I know this has been asked before but I could not find the answer. What is the intended use and benefit for Sporalli / Myconid / Polyporus assault temporary pets? Anyone do some parses on these? Anyone use this? Been around for 3 expansions now so must be of some use, right? right? Sure, not another joke on druids?
The shroom spells are pretty much completely useless. File next to the Beastwood Guard line, split nukes, short duration DSes, and silly combo spells.
The Mushroom is not the most generally usable spells, but its far from useless. Say you were on a raid and there were lots and lots of pets attacking a boss, and any direct spell you were to cast would get you insta-summoned and smooshed?
That being said though, it would be much nicer if the spell was twincastable (two pets per cast) and they crit and had focus at the level of the caster. Without the ability to crit or focus, the Mushroom really isn't for damage.
Mages like druids that use swarm pets. Make a mage happy and use your useless toy swarm pet! (for the sake of fairness even though this pet assists in mages hitting the pet number cap on their "of many nuke" the spell itself is so weak that even with mages present the amount of power the druid loses in other areas just by stopping to cast this fully negates any power it adds to a mages of many nuke. Sad but true.
The shroom's aren't our crappy AA pets, I use those all the time. Spirits of nature are more dps for mages than they are for us. Shrooms are like really terrible Ro's Servants for us.
For single-group content, sporali swarm pets seem to be at their most useful as an off-DPS spell for Alteration (healing) specialized druids who have been leveling up in a group in the role of the main healer and have (as a result) mostly focused their AA expenditure on healing-related bonuses. (Since the sporali are summoned by Alteration, they get a nice mana discount.) The sporali is basically a living DoT in the form of a ranged nuking pet, and virtually all of their power is in their base damage output (foci or AA investments, other than Extended Swarm, don't meaningfully affect them), which means you can get good results out of them without needing any kind of spell crit AAs. It is true that they don't duplicate from Twincast, meaning they aren't very useful for burns, but the spell to summon them does at least proc Mana Flare type effects (including the kind coming from druid auras). A sporali pet does allow the druid to deal some extra damage without generating much additional hate for themselves, and they allow a way for the druid to deal poison damage that the druid's kit otherwise does not have. As others have already mentioned, the sporali pets also count for boosting a magician's Shock of Many type spells. Finally, they can be used as a speed bump for off-tanking purposes in a pinch on a bad pull (but there are almost always better options available). Still, I feel that I should mention that they do have a nontrivial amount of hit points (they certainly endure damage better than the Nature's Guardian AA pet, which is probably the squishiest dark-blue con bear ever). Their melee damage is indeed pathetic (but that isn't the point, after all). Humorously, they can flurry from bard aura benefits (RAWR, 24 damage flurry hits!). But yeah, you're missing out on at most 1-3% of their total DPS by not summoning them in melee range of the target... if even that, so don't worry about it if it's not highly convenient. xD Now then, mathematically speaking, I don't understand why so much hate is directed at the sporali spells. They aren't terribad (especially for druids who aren't utterly top-end and sitting on thousands of AAs spent), and for certain setups they may be a mathematically preferable spell to have loaded. At any given tier of content (from Underfoot onward), the sporali pet's nuke hits for 60% to 90% of the damage of a magician's fire pet of the same level range (the more recent expansions seem to have the fire pet outclassing the sporali by larger margins than UF and HoT did), with only a one second longer recast time (which NPCs nuking don't appear to follow exactly anyway). Assuming it has uninterrupted sight and range on its target, a sporali swarm pet will nuke 4 to 5 times over the course of its 34 second base lifespan. (It can nuke up to 6 times if you have extended swarm AA investments, and will lean more toward 5 even when it doesn't make it to 6 if you've got the AAs, but I'll assume for the moment that this comparison is being done without them.) For the rk. 2 version of the level 89 (HoT) sporali, Polyporous Assault... assuming about four and a half nukes per sporali summon, that's an average of around 24,000 damage from the one spell cast by the druid, which didn't require any offensive AA investment at all and barely dented the druid's mana. It also only consumes one spell slot (and its 15 second recast time means you can put out a second sporali while the first is still around, if the fight is going to last long enough to warrant it and the extra DPS would be useful), meaning that it doesn't consume as much "spell gem real estate" as a DoTing or nuking off-dps setup is inevitably going to need. Compare that to something like Sunbrand (comparable mana cost and duration), which even in T4 group gear is only going to hit for an average of ~11,500 in total before crits are factored in, if the druid isn't being focused by a bard. Or you could go with Nature's Incinerating Wrath for only ~18750 (at nearly double the mana cost). I can't speak for content higher than 90 because I haven't taken my druid into the 91+ range yet, but from what I'm experiencing in the 86-90 range, I'm really not seeing why everyone seems to hate the sporali summons so much. I find them to be a very usable tool in my druid's kit.
