Hello!
TL;DR: Keeper of the Grove feels most fun when its used to support Convoke over Force of Nature. It might focus better on the theme of the hero spec if it had chances to randomly summon treants and ancients!
I’ve mained Boomkin since I started in Burning Crusade, and I’ve loved Force of Nature that whole time. So, I was super excited to see that our Keeper of the Grove hero spec focused on our treants. I’m a super casual player, and this post is just me sharing my experience and thoughts with it so far. I’ve also not played Chosen of Elune yet for comparison.
On the whole, I’m a touch conflicted. I have had a lot of fun playing KotG, but… not because of the treant buffs. It’s fun because of the ways that its talents interact with Convoke the Spirits. I love Convoke as a universal delete button (Boomkin Jutsu), and KotG’s talents have done a great job enhancing that button. Even with Convoke being a veritable grande finale at a Fourth of July fireworks show, the green bursts visually stand out over the largely whites and blues of my spells. And, it goes without saying, the numerous damage bonuses that the Hero Spec gives make Convoke feel all the better.
However, therein lies the disconnect: Keeper of the Grove sells itself as a treant-focused spec, but - to me - it plays much better as a Convoke-focused spec. I’m enjoying it, but it’s like I went to a restaurant, ordered a hamburger, and they gave me a chicken sandwich instead. I like chicken sandwiches, but that’s not what I was expecting. I was excited for Keeper of the Grove to enhance my treants, but I’ve found the most fun way is to use the treants as part of the set up for a big Convoke pay off.
Frankly, when I first saw the spec back in Blizzard’s blue posts using it as an example, I thought that it felt… Unfinished? That it was just some placeholder talents. However, on into release, that vibe is still there. None of the talents are particularly exciting, and the spell I’ve found gluing them all together is hardly in the spec at all.
So, while I am having fun with Keeper of the Grove, I’d suggest the following changes to bring it back in-line with its selling point: treants. These are listed in no particular order, and I probably wouldn’t want all of them at the same time (or maybe that’d be cool!), but I do think that they better translate the expectations into the typical gameplay language we’d expect to see with a WoW class.
- Have it summon ancients instead of treants. Or like… Every x treants summoned summons an ancient instead. That’d be awesome! If ancients are too big, can you maybe have them be a smaller scale on other players’ (or raid members’?) screens?
- Have your spells have a chance of summoning a treant. That way it isn’t just like “oh, I get to use my hero talents once every 45 seconds”. Even if it was passive, at least your hero spec would be something more than just more incentive to hit Force of Nature on cooldown. Maybe like… When Starsurge or Starfall are cast, so treant summoning is tied to your spender, to make your spenders feel better. Or maybe wild mushrooms blowing up spawns a treant. That sounds funny! Whenever a treant is summoned, it could use the green poof animation that the Dream Surge currently gives.
- Right now, KotG just gives a flat 15 second cooldown reduction to Force of Nature. It also gives an additional cooldown reduction if Force of Nature isn’t used? That’s a very awkward cooldown management, and not typically anything we see in WoW. It actively incentivizes players not to use Force of Nature, the core focus of the spec. Why not instead tie the cooldown reduction to part of your rotation? A shooting star hits the target? Using Wrath or Starfire in the correct eclipse? Starsurge/Starfall are cast? That way, with proper play, the cooldown could maybe get waaaay lower than 45 seconds. That incentivizes players to play fast and keep treants up.
- This is really 3.5: Alternatively, if not a CD reduction, then maybe extend how long my treants are active. Or both!
- Rework Force of Nature to work more like Grove Guardians, the Resto Druid equivalent of it. Force of Nature is a once per minute cooldown that summons 3 treants. Grove Guardians is a 3 Charge spell that summons 1 treant per charge. Recharges on a 30 second(ish) cool down. Force of Nature really hasn’t changed all too much since Vanilla, so it could use a touch up. Having it act like Grove Guardians would perhaps enable it to be integrate into your rotation as a resource to manage, rather than something you just press once and forget.
I think adding additional methods for summoning treants would be easy enough to do an really sell the theme of the spec. Doubly so if those treants were occasionally Ancients. That’d make the spec kinda focus around getting as many treants as possible to get as many ancients as possible, and that sounds fun? It helps define Keeper of the Grove’s identity as basically “the druid who summoned the trees to Isengard”, carrying with you an army of the forest wherever you go!
Thanks for reading!
re: Isengard
I know a druid didn’t summon the ents to Isenguard, an ent did, it’s more about the point that what if a druid had, and you were that druid!