Dragon-Druid Oil Barrage and Flame Breath Skills - High Damage But At What Cost?

I've been playing dragon and overall, its not that great. The two main attacking skills, oil barrage and flame breath has so many limitations such as movement and resource management. This makes the gameplay clucky and unfun.

Movement for both skills are pretty bad. Oil barrage immobilizes you while limiting your cone radius of attack, and then flame breath has a very short range of attack as well as reduce movement speed, making you an easy target.

Even with 30 m/s shoes along with a lot of skill speed and attack speed nodes, both skills, especially flame breath, still feels so bad to use. The worse part is that both skills requires heavy resource management.

Oil barrage requires a constant source of power charges, which, can be to gain from devour or aliths chimes and culmination gems, but what happens when you have no corpse to devour during a boss fight or that you are not level 65 to use alith's chime skill gem to get your power charge up? it becomes a slow slop.

but the worst offender is Flame Breath. Not only does it requires rage to use, but mana for the initial upfront cost. On top of that, you also have to manage power charges and a 10 second cooldown. And god forbid, if you have to reposition or the skill bugs out on you, you not only loose 1 power charge, but also have to wait for the cooldown to finish. And then, you can also count in Life and ES as two additional resources that you have to worried about while using Flame Breath due to the nature of how close you have to be to the enemies/boss. And finally, the harsh reduce in m/s from Flame Breath gets the dragon-druid kill pretty often either from really fast enemies or boss's huge aoe skills.

the only upside to oil barrage and flame breath is that they are strong, BUT so are many other skills are too and most of them do not required multiple resources to use or have long cooldowns attached to it. For example, spark, lighting arrow, and twisters, can all be scaled up to do just as much if not more damage compared to Oil Barrage or Flame Breath.

i tried many combinations in the skill tree to make these two skill work along with uniques, but right now, there are too many negatives to these skills while there's only one upside, and that is, it's damage - but I'll iterate again, so many other skills can do the same or if not, more with little to no penalty.

Im not here to put down dragon-druids as i really do want it to work, but rather i'm here to say that dragon-druid needs some more tuning to its two main attacking skills.

Also, i did not mention about the bugs as much for flame breath which makes the skill even more cumbersome to use, but knowing GGG, they will patch that out eventually hence i did not harp on how bad the bugs are while using flame breath. But damn, it doesn't make the skill any more fun to use.

I completely agree, and the chance of getting stunned during all the channeling is also very high. All these restrictions are just too much. It only feels good under ideal conditions with maximum power charge and no long boss spawn times.

I think to fix wyvern single target, they need to add a wyvern alternative of pounce.

The way I'd design it: level 7 skill gem tier, "thunderclap", perfect strike type ability that works like this....

Hold input to charge a leap attack, increasing the lightning slam damage as you approach the perfect timing, when you let go it slams where you are aiming and is a really fast animation that ends with a huge thunderclap if perfectly timed, and generates a power charge.

If you do not charge it, it is still a fast slam(replacing the utility of pounce, because really I don't want to be using wolf abilities as a wyvern) but doesn't generate power charges, so you still need to rely on devour during clear to generate power charges.

This way we get a reliable wyvern method of generating power charges during boss fights, and a proper engagement/movement alternative to pounce as a wyvern.

Give it a cooldown so we aren't just leaping around endlessly, but really it is what wyvern needs. We shouldn't be using siphoning strike, we shouldn't be using lingering illusion(it looks really bad with druid forms, way too much visual clutter and it's not fitting with the fantasy of the class)

Really feels like wyvern wasn't playtested properly as is. The power charge issue in single target is horrible.

On top of this, the damage is just way too high when you use oil barrage. I said this in another thread, but the feast is too strong, the famine is too bad. Less famine, less feast, better experience. I don't like deleting bosses in one heavy stun cycle. I don't like auto attacking bosses with basic attacks until heavy stun.

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XXIdefiX#2390 wrote:

I completely agree, and the chance of getting stunned during all the channeling is also very high. All these restrictions are just too much. It only feels good under ideal conditions with maximum power charge and no long boss spawn times.

Yeah, i've been heavy stunned out of the air in the first second of combat and it just feels awful - especially in the early levels where you do not have access to alith's gem. But even with alith's gem, the gameplay still feel clunky as hell.

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dandelousx#7809 wrote:

I think to fix wyvern single target, they need to add a wyvern alternative of pounce.

The way I'd design it: level 7 skill gem tier, "thunderclap", perfect strike type ability that works like this....

Hold input to charge a leap attack, increasing the lightning slam damage as you approach the perfect timing, when you let go it slams where you are aiming and is a really fast animation that ends with a huge thunderclap if perfectly timed, and generates a power charge.

If you do not charge it, it is still a fast slam(replacing the utility of pounce, because really I don't want to be using wolf abilities as a wyvern) but doesn't generate power charges, so you still need to rely on devour during clear to generate power charges.

This way we get a reliable wyvern method of generating power charges during boss fights, and a proper engagement/movement alternative to pounce as a wyvern.

Give it a cooldown so we aren't just leaping around endlessly, but really it is what wyvern needs. We shouldn't be using siphoning strike, we shouldn't be using lingering illusion(it looks really bad with druid forms, way too much visual clutter and it's not fitting with the fantasy of the class)

Really feels like wyvern wasn't playtested properly as is. The power charge issue in single target is horrible.

On top of this, the damage is just way too high when you use oil barrage. I said this in another thread, but the feast is too strong, the famine is too bad. Less famine, less feast, better experience. I don't like deleting bosses in one heavy stun cycle. I don't like auto attacking bosses with basic attacks until heavy stun.

interesting. i think oil barrage should allow full movement with m/s penalty to make it feel cleaner, and dragon breath should not have any type of cool down at all since rage cannot be regen during skill use anyways. I don't understand the purpose of why flame breath has a cool down in the first place when its not even that great since oil barrage actually out dps it.

i have to agree that wyvern feels a bit rushed compared to the bear and wolf who seemed to have a lot of synergy going. Hell, bear can even regen rage while using its rage skills, like, why can't wyvern do that considering it has a cool down and resource cost?

i don't understand the design of dragon at all.

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interesting. i think oil barrage should allow full movement with m/s penalty to make it feel cleaner, and dragon breath should not have any type of cool down at all since rage cannot be regen during skill use anyways. I don't understand the purpose of why flame breath has a cool down in the first place when its not even that great since oil barrage actually out dps it.

i have to agree that wyvern feels a bit rushed compared to the bear and wolf who seemed to have a lot of synergy going. Hell, bear can even regen rage while using its rage skills, like, why can't wyvern do that considering it has a cool down and resource cost?

i don't understand the design of dragon at all.

Yeah there is no reason to keep it a stationary attack if they nerf the damage a bit, which they should regardless because it is way too strong. I also agree that putting a cooldown on flame breath is silly, using it properly consumes a power charge and drains rage, with current mob density you end up just using it on nothing between packs a lot of the time and it feels dumb when you could be starting and stopping while mobs appear. Or they could give us the ability to do a quick dash while flying with dodge input so we aren't just burning empty ground while moving slow in flight to keep it active.

For me, wyvern is almost perfect except for during single target. The clear loop feels amazing when you get it set up right. The issues I have are it needing pounce as an engagement tool, and the same issues you have with flame breath.

I pounce in with stun support gems to prime for wing blast, use wing blast, then re-engage with devour, then start using empowered rend to clear to build rage, then using flame breath to spend rage. That's the clear loop, and it feels really complete. I'd prefer if we had a wyvern equivalent to pounce like I described earlier, and that could solve the single target loop as we'd have power charges to actually attack the boss with instead of only getting them after a heavy stun, where we obviously use them on oil barrage to delete the boss. I'd like to be able to use empowered rend during boss fights too, but it rarely works out that way. Unless you use some twisted non-wyvern abilities, the class just feels too hollow and one dimensional prior to heavy stunning the boss.

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dandelousx#7809 wrote:

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interesting. i think oil barrage should allow full movement with m/s penalty to make it feel cleaner, and dragon breath should not have any type of cool down at all since rage cannot be regen during skill use anyways. I don't understand the purpose of why flame breath has a cool down in the first place when its not even that great since oil barrage actually out dps it.

i have to agree that wyvern feels a bit rushed compared to the bear and wolf who seemed to have a lot of synergy going. Hell, bear can even regen rage while using its rage skills, like, why can't wyvern do that considering it has a cool down and resource cost?

i don't understand the design of dragon at all.

Yeah there is no reason to keep it a stationary attack if they nerf the damage a bit, which they should regardless because it is way too strong. I also agree that putting a cooldown on flame breath is silly, using it properly consumes a power charge and drains rage, with current mob density you end up just using it on nothing between packs a lot of the time and it feels dumb when you could be starting and stopping while mobs appear. Or they could give us the ability to do a quick dash while flying with dodge input so we aren't just burning empty ground while moving slow in flight to keep it active.

For me, wyvern is almost perfect except for during single target. The clear loop feels amazing when you get it set up right. The issues I have are it needing pounce as an engagement tool, and the same issues you have with flame breath.

I pounce in with stun support gems to prime for wing blast, use wing blast, then re-engage with devour, then start using empowered rend to clear to build rage, then using flame breath to spend rage. That's the clear loop, and it feels really complete. I'd prefer if we had a wyvern equivalent to pounce like I described earlier, and that could solve the single target loop as we'd have power charges to actually attack the boss with instead of only getting them after a heavy stun, where we obviously use them on oil barrage to delete the boss. I'd like to be able to use empowered rend during boss fights too, but it rarely works out that way. Unless you use some twisted non-wyvern abilities, the class just feels too hollow and one dimensional prior to heavy stunning the boss.

yeah the loop is RSI educing. i also failed to mentioned that every time you use flame breath, there's a little "take off" animation that just makes the skill feel even more sluggish. I spec into as much Skill Speed and attack speed node plus a speed jewel and even then the skill still feels slow.

Also, i can be wrong, but i do not think skill speed or attack speed, speeds up the dragon's take off animation as i see very little difference. I think its either skill speed and attack speed does very little to the take off animation, or GGG hard-locked the take off animation to give off that "flight" feel.

What i do noticed is that the turning speed of flame breath IS faster with more speed added - making aiming much more bearable and your dragon able to turn 360 much faster. but that's as far as i got because I'm just not having fun with the dragon arch-type.

Entering a fight knowing the boss has no adds just feels awful having nobody to eat...I always struggle in non add boss fights , rend is weaker, oil barrage rendered pointless and the wing blast mechanic just feels real awkward to play.

One other thing I find funny are the pounce wolves can't even kill white level mobs lol on their own.

All just seems rushed this league.

Also 1 personal sidenote coming from playing D&D years ago , having druids wear plate armour, just seems odd.