Proposed revised version, to be submitted to SOE this week (revisions in italics):

1. Improve our healing abilities (currently being evaluated) [possible upgrades to healing abilities in omens, current abilities will be evaluated after launch]

2. Fix resist mods on cold debuffs to match corresponding fire debuffs (currently being evaluated)

3. Charm issues (currently being evaluated)
- increase CoT cap to match new min. hynid levels in Vxed and Tipt (druids used to be able to charm the lower level animals there, but the recent revamping of those zones to increase XP by boosting mob levels stopped that)
- tag mobs that should be animals as animals (suggested list of mobs by zone being prepared)
- add more animals to OoW zones (chimerae in WOS don't cut it)

4. Harmony issues [possible upgrade with omens]
- remove outdoor restriction on harmony (no change planned at this time)
- the aggro/assist radii for harmony should match pacify [possibly in upgrade with omens]

5. Snare issues (currently being evaluated)
- druids should share Entrap as AA skill (druids share Innate Camo and similar skills with rangers, and druids get various snares before rangers get comparable spells)
- upgrade to AoE snare with resist modifier and greater speed reduction (so it is not overwritten)
- fewer immune mobs

6. Improved Aggro Management (no change planned at this time)
- druids need way to deal with excessive aggro from early fast heals in raid situations; OoW spell Thorn Guard has promise but falls far short of what is needed for high end druids in its current form, primarily due to 5000 point cap
- debuff and DoT aggro too high

7. More shape changing forms and ideally special abilities for each (currently being evaluated)

8. Wolf form problems (currently being evaluated)

9. Pack pureblood/remove curse (no change planned at this time)
- druids have single target versions, which are insufficient, particularly in the high end game

10. Improved run speed (currently being evaluated)
- "Spirit of Horse": faster SoW closer to run speed of higher end horse, but w/o lev effects (floating effect of FoE causes motion sickness, excessive lag for many players)
- faster indoor SoW
- revised Spirit of Cheetah spell (druid only, longer duration, no long recast time)


We could replace 6 and 9 with something, as this is the second time around for them. Any suggestions, or keep them as is?

Increase HP limit on Oaken Guard to 2 - 3 times its current value.

Increase HP limit on Hungery Vines Respite by apx 8 times its current value.

A way to resist summoning.

I don't really expect this to make it into the game, but I'm floating the idea anyway.

Vestix
Storm Warden of Tunare

Our new rain spell needs tweaking, lower mana or higher damage...current form is only a slight upgrade in dps, but a Degrade in DPM

Not sure if this would classify as a class need, but I know it affects a good amount of druids. Spell casting subtley should have the ability to be turned off and on. Also, some tweaking to nature's recovery or an upgrade would be neat.

SCS should be toggleable, SK's agree.

Yeah, but toggling passive abilities is something they've already said they are going to do (at some point.) No need to put it on our list.

9. Pack pureblood/remove curse (no change planned at this time)

- druids have single target versions, which are insufficient, particularly in the high end game

Perhaps SOE is balking at this request because such group spells would be expected to be massable. And yet we need them most for the druid's own group.

I believe we will get farther if we refine this item to specify non-targetable, druid's group only, not massable.

edit: missed the last bit.

Perhaps SOE is balking at this request because such group spells would be expected to be massable.

SOE is balking at this request because the current dev team has not been into the druid "group" thing for a couple years. Group heals have gotten nowhere, and the same thing is happening with group cures. *shrugs*

Upgrading Natures Renewal? Our class specific regen is useless now compared to the other regens. Our regen spells that we shared with the shamen benefited from the shaman fix but SoE never intended to fix anything for druids.

Now that Mobs run a Selos speed shouldnt SoW/SoE get a speed boost? I tried pulling in WoS last night and could barely keep ahead of the mobs. That lead to the situation where either I could train the zonein or die since I couldnt get egress off. I took two deaths to avoid training and there is no other outdoor zone I know of where I have to do that. Some mobs were snare resistant which snared me (vassels I think) so we were both running snared and they were outrunning me but that is another issue. There is no reason that a Druid run spell should not be able to outrun a normal mob or where a mobs snare should be more affective unless the programers hate druids (and rangers by association).

I agree with the other items.

No group heals for druids probably because they want paladins to have a niche.

Group cures have to be limited otherwise it trivializes too many ae's too quickly. Would just end up with either uncurable ae's or ones with so many counters the difference doesn't matter anyway. Otherwise AE's would just be a nuisance and not something that have to be fought through and countered as best as possible. The current limited group cures leaves room for encounters where you cure a subset of the people either those who are more adversely affected by it or those who failed to resist up until too few are resisting and it's eating away at the raid.

the current dev team has not been into the druid "group" thing for a couple years

Now there's a mental image that it'll take me quite some time to lose. :/

Maybe add tree form fixes into number 7 or 8.

Address the exodus after death bug.

Another good one might be a change to the hungry vines spell. Seems like it would be more appropriate as a targetted AoE.

Please dont ever mention anything about tree form in serious discussion about changes. I can just see Sony looking at all the valid changes and going, "TREEFORM! That is what we will give em a fixed treeform!" /sigh Not undermining your feelings about treeform but of all our issues treeform imho is dead last... in fact I would argue mask of deceptions should be made druid usable again before bringing up treeform :dance:

How about giving us the snare back on our Epics.. It isn't much but I miss it.

Epic snare was removed mostly because of this forum, why would we ask for it back?

Epic snare was removed because they were to lazy to fix it like the necro snare. The same reason they nerfed the Pally Epic Stun instead of fixing it. As I remember there was no overwhelming outcry to nerf it from these forums against having it snare. The problem was the snareproof mobs blocking the DoT.

Epic snare was removed because they were to lazy to fix it like the necro snare. The same reason they nerfed the Pally Epic Stun instead of fixing it. As I remember there was no overwhelming outcry to nerf it from these forums against having it snare. The problem was the snareproof mobs blocking the DoT.
The other problem is that the epic snare only lasted 3 minutes vs. 14 minutes for Ensnare (at level 65).

How about giving us the snare back on our Epics.. It isn't much but I miss it.

I am sure they have more important things to work on then giving us back a snare that takes 9 secs to cast and only last 3 minutes.

Humm that could be true.. I never had mine wear off where the mob wasn't rooted since I either root rotted or had a group kill it before 3 mins. I could see where a kiter would have a problem with that. Then how about replacing the old snare with a 14 min snare? After all, our epic snare did slow the mob more than ensnare did and that is something we need is a better snare. As it is the Epic Dot is pretty weak by itself. If they don't want to replace the snare they could extend the DoT another minute or two or shorten it for faster DPS since before they said they couldn't change the length because it matched the snare.

I know. Silly to begin with since everyone will have epic 1.5 before they make any druid changes.

As a reminder, the druid issue list should focus on things that are "broken" as opposed to wish list items.

Putting a snare back on our epic after we begged for so long to get it taken off will give the Dev Team a good chuckle. Ain't nothing funny down that road.....

Forget anti-summoning. I know it's a cheesy design feature, but SOE appears enamoured with it. I've brought it up a few times, but the general feeling is that if anyone gets anti-summoning abilities, it will be mages. I'm not going to spend my time arguing for mage improvements, sorry. Ain't nothing worthwhile down that road.... :P

Forget trying to increase the cap on Oaken Guard, for the moment. Several druids argued for that, but it got shot down. Come back in two or three months with hard data showing that it doesn't work, and then we'll have a shot at getting it kicked up as "not working as intended." Same thing for HV.

Now that Mobs run a Selos speed shouldnt SoW/SoE get a speed boost? I tried pulling in WoS last night and could barely keep ahead of the mobs. That lead to the situation where either I could train the zonein or die since I couldnt get egress off. I took two deaths to avoid training and there is no other outdoor zone I know of where I have to do that. Some mobs were snare resistant which snared me (vassels I think) so we were both running snared and they were outrunning me but that is another issue. There is no reason that a Druid run spell should not be able to outrun a normal mob or where a mobs snare should be more affective unless the programers hate druids (and rangers by association).

/agree 100%

When I think back of what it mean't to be a druid one of the first things that comes to my mind was the Spirit of Wolf runspeed buff. Everyone wanted a druid in their group because of SoW and subsequent upgrades (SOE, FOE). Having a faster runspeed mean't you could pull more effectively and escape danger when things went bad. The problem is SOE has trivialized the exclusivity of having a runspeed buff and advantage by the following:

1) creating a new breed of mobs that run at Selo's speed

2) giving players easy accessible runspeed abilties via potions and AA's.

What we have now is a situation where Spirit of Eagle or higher is the defacto base run speed of mobs in GoD and Omens. Therefore having any kind of runspeed buff is absolutely required just to stay on an even keel with the mobs. What this amounts to is a hidden nerf to classes like druid, rangers, and shamen who could previously enjoy an advantage by running faster then 99% of the mobs.

SOE no longer gives the player an advantage over the mob. SOE is absolutely required to remain on a level playing field with that mob's runspeed.

It seems that SOE believes that it's necessary to balance the scales of PC vs. NPC power by giving mobs all kinds of innate abilities, immunities and resistances. Now it's quite commonplace to have trash mobs that summon, immune to snare/root, immune to fear, immune to mez, immune to slow, immune to charm, immune to harmony and finally mobs that all run at Selo's speed. Players it seems in relation to the mobs are taking one step backward while mob abilities are taking 2 steps forward. One wonders if in future expansions we will have mobs that are 100% immune to any form of player casted spell. That seems to be the direction we are heading. Also when this happens it makes melee classes more valuable as they can actually do damage vs mobs.

We are seeing a major paradigm shift with classes in EQ as caster classes are losing power in relationship to melee classes and vs most generic mobs. I think the answer is as someone pointed out in an earlier post: the current Dev team just isn't into supporting casters as much as the previous Dev teams did. Most spells for most classes have been marginal upgrades and are unimaginative and lacklustre at best. As druids (and other casters) we are victims of a pendulum shift and the "vision" of the current Dev team. The constant state of flux on the Dev team is perhaps the biggest problem in EQ today. Classes are defined by the whim of the current Devs. Their biases and philosophies get imparted to each class. No longer are druids masters of nature, animals and no longer can we even hope to get upgrades to snare, root, SOE, charm, etc. in future expansions. The Devs sense of stewardship, vision and continuity of our class seems to have evaporated over the past few expansions.

See, that annoys me. Hard Data? If they really just dont have the sense or the ability to look at the damage output of mobs and compare it to this spell (which is, again, a no-brainer that somehow eludes them) then why dont they check some vaunted mathematical models? Run some tests of their own? Yeah, it might take one guy an hour to do it... omg... but actually testing their own spells, is that so far fetched?

Anyone who's ever actually done *anything* raidwise since PoP can see that OG is 90% useless (never mind about CotW etc...) Why do we keep having to prove the same things over and over and over?

Run some tests of their own? Yeah, it might take one guy an hour to do it... omg... but actually testing their own spells, is that so far fetched?


When we are faced with the assertion that the 5K cap is fine based on calculations and testing, we have the burden of showing that the 5K cap is not fine. Why? Because we don't do the programming, they do.

By hard data, I mean keep track of how fast you die when you have aggro, and whether OG does its job. If it doesn't, then I can take that back and push for a cap increase. It isn't going to happen now, so it's not worth any time B&Ming about it.

Anyone who's ever actually done *anything* raidwise since PoP can see that OG is 90% useless (never mind about CotW etc...) Why do we keep having to prove the same things over and over and over?

Get the spell. Use it several times in several situations. Then tell me that how it is useless, and why.

I'll have to leave that to others. If I last another month in EQ enduring this latest wave of stupid anti-caster changes (and the echoes of the numerous empty summit promises), I'll be surprised.

Do we need 10? If people are having to wrack their brains for ideas, why not leave the list shorter than the last, and let it keep shortening? A short list leaves SOE less to pick and choose from.

Besides... isn't this all "stuff" from previous expansions (or the game as a whole) that they should have reviewed and fixed BEFORE OoW? I'll bet they are in the "debug the new expansion" mode now anyway. This list is probably gonna be backburnered for quite a while.

Ok, let it be known I haven't played EQ since GoD was released but I have read the forums and almost got sucked in (thank god for girls.) Ok something I would like would be for that Oaken guard spell to last more then three ticks. THAT IS GOD DAMN PATHETIC. It should last at least 5 minutes in my opinion. Sorry, I know I haven't played and stuff but 3 ticks seems ****ty. gotta go cherrio

I'll bet they are in the "debug the new expansion" mode now anyway.
Five'll get you ten that half the development and design staff is shifting focus to the next expansion at this time, or are already hard at work on it. The visionaries and lore mongers are leading the pack. Marketing is listening and sounding off ideas. The engineers are partly there to tell them what can, might and cannot be done. Management is sort of keeping up.

Typical for this moment in their business cycle. OoW is in maintenance mode.

I'd like to be a fly on the wall in certain SOE cubicles, offices and conference rooms. A fly wielding an epic megaphone.

I would like some unique AAs. Some singular reason that an AA would be valued and not replacable by another class.

There currently is no AA that qualifies in my opinion, in a single expansion for Druids. And the only 2 that used to qualify in my book were recently overlapped.

Wood: now replacable by Shaman since thiers is the same slot/line as ours
Quick Damage: mages now get.

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Druids need something similiar to Heart Line of Mages to maintain balance in nuking.

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How about as a new idea, an OUTDOOR ONLY shroud of stealth like invis?

I'd like to be a fly on the wall in certain SOE cubicles, offices and conference rooms. A fly wielding an epic megaphone.

Personally Id rather be a fly wielding barrett's prototype 25mm sniper rifle~

Personally Id rather be a fly wielding barrett's prototype 25mm sniper rifle~

Personnally I find Tazers more effective since you can keep jolting them each time they do something you don't like... The orange ones designed for large bovines would work...

When we are faced with the assertion that the 5K cap is fine based on calculations and testing

Can't we just come back with "You've never been right before, what makes you think you got it right this time?"

Immolation of the Sun (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=5348&source=Test)
Sylan Embers (http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spell.html?id=4885&source=Test)

The fire debuff portion of the oow spell is a downgrade from the god one.. that shouldn't be the case.


Among other oow focus issues Quickening of Mithaneal needs to be bumped up to effect lvl 68spells and Alcartity of the Ikaav (Alacrity of the Ikaav) (or the two nature's ____ foci)should be made to hasten by 30% since it looks like that's the highend beneficial haste for oow. Druid heals without a haste focus just don't cut it really. The bar was set for 30% and I'm assuming that's what the spells were balanced around since the two new heals are the same cast time as our infusion heals, it should remain there.


(as a general issue they have to lower the min duration on the vindication of the dragon line of foci so they work on 30sec dots)

See, that annoys me. Hard Data? If they really just dont have the sense or the ability to look at the damage output of mobs and compare it to this spell (which is, again, a no-brainer that somehow eludes them) then why dont they check some vaunted mathematical models? Run some tests of their own? Yeah, it might take one guy an hour to do it... omg... but actually testing their own spells, is that so far fetched?

Anyone who's ever actually done *anything* raidwise since PoP can see that OG is 90% useless (never mind about CotW etc...) Why do we keep having to prove the same things over and over and over?

Because "Math is Hard" and "Everything is Peachy".

I have a prediction: 500 years in the future alot of things will be different but, some things will never change.

I have a prediction: 500 years in the future alot of things will be different but, some things will never change.

In 500 years everything will be working as planned and that teleportor that just fried your right big toe as you used it wasnt a bug, its a feature.

- nieros

I've brought the IoS FR issue to SOE's attention. If we don't see any corrections in the next patch, I'll include an "OoW Spell Corrections" bullet in the next druid issue list.

In 500 years everything will be working as planned and that teleportor that just fried your right big toe as you used it wasnt a bug, its a feature.

- nieros

Obviously you didn't get what I was saying think about it a little longer...

As a minor quick fix I'd love to see 2 seconds shaved off the recast
on Natures Sereneity

http://thedruidsgrove.org/forums/showthread.php?p=142034#post142034

Nature's Serenity gives a 'Your spell is too powerful for your intended target.' message when cast on a low level mob. This seems like a bug.

Edit: It's not level based as I assumed. It only seems to happen when casting on pets belonging to mobs.

How bout fixing our pet? Tell me all you want that it was intended to be a weak lil bear.... I don't care. I think our pet should be just about Equal to shaman... with some fancy schmancy thing like stun or auto snare or soemthing...

Issues I'd like to see:

1) Natures Serentiy Changes
-- Change Recast to 3
-- Fix all Lulls to have the Agro Range Reducer Back as well.

2) Fix Fire Dot Stacking.

The fire dots, do not stack with each other because of the AC/FR debuffs.
This means that druids are unable to stack dots as well as rest of the dotting classes.

There should be a way to code, where the dots land, so that the damage stacks, but the debuff portion is only counted once.

Was all of the list submitted in time for next weeks patch? I wonder if anything will change.

Scirocco -- I would add fix Epic clicky effect to the list depending on whether there is a response to the "1.5 Effect is Broken" thread.

It would be better to ask them to change the effect to Harmonic Balance, or come up with something new that is equally powerful. No point in asking them to fix something that is almost useless, imho.

or come up with something new that is equally powerful. No point in asking them to fix something that is almost useless, imho.

Agree!!