- Feb 24, 2006
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Dec 2022 Update: Every druid summoning skill was significantly modified in the D2R 2.4 patch.
Poison Creeper
I really like the concept of "carnivorous pet weeds." The developers at Blizzard North designed and implemented three interesting "intelligent plant" minions, which burrow underground and attack enemies from below. Only one vine may be summoned at a time, so summoning another causes the previous vine to instantly die, with a really cool "screaming plant" sound effect.
Poison Creeper is the only weed that actually causes damage. The creeper itself doesn't cause the damage; rather, it sprouts a stationary mat of greenery that covers a plot of ground (3x3 tiles) under a monster. The sprouted mat causes the poison damage. It isn't much - the poison duration is just four seconds, and the damage is about one per second at skill level 1, or 21 per second at skill level 20 - but every monster that walks over the sprouts gets poisoned. The toxic mats persist for a while longer, so monsters could get re-poisoned again and again by the same sprouts. I believe the mat duration is about 4 seconds at skill level 1, and another second per skill level after that - 23 seconds at skill level 20. With luck and enough nearby enemies, the creeper will seek out another foe that's not yet poisoned, and sprout another mat under that monster as well. A clever player can sometimes maneuver many monsters to poison themselves over multiple green carpets. I recently played a berzerker barbarian who summoned level 21 Poison Creepers, using charges on a Carrion Wind unique ring. Those weeds worked very well, not just to distract monsters, but also to briefly arrest unique and champion monsters from replenishing their hit points during battles.
All three weeds are difficult to harm while they remain slinking underground. When the Poison Creeper comes above ground, it is very vulnerable, and only has 42-58 hit points at skill level one, 241-333 hit points at level 20.
Most of our SPF heroes that maxed Poison Creeper were the Rabies werewolves discussed previously, who wanted the poison damage synergy. But there were a few other distinctive max-PC builds: Alfonso the Great's Schrute, bcoe's Corvus_Corax, Solar Ice's Lycander, TopHatCat64 's Dendron, and Dezrok's Kodi.
Carrion Vine
The other two weeds don't attack monsters, but instead are utility corpse eaters. Whenever the druid's life bulb is even one point below his maximum life, Carrion Vine will seek out and consume a corpse, after which the druid regains health. At skill level one, each corpse replenishes 4%, and the percentage rises at certain skill level thresholds (5% at level two, 6% at three, 7% at 5, 8% at 7, 9% at 10, 10% at 15, 11% at 26). For a severely injured druid with only one hit point left, a level one CV could heal him fully by eating 25 corpses; a level 15 CV swallowing just ten could fully heal. Personally, I would like to test this some more. For a wereform with high Lycanthropy, I expect that a Carrion Vine might actually heal a druid at faster rate than drinking super healing potions.
A CV is a little more durable during battles than the Poison Creeper: 80-110 life at skill level one, 460-632 life at level 20.
We don't have any guardians nor patriarchs that maxed Carrion Vine. The heaviest investor was Liquid_Evil's Trifecta, who put fourteen hard skill points into his CV. He shared several opinions about it in his write-up: "I wanted a change of pace on a PvM Druid and thought it would offer me a bit more survivability on a character that had so few hit points. After Fury, Werewolf, Lycanthropy, and a spirit are maxed, there aren't many options left for a werewolf that doesn't want attacking summons. The vine didn't appear to be a bad investment, though I don't see any real reason for more than 15 points in it after +skills (and that's me being generous). So yeah, depending on your play style, a Carrion Vine might deserve some future love."
Solar Creeper
The Solar Creeper is the most durable of all three vines: 138-192 life at skill level one, 662-921 at skill level 20. This one regenerates the druid's mana. Its thresholds are: two percent at skill level one, 3% at level three, 4% at 4, 5% at 7, 6% at 12, 7% at 22. A Solar Creeper is a great corpse disposal tool. For example, when a devilkin shaman threatens to raise slain devilkins, or a greater mummy threatens to raise skeletons, just spend some mana by casting any spell, and the SC will then seek out and eliminate the nearest corpse to regenerate some of that spent mana.
Mana regenerates by itself over time. Regeneration is pretty slow for the typical druid that keeps his base energy stat. It isn't much faster if he has higher energy, or wears equipment with "+mana" or "regenerate mana" mods. For a mana-burned druid, it's quite nice when a Solar Creeper quickly restores enough mana to cast another spell; that's another reason why almost all of my druids have this vine follow them around. Usually I get my Solar Creeper from a pelt's staffmods, but other times I happily invest the three necessary skill points to get one. So far, it appears some of my fellow SPFers seem to have a similar attitude. I could only find ten "one-point-wonder" investments for Solar Creeper in the entire Mat/Pat/Guardian compilation. Only three of them had any remarks about SC in their write-ups: jiansonz's Burt, Stephan's Shib, and maareek 's Fruor.
-----
That's the last of the druid's skills. There are many popular projects in the compilation that use druid shapeshifting abilities with other classes: barbarians that become werewolves using a Wolfhowl unique helmet, and runewords that let any class transform into a werebear. They are pretty easy to find and explore - just scan for "bear" among the compilation links. I choose to discuss cross-class werebears in the respective individual class skill reviews rather than here, but I felt that the deep creativity I found among those builds is still remarkable and worth mentioning.
Next up, I plan to explore the skill placements of our necromancers, beginning with the mastery skills in the left column of the summoning skill tree.
Poison Creeper
I really like the concept of "carnivorous pet weeds." The developers at Blizzard North designed and implemented three interesting "intelligent plant" minions, which burrow underground and attack enemies from below. Only one vine may be summoned at a time, so summoning another causes the previous vine to instantly die, with a really cool "screaming plant" sound effect.
Poison Creeper is the only weed that actually causes damage. The creeper itself doesn't cause the damage; rather, it sprouts a stationary mat of greenery that covers a plot of ground (3x3 tiles) under a monster. The sprouted mat causes the poison damage. It isn't much - the poison duration is just four seconds, and the damage is about one per second at skill level 1, or 21 per second at skill level 20 - but every monster that walks over the sprouts gets poisoned. The toxic mats persist for a while longer, so monsters could get re-poisoned again and again by the same sprouts. I believe the mat duration is about 4 seconds at skill level 1, and another second per skill level after that - 23 seconds at skill level 20. With luck and enough nearby enemies, the creeper will seek out another foe that's not yet poisoned, and sprout another mat under that monster as well. A clever player can sometimes maneuver many monsters to poison themselves over multiple green carpets. I recently played a berzerker barbarian who summoned level 21 Poison Creepers, using charges on a Carrion Wind unique ring. Those weeds worked very well, not just to distract monsters, but also to briefly arrest unique and champion monsters from replenishing their hit points during battles.
All three weeds are difficult to harm while they remain slinking underground. When the Poison Creeper comes above ground, it is very vulnerable, and only has 42-58 hit points at skill level one, 241-333 hit points at level 20.
Most of our SPF heroes that maxed Poison Creeper were the Rabies werewolves discussed previously, who wanted the poison damage synergy. But there were a few other distinctive max-PC builds: Alfonso the Great's Schrute, bcoe's Corvus_Corax, Solar Ice's Lycander, TopHatCat64 's Dendron, and Dezrok's Kodi.
Carrion Vine
The other two weeds don't attack monsters, but instead are utility corpse eaters. Whenever the druid's life bulb is even one point below his maximum life, Carrion Vine will seek out and consume a corpse, after which the druid regains health. At skill level one, each corpse replenishes 4%, and the percentage rises at certain skill level thresholds (5% at level two, 6% at three, 7% at 5, 8% at 7, 9% at 10, 10% at 15, 11% at 26). For a severely injured druid with only one hit point left, a level one CV could heal him fully by eating 25 corpses; a level 15 CV swallowing just ten could fully heal. Personally, I would like to test this some more. For a wereform with high Lycanthropy, I expect that a Carrion Vine might actually heal a druid at faster rate than drinking super healing potions.
A CV is a little more durable during battles than the Poison Creeper: 80-110 life at skill level one, 460-632 life at level 20.
We don't have any guardians nor patriarchs that maxed Carrion Vine. The heaviest investor was Liquid_Evil's Trifecta, who put fourteen hard skill points into his CV. He shared several opinions about it in his write-up: "I wanted a change of pace on a PvM Druid and thought it would offer me a bit more survivability on a character that had so few hit points. After Fury, Werewolf, Lycanthropy, and a spirit are maxed, there aren't many options left for a werewolf that doesn't want attacking summons. The vine didn't appear to be a bad investment, though I don't see any real reason for more than 15 points in it after +skills (and that's me being generous). So yeah, depending on your play style, a Carrion Vine might deserve some future love."
Solar Creeper
The Solar Creeper is the most durable of all three vines: 138-192 life at skill level one, 662-921 at skill level 20. This one regenerates the druid's mana. Its thresholds are: two percent at skill level one, 3% at level three, 4% at 4, 5% at 7, 6% at 12, 7% at 22. A Solar Creeper is a great corpse disposal tool. For example, when a devilkin shaman threatens to raise slain devilkins, or a greater mummy threatens to raise skeletons, just spend some mana by casting any spell, and the SC will then seek out and eliminate the nearest corpse to regenerate some of that spent mana.
Mana regenerates by itself over time. Regeneration is pretty slow for the typical druid that keeps his base energy stat. It isn't much faster if he has higher energy, or wears equipment with "+mana" or "regenerate mana" mods. For a mana-burned druid, it's quite nice when a Solar Creeper quickly restores enough mana to cast another spell; that's another reason why almost all of my druids have this vine follow them around. Usually I get my Solar Creeper from a pelt's staffmods, but other times I happily invest the three necessary skill points to get one. So far, it appears some of my fellow SPFers seem to have a similar attitude. I could only find ten "one-point-wonder" investments for Solar Creeper in the entire Mat/Pat/Guardian compilation. Only three of them had any remarks about SC in their write-ups: jiansonz's Burt, Stephan's Shib, and maareek 's Fruor.
-----
That's the last of the druid's skills. There are many popular projects in the compilation that use druid shapeshifting abilities with other classes: barbarians that become werewolves using a Wolfhowl unique helmet, and runewords that let any class transform into a werebear. They are pretty easy to find and explore - just scan for "bear" among the compilation links. I choose to discuss cross-class werebears in the respective individual class skill reviews rather than here, but I felt that the deep creativity I found among those builds is still remarkable and worth mentioning.
Next up, I plan to explore the skill placements of our necromancers, beginning with the mastery skills in the left column of the summoning skill tree.
[Update: new histograms]
[2022 Dec Update: new histograms, D2R patch notes link]
[2022 Dec Update: new histograms, D2R patch notes link]
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