Arelith

Sooo.. I am happily trudging the wild areas of Arelith with my young druid, and can't help but react to how difficult it is to help animals with a druid compared to a ranger! My ranger could easily use animal empathy to turn animals into permanent henchmen, and also make them fade away with a *walks off* when releasing them. This made it easy to RP "Oh wait let me tame and make it walk off in peace, the deer population is low and must be protected!" With my druid I keep making a fool of her when she tames the animal only to have it charge her butt a little later unexpectedly. When taming and making a scene by walking faaar away from the party to drop it off out of sight, they charge back all the way and through another map more determined than ever to slaughter everyone! Hilarious, but not fun for my druid.

Any chance of making it easier for druids to work with the animals, or am I misunderstanding the purpose and differences between rangers and druids?

The ratio between herbivores and carnivores is already so askew in there, please let me save the deers! XD

The skill was changed for rangers but not for druids....

Animal Empathy: Characters with 75% or more of their levels as ranger levels can turn animals into henchmen, allowing them to use Animal Empathy on more than one animal at one time. Additionally, neutral animals usually attack those that get too close, but Animal Empathy will be passively rolled against the animals' CR to keep them neutral in these cases.


Which makes Zero sense.

I'd like to see them get more RP fluff in the form of naturey animal stuff, too. Would be nice if spiders, insects and snakes were recognised an animals too, for the druids who do not discriminate.

Druids seem to at least be able to placate one creature at a time .. Unless of course it's something a child would consider 'icky', then you must kill it.

Druids do not need more cookies.

Druids already have a zoo of creatures and the buffs to support them so being able to gain 2 permanent henchmen is over the top IMO.

Perhaps using Animal Empathy again on a currently dominated creature could make them despawn or else code it into Player2Tool or something.

Snakes (even the ones marked at animals/beasts) cannot fall under the sway of Animal Empathy due to mind immunity. Which is odd as unlike insects they're not mindless creatures in D&D and are animals with an intelligence score of 1 and no mind immunity.

Personally I'd like to see a minor "verminlord" style druid/ranger. For example if someone picks spider totem their Animal Empathy works on vermin (ignores mind immunity like control undead) and magical beasts (still respects mind immunity) to cover phase spiders as they're not vermin, but they lose the ability to use empathy on animals/beasts. Likewise a snake totem might only be able to empathy mind immune animal/beasts (as I think on Arelith snakes are marked as animals/beasts and not reptilians) and still respect mind immunity for magical beasts.

So a spider ranger/druid could befriend all types of spiders as well as other vermin like beetles but couldn't befriend deer, likewise a snake ranger/druid could befriend snakes but not wolves/bears/etc.

The Greater Good wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 09, 2019 8:52 pm

Druids do not need more cookies.

They don't need more combat NPCs under their control or any additional mechanical strength. There's no harm in giving more cookies though. It's just RP toys and fluff.

I certainly wished I could be nicer to animals. You can't even release them if you're too far away.

You forget one great thing about the way druid currently has it. You take a creature to help you kill mobs. If it gets free you can use empathy again and carry on killing stuff. I cannot count the times a strong animal has helped me clear content especially early on and re taming mid fight has helped me if it's gotten free.

As somebody who invested a lot into Animal Empathy, ALL that needs changing with it on Druids is a way to release/have the animals wander off, So you can tame/send them away rather than having to release only to be killed.

They should not become henchman Ala Rangers, but some way to get rid of angry animals without them turning around to bite you as soon as you stop dominating them would be very nice.

Mythic wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 11, 2019 3:51 pm

As somebody who invested a lot into Animal Empathy, ALL that needs changing with it on Druids is a way to release/have the animals wander off, So you can tame/send them away rather than having to release only to be killed.

They should not become henchman Ala Rangers, but some way to get rid of angry animals without them turning around to bite you as soon as you stop dominating them would be very nice.

Yeah. That would be perfect.

I've also heard of druids who have had that problem. I really feel for their pain and it really does hurt RP.

As someone currently playing a druid, I do agree on both sides of this.

Druids don't really need more goodies, but this does also create many awkward moments where you have to kill an animal you tried to calm down after it got angry at party members.

Having animals released from empathy be either neutral or disappear when released, I think would be a suitable fix.