Druid Feedback Compilation thread

I thought it would best to put all the Druid feedback in one place, to make it easier to access.

Stone Burst

  • This is a channeled skill, when Druid Earth/Bear passives, skills and boons are designed around Overpower, which channeled skills cannot do.

Shred

  • The minor buffs to Shred do very little, especially seeing as they come in the form of Aspects which Shred is already overwhelmed with. How are we supposed to fit 6 aspects in the two offensive slots we can spare?
  • Shred also needs to DASH by default, as this is the entire reason people use Shred.
  • Aspect of the Agile Wolf is still bugged, and does not dash properly.
  • Shred regularly dashes underneath the ground, which ruins Pit and Undercity runs.
  • Waxing Gibbous is still severely underpowered.

Pulverize

  • This ability needs an Aspect squish, as it requires TWO before it even functions properly (Shockwave and Ursine Horror).

Boulder and Dolmen Stone

  • When using Dolmen Stone, Boulder needs to be able to be cast while moving, to remove the clunkiness of the build (like what Sorcs gained with one of their foci).
  • When you are at max level of rotating boulders (10), you should gain some visual aura, to make it easier to know when to stop spamming. You could even make it so you gain an actual buff at 10 stacks, which has an obvious visual component.

Toxic Claws

  • I understand this was changed to stop everyone putting one point into it just for on-poisoning and against-poisoned effects. But why does it still do no damage? Now it is ‘put 1 point if you use Shred or Lacerate’ which is pretty much the same thing.
  • Greatly buffing this passive would bring Shred up, and would give Lacerate an alternative to the horrible Overpower snapshotting which everyone does.

Overload (Snake Boon)

  • Why does this do 20% of WEAPON damage, with ZERO scaling? I have seen 1 billion damage lightning strikes, add a few hundred damage poison dot. Was this even tested, once?
  • What, exactly, is the 1% poison chance thing?

Blood Howl

  • Maintaining Wolf form is actually incredibly difficult, due to 90% of Druid skills being base Human or Bear. Druid runes also change your form, cancelling the new bonus. If you want people to use the new choice, and invest more than 1 skill point into Blood Howl, then you should have the cooldown lower with more skill points. This would also buff the underpowered Waxing Gibbous.

Heightened Senses

  • The nerf was needed to stop Druids from becoming immortal, but it was still too much. It needs more Damage Reduction, especially for Wolf Druids.

Grizzly Rage

  • This Ultimate is something you cast ONCE, then maintain for the duration of an entire Pit, Helltide, or whatever. Giving it knockdown and damage upon activation for its level 5 ability is just pointless. Please change it to something actually useful.
  • Grizzly Rage still has too many Aspects, and is still pretty much impossible for Werewolf builds.

Lacerate

  • Actually does a lot of damage, now
  • Sadly, Overpower is, once again, the way to go.
  • Toxic Claws adds negligible damage, and is only used for against-poisoned effects (1 point only).
  • Massively increasing the poison damage dealt, removing the ability to snapshot overpower, and giving it the ability to be cancelled mid-ability, would make Lacerate so much more fun, instead of another overpower build. You could even make it a channeled ability, which would remove overpower altogether, and give the ability to cancel it, as long as the lost damage was compensated for.

Cataclysm

  • Another snapshot Overpower build.
  • Damage increase on this PTR is a lot, and should allow it to compete with other classes.
  • The 5 point ability is bad, though, and should be something that benefits the entire ~20 second long ability, not a strange on-cast ability. Perhaps giving it the scaling mechanic which was just added to Mjolnic Ryng, and giving the ring something else?

Petrify

  • The Petrify rune is NOT resetting cooldowns when Druids have 5 points in Petrify, despite the blizzard comment saying runes should inherit the class’ skills and points, if used by the corresponding class. If this functioned properly, it would open up a lot of niche builds.

Perfect Storm, Nature’s Fury, Earthen Might Key Passives

  • Still extremely underpowered.

Malefic Crescent

  • Using this is actually a huge damage loss compared to a proper legendary amulet + Aspect. The speed needs to be a damage trait, and the bonus power needs to work with Mad Wolf’s Glee ( i.e Mad Wolf’s Glee’s bonus needs to be added ON TOP of the amulet’s, not replaced by it).
  • Requiring chain critical strikes is a nice idea, but requires 100% crit chance (was it designed for Shred, only?).
  • Feral Aptitude on it is bugged, and gains nothing from masterworking.
  • Would work better as boots.

Waxing Gibbous

  • Currently, completely outclassed by a two-hander with Stormclaw.
  • If Toxic Claws was actually worth more than 1 point, and critical strike chance above 100% was converted into critical strike damage, then it would be very fun and viable.
  • The Stealth does NOT work with the Shroud of False Death Stealth damage bonus, which needs to be fixed.
  • Maintaining the critical strike bonus against bosses or strong monsters is pretty close to impossible (outside of Petrify spam on bosses), due to Blood Howl’s reset mechanic only working on things you can kill fast.

Greatstaff of the Crone

  • This simply does not have the damage to compete.
  • It needs to enhance Claw, as well as Storm Strike, by allowing Claw to cleave, and attack twice (Claw procs the Storm Strike).
  • It should also be changed to greatly increase ALL basic attack damage.

The Basilisk

  • The Petrify damage is extremely weak, and the stats just make no sense in relation to Druid’s Earth skills. What is this staff even for?

Mythic Helms

  • Druids have class-specific helms which are often requirements for Nature Magic builds to work, due to the complete lack of Human passives, paragon nodes and viable Key Passives. This locks druids out of some of the strongest items in the game, the Mythic Helms.

Skill Tags

  • Many Druid skills lack the skill tags to facilitate the necessary end-game, or even late-game, scaling.
  • Ravens should gain the Storm tag with the Stormcrow aspect, Shred the Storm tag with the Stormclaw aspect, and Poison Creeper the Earth tag with the Subterranean aspect, for example.

Offensive Aspects

  • Druids have a huge number of weak offensive aspects which will never be used in the 2-3 slots Druids have (and Rabies was just moved into this pile, for some reason).
  • Many of these aspects should be combined together, and Druids probably need to be given a special ‘relic’ slot, which holds an aspect at 1.5 times power.

Core Skills in general

  • All Druid Core skills need their damage buffed up, as they are completely outclassed now by Wrath and Ultimate skills. Band-aid fixes increasing aspects such as Stormclaw and Retaliation to the moon are not fun, and just serve to kill the use of unique items for Druids.
6 Likes

I would like to add to please also make Stormcrows and Stormclaw aspect actually STORM skills and benefit from storm passives.

… And Poison creeper with a landslide should also become nature magic and earth.

And please combine some of the aspects so we can use some uniques and mythics without ruining our build

4 Likes

Stone burst
-Stone burst feels very underwhelming damage wise and clunky with the delay in the attack starting and stopping when you release your finger from the cast button. The only fix for this seems to be button mashing but it defeats the purpose of a channeled skill. This also needs to be able to overpower like all our earth skills.

Shred
-Shred is better but remains in the same spot it is on live server now. Yes we got more aspects to increase its damage but now there are serious issues with unique vs legendary slot gear choices. Plus as one of druids core skill that is primarily single target it is still lacking in damage. This should be our best skill for bossing and elites but it is still behind almost all our other core skills in damage.

Tornado
-Tornado speed should increase. Feels like it starts very slow and takes awhile to ramp up.

Malefic Crescent Unique Amulet
-Not worth using in the amulet slot. Should be boots to mirror wild heart hunger because we lose too much if it is in the amulet slot.
-The unique effect is Ferocity’s consecutive Critical Strike Damage is increased to 100-150% against enemies when consecutively Critical Striking.
-It should be changed to Ferocity’s consecutive Critical Strike Damage is increased BY 100-150% against enemies when consecutively Critical Striking.
This way a player can use this plus mad wolf’s glee to really up their crit strike damage and enable werewolf builds not rely on overpower.

2 Likes

Updated it with the extra feedback.

Huge druid main. Probably 2000+ hrs on druid.

I agree with everything 100%. We’re starved for offense aspect slots. A lot of utility needs to be combined with offense to open more scaling.

Skill tags needing to be fixed since day 1.

Bugs.

Reliance on OP and quickshift/ beastial rage to compete.

All of these need to be fixed for druid to have open options.

Props to you for sourcing discord and reddit and compiling everything. Thank you.

1 Like

PTR is about to end, so hopefully some of this feedback was heard.

Probably common again but if just survivability in wolf form. I was weaving in pulverize just to get fortify. Wolf has no innate survivabilty for a melee class.

Blizz did such a good job with spiritborn finding ways to give each spirit an identity and using the spirit halls to make ways for the skills to work together that i refuse to believe this is an impossible ask.

Couple other items on my list.
Would love crones to add a dash to claw so im not reliant on shred to move. Generally druid movement is not smooth.
50th on aspect squish. Frankly some of the aspects should replace lesser used skill options.
Grizzly rage should just be a primal rage and give you damage reduction and damage, fortify tick should be heal and bake in some of the aspects, preferably the crit damage and time extension. The locking into bear skills is what kills it ultimately. Or dump it and make a new bear ultimate that isnt so restricted.
Lightning bolts outside of cataclysm felt like they needed a bump to chance. Maybe a buff to bad omen or dancing bolts baked in.

1 Like

Good feedback, hope they consider change.

1 Like

Yeah, it is strange giving Druids an Earth skill which cannot Overpower, and does not interact properly with the (incredibly weak) Earth Key Passives.

1 Like