Viability of Primal Avatar as TWF Option in U23?

[Nayus]

I'm considering farming my Colors of the Queen in Primal now that we have melee power.
The biggest drawback is that it requires TWF. It also works on unarmed and animal forms but those are limited to very specific builds, I'm talking about melees in general.


http://ddowiki.com/page/Primal_Avatar

Main bonuses:

Cores:
** +30 Spellpower. Useful for stronger heals. Useful for Energy Burst twist.
** Primal Travel: +50% Dodge that ignores Dodge cap for 12 seconds every 60. [Bursts of Survivability]
** Walk with the Spirits: 25% Incorporeality, but it's super hard to maintain so might as well forget about it.

Tier 1:
** Coccoon: Potentially saves a twist slot, or saves SP, or does almost nothing if you're a Bladeforged...
** Ephemeral Evolution: Useful in boss fights for 15 PRR.

Tier 2:
** +3 Reflex
** +3 Dodge Aura for the entire group, but it does not ignore dodge cap so it's probably just for you and some random gimps. Lasts for 6 seconds after being hit.

Tier 3:
** Balanced Attacks: Huge bonus to damage and survivability. [Knocks down for 2 secs on Vorpal, enemy is considered helpless] - One of the main reasons I'm considering this.

Tier 4:
** 5% bonus to physical damage.
** Dryad heals your group, saving SP overtime. Wikia says her regenerate hits for 50 per tick, which isn't bad.


Tier 5:
** Chill of Winter: Not that good but it's an Aura, affecting your entire group. It reduces attack and movement speed which is certainly useful for everyone. The damage stacks, which might be useful against bosses.

Tier 6:
** Nature's Fury: +1 Crit Mult on 19-20s... 'Nuff said. You could alternatively pick Evasion.
** Avatar of Nature.

Avatar of Nature is tricky, I've heard people say it usually lasts for little less than 30 seconds and it should take around one minute and half to fully recharge, it does MASSIVE damage when it's on. I was considering building for it, then I could activate it every 45 seconds or so. If somehow I could activate all three spirit-charges categories every 3 seconds I could keep Avatar over half the time.
Biggest drawback is: You can't cast spells... You could alternatively trigger Avatar when you have around 15 Spirits, instead of 30, potentially offsetting the healing loss by giving it a lower duration, but it costs 35 SP every time.

Avatar of Nature could potentially allow coding exp- I meant "intelligent uses" of it. A developer said it's for all means considered "Unarmed" damage, even though you're using 2 weapons. But any tricks involving it would be better off left out of the discussion, even because I don't think they're very applicable outside of a Druid build.

[BigErkyKid]

People twist some good stuff, I have yet to see someone running it as a main melee destiny.

I did for a bit, long LOONG time ago. It was not great.

IMO, all epic moments should be like blitz: sustainable through the quest with certain conditions.

Then I might look back into this tree. For now its dead. (Even casters avoid it...)

[cru121]

There's at least one good thing about Primal Avatar... You don't have to twist Cocoon.

More seriously, I've been recently running in Primal Avatar on my swashbuckler. I guess the summon is OK, buffing you with Deathward (24 minutes) and decent Regenerate. I read the Spores have some situational use vs constructs. Buffs to hirelings are useful if you're using them. Autumn Harvest is considerably weaker than similar ability in Divine Crusader.

[Exiledtyrant]

I like primal avatar. It suffers from having half of it's talents wasted while the other half are good. The DC for lightning strike is also capped at 50 so there's a scaling issue there. I'm still debating of grinding my EK to primal or not. The vanguard reveal will be the decider.

The knockdown procs a lot and it's not limited like adrenaline. With the removal of requirements from overwhelming critical I think that you can now have all weapons at cleaver level of crit multiplier but without needing axes thanks to natures fury. The 5% physical damage is also pretty nice. Tree form has always seemed so backwards to me. You dedicate your entire character to two separate weapons, effects that favor two weapons and an ED designed around two weapons and you lose all of that for a tree with it's own hit dice, multiplier and ranges ( if it even crits?), slow attack speed and no consideration for procs. Tree form seems so anti two weapon fighting and spell casting but it's the final form.

My sorcerer keeps up spirit almost indefinitely because of persistent aoe spells and dots. It's not hard to keep all of the toggles running for a fairly long time with the exception being tree form.

Actually I did a bigger write up here explaining what I thought was wrong with Primal Avatar:

On primal avatar I again like the cores. I wish eternal return didn't have an hp cap and just kept converting spirit into health. All of the actives are strong though and give a nice mix of hp spell points, spell power and defense.

Tier 1:

Ephemeral Evolution requires to many hits to get the PRR bonus: Instead of rewarding getting hit I think it should give the full 5/10/15 PRR for 10 seconds every time you Dodge, Displace, Blur or are missed by an attack.

Insidious spores is costly and seems to be to niche of an ability. I would hope it's something new entirely.

The friends of nature need a definite boost in the stats they give.

Tier 2:
Natural shielding needs a boost. If your going to have summon abilities they have to be worth something to increase the summon power level to useful. Especially for classes outside of druid.

Tier 3:

Summer smoke has been proven useless to me. I researched it awhile back it seems the main use was for raid damage that's why it was given such a crappy 1% proc rate. This however makes it feel like a waste of points in any group smaller than a raid or solo. Deserves a much higher proc rate with a 5 person cap. Now that the bug is fixed where it messed up handwraps and killed team mates I think the proc rate is the only thing holding it back.

The Oncoming storm is terrible because it is a 1 % proc and very few people are going to have more than a hireling or a summon out at once time. Possibly only one of either. Secondly they don't exactly have crazy attack rates. It should be every X amount of attacks your summon/hire procs 1, 2 or 3 effects. At least it makes small and large summoning groups useful and the enhancement has some worth.

Tier 4:

Autumn Harvest should be brought up to around 20% or possibly every X amount of kills triggers a nice heal.

Stromrage needs it's DC removed, and it's 1 lightning strike every 3 seconds per spell/ melee hit removed. The damage may or may not need to be scaled up after the change.

Tier 5:
Chill of winter should take less time to stack to full potential. I am still not sure if it should proc off of being hit either. Casters and dps are probably not looking to be rewarded for being hit although the buff is group wide so if summon builds are ever boosted up may be good for tanking summons.

Sprit Boon is pretty strong I am not sure if it needs a boost. Being a Primal bonus it already adds to that large pool of str / con with no overlaps. And caster get a nice primal bonus as well. Maybe 4 bonus instead if it is not inline with the current power curve that's coming with all these revamps.

Tier 6:

The epic moment is fun but it may need some rebalancing. I think it use to be effected by haste but this made it very unbalanced. I remember watching a youtube video where primal avatar was being abused to kill bosses in a matter of seconds. Something I hope the game is trying to move away from. All it might need is less spirit drain so that the better effects like cleaving auto attacks and aoe knockdown can be used longer.



Lastly if EDs are going to push summons they need to make summons actually useful that goes for Primal and Magister, and not useful for 1 class after who know how many lives.

[Zoda]

Make a monk with whirwind attack (and cleaves), turn into a tree and own, the rest of the destiny is fairly useless. Whirlwind attack in tree form is some serious damage though.

[BigErkyKid]

Twitching with the tree is awesome, but hardly WAI.

This is why I am very suspicious of twitching: it is out of the direct control of the devs.

It is not a mechanic, hence things are NOT balanced around it.

PS - Also, the tree is only usable now and then for a melee. You gain +1 charge every 3 seconds on melee atacks.

[serthcore]

Twitching with the tree is awesome, but hardly WAI.

This is why I am very suspicious of twitching: it is out of the direct control of the devs.

It is not a mechanic, hence things are NOT balanced around it.

PS - Also, the tree is only usable now and then for a melee. You gain +1 charge every 3 seconds on melee atacks.

Twitching on tree form? wasn't this fixed a while ago?
Last i tried you couldnt do it anymore, but i might be wrong...

[Eth]

Balanced attacks is absolutely awesome for TWF, everything else in the destiny is pretty meh.

[cru121]

Balanced attacks is absolutely awesome for TWF, everything else in the destiny is pretty meh.

Totally. I've never heard of anyone twisting for example... Cocoon.

[Nayus]

Totally. I've never heard of anyone twisting for example... Cocoon.

Coccoon is so basic for non-self-healing toons that we even forget it actually belongs to a ED. Sometimes it feels it's just a twist.

[droid327]

It basically depends on what you can twist it with, since its not really enough on its own...you might do Soundburst SLA from the Divine side, as a spammable offensive spell for Spirit building? Since Spores is too expensive to spam. Plus, if you're a WIS monk, its got a decent enough chance to actually stun something

Honestly, if the main draw is that KD-on-vorpal, you might be better off just twisting it and grinding Primal in FotW. You'll get +30% Helpless damage when it procs, and of course Adrenaline with a good recharge rate.

[maddong]

If you have to go primal go fury.
Preferably don't go primal and stay in LD or DC (unless you can still benefit from slayer arrow bs?).

[Nayus]

Well nevermind, I analyzed it better and I was vastly overestimating Nature's Fury. This ED still sucks, even for a dedicated toon.

[Spoonwelder]

Gonna necro this as I switched to PA just to test some things on my main....ran Two Toed and Garls on eH.

The tree across the board is kinda meh - 5% damage +1crit mult and a bunch of procs I don't notice doing anything significant (heal, smoke were not noticeable - they might have done something but it was not noticeable in assisting completion). That said I had skipped balanced attacks as a 2sec knockdown just didn't seem that helpful - especially on vorpal even with a TWF it just didn't feel like it would proc enough......

Anyway I saved Nature's Avatar for boss/mini-boss fights and in the end it was 'effective' every time the boss and most if not all the trash was dead by the time it ended. I would guess that out of form it wouldn't have been much longer but I can't say how much longer.....the bosses were running at about 50k HP so taking that down in 30seconds isn't bad.

But I have a question - I am running a twf pally/fi/tempest - my question is when in Natures Avatar are my smites, cleaves, Holy Retribution, divine sacrifice doing anything? I couldn't see the damage numbers since the body is so large. I know I should have scanned the damage log but it didn't occur to me until later.

I think my assessment is that PA is still meh but I wanted to test it out since it is supposed to be the TWF tree of choice...that and I am planning my next few ETRs after I finish Divine and want to see if Fury or PA is better - my problem is fury is very rage centric and I have the Sacred Defender stance running for the 6str bonus.....so Fury may not be a great fit.

[genneko]

this vid is the answer. nothing more to say.

yea zoda is right and enough strong without twitching.

[gwonbush]

this vid is the answer. nothing more to say.
http://youtu.be/SaT2b8stSlA

yea zoda is right and enough strong without twitching.

Watching the video, it seems to rely entirely on cleaves, whirlwind attack and monk special attacks to improve its attack speed beyond the basic tree form attack speed.

[Hendrik]

Make a monk with whirwind attack (and cleaves), turn into a tree and own, the rest of the destiny is fairly useless. Whirlwind attack in tree form is some serious damage though.

Don't even need to do that, Alpha Strike from PA is rather nice.

GMoF and PA are my fav ED for my Monk. Really just fun.

If your a min/max type player, then there are prolly better ED to suit that playstyle.

However, if you play for fun and the sheer enjoyment of the game, you can find that in PA.