So right now we’re the underdog of all the classes. What are some reasonable buffs/fixes that you think will make Druid at least relevant without being stupidly broken? I have some ideas from the top of my head:
- Tornado ticks/boulder rotates based on the actual attack speed. This would make these builds significantly stronger while it still makes sense.
- Cataclysm: The tornado from Cataclysm inherits the Tornado core skill’s characteristics, meaning it can utilize tornado’s aspects. This can also make the malignant ring very relevant as we now have more than just 1 ultimate skill that can go well with it. Also opens up a lot of build variations.
- Pulverize: dmg increased the less target hit. May take up another aspect slot to balance out. This will help solve the single target dmg issue.
- Claw: Can go beyond the attack speed caps.
- Also boulder: deals 0 damage when outside of suppressor aura, instead of varnishing completely. This will help keep the momentum of the build up while still keep the mechanic well balanced.
There might be more…
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No mention of lacerate, companions, spirit management, or the leveling experience. All much bigger issues. Spare me the paragon and endgame discussion.
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Blizzard still haven’t fixed the Pulverize shockwave hit box bug
You will not be able to hit the monster and damage it properly
If it is sitting and standing right on top of you, like literally in your face. I have always been bothered by this a lot. It has never changed since beta, which is clearly a bug
Though they tried to nerf and fix Barb HOTA. In the end making it OP again. They allow Sorc to have more counts of balls lightning with Tibult wills and scaling with attack speeds… while Druid can only have 4 Boulders and no more. Tornado of 1 and no more…ticking in time based and not scaling with attack speed
Claws and it poison doesn’t “Stack” !!! Hell, I don’t get it… every other sources of poison damage stack up. Even if I have 3 little Spider exploded in my face and they stacked up, my HP started dropping like crazy. Here, Claws crit hits almost 90% of the time and poison never stacked up
Druid is crippled compare to other classes
Man this season i was so excited to make a perma lacerate druid and i managed to do a nm100 dungeon but it took me like 25 minutes… With rly good gears and glyphs at lvl18. With the gears im using in my lacerate druid i could 1 shot lilith with shred or kill her rly fast with tornado.
I dont ask to make it broken and do 1 billion damage but man… At least let us do 800k - 1million dmg per hit and be eable to kill uber bossess at a good speed. Also being eable to kill nm100 bossess in a decent speed.
Not to mention companions are only useful to boost you personal dmg with sheperd aspect.
Alpha aspect is the most useless aspect i saw in the game si far. No dmg the rabies does not work like ours. And the cooldown of the rabies spread is a lot and also doesnt spread as much as our rabies skill. (And also they die so fast in high nm dungeons).
Yeah the nerf to Druid is really questionable given how other much much broken skills of other classes are getting free passes left and right. For example, Grizzly rage, even if Blizzard had left it as it, it would still be subpar in season 2 compared to HoTA, LB. It might feel just right for this season because it’s the only build we ever had that can actually function efficiently in 4 man contents. Yet they nerfed it to the dust for no apparent reason. The only reason some people are still sticking around because thankfully Druid still has arguable the most amazing synergy and build diversity. I just wish Blizzard cared enough to make these builds actually work.
What if we replace one ultimate (cataclysm or lacerate?) with something new?
Somebody on this forum already suggested the bear companion from D2.
But I was thinking more of a stampede of spirit animals.
A lot of normal animals from the open world, but then in spirit form that trample the opposition.
A full screen animation. I think it would look amazing!
Would love to hear what you think of this idea.
Nice to read that you tried to make a lacerate build work. Had many ideas this season, and this was one of them, but didn’t get to it yet.
Completing a nNM100 with it is still a great result. I never got that far.
I’m currently fiddling around with the seismic shift aspect. Love the animation and I got a soft spot for trying to make less used things work.
Paired it with great staff of the crone, nature’s Fury and Vampire powers.
Also tried companions, blurred beast, changelings debt, and bestial rampage builds in general.
There are three major issues I have with Druid:
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Wisdom is the main stat, and wisdom increases overpower damage, this creates a scenario where Werebear immediately becomes optimal for the base damage stat.
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Minions have no real impact: there is a key passive for everything but minions, none of the key passives feel like they would even synergize with a minion build. They have little value in clearing, and almost no value in a boss battle. They take up a spot on your action bar and are far overshadowed by any other non-minion option.
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Their class feature is literally gear affixes, every other class’ class feature feels like a selection of legendary aspects (literally for Barbarian), but the Druid’s feels like a selection of affixes on a magic item.
These issues can be felt while leveling, corrections at endgame will not address these issues. They will lead to a very homogenous leveling meta which will funnel people into either a specific endgame build or make them lose interest before they can get to a point where the desired play style becomes viable.
Companions need a ton of work. There’s no Paragon tree for them, tons of damage multipliers don’t work, there is no way to align companions with an element and get synergies going, it’s basically a broken skill tree.
I know they don’t really want passive pet gameplay replacing active gameplay but literally god, you have them so weak that achieving 1 million damage in an active wolf hit is like a dream while other classes are literally doing billion damage hits. It’s beyond imbalanced.
Druid is still probably the best balanced class around, the other classes have one gimmick or build doing decent. Hopefully season 3 sees some major changes across all the classes. Druid was so good pre and season 1. Would love to see some more support around Blurred beast with Lacerate counting.
I noticed the problem with lacerate is it haves a really low base damage. Yeah, 460% sounds broken but its not per hit but its if u hit all the 12 hits on an enemy. Thats 38.3% per hit its even less than basic skills. Tornado haves a low multiplier also 48% but the difference is tornado can be spamed super fast and have a lot of passives that boost its damage. Also a lot of aspects. Lacerate needs a a lot of love by devs or its always gonna be a meme skill.
Druid was my first character at launch and I’ve just come back around to giving it another go in season 2. What you’ve said here are the same problems the Druid had at launch only some things can be covered up by temporary seasonal powers to make most builds seem OK until you start pushing deep into endgame.
I want to focus primarily on the levelling experience which is too much of a grind even with seasonal boons. The mothers blessing helps, but in the time it took me to do level 1-30 on Druid I was able to complete levels 94-100 on my seasonal barbarian.
The biggest problem with the class and I said this months ago is that it is just too slow. It moves slow and it casts slow and that makes it feel lethargic to play. Every class can one or two shot most mobs and Druids take longer to walk between them and also to get their attacks out. Season of the vampire teleporting all o we the map makes it feel even worse and you spend more time chasing the fight than anything. The 10% attack speed boon needs to be made permanent into the class maybe even boosted to 15% and it needs a movement speed boost added as well.
Speaking of boons, that entire system needs a rework. There is no real parity of choices depending on playstyle and most of us are all taking the same things. We need better and more impactful choices. Lucky hit % needs to be dropped from any and all boons and be made a flat percentage to proc.
Spirit management is quite terrible early on. From what I remember I was able to spam core skills nonstop at endgame but had to eat up a few aspect slots to do so. With the introduction of more uniques aspect slots are at a premium on late game builds, but at least you get massive damage for making that trade. Also the timers are quite terrible on this class as well. I’ve heard the words I’m not ready yet, and I don’t have enough spirit more times that I can count.
All of those things in combination make the class play unnecessarily slow and clunky until you get reasonably good gear and well into your paragon boards. It doesn’t really matter if the class is OP at endgame if you get bored or discouraged from pushing to the endgame.
I played Rogue, Barb and even a minion Necro which was still faster and less clunky than this Druid. I want the class to feel good from level 1-100. Being handicapped for the first half of the game because it might get too strong at endgame is a poor rationale especially when you have other classes holding down one button and walking through content at 50x the speed of the most powerful endgame Druid.