage. You require Spriggan Form to summon Bees (with the Honeycomb Unique), and yet all the Locust Swarm bonuses are the furthest possible distance from Swarmblade – Spriggan Form switching (with all the Bleed goodies in the Swarmblade Tree also in the opposite direction). You give bonuses to minions when they have a Thorn Shield up, then you make it so that Thorn Shield only applies to 1-2 minions at a time. The Druid tree has nothing in terms of having minions applying Bleed, and almost nothing that helps either the Locust or Bee strategy; there’s Attunement stacking and Force of Nature, which inexplicably requires 10 points for 10 minion physical damage, when you have Axe and Claw in the Beastmaster tree which does the same thing (for melee minions only) for only 5 points.

[Tree]

TRANSFORMATIONS

Spriggan Form: Thorn Healing Totem Spam. That’s it. That’s the joke.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit too harsh. But let’s actually take a look at what Spriggan Form can do… You can cast Spirit Thorns 20-30 TIMES to get one Entangling Roots off, and maybe a few Maelstrom casts too. Ooh, your Healing Totems can have a 60% chance to summon a Vale Spirit when they die, and you have a 10% chance to cast Spirit Thorns with your Healing Totems. Vines are a thing, but they are melee minions with laughable range (ooh, and you have a 36% chance on your kills only (so no minion kills) to summon one Vine, on a 2-second cooldown. Woo-hoo), and you need to invest more 2 points in Nightshade just to be able to have the Vines become vine-shaped Thorn Totems (that can actually hit enemies outside of melee range and not just sit there feeling sad when no enemy wants to come out and play) without all the fun Totem bonuses.

The Thorn Shield Armor bonuses are very nice, and the fact that you can combo Thorn Shield with Eterra’s Blessing is pretty nice as well. If the Entangling Roots cast didn’t require such a convoluted summoning system, you could do some nice things with casting Bear + Entangling Root’s massive flat Crit chance to Bear with Thorn Shield + Eterra Blessing to give the Bear more % Physical Damage with a massive Cast Speed bonus. Yet, all Werebear needs to do is cast Maul to get Entangling Roots out… life isn’t fair sometimes.

So yeah, Spriggan Form. Pretty terrible. Too many %chance on effects instead of guaranteed effects. Too many 5-point nodes that do practically nothing (oh boy, 5 points to have Spirit Thorns grant 1 stack of Bleed. That’s totally worth a quarter of all your skill point allotment). Terrible interaction with other skills outside of Eterra’s Blessing and Thorn Totems. Summon Spriggan isn’t worth it even with 2 of them on the field. Just say no to Vines.

Swarmblade Form: This was the last revealed transformation, and even being as critical as I can get, it’s an alright transformation. Nothing great, nothing amazing, but it has obvious synergies and does what it wants to do well. Cold Serpent Strike leading to massive dodge and summoning Maelstroms for even more Dodge and converting all that Dodge to Armor if you want to? Clearly well-designed (though I wish there was a way to incorporate War Cry for its obvious Cold synergies, you should change the Call of the Tundra Boss Unique to have it activate on Crit instead of having the Unique converting it to Cold, since you’re already converting it to Cold within the Tree itself. Then you can channel your inner Kricketune and go “delelelelele WHOOP!” It’s a Pokemon reference, if you’re not in the know). Want some Tornadoes? You can slash your way to making a cyclone of Tornadoes (sadly, the gloves that convert Bleed to Ignite conflict with the gloves that allow you to summon more Fire Tornadoes, Fire Swarmblade with Ignite + Earthquake and Tornadoes actually sounds pretty cool, even if less viable than Lightning Swarmblade).

The minion stuff, well, I went over it in the Minions section. Death by a Thousand Wings and Bloodlust Swarm would be really cool, if it wasn’t in the opposite direction of the other Locust Swarm nodes. The Hives are too clunky to take good advantage of, and the transition from Swarmblade to Spriggan Form is just as terrible as the other way around (and yet, both forms have really good effects switching to Werebear Form). There’s a node that allows you to use a Companion ability when you use Dive, but outside of Wolves’ Howl (and again, if you’re taking Wolves you’re competing with Beastmaster’s Frenzy Totem alongside being able to use War Cry), I don’t see a companion that can work well with Swarmblade.

Werebear Form: By far, the best of the bunch. Great synergy with your other skills (Swipe, War Cry, Fury Leap, Upheaval), a multitude of damage options at your disposal (Physical, Cold, Lightning, minion-focused, spell damage, Crit, heavy non-Crit hits), and each skill bringing something unique and viable to the table. Every attack feels weighty (Swipe and War Cry give a great appearance of a bear slicing out of control, Rampage is terrifying in all the best ways, and Maul + Upheaval gives enemies nightmares about leaping bears), and leveling with it never feels old or unsatisfying. Your team should feel immensely proud of this work.

My only gripe is that the Lightning Rampage Bear doesn’t feel great to move around. Yes, Rampage has no cooldown, but you need something extra for single-targets, and Maul’s leap is too short to take advantage of Fury Leap’s Lightning nodes. I wish there was a way to generate Storm Stacks outside of going outside your Bear form to use Gathering Storm, because Friends of the Tempest is great at keeping the Storm stacks a plenty even with only one Crow. You can go the Maelstrom + Storm Bolt route, but Maelstrom is another skill that doesn’t play nicely with Lightning damage, meaning there are multiple skills that feel like a chore to incorporate instead of actively cooperating with your build. Then there’s the fact that there are multiple minion synergies that are so close to working well to create a solid build, but just falls apart when you’re trying higher corruption / Tier IV dungeons.

Overall, though, very solid skill, and with the right combination of creative Uniques and better synergies, Werebear can lead to hundreds of hours of fun with multiple great builds to focus on.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The passive tree is plagued with way, way, WAY too many high-investment nodes where most of them have little to no impact (5 points to get 40% Frostbite chance, or equip Mordita’s Reach and get 500% Frostbite chance every melee attack. Tough choice… not). For game-changing buffs like the Crit Avoidance per Attunement or restoring Rage on Crit? Sure, leave those as high-investment nodes. But Nightshade Fangs, Blossoming Garden, Force of Nature, Toxic Reach & Hideskin can have their maximum nodes cut in half while doubling the bonuses per node and people still likely wouldn’t flock to them. Primal Shifter would be interesting, if Beastmaster didn’t have Aspect of the Lynx which does the same thing, but much, much better than it.

Trash the Vine system completely and with no regrets. Make the Spriggan Form something other than an Armor bot that throws up Totems everywhere. I mean, what does Spirit Thorns do, really? Thorn Shield would be really great, especially with Thicket of Thorns that lets you have Thorn Shield on Hit. Hazelroot is a good example of combining Thorn Shield’s defenses with Physical Spell offenses, too bad the only good Physical Spell Primalist has is Avalanche, and maybe Entangling Roots & Wind Tempest from Tempest Strike?

Speaking of Spriggans, decide what you want to do with it. If you want it to be a healer, then give more bonuses that apply on heal (similar to Spriggan Form’s Eterra Blessing when you directly cast Thorn Shield). If you want it to do damage, then give it more than a 28% chance to have 2 extra thorns (again, what’s with these partial chances, they drive me crazy). Brutal Mire is an example of a node done right, as it applies to multiple conditions (although maintaining freeze, stun, or ensnared is going to be harder and harder the higher corruption you go) meaning it has a higher sustained uptime (since you can freeze for a second, then ensnare while the freeze skill is on cooldown). I’ll trust you find something to replace the Vines with.

As for Druid minions, please let the Locusts and the Bees play nicely together. Heck, you can buff the Honeycomb relic to have the Bleed Penetration apply to Locusts as well as Bees. Find a better way to transition from Spriggan form to Swarmblade form and vice-versa. Swarmblade and Werebear’s melee skills are really nice, though the Werebear tree has much more concise synergy and options than the Swarmblade does at the moment. If they had a little more synergy with your companions, the two transformations would be amazing.

I never thought I was able of conjuring up 10,000 words on the Primalist’s weak points, much less organize them in a semi-coherent manner, but here I am, hoping at least a thousand of these words will spark up some creative ideas and replace some of these outdated, clunky mechanics with smooth gameplay inspired by the success of your more recent classes. Now to try and build that Fire Damage Swarmblade and see if I can get the field to swim in lava.

EDIT: I went and made the Ignite Swarmblade as I had the Uniques I needed and had several good Elemental Damage Over Time gear from when I was making and refining my Ignite Warlock. Damage can use some work, but I beat T4 WolfJaw for the first time in Arena, which is much better than a lot of my other build concepts have been able to do.

[Makszi]

It’s kind of funny that Spriggan Form is the only transformation with no cooldowns, all of it’s abilities are instant.