2025 Druid Wishlist

[Wulfhere]

I don't think all three priests are supposed to be exactly equivalent value in every role, but I'd agree druid values (dps, debuff, heal) are too low in general. If you carry mythical frost it stacks pretty well with aa ro. Druid's only debuff aas are seasons and single target/aoe ro, and carrying the other debuffs and stacking them up is harsh on spell slots and casting time, which is already painful for a multidot/heal/cure/nuke/buffer. ery mob, maybe with a group hot attached.

I guess we agree. I'm saying that if you stack all of the Druid debuffs that they do not compare to what a shaman can do with 1 or 2 spells.

Previous thread: https://forums.everquest.com/index.php?threads/most-effective-reduction-….277877/

 

[Vumad]

This sounds like "Stances", which means you are locked into either heal or damage mode for a set time. It's been mentioned a number of times over the years.

And my answer is always the same.

As a druid, my primary playstyle, as well as one of the core advantages / class defining abilities is flexibility. You can heal and you can damage, you can be a floor wax and a dessert topping.

So, within a minute, I can throw some heals, barely saving another character's life, throw some dps on some mobs; and be flexible to do either as the situation demands, especially in very tough rapidly changing events, like raids.

Locking me into one or the other means I somehow have to both predict the future (whether during that "locked" time I need to be healing or damaging) as well as not letting me use one of the druid's primary strengths, the ability to fill in what is needed at the moment.

The AA Spirit Wolf forms used to be "white wolf" (healing) or "black wolf" (damaging). It was, basically, a stance much like you are saying, only I think it just provided a bonus to healing or damaging and didn't have a negative to the other. Still, it had the same problem, it was in opposition to the core of druid play style.

Thankfully, those druid AAs were changed to "Spirit of the Great Wolf" (one group and one self) which improved both direct damage and instant duration healing spells, fixing that conundrum.

To "sacrifice" one for the other is a step back to a design idea that was discarded due to the reasons I stated above and, I believe, the change made, leading to the current improvement of both healing and damage, was greatly appreciated by the vast majority of druids.

Imagine if it was like stances. You could simply bandolier from a 1H (healing bonus) to a 2H (DPS bonuses).

Weapon stances are exactly why knights are so powerful. They can 2H DPS and the moment they need to tank they can hot swap weapons and sturdy up. People think SHD/PAL is OP but the truth is that weapon stances is just incredibly powerful.

As an enchanter, I would love weapon stances, and I can’t imagine why any class in EQ wouldn’t want such a powerful and easy to use tool.

 

[Fanra]

Imagine if it was like stances. You could simply bandolier from a 1H (healing bonus) to a 2H (DPS bonuses).

Weapon stances are exactly why knights are so powerful. They can 2H DPS and the moment they need to tank they can hot swap weapons and sturdy up. People think SHD/PAL is OP but the truth is that weapon stances is just incredibly powerful.

As an enchanter, I would love weapon stances, and I can’t imagine why any class in EQ wouldn’t want such a powerful and easy to use tool.

So you are saying we could instantly swap between them as often as we want whenever we want? Well, that's fine. But what's the point of having stances then? To give us another button to mash?

 

[Szilent]

Boosting 2h damage does not require the mechanical encumbrance of a stance buff.

Providing tanking benefits while equipping a shield does not require the mechanical encumbrance of a stance buff.

Stances are dumb.

 

[fransisco]

Szilent is correct, stances should honestly be removed.
It would totally fix the tank dps issue. Or at the very least, there should only be a shield stance, and not a 2h stance.

 

[Szilent]

Szilent is correct, stances should honestly be removed.
It would totally fix the [whatever]. Or at the very least, there should only be a [] stance, and not a [] stance.

Removing them would not fix anything except rid EQ of the mechanical encumbrance of the stance buffing. The same bonuses and multipliers are entirely available via Innate Prowess, Weapon Mastery, Shield Block, a worn focus on tower shields? whatever. Stances existing is an intrinsic problem with stances that I'm interested in solving, not altering any part of their function. Their function is absolutely fine with me, equipping different weapon setups feeling quite different from one another seems like a great thing to reinforce.

 

[Vumad]

Removing them would not fix anything except rid EQ of the mechanical encumbrance of the stance buffing. The same bonuses and multipliers are entirely available via Innate Prowess, Weapon Mastery, Shield Block, a worn focus on tower shields? whatever. Stances existing is an intrinsic problem with stances that I'm interested in solving, not altering any part of their function. Their function is absolutely fine with me, equipping different weapon setups feeling quite different from one another seems like a great thing to reinforce.

I feel like sometimes people forget you can disable weapon stances. There are 4 ways for a knight to use their weapons, not two, which does a good job scaling knights from being weaker to stronger (1H enabled -> 1H disabled -> 2h disabled -> 2H enabled). On the dummy, that was about 200k -> 215k -> 350k -> 450k DPS with just auto attack. You can hotkey the bandolier and the AA, so mixing these up isn't very cumbersome. I see no harm in weapon stances other than eating a buff slot I don't need anyway.

 

[fransisco]

I feel like sometimes people forget you can disable weapon stances. There are 4 ways for a knight to use their weapons, not two, which does a good job scaling knights from being weaker to stronger (1H enabled -> 1H disabled -> 2h disabled -> 2H enabled). On the dummy, that was about 200k -> 215k -> 350k -> 450k DPS with just auto attack. You can hotkey the bandolier and the AA, so mixing these up isn't very cumbersome. I see no harm in weapon stances other than eating a buff slot I don't need anyway.

huh? There is literally ZERO reason to ever disable weapon stance. The fact that 2h stance exists means tanks will always use it unless they are incapable of handling the incoming damage. At which point they switch to a shield to be safe (and their dps plummets because they lose the 100% bonus to dps).
The issue with stances as they exist is that tanks have a dps stance.

 

[Evast]

huh? There is literally ZERO reason to ever disable weapon stance.

2H damage without the reduction to dodge/parry/ac > Increased dodge/parry/ac at 1H damage

There's a middle grounds

 

[fransisco]

2H damage without the reduction to dodge/parry/ac > Increased dodge/parry/ac at 1H damage

There's a middle grounds

your pedantry is showing

 

[Evast]

It's a legitimate answer.

Nearly 2x the damage of sword and board, without taking extra damage. It's part of progression. It's not "can't tank anything in 2h" to "no fear of dying whatsoever while tanking in 2h"

There's an entire middle ground where 2h no stance may be the most efficient pick.
Are people going to use it that often, or are they going to do as you said and wait to be on the extremes of the spectrum, well that's up to them. But to say there's no point is a bit disingenuous. It's funny though, everyone worried about min-maxing, yet with the options to mix-max concerning stances, they'll opt out.

 

[Zhora]

I would like to see remote sun and moon put on different timers/refresh whatever so we can use both. Make heal-on-damaged-target the druid niche, shaman niche is splash, and cleric direct heals.

I think our dots need to be addressed, as well. Either reduce overall mana cost, or make them longer, or more damage.

I don't expect druids to be top of healing or dps but they are mediocre at both. Since long distance transportation is no longer a factor in travel times, druids are basically neutered buff bots.

Druids are ridiculously reliant on AA gains to be viable healers, as well.

Just my two cents as a 4th string druid alt.

 

[Petalonyx]

QOL: Group wolf to overwrite Self wolf? Trying to find and click off self wolf while doing busy druid things is a lame where's-waldo-whack-a-mole, experience. I think this has been asked for before.

Healing: Just cut 'Vida line of heals cast time way down (by half?). Druids have the most intense spell bar competition of any class i've played. Rather not have to devote 3+ slots to unlinked timers, i'd rather have acceptable vida spam (with spell bar freedom), with the option to 'step-up' heals by slotting in some of the other lines for max heal effectiveness. Also, pls continue to reduce cast time on Luna line of group heals. It's still feels too long. Something should probably be done with the regen line of buffs, too. They are way behind.

Debuffs: the weak dots with additional fire/cold dmg are nice in concept but don't actually add notable additional fire/cold dmg in practice. Would be nice if they performed better, especially in the debuff effectiveness.

Nukes: DDs have fallen really far behind.

 

[Fanra]

QOL: Group wolf to overwrite Self wolf? Trying to find and click off self wolf while doing busy druid things is a lame where's-waldo-whack-a-mole, experience. I think this has been asked for before.

Yes. Highly annoying to "lose" your wolf for a few minutes because there were 2 seconds left on the previous one. Especially since the emote that your wolf has worn off often happens before it actually wears off (this has been reported and a video sent to developers as proof).

Healing: Just cut 'Vida line of heals cast time way down (by half?). Druids have the most intense spell bar competition of any class i've played. Rather not have to devote 3+ slots to unlinked timers, i'd rather have acceptable vida spam (with spell bar freedom), with the option to 'step-up' heals by slotting in some of the other lines for max heal effectiveness. Also, pls continue to reduce cast time on Luna line of group heals. It's still feels too long. Something should probably be done with the regen line of buffs, too. They are way behind.

They just need to be careful about lowering cast times. Any cast time above 3 seconds that is reduced to below 3 seconds no longer is affected by Beneficial Haste focus (feet items) and cleric buff spell haste. If the cast time is lowered from above 3 seconds to below 3 seconds this must be accounted for or the actual cast time for those with feet and/or cleric buff spell haste could see an increase in cast time.

Debuffs: the weak dots with additional fire/cold dmg are nice in concept but don't actually add notable additional fire/cold dmg in practice. Would be nice if they performed better, especially in the debuff effectiveness.

It also would be nice to not have to cast three spells to debuff (not the dots but the debuff spells) in order to debuff mobs. That's not even including Season's Wrath AA, which at least doesn't take up a spell slot.

Nukes: DDs have fallen really far behind.

Not being a spreadsheet warrior I haven't tracked this, so no comment.

 

[Vumad]

Not being a spreadsheet warrior I haven't tracked this, so no comment.

The overwhelming majority of Druid DPS comes from NBW Edit: DoTs with a large portion being NBW. Druid nukes are unjustifiably weak. They suffer from the same problem as NEC, where the faster the mob dies, the less damage they can do, except Druid dots are excessively inefficient and Druid mana recovery tools are excessively inadequate. Druid nukes need a DPS buff or druid DoTs need to consume less mana or Druid needs better mana recovery tools. Probably all of the above. The inefficiency of Druid DPS is claimed to be because they can also heal but Druids do not DPS or heal well enough to justify how much mana they use when DoTing.

 

[Szilent]

In last weekend's Conqueror of Brood full run, NBW was 42% for one druid, 45% for another. That's by far their biggest single contributor, but not the majority of their overall damage.

For our wizards, Ethereal Immolation was 40 - 41 - 43 - 47 - 38%

For necromancers, Pyre of Illandrin was 38-33-43-40%

For magicians, their Servant pet summons were 30-32-31-25%
their Many nukes were 34-31-30-43%

Druids on average are a *little* more concentrated than other spell casters on their best spell? but only a little.

 

[Szilent]

lil' more data, Nature's Boiling Wrath for those druids averaged over 20M per cast (just the spell damage, not procs & whathaveyou). 20,323,442 & 21,648,651 for them.

That's real close to 3x the damage of Ethereal Immolation, which averaged 7.6, 7.6, 7.4, 8.1, 7.7 for the wizards present.

at 36k mana vs 17k mana per spell, it's pretty hard to describe NBW as inefficient.

The other dots are less efficient than NBW, substantially because they take less advantage of ADPS (Season's Wrath, mag Synergy), but still aren't strikingly out of line. My log had average damage per cast for these spells of-

Sunscald @18k mana 9,720,082
Horde of Hotaria, 33k mana, 8,298,283 (eh, this could use some attention. it is disadvantaged by Enhanced Ruin scaling )
Chill(+Frost) of the Ferntender, 37k, 13,228,977

-for one druid. Slightly lower Sunscald/Horde efficiency for the other, but substantially higher total damage. That tells a clear story of that druid having the mana to be more profligate in casting the spells at lower efficiency to gain dps.

With no attempt made to suppress mobs dying out from under late ticks or whatever, or the casts on an immune Herald which definitely happened. Just total damage dealt divided by count of spells resolved (and so, mana spent)

 

[Sprooce]

In last weekend's Conqueror of Brood full run

Just curious, in your run, how did the druids damage compare to your nec/wiz/mag/sha?

 

[Szilent]

Just curious, in your run, how did the druids damage compare to your nec/wiz/mag/sha?

uh, neither matched the total damage of nec/wiz/mag. Anyone on those plainer damage classes getting beat by someone (one of the priests) that spends 1/3 of their casts on valuable support spells would be strongly encouraged to contribute to the effort on some other class.

They were right in the mix with the shm, with total damage across both classes mostly linear to cast counts / time engaged.

Combined (321): A soldier in 7281s, 561.34B Damage @77.10M, 21. Shaman +Pets = 10.97B@1.56M in 7029s | 23. Shaman +Pets = 10.26B@1.51M in 6791s | 24. Druid +Pets = 10.19B@1.55M in 6595s | 25. Shaman +Pets = 9.91B@1.43M in 6907s | 27. Shaman +Pets = 9.39B@1.65M in 5702s | 36. Druid = 7.35B@1.12M in 6593s | 40. Shaman +Pets = 6.82B@1.25M in 5447s | 53. Shaman +Pets = 1.68B@290.66K in 5793s

 

[Vumad]

Thanks for taking the time to post the data @Szilent. Not many people do and it makes for a much better conversation to have a lot of qualifiers to work with.

Any idea why the one Druid had more mana? My box Druid is always the first OOM.