Druids are worthless?

I know a lot of people on Agnarr and Selo that have druids. They don't "play" them - they level them and then use them for PL other toons or for ports until not needed. Many don't make it in an xp group unless we can't find other mains looking to xp.

Doesn't mean they aren't good class or that they don't exist, but you're right - we've just recently started having more than one main on a raid consistently. I would guess that their count includes the thousands of soloing druids or PLing druids over the years?

Do it, Do it, Do it!!!

You admitted that you haven't even witnessed druids charming in chardok, and yet you insist on multiple longwinded rants against the class. It's pathetic to read this drivel. You literally don't know what you are talking about / have no experience in the matter.

Same experience with my group. Druid was our highest dps. We also were able to have him haste the enc pet instead of the wildly inferior enc haste. I (cleric) could step away without a burden as he would heal. His burst dps with pet + dots/nukes the times we just needed to crush stuff was widly higher than the enc, even if the enc wqs staying somewhat close on sustained. Finding a leveling path with charm mobs constantly available and nonstop kills was easy to do. I literally had perfectly valid backup zones ready in case the server had been more toxic (selo ended up being surprisingly friendly compared to past tlps) and, oh hey, that druid could port us around to get to them faster.

There are many many group situations where as a cleric I find that we are just wildly overstaffed in the healing department. I melee or pull with yaulp and/or dump mana into nukes. A druid healing in my place using far more efficient nukes or dots would be an improvement. On the other hand, sometimes I have been the bottleneck and pulling stutters because my mana can't keep up, eg with a heavy charm pet tanking grind. Having a druid here instead of basically anything except said charmer, or as an alternative charmer with an actual heal, would be huge.

I suspect a great deal of druid hate, just like my experience a decade ago where there was tons of bl and shm hate, is based on people looking at the game in the theoretical without any actual experience in practice. If you actually group with druids in chardok or similar zones you see they are the strongest dps and then piles of utility. If you play a cleric and group with druid or shaman for long grinds that push hard, it's a huge and appreciated difference vs being the only healer. If you / your druids do not actually charm, or you / your clerics don't get into group situations intense enough to need extra heals, then sure, like the ranting noob I quoted, they are not a good class for you.

Druids really need their AA Spirit of Black/White and Group versions of them backfilled to Luclin. A new rank of each for each level increase. This would go a long way in adding value to Druids.

Changing Tunare’s Renewal to a Kunark spell instead of a Luclin spell would also help quite a bit.

Incarnate Anew should also be made a Kunark spell rather than a PoP or OoW spell.

Tunare’s Renewal and Karana’s Renewal should both be recoded from percentage based heals which have never worked correctly into Complete style heals. Keep the Heal value the same for both, however this change would allow Critical Heal AAs to work on them which they currently don’t. This change also will increase the aggro they generate (which is currently basically 0). I’d also argue that Karana’s Renewal should see a 200 mana cost reduction from 600 mana down to 400 mana. This way it’s closer to Complete Heal in terms of efficiency but still not quite there.

I also think their Remote Sunflare line of spells is something they should have from day one but obviously this was a code limitation since ToT spells were not doable until Underfoot.

Doing the first four things here would help a lot with druid group and raid desirability in Classic-GoD eras. But obviously it’s not classic

I always remember druids being great for solo leveling, PLing and porting. But they nerfed quad kiting right? and dot kiting...

Resists seem more common than I remember, but both are perfectly doable with a high enough mana pool.

DoT Kiting is just highly inefficient unless you can get super well-timed sitting every six seconds going... or if you have a mount I guess... but that's always been the case.

You won't!

If the average tlp lifespan is classic to pop, maybe you could consider tweaking the druid class early on as well.

For instance change their short buff heal over time to be more substantial. It's like 30 or something per tick.

Druids are fine. Just need a min/maxer to get what's desired. Example chardok, I made group of ranger cleric bard wizzy druid rog and still did lvl in 3 hrs easy with druid charming pet and bard charming/cc with aoe slow/snare. Cleric never dropped below 80 Mana.

It all depends on the players.

Druids only in-general weak point classic-pop is the xp grind after 30 in a classic only setting. They are decent or good on all classic raid content, literally #1 class for the 50-60 kunark grind, or for any post-classic start for 1-60 they will be at least top 3. They are average or decent in kunark raids, and this trend continues with them always being ok but never best or terrible on raids. They are fantastic in ME and storms, 2 of the worst key bottlenecks.

A huge hurdle for tlp raiding is that some encounters have resist which make classes go from great to garbage, or aes that really dump on melee dps until geared. The druid toolkit including several resist types, -mr dots, and then heals results in them never having a single raid where they are bad.

You guys really need to play with better druids. This is a class that scales very well with player ability.

Druids offer unique debuffs on raids and can be either heals or dps. They might not be better either role than other classes, but it's not like most raids have people sitting on the bench to class stack.

So are shaman and clerics. The difference is those classes have vastly more useful toolkits that make them critical raid classes. A highly skilled player is going to be more effective in a raid playing any priest besides druid. Bring one box druid for buffs and debuffs and you've maxed out what the class can bring to a raid until much later expansions when they get meaningful ADPS

I think what you're observing is that so many druids are completely unable to play their class well that a player who puts any thought and effort in looks like a rockstar. The fact is for druids, unlike the other priest classes, their utility does not stack, mana regen is trash, healing throughput and efficiency sucks, have mitigation roughly as terrible as a cloth wearer, and are just all around a trash tier class when they cannot abuse the power of charm in early expansions.

Having mained a druid from Classic to PoP, I won't touch the class as a main and next time will play a shaman and enjoy being insanely powerful in every era of the game. The big thing druid has going for it is nobody expects you to do anything so you can just screw around and do whatever you want if your group is alive

Im heavy into min maxing and finding advantages but even after that i had a dru clr and wiz on agnarr and i never would pick the druid over the other 2 99% of the time. Their lack of heals crushes them when you compare to a clr. And yes charm is nice, but i also had a 65 enc so that lets you play in just about every zone whereas a dru is really tied to a lot fewer places for charming.

And if i just wanted spell dps we all know dots just don't synergize with anything other than the slowest pugs.

I feel that if druids could get some early heal or slow heal help it would offset their shortcomings. Namely no slow, rez, group heal, or even a useful more efficient slow heal. (Natures recovery is absolutely ripe for a simple tweaking.) But modern tlp is slow and a druids bread and butter is slow dots, slow regen, and "slow" ds. All very efficient but all very old school in a new school tlp setting.

Also druid debuffs are some of the worst designed spell lines I've seen in the game. They are just a stupid mess of extremely questionable usefulness. The idea was good but implementation was a disaster. From what I've seen of later eras, the debuff situation gets even more pointlessly complex. The druid debuffs always gave me the feeling that nobody in charge of spell design played the class

Basically they should have given druids the Call of Earth line rangers got, and the Blessing of Reverence line clerics got, and a mind wrack like spell that could only be used when they had no pet active. That would have been a respectable kit for the class in pop era

Druid debuffs are pretty damn good. Much like bard debuffs though its not something that shows up like a parse list. But the negative fr is big.

Unfortunately like some mentioned, a good single box druid gets it done. Nothing like seeing that druid take quarm loot and primo pixels so they can power level newbs better.

I just wholeheartedly disagree. Finding a level path with animals is extremely easy, solely excepting 30+ with classic only. Add in kunark or anything past it and animals abound. Then, your charming druid is adding their solid dps on top of the charm whereas the enc is adding weaker dps (but more utility). Already have an enc or bard, the druid adds more. Finally and very importantly, that druid's charm pet buff is ridiculously good, so much that enc will want a druid hasted animal over other options if you have both in group.

On raids, versatility really does matter unless you zerg. If you roll 60+ into potime for example you don't need anyone to swap roles and everything is just epeen number games. Do it with 30 and you absolutely feel the importance of a class that can focus on mostly dps while able to burst heal eg on a knight tank swap (no furious) until the rot can move, and help cc adds on vz and inno, the hardest encounters of their phases.

The problem is you apparently only want 1 thing at a time, or at least think you only do? The question is, why can't the druid heal AND dps and/or charm? Why can't your enc charm and your druid charm too? Or if you only wanna charm on one box (understandably) why not have a druid's haste on it, whether or not the druid charms it or the enc does?

Even when your enc charms the same pet with the same haste (eg my selo level group) the druid will STILL crush on dps, especially burst, because they have all their other non charm dps. Have a druid and cleric, and just got a bunch of undead? Druid can suddenly play healer while the cleric temporarily goes to town. This was routine for us in ME on selo, or can occur in chardok for you manglerers.

Finally, the min maxing ignores real life. Hey, one of our clerics just left the time split because her husband was yelling? I can slot a druid into the ch rot. Hey guys I (cleric) just dropped an entire wine bottle which shattered, need to afk immediately or the dog will cut himself (this really happened, rip barefoot merlot), druid was on it and pulls barely slowed despite me out for almost 10 minutes. We need extra healers to manage doing this blob with only 30 people but if faceless shows up to dps race we could really use more dps? Thank god for that druid.

Druids are only weak in a perfect world where everyone can just do their best role. Raids like that are probably zerging. Groups like that are probably not pushing their limits.

I think a lot of the disagreement comes down to differing experiences by different player types. The powergamer types on their nth iteration of TLP launch playing with people they know in static groups get to play with the competent Druids that can do all the cool stuff mentioned in this thread, know how to adapt how they play their toon as the situation warrants.

The pug guys have to deal with the

• First time players that were told Druid was a great starting class to learn EQ.
• Lazy players that expect to coast doing the bare minimum to scrape by in a group.
• Boxes that sit around contributing little, because you know, reaching over to a second keyboard to cast a nuke then sit down again is too much work.
• People that are just wanting a Druid leveled so they have a Port/PL box but don't know or care about how to play the class effectively beyond those 2 things.

These guys tend to be the ones that give the class a bad name, those of us that have to deal with them day in day out tend to get pretty soured on the class.

heh at least druids don't have to deal with how 99% of bard players only pick the class to afk melody giving bards an even worse name.