A new playable spec in pvp sounds like fun to me. Right now summoners are a joke in pvp, if they could actually cause damage telestomping that would be great. As long as extra summons are gated to investing heavily into the summon tree.
3 Likes
Despite small improvement summoning skill need a buff, they still strongly underperform necromancer summons.
Possible solution: allow summon bear and wolf together , increase bear attack speed and wolf damage and improve bonus and survivability of all the spirits (for example add attack speed bonus to heart of wolverine) or give chrusing blow to the bear
Fire skill also need more work.
4 Likes
underwhelming in 2.4ptr, for sure… qq
2 Likes
Spirit Wolves are fkn BONKERS for trash mob killing… they feel really great! Baal rekt them quickly though, so I tried Dire wolves and they did much better against Baal. I was able to kill Baal more quickly on a Summon Druid than a Summon Necro! With about an hour of testing on both, I can say that Summon Druid is roughly comparable to a Summon Necro’s offensive power (while being much weaker defensively in virtue of having less meat shields)
New raven interation is horrendously spammy and I hate it. I specificially play summoner builds to STAND BACK AND LET MY MINIONS DO MY BIDDING! I hate the new raven spam summoner, and what’s worse is that this change to raven will cause Elemental and Shapeshifter to never care about the skill, as it will be unreasonable to keep up in the course of normal play of those builds (whereas in live D2, and for the past decade and a half, EVERY druid build was able to make decent use out of Ravens)
3 Likes
Nice thing about the changes to Raven is that, while they receive synergies from wolves, they give none back. So, if you hate that playstyle, you do like you always have and skip over them and just enjoy the much improved spirit wolves.
1 Like
You are misinterpreting me here. I LOVE the raven skill and I have always used it. It was one of my all time favorite D2 skills, even if it didnt actually DO much. It was good flavor, minor utility, and convenient to use in EVERY build regardless of if you were Fire, Wind, Bear, or Wolf.
Now the ONLY build who will find room to keep ravens up is Summoner, and even then it FEELS bad to use. I much prefer the stand around and let the minions carry your weight playstyle
2 Likes
Let’s start from basic. How many hours you have on summoner druid?
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How about Sages be a flat out aura instead of a floating target ? ( they die when you die )
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Fissure could do with some physcial dmg and better aoe
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Hurricane can be cast anywhere, not just around the druid ( Think down the lines like blizzard sorc ) I reiterate the physcal and or maybe lightining dmg can be added into hurrican as well.
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Twister, Nado - wtf ? I need to be right on top of the mob to cast it to actually hit the mob ? straight line dps aiming pleox !!!
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And pets ? the same old - why on earth have a summoner tree when we can only summon and handful of pets to do our biding ?
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Thoughts
3 Likes
I don’t know about this whole summoner druid but one thing I want to see is the oak sage AI move out the way fast enough and not die all the time.
2 Likes
How lol? I have pretty much maxed summon build and wolves are bad.
3 Likes
Spirit wolves are a bit better then before, true, but they are far less effective that necromancer summons and many other build. The damage is simply not enough to be competitive with other build, as many others pointed out.
4 Likes
Ok, after testing Druid for 2 hours, i knew ravens do high dmg mine were doing 2k but casting them all the time is annoying.
With medium gear, 30 lvl wolves i wasnt that able to clear travi P1.
I made necro and i had 24 minions destroying everything with the same skeleton lvl.
Wolves doing ok dmg but only 3 takes so long to kill anything. It still req high end gear to by good, not even close to OP.
Dunno if this will be a good spec, i still doubt after testing it, that we will stack on Act3 while gearing and farming…
PTR Summon Druid damage is from Ravens, not wolves/bear.
That’s a fact. Not one I like, but a fact nonetheless.
I would like to see all pets allowed out permanently and possibly even out the insane damage of PTR raven to raise the damage of all pets.
Another problem is that the summoner Druid now has 5 skills he must max - which is doable but very hard. Most builds do not need 5 synergies for max build. Druid needs Raven, Spirit Wolf, Dire Wolf, Bear, AND Heart of Wolverine.
If the insane damage from Raven was instead evened out to where levels of raven boosted wolf/bear damage AND we could have all wolves and bear out simultaneously, that would still give raven a good use while also granting a smoother, funner playstyle. Summon Druid would feel more like a summoner then.
1 Like
Even with that SUmmoner Druid is still lack of crowd control, the 5 spirit wolf cold damage is not affected by any damage aura, and their own damage is weak, dire wolf is almost the same as before, nothing to write home about, and the bear…its a tank, with some damaging power; however, since summoner druid has no control of what mob to focus on, when facing a big group they just scatter around and attack random mobs, which make the whole situation super inefficient.
I do not mind having raven like a rocket launcher and need recating for huge damage, but with how they are attacking now my druid is pretty doin nothing but resummoning raven all day long, and that is quite annoying as a summoner point of view.
I know other caster need to keep recasting as well, but at least those recasting has a clear target, raven does not.
Not to mention we still lack of ways to deal with physical immune.( Spirit wolf’s cold dmg is almost useless)
8 Likes
I didn’t think of A3 enchant merc with summon druid… wow, that could be amazing…
- Remove synergies from Grizzly for both Spirit / Dire wolf
- Oaksage, wolverine & barbs to be aura’s ( each adds either dps/resistance/life to summons as a synergy ) similar to mastery / summon resist
- All 3 summons up ( all wolves and grizzly can be on screen doing the summoners biding )
- Grizzly to have growl / aoe taunt
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Thoughts
3 Likes
When thinking about how lackluster summoning druids still are, I was thinking maybe they should take a different approach to their synergies. Have so many that you could never max them all so your options within the summoner tree itself create choices for different kinds of summoning builds.
Examples:
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Dire wolves, bears and ravens could get cold damage from spirit wolves (or possibly movement speed for wolves and bears if we wanted to leave cold damage as a spirit exclusive)
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Add critical strike chance passive to ravens that also applies to wolves and bears
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While it would make sense for bears, wolves and ravens to get poison damage from creeper, the terrible poison mechanics of the game would make that awkward, especially if you want to use the creeper itself, so instead they could get chance of open wounds (which I was originally thinking of for dire wolves)
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Spirit wolves and bears could get attack speed and/or movement speed from dire wolves. Physical resistance piercing or ignoring some defense could be options here also.
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Wolves and ravens could get chance at crushing blow from bears (bear could potentially have a higher % chance and other summons only inherit a smaller chance if it’s too powerful)
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Wolves and bears get life leech from carrion vine
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Solar Creeper could add magic or fire damage to wolves, bears and ravens or give them mana on hit that goes to you when any of your summons hit (could add an interesting option for elemental druids as well)
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All spirits could give wolves and bears (could add ravens for wolverine) 50% of their aura effect passively, similar to how some paladin auras have a passive effect for the paladin
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To add more to active vines, poison creeper could occasionally blow up corpses in a poison explosion, carrion vines could sometimes do a corpse explosion and solar creeper could occasionally cleanse your party of debuffs or something. The frequency could scale up with points. This might be too much on top of the other things though. Alternatively this could be another way of adding a more active option to the kit and make the effect only happen once on summon and add an independent cooldown to each summon that decreases with points.
The spirit change could also apply to the druid to add some additional options for shifters.
I think this approach actually fits into the existing design well given how passives from some summons already effected the others. We’d just be adding more passives and making them more interesting.
I would also allow bears to be summoned at the same time as wolves, otherwise wolves would just always be better due to the additional proc chances. If some baseline damage had to be lowered because of all the different synergy options, that could be done easily.
For both druids and necros you could also add a bindable order pet attack skill. That would allow non-enigma users to get their pets to focus fire on a specific target.
Since you do not have 200 points to spend to max the entire summoning tree, you would have to decide what you wanted. This would be a different kind of choice rather than “I picked skill A as my main skill, so now I have to max B and C to optimize it.”
1 Like
You are aware a druid can transform and actively attack in WW or WB form which a necromancer can’t. The buffs and changes are enough. Diablo 2 shouldn’t become a power creep fail like D3. The only thing left is reversing the ias table for the WW and WB form. Again, YOUR choice of playing a char where summons are supposed to be HIS support and he can dish out lots of damage himself a necromancer can never dream of AS a summoner shouldn’t result in another power creep character.
If you want a truly summon focused char why not play summonmancer?
Am I wrong or, where what you asked for is allowed, Druid became immediately a top tier build outlclassing everything else?
Druid won’t become super top tier char but those skills have certain design choices. A necro summoner cannot attack at all. The most important dmg dealing option is his merc with skeletons + golem as support. Corpse explosion is useless without the summons.
Druid is designed with summons being his blockers in elemental form or dmg soakers for the WW/WB form because a druid doesn’t have any defense enhancing skills. Some people decide to play him as a summoner. They can do so, it’s their choice. Ravens, grizzly and even wolves have been buffed. By making their summons as strong as the ones from necromancer, you’re going to break druid’s design.
That’s totally wrong. You want to play him as a summoner, your choice. Learn to use the new buffed ravens. There are items (pride on might merc, beast runeword in druid’s hand) which can make it possible.