I’m curious to hear fellow Caster Druid’s experience and thoughts on early levelling (20/25) a sole caster build:
Other thoughts and feedback welcome.
The lack of Spirit regeneration is very painful compared to Essence and Mana.
Necros and Sorcerers will regain resources while kiting, Druids will not.
Fully agreed on lack of Spirit regen.
This alone makes an early pure caster Druid build feel sluggish and tedious, in comparison.
Storm Strike has so much utility that it’s hard to ignore.
However, if you’re good at firing it into groups, Wind Shear is superior as a spirit generator. It’s my preferred if I want to stay mostly at range in the early game.
If you prefer Storm Strike then skills like Blood Howl and Trample can help with Spirit.
Wind shear is actually pretty good because it mitigates the druid worst aspect, it’s spirit regeneration. Its ability to pierce and generate extra spirit by hitting multiple targets means you can use less basics, and druid basics all suck so using less of them is good. It’s still terrible single target though.
Tornado is the best range skill, but it absolutely needs the legendary to make it work. Before that lightning storm is superior.
Bone spear is vastly superior to anything druid has baseline as a range ability before legos.
Druid is a bit tedious just because you have far more resource regeneration issues than necro or sorc.
Storm Strike with Lightning Storm and Bad Omen was a lot of fun and easy mode on WT2. Thought I was going Landslide since I really dislike channeled abilities and enjoyed Landslide a lot in the Open Beta. But, Lightning Storm actually felt pretty fun for a channeled. Looking forward to using it on release and getting actual support for it.
Wind Shear has potential, for sure. It’s the single target use case that’s a buzz kill.
Whereas Storm Strike grants 25% damage reduction, higher Lucky Hit, more Spirit and innate AoE. Makes it the go to for most builds IMO.
Tried a “caster” druid in one of the earlier betas, I didn’t like it much (didn’t have the tornado aspect), might be fun with that one as the tornados seeks out enemies 
I didn’t manage to get it to work for me, at least compared to pulverise. Even the tornado legendary which dropped didn’t make it seem viable.
I am sure that could well be down to me but I think, low level, it isn’t that good. Should be fine later on though.
I found the lack of spirit regen made a pure caster druid too painful. And switched to a werewolf/caster combo.
First paragon Points I get on my Drööd instantly go into the energy gain paragon board if it stays like it was datamined 
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I played caster druid in the Slam, wihout any legendaries. The data we got at this lever is nowhere near enought, to showcase how stong the skills are, but i can share my experience.
As most of the builds are built around a core skill, i’ll do it by them
Tornado: is a skill like Barb’s Wirlwind. On it’s own, it’s not a good skill. If you got the support of other skills, and items, it’ll be really strong. Wind Sheer’s bonus movement buff helped a lot to manoeuvre for a better position to use the skill.
Lightning Storm: Will probably won’t work in a pure strom build. It really need heavy cc build up to use. So i earth-Strom is more fitting for it. It has a play style of Collect evereything together, then nuke. On bosses more like a hit n run.
Landslide: probably the most flexible out of the 3 caster options. Can be used as a CC opener for combos, can be used as combo finisher too. It has the smallest Area effect though. I think on the long run it’ll be lacking wihtout the +lvl to earth skills legend.
Druid was the worst class in the beta in both damage and resource generation. In the slam its becoumes FAR WORST than everything ive ever see.
THis is the list of changes for the slam that well killed a dead class. By the way the only way to make druid viable at end game was to recover resources with luck hits. And now you wont luck hit anything anymore. SImple becouse its the class with the worst luck hit chance and no way to increase it, but the most reliable to it.
NUMBERS
They increased the the spirit regeneration in 1 point for Claw, 2 for earth spike, 3 for maul and nerfed 1 for storm strike.
By the way they nerfed maul range to from.
But this is a nerf because the passive abundance that increased the generation for 30 % with 3 points to 15%. AGAIN NERF.
Nerfed wind shear luck hit from 33 to 20.
NERFED pulverize overpower. Was every 10 s now its every 12.
NERFED landslide from 115 to 75%
NERFED tornado luck hit from 33 to 8
NERFED SHRED health gain from 2 % to 1%
NERFED cyclone non physical resistance from 20 to 10 %
NERFED earth bulwark luck hit in 20%
Nerfed hurricane luck hit 33 to 21%.
NERFED Wild impulse that increased cost and damage nerfed in 50%
NERFED Predatory instinct crit chance close enemy 9 to 6.
NERFED. Provocation stay in werebear form give next skill overpower from 15 to 20s
NERFED perfect storm cap stop, from 2 spirit to 1, and damage from 20 to 15%.
LITERALY every single skill got nerfed but pet active that’s well trashand high cooldown, and trample.
I tried lightning storm or whatever it was called. It was “fine” but super annoying. You stand there channeling for 4 seconds to get the max lightnings going. Then you do a couple of basic attacks and repeat. The problem is you’ll have no power going into the next pull. If the “buff” from lightning storm lasted a lot longer then it wouldn’t be a huge problem. They really need some passive power regeneration.
The Caster Druid is in a weird spot right now, imo. Basically I feel like it’s pretty strong if, and ONLY if, I have Poison Creeper in my build. All the other caster stuff still feels underwhelming by comparison. Though, I haven’t tried any Earth Skills recently, cause I hated them during the first beta weekend.
I think the recent pet buffs (moving the massive damage increase from the Legendary affix to the base skills active ability) was a weird choice. It makes Poison Creeper crazy strong, meanwhile everything else still feels underwhelming. Also having the wolves doing negligible damage, until the active where they suddenly hit like a truck, feels really strange.
Tornado needs the Legendary affix to be even remotely usefull imo. They need to either give it an inherent “Seeks 1 target”, or put that Legendary affix into the codex so we can be guaranteed to have it available. I know I’m not the first person to suggest this.
Lightning Storm is ok, but still feels a bit weak even with the recent buff, and I would plan to replace it with Tornado the moment I got the Tornado Legendary affix.
I imagine they didn’t give Druids passive resource generation because Druids are meant to be closely related to Barbarians, so similar mechanics make sense. But then Barb seems to have more ways to increase their resource generation than the Druid does, making the Druid generation feel sluggish by comparison. I think they could use some help here too.
I did the first beta with wind shear and landslide and it was… sufficient. I think melee druid is a bit stronger though, because of stormstrike.
Last beta I got the legendary which turned Boulder into a Core skill with a 40 mana cost (I think). With items to speed basic attacks it was a lot of Storm Striking and Boulder rolling.
Druid basics outside of stormstrike and wind shear need to be reworked. They are simply bad when comparing them to other classes.
Need a good mixture of the following for a generator/spender class
Dmg
Resource gen
Utility/temp buffs
Maul/claw are just straight bad compared to the barb basics skill nodes
i was having a lot of fun with tornado until i died.
might just start with that when it goes live. ill see.
I would also add Dont sleep on your earth skills especially lookign at “earthen might” pushing a luck build seems like it could be very very strong. Huge stun potential with overpower/luck. I expect many people taking advantage of this to push bosses to knock down and for pvp to try to really control a fight. I also feel resource regen was in a good place.