Druid Feedback from PTR by Zax

PTR Feedback
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Hey devs or anyone who will read this :slight_smile: I spend some time today checking druid and I would like to provide feedback from the PTR.

I was checking Summoner, Wind druid, Fire druid and few shapeshift skills but only briefly.

--------------------------------------------SUMMONER DRUID-----------------------------------------------------

SUMMONER
I had pretty much bis gear with only very little possibilty to have like +2 more skills maybe.
I did test run in Chaos sanctuary and tied various skills and then also killed Mephisto and was also in Travincal. I recorded my test run showing my equip and skill number for highest levels of summons. I will post link for demonstration so everyone can see it without wasting time to duplicate summon charms or making equip on their own. But before that I will say few things about individual skills

Generaly speaking is I cant tell I like the changes. Summoner build definitely need buff but I feel like direction where it was decided to go was not the best. It is not fun to watch ravens to kill stuff. They are small, barely visible and its hard to notice how many is still active and if you need to cast them again. I would much rather have stronger wolves and have them actualy together with bear. We really need all summons together. Considering i was pretty much maxed, I didnt feel like summons were doing exceptionaly amazing on even players 1. It seems that wolves have sometimems hard time to fight and just stand doing nothing which sucks as they are 1/5 or 1/3 of your army.

Ravens
As I already explained, casting is not great, they need to stick around much longer doing maybe less damage. They seems to be most OP on paper, but because they are not improved by Heart of wolverine, they are actualy worse then wolved or bear.

Summon Spirit Wolf, Summon Dire Wolf
I could not decide if I should be using spirit wolves or Dire wolves. I had issue with Dire Wolves as only 3 summons is not enough as meat shield and even when they had more damage, I liked bigger army of 5 spirit wolves better even with less damage. I wonder if their damage is amplified at all tho by dmg aura from spirit of wolverine since its cold damage. I forgot to test that. Also I think it would be better if spirit wolves would do magic damage and not cold damage.

Summon Grizzly
This guy is freaking monsters, he was one shotting enemies and two shotting specials. I was ready for struggle against Diablo as bosses are for some reason a lot more tough, but damn. Grizzly just shredded him to pieces so fast. I was shocked. But his damage was not changed i believe, so he was always like that i guess when maxed :slight_smile:

Spirit of Barbs
Interesting change with reflected damage. But because other summons need a lot of skill points I dont really see a big use for this. Heart of wolverine is simply better improving damage fo your summons. Spirit of Barbs aura has only little effect even fully maxed with skillers reflecting 1500 damage.

Poison Creeper
nice upgrade

Carrion Vine
Honestly better than expected, maxed vine healed me with like 600 HP per corpse.

Here is small demonstration, I am not exactly streamer so if you think my video suck, i wont disagree :smiley:

Few last words:
If I play summoner, I want big army, wolves and grizzly are so coold to watch in action, but you cant have them together and that sucks. I want to watch fight them, I dont want to watch barely visible boring Ravens. I think spirit of Barbs should be actualy providing aura which lowers physical resistance of monsters too. If necro mancer ha sit, why not druid?

-------------------------------------------------WIND DRUID---------------------------------------------------------

Arctic Blast
I was hoping this skill will get better. But honestly its not better. Not only I dont like animation as I liked old legacy d2 animation better but 2.4 change didnt make it viable either sadly. Even with maxed build was damage just way too weak. I noticed that even with 7 skillers, damage of it really didnt went up that much.

Cyclone Armor
Change to casting in Werewold or werebear is nice.

Twister
Damage scalling +50% didnt really do much. Tornado is still main dmg skill and Twisters for stun. Maybe stun could be little longer.

Hurricane
I like the changes.

Again small demonstration :slight_smile:

-------------------------------------------------FIRE DRUID---------------------------------------------------------

I really like the removal of casting delays for fire skills and Improved armageddon.

Imgur

It has really nice damage now and seems to be viable. But maybe it could hit little bit more often.

What I dont understand it why I have to invest 5 non related skill to be able to use Armageddon. It doesnt really make sense to be forced to invest in skills you will not be using and are doing cold damage while armageddon is doing fire damage.

------------------------------------------SHAPE SHIFT DRUID----------------------------------------------------

Werewolf/were bear attack speed change
I really dont know what to think about this. I didnt feel like it was issue before.

Rabies
Its like 15 years I played with Rabies so I cant really comment that :slight_smile:

Fury
Not very significant change, I was expecting something more.

Maul
Nice changes.

Shock Wave
I dont really understand increased dmg, its not doing much anyway so why?

Fire Claws
Nice dmg increase, but synergies are still there even when patch ntoes are saying they were removed.

Thats all :slight_smile:

6 Likes
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Nice feedback, could have summarized the shapeshifting section by saying “unusable please remove skill tree”

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Yeah i wanted to say something there ,but i wasnt sure what. I feel like it need some upgrades, better skills. Feral rage or Hunger, idk I would make different skills instead. Or hell make new transformation :slight_smile:

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Well the issue really is with the IAS changes, it is now extremely slow max 10 Fpa, compared to 4 fpa today, with absolutely nothing to compensate for the massive DPS loss

7 Likes
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Even if they boost damage by 500% the class will still be fundamentally broken. Right now it only WORKS because of the fast attack speed exploiting proc mechanics in order to be viable. It requires specific gear and specific effects (lifetap proc from draculs, crushing blow from weapons or goreriders or gface etc) in order to even approach viability. Even then it’s considered a niche class because if you dont have that VERY specific gear, you’re trash and cant fight your way out of a wet paper bag, let alone hell elite packs.

It’s not JUST a damage problem with being slowed down, it fundamentally breaks the mechanics of the class. Fury is interruptible, druids have no defensive abilities, have no movement abilities, have no survivability tools, have no AOE damage. Shapeshift druids are excluded from using two of hte most powerful items in the game, in Enigma and Call to Arms. The only viable shapeshift builds currently all exploit high speed + procs in order to survive, and this goes for both PVM and PVP.

9 Likes
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Both summoning skill and fire skill need improvements.

For summon it makes no sense to me that a level 1 skill makes more damage than wolfes and bears. Also the frequently recasting is a big issue and there is still no source of AOE damage. I suggest that bear and wolves can be summoned at the same time and the wolves need a damage increase. Also the spirits need more survivability and buff upgrades (for example heart of wolverine could provide also increase attack speed).

For fire skills fissure need a slighly damage buff to be effective and the other skills need more physical damage to deal with fire immune monsters. Armageddon is not a reliable source of damage and the hurricane requirement doesn’t really make sense

5 Likes
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Blizzard doesn’t understand the defensive viability that comes from fast frames. They don’t play the game otherwise they would have known instantly how bad giving Wereforms Human frames would perform.

1 Like
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Quite litterally for shapeshift druids the only defense IS their offense. Fury druids dont even use shields because the block animation makes it so they cant proc the lifetapping hits they need to survive.

5 Likes
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I think this is something that deserves special attention. The way it is for elemental druids’ skill tree now, it’d be like if Sorceresses had to put a point into Glacial Spike in order to get Hydra. People would rightfully call that absurd, but Druids have to do this. Before skill synergies this wasn’t a problem, but now you need every skill point you can get.

3 Likes
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Druid synergies make almost no sense. Why does fireclaw have 40 points in synergies of abilities you CANT USE SHAPESHIFTED? What purpose in allowing shapeshift druids to use cyclone armor when not enough skill points exist in the game to buy the cyclone armor synergies to make it usable AND buy ANYTHING in the shapeshifting tree? Even the summon tree synnergies are just plain bad, you have to spend 100% of your skill points in summoning to actually make them usable and then they’re marginal at best and you can only use one of the 3 main skills at a time, pick a bear or direwolf or wolf, but never more than one at a time.

5 Likes
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Excellent post as usual, Zax!

Just tested, can confirm Spirit Wolf COLD damage is NOT affected by Heart of Wolverine/Might/Concentration/etc. This is a HUGE nerf! If Spirit wolves remain having unbuffable damage then their base damage must be severely boosted. Ideally, Spirit wolves would do magic, not cold, and would be buffable as before.

The qty of 5 spirit wolves vs 3 Dire wolves is pretty much required. There simply isn’t enough versatility and attack speed with only 3 wolves. Of course this would be remedied if we were allowed to have all pets out like the necro…

Ravens should buff pet AR and last much longer, not have insane damage themselves. The blind affect they give overwrites amp dmg, so they are useless against physical immunes. The huge damage boost from ravens should be equalized out over the other 9 true pets (wolf, wolf, bear).

Also, requiring 5 maxed skills (Raven, S Wolf, D Wolf, Grizzly, HoW) to complete the build is a little much. Not sure how to remedy that…

Perhaps make spirit of the barbs reduce enemy physical resistance akin to amp dmg. This would give it use. As is, I have never found a use for the thorns spirit.

3 Likes
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Thanks for testing it. If you saw the video, build is barely viable fully maxed. Damage of spirit wolves with max build is not that bad, but not that great either. And they are summons so - cold res wont affect them on your equip. They need own cold dmg synergy which would do - cold res maybe on their attacks because dmg spirit is useless for them.

And yeah number of points invested is too much too. But idk what to do with that. Maybe let all summons be spawned together and change raven to passive skill increasing raven effectivity based on your level so you would invest just point for example.

Or Raven skill could be adding chance to cast amplify dmg by other summons with diminishing return so only 1 point in it is enough with + few all skills.

2 Likes
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That’s it! Make Raven have a 3% +1/lvl chance to cast Amp dmg instead of blind. That would allow summoner to break most phys immunes and would boost summons dmg while also lowering the point requirement. Also revert hit count to the previous qty and avg current raven dmg out between total hit count or persistent summons.

Only downside could be making it too OP for shapeshifter? If Ravens could have a 5%+ chance to amp damage then I would definitely use them as a Fury Druid. Although, tbh, I don’t think it would be game-breaking for shapeshifters to have that.

I didn’t get to watch the video before, but just did. I had about the same experience as you, although I didn’t have quite as many charms. (did you smite to get the torch?)

Another major issue facing the pets is their slow AI and movement speed. Compared to skeletons, the wolves and bear do not run to engage nor swing anywhere near as fast.

I built a summoner in the live game and he runs 5x Spirit Wolf typically and does decent damage (but is forced to run max inv of skillers). One of the core advantages of the build is that it is a tactical summoner - summoning wolves into the thick of combat and near primary targets gives it a key advantage over Necros. The damage is still lacking in comparison though due to the qty. If we could have all 9 pets (5x Swolf, 3x Dwolf, 1x Bear) plus 5x % chance to cast Amp dmg Ravens I think we would have a fun and viable build. Run with all pets out and tactically cast Swolf into combat while Dwolf and bear run to engage. Swolf do cold damage, Dwolf do magic, and Bear do physical, but all being affected by HoW.

2 Likes
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Well, shapeshifter using melee dmg skills actualy needs it too lol so i fixed that also :joy:

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Yeah i have smiter for uber tristram.

Their AI sometimes just stops them if they are not so close to enemies. They need to be more agressive or have wider attack range.

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Very nice post Zax! My comments/feedback:

Summoner:

I agree too, as a fire/wind druid, I like the ravens as a passive “blind enemies aura”… Birds killing huge demons and bosses isn’t “thematic” or “realistic”… So I really am not a fan…

I will make a separate post later, but I think the Devs would solve a lot of problems/complaints about the summoner druid if they removed the synergies between Spirit Wolf, Dire Wolf, and Grizzly - instead they should replace these synergies with a new “summoning mastery” skill that gives extra health, life, AR, and resistances to ALL summons (spirits and vines too godammnit!!)

This way, players can pick their favorite animal (wolf or bear or even raven?) and spend 20 points on that ONE animal (maybe two if you include raven)… Then you spend 20 points on the summon mastery… So 40pts, you get a fully synergised animal, and then you have 60 points free to invest in other skills…

I think the devs are wasting their time trying to make a viable summoner druid that needs 80 points invested in summoning - this is not the right solution…

Part of the reason why the summon necro is so strong is because they have lots of spare points to spend on corpse explosion and other good necromancer skills…

Imagine how bad summon necromancer would be if you spend 100 or more points on summoning… it would be about as slow as the druid…

Wind:

Good points… One thing on Arctic blast - your equipment is not optimal for cold damage… I recommend you test the Doom runeword which gives can give -60% enemy cold resist… Your merc is also using Reapers Toll which is not the optimal weapon for elemental damage, you probably should use Infinity…

I think you will find Arctic blast (and hurricane) will be much stronger with Doom and Infinity…

4 Likes
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Summoning mastery is good idea. But i dont feel like they want to go that deep in completely changing skills or making new ones. I think they should tho.

If you watch my video i would say that currently are druid sommons better vs individual monsters. Grizzly is awesome, but druid summoner cant deal well with packs of enemies where necro summoner just use CE+ amplify.

Hmm what if dire wolves would actualy instead of eating corpses let to explode them? :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Did you see the damage? It was on players 1 fully maxed almost bis gear + skiller and more +skills werent even doing much to be honest.

Would you make doom and Infinity to make arctic blast viable on players 1?

I am not saying you are wrong and it would do more but for what cost? And isnt point of improving skills to do them viable even without very expensive rune words?

I really wanted arctic blast good for leveling up but its simply too weak.

Btw monsters see me me using it on had 0% resist. Arachnid lair should be ideál for cold dmg builds.

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Hey, maybe the merc do the most dmg to Diablo? Whats the dps with the spirit?
In POD (with beast and spirit) he dont have might and he can get him done alone very quick.

Plz test on kill with bear and on with merc only :smiley:

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Hmm i can probably do that today but i doubt it was merc. Bosses in PTR are also more tough and mercenaries usualy struggle against them. My grizzly had 6k dmg i think + 300% from oak. Merc had also might.

That grizzly was basicly one shoting anyone before that, two shotting unique enemies.