I still have no idea how to play guardian but i sure as shit know how to play boomie now.
Minor correction to the title: every single class build.
It's well known that moon druid has a ridiculously powerful level 2 spike, and I want to push that to its limits - is there a single time when taking 2 levels in it makes a build worse at any level? To be clear, here are the benefits:
- The most obvious benefit - wild shape. Add 74 (!!!) effective HP to your base thanks to direwolf form, or 62hp and a powerful multiattack as a brown bear.
- For martial characters, access to ranged cantrips like produce flame. For classes like barbarian, this has obvious utility.
- For martial characters, wild shape stacks with bonuses like unarmored defence/cunning action/rage/action surge, meaning your extra HP gets additional power scaling as you level.
- For spellcasters, the ability to rotate in as a frontliner if your martial characters are damaged is incredibly powerful.
- For all characters, you gain the ability to very quickly retreat from an encounter. Very few creature can catch a galloping warhorse, doubly so if the warhorse used its action to cast longstrider before wild shaping with its bonus action.
- Wild shape has a ton of utility outside of combat - stealth and environmental obstacles are no longer a challenge.
- 4 castings of cure wounds/healing word/entangle is intuitively very helpful for everyone.
I can't possibly think of any cases where losing 2 levels in your class is enough to overcome all of these benefits. I'd love to have my view changed. If you can even show there is a single time when a different multiclass would be more effective, I am happy to concede a delta.
So first of all, this is the first HC character I've beaten the game with since like 2005, and the only one I beat the game with solo. Yes, I traded along the way and partied up at various points for EXP runs, but made it my goal to actually complete the quests and kill the bosses by myself... that is, to ensure I had an actually viable build and could progress through the whole game. I was pretty nervous, because I had already lost two other HC characters to dumb mistakes.
Fire Elementalist druid is by far less popular than Wind due to its damage type limitations and cast timers. I had actually respecced into Wind around level 50 to try it out (I've never played a Wind Druid) but respecced back for a few reasons:
- It felt like a high APM/constant attention necessary to play, and since I was HC I didn't want to make mistakes that would distract me and get me killed
- I didn't like having to charge right into all the monsters in HC, even if I was overall safe due to Hurricane
- My character's name is SireOfFire and, well, it just felt wrong!
For an approximation of my current build at 85, check out this builder here.
Skills
For anyone who hasn't played or considered playing a Fire Elementalist Druid before, it's a mixed bag. You have 5 skills that are some of the coolest-looking in the game, but all have huge limitations, the greatest of which are:
- Almost completely fire damage, making it hard/impossible to kill fire immunes
- Cast timers on ALL skills, meaning you have to make each cast count and can't spam
- Weird synergies, you can basically only have one "good" skill unless you max ALL of them, which leaves little else for survivability or dealing with fire immunes
I decided therefore early on that I would have only one main fire skill, and ensure I had good physical damage from the Summoning tree and from my merc to (slowly) cut through fire immunes. While there are two Ele skills that deal physical damage, one is VERY slow (Volcano), and neither deals good physical damage unless you max both of them! So my skill distribution plan was this:
- 20 Fissure as a main damage spell. Fissure is widely considered the best fire ele skill as it can do MUCH higher damage than listed if enemies walk through it, which is easy to accomplish either naturally or by recasting summons to change their behavior. With one synergy maxed, it demolishes most enemies on /players 1 easily, and harder content with mo
As the title says, I'm looking for Elemental Druid skillers. Depending on how many you have, I might want them all. Looking for maybe 3-4.
Also interested in a couple shape-shifting skillets for a firy build later down the road. Let me know and I appreciate anyone posting.
#Intro
###Why this post?
I am a still big fan of the Game Design of D&D 4E, and after reworking the vampire I looked a bit at some other essential classes and thought about them. In this post I group 3 small updates together, to not spam this subreddit.
I want to keep it a relatively simple class, and keep the (intended) play style, while trying to make it a bit more interesting, and a bit more in line with other classes.
###The purpose behind the rework
The goal behind the rework is, that players who like playing these classes, including beginners, can play it without being left behind other party members (and without being forced to multi classing). I don’t think the these classes are too much behind, but I think they could use some slight improvements to bring them in line and make them a bit more interesting and a bit smoother to play. I also think that having “essential classes” is a good thing, since it just allows a broader variety.
###General I just write the changes here, not the whole abilities, so it is assumed people have the material with the classes in them. When an ability has upgrades on some levels, I write them normally on the level the ability is gained. First come the classes/changes and at the end the reasoning/explanation behind these changes, for people interested in the explanations. (As I guess more people might be just interested in the changes).
#The revised Binder Warlock The controller version of the Warlock lacks quite a bit of control compared to other controllers. It also has the curse removed which was the striker feature of the main class. And with the lack of choices, the class just really loses a lot of flexibility which is especially for a controller quite bad. For me the class feels like they just forgot to give it a control version of a curse and could need a bit more flexibility, so lets fix that.
##Main Class
Shadow Claws:
Additional: Binder: Instead of making a ranged attack you can also make an Area burst 1 within 10 squares attack and target each creature in the burst. If you do, the damage of the hit decreases to 1d6 cold damage. (Increased to 2d6 + at Level 21) Improved: Effect: Increase the damage to 5+ your Dexterity or Intelligence modifier at level 11 and to 8+ your Dexterity or Intelligence modifier at level 21
Curse of Binding:
Additional: Once per turn as a minor action you can put the Curse of Binding on up to 2 creatures of your choice within 10 squares. This cur
... keep reading on reddit ➡Lay them all on me! I want some interesting, fun facts that I can incorporate into my RP. Additionally do you have a favorite fungus that is striking in appearance or you just find really neat? Love to hear about it all. Thanks guys!
I had to keep spamming town portals. I would run in with my dire wolves, get a few shots in and bounce using a TP as soon as that fugly roach thing landed a hit on me (preferably before). I went through what feels like over a dozen town portals, maybe significantly more lol. I killed that bastard though, and I didn't even use roach spray. Feels good.
Has there ever been a worse meta in wild? sniplock wasn't very popular at least when it was a thing, despite being worse than sniplock that fucking quest is everywhere!!!!! I hope the questlines get seriously reworked. This is unacceptable! WTF!?
Level 20 is a hard road to travel to, and it can take literal years, depending on the game.
I'm in a game that will be eclipsing it's first year of play on the 13th, and we're level 7.
I saw a post not too long ago about a house rule to "revise" the druid's level 20 feature, so that it wasn't so game breaking. However, I always liked that feature. It was something to look forward to.
Take, for comparison, the class I play's capstone: warlock's level 20 Eldritch Master: Spend 10 turns in combat to get your 4 spell slots back, or save 59 minutes out of combat to get 4 spell slots back. Pretty not cool.
So uncool, in fact, that it's encouraged me to look into multi-classing, rather than exploring the full potency of the warlock class. Granted, casters get level 9 spells, so that's more like their cool capstone, sort of.
Rangers, though, have it the worst. Adding your WIS to ONE attack or damage roll per turn. Something a Blade Warlock can do at level 12 with an invocation, on all his/her attacks. No level 9 spells to make up for it, either.
Same goes for a lot of classes. However, I feel like, in my opinion, it would be cool if level 20 features were almost these tantalizing abilities that discouraged multi classing. Not in a bad way, but more in a prospective way: "if you take 3 levels in fighter, you'll get these cool fighter abilities, but you'll miss out on ever getting this."
What are your ideas, based on this principle? Any house rules you've seen or homebrew that sort of aligns with this philosophy? I've always been a fan of the druid, barbarian, and paladin (subclass) capstones.
