So I had two concerns/suggestions about Druids:
1. Bees!
The first "issue" I see comes from the pretty cool modifications to the Swarm line of dot spells Druids receive. While potent hard-to-resist magic based DoTs on live, SOD kicks this up by adding a "Bees!" effect which summons a small (4ish?) swarm of bees to sting the target for around 10 seconds. I've not parsed exactly how much DPS they add to each tier of the spell line, but they add non-negligible damage to the front end of the spell (and sometimes even buy you a bit of defense if a bee manages to distract the mob into attacking it). They also Bash which is nifty in terms of possibly interrupting spell casting.
Overall, a good thing, right? Well of course; most players are generically in favor of a boost to their damage potential. The problem is that these Bees are out-door only, but instead of only adding their damage when you are fighting outdoors where a swarm of insects might reasonably be called by the druid, it also prevents the base DoT portion of the spell from landing. Instead, similar to SoW and (basic) Camouflage you cast the spell and are then told "This Spell Does Not Work Here" (or something to that effect). No bees, no magic-based-dot and I can't remember if it takes mana. This essentially limits druid damage options indoors to either nuking or using the fire line of DoT spells (or Creeping crud, a low tier magic based DoT which doesn't have the "Bees!" effect but also does very low damage once you're out of your 20s). The fire DoT line is a single line and perhaps more importantly relatively high resist.
One of my guildies had commented that he thought that these spells worked indoors just without the "Bees!" but he doesn't have a druid main and may be referring to higher tiers of the spell (I am currently 45 so my testing was limited to those spells in the line up to the mid 20s where I just quit casting them indoors).
So I'm not sure if it's intended that the underlying magic DOT not work indoors, but it is presently uncastable whatsoever inside. If this is intended, I'd request that it be re-examined and either the "Bees!" not summon while inside but the DoT effect still work, or that the bees be allowed inside. Alternatively, making one or two of the current mid-high tier swarm spells (30s? 40s? 50s?) act similar to Creeping Crud and work indoors might balance things a bit more so that leveling druids didn't feel ENTIRELY forced to hunt outdoors while still rewarding them when they choose to do so.
Even within the realm of explaining magic, it can still make sense that a druid could conjure (this is the skill these are under) the magical swarm of tiny bugs to bite and sting a target even where also calling their angrier corporeal big brothers wasn't possible).
2. Ice and Lightning, Oh My!
The second issue I've come across is modifications to the Lightning Targetable AEs and Rain/Wave nuke spells for druids. I was recently in the heartlands killing some robots for a quest and thought to myself "Oh, why dont I give a shot to quad-kiting!" I memm'ed Lightning Strike (34 druid Targetable AE nuke) gathered up 4 bots, snared them, and clumped them together, and then began letting loose with my Thor-like power. I quickly realized that despite all of my magical prowess, and the fact I had these 4 bots walking literally in lock-step on top of each other, I was only damaging 3 at a time.
I inquired of my guild if I was mis-remembering how these spells worked on live (I didn't play a Druid so I hadn't really had a chance to play with them much) and was told they had been nerfed a bit on SoD for balance purposes. OK, fair enough I guess, so I continue to nuke down my group, kill the one I have targeted only to realize the other 3 were at varying health levels because the "missed" one had varied between casts, ran out of mana, and ended up heading for the hills (then over them and through a zone line).
Came back and did it again, except this time rounding up only 3 so that I wouldnt run into the same problems of not damaging them all equally/consistently. On a full mana bar I was able to kill the three pretty much by going OOM (the robots were blue... not certain what level they were, but I was 44 for comparison purposes).
OK, so tri-kiting works, but may not be terribly efficient. I put aside that problem and think to myself that if I can clear or find an empty enough field, maybe I can stack mobs together and through carefully kiting them around within the narrow confines of a rain/wave ae, I can get some more mileage out of my mana through the extra effort of keeping them corralled and timing their movement through and within the small AE field. I round up another 3 mobs (uncertain at this time if rains hit the same 3 targets as targeted AEs or perhaps more to account for being "harder" to use and get going using Avalanche (39 rain ae spell) . At first, I am struggling to even get multiple waves to hit the mobs (as I am learning the timing of the waves compared to snared mob speed, etc). Then, I get that down such that I am routinely getting all 3 waves to hit the mobs. Lo and behold, the wave spells appear to be capped at even fewer targets! Despite all of the mobs being stacked on top of each other, the rain would only hit two targets for each of the three waves! And, it had a longer cast time and refresh time to boot!
Well, six total hits (2 targets for each of 3 waves) so it's still gotta be more efficient than the targeted AE spells (and certainly moreso than DD nukes) right? Well, yes and no...
I started to do the math and these were my results -
At 44, a druid can do the following:
Firestrike (lvl 39 spell -- seems fairer to compare this to those others because it is around the same level and isn't one of the fast-cast-mana-inefficient spells like Calefaction) and do approximately 300 damage (297 for most casts) for 155 mana. It has a 4.6s base cast time and 2.5 recharge (so pretty average for a nuke at this level). Roughly 2 damage per mana. It might take between 4 and 8 casts to kill a mob (I'm just estimating here) and takes literally no practice to round up or time casts. There is also no risk of running out of mana or snare wearing off because you have to be genuinely retarded to screw up killing a mob on even low mana once it's snared. Then sit down, Meditative Trance back up and do it again. Of note, the dps of this is 300/7s or approximately 42dps. A single target (assuming 5 casts) would take 35 seconds (ignoring time to find and snare and loot) and use about 750 mana.
Lightning Strike (level 34 spell) and do approximately 166 damage per target to 3 targets per cast for 149 mana. 4.5s cast time and 6 second recharge time, so slower overall casting cycle than Firestrike, but nets to about 500 damage for 150 mana. A bit better than 3 damage per mana. The DPS, however, is only 47 total across all targets, requiring 9 casts (and a total of about 95 seconds) to kill all three mobs. This is still "faster" than burning three down with firestrike, but only very marginally so (95s versus 115s). It also costs a whopping 1350 mana -- quite a bit less than three mobs worth of firestrike, but also enough that it may be most of what a druid has in the 40s. You will also be in combat the entire 95 seconds, meaning you do not reap the benefit of meditative trance, and if you end up screwing something up (needing to refresh snare, picking up an add you need to root or otherwise expend mana on, etc) you run the risk of running out of mana and are generally "exposed" for a longer period of kiting time.
Avalanche (level 39 spell) and do 116 damage per wave for 3 waves to 2 targets per wave for 200 mana. 5s cast time and 12s recast, so your casting cycle is substantially longer than either of your two other options, plus you have to be pretty spot-on about kiting them back and forth through the rain effect. 6 total hits (if you are perfect) for a total of 696 damage nets a ratio of almost 3.5 damage per mana. The DPS is 41 total for both mobs, again assuming perfection with 5 casts (across a total of 85 seconds) to kill 2 mobs. This is slower than the time to kill 2 mobs with firestrike and MUCH slower than the per-mob kill time for 2 mobs with Lightning Strike. It does take only 1000 mana (so higher than a single kill with firestrike but in between it and Lightning Strike's 3 mob kill). You must, however, kite PERFECTLY through the rain in order to get the mana efficiency, and if you miss any waves you're looking at potentially needing extra casts to finish off a mob, further increasing your kill time. Also, the 5 second cast time seems to be right around the cusp of the time it takes for a snared mob to close from max casting range to melee range, such that i found myself sometimes taking a bit of melee while doing this. This was exacerbated because I had to kite towards the mobs rather than directly away to make sure they were back in the AE effect for the second (and then third) waves. Finally, I sometimes found myself timing it poorly and actually hitting myself with a wave, which was both stupid and killed efficiency.
DOT Kite/Root-Rot/DoT+DD. All of these are very efficient options and have their own merit but because comparing DoTs to DDs and AE DDs is somewhat of an apples-to-oranges scenario I figure it is best to just say these are great options but not within the scope of this analysis.
In summary, while you may gain clear mana savings (and even sometimes time savings) with targetable AE and rain based DDs, this is countered by the lack of ability to use meditative trance.
On live, at least early on before they added Out-of-Combat regeneration, a careful and patient druid would essentially time med ticks to make sure they were sitting on meditation ticks and getting full mana regeneration even though it extended kill times because they weren't casting literally on cooldown. This essentially left the careful druid with 4 dead monsters and a fair bit of mana (and not a lot of downtime waiting to fill back up before starting again). Was this gaming the system? Absolutely! Druids were able to get the benefits of sitting staring at their spellbooks even as they were actively killing mobs! Very few other classes could do this with the same efficiency and reliability of druids. Was it overpowered? Perhaps more subjective, but probably. Druids and wizards were often cited as the most efficient soloists even often above necros because of their efficiency in killing 4 targets while getting meditation benefits most of the fight.
In SoD, however, the dynamic shifts substantially because of Meditative Trance. In combat regeneration (even with Clarity, which I am blessed with from my enchanter box) is trivial at best such that being out of combat lends direct mana efficiency gains. I would need more information that I don't think is publicly available about exactly how long it takes for Meditative Trance to kick in and how much you gain per tick with it versus without it in order to plot a timecourse and empirically prove that it is substantially more efficient to simply do single-kills with Firestrike then Med than it is to screw around with the extra risk and hassle of Lightning Strike or Avalanche. I can, however, confirm that my anecdotal experiences are pretty clearly in support of a single kill->med rotation being greatly superior to the other options...
Now the real question is whether this is working as intended or not, and is one that only the design team can really answer. All I can point out is that even if quad-kiting is "too good" based on the numbers from live, the nerfs essentially take niche spells (frankly if you were in an AE group you'd use PBAEs like earthquake anyway to hit more targets and not yourself) that were ONLY efficient/worthwhile in quad-kiting situations and rendered them effectively worthless even in that niche.
If I've sufficiently proven that there is an issue with this, how should it be solved? Well, there are a lot of ways and I'd leave it to the discretion of the design team, but you could either increase the kill-speed of these AE spells (increase damage, lower cast time or refresh), increase the number of potential targets (keeping the same "kill speed" but with more mobs to essentially make it a more balanced trade-off of risk getting ganked by spending almost 2 minutes kiting around but kill faster than you could with single target DDs) or by deciding that these spells simply do not have a niche to fill and changing them to something else entirely (perhaps an AE DoT? That could spice up the DoT options briefly mentioned above and make it a choice between rotting single targets versus multiple). I would argue that based on my analysis and experience using them, the rain/wave based spells only hitting 2 targets and being relatively difficult to use would need a HUGE increase to make them worth casting; there just isn't a reason I can think of to have to kite PERFECTLY and risk taking a few rounds of combat or your own spell damage for only a very minute increase in mana efficiency and an actual decrease in kill speed.
1. Bees!
The first "issue" I see comes from the pretty cool modifications to the Swarm line of dot spells Druids receive. While potent hard-to-resist magic based DoTs on live, SOD kicks this up by adding a "Bees!" effect which summons a small (4ish?) swarm of bees to sting the target for around 10 seconds. I've not parsed exactly how much DPS they add to each tier of the spell line, but they add non-negligible damage to the front end of the spell (and sometimes even buy you a bit of defense if a bee manages to distract the mob into attacking it). They also Bash which is nifty in terms of possibly interrupting spell casting.
Overall, a good thing, right? Well of course; most players are generically in favor of a boost to their damage potential. The problem is that these Bees are out-door only, but instead of only adding their damage when you are fighting outdoors where a swarm of insects might reasonably be called by the druid, it also prevents the base DoT portion of the spell from landing. Instead, similar to SoW and (basic) Camouflage you cast the spell and are then told "This Spell Does Not Work Here" (or something to that effect). No bees, no magic-based-dot and I can't remember if it takes mana. This essentially limits druid damage options indoors to either nuking or using the fire line of DoT spells (or Creeping crud, a low tier magic based DoT which doesn't have the "Bees!" effect but also does very low damage once you're out of your 20s). The fire DoT line is a single line and perhaps more importantly relatively high resist.
One of my guildies had commented that he thought that these spells worked indoors just without the "Bees!" but he doesn't have a druid main and may be referring to higher tiers of the spell (I am currently 45 so my testing was limited to those spells in the line up to the mid 20s where I just quit casting them indoors).
So I'm not sure if it's intended that the underlying magic DOT not work indoors, but it is presently uncastable whatsoever inside. If this is intended, I'd request that it be re-examined and either the "Bees!" not summon while inside but the DoT effect still work, or that the bees be allowed inside. Alternatively, making one or two of the current mid-high tier swarm spells (30s? 40s? 50s?) act similar to Creeping Crud and work indoors might balance things a bit more so that leveling druids didn't feel ENTIRELY forced to hunt outdoors while still rewarding them when they choose to do so.
Even within the realm of explaining magic, it can still make sense that a druid could conjure (this is the skill these are under) the magical swarm of tiny bugs to bite and sting a target even where also calling their angrier corporeal big brothers wasn't possible).
2. Ice and Lightning, Oh My!
The second issue I've come across is modifications to the Lightning Targetable AEs and Rain/Wave nuke spells for druids. I was recently in the heartlands killing some robots for a quest and thought to myself "Oh, why dont I give a shot to quad-kiting!" I memm'ed Lightning Strike (34 druid Targetable AE nuke) gathered up 4 bots, snared them, and clumped them together, and then began letting loose with my Thor-like power. I quickly realized that despite all of my magical prowess, and the fact I had these 4 bots walking literally in lock-step on top of each other, I was only damaging 3 at a time.
I inquired of my guild if I was mis-remembering how these spells worked on live (I didn't play a Druid so I hadn't really had a chance to play with them much) and was told they had been nerfed a bit on SoD for balance purposes. OK, fair enough I guess, so I continue to nuke down my group, kill the one I have targeted only to realize the other 3 were at varying health levels because the "missed" one had varied between casts, ran out of mana, and ended up heading for the hills (then over them and through a zone line).
Came back and did it again, except this time rounding up only 3 so that I wouldnt run into the same problems of not damaging them all equally/consistently. On a full mana bar I was able to kill the three pretty much by going OOM (the robots were blue... not certain what level they were, but I was 44 for comparison purposes).
OK, so tri-kiting works, but may not be terribly efficient. I put aside that problem and think to myself that if I can clear or find an empty enough field, maybe I can stack mobs together and through carefully kiting them around within the narrow confines of a rain/wave ae, I can get some more mileage out of my mana through the extra effort of keeping them corralled and timing their movement through and within the small AE field. I round up another 3 mobs (uncertain at this time if rains hit the same 3 targets as targeted AEs or perhaps more to account for being "harder" to use and get going using Avalanche (39 rain ae spell) . At first, I am struggling to even get multiple waves to hit the mobs (as I am learning the timing of the waves compared to snared mob speed, etc). Then, I get that down such that I am routinely getting all 3 waves to hit the mobs. Lo and behold, the wave spells appear to be capped at even fewer targets! Despite all of the mobs being stacked on top of each other, the rain would only hit two targets for each of the three waves! And, it had a longer cast time and refresh time to boot!
Well, six total hits (2 targets for each of 3 waves) so it's still gotta be more efficient than the targeted AE spells (and certainly moreso than DD nukes) right? Well, yes and no...
I started to do the math and these were my results -
At 44, a druid can do the following:
Firestrike (lvl 39 spell -- seems fairer to compare this to those others because it is around the same level and isn't one of the fast-cast-mana-inefficient spells like Calefaction) and do approximately 300 damage (297 for most casts) for 155 mana. It has a 4.6s base cast time and 2.5 recharge (so pretty average for a nuke at this level). Roughly 2 damage per mana. It might take between 4 and 8 casts to kill a mob (I'm just estimating here) and takes literally no practice to round up or time casts. There is also no risk of running out of mana or snare wearing off because you have to be genuinely retarded to screw up killing a mob on even low mana once it's snared. Then sit down, Meditative Trance back up and do it again. Of note, the dps of this is 300/7s or approximately 42dps. A single target (assuming 5 casts) would take 35 seconds (ignoring time to find and snare and loot) and use about 750 mana.
Lightning Strike (level 34 spell) and do approximately 166 damage per target to 3 targets per cast for 149 mana. 4.5s cast time and 6 second recharge time, so slower overall casting cycle than Firestrike, but nets to about 500 damage for 150 mana. A bit better than 3 damage per mana. The DPS, however, is only 47 total across all targets, requiring 9 casts (and a total of about 95 seconds) to kill all three mobs. This is still "faster" than burning three down with firestrike, but only very marginally so (95s versus 115s). It also costs a whopping 1350 mana -- quite a bit less than three mobs worth of firestrike, but also enough that it may be most of what a druid has in the 40s. You will also be in combat the entire 95 seconds, meaning you do not reap the benefit of meditative trance, and if you end up screwing something up (needing to refresh snare, picking up an add you need to root or otherwise expend mana on, etc) you run the risk of running out of mana and are generally "exposed" for a longer period of kiting time.
Avalanche (level 39 spell) and do 116 damage per wave for 3 waves to 2 targets per wave for 200 mana. 5s cast time and 12s recast, so your casting cycle is substantially longer than either of your two other options, plus you have to be pretty spot-on about kiting them back and forth through the rain effect. 6 total hits (if you are perfect) for a total of 696 damage nets a ratio of almost 3.5 damage per mana. The DPS is 41 total for both mobs, again assuming perfection with 5 casts (across a total of 85 seconds) to kill 2 mobs. This is slower than the time to kill 2 mobs with firestrike and MUCH slower than the per-mob kill time for 2 mobs with Lightning Strike. It does take only 1000 mana (so higher than a single kill with firestrike but in between it and Lightning Strike's 3 mob kill). You must, however, kite PERFECTLY through the rain in order to get the mana efficiency, and if you miss any waves you're looking at potentially needing extra casts to finish off a mob, further increasing your kill time. Also, the 5 second cast time seems to be right around the cusp of the time it takes for a snared mob to close from max casting range to melee range, such that i found myself sometimes taking a bit of melee while doing this. This was exacerbated because I had to kite towards the mobs rather than directly away to make sure they were back in the AE effect for the second (and then third) waves. Finally, I sometimes found myself timing it poorly and actually hitting myself with a wave, which was both stupid and killed efficiency.
DOT Kite/Root-Rot/DoT+DD. All of these are very efficient options and have their own merit but because comparing DoTs to DDs and AE DDs is somewhat of an apples-to-oranges scenario I figure it is best to just say these are great options but not within the scope of this analysis.
In summary, while you may gain clear mana savings (and even sometimes time savings) with targetable AE and rain based DDs, this is countered by the lack of ability to use meditative trance.
On live, at least early on before they added Out-of-Combat regeneration, a careful and patient druid would essentially time med ticks to make sure they were sitting on meditation ticks and getting full mana regeneration even though it extended kill times because they weren't casting literally on cooldown. This essentially left the careful druid with 4 dead monsters and a fair bit of mana (and not a lot of downtime waiting to fill back up before starting again). Was this gaming the system? Absolutely! Druids were able to get the benefits of sitting staring at their spellbooks even as they were actively killing mobs! Very few other classes could do this with the same efficiency and reliability of druids. Was it overpowered? Perhaps more subjective, but probably. Druids and wizards were often cited as the most efficient soloists even often above necros because of their efficiency in killing 4 targets while getting meditation benefits most of the fight.
In SoD, however, the dynamic shifts substantially because of Meditative Trance. In combat regeneration (even with Clarity, which I am blessed with from my enchanter box) is trivial at best such that being out of combat lends direct mana efficiency gains. I would need more information that I don't think is publicly available about exactly how long it takes for Meditative Trance to kick in and how much you gain per tick with it versus without it in order to plot a timecourse and empirically prove that it is substantially more efficient to simply do single-kills with Firestrike then Med than it is to screw around with the extra risk and hassle of Lightning Strike or Avalanche. I can, however, confirm that my anecdotal experiences are pretty clearly in support of a single kill->med rotation being greatly superior to the other options...
Now the real question is whether this is working as intended or not, and is one that only the design team can really answer. All I can point out is that even if quad-kiting is "too good" based on the numbers from live, the nerfs essentially take niche spells (frankly if you were in an AE group you'd use PBAEs like earthquake anyway to hit more targets and not yourself) that were ONLY efficient/worthwhile in quad-kiting situations and rendered them effectively worthless even in that niche.
If I've sufficiently proven that there is an issue with this, how should it be solved? Well, there are a lot of ways and I'd leave it to the discretion of the design team, but you could either increase the kill-speed of these AE spells (increase damage, lower cast time or refresh), increase the number of potential targets (keeping the same "kill speed" but with more mobs to essentially make it a more balanced trade-off of risk getting ganked by spending almost 2 minutes kiting around but kill faster than you could with single target DDs) or by deciding that these spells simply do not have a niche to fill and changing them to something else entirely (perhaps an AE DoT? That could spice up the DoT options briefly mentioned above and make it a choice between rotting single targets versus multiple). I would argue that based on my analysis and experience using them, the rain/wave based spells only hitting 2 targets and being relatively difficult to use would need a HUGE increase to make them worth casting; there just isn't a reason I can think of to have to kite PERFECTLY and risk taking a few rounds of combat or your own spell damage for only a very minute increase in mana efficiency and an actual decrease in kill speed.
