Hello, I am a really big fan of the druid class, overall (WoW, D2 and now D4)
So I feel it’s important to list my concerns and feedback about the class.
I have a few concerns I’d like to bring up about this class and I feel they are pretty important for the immersion and game play of this class.
No permanent transofmation
This is a pretty big deal for a lot of people, being able to maintain bear-form or wolf-form is what the druid class has had at its core in all blizzard games. It feels really bad to have to keep using a skill or attack to keep up the transformation, this invites cheesy skills and bonuses that award uptime of said form - and I have a feeling its going to become one of those classes that has to race against the clock to maintain bonuses and keep the form in order to perform at it’s peak. This is whats going to be completely swinging this class into a stressful game play direction and probably put a lot of people off from wanting to be a melee druid . I’m sure blizzard will add some sort of item or Codex to maintain the form permanently, but I think it should be part of the core skill.
Another big part of this is the immersion, many players love to play as a bear or a wolf, but having to constantly transform into the (sorry, but it’s true) hideous husky human form that we can barely customize, it’s awful and it just makes it feel like there is a guy putting on a costume every time he attacks something. I would really like to see a permanent form that we can customize and maybe even have items appear on it or affect how it looks. Wolf with neat claw weapons or bear with buff armor/helmet, there are lots of ways to do this.
No Bear pet
The pet selection is really weak, we’ve got ravens, wolf and vine, but no bear.
A bear pet is one of those things that has become a trademark for the Diablo druid, not having it in D4 makes it feel like a very empty class when it comes to pets. Ideally we’d have something like wolf for DPS, bear for tanking and taunting, vine for poison and dots and ravens for support/misc. and I feel we’re missing one of those core pets.
These are my two main issues with the class right now. Hope it gets taken into consideration, but looking at how far Blizzard has allready developed the transformation mechanics, I doubt they will change that one, I’m really hoping for a bear pet tho, don’t make that a cheesy expansion selling point along with shields.