Meet the druid

As many of you super-sleuthed while watching the Tiger Chat video, we’ve begun work on our next archetype, the Druid! Our goal is to bring the Druid into both the Hunger Dome and Siege Perilous maps before the next major milestone.

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We’re solidly “in a whirlwind” of development now, not only refining Siege Perilous and letting more backers in, but we’re also ramping up the mid-stage development on the Druid. She is really starting to look great! The base equipment set is done, the character is all rigged and ready to start integrating into the game. That means we’ve started creating all of her alternate armor sets, designing her powers and crafting both her unique animations and her spell FX.

 

I know I’ve said this every time we make a new archetype, and I will continue to say it: the Druid is looking like she will be the most versatile archetype that we’ve designed so far, with:

 

Multiple new types of healing mechanics,

A healing and a nuking powers tray!

That’s right! The Druid will blend between a ranged healing tray and a ranged nuking tray as the situation warrants. “But wait, Blair!  I thought you didn’t have any dedicated healers!”

 

Not exactly. I said we don’t have any “firehose” healers, the kind that a party might need to take on a boss monster at the end of a dungeon raid. However, we do have support classes, like the Legionnaire, that can be instrumental in helping your team be more effective once deployed on the battlefield.

 

The Druid is a lot more versatile then your traditional PvE firehose healer. When we were designing her power kit and thinking about her thematically, having two trays made the most sense. (Todd will go into the lore at a later point but it is all tied up with the Gaea the Earth Mother being dead and as a result the Druids have a much more difficult time harnessing the power of Earth Magic.)

 

The theme of the Druid is very yin and yang, ebb and flow, whichever way you like to look at it. Her resource mechanic is tied up with this idea in mind, but with a twist.

 

Using healing will generate her resource; however, accumulating too much will cause her to ignite herself, and she continuously takes damage until purging it from her body or dying. “How do I get rid of my resource, Blair!?” Just swap over to the nuking tray and start blasting away with Nature Magic!

 

We think this will create some super interesting tactics without unleashing a 100% uptime firehose healer into Crowfall. Instead they will need to balance the use of both healing and damage/support spells and we suspect that having the two modes will have Druids making interesting choices about when to keep healing (at a risk of self-immolation) and when to swap to nuking and start laying waste.

 

In terms of healing mechanics, we have a nice array of options planned: healing orbs, regeneration fields, health projectiles, and some other surprises. Beyond the healing powers tech, we are also getting a bunch of new statistics dedicated to healing. (And yes, some of this will bleed back into making the Legionnaire more interesting as well!)

 

Here are a few quick renders to show great she looks!

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And as a reminder for those who don’t read our site as often:

 

Yes, there is a corresponding male version of this archetype, and

Yes, we will allow full appearance customization in the game at launch!