Well…he’s right that pets carrying Druid damage. For a spec that is meant to heal a lot and be difficult to kill and provide plenty of support, it sure does hit hard. And most of that damage comes from pets and Ancient Seeds hold you still so you can’t dodge any burst. So, a Druid is meant to support and heal, which means that it should be difficult to kill, but then it has a stun break and full condition cleanse on a 15 second CD and then it can stealth. And then they can pop their short CD pulsing stability, only countered by frequent boon strip/corruption, and never be controlled long enough to take damage. Plus they have excessive evades from S/D and staff (not the only profession guilty of this).
So yeah, hard to kill if they know what they’re doing. But then on top of all this, they have hard hitting, practically passive pets (alliteration no intended). And this is where the problem happens. It’s fine that they can be hard to kill, but hard to kill must come with the consequence of doing crap damage, and that is not happening in the case of Druids. Hell, even Tempests can do some pretty big damage with Overload Air and some well played bursts from Burning Speed, while being fairly hard to kill. But the damage of Tempest is active and easy to avoid, but you can’t avoid pets (exception being Bristleback activated skill which has plenty of counterplay). This is why I suggest that rangers themselves receive a damage buff and pets get nerfed. This makes a Druid’s damage more active so that if they want to do damage, they have to sacrifice using a survivability related skill.
This ties in with so many other professions who have skills that do high damage while also being defensive in nature. Ele’s Burning Speed is actually one It evades and does good damage for how fast it acts and how low the CD is. Scrappers are also a massive problem. Hammer has three skills that do something defensive while also doing damage, and they’re all on pretty low CDs, and they’re also all AoE. Let’s see, what else is there? Chronomancers have block that summons a phantasm which can be shattered twice. Though the phantasm summon can actually be dodged. Still, it’s a defensive skill that does something offensive. Berserkers can easily and frequently use Primal Bursts skills while maintain pulsing stability, and each burst give 15 seconds of pulsing healing and when any burst hits, the warrior is cleansed on 3 conditions. Now these are skills that do these effects baseline. Instead, this is an issue with traits have too much synergy with other traits and skills. But then they have stances that basically make them immune to damage for 4 seconds (8 with the passive proc trait) and conditions for 12 seconds.
Notice any commonalities with all these? Everything is too passive or requires very little activity to achieve a good reward. Basically, the risk/reward ratio for damage is out of whack. Druids risk very little to do damage (due to pets). Scrappers risk very little to do damage (due to constant defences). Warriors risk very little to do damage (due to low CDs). Chronomancers risk very little to do damage (due to illusion respawning). Some elite specs have to risk something. Support Tempests have to overload for a full 4 seconds to do their main damage, and most other damage skills are AoE, slow, easy to avoid, require facing your target etc. Reapers have so little defence that they have no choice but to avoid bursting when they’re too prone to damage. But then they have powerful, constant AoE bursts and condi bombs which are only risky when the enemy has enough CDs to cleanse or avoid the damage completely. Revs couldn’t just jump into a fight and expect to tank everything while doing a ton of damage. They had to line up their skills and set them up to do the most damage against a competent player. Yet, they also have constant evades/dodges/blocks. There are other professions, but this post is already getting too long, so I’ll cut it here and summarize my point.
There’s too much of everything, and it’s removing or slowly killing risks that players need to take in order to achieve a desired result.
