I've been leveling up a druid hoping to get first for Hell Nalatos - This class has some good parts and some pretty limiting parts.

Offensive:
- Tornado - basically the only offensive spell worth casting - outside of the big cooldown abilities (Earthquake, Hurricane, Volcano).

Healing:
- Greater Healing - Heals roughly ~500hp at L.90. Not bad, but definitely doesn't keep up with the spammy spell mobs.

Buffs:
- Skin Like Nature - Decent, adds some hp/armor
- Shield of Spikes - Laughable. Reflects 27 damage at L.90. Totally worthless.
- Chloroplast - Laughable. Regenerates 15 hp every 3 seconds for 8 minutes - again, totally worthless.
- Spirit of the Wolf - 15% Attack Power and increased chance to run - not super helpful.

I'm using full Elites, so the typical experience will definitely not be nearly as good as this one. Just wanted to provide some feedback on the abilities.

I've played a Druid before servers went live but only up to lvl 30ish, so can't talk about later on, but it felt lackluster, and inferior to Magician - which is not an op class for sure! So it could use some love imho. Dunno how... but if it is feasible, what about giving him the ability to summon a pet, something like a familiar or an earth elemental? He's in touch with nature after all...


btw this could be moved to the appropriate class subforum.

Oops, my mistake on the sub-forum - forgot to change it. Please move.

I found the class to be extremely OP once I got 20 points into Tornado. The first bit of trouble I had after that was after reaching Hell and being chain stunned to oblivion.

There's just not enough -Stun% gear that is equipable with the Hell penalties to control effects and resists. Wish they could be ogres! hah

I think it's fine in this forum. It's more about improvements than Druids. Besides, I get email notification for this forum only. I don't get emailed for general/class forums.

You can't just stack crit % and leech to the ceiling and act surprised when you get chain stunned to death.

Fortunately, I'm not doing that - I'm trying to stack -Stun %; however looking at all of the gear I've found. -Stun tends to be on Plate mostly. Since I'm a Druid, I can't wear plate.

Example - Most of my Warrior and Paladin gear has -Stun on it. Only 2 pieces of gear for my Druid have it. Pretty much none of the gear I have on my Wizard has any. I've looked through all the gear I do have and there are only a few pieces with it on it.

Get you some Scaled Hierophant Boots. Or a Stormshield. I think when I make the Nevergrounds I will make a tab where you can easily sort and list unique/set items by property.

Anyway, the point of this post wasn't about the Stun resist and itemization - it was feedback on the skills themselves.

The lack of stun resist gear could be mitigated with some changes to the skills. ie. There are two passive regen abilities. Both together regen like 25 hp every 3 seconds. It should be ~10x that.

Defenses in Hell. I threw on the Scaled Heirophant boots and do have a Stormshield. Stormshield brings me to 80%; however I'm basically gimping myself since most of the gear I'm wearing right now is Strength based. I'm a druid.

It's certainly not easy... many of these items are rare. But here are a few items in the game cloth/leather casters can take advantage of:

Shields:
- Shield of Elders (40)
- Head Hunter's Pride (25)
- Spirit Ward (25)
- Shield of the Clawed Guardian (35)

2H Weapons:
- Hierophant's Crook (60)
- Staff of Sentoth (35)
- Hammer of the Dragonborn (25)

1H weapons:
- Willow's Calamity (26)

Armor:
- Friar's Grace (30)
- Sandstorm Slippers (20)
- Gelke's Valor (25)
- Diadem of the Ages (25)
- Heavenly Gait (13)
- Caretaker's Wraps (13)
- Breastplate of Honor (15) (leather wearable)
- Messiah's Crown (12)
- Venova's Ascent (12)
- Venova's Wings (20)

Jewelry:
- Duke's Laurel (25)

Edit: found more with + all status resists

Right. The point I'm making is that end-game isn't when these items are needed; however it's the only time you'll get these items.

Druid has been BY FAR the most frustrating class to get to Hell Nalatos. Getting to hell I had 1 death. Now I'm sitting around 40 since it's so RNG based - most of it is just the lack of ability to mitigate damage. You can see my defenses - they are VERY high (must higher than my warrior) and I'm still getting obliterated.

As mentioned, Druid definitely needs a class review - Like some other classes. There's a reason why no-one plays these classes. It's a terrible experience even with super Elite gear.

PS. I have 90% of that list.

You forgot quite a few I think. Nature's Wrath rings +15 all, I use two of them on every character. I agree that there is a lack of good stun reductions until later levels though.

Druid is an interesting class, tornado spam makes normal / nightmare cake but since it almost entirely scales with evocation skill level which caps at level 50. It just runs out of juice in hell for that reason.

So mainly you think they need more defensive capability?

Sort of, I'm not even sure.

You'd think their survivability is solid, a quick cooldown heal, perma slow on all enemies. However, it just didn't seem to work as well as it looked on paper. A nice increase to chloroplast regen?

I'm still an advocate of spell damage benefiting from leech which would go a long way for druid.

One problem is their all-target root just sucks ass. Root is very situational and AE rooting is probably a death sentence in many scenarios. Expect this to change in 1-0-5.

Just increasing the healing abilities (since they are a healer) would help immensely. If skills continued to scale, this would probably mitigate the problem; however they don't. Something to keep in mind is that in EQ skills stopped, yes.. but you still increased power through spell rankings. In this game there is no spell power (ie. Fire Nuke 1, Fire Nuke 2, Fire Nuke 3, Fire Nuke 4, etc. You get Fire Nuke that stops increasing in power at L.50. and that's it).

That said, the regen on the current buffs is laughable. In hell you have things hitting/nuking for 400+ and that's with 50+% mitigation (pretty sure this isn't working right, BTW).

I've decided to grind a bit at L.91.. in Nightmare.. because I die to trash WAY too often in Hell. It's not worth the XP loss. Needless to say, I didn't have to do this with any of the other 4 classes I've beat Hell Nalatos on thus far.

Don't be surprised to see a buff to Sylvan Grasp and Chloroplast. Sylvan Grasp will be like Earth Pet's elemental fury.