Druid Update Preview V.2

[edrein]

Out of curiosity is Insidious Spores going to be updated to Acid and Rust damage similar to Creeping Doom/Enveloping Swarm. It'd be great if this could also scale with spellpower. (It's one of my favorite dots as is but the poison damage doesn't scale and I'd take the unique damage spot hit for scaling with spell power.)

[Drag-]

The caster improvements look good. Fixing spells and making them useful is always good.
Bears look like an interesting type of tank.

But my question is why are you not changing the Natural fighting feat for wolves?

Wolf: 6% Double Strike per feat as before. Net Total 18%

Bear: 3% Double Strike & Now triggers Glancing blows, 15% damage per Natural Weapon Fight feat taken, and 2% weapon proc rate per feat taken. Net Total 9% Double Strike and 45% Glancing blow damage 9% proc damage[/INDENT]
[/INDENT]

These are very pathetic bonuses compared to every other combat style feats.
As it has already been pointed out there are items that give more doublestrike than 3 of these feats in wolf. 23% on gloves.
Now what other combat style can I get a bonus from one other item larger than the bonuses provided by the feats. There are none for THF, TWF, SWF. And even then we don't get melee power with the feats I mean come on.
Wolves are going to easily hit 100% doublestrike and over but you know it's useless to go over.
What other build can drop one of it's combat style feats because it's just useless at cap?

Why can't wolves have crit range and multiplyer bonuses? Do you really expect them to be that OP because they can cast and melee? If that's the case you can buff away because they have a long way to go until they start coming close to how powerful monks are right now.

Why is there only 6 constant melee power and 15 situational melee power in Nature's Warrior. Other melee trees get 40 melee power and crit and multiplyer bonuses.

What are you basing your numbers off of that these wolves dps will be acceptable and in line with current meta builds?
Because it sure looks like this is a huge nerf to wolves DPS when really they were the only ones that could compete with monks.

I am asking you to look at your numbers again try balancing wolves as a "melee type" because I love the class and as it currently looks I will either need to TR into a monk or a DC caster to be useful in high reapers.

[Torc]

With the changes what feats and enhancements apply to weapon in form now ?
For Example.:
Im in wolf form, holding great sword:
Do i need Improve critical piercing, blut or slashing ?
If i muticlass into fighter kensai would all the enhancements from kensai (including expanded crits) work if i take heavy blades path in wolf/bear form or should i take unarmed kensai path ?

All this works as it normally does. You can make a Kensai Wolf with all the Kensai stuff for either style. The only real difference is you don't benefit from combat style feats while in animal form except natural weapon fighting, and wolf/bear form traits. There are a few edge case enhancements in the trees that all involve attack speed increases that will not stack with wolf speed (thief acrobat quarter staff for example). These will be labeled as we finish the pass.

On the unarmed front if you actually do not hold a weapon (not recommended) you will do the wolf damage that is currently on live, but if you use hand wraps you will use normal hand wrap damage.

[janave]

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

what happened to the +4 wisdom and +4 con?.

i can understand that the above is too much but to drop it back to 2 and 2 i find to be wrong.
this is the caster tree so please drop the +2 con and add it back to be +4 wisdom please.
in the caster trees of bard warlock they get +4 charisma so please lets see +4 wisdom.

your friend sil

Personally I would recommend:

+4 Wis
+2 CL/MCL

(dropped spellpower, and 1DC.. covered by +2WIS)

I'd rather see capstones were a bit more focused, many of them look like a bag of M&Ms.

[silinteresting]

Personally I would recommend:

+4 Wis
+2 CL/MCL

(dropped spellpower, and 1DC.. covered by +2WIS)

I'd rather see capstones were a bit more focused, many of them look like a bag of M&Ms.

i couldnt agree more.

your friend sil

[Torc]

out of curiosity, does the change to Druid Snare also affect the Ranger spell Snare? I don't know how well it works for Druids, but I know its a useless spell for Rangers and this change wouldn't do squat to improve the spell.

Yes the changes apply. No it probably won't really help your ranger much except in early heroics. We might look at removing the first saving throw which means you could at least get a 6 second CC out of it even if your DC is garbage.

On a side note we made split warlock and druid howls of terror into their own versions (probably change one of their names) so they can pursue different spell schools

[edrein]

On a side note we made split warlock and druid howls of terror into their own versions (probably change one of their names) so they can pursue different spell schools

As long as the DC for both increases to being viable for either class please.

[Hipparan]

Not the first time I've heard Beguile doesn't have much appeal. It wouldn't surprise if something else replaced it, though we're pretty booked up on space so it'll be a tier 1 whatever it is. We've heard requests to save spell pen or the wand & scroll enhancements which may take it's place if something new doesn't happen.

I recommend giving Druids a tier 1 enhancement to give them more spellpoints like other spellcaster trees (and in the case of Arcane Archer, non-spellcaster trees) have. Since Druids tend to run out of SP really fast, I recommend something along the lines of the Bard Spellsinger tree where the 3rd rank gives +100 spellpoints.

[edrein]

Cold Breath
-Damage Die reduced to 1d4+1 from 1d6
-Reflex save removed

D'aww there went my double frost breath dragonborn druid idea. That being said could dragonborn possibly lose the save on their breath attack or have the save relooked at? For the AP investment it's slightly disheartening given so many things save and nullify the already low damage.

[Captain_Wizbang]

Torc, it's about time you all considered giving druids a real Grove Spell.

DDO is the ONE place where this should be developed. In PnP, it's used a lot, and for high level characters these groves are part of their keeps & strongholds. So why dont we have this a spell?


Druids Grove

Animating # trees based on level, includes;
Wall of fog
Wall of Wind
Spikegrowth (includes entangle)
Each tree has at least one spell to cast
Natural fauna grows in size and deals appropriate damage
Each Grove can be adapted to actual environment, (desert, jungle, snow etc...)

This is just off the top of my head, and given the trend of using D&D 5.1 rules this can be a great addition to this game

[edrein]

As suggested in the last thread and several times down the years, can we please get air and earth elemental forms for druid?

With the changes to Enveloping Swarm and Creeping Doom, now more than ever I want a pure earth form. More or less so that I can run an acid build with a minor in earthquake.

[edrein]

Torc, it's about time you all considered giving druids a real Grove Spell.

DDO is the ONE place where this should be developed. In PnP, it's used a lot, and for high level characters these groves are part of their keeps & strongholds. So why dont we have this a spell?


Druids Grove

Animating # trees based on level, includes;
Wall of fog
Wall of Wind
Spikegrowth (includes entangle)
Each tree has at least one spell to cast
Natural fauna grows in size and deals appropriate damage
Each Grove can be adapted to actual environment, (desert, jungle, snow etc...)

This is just off the top of my head, and given the trend of using D&D 5.1 rules this can be a great addition to this game

As I recall they don't have the animation department available for this pass at the moment. I'd love to see something that made Spike Growth viable past mid heroics. The enemies in the Druids chain sure seem to find a way to deal massive damage with it, but we the players cannot.

[edrein]

Might I also suggest putting Enveloping Swarm as an SLA within Season's Herald. Perhaps as the level 6 core or a T5. It might also help to take the Word of Balance SLA and make it a multiselector option on the Core 12. Leaving room to put an acid spell in the T5 slot to round off the elemental damage SLAs.

Although I'd actually like to see Acid Blast to match the various vine stalker npcs we encounter.

Edit: Speaking of Vine Stalkers and my previous post. Can we get Spike Growth updated to have a damage cap higher than 10d4?

[Torc]

The caster improvements look good. Fixing spells and making them useful is always good.
Bears look like an interesting type of tank.

But my question is why are you not changing the Natural fighting feat for wolves?



These are very pathetic bonuses compared to every other combat style feats.
As it has already been pointed out there are items that give more doublestrike than 3 of these feats in wolf. 23% on gloves.
Now what other combat style can I get a bonus from one other item larger than the bonuses provided by the feats. There are none for THF, TWF, SWF. And even then we don't get melee power with the feats I mean come on.
Wolves are going to easily hit 100% doublestrike and over but you know it's useless to go over.
What other build can drop one of it's combat style feats because it's just useless at cap?

Why can't wolves have crit range and multiplyer bonuses? Do you really expect them to be that OP because they can cast and melee? If that's the case you can buff away because they have a long way to go until they start coming close to how powerful monks are right now.

Why is there only 6 constant melee power and 15 situational melee power in Nature's Warrior. Other melee trees get 40 melee power and crit and multiplyer bonuses.

What are you basing your numbers off of that these wolves dps will be acceptable and in line with current meta builds?
Because it sure looks like this is a huge nerf to wolves DPS when really they were the only ones that could compete with monks.

I am asking you to look at your numbers again try balancing wolves as a "melee type" because I love the class and as it currently looks I will either need to TR into a monk or a DC caster to be useful in high reapers.

Double strike....

23% molten silver gauntlets
9% Doublestrike Past life's
10% Natures Warrior Core 6
15% Legendary Silent Avenger Set
10% Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner
18% Natural weapons Feats

= 85% (not 100% yet, including the 18% from the feats) Sure there are actives to boost you over, but full time double strike is full time double strike and that's a very pimped out character there. Until you cap on double strike it's much better than melee power no?

Melee Power!

As a primary casting class a druid tree, even a melee one, shouldn't necessarily generate the same results as a focused melee class such as kensai, that being said..... I would say it looks more like this....

it's 6 melee power easy, 21 melee power pretty easy (just take go for the kill and charge every 20 seconds for 15 melee power for 30 seconds :P ) and 42 with more work... raging, and using charge at long range. I don't think that'll be much of an ask if your using snow slide to charge out and in.

Combat Style comparison?


Take Single Weapon Style

30% attack speed
1.5 Ability Mod
10 Melee Power
Vorpal on 19

Wolf with 2 hander

30% attack speed
Bigger base damage die from two-hander
1.5 ability mod
Power attack at improved rate
18% double strike

Unless I'm wrong on the point above this looks pretty competitive on paper at least. More testing will tell.

Crit Stuff

They get a crit damage multiplier in their 4th core of nature's warrior.

[asdfghhjkl]

Yes the changes apply. No it probably won't really help your ranger much except in early heroics. We might look at removing the first saving throw which means you could at least get a 6 second CC out of it even if your DC is garbage.

Would this affect NPCs as well? It’s already frustrating when my low-strength caster fails the save; getting locked down for a minute with no save would be quite punishing.

[unbongwah]

1. Animal forms will now use the stats of the player's main hand weapon for melee attack purposes, such as Base Damage, Critical Multiplier, Critical Range, all Enchantments, Material traits, procs, etc. The issue with the power level of certain effects not scaling will be resolved by this as well.

I can't remember if this was answered in the first thread: do we still take the Improved Critical Blunt weapons feat for animal forms (unarmed); or do we take the Imp Crit feat which matches the weapon type we're using?

EDIT: Headman's Chop currently applies in wolf / bear form with an axe equipped; will that still be the case?

5. Bear & Dire Bear form's AC bonus is now typed Exceptional.

Improved Mage Armor will also be typed Exceptional.

Oh well, so much for my bear / Eldritch Knight AC tank ideas.

11. Natural Fighting Feat

Natural Weapon Fighting will now give different effects based on if you are in bear or wolf form. (updated)

Wolf: 6% Double Strike per feat as before. Net Total 18%

Bear: 3% Double Strike & Now triggers Glancing blows, 15% damage per Natural Weapon Fight feat taken, and 2% weapon proc rate per feat taken. Net Total 9% Double Strike and 45% Glancing blow damage 9% proc damage

Disappointed that Natural Fighting isn't getting any buffs to wolf form. Particularly since endgame builds can exceed 100% doublestrike while temp-boosted.

For bear form, will bonuses to glancing blows from other Enhancements apply as well (e.g., Frenzied Berserker's Mad Munitions)?

4. Nature's Hunter: In wolf or bear form you gain a +1 competency bonus to crit damage multiplier on your weapon. Requires a weapon to be equipped.

I don't see a crit range bonus in either Nature tree; will crit range bonuses from other trees (e.g., Kensei's Keen Edge) apply to animal forms? For that matter, would Strike with No Thought apply to wolf / bear form if someone did e.g. druid 9 / fighter 6?

Fatal Harry: Killing an enemy grants you a 5% enhancement bonus to attack speed for 20 seconds. This can stack up to [1/3/5] times.
Enemies your own level or higher have a 100% chance of activating this ability. For every level below you, the chances are reduced by 20%. A monster two levels below you only has a 60% chance of creating this effect.

Can you make it so stacks decay one at a time like e.g. Killer? Currently on live they expire all at once when the timer runs out, making Fatal Harrier a lot more of a pain to sustain than other stacking bonuses.

Double strike....

23% molten silver gauntlets
9% Doublestrike Past life's
10% Natures Warrior Core 6
15% Legendary Silent Avenger Set
10% Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner
18% Natural weapons Feats

Will Divine Crusader's doublestrike bonuses apply to animal forms? If so, Zeal of the Righteous easily pushes you past 100%.

A simple stopgap: make Nature's Warrior action boost a selector between Doublestrike or Melee Power Boost. So those with static doublestrike of over 70% can decide which is better for them.

Also: historically wolf / bear builds could benefit from doublestrike bonuses from Wind stance and Shield Mastery feats, going all the way back to initial release, IIRC. Will either / both still work post-update?

[edrein]

Double strike....

23% molten silver gauntlets
9% Doublestrike Past life's
10% Natures Warrior Core 6
15% Legendary Silent Avenger Set
10% Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner
18% Natural weapons Feats

= 85% (not 100% yet, including the 18% from the feats) Sure there are actives to boost you over, but full time double strike is full time double strike and that's a very pimped out character there. Until you cap on double strike it's much better than melee power no?

Melee Power!

As a primary casting class a druid tree, even a melee one, shouldn't necessarily generate the same results as a focused melee class such as kensai, that being said..... I would say it looks more like this....

it's 6 melee power easy, 21 melee power pretty easy (just take go for the kill and charge every 20 seconds for 15 melee power for 30 seconds :P ) and 42 with more work... raging, and using charge at long range. I don't think that'll be much of an ask if your using snow slide to charge out and in.

Combat Style comparison?


Take Single Weapon Style

30% attack speed
1.5 Ability Mod
10 Melee Power
Vorpal on 19

Wolf with 2 hander

30% attack speed
Bigger base damage die from two-hander
1.5 ability mod
Power attack at improved rate
18% double strike

Unless I'm wrong on the point above this looks pretty competitive on paper at least. More testing will tell.

Crit Stuff

They get a crit damage multiplier in their 4th core of nature's warrior.

Bears need melee power substantially more than wolves though. Atleast that's how it feels with the change to tremor and roar. I really hate that your argument is that druids can cast spells; you're ignoring how much of that casting potential is being dumped when a player goes melee. Rarely beyond an occasional earthquake or healing will any animal druid make use of a spell. And with the rage stuff in the bear tree? Bears aren't going to be casting spells nearly at all.

Speaking of; are bears going to get a longer lasting rage? 40 seconds is nice for the sake of topping off in between fights, but that's not nearly enough rage uses to justify the low lasting rage. Instead why not give them scaling rage timers similar to barbarian with the added addition that non-wildshape spells are cast at a 4x cooldown with no way to reduce this. It prevents a lot of your own argument against buffing melee power, allows those who want to have a long lasting rage do so without the original implied intent of 40 seconds so that you can heal/buff in between rages, and overall the class as a whole benefits. Casters won't be able to abuse the rage as well.

Also on your comparison you are conveniently leaving out +1 multiplier and range on SWF builds. As they are certainly going to be either Swashbucklers of some variety or Battle Engineers which have both crit bonuses. Wolves are getting +1 to multiplier but no range.

[edrein]

Also: historically wolf / bear builds could benefit from doublestrike bonuses from Wind stance and Shield Mastery feats, going all the way back to initial release, IIRC. Will either / both still work post-update?

Shield Mastery will not per earlier in the thread. As it's considered a combat style bonus now.

[Tom116]

Double strike....

23% molten silver gauntlets
9% Doublestrike Past life's
10% Natures Warrior Core 6
15% Legendary Silent Avenger Set
10% Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner
18% Natural weapons Feats

= 85% (not 100% yet, including the 18% from the feats) Sure there are actives to boost you over, but full time double strike is full time double strike and that's a very pimped out character there. Until you cap on double strike it's much better than melee power no?

Melee Power!

As a primary casting class a druid tree, even a melee one, shouldn't necessarily generate the same results as a focused melee class such as kensai, that being said..... I would say it looks more like this....

it's 6 melee power easy, 21 melee power pretty easy (just take go for the kill and charge every 20 seconds for 15 melee power for 30 seconds :P ) and 42 with more work... raging, and using charge at long range. I don't think that'll be much of an ask if your using snow slide to charge out and in.

Combat Style comparison?


Take Single Weapon Style

30% attack speed
1.5 Ability Mod
10 Melee Power
Vorpal on 19

Wolf with 2 hander

30% attack speed
Bigger base damage die from two-hander
1.5 ability mod
Power attack at improved rate
18% double strike

Unless I'm wrong on the point above this looks pretty competitive on paper at least. More testing will tell.

Crit Stuff

They get a crit damage multiplier in their 4th core of nature's warrior.

Doublestrike is missing 8% from Shield Mastery, offhand seems to not matter and there are lots of druid shields. Also the 30% doublestrike boost was put there to be used, no? If they're sitting even close to 100%, the action boost is a waste of AP. Air stance multiclassing wolves gain up to an additional 12. They need to get their dex to hit from somewhere, and monk gives them henshin for melee power + healing strikes with high doublestrike + attack speed. See here for more places they can gain doublestrike that you didn't mention

Would you PLEASE define what makes the cut as a "Primary Melee Class" rather than a "Primary Casting Class"? I see a couple possible options:

-They have the capability to offensively cast. CC, Nuking, and Healing are all available.
The same can be said about Clerics (who have holy sword, +1/+1 for crit profile) and (to a lesser extent as far as nuking goes) Bards (who have Swashbuckling, which varies but is almost always as big or bigger of a ciritcal profile increase)

-They are listed under "Spell Caster" in the character creation page
So are clerics, who again have holy sword.

So what exactly is your issue with allowing druids to have the same bonuses? Clerics are better healers and as good if not better nukers. Druids have a core mechanic of the class intended to melee, because clearly the increased spell cooldowns wasn't an incentive to cast while in animal form. You need to all but dump Str if you want to successfully land spells in end-game content, which would make your damage incredibly low. I'd say there's even a good chance you wouldn't hit on anything below a 20. As a melee druid, you would want to max out (or at least nearly max out) your to-hit and damage stats, thereby reducing the amount of build points and level ups you could put into Wisdom to cast, which would stop any spells from landing. Heck, even if you only used no-save spells, you wouldn't have the room to take metamagics for them to do decent damage without sacrificing melee damage potential.

You know who DOES have potential to do both good physical damage AND have good end-game DC's? How about Artificers, who only really needs Int and a little bit of Dex to hit the prereq's for a few feats? They also get bonus feats, meaning you could probably squeeze in a Spell Focus: Evocation so that you could twist in a few DC's. Did I mention they also get increased critical threat range AND multiplier while being able to nuke? And they get a huge survival bonus from the Mastermaker?

Edit: So SM no longer is useful for wolves to get doublestrike, that still leaves Monk forms, doublestrike boost, and other types of bonuses as seen on the wiki. My point stands.

[Drag-]

Double strike....

23% molten silver gauntlets
9% Doublestrike Past life's
10% Natures Warrior Core 6
15% Legendary Silent Avenger Set
10% Legendary Lore-Fueled Packbanner
18% Natural weapons Feats

= 85% (not 100% yet, including the 18% from the feats) Sure there are actives to boost you over, but full time double strike is full time double strike and that's a very pimped out character there. Until you cap on double strike it's much better than melee power no?

Melee Power!

As a primary casting class a druid tree, even a melee one, shouldn't necessarily generate the same results as a focused melee class such as kensai, that being said..... I would say it looks more like this....

it's 6 melee power easy, 21 melee power pretty easy (just take go for the kill and charge every 20 seconds for 15 melee power for 30 seconds :P ) and 42 with more work... raging, and using charge at long range. I don't think that'll be much of an ask if your using snow slide to charge out and in.

Combat Style comparison?


Take Single Weapon Style

30% attack speed
1.5 Ability Mod
10 Melee Power
Vorpal on 19

Wolf with 2 hander

30% attack speed
Bigger base damage die from two-hander
1.5 ability mod
Power attack at improved rate
18% double strike

Unless I'm wrong on the point above this looks pretty competitive on paper at least. More testing will tell.

Crit Stuff

They get a crit damage multiplier in their 4th core of nature's warrior.

For doublestrike
You can get 7% higher while 2hf with the scourge past life (3%) and quality (4%) which puts you at 92% base which means the 30% doublestrike action wouldn't be worth the points. Does it have to be a doublestrike action boost or can it be haste?
Then there is zeal in divine crusader which loses a lot of it power with the doublestrike cap.

These builds are entirely for 2hf but if you go with a sword and board you can grab the shield mastery feats and destiny twist which will give another 15% doublestrike with 6 melee power and 30 prr. And if you use a dagger you get to take enhancements in vistani and get crit range and multiplyer along with 5-10% passive doublestrike and 20% moral temporary. Plus you get to use a shield. So you easily hit above 100% doublestrike and can drop natural fighting and take shield mastery feats instead.
Also this way you get an extra feat so you can work towards that dual caster and melee build hybrid that the devs are so pushing.

Also you can get another 30% doublestrike out of tier 1 reaper melee tree just when you want to hit stupid doublestrike numbers like 200%.

200% doublestrike breakdown on my wolf right now
23 molten gloves
18 natural fighting
12 past lives
10 bracers
4 quality
10 passive vistani
20 clickie vistani
15 silent avenger
30 action boost
15 shield mastery feats and twist
50 zeal at full stacks
30 reaper boost
237

Let's just go full crazy
6 bard
3 hail of blows
246

But yeah more doublestrike that caps at 100%
Please think about perfect natural fighting that breaks that 100% doublestrike cap.