Druid’s ability to recoup mana

Discussion in 'Priests' started by Jack, Dec 29, 2022.

  1. Szilent Augur

    I think you include me in "the other warriors"? No, I don't expect someone who describes themselves as casual in any fashion to do any particular this or that. And there is indeed a bunch of thises & thats for a druid to potentially do. But I expect that if they put in the effort & time that they'll feel rewarded by how much more powerful their character is. I think that's a substantial meta-level plus of building up a druid character. That could be a bias of warrior players. Tanks, especially warriors who don't have spell bars as a crutch, become more powerful with good development. For most players whose characters have a spell bar, their gear and deep character development is… not nothin', but counts for much less.
  2. Allayna Augur

    That's a pretty hot take. Mana-envy? Spell bars are not a crutch as they are limited to only 13 gems. Imagine all of your warrior endurance using abilities being limited to a single hotbar.
  3. Tucoh Augur

    Brother, your ostensibly intentional misinterpretation of conversations is exhausting.
  4. Jack Elder

    As the OP of this thread, I agree with Allayna.

    Spell bars are not a crutch. Spells are an integral part of caster classes. Just like disciplines are for warriors. To say that spell bars are a crutch is extremely disingenuous. Even with all of the extended spell slots casters only have 13 slots available to us. Yes, we can swap out spells as needed, but that requires us to sit to load new spells and then we have to wait for the cool down timer on the spell to use it. Disc are not limited by the amount of slots you have available on the combat page. Imagine only being able to have 8 disc loaded at anyone time and having to load discs when you need more than those 8 loaded. You just load up your hot bars with however many you need. Now imagine having to sit in front of a mob swinging you to load up those other discs.

    If you want to talk about other aspects of casters than their ability to gather mana back to them in great chunks at a time, great. Please make a different thread for that so that we can get back on topic here.
  5. Szilent Augur

    It's not envy, I'm happy with my choices. But it's not at all a hot take to understand that the power of spells and their contribution to knights' characters' power doesn't depend nearly so much on gear.
  6. Szilent Augur

    Read whole sentences, please.

    What I wrote there was that tanks as an archetype, and especially warriors who don't have spell bars like knights do, require character development to be effective. Like Druids, a robustly developed character will feel much more powerful than a more superficial one. This is unlike most caster classes, for whom just having spells, and casting them, is nearly all their power.
  7. Allayna Augur

    So…

    We’ve gotten a few vocal warrior opinions on mana, derailing a thread all the way to a tanking discussion of how much easier knights have it…since we have a mana bar/spell gems…

    I welcome any Druids to join the discussion about their class, abilities and improvements.
  8. Jack Elder


    Not only do I read whole sentences but I read whole paragraphs and threads. This is a priest class discussion about mana and abilities to recuperate it. You sir, a non mana using warrior, have gotten so far off topic as to turn it into a warrior vs knight thread. If you have issues with knights vs warriors, please take that to the tank forum.
  9. Tucoh Augur

    I've got a max-level druid. And a wizard. I'd be curious to hear what druids think about the concept that their mana-starved status acts as a counterweight to their DPS capabilities relative to their pure caster-DPS counter-part, the wizard.
  10. Cicelee Augur

    Druids, like every other class in the game, can OOC regen in group content and quickly regain mana. Smart druids will communicate with their group when they need a med break to prevent them from ever being in a situation where they run OOM while in combat. So because of the relative ease of getting to OOC regen, I don't want to focus too much on the group game.

    On the raid game, druids have access to multiple instant/near instant mana regen capabilities-

    Magician mod rod
    Paragon
    Horn/feather clickies
    Cleric QM
    Bard Rally

    They are also generally grouped on raids with an enchanter and necromancers, who *I believe* have group mana things that they do. I don't exactly know what they are, but I believe it is there- as a magician, I have gone weeks not using mod rod/gather/conversion on raids and never worry about OOM. And I see my mana bar going up, even though I am chain casting. So something is going on that is helping.

    I understand the Druid concern for a lack of individual instant mana regen, but I believe that concern is because other classes have something and they don't. It is more a "want" because other classes have than a "need". And there is so much farming out of other class abilities that sometimes it is silly- hence why I made my over-the-top comment about just removing blue/yellow bars and everyone can go nuts.

    I miss the days when things mattered. Where your mana bar mattered, and you had to balance it. When that spell resist number mattered. When gear mattered, when a lot of things mattered. Nowadays the game is cookie cutter for nearly every class- bards sing the same songs (aria/march/4 dots/2 insults) and 90% of their spell book is ignored. Monks use 2hb exclusively, regardless of situation. When was the last time you saw a magician use a 1h/shield? As a class that is perceived by many as having "unlimited mana" (and there is some truth to that), sometimes I envy classes like rangers and druids and wizards that have to make strategic choices and decisions during game play that allows them to maximize what they have and yet have some preservation of assets in order to be able to react... not just mash a hotbar key ad nauseum.
    Petalonyx likes this.
  11. Marton Augur

    ROTE necros use Mind Atrophy (or old Mind Erosion)? Not trolling, a serious question. I don't believe this spell is in anyone's raid spell set.

    Druid mana regen is not stellar; on the other hand, looking at their dps, I understand devs are cautious to change things.
    Allayna likes this.
  12. Tucoh Augur

    Mind Atrophy is a very strong spell that is rightfully not casted frequently because that few seconds is better spent by a necro dumping yet another massive DoT onto some poor mob. This is partially because necros are still very good and also because many classes (including mages) are so mana efficient. My mages (who have not yet done any of the old content things we've talked about in this thread to improve their mana) can just plant their feet and sling spells for a looong time before running through their mana pool and needing to deign to summon fresh modrod. Of Many (3669 base cost) and swarms (7308 base mana) in particular are super efficient and all we have to pay is laggy raids.

    You could literally double mage's mana cost for all their spells and still be in a better mana conservation situation than druids. This is partially because the substantial DPS that DoTs do is counter-balanced by a huge mana cost, but the answer of, "If you don't want to run out of mana, stop casting Wrath" isn't super useful.
    Allayna and kizant like this.
  13. Marton Augur

    Tbh I rarely use mod rods on my mage. It depends how raids go, but usually I don't need them.
  14. Allayna Augur

    I appreciate the continued dialogue. I was going to say, absolutely no Necros are casting the mind wrack line.

    @Cicelee - I will debate, despite using every tool, having a plethora of clickes from years of invested gameplay, I can easily go OOM on raids while playing my druid. That even with Ro, occasionally a NSW is resisted, and it stings. When raids today are not about a quick 3 min burn of a boss fight, but more about wave after wave of billion HP adds, druid DPS is going to suffer as an attempt is made to DoT them all.

    It’s not like they can hit AE slow and languid bite starts dotting them all.

    It’s not like they can beam them all endlessly.

    Applying 27k mana cost dots to each mob, despite all the tricks is going to run you dry quickly.

    I could easily list out all the ways Druids have been left behind and the counterweight in that argument is but they do dps now?!


    No splash heal (cleric, shaman, paladin)
    No HoT (cleric, shaman, paladin)
    Linked heals prevent fast spam casting (cleric, shaman, paladin)
    Lack ability to get back in the fight quickly via mana (cleric, shaman, paladin, shadow knight, enchanter, magician, necromancer, wizard)
    No pet, either as dps/defense (shaman, magician, necromancer, beastlord, shadow knight, enchanter, even cleric to a degree)
    5 min aura, doesn’t help survival (cleric, shaman)
    No spell shielding (int casters)
    No combo DoTs (necromancer, shaman)
    As a side slight… most mobs are coded to be either snare immune or root immune, nearly none in game ignore the pet and go for the owner…or, are 100% slow immune.

    Am I saying Druids should get everything in that list, no.

    But arguing that Druids can track, “heal”, port, and root are weak excuses for why they have been ignored.

    Also, two things can occur simultaneously, like druid mana recoup abilities sucks AND wizards need a boost to DPS…
    And…warriors should have something that stands them apart from knights…

    A class asking for improvements doesn’t negate other classes needs.
    Jack likes this.
  15. Jack Elder


    I get what you're saying about removing the bars though. Some classes seem to have unlimited mana.


    As I stated in my OP
    **Wanting to have a way to recoup mana, like every other caster class, isn’t out of line. No one wants to take those tools away from those classes, we just want to have access to a similar tool.**
  16. Lluianae Elder

    Some context for my recent experience with Druid mana: since my return to EQ, my buddy and I box 3 chars each in our 6 stack. He has his original Druid as an alt box, his current main as a Beastlord and his Magician alt. I have Llu (Cleric) and my alt SK and Bard.

    When you account for mod rods, paragon, songs/rebuttal, sk bites, even 2h melee and anything else, the one character in our group when we're doing sustained chain multi-pulls will be the Druid. Everyone else's mana is usually far better off and the Druid will be my typical target for QP on cooldown. This is even with my having farmed all of the relevant CotF augs for his Druid when I was working on Hunter for us. Edit: My buddy wanted to mention this is even with him exclusively using Focused Paragon on his Druid all the time!

    Sustain in that aspect is rough, and you do see it on raids, especially on drawn out encounters in mid-tier and lower guilds where fights that higher end guilds will end in a fraction of the time become 30-40 minute+ slogs. That all said, in those prolonged fights my QP is generally reserved for my Beastlord buddy who knows what he's doing!

    If someone dies prematurely, then sure, I'll throw them my mana as otherwise I'm not dipping much below 90-95% mana on my Cleric even with the majority of my casts never being Remedies. If I die, I will happilly run on 5-10% mana, so one mod rod use and I'm golden, or if it's on CD then I will recover steadily with Yaulp, Avatar and 2h procs. This is one of the glaring differences as a Druid will struggle to run on such fumes. I can focus the majority of my time, be it healing &/or DPSing and never care about my mana, all that effort for such small results, but at least it's better than nothing. The only exception is multi-dotting Undead as Sermons are expensive DoTs and short duration.

    On that regard, I see NSW being mentioned repeatedly. I remember when that spell line was first created in what was it, TSS era? Its intent was meant to be costly for use outside of a GoM spender and not as something so easily sustained for crazy damage, especially in multi-target scenarios. This is not to disparage how it falls into the current situation for Druids, more, a nod to its original design premise and a time from when Druid mana has been more painful than what it was prior. What's going on currently needs to be looked at as a whole and not certain aspects and spells in a vacuum, since in the end, we're playing with a total package of a given class amongst all the other classes.

    They could very easily tweak the Mask line to help with the sustain, whether it's in the base regen values, or % enhancements with a focus AA (I don't know if /tick mana can be scaled by such an SPA, but a similar % scaling focus AA exists for the mana recourse on SK bites, or ones increasing HoTs). Or even a stacking buff mana pres% slot as something more unique for Druids. Things like these would be simpler than a rescaling of spell base mana costs across the board, but doesn't address post-death recovery.

    As mentioned, as a Cleric I can happilly run on a small amount of mana and recover more mana as a fight goes on to the point I will hit 100% or near enough, over and over. Deaths don't really phase me unless things are really hitting the fan, which is usually in an attrition/wipe scenario. Such that I almost never use VP for myself, it's a QP for others. I'd be fine if Druids had something along those lines just so they have that safety cushion. Plenty of other classes have tools for post-death resource recovery, presuming they die just the once in a certain time frame. Subsequent deaths are naturally punishing across the board.

    Post-death Druid with no real recovery tools is currently miserable. It shouldn't have to be.
    Metanis, Tucoh, Silvena and 3 others like this.
  17. Rolaque Ancient

    You asked for a druid's opinion about what is maybe missing or needed for them. Simply put, druids need a fix during continuous rapid tank healing.
    Allow me to explain. I can cast my 3 instant heals (sootheseance 0.5sec; adrenaline 1.8sec; and clotavida 2.2sec) continuously, and when needed throw in a survival (spell and/or AA version). It all works well, except for damage spikes when clotavida is being cast while the others are on cooldown. The 2.2sec cast time for clotavida is literally a killer. What is needed is something like an additional 0.5sec reduction in clotavida cast time (to about 1.7sec or so) when our other heals are on cooldown.
    Jack likes this.
  18. Jack Elder


    The easiest fix for this would be to remove the timers tying current heal spells to their lower level versions, giving us access to a much broader variety of arrangements of our healing line ups.
  19. Tucoh Augur

    When I played my druid I was really surprised at the massive gulf in healing power of the druid relative to the shaman. The shaman is superior to the cleric in some respects while the druid is massively inferior. Chief gap between them is definitely the inability to spam tank heals where I think the paladin is even superior to a druid while being able to splash the raid?

    I harbor suspicion that this gap is an intentional effort by the druid lobbyists in order to become wizards-with-heals instead of healers-with-dps.
  20. Rolaque Ancient

    That's an old proposal which never has been acted on, most likely because the devs want to restrict druids to being unable to stack spell lines (for our heals and dots). That's why my proposal is a valid workaround.