Hey Scirocco, great communicator of ours!

I wonder if you could discuss with the dev types.

Druids need a new, higher level snare. It's my impression that higher level spells have a lower chance of being resisted. So, our level 29 Ensnare is likely to be resisisted a lot more than a level 60 something Snare. Make it cost a bit more mana, last the same as Ensnare, but be resisted a bit less, and it would help LOTS! (A bit faster casting would also be nice! It doesn't have to be like Entangling roots, but just a bit!)

For comparison, Necromancers get a new snare/dot at 63 for 200 mana.

SKs get the Necro 49th snare/dot at 59. (Which slows more than our snares.)

Rangers get Ensnare at 51, and also have an AA snare (Entrap). (They also get a fast casting low level snare for agro.)

Berserkers get Leg Slice at 54.

Thanks, Aquila

PS. Why the heck is our Ensnare overwritten by lower level snares? Or by snares cast by lower level chars?

to answer ure ps its becuase the snare they cast is at a higher lvl then are ensnare a lvl 34? necro can ovevr wright at snare in essince :mad:

PS. Why the heck is our Ensnare overwritten by lower level snares? Or by snares cast by lower level chars?Theirs have damage, ours do not.

Pet peeve of mine: Snare immune mobs. They resulted (presumably) because of the 'powerful' nature of snare, kinda like slow immune mobs. It would be kewl to see an upgraded ensnare that worked on 'immune' mobs, but has less of a reduction in movement rate, ie: 25%. Or if they could 'mitigate' ensnare (ie: slow) so that mobs run slower, but not ensnare speed, and just do away with immune mobs.

I've always thought this is the way they should go instead of making things immune. bleh...

technically why - other snares, such as the darkness series, have higher (neg) movement modifier. So they overwrite ours.

Philosophically why - I dunno. That's the way they made them. 989 Studio / Verant / SOE hasn't ever been that "together" when creating spellls and their interrelations with other class' spells.

Ours last quite a bit longer. Popular belief is that is the trade off we had. Duration for lower modifier. Personally, I think it wasn't nearly that thought out. SOE heard the reasoning and ran with it. ("Uhh, yeah. We, uhhh, meant it that way. Sure.")

There's no question that a big advantage to snare is the long duration. I've not been having significant problems getting it to stick to white and yellow mobs in KT. What mobs have you been having particular problems with?

As for overwriting, that appears to be due to the greater run-speed reduction of the other spells. In those cases, I gladly leave snare duty to the casters of those other spells. What circumstances of having ensnare being overwritten cause you trouble?

I hesitate to even mention snare to SOE (and have been so for years), because I fear the consequences of bringing it to their attention. Sure, we could get a new higher level snare with a duration of a minute or two, but at what cost? Ensnare being level limited or having a reduced duration? This may be a case of letting sleeping dogs lie.

I think a new Snare should be an AA and not a spell. Reasoning is that it would be manaless and not take up a spell slot.. Low resist, quick casting and very quick refresh. Heck, it could even slow a snareproof mob or have some other component like disrupting casting or it could just be very hard to resist and instant casting.

The Ranger quick casting snare (I think called Tangling weeds?) is a spell in my spellbook (from when druids could mem it) and is good for pulling. It casts quickly (.5 sec) but wears of in a few seconds most of the time. It gives you a head start but breaks quick so it doesnt take forever to get the mob back to your camp. It is useless for kiting or long term use but is quick enough to keep a runner from getting away from your group plus harder to resist than Ensnare.

Thanks, good answers!

I've been getting tons of resists when I snare mobs in regular LDoNs (blue at 65 on those), and it's gotten silly. Yeah, maybe I should just let the dps do the job as they run, or let them auto pull, but my groups like them snared, often, and I'm tired of two resists and it's running. I don't want to spend half the time casting snare and waiting for it to refresh while mobs die!

I also get resists in Fire a fair bit, now that I think about it. And I've had enough resists in Tipt and Vxed to be irritating.

All druids can scribe/mem Tangling Weeds now.

When it first went in game, this was so, and I missed my opportunity to get it. They changed it to Ranger only shortly after, but then added Druid back. Lucy doesn't tell me when, but I scribed it after the change, so I know it's so.

Tangling Weeds (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=2591&source=Live) on Lucy.

I've used it to aggro kite, but it doesn't seem to do any better job than Flame Lick for that purpose, and it's duration is hella short. =) So I went back to ensnare/Immo/VoT etc. for that stuff.

Incidentally, there are new spells on Lucy called Tangle and Entangle, which look to be higher level versions of Snare and Ensnare. Still being tweaked, though.

new spells on Lucy called Tangle and Entangle

I hear these are for the PVP servers, with unique resist rates.

Druids should just be given the Ranger AA Snare. Seems silly that they don't even get Ensnare until much later than Druids do, but they get an AA for it and we don't. :confused:

/agree Scirocco

As druids we are the masters of root with aa's to prove it, not necessarily the masters of snare. I'm ok with the one we have being a fringe benefit, not a main job. We have enough going on without being the main snarer every time. I have 51 necro and he enjoys his snaring job immensely. =)

We arent even the master of root.

Wizard strong root is a LOT better than our viscid root

I agree with Scirocco: I think this is one area where we should let sleeping dogs lie. I've met plenty of people who already think our snare is overpowered, and while I hate having blue mobs chain-resist snare, I'd rather have that than to have SOE give our snare the "Harmony of Nature" treatment and give us a higher level snare that has a resist adjustment but a much shorter duration and make mobs above a certain level immune to good old ensnare.

What I'd like to see addressed is the increasing prevalence of snare immune mobs, with the possibility of having some of those mobs immunities reassessed. Oh, and how about having some of the summoning yard trash in old content lose the ability to summon. To me, addressing those problems would be a step toward making the game more enjoyable for me.

Ayonae Ro

btw.

The high lv Necro + SK snare spells have an -30 resist modifier...

What mobs have you been having particular problems with?

LDON mobs suck for snaring. Sometime it takes 3-4 snares in a normal

"LDON mobs suck for snaring. Sometime it takes 3-4 snares in a normal"

LoL - to paraphrase - Let them eat root!

I think ensnare is working just fine. Sure sometimes we have to cast it more than once. However, all spells have their drawbacks - I'd rather live with the devil we know than have to learn to live with a new devil (devil = nerf)

The only real "improvement" I'd like to see in snare/root are lure type snares and roots that will affect mobs that are immune to run speed changes. Perhaps this could be done in the form of a future AA skill to allow a "chance" that our snares and roots would take hold on those bloody pests.

Do you really want an unreliable movement modifying spell, Solice?

Edit: Or an unreliable AA that could be 15+ points ?

"Do you really want an unreliable movement modifying spell, Solice?
Edit: Or an unreliable AA that could be 15+ points ?"

They are all "unreliable" now. It's all based on percentages; the spell can fizzle or the mob can resist. I would want one (lure style spell or AA) that would give us a reasonable chance to put the brakes on the mobs that we have no chance of snaring or rooting now. Of course everyone has their own definition of reasonable.

AA Snare please. Screw the ranger dev who gave them our AA and wont share it back.

They are also multi-part spells though, involving snare + damage (and ED is -20 not -30). Ensnare is likely resisted less often overall or at least that has been my impression playing both a Druid and a Necromancer in similar zones. The duration on Ensnare is night-and-day in comparison and I doubt you'll find a Necromancer that wouldn't toss ED into the garbage for Ensnare.

I agree that Druids should have the better snare overall though and I think there's nothing wrong with looking for an upgrade. Slightly faster cast time, slightly more slowing would be right in line. I don't know so much about a lure snare though, there needs to be some minor element of risk in setting up quads. The concept of snare-mitigating mobs is an interesting one but as with some of the above posters, I think perhaps it's best to let sleeping dogs lie.

I think it's a real shame that EQ's dev team has destroyed so much of the players' trust that we're afraid to share interesting ideas about future spells, for fear that they'll turn it into a nerf that puts us further back than we are.

See also: Harmony -> nerf -> Harmony of Nature.

That is all.

~Firemynd

They are also multi-part spells though, involving snare + damage (and ED is -20 not -30). Ensnare is likely resisted less often overall or at least that has been my impression playing both a Druid and a Necromancer in similar zones.
This hasn't been the case for some time now. It's a single resist check; a spell with multiple effects doesn't have to pass multiple resist checks anymore (although in some cases immunity to any one aspect of the spell blocks the entire spell).
So while ensnare does have its advantages, ensnare is not resisted less than necromancer snares. Praetorian Myral in Grieg's End made this clear--to this day I don't think I have landed a single snare on him, while necromancers I hunted with were able to snare him (with some difficulty).

For those who say druids are master of root . . . Shaman and wizards get better roots than druids.

Hehe, we used to be the master of snare, master of harmony, master of dots, master of speed (back before Kunark), master of travel. We had it made at one time. We are the master of nothing now.

Ensnare is nice, it would be nice to get a type of snare that is close to lure at higher level, or as an AA (as long as they dont nerf ensnare). But if they mess with it, you know that is exactly what they will do, cap ensnare at level 57, or some crap like that, and give us a lure snare that lasts 1 minute, but costs 500 mana. They seem to hate druids since Kunark came out, we have become the weakest of the weak, it would not surprise me in the least if they did exactly that (nerf ensnare--and pretend like they gave us something).

we used to be the master of snare, master of harmony, master of dots, master of speed (back before Kunark), master of travel.

Necromancers had a better snare from the get-go (run speed modifier). The only thing going for Ensnare is duration. No small advantage when mated with SoW and DoT kiting but as far as movement modification is concerned, Cascading Darkness was better.

Without a doubt, Harmony was the best outdoor lull in the game: area effect, unresistable and non-aggro. At level 5, it was appropriate. At level 60 (Kunark), it was damn near overpowering. If it were useable on level 66+ mobs ... It would have been godly. No doubt, druids (and rangers) were masters of outdoor lulls. We got nerfed. In an outdoor setting, we still hold our own to clerics, enchanters and bards. Indoors ... Well, we suck at lulling indoor settings. In any case, we were never masters of harmony since we shared it with rangers.

We were never masters of DoTs. We had good DoTs. They were lure DoTs. But we were never masters of DoTs. By the bye, necromancers had access to low resist DoTs and shaman could stack all their DoTs (kinda like stacking Creeping Crud with Swarming Death ... DoT stacking today was an ability stolen from shaman).

Shaman got SoW at level 9. Druids got it at ... Level 14. We did get a bit faster than SoW with Form of the Great Wolf (60% vs 55%) but anyone who's ever raced a bard, a bard running backwards while ducking, will tell you that druids are not the masters of speed.

And finally, wizards were quite adept at teleporting since before Kunark. Not only that, they had access to two ports that we didn't.

Counter-point:

When taken together, we were pretty damn good. Ensnare with SoW with Lightning Blast was awesome. Wizards had better quad efficiency but they lacked SoW. Teleports with SoW made travel much easier than just teleports. Harmony with ensnare with DoTs made breaking camps and killing mobs trivial. And of course, wolf form gave us beta neutral faction which made kiting the Karanas safe and easy.

What made druids unique was the combination of abilities we had, not any particular ability. I understand the desire to use "Master of ..." terminology, but it's not all that accurate, useful, or relevant.

^ exactly.

I always enjoyed the title of "Master of Finding Lost Rangers"..