Take A Walk On the Wild Side, The Druid

Flitting Fae, and rampaging Saytr, slashing through the enemy or helping to keep you alive. These are the trademark pets of the Druid. Druid pets aren’t like other pet class pets. While the other pet classes have abilities that allow their pet to tank, our pets aren’t made to tank, instead they are designed as support for us and our group. We have a pet that can use a HOT, but can’t main heal. We have a DPS pet that’s ok, not great, but gives everyone a boost to your DPS. We are the one that does the tanking, and the majority of the healing or DPSing in this partnership. So without further ado, let’s take a look at our roots and talents.

Root Abilities

Summon Faerie 0 pts. Summons a Faerie who will help heal you and your allies. This is your first pet. She has a HOT and a weak damage spell. Not great, but she’ll help to keep you topped off, while adding something to your DPS.
Combined Effort 14 pts. A blow that deals weapon damage plus 41-44 damage, and increases pet’s AP/SP by 50% for 15 seconds. This is it folks, this is a must. Use it every time it’s up it is the single biggest boost you can give your pet.
Summon Greater Faerie 26 pts. Calls forth a greater Faerie to heal you and your allies. The upgraded version of the basic faerie. Not the brightest healer but its’ HOTs will help to top people off.
Hidden Path 32 pts. Removes harmful effects from your pet. When Fluffy has all kinds of crud on him, this will fix him right up.
Friend of the Weald 36 pts. Increases your pet’s AP/SP bonus by 10%, plus 10% more per point spent in the Druid tree above 36. This is a big one here guys. If you’re not going to go at least 45 points in to the Druid tree, you will not get the most bang for your buck period.

What It Means
So as you see we don’t get many root abilities for our pets. Almost half of them are used to summon them. So what’s left? Three very useful abilities that can buff our pets, making them an even bigger asset than they normally would be.

So let’s see what we have in our talent tree next.

Talent Tree

Touch of the Fae 5/5 T1 Increases your endurance by 5%, and your pet’s by 25%. A straight up boost to both of your hit points plain and simple.
Heed the Call 3/3 T2 Reduces the casting time of your summon spells by 6 seconds. It makes Fluffy come to you that much faster.
Spirit of the Wood 6/5 T4 Fervent Strike has a 30% chance to cause your pet’s next ability to automatically crit. An increase to Fluffy’s healing or DPS is always welcomed.
Rage of the Fae 1/1 T5 Sends your pet in to a rage, increasing it’s healing and damage by 100% for 15 seconds. Double the damage or the healing is a big boost, especially when combined FotW, and CE, you get a huge boost that will push Fluffy over the top.
Forest Blessing 1/1 T5 Reduces AoE damage to pet by 65%, plus 1% for each point over 21. With this talent, and enough points spent, Fluffy can withstand almost any AoE.
Hot Blooded 5/5 T6 Reduces the cooldown on RotF by 1 minute. Fluffy can fly in to a frenzy again that much quicker.
Summon Satyr 1/1 T7 Summons a satyr to fight for you, and increases everyone’s AP. Here he is folks, your main DPS pet and group buffer.

Branching Out

So once again, we’ve a shorter list than the rest of the pet classes. We get some major buffs with RotF, SotW, and HB, but there’s not much else here. FS goes from being used sometimes, to use every time it’s up, so we can maximize our pet’s chance to crit. Now Druid pairs nicely with almost all of the other cleric souls. Druid paired with Justicar and Inquisitor make for a nice AoE grind build. Try different things, and combos, and builds. There is wrong way as usual. So go ahead and let your wild side loose, and see what you come up with.
So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Looking To The Future

Long time no see kids! So how has everyone been enjoying the Waves Of Madness event so far? Have you gotten everything you wanted so far? Did you complete all the achievements? We just started phase 4 on Saturday, so that means we’re coming in to the final parts of the story, and all of the rewards will soon be unlocked.
Leveling for me has slowed down as of late, and I’ve finally hit 45 this weekend. I’m almost to 50, and that means I’m almost high enough to start running experts and more importantly, raids. EotM has recently started raiding. Great for us, but not so great for me. I’m not 50 yet, and because of that I’m not geared for it yet either. Right now we’re mainly doing raid rifts while we gear up for GSB.

A New Way Of Instancing
Recently Scott Hartsman gave an over all update on the status of Rift, and an idea of things to come. Out of all that he said, this is what I found to be the most interesting.

NEW INSTANCES: CHRONICLES OF TELARA

We’ve also been working on ways to get a similar sense of involvement with key story characters, and new key areas, in a way that’s available to more people.

The story involvement with world events is a good first step here, but we think there’s even more we can do. Chronicles of Telara are solo/small group instances that get everyone involved with key characters and villains in the worlds’ ongoing story.

We’re aiming to do this in a way that is accessible to solo and duo people who may well be great players, and excellent friends who really enjoy Telara, but may not have the uninterrupted time they’d like. These are shaping up to be a really fun way to make sure you can stay involved with the story.

We’re going to be working on these in a way such that they’re fun to do for the most casual of players, all the way to the people who are already enjoying the raid game and interested in new things to do in their downtime. (Even the hardest core raider doesn’t raid 24/7!)

Telara needs to be a world that’s capable of entertaining all kinds of people, who like all different kinds of things – When we succeed there, everyone wins.

Now he didn’t say of this was going to be a brand new set of instances, or a feature added to existing instances, or all the above. See when Wife and I game together, she doesn’t want to group up with others. She’s afraid that she’s “going to suck, badly”. I try to tell her it won’t be that bad, then she reminds me of the one time she had tried raiding… So from the sound of it, it seems like Trion is going to make it so you can duo the instances. This will be great for us, and might help Wife get back in to the game again. I don’t care if they make the drops lower, since it’ll take less people to finish it. I have no problem with that. I think it’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Now the cringe worthy news. Trion is testing cross shard LFG, instead of single shard LFG. This kinda scares me a little. I saw what happened when WoW started cross server LFG, the quality of groups went down…fast. The ugly side of people came out, if you didn’t like your PUG, you could drop group, wait out the debuff, requeue and hope for the best. I know the wait times are long, but I’m really worried about how this is going to turn out. I can only hope that the fact that the player base in Rift, being more mature, won’t sink down to the same debased level that WoW’s did. But there might be hope for a cross shard LFG. I’ve seen a lot of good helpful people in Rift so far. People are willing to help each other. So it might not bottom out.

So there are a lot of changes coming in the future, and hopefully they will pan out. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.