According to the 2.4 interview from a while back the summoner druid would be a thing and hell viable… well not wanting to be very negative here… but you guys really might take a real good look here… because the summon druid is just awful.
My suggestions. Make it so we can have all summons at once… ravens, both wolfs and the bear. Buff the number of ravens and make it so we can cast them all with 1 click.
I know this is ptr… but come on you tested this on hell or normal?
Good luck with the changes
Cheers.
6 Likes
I seriously have to wonder what their concept of ‘hell viable’ was. Was it “able to beat den of evil even if it takes 30 minutes” ? because … with 100% of skill points invested in summoning tree, maxing all synergies, that’s about what it takes. No movement abilities, no aoe, negligible elemental damage. even spirit of barbs does less than half of what it used to pre-patch, and we all know just how brokenly good barbs were… um yeah.
D2 is a game that’s all about speed, speed killing monsters, speed killing packs, speed traveling between packs. Druid right now is last in dps, last in movement speed, last in travel speed between packs, last in AOE killing ability. In fact, on PTR they’re even WORSE than they were pre 2.4 with the misguideded IAS changes.
2 Likes
Yea, Getting all the best cold dmg% gear, + summon gcs, fant from beast, might and concentration from merc, walk out of town. all 5 of my summons not able to kill a small group of player 1 fallen minions in time before a shaman could res them all.
feels great. Plus, was the ravens hitting 5 times thing just to annoy the players or? Did they really think we were going to sit there and spam crappy ravens over and over.
1 Like
Despite some little improvments summons are still too weak compared to the necromancer ones. They are not even close, it’s a pity!
Possible solutions include allow summon bear and wolf together, increase bear attack speed and wolf damage, improve bonus and survivability of all the spirits (for example add attack speed bonus to heart of wolverine).
Ravens are not the way to go in my opinion and there is not source of splash damage (like necro corpse explosion) which makes every summoning build way too slow to be effective for druids. If they rework the synergy maybe an hybrid fire+summon build could become viable but there is a lot of work to do and i really hope devs realize that druid, at the moment, is not in a great place
2 Likes
Yup, i mean, if they changed ravens to be … like Paladin hammers, fly around you in a circle hit everything they pass through AOE, and you chain cast them like hammers, then maybe it’d become a viable skill, but right now Summoning , while ‘better’ is still just plain BAD. It’s going to take MAJOR overhauling to be at all even close to viable, even with god teir endgame gear in every slot.
1 Like
Pretty simple fix let all summons out and once and add an extra grizzly bear to the RAIN runeword as it is useless waste of a mal rune as is it is.
3 Likes
Allows spirits and pets to work together to provide magic damage
In particular, the rebound damage from spirits can be magic damage.
I really like the idea of having an extra grizzly bear with the RAIN runeword. I think all armor runewords that are targeted at specific classes such as Treachery, Myth, Peace, Bone, etc., should have something unique added to them so they would be good for those specific classes mid-levels.
2 Likes
HanSolo, your feedback is good!
Everyone compares Druid Summoner to Necro Summoner, but Necro only spends 40 points on summons - Raise Skeletons and Skeleton Mastery…
Druids shouldn’t need to have to spend 80-100 points in summoning tree to be good!
I think all the bear/wolf synergies should be removed and just replace it with a “summoning mastery” that boosts health/damage/resistances/AR of all summons (including spirits and vines!!!).
Then you just spend 20 points on your favorite animal, and 20 points on the mastery to get a reall strong pet… Then you’ll have 60 or so points to spend on other things like vines/spirits/elemental/shapeshifting and you then you can probably make some viable builds…
I don’t think encouraging players to invest 80-100 points in summons with synergies is the right answer…
If you want to make Summoning Druid really strong (like Necro), my suggestion would be:
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Remove synergies between bears/wolves/ravens and replace these synergies with a summoning mastery skill (as discussed above).
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Give poison creeper a “corpse explosion” effect, and make it a little bit like death sentry (except it does poisons+physical damage to make it different/special)
If you made these two changes, people probably wouldn’t complain so much that the Druid summoner is weaker than the Necro summoner… And summoner druid builds would be waaaaay more diverse, because they’d have lots more flexibility to choose the skills they want to invest in (rather than synergies forcing them to do this)…
The druid summons are already “one point wonders” in pvp. They are really strong there and don’t need any buff for end game pvp.
I would prefer that for pvm buffing, they just increase the synergy scaling for each skill. They could do it in a way where like every base point in bear gives spirit wolves 100% increased damage or something like that. Idk if the devs understand how synergy scaling works, but it only counts hard points, not +skills. Buffing this way would make them better in pvm without breaking pvp balance.
Then again based on what I am seeing I think pvp might be headed towards a brawling type garbage can situation anyways under the new team. Might be time to give up and find a new game… :C