Before Blizzard finalizes Patch 2.5, I strongly urge the developers to consider a few more improvements to Druid summons as follows…
Ravens
Maximum number of ravens increased to 8 (from 5). Damage per raven is decreased to compensate (damage remains the same). This promotes fantasy of summoning a flock of ravens, also called an unkindness or conspiracy
Summon Spirit Wolf
Increase movement speed by 30% (wolves are FAST, move like molasses)
Add -X% Enemy Cold Resistance per level (now pierces cold resistance of enemies)
Summon Dire Wolf
Increase movement speed by 30% (wolves are FAST, move like molasses)
Add +X% Open Wounds per level
Summon Grizzly
Add +X% Crushing Blow per level
Poison Creeper, Carrion Vine, Solar Creeper
Can now summon all three vines at once
Vines immune to Poison Damage
Vines have 33% Resistance to Physical Damage
Oak Sage, Spirit of Barbs, Heart of Wolverine
Spirits immune to Physical Damage
Spirits have 33% Resistance to Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Magic Damage
Spirit of Barbs now deals flat damage when attacked in addition to returning a percentage of damage taken to the enemy when hit. This should be consistent to Thorns change in 2.4
I also have a post about buffing the summon druid and someone suggested the veins having a corpse explosion effect similar to the assassin’s 40-80%. I would heavily want this over summoning all 3 at once.
I would prefer that Spirit Wolf does magic damage instead of cold for those physical immunes.
I think summon druids are mostly in a good place after 2.4.
Ravens
Maximum number of ravens increased to 8 (from 5). Damage per raven is decreased to compensate (damage remains the same). This promotes fantasy of summoning a flock of ravens, also called an unkindness or conspiracy
I don’t see the need for this, this would just increase the upkeep for Ravens. 5 Ravens is admittedly a small number but I think it’s fine where it is for gameplay purposes.
Summon Spirit Wolf
Increase movement speed by 30% (wolves are FAST, move like molasses)
Add -X% Enemy Cold Resistance per level (now pierces cold resistance of enemies)
Definitely agree with the movement speed increase, Spirit/Dire Wolves are horribly slow.
I think their cold damage could definitely be improved, though I don’t think cold pierce is the way to do it. I think better scaling or having it function as physical damage converted to cold damage so they benefit from auras (like Berserk functions) would work better.
Summon Dire Wolf
Increase movement speed by 30% (wolves are FAST, move like molasses)
Add +X% Open Wounds per level
As mentioned earlier I think the move speed makes sense, I don’t see the need for Open Wounds though. Dire Wolves do a pretty good amount of physical damage already and OW doesn’t provide much damage although it’s a good utility for preventing regen.
Summon Grizzly
Add +X% Crushing Blow per level
I don’t think this is needed. It makes sense thematically but Crushing Blow should be left to the player and merc, Grizzlies are in a good spot where they are I think.
Poison Creeper, Carrion Vine, Solar Creeper
Can now summon all three vines at once
Vines immune to Poison Damage
Vines have 33% Resistance to Physical Damage
I think vines have a good tradeoff currently, I don’t think you should be able to use all 3 at once. If you want life replenish then you can use Carrion Vine, if you need mana replenish then you can use Solar Creeper.
I wouldn’t mind if they got a small toughness boost though, they are horribly fragile and tend to die easily.
Oak Sage, Spirit of Barbs, Heart of Wolverine
Spirits immune to Physical Damage
Spirits have 33% Resistance to Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Magic Damage
Spirit of Barbs now deals flat damage when attacked in addition to returning a percentage of damage taken to the enemy when hit. This should be consistent to Thorns change in 2.4
I don’t think Spirits should be fully immune to physical damage because you should have to manage them carefully, but I think it’d be fine to bump them up to 50% physical resist from their current 25%. I think bumping their elemental/magic/poison resist to 33% from their current 25% would be fine too.
Spirit of Barbs returning flat damage makes sense with the 2.4 changes to thorns in general, I agree.
They should also fix the Attack Rating synergy bug for Dire Wolves/Grizzlies as detailed here.
A lvl 18 Paladin can kill ubers… your argument is invalid
Also, Uber isn’t a metric of viability in Diablo since it’s a challenge encounter that has nothing to do with how 99% of the game is played… D2 is about killing masses of monsters to maybe get items while ubers is a boss fight with a deterministic outcome
In a game with such low success requirement, efficiency is the standard on which viability is determined
Summoning all vines is still pointless. I think it would be better to mirror the Spirit branch of the summon tree. If the spirits are all about buffing the party, make the vines all about debuffing the enemy.
Poison Vine: Add an aura to the vine that Slows Enemies by 1%, with each point in Poison Vine increasing the Slow effect by 1%. Add a Chance Monster is Stunned When Struck effect to the vine, starting at 1% and increasing by 1% per a point in Poison Vine, with a duration of 2 seconds. Thus, level 20 Poison Vine would have a Slow Enemies 20%, and 20% Chance Monster is Stunned When (the Vine is) Struck. Both of these abilities would work well with poison damage.
Carrion Vine: Since Carrion Vine restores life; I think we should aim to make it work well with Shapeshifter builds. Add an aura to the vine that reduces Enemy Attack Rating by -2%, and Enemy Damage by -0.5%. Each point in Carrion Vine further reduces Enemy Attack Rating by -2%, and Enemy Damage by -0.5%. Add a Chance Monster Flees When Struck effect to the vine, starting at 1% and increasing by 1% per a point in Poison Vine. Thus, a level 20 Carrion Vine reduces Enemy Attack Rating by -40%, and Enemy Damage by -10%, with Monster Flees (from the Vine) When (the Vine is) Struck 20%. As for synergies, how about each point in Carrion Vine grants 2% Open Wounds to both Feral Rage and Maul (thus giving both wereforms access to it).
Solar Vine: Since Solar Vine restores mana I think we should aim to make it work well with Elementalist builds. Add an aura to the vine that reduces Enemy Resistances (Cold, Fire, Lightning, Poison) by -1%, and allow this effect to break Immunities. Each point in Solar Vine further reduces Enemy Resistances by -1%. Add a Chance Monster is Blinded When Struck effect to the vine, starting at 2% and increasing by 2% per a point in Solar Vine. Thus, a level 20 Solar Vine reduces Enemy Resistances by -20%, or -4% against Immune Monsters, with 40% Chance Monster is Blinded When (the Vine is) Struck. Even if you got the vine up to level 50 (max realistically possible), that would still only grant -10% Enemy Resistances to Immune Monsters.
I think the Spirit of Barbs was already changed to deal flat daamge to attacker instead of returning damage.
I wouldn’t like that, while the Blind is annoying when it overrides curses it is quite useful to debilitate ranged monsters.
Ravens can actually be “targeted”, if you highlight a monster and summon a raven on them then all the other ravens will also change targets to that monster, or if you wish to only “target” one raven then you can summon one next to a monster without highlighting them.
I’d use the second technique often for archers or casters that hang in the back while I Shockwaved the melee mobs, worked quite nicely.
I dont like this, i dont want to spam them more than now.
I feel like issue is in their AI, not the attack speed. They often are not engaging in fights.
Ok why not. But i would rarher see magic dmg on them.
I dont feel like this would do much. You cant stack OW and its also based on lvl. So it would be too weak on them. Maybe give them chance to inflict rabies?
I am fine with this, but i dont feel like grizzly need it as his blows are already pretty powerful.
In my opinion, the main issue with Raven is the constant need to resummon them. Any change to the skill should not worsen that issue. If the number of Ravens was increased, they would need to have proportionally more hits per Raven.
I’d rather avoid giving all those extra abilities to the summons.
If anything, I’m not a fan of some of the choices that were made to summons (just to clarify, I do play summoner druid), because I want the druid and necromancer to have better differentiation.
My first step would be to have only two summons among the three active at once at most.
My second step would be to have Dire Wolves deal fire damage, just like normal Wolves currently deal ice damage.
My third step would be to specialize each summons a little better. Slightly increase normal Wolves damage and give them a very small amount of flat damage reduction so that it deals well with large groups of monsters. Increase Dire Wolf survivability and make them resistant or immune to knockback (but not stun) so that they are able to shield other summons from attacks. Increase Bear damage so that it deals significantly more damage than 5 normal Wolves of same level combined (synergy included), so that it becomes the best damage dealer against single targets.
The goal is to have players switch between them depending on what they are facing. For example, switch to avoid immunities, or to have extra corpse-destruction through direwolf, or optimal damage output, or better survivability against powerful monsters, etc…
PS : I have nothing against giving extra movement speed to wolves.
The main issue of Vines and Spirits is that they tend to be way too squishy so you constantly have to resummon them. So I would start by increasing their survivability.
Then I would like there to be a point in spending points in multiple of them, but without making them all one-point wonders. For that, I’d rather look at synergies where you may want to spend points for the bonus, but not necessarily feel that you need to max them out.
For example, I could go with something along the lines of :
Every point in Solar Creeper or Carrion Vine gives other Vines 0.1% of relevant resource regeneration upon corpse destruction. Every point in Poison Creeper gives other vines +5% HP and +5% poison resistance (up to 100%).
Every point in a spirit increase all other spirit ranges by 5% and/or gives them some resistance to elements (Oak), physical (Wolverine) or magic (Barbs).
The point is that I don’t want the Druid to have all 1-point wonder summons available at the same time, but I don’t want the points in one of the summons to be wasted just because you prefer the next (or previous) summon in that column either.
That being said, other than disliking the idea of having multiple vines active at the same time, I don’t have anything against your Vine and Spirit suggestions.
Who is it hurting if its disabled in pvp? No one you class oppressor! You do realize everyone else gets to do this? Imagine being a shifter only player. Joining your buddies to farm but you just cant keep up because all real meta farmers/players use TP. We are jusr left behind figuratively and actually.
If its disabled when pvp flagged, really, why? God the prejudice. You shifters have to drink out of the water fountain across the street. The broken one which some paladins roughed up… the ignorance. Imagine life from another perspective?
I didnt say anything about pvp so idk why you talk about that.
Sorry but this is nonsense, you would know this if you actualy play in groups. Even players without enigma can keep up with others when clearing zones. You dont need teleport for that.
Why I dont like shofter using teleport? I dont like it from lore perspective. You are tranforming into beast/wild animal using hands/claws to fight. So I would not like to see teleporting around in transform as some caster class.
You can already teleport. And then you can transform.