When Druid? Pretty much never. It's extremely clumsy and actively fights against it's user.
Why not Druid? It's a luxury since Shaman and Inq already cover everything you need. It's terrible for solo play, casual and leveling and a meme for pvp. It combines everything you usually don't want: Hefty buff chasing, lots of spam, mana drain and self harm, mandatory melee up time, no aoe, no forced crits, handles immune phases poorly.
1H or 2H? No direct difference, 1h is more responsive.
- Druid Tree.JPG (255.86 KiB) Viewed 2756 times
-> I removed all ''easy approaches'' since there really is no reason to go Druid and cut corners. Shaman and inquisitor cover everything you need for casual play.
Older pov to get the vibes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bi7_Kj ... e=youtu.be
//More pov videos from Zehne in the post below.
I just got a hint that Resounding Blow's +50% bonus affects Sanction again. This wasn't the case during ''Mage and Cleric adjustments'' late 2019. Somehow someone at Gamigo did an accidential rollback on some patches (like Stand Tall! eternal stacking for healing again). Without this, L. Sanction is worse than L BoJ. But being able to give +50% to every L Sanction again now, it is marginally better.
Basics:
You have to doctor A LOT on your target to get things rolling. Target swaps will be a nightmare.
Your melee attacks apply 5x Natural Force (debuff), Nature's Edict transforms them into Natural weakness(debuff) for more 'Druid' damage taken, doubled if Crushing force is active.
That's a minimum of 7 gcds for a 70% buff.
Resounding Blow applies 50%/25% buffs for the next 2 attacks and increases your life damage on the target by 100%; which is why we favor Trickster's bolt over Fervent Strike.
Combined Effort(& Punishing Strike) increases ALL damage taken by 20%. Both attack's damage is just around the ballpark of Trickster's Bolt damage wise but they usually scale better into max hits and the additional Natural force they apply helps Censure and Edict.
Essence Strike is a life based attack from Druid which refreshes Eruption of Life. It's also your hardest hitting attack for:
Fae Mimicry- which produces 225% echoes of the damage done by the next direct 5 Druid attacks.
Dump all your carpet buffs, amplify Essence Strike for the Mimikry block, afk until the next Mimikry block.
It is rather spammy and one may soothe away but if you jinx a timing (Edict) it all falls apart rather quickly.
Also: A Lot of things are procc based. Like Resounding Blow's cool down losing cd chunks on Life Surge damage- which proccs off a Trickster's Bolt + IoB - which impact almost a second later into the next gcd so you can have a big rat's tail of effects from many abilities where only the end of that chain gives you the desired effect.
Sometimes you just have to fly blind and trust in the buffs and cool downs which 'should be there by then', to really be there.
Druid is both a resident sleeper and pure nail biting- very odd.
First things First: Buffing up.
1) * One big thing on Druid is Conduit of Nature, which renders your pet afk in return for some buffs. However, with a minimum of extra attention, you can get that buff while keeping the pet active and able to attack. This means ca. +39k dps flat by chance.
You have very good odds to get the pet to stay active when hitting Rapid Summon, WAIT A SECOND and then quickly press:
> Summon: Greater Faerie Seer and instantly press Conduit of Nature
This can have the game spawn the Pet just ever so slightly after you are able to use Conduit of Nature, making it buff you; but having no ''Fairy model loaded in yet'' to de buff. (This also applies to Mage Ele where it ads over 100k from pet dmg & extra charge generated)
If you pull it off, it's ca. +39k dps for Druid from the active pet.
If you buff up and your pet ends up debilitated, Druid clearly doesn't want to get used today. Switch to Shaman or Inquisitor because why even bother.
Second addition compared to Druid versions which you may know is the use of Nature's Censure as well as always sticking the ''long opener'')
''Short opener'' wastes one stack of Mimicry to use Mimicry's instant 5 Natural Force for Censure, using your worst damaging attack on your best cool down, losing you 100k up to 160k dps), spending the extra time & gcds upfront to manually get 5 stacks will end up higher in most cases.
Nature's Censure used in a spammy fashion will drain your mana like crazy. Even with maximum Peace of the Forest, prepare to use Mana Tonics (the mana over time Tonics are WAY better than the one time pots)
If you don't do those extra things, Druid won't beat Shaman.
Macros:
Spoiler:
(rightclick- open in new tab to enlarge the image)
Button gcd = the button you press. Below are the actual effects+ogcds.
Step one: OPENER
Start with Eruption of Life and one Fervent Strike
It's as range, you want to get it up asap plus whenever Essence Strike resets it, it gets freshly calculated. So no reason to break your back trying to get buffs for it up early. Follow it up with a Fervent Strike which will greatly improve your Sanction and Insignia of Blood.
EoL and Fs are both ranged, enough time to get into melee range!
Get into Melee range as quickly as possible and use the #Opener macro 3 times.
If you are not into melee super quickly, mixes up the timings and you may as well save the gcds (and only use Crushing Force)
#Open x3 will fire Resounding Blow, Sanction Heretic (with +50% buff) and Crushing Force (with +25% buff). Main concern here is to use them early enough so that Resounding is ready again for Mimikry.
Hit that #Phys macro and monitor the stacks of Natural Force.
We want 5 stacks for Nature's Edict which transforms them into 5 stacks of Natural Weakness (+35% dmg, doubled if Crushing Force was active).
- Druid weakness.jpg (2.39 KiB) Viewed 2756 times
Outside of farming stacks, we replace the physical Fervent Strike with Trickster's Bolt's life damage (which does more damage due to Resounding Blow's +100% life dmg taken)
IMPORTANT: Your Melee attacks can have quite a hefty delay between the attack being used and your gcd starting and the attack actually hitting.
While monitoring Natural force, keep in mind that your current attack may hit 0.8-1 second later. Since Nature's Edict also follows this delay, you may hit Edict while the stacks are still displayed as 4. Best we ''count'' our uses of #phys which helps so you are not dependent on kalerts here.
We will only farm and monitor 5 stacks of Natural weakness in the opener or on new targets.
Use a manual Nature's Edict
Be sure that Crushing Force and 5 stacks of Natural Force will be active when Nature's Edict impacts.
After the opener, Nature's Edict only needs to consume one stack to refresh your existing timer of a 5 stack Edict. This means Edict only needs to consume 5 stacks whenever it fell off/ is applied to a new target.
This removes the need to manually ''farm'' physical attacks outside of the opener and takes the main bulk of stress away. Druid was intended to have a complex system of Natural Force, Nature's Censure and Nature's Edict. But we simply ensure 5 stacks for Nature's Edict in the opener and use Nature's Censure as well as Nature's Edict with less than 5 stacks after that.
Use #PRE for a manual Resounding Blow, followed by 5 uses of #MIMI - this starts our returning Mimikry block
#MIMI will fire Mimicry- which instantly gets you back 5 stacks of Natural Force. It also Essence Strike (your strongest attack) have no cool down for 5 uses and echoes the next 5 Druid attacks. With Essence Strike proccing Life Surge, proccing Insignia of Blood which procc Life Surge, refreshing Eruption of Life and having it's damage echoed by Mimicry, one Essence Strike can do some 7mil in one gcd Unfortunately, Druid has zero direct buffs for Essence Strike and you are at he mercy of it crits. Having all five Essence Strike not crit or crit (We are talking a fluctuation from 4mil to 22mil per Mimicry completely at random) is the very thing that can suck the joy out of Druid while Shaman and Inq can easily guarantee crits for their best attacks.
Mimicry ends with 5 stacks of Nature's Edict and another Essence Strike ready to go. You can no refresh Nature's Edict on 5 stacks followed by an Essence Strike (pov video) or throw in a 5 stack Nature's Censure followed by ES and refresh Edict with one stack later.
And now we are into the Mimicry downtime block which will always be the same.
In between Mimikry:
Sanction Heretic buffed with Resounding Blow is our second best attack after the Mimicry block.
If we ''spam'' Resounding Blow, it can misaligned so much that we are already back to Mimicry before using it a second time
Instead, we use #eco and then interrupt it in order to manually buff Sanction Heretic+Crushing Force, Essence Strike and SH+Cf during the Mimicry down time.
If we avoid delaying SH by more than 1 second every block, they keep lining up nicely and every Mimicry downtime will be extremely predictable.
Resounding Blow > Sanction Heretic(+50%) > Crushing Force(+25%)
Now we use #eco to not fire Resounding Blow before Essence Strike is ready again. This should take only 4 uses of #eco.
Then use #Sanction for Resounding Blow followed by #ES for Essence Strike(+50%).
This ES in between also ensures that the 20 second Eruption of Life stays on target.
And back to #eco 4 times.
We once again use: Resounding Blow > Sanction Heretic(+50%) > Crushing Force(+25%)
Now we use #eco to not fire Resounding Blow before Essence Strike is ready again. This should take only 4 uses of #eco.
This last bit of #eco can be used to get your Nature's Edict refreshed with one stack.
Weave in one Nature's Edict and have it consume at least one stack of Natural Force to refresh it's 30 second 70% damage bonus. Make sure to pay attention here because if the buff runs out, your damage drops by a lot.
When Resounding Blow and Mimicry are ready again (or less than a second away),
Use #PRE for Resounding Blow. The macro has no other gcds in it so you can press it even before Resounding Blow is fully ready. It will not fire anything and wait for Resounding Blow to be ready.
gg you now have Fae Mimicry+Essence Strike ready to go as well as a +50% and +25% buff for the next two attacks in the pipeline.
If you followed the Sanction and Es timings before, the Mimicry downtime portion should 1:1 repeat the same way.
Your downtime pretty much reflects:
Resounding mimicry+ES (#eco) Resounding SH CF (#eco) Resounding ES (#eco) resounding SH CF (#eco with Edict)
See how Resounding-ES and Resounding-SH-Cf do a zick zack and Mimicry is basically just replacing one of the #eco slots
TLDR:
Buffs & Opener:
-> Try to get Conduit of Nature without debilitating the pet (40k dps)
-> 5 stacks Natural Force with either Druid melee or Mimicry -> Turn them with Nature's Edict while Crushing Force is active. (+70% dmg taken)
Repeating Mimicry cycle:
-> Keep your 1minute Fervent Strike up like you would on any Fervent Strike using build
-> Have Eruption of Life, Resounding Blow and Combined Effort up. (fundamental de duffs on target)
-> Sneak in 1 stack Nature's Edicts before every Mimicry to keep the 5 stack buff timer rolling
-> Only consume Mimicry with Essence Strike. (40% of your damage)
-> Have mana tonics ready when using the Nature's Censure ogcd
Snapshotting buffs for EoL does nothing. RB's +50% has no effect on the procs and at last when refreshed by ES it gets any stat updates anyway.
Druid is extremely mana hungry. It got a gcd buff from 1.5 to 1 sec without any cost benefits. You will need to rely on Peace of the Forest (ogcd costing health for 7% mana) to keep yourself above 50%.
Peace of the Forest can eat up the ''Mimikry Cd removal'' stacks needed for Essence Strike so watch out there.
-> Nature's Censure costs tons of mana and eats your valuable Nature stacks (direct competition to the super important Nature's Edict dmg bonus)
However, we only need 5 Natural stacks every ~ 27 seconds. As long as we keep/ guarantee at least 5 stacks of Natural Force for Nature's Edict right before Mimikry, Natural Force- stacks are very well free for the taking. Censure is a minmax in itself. You could "spam" it with a 4 second cd but stacks more than double (+40% on 4, +200% on 5) it's damage. If you even slightly delay Censure (which we do during Mimikry), going for 5 stack Censures is a better deal. Especially from a mana standpoint. If you are open to run mana pots and fights don't take long, you can totally fit an extra Censure/ cycle (see the RB without Censure it in the visual rotation image)
The legendary point in Censure however is not even close to L. Fervent Strike's value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bi7_Kj ... e=youtu.be
See how mana taxing it is. I am using Visionary mana Tonic for 12500 mana over 12 seconds, a ''smaller'' one with let's say 1800 per tick is just fine! Tonics tick 5 times so as long as 5 ticks of the tonic's tooltip can fill up ca. 8k mana, you're good.
The mana over time effect will give much more effective mana/ flask cool down when used above 50% mana.
Looks like a lot i know. But it's mainly about ''interrupting eco'' when Essence Strike, Sanction Heretic and Mimikry's cooldown are at certain points.
-> Can easily do 1.75-1.85m
-> Don't try to bring Druid to a party without a very specific plan figured out. If the boss/ fight doesn't represent a target dummy, best not to bother.
-> BE READY TO USE MANA TONICS
-> If the Pet gets debilitated by conduit of Nature, consider just using Shaman/ Inquisitor because why even bother.
Kalerts: (I don't switch sets, it's a general Cleric set which should do fine for your 'Druid set')
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L Sanction vs L BoJ, without Resounding Blow, BoJ does more since it can proc Life Surge, With Resounding's +50%, L Sanction barely runs ahead with about 40k or 2%.
Note: i usually don't spend years on something before posting but am always happy to update. What's still open on this version is to try and let L Sanction "breathe" i got it to over 250k compared to 180k when clipping it which is entering the 1.9m selfbuffed- ballpark. Please do share your experience.
Credits: Winford (Og 4.3 Druid), Sepelio (Downtime prios), Killerloose (pts & bugfixes), Zehne (5 Oracle update), Piksil (Edict one stack tech)
