Druid Update Preview

[elvesunited]

Woooo! That's gonna be interesting ! But u did miss 1 of my concerns dreads only get cong to dmg not con to attack unlike others like dex STR wisdom int etc. They all get to attack for that stat but con doesn't from dwarf tree (unless it was changed and I not notice) will that be changed as a quick patch sometime soon??

The druid update will replace druid animal form damage with equipped weapon damage so its effectively going to change the entire mechanic behind animal form attacks. It will eliminate all the animal form combat bugs ( and potentially replace them with a whole new set of different animal form combat bugs )

[Silverleafeon]

Anything that takes reduced, 0 or heals from that damage type would take normal damage.

Sounds wonderful!!!

The only snag is it won't stack with damage multipliers such as the sorcerers +15% damage curse. An immune monster made not immune can't be made more vulnerable at the same time.

Perfectly acceptable and certainly thematically logical.
Will accept this "flaw" very happily (and possibly other "flaws") in order to obtain some sort of negate immuntiy function.

Doesn't interact with physical or magical resistance at all, though we don't really use those properties on monsters much because the feedback is wacky.

Nods sagely...

[Silverleafeon]

The HP buffs in the fighter/paladin stances are exclusive from the druid stance (only one defensive stance active at a time).

Well done, that eliminates one of my concerns.
{and as someone mentioned above Druid x / Pally Y multi-class does not exist due to alignment restrictions...}

You can pick up some other things in those trees that will stack. The druid bear line doesn't have reinforced armor for example, but it would work if they got it through fighter levels.

Sounds similiar to what already exists for multi-class tank builds.
Well Done.

I do expect to see some dwarf bear druids, and the con to hit damage will totally work in all forms.

-T

Excellent!!!

[Silverleafeon]

The two things that I will be most interested concerning the new animal combat is:

1) How tanky a Druid 16 / Fighter 4 Bear can be?

2) Is a pure Wolf Druid going to be remotely competitive with other melee builds?

[Pilgrim1]

Thank you for your feedback and work on the druid enhancment pass. However there are a few fundemental issues that nead to be addressed to be a well rounded class.

1). Caster druids are forced into way to many elements to be viable. Adding imunity bypass is a good first step. Additional spells would be a second step. Another option is to consolidate spell power effects to fewer schools, like what was done with the cleric domains. - think 4 seasons or something.

2). Caster Druids have a real lack of viable AoE damage spells. Fixing broken spells and imporoving existing spells like call lighting storm is a good first step. Additional options include adding spells or enhancments that work well with the druid class.

3). By seperating the wolf and bear enhancments into 2 classes you force people to specilize diffrent asspects of the druid class. Combine them and create enhancments that read: in wolf form gain “....” and in bear form gain “...”. People will already have to take 8-12 levels of druid to access both animal forms. All this does is allow people to play the entire range of a shapeshifter.

These have been mentioned in this topic before several times by diffrent posters. I’m repeating them to give more visibility in case you missed them.

Thank you.

[A3oN95]

3. New forms! Summon Tree! Heal Tree! Oh My: So these are things we would love to do but will not fit into the scope of *this* pass. With the tech debt were paying to just fix the existing wolf/bear forms and art sources committed elsewhere it is not in the cards now. Later will be a different story. We do want to revamp the pets, and Druids will likely end up with at least 4 trees total in the long run. They need at least a healing tree still if not healer summoner hybrid or five trees if we split them, as for now we need to focus on Wolf, Bear and the elemental forms we have and make them as good as possible.

When the time comes, might I suggest you look at the Verdant Lord thread; some interesting ideas for how to port that PnP PrC to DDO for a healer / summoner / Conjuration-focused druid tree, IMO.

Healer/summoner/conj-or-transm-focused hybrid sounds like a very fun tree! (And one not replicated by any other one from different classes). After reading the linked thread, I agree that creating a single tree for the concept seems more effective for both keeping it viable and making some of it interesting for anyone *not* interested in the playstyle. Make it happen, please!

[SirValentine]

SEASONS HERALD
TIER 1:

Beguile: Whenever you attack or cast a spell on an enemy, there is a 50% chance to Beguile an affected enemy [1/0-2/0-3] times for [3/0-6/0-9] seconds. Beguile: -2% attack speed, -2 Spellpower. Beguile stacks up to 25 times, and one stack fades every few seconds. Up to one enemy affected each second (by up to [1/2/3] stacks). Does not affect bosses. AP COST: 1

Have you given any thought to making it actually interesting to buy more than 1 tier of Beguile? At Tier 1, you're guaranteed one stack. At Tier 2, you might get zero, and your average isn't even any higher. How about something like 1/1-3/2-4, or even just 1/2/3? Mostly irrelevant anyway, since, "Does not affect bosses." and that's who you'd most want to stack it up on.

[SirValentine]

SEASONS HERALD

CORES:

6. Hierophant: You are wise and skilled in the art of wielding divine magic to summon aid and change the world around you. +4 Wisdom +4 Con +10 Universal spell power. Your Conjuration and Evocation spells gain +1 DC, +2 caster level and +2 max caster level. (new – increased wis/con bonus)

TIER 5

Wait, I just noticed: you're nerfing caster Druid DCs! Why?

You've removed the +2 to Transmutation from the capstone completely, and lowered the Conjuration bonus, and you've removed the +1 to DCs from Tier 5 completely.

Were people maxing out their Entangle and Spike Growth DCs somehow unbalancing the game? A "pass" or "update" that nerfs existing abilities without really good reason is not a nice thing.

[Wongar]

I do expect to see some dwarf bear druids, and the con to hit damage will totally work in all forms.
-T

As others have pointed out - Dwarf does not get CON to hit - only CON to damage. This makes building a Throw Your Weight Around Dwarf very difficult as you still can't hit anything in Legendary quests. I'll second the request to make Dwarf CON to damage AND CON to hit. I think it is the only stat that does not provide both hit and damage.

[SpardaX]

7. Small Spoiler from next week changes - As we looked at making Anger of the Noon Day Sun not quite so feeble we experimenting with an effect that will neutralize the invulnerability of a monster to an elemental damage type. Fight fire with fire they say Will be applied to the sorcerer trees as well if it pans out. It's looking promising so far.

Yes Please please please find a way to make this work.
Someone said it was power creep. But why do you think that? It's not making an enemy more vulnerable to an element (as in purple damage), most likely I expect the damage to stay yellow even (resisted).
But I've been playing this game for about a decade out of it's 12 year run, and I can count the amount of Fire Sorcerer's I've ever met on 1 hand.

If this change, finally gives Druids and Sorcerers an even playing field, suddenly all Sorcerers become (at least semi) equally viable again, for the first time in years. It just means you can take a Fire Sorc into Shavarath, and not feel like literal dead weight, because you cant hurt anything.

Please, please please please, please, if there's one thing on that list that gets through, make it this.

Someone asked if it would be an activated ability, or if it would be a passive ability on all spells cast. I agree that, unless the Immunity Kill is a 1 spell point / 1 second cooldown ability, passive would definitely be the more userfriendly option, I'm pretty sure under the hood it would be almost impossible to have an enemy be set to "Fire: Immune" and then have fire damage come in and not be immune.

So I assume the only real ways to do this (at least with my very limited coding experience) would either be
1: an active ability that removes immunity (which would also have the benefit of removing immunity for everyone, but be single target enemy specific)
or
2: An enhancment (most likely tier 5 or level 12/18/20 core ability) that changes all spell damage you do of your chosen element, into a non resistable element. Such as Bane damage. But doing that would kill purple damage also, since it wouldn't really be your original element anymore. Or something along those lines anyway. Or like certain cleric spells, that do 50% fire damage / 50% "radiant" damage.

What ever way they try to do it, It's probably not going to be easy. Good Luck Torc and Friends.

P.S.

I've said this already, but it probably got lost in the torrent, so I'll say it again. Making craftable Dragonscale armor blanks using heroic and epic dragonscales, at each AML Armor level (1, 4, 10, 16 and 22) for each armor weight type (Light, Medium, Heavy, and Docent), that you could of course then apply a crafted ML shard on, to make armor of any level that you need, would go a long way in helping druids get usable armor without having to hold out for that next point in time 5 or 10 levels down the line when they would get a named one. I know it would be a lot of work though. But it would be good.

[burlicconi]

Wait, I just noticed: you're nerfing caster Druid DCs! Why?

You've removed the +2 to Transmutation from the capstone completely, and lowered the Conjuration bonus, and you've removed the +1 to DCs from Tier 5 completely.

Were people maxing out their Entangle and Spike Growth DCs somehow unbalancing the game? A "pass" or "update" that nerfs existing abilities without really good reason is not a nice thing.

Druid's conjurations spells mainly don't need DC, so +150 DC to conjuration wouldn't make so much difference if spells are not gonna be reworked- not all, but some of them.
Druid's Spontaneous casting, which should be main ability of a class is useless- summons are not useful on epic or elite. I believe it should scale with conjuration DC.

Another druid ability, transmutation spells, are hit by lack of boost via enhancements or seriously good spells. Most of transmutation spells are either predefined and limited effects (Tenacious pact, Pack Aptitude) or obsolete after low-mid lvls (Bull's strength). It would be great if some of this spells (Tenacious pact, Pack Aptitude) gets some increase based on druid's DC or number's of druid's core enhancements (for example Tenacious pack 20/10 + 5/10 fortification/heal.apm. per core lvl of druid).

This would mean seriously rework of some spells, but this would improve summoning potency of druids.

[red_kain]

An enhancment (most likely tier 5 or level 12/18/20 core ability) that changes all spell damage you do of your chosen element, into a non resistable element. Such as Bane damage. But doing that would kill purple damage also, since it wouldn't really be your original element anymore. Or something along those lines anyway. Or like certain cleric spells, that do 50% fire damage / 50% "radiant" damage.

I feel that something as powerful (as it build enabling) as elemental immunity bypass, NEEDS to be a capstone effect. Core 5 at the very least. It should be tied to specific classes and require significant investment to gain.

If it is a damage type change, as you said, it would need to be a toggle. Depending on how things are handled in coding, leaving it on passive would affect the damage output as bane would fall under untyped (force) spell power instead of the original elemental type. Overall, I'd just like to see, "Enemies normally immune to this element now take normal damage." Would solve the sorc issue of which update flavor of the month savant is actually viable at endgame.

[Kamode_Corebasher]

I do expect to see some dwarf bear druids, and the con to hit damage will totally work in all forms.

-T

Wait...

So what I'm reading here, is that the tier4 "Throw Your Weight Around" in the Dwarf enhancement tree will get a change to allow Constitution to hit. Is this correct?