Druid Improvement?

[Edge]

Slay Living is a great spell, but it has the stink of necromancy on it.

And? Not all Necromancy spells are evil. Slay Living doesn't have the [Evil] descriptor. There's no rule against druids using necromantic or death effects. Otherwise the spell wouldn't be on their list.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine that a lot of the NWN playerbase and the D&D community in general seems to have this mistaken idea that Necromancy, as a school, is all evil.

Generally the class fantasy(I'm sorry WoW-fans) is wizards damage the battlefield, clerics aid the party in doing their jobs better and fix mistakes, and druids control the battlefield.

This isn't my experience. Wizards tend to be the battlefield-control types in 3e/3.5 D&D/Pathfinder. Wall spells, Black Tentacles, Pit spells (PF only), Grease, Web, Cloudkill, these are the classic battlefield-control magics and they're all Wiz/Sorc spells. Sure, you can play a blaster mage, and they're a lot of fun. But they're not the most efficient use of a wizard, at least in PnP, compared to having them be the battlefield-control guy.

Not that any of that really matters in this context, as the best battlefield-control spells in PnP either don't exist in NWN or don't work very well. See again Black Tentacles, Grease, Web, Entangle, and so forth not working so great due to something on our server, and even when they do work the NWN version of them is less than impressive.

The main problem with Druids in NWN is that they don't have access to 99% of the stuff in PnP that makes them great, and/or what they do have is severely nerfed in NWN. Primarily Wild Shape is the best example: it's nowhere near as awesome in NWN compared to how it works in PnP. A lot of their best spells are not in NWN, and because of the way they work they can't be added, the spell's effects just won't work properly in the NWN engine. Summons don't work as well as they do in PnP because NWN limits you to only one summon and you can't buff your animal companion with gear, which causes them to really lose usefulness before around levels 10-12.

A lot of the trouble of fixing druids just comes to the fact that no one has any idea what to do with them. Just pulling from PnP won't work, and we're logically reluctant to just make up things out of whole cloth.

[Garage Trashcan]

Actually, as far as I'm aware, Spikes was altered to affect Scimitars and Sickles as well.

[Support]

Jul 30, 2016 11:50:51 GMT -5 Garage Trashcan said:

Actually, as far as I'm aware, Spikes was altered to affect Scimitars and Sickles as well.

 I just tested, and it doesn't. But thank you for your insight!

And? Not all Necromancy spells are evil. Slay Living doesn't have the [Evil] descriptor. There's no rule against druids using necromantic or death effects. Otherwise the spell wouldn't be on their list.



This is a personal pet peeve of mine that a lot of the NWN playerbase and the D&D community in general seems to have this mistaken idea that Necromancy, as a school, is all evil.

Ah, of course there isn't a rule against it. There are many druidic deities. I don't know if there are house rules or server specific rules, nor do I know if I'm correct in my assumption, but I've always assumed praying for negative energy spells which come from the negative energy plane to a non-evil deity wouldn't be favorable, even if the deity has plentiful capability of granting them and the druid him/herself using them. I love infestation of maggots! I think that spell is great, but it's often a pvp only spell, as most things die long, long before all the saving throw failures. Thanks for your input, though. I appreciate it.

[Fire Wraith]

Jul 30, 2016 9:11:36 GMT -5 Support said:

I normally try to avoid conversations like this on the forums since it often divides some players with staff, especially staff who work every hard for what the server has, but I'd like to throw some overview from my perspective so far playing a druid. I'd like to start with this disclaimer, however.

Please don't hesitate to post thoughts and ideas. We certainly don't want anyone to feel like they can't add in their thoughts. Ultimately, we're all just a bunch of people playing a game. Ultimately, it does fall to those of us who are admins to make choices about things, because someone has to, and we're the ones who'd do the work to make any changes anyway.

We do also change our minds about things. There are many things in the game now that were rejected by the admins in the past for one reason or another, only for us to decide over time that "you know, that's actually not such a bad idea after all." Thus, don't be too worried if we don't agree with you right at the moment. It doesn't mean we don't hear you. I certainly don't think any less of anyone who's posted here (or in similar threads) as a result of that, even if I may not agree with their suggestions or view of issues.

Really about the only thing that annoys us is repeatedly banging away at the same thing after we've explained why it won't work. In some cases that's not because of the contents so much as getting tired of repeating ourselves.

[Support]

I've been looking over sources for spells, and the easiest to translate seem to be these:

www.d20srd.org/srd/spellLists/druidSpells.htm

www.anmanindustries.com/anman/stuff/dndconvertable/DrdSpells.pdf

Things I think could be interesting without depending on heartbeat:

2nd level: Fire Trap. I think this spell could be useful in a variety of ways.

3rd level: Wind Wall. This could be an interesting aura spell similiar to how Stormshield is scripted. It could give a small flat reduction to piercing weapons or concealment to arrows(like protection from arrows?).

5th level: Wall of Thorns. Vine Mine could be changed into this. It could be a trap or symbol based spell that does acidic damage with a chance to paralyze.

And the nature guardian spells could be merged into the current summons, and use a "druid" tag similiar to how the planar ones use an alignment tag. There are legendary(epic HD) animals like bears and tigers that are a step above dire tigers and bears. Their size catagory could be bumped up one catagory and stats adjusted. They'd still have all the vulnerabilities a non planar summon would have, but they'd have the unique benefits of being buffed by druid-only spells.

[Edge]

Jul 30, 2016 12:13:05 GMT -5 Support said:

<abbr class="time" title="Jul 30, 2016 13:13:05 GMT -4" data-timestamp="1469898785000">Jul 30, 2016 13:13:05 GMT -4</abbr> Support said:

And? Not all Necromancy spells are evil. Slay Living doesn't have the [Evil] descriptor. There's no rule against druids using necromantic or death effects. Otherwise the spell wouldn't be on their list.



This is a personal pet peeve of mine that a lot of the NWN playerbase and the D&D community in general seems to have this mistaken idea that Necromancy, as a school, is all evil.

Ah, of course there isn't a rule against it. There are many druidic deities. I don't know if there are house rules or server specific rules, nor do I know if I'm correct in my assumption, but I've always assumed praying for negative energy spells which come from the negative energy plane to a non-evil deity wouldn't be favorable, even if the deity has plentiful capability of granting them and the druid him/herself using them.

That's a house rule at best, but more likely a common misunderstanding or mis-assumption. With a few very specific exceptions like Eldath with her pacifism, such spells are not anathema to most druids or druidic deities, or spellcasters in general unless they have a personal reason for disliking or fearing death magic or negative energy.

Negative energy and the NEP are not evil in and of themselves, they're neutral forces, no more than positive energy and the PEP are good (and you can die just as easily from the inhospitable climate on both planes). The commonly-held idea that negative energy itself is evil because of how undead thrive off it, living things wither under it, evil clerics channel it, and several [Evil] spells make use of it is a long- and widely-held mistaken belief.

[Support]

Jul 30, 2016 19:02:08 GMT -5 Edge said:

Jul 30, 2016 12:13:05 GMT -5 Support said:

<abbr class="time" title="Jul 30, 2016 13:13:05 GMT -4" data-timestamp="1469898785000">Jul 30, 2016 13:13:05 GMT -4</abbr> Support said:

Ah, of course there isn't a rule against it. There are many druidic deities. I don't know if there are house rules or server specific rules, nor do I know if I'm correct in my assumption, but I've always assumed praying for negative energy spells which come from the negative energy plane to a non-evil deity wouldn't be favorable, even if the deity has plentiful capability of granting them and the druid him/herself using them.

That's a house rule at best, but more likely a common misunderstanding or mis-assumption. With a few very specific exceptions like Eldath with her pacifism, such spells are not anathema to most druids or druidic deities, or spellcasters in general unless they have a personal reason for disliking or fearing death magic or negative energy.

Negative energy and the NEP are not evil in and of themselves, they're neutral forces, no more than positive energy and the PEP are good (and you can die just as easily from the inhospitable climate on both planes). The commonly-held idea that negative energy itself is evil because of how undead thrive off it, living things wither under it, evil clerics channel it, and several [Evil] spells make use of it is a long- and widely-held mistaken belief.

That's interesting and useful information. Thank you for that. 

[Vincent07]

Unfortunately, most wall spells won't work right in NWN.    Any that should be solid, block movement, LoS, etc, we really can't do.

Others might be doable, but there aren't really any visuals for them that would give any sort of accurate representation of the AoE.

[Support]

Jul 30, 2016 22:30:09 GMT -5 Vincent07 said:

Unfortunately, most wall spells won't work right in NWN.    Any that should be solid, block movement, LoS, etc, we really can't do.

Others might be doable, but there aren't really any visuals for them that would give any sort of accurate representation of the AoE.

Any feedback on higher level summons or adding a small weapon to the Spike spell?

[lurkerabove]

A hak-less server I once played on had a totem Druid mechanic, you could opt to forego the standard shapechange ability in exchange for single, totem form. This form physically grew with level (example from small  wolf to big wolf to dire, etc) and had different forms (Mirroring all the companion types) and a stronger progression than standard forms in trade for versatility. It also changed the form of all summon creature spells to the totem form (not their specs, just morphed their shape and renamed them upon summon) and determined which summon you could choose at level up. It was pretty impressive to see a totem Druid stalking around with their companion and a summon all looking like a small pack.

There were no changes that were required on the client side, since it was hak-less, though I'm not aware of the scripting required for such a feature. It is apparently possibly entirely thru scripting however.  

I do like the thought of giving the Druid an alter self widget at 14th to mimic the thousand faces ability.

Could we mimic another signature p&p Druid ability, that of spontaneous Summon Creature, by giving them a widget that levels up with the PC, that would give them X number of Summon Creature I-IX as appropriate? The idea of a Druid as a force of nature, commanding a swarm of allies against an enemy is a powerful image, even if more image than power.

[Edge]

To keep this short and simple (i'm on my phone) the main issue with implementation on something like that is scripting. We'd have to either cook it up from scratch whole-cloth - and our scripter's plate is VERY full right now - or have someone provide the scripts from another server and hope they don't explode anything of ours when added.

If you can get your hands on the scripts and pass them to the admins, we might be able to look at something.

[Vincent07]

Something like that would be two parts actually.  All of the scripts, as well as the needed creature templates.  The short of it is, it's a lot of work to implement something like that.