Im in the “buff weak skills” group here, and playing weak builds is what makes me not want to play the game, so this is not directed at your post.
Summoner Druid focusing on wolves, singleplayer. Compare to skelemancer.
Arctic Blast Druid – a skill balanced fora damage output for a game where the sorceress doesn’t have elemental masteries, and that is bugged.
Even without the Inferno-bug affecting both, the skill deals damage similar to inferno without Fire Mastery.
Generally, druid elemental skills – and assassin claw skills – are all balanced versus sorceress elemental skills with 0 points in masteries.
Summons not surviving for long enough to kill enemies is not challenging. It’s repetitious and tedious. You’re not threatened. You just have a real life and real life needs that limit your in-game progress by forcing you to take unnecessary risks by literally clubbing the enemies with a spellcaster to help them die – not because of a lack of skill or patience, nor out of recklessness, but because of a lack of real life time.
Then there’s the reply ‘Then those skills/classes aren’t for you’ .
Thing is, nothing stops people who wants tedious builds from investing max 1, 5, 10 skillpoints in a skill if they want to play a gimp.
I you don’t have a day job and your life revolves around wasting as much time as possible while waiting for the onset of dementia, blindness, loss of muscle function, or death, the more power to you.
Invest 1, 2, 5 skillpoints, whatever makes the skill bad enough to waste your life. Invest 20 points but only use white, blue or yellow items. Nothing stops you from gimping yourself.
But the game DOES prevent some skills from being fun and/or challenging. You can’t just invest 40 skillpoints in a skill to make it bearable the way you can just invest 5 to gimp yourself.
In fact, I suggest they rebalance the game and allows a Gimp checkbox Next to Ladder and Hardcore.
Gimped characters can play alongside others on the realm, one skillpoint every 3 levels, only 3 attribute points every level, max 10 points in any skill. That’d make everyone happy.
They can have special titles as well.