TWF feats now work with Wolf and Bear forms, is this wai?

[VorpalKnight]

tldr? Are the GWF feats working with animal form working as currently intended? Are you thinking about changing them so that they do not benefit druids while on animal form in the future?

......
Just came back to ddo and found a pleasant surprise; Druids now benefit from TWF feats. I am pretty certain its not working as intended and is going to be fixed soon, but I certainly hope you guys reconsider and it will be declared wai as an early Christmas gift to us druids that were looking to be in animal form from the start and had to change into a caster 18/2 or tr into another class.

Personally I think it was a bit silly that animal form did not benefit from TWF feats from day one as Elemental form has quite a few advantages:

1.On the melee hybrid side splashing 2 monks and using Water elemental form while still doing good in melee since GWF added offhand strikes while on ele forms. You also gain 2 extra feats that you can use for TWF and Stunning fist or Power attack, thanks to these you can more meta magic feats.

2. Water elemental form made landing your quake and other spells more reliable for all other casters thanks to Mantle of the Icy Soul made and for fire you could have a fire aura aoe that is pretty decent, compared to ele forms it seems like Animal form Druids where just there for flavor.

3. Spells do not have a 2.5 increased cooldown on elemental forms compared to animal forms, even with the capstone from nature warriors you will still end up with a 50% longer cooldown than Fire/Water ele forms.

4. Crown of Summer (I seriously love this spell on my 18/2 druid)

5. Sla's from Natures Herald that can be empowered, maximized, etc.. for free. The SA is nice addition to wolf forms but without offhand attacks you will still do much more melee damage as a 18/2 splash with GWF feats.

6. Cannot use heal scrolls while in animal form.

Animal form druids have a lot going against them, it seems that the only thing that would make animal forms a decent alternative to pure caster druid, or 18/2 builds is the GWF feats working while in animal forms. I honestly believe that they intended for GWF feats to work while in animal form on live, if anything just to test it out since I didn't see many druids, let alone animal form druids and they wanted to make them more viable, I just want some clarification if its going to stay that way and its as intended.

[Violith]

hopefully a dev does reply, there was a few other threads like this but so far no comment as to whether it is WAI, or going to change or even if they have knowledge that it is happening. I'm currently holding off on using the 20LR for my main due to this, sicne if it does work and is WAI then he'll be switching to use those.

[SerPounce]

Yeah, we've been asking whether this is WAI in half a dozen threads since Lamannia, but apparently it's too much to ask of the devs to write "WAI" or "not WAI" in any of the threads (or even "we haven't decided"). I really like this game, but I'm so fed up with the lack of documentation about how things are suppose to work and lack of communication to clear up the ambiguity left by that lack of documentation. We don't even know what to bug report because we have no idea how things are suppose to work.

Come on Devs, is this, or is this not WAI?

I think it's a great change that will finally make animal druids a viable choice (and get rid of the previous byzantine and counter-intuitive mechanic that only the most hardcore druid players understood), but I don't want to rebuild my druid around it only to have the "bug" get "fixed" in the next patch.

[Havok.cry]

We don't even know what to bug report because we have no idea how things are suppose to work.

According to one dev, we are supposed to bug report everything. (this would take me more time than my full time job)

[VorpalKnight]

I am eagerly waiting for a comment from them, I want to respect as well and either go full caster druid if it it gets nerfed back, or stay GWF and make a few changes if it doesn't and gets announced as wai. Hopefully they will address it by then and tell us if they intended for it to be that way or not.

[burningwind]

god they really make it hard for us player..

[Cordovan]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

[jakeelala]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

considering how incredibly terrible animal forms are for druid builds changing this back would be silly. Right now druid animal form melee buidls make up about .0001% of melee builds.

or is your obsessive love of monks too great and you need to nerf everything that doesn't involve someone using monk in their build? I guess people will just continue to use both.

[Failedlegend]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

Any chance we can lose the pointless requirement of 9 Druid levels for Nat fighting. It just make it a PITA to make any non-single classed druid that uses wildshape

[Havok.cry]

Any chance we can lose the pointless requirement of 9 Druid levels for Nat fighting. It just make it a PITA to make any non-single classed druid that uses wildshape

They should have, instead of making one feat that stacks three times, made three feats with the same level requirements as the TWF/THF feat chains. This way progression would be the same.

[Missing_Minds]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

Feats... you mean what the animal form grants?
Or actual feats as the only FEATS are the forms.

[Havok.cry]

Feats... you mean what the animal form grants?
Or actual feats as the only FEATS are the forms.

I believe he was referring to the feat called Natural Fighting. A passive feat that requires druid 9, gives +6% doublestrike chance animal form attacks, and stacks up to 3 times.

[Missing_Minds]

I believe he was referring to the feat called Natural Fighting. A passive feat that requires druid 9, gives +6% doublestrike chance animal form attacks, and stacks up to 3 times.

If that is what he's refering to, that is so laughable due to the rate of attack of bear/direbear form as that does not have any appreciable amped up damage to help account for the slow attack rate.

Then again... finally something with worse dps than ranged.

I'm half expecting him to come back with "oh, I was refering to the form spells." SPELLS are not FEATS, And those really should be SLA (that cost zero sp) that are granted with the form at the appropriate levels.

[Charononus]

If that is what he's refering to, that is so laughable due to the rate of attack of bear/direbear form as that does not have any appreciable amped up damage to help account for the slow attack rate.

I've heard they upped bear animations for the capstone, which still sucks as a pure build loses so much compared to even a 2 monk splash that there is no reason to stay pure and even with the new capstone it won't make up enough for staying pure.

[SerPounce]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this, it's good to know it's official status.

That said I am disappointed. Natural fighting feats are far to small a bonus, to far to small a baseline to make natural fighting a viable option. Allowing 2wf feats to work in animal form finally makes them fun and viable.

[Tilomere]

The druid's animal form has feats that are meant to compensate for the lack of Two Weapon Fighting support. The change which allows Two Weapon Fighting feats to apply to animal form attacks is not working as intended, and is under investigation. It's too early to say when or if it will change, but you can officially designate this as "not working as intended." Thanks!

Well good to know!

I'm not sure how NF feats alone compensates for 100% offhand TWF with kensai centered mountain stance fighter/monk/X using Axe of Adaxus in LD with 18x4 19-20x8 base crit profiles though...

Wolves used to be able to supplement their melee damage with ice breaths, reaving roar, decent spells, and decent healing (hybrid nature), but that all went away in update 19. I used to run a wonderful ice-cleave-reaving AoE build.

[PurpleTimb]

Thanks for giving an official ruling on this. I guess animal druids will have to keep waiting for an actual melee buff.

Please do something to make bear form viable. Wolf in its current state is not optimal, but it at least is viable and gives enough DPS to be a reasonable alternative to a martial class when you consider the healing and buffs druid provides. Bear form just isn't viable.

To help bears, consider granting one/some/all of:
More PRR.
Bear attacks treated as THF.
Glancing blows.
Bear attacks that give knockdown/knockback chance.
Bear attacks that give stun chance.
More guard effects.
More double-strike.

As it stands now, bear form is just terrible for anything other than using the /dance command.

[unbongwah]

Any chance we can lose the pointless requirement of 9 Druid levels for Nat fighting. It just make it a PITA to make any non-single classed druid that uses wildshape

Considering you need druid 8 for winter wolf - which, let's face it, is the only form worth building towards - I don't consider an extra druid level a big deal. That said, I certainly won't object to, say, monk 12/druid 8 becoming a viable alternative.

What I really want to see is the animal-form abilities become SLAs, for all the reasons why casters want SLAs (i.e., freely meta'ed, work in anti-magic, etc.). And while we're at it, how about some more elemental-specific abilities?

Wolves used to be able to supplement their melee damage with ice breaths, reaving roar, decent spells, and decent healing (hybrid nature), but that all went away in update 19. I used to run a wonderful ice-cleave-reaving AoE build.

Apart from the Reaving Roar nerf, why does this no longer work in U19?

[Charononus]

Apart from the Reaving Roar nerf, why does this no longer work in U19?

No way to get spwr except for spending in a tree that will have nothing else for you in it. For devotion for example it's easier to get devotion from a multiclass and get abilities that are useful to you with those ap at the same time.

[unbongwah]

Even on a STR-based wolf build, I'd probably still want to spend at least 15 APs in Season's Herald: 1st 3 core enhs, Beguile, Produce Flame + Creeping Cold SLAs (no save on either), Wax & Wane x3. That said, it sucks that NW provides zero Spellpower; I know it's meant to be the "melee DPS" (ha!) tree, but c'mon, it oughta be worth, say, 0.5 Spellpower per AP.