Are druids a weak class, or do none release builds for them? I personally use a trozans sky shard druid and it works ok with a max crit of 122k. Can clear most of the content. My question is do druids need more love frome the community or the game developers? 
Druids have a core issue. This issue is no innate RR for any damage types you do. Anything you can do on a Druid, another class can do better.
Raging Tempest can reduce elemental resist, so except if you aren’t doing any elemental damage, you have innate RR for the damage you do
Thats correct, but Wind Devil has to actually hit the target and, for instance, cof from occultist has a huge area that instant hit
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There is an issue with that. Everyone has access to a faintly weaker Elemental Storm proc from Crown. The druid advantage is at best 10 RR from max overlevel WD, and on average would just be +5 RR of that type. Meanwhile, Nightblade will bring -30 cold resist shred, Demo will bring -40 lightning resist shred, Occultist will bring -35 Elemental resist shred, all of which stack with the 30 from Crown proc. So Druid is sitting at 35-40 while Nightblade is at 60 cold/30 lightning, Demo’s at 70 lightning/30 cold, and warlock is at 65/65 cold/lightning.
Druid is still the weaker option.
Which again is why they need to remove resist reduction from the game. It hurts build diversity and build itemization. It adds nothing to the games actual enjoyment or any actual added challenge.
Sure. Then they should remove the various damage types, and just make it physical/magical. I mean, why can’t I use Doombolt with OFF as an effective build?
But at that point, perhaps we should mono-type all damage, so that you can combo any skills together. But look, AS is now > Cast speed. Can’t have something outperforming another thing, now all attacks scale on the same system. /s
Resist reduction is fine, Crate just hasn’t balanced it well. They completely undervalued it when they started the process of creating the game, and it’s coming back to bite them because of it. And for a balance update to remove RR, it would have to come at the cost of an absolutely insane rework to all the resistances mobs have. Because a lot of mobs have resistances scaled around the idea of RR.
I understand this but doesn’t change the fact that resist reduction is ruining build diversity and build itemization. Certain damage types are retardedly easy to get high amounts of resist reductions while other damage types (Aether/Chaos) are alot harder to come by.
And the game right now is way to reliant on resist reductions.
I never understood the concept of making enemies have really high resists towards damage types. This has never actually made the game harder, just makes that fight alot more tedious if you use said damage type.
That’s why Aether and Chaos builds pop up as T1 builds all the time. Because they are weak because bad RR access.
Not sure I get the logic here. Seriously, I can’t think of any Aether or Chaos build that has real issues. Chaos Cadence is T1, held back more by being 1 point shy of what it needs Devotion wise, CT Sorc literally was laughing it’s way through Glad during the 1.0.0.7 OA bug that rendered most builds unplayable in the endgame, AAR is fine and just gear hungry, Chaos ray is a T1 build, just again, Gear hungry, PRM has core issues that Crate refuses to resolve, and that is not an issue with the skill itself. Just Crate’s balancing of the skill. Doombolt perhaps? But you don’t build around Doombolt. It’s a secondary addition to a build, as is fitting for a 12 point skill. Brimstone gunslingers are quite powerful, and some creative builds have set up pure Chaos (or at least close to it) varieties of it utilizing Blood Orb, double Black Flame Dagger, or other such trickery. VoS builds are on their second to third nerf in a row, for good reason. The only Aether/Chaos builds that are shit are shit because they have bad itemization, not because the build idea itself is bad.
It makes sense for some enemies to resist one thing and some to resist another. IE, if you could hurt Chthonians easily with Chaos, when these creatures are literally holding gobbets of the shit to throw at you…There’s an issue there.
I think RR’s balancing issues stems from two parts. One, Crate thinks immunity is OK because RR exists. It’s not. Immunity to anything is never OK. Not even CCs. High resistance? Fine. 99% Resistance to CCs and things? Okay. Immunity? NO. BAD DEV.
Secondly, OFC…People insist you need it. Go make a build with NO RR…And in most cases, it’ll actually work just fine. Go make a build with very little RR, and it’ll still be K. But the thing is, people don’t see that, so Crate doesn’t see that, so the balancing is skewed by it.
We need RR more because the state of enemy resistances in this game than anything. It heavily starts to devalue as you stack it, but the difference between -80 resistance on an 80 resist enemy and a 0 resist enemy is one is a 500% DPS up, and the other is an 80% DPS up. Many enemies fall far closer to 80% resistance than 0%. I have multiple times avocated for all enemy resistances to be halved, and all player RR to be halved. This would have massive effects on the RR meta, because it strips how much of a multiplicative increase RR is. Suddenly, stacking it to the ends of the earth isn’t really all that valuable.
Again never said they can’t be effective, but everyone knows other damage types are more effective in end game areas. Resist reduction is a pointless stat as it adds nothing to the game at all. And if a item has it on it it makes that item alot more likely to be used over one that doesn’t. Especially if the 2 items are of similar stat gains.
Sky Shard Druids are generally considered good. The problem comes when you want to use other skills and either focus on lightning damage (which Elementalists are arguably better at) or cold damage (which Spellbreakers are undeniably better at).
This is like a slippery slope, non sequitur, and red herring all in one. Nobody is talking about removing damage types, it’s not a logical consequence of what he said, and I don’t know what it has to do with the original point.
Yes. But he is talking about removing core game mechanics on how we, the players, deal damage. A further idea from that was he wanted enemies to not have resistances either. At that point, we are literally 1 step away from homoginizing damage types. It’s an incredibly slippery slope. But you know how many games I’ve seen fall down that slope? Way to many. They give up complexity for causality, and in the end the game/series burns out.
I didn’t say remove resistances I said that making enemies have really high resistances doesn’t make the content harder. Enemies can have resistances just no reason they should have so much that you need to counter them with resist reduction. Especially since resist reduction is already one of the strongest ways to make your damage higher. Hence defeating the purpose of why they gave said enemies high resistance in 1st place.
my biggest problem with druid is what are you supposed to spam? i suppose primal strike or… reroll
You aren’t supposed to spam with them in the traditional sense. Druids are based around chaining cooldown abilities.
I agree with op with some parts. Immunity is cheap and lazy way of making game harder. RR must not be that important.
In my opinion arcanist class really needs a redistance reduction skill for elemental and aether. This would buff both druids and battlemages. Occultist’s curse of frailty on the other hand does already too many things and should not have elemental rr. This could potentially make sorcerers a bit too performing, however.
As much as I like the idea, having both elemental and aether would be overkill imho. Aether alone or with something else but not elemental would be more than enough.
To OP: yes druids are somewhat week when compared to other classes combos.