We hope you enjoyed our new Entangling Roots design in the Entangling Roots Blog. We are thrilled to have you back again for our next reveal. Today marks day three of our Druid Development Week, so stay tuned in the coming days to catch even more great news (full schedule below)! Today, we will be focusing on the Druids most adaptive transformation - the Spriggan.

Druid Rework - The Spriggan

The design goal of the new Spriggan form is to connect our players to the 'magical spellcaster rooted in nature' type of fantasy. This involved committing to a couple thematic design goals:

• The Spriggan would not utilize any movement abilities. Being a tree-man, he cant move very quickly without breaking the fantasy.
• All attacks and spells should be deeply rooted in nature magic
• The two major themes expressed through gameplay should encompass the feeling of controlling the environment and summoning natures creatures.

New Spriggan Visuals

The visuals for our current Spriggan form were a bit outdated and the abilities felt rather clunky and difficult to use. All around, he needed of a lot of love. Here is some of our early concept art for the model redesign:

Once we decided upon the concept art and the details within, we set forth to create a new epic model for the Druids Spriggan form. Complete with hardened bark, a variety of natural growth, and an ancient glowing power within, our new Spriggan form stands ready to take on any threat.

New Transformation

Weve given our new Spriggan form an exciting new transformation animation and integrated the casting of a new ability while transforming: Thorn Shield. Casting Thorn Shield while transforming into Spriggan strongly communicates the fantasy of becoming a tree. It feels great in dangerous situations, and connects the player with the soul of the Spriggan fantasy.

Spriggan Skills

This patch we have updates to all of the abilities which include replacing Vale Blast with Spirit Thorns, and replacing Root Wall with Thorn Shield. Let's dive into each of these decisions a bit more below.

Spirit Thorns

Vale Blast, while decent at single target damage, felt rather lackluster and its theming did not fit well. Generic green laser blast of sorts doesn't really scream "nature magic." Also, we're removing Ice Thorns from Primalist this patch, so we would be lacking in any spell cast where you are creating thorns, which is very appropriate for a nature caster. So that led us to building Spirit Thorns. This is a single target, or multitarget, skill that feels much more satisfying to use than Ice Thorns or Vale Blast currently does, and really hits on that Spriggan nature theme.

Thorn Shield

While we loved the theme of Root Wall, weve ultimately decided it wasnt effective or impactful enough, so it was time for it to retire. Its replacement, Thorn Shield, is a rather different skill compared to Root Wall. It forms a protective barrier of thorns around you that grants armor and reflects a flat amount of damage to attackers. When the shield expires, a burst of thorns shoots out and damages all nearby enemies. For Thorn Shield, we wanted to double down on the thorn theme, and also fully empower and support a thorns style of gameplay, where things die just from touching you. Being able to cast it on your companions also enables a fun playstyle where you stand back and send your thorny bear into battle for you. Or you can even sprout some thorns on your friends as they charge into the fray.

Summon Healing Totem & Summon Vines

Healing Totem and Summon Vines are both keeping their current base functionality but gain visual updates and several new options in the overhauled skill tree. The reworked Spriggan Form minions often feel like new skills when using them in battle.

New Spriggan Skill-Tree

As we discussed in the Werebear Blog, we're moving away from a mana based resource for all Druid transforms and they will use a new resource called Rage. There will be many ways to recover Rage such as the examples below.
Similar to the Werebear, one of our major redesign goals with the Spriggan skill tree is to allow players to bring in the power of other skills while transformed. This will allow players to make more strategic decisions when choosing which other skills they wish to specialize in.
The entire Spriggan skill tree has been redesigned with the intent to allow our community of Travelers to create many new builds and explore new ways to play. Here are some of our favorite new nodes:

Great Vine lives up to its name Thank you for joining us for this reveal of the changes coming to the Druids Spriggan form in Patch 0.8.4. We hope you love the new direction for the Druid and, as always, would love to hear your feedback in the comments! We hope to see you again tomorrow for a sneak peak at our Druids new and final transformation! Here is a peek at what you can expect this week! See you next time! Druid Rework Development Week: 1st November - Werebear Form Blog Post 2nd November - Entangling Roots Blog Post 3rd November - Spriggan Form Blog Post 4th November - New Form Teaser 5th November - New Form Blog Post 5th November - Druid Rework Overview Video