How good is the dryad?

[Archmage MC]

Topic. Deciding if I should buy her or not.

[Gwumpy Fwog]

depends, shes very underwhelming atm, id start off with AL and EV, then probably mystic or lava after, shes a luxury like GW.

[FunkyBacon]

Her abilities for fighting are boring as heck and doesn't do anything another hero can't do better. However her towers are the best I have for damage, probably cause gear drops have not been kind to me for my other builders but still, I find them to be the most useful for how I play.

Really wish she was more fun to fight with...

[Eyedea]

Simply put, she's a lesser squire that can fly, when used as a DPS hero. Even worse, due to spheres, since you have less selectivity on usage of speed spheres.

For towers, they can be used selectively, but are pretty garbage. But in reality, almost all base towers are garbage until you get gear defining passives (toxic box, splody harpoon, evil purge serenity, etc.), which don't seem to exist yet for Dryad.

I think her issues are more the problem of Trendy having the talent to make the game better, but the out of touch reality causing its regression. Hence reviews getting even worse with the new players coming in via the current advertising, and old players here simply because we're masochists.

[Mexican]

Ive been using her as a filler for long onslaught games. Ive got decent gear (tho I havnt upgraded yet). Her harpie Dps is better than the PDT tower, EXCEPT it's single target, and doesnt do exploding damage like huntress.

[KingXRay]

she got nerfed on latest patch, you are now safe to delete her, since she cant do either of these (dps, tower power, tower hp)

[Eyedea]

Mexican, can you speak to what these "DPS" numbers are? Are you going off of the tower stats or real world numbers? PDT doesn't list the accurate DPS with the poison factored in. In real world usage, PDT should be achieving 2-3x damage, for cheaper DU (70 du vs 40, since harpy needs a world tree) and the AOE benefit of toxic bow.

This isn't just a dryad problem, as really all towers are poor right now except pdt. Even worse is the boring design of having kobolds (bombs) a mechanic of nearly every map. As such, you need towers (pdt or proton beam) that kill them outright, as opposed to triggering them.

[Gwumpy Fwog]

Originally posted by Snakadaktal:

Mexican, can you speak to what these "DPS" numbers are? Are you going off of the tower stats or real world numbers? PDT doesn't list the accurate DPS with the poison factored in. In real world usage, PDT should be achieving 2-3x damage, for cheaper DU (70 du vs 40, since harpy needs a world tree) and the AOE benefit of toxic bow.

This isn't just a dryad problem, as really all towers are poor right now except pdt. Even worse is the boring design of having kobolds (bombs) a mechanic of nearly every map. As such, you need towers (pdt or proton beam) that kill them outright, as opposed to triggering them.

archers kill kobolds better than PDT wont kill them fast enough since its a DOT if yours are subpar.

[Archmage MC]

Well I found out one neat thing about the dryad. She is a super tank that is really hard to kill. lol

[Eyedea]

Originally posted by Archmage MC:

Well I found out one neat thing about the dryad. She is a super tank that is really hard to kill. lol

She is less tanky than the squire (sphering), and if equipped right, the squire still does more damage than her, while he's blocking.

[Archmage MC]

Well if we're honest the only heroes that matter are Squire ("cades) and Huntress (PDT) for towers. The rest just support that more or less.

Gotta figure out what the dryad is useful for. Trees do give cades 10% more health and a good shield from time to time, Dryad is quite tanky... anything else?

[Gwumpy Fwog]

Originally posted by Archmage MC:

Well if we're honest the only heroes that matter are Squire ("cades) and Huntress (PDT) for towers. The rest just support that more or less.

Gotta figure out what the dryad is useful for. Trees do give cades 10% more health and a good shield from time to time, Dryad is quite tanky... anything else?

no nothing else... cuz she sucks lol, and I would argue purge is needed as well.

[Mitzruti]

nigh unkillable hero with massive burst damage and good mobility.
beefy walls with built in serenitys.
slimes are fantasic aoe defenses. they're basically echaos traps that chase enemies down instead of reling on them to stand still. and can preload 3 blasts instead of having to recharge every attack.
harpys are top tier for single target towers - huge range, fantastic damage, and no gimmicks to hold it back. most notably, the only towers even close to it are limited to 1 per target.

while nimbus and hornets have scaling bugs holding them back, she still has everything she needs to mop the floor with NM4. If you're stuggling, it's very much a L2P issue.

[A Old Man]

Her burst is quite terrible, since the corrupted skill that does alot of damage IS THE SAME skill that gives you mana on pure form.

also for the ppl who said she is tanky, well the only tanky thing about her is the fact they gave her a massive HP pool. squire is still top tank and does dmg to boot.

Hornets are rng based on top of being rng target base, very unreliable, same goes for nimbus but at a cost of 100DP.

Harpys could be good but the main issue is how their targetting works, currently if the elevation is different from target, her feathers acn hit nothing, at the same time if her target dies before harpy finishes the attack animation, it will atk the same spot until its over.

[Gwumpy Fwog]

Originally posted by Carillon:

nigh unkillable hero with massive burst damage and good mobility.
beefy walls with built in serenitys.
slimes are fantasic aoe defenses. they're basically echaos traps that chase enemies down instead of reling on them to stand still. and can preload 3 blasts instead of having to recharge every attack.
harpys are top tier for single target towers - huge range, fantastic damage, and no gimmicks to hold it back. most notably, the only towers even close to it are limited to 1 per target.

while nimbus and hornets have scaling bugs holding them back, she still has everything she needs to mop the floor with NM4. If you're stuggling, it's very much a L2P issue.

Squire is tankier and has WAY more utility, her cheapest def is 60 considering your forced to build a wall (and if you want ur tree to not suck total ♥♥♥♥ you need def hp meaning you need 2 dryads if you want her to have dmg twrs as well) her corruption form eats mana like no other and she has possibly the worst way to gain mana ive ever seen, her dps is lackluster in general, nimbus blows horribly it is NOT a 100 DU defense (once again 130 with tree) slimes range is piss ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ poor..... I dont know what your playing but we ARE NOT playing the same dryad and mines specced already and ive tried every sphere combo so far except maybe like 2.

[K-ToF]

I know the thread is about the dryad, and this is offtopic, but:

Originally posted by Archmage MC:

Well if we're honest the only heroes that matter are Squire ("cades) and Huntress (PDT) for towers. The rest just support that more or less.

Been playing with the lavamancer's maw a lot lately. Although it does not have as much health as the squire's barricade, it slows down an enemy until it petrifies it, and that causes all enemies around it to attack it.

That works really well with PDTs as anything that slows down or delays enemies from getting to the barricade is more time for the PDT to do it's job. If a petrified enemy dies, it'll also do an AOE explosion.

I'm finding a great synergy between the maw and the PDTs.

Originally posted by Archmage MC:

Gotta figure out what the dryad is useful for. Trees do give cades 10% more health and a good shield from time to time, Dryad is quite tanky... anything else?

The monk can use his boost aura to give barricades +25% health AND at level 1 gives all buildings inside of it 10% damage resistance.

As other mentioned, the squire is an excellent tank. I tanked the eye of cthulhu with my squire while shooting fire from my shield at it in front of my defenses for a good 10 mins and my health never went under 95%.

Plus the squire has a sphere that makes it so that anything that's targeting him takes 35% more damage from your defenses. Might not work on bosses, but honestly, who knows.

Originally posted by Archmage MC:

Deciding if I should buy her or not.

Honestly, I'd wait til they tweak her. Almost every new hero that comes out gets tweaked within the first 2 weeks of coming out, either buffed or nerfed.

That aside, I have yet to hear of a single role the Dryad is great at.

In a game with some many heroes, and not that many roles to fill, a lot of heroes are just not going to be either not as useful or redundant at best. We may end up having more and more "apprentice" situations.