Okay, I'm finished revamping the druid class, as promised. Here is the summary of changes that were made:
- The Arm and Shapeshift effects have been removed. In their place, we've instituted the effect. An action that grants Wild Form transforms the recipient into a beast. Exactly what beast is entirely up to the user, and can even change with different castings since it no longer has any bearing on game mechanics.
- A character affected by Wild Form cannot speak intelligibly or use items, but gains an unarmed attack. The damage of this attack is based on the level of the action, so higher-level druids have a higher base damage when in Wild Form, reflecting the stronger varieties of the animals that they're able to turn into.
- For those druids who want to specialize in fighting while shapeshifted, we've also added the skill. This skill adds one point of damage per rank to all unarmed attacks used while in Wild Form. Druids have a moderate affinity for this skill, and elves, fairies, and humans have a weak affinity for it.
- More importantly, a character in Wild Form can use Wild Actions. is a special meta component that distinguishes actions that the druid can only use while shapeshifted. These actions mimic savage- and rogue-like abilities.
- The good news about this change is that druids will now be calling damage comparable to melee classes. The bad news is that, for balance purposes, they will no longer have access to the full assortment of savage and rogue abilities when shapeshifted. For example, druids won't be able to deal Burst weapon damage like a savage or open locks like a rogue.
- Perhaps even more significantly, a druid's Wild Actions are prepared the same way as the druid's normal actions. This was actually the main impetus behind the revamp, since it was becoming clear that giving druids a whole different pool of actions lacked parity on a very broken level. Thus, druids will have to decide whether they want to cast spells and heal, wade into combat as beasts, or some balance of the two since they're preparing actions from the same pool.
Naturally, this is a major class shift, so all characters with levels in druid are entitled to a full respend of those levels. If this includes you, please feel free to drop me a message and let me know how you'd like to be respent, if at all.
Not removed. Replaced. What we removed was the Shapeshift effect, which was cludgey and game-breaking. What we replaced it with was Wild Form, which achieves the same goal (i.e., combat bonuses and animal-like abilities) with the same semantics (i.e., by turning your character into a wild animal) without the unnecessary and unbalanced complexities (i.e., a whole new character sheet with an extra pool of actions).
WHY DID YOU REMOVE SHAPESHIFT!!!!!