We hope all you Druid fans loved the unveiling of our new Werebear design in the Werebear Blog. We are thrilled to have you back again for our next reveal. We are eager to share our full vision for the future of the Druid Mastery, and all the exciting changes coming your way before the end of the year.

Today marks day two of our Druid Development Week, so stay tuned in the coming days to catch even more great news! See the full schedule below. Today, we will be focusing on the Druid’s skill - Entangling Roots.

Entangling Roots - Rework

While redesigning the Druid as a whole, we knew we needed to elevate one of his skills into the Mastery-locked section of his passive tree. After some consideration we felt that thematically, Entangling Roots fit this spot very well. By elevating the skill in this way, we also knew we had to elevate the power, visuals, and impact of the skill across the board to make sure it was worth committing to. We are thrilled to share with you the results of that work below.

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We wanted to keep the core fantasy of rooting large groups of enemies while also being open to changing other aspects. We quickly came across 3 design challenges.

• Currently it created too much visual noise by being a large persistent area of effect, and this was a major barrier to bringing its VFX up to our latest quality standards as it had a negative impact on performance.
• In it’s current form, Entangling Roots simply slowed enemies rather than completely immobilizing them resulting in them doing a slow walking animation that again did not hold up to our standards.
• New enemies walking onto the skill’s area were also effectively rooted. This often created a pile-up effect as enemies were all stopping at the edge of the skill’s effected area. This made it harder to solve as completely immobilizing the enemies exacerbates the pile-up effect.

To combat visual noise it made sense to avoid leaving a persistent visual effect on the ground for the full duration of the root. From a mechanical perspective, losing the persistent ground effect would have the added benefit of preventing the pile up issue, as no new enemies could be rooted after the initial cast. As such, we changed the skill from having a persistent ground effect to having an initial impact that left enemies immobilized, while also suffering damage over time.

https://forum.lastepoch.com/uploads/default/original/2X/1/17018915c1c08f8a0fe03c5aa1f9ae06bb459742.mp4

From a visual perspective, this meant we could focus the roots visuals around individual enemies, allowing us to increase the prominence of the roots without causing too much visual noise and increase their visual fidelity without sacrificing performance.

The end result is a fresh take on a classic Druid-themed skill that we are very proud to share with our community. We hope you enjoy exploring this newly energized skill and its brand new skill tree full of unique decisions and powerful changes.

Nodes Examples

The skill specialization tree is also getting a complete overhaul with a wide variety of options for different druid playstyles. Enjoy a taste of what Entangling roots skill has to offer!

Values have been omitted as we are still balancing the skill.

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https://forum.lastepoch.com/uploads/default/original/2X/1/12f7f341c88c99841b63a1d9f136924260faac30.mp4

https://forum.lastepoch.com/uploads/default/original/2X/8/8515785c0b41583401bf088c81b95c99830c9b7a.mp4

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Thank you for joining us for this reveal of the changes coming to the Entangling Roots skill in Patch 0.8.4. We hope you enjoy the new direction for the Druid and, as always, would love to hear your feedback in the comments! We hope you join us again soon to check out the exciting updates coming to the Druid’s most adaptive transformation - the Spriggan.

Here is a peek at what you can expect this week!

Druid Rework Development Week:

1st November - Werebear Form Rework
2nd November - Entangling Roots Rework
3rd November - Spriggan Form Rework
4th November - New Form Teaser
5th November - Druid Overhaul Overview and New Form

They are quite different, but will have things that interact between them.

Since we’re also updating the Druid passive tree, it’s very possible that there will be more minion or even totem nodes on there.

Shaman won’t be the focus this patch, but we will very likely buff totems in general.

We are changing the wording to say “wraps around” since it doesn’t really make sense to immobilize something that is already immobile

Unfortunately no, the way we have made the roots with animation and VFX didn’t lend them to be increased in size. However it might be something we can look at in the future if we find a good solution for it.

Sometimes when we are making clips, we give ourselves impossibly high CDR and Mana just to be able to display the visuals. One smooth clip generally looks better than many clips cut together. Please don’t look at the speed or frequency he is using the abilities for reference to what you can do in game under normal circumstances.