Druid Spell: Garden of Life. What does it do?

[Gregorovitch]

Having been burnt badly by the utterly useless Confusion spell I am a bit reluctant to take any spell unless I understand exactly what it does now.

Garden of Life says: 12 health restored per 6 sec per 3 sec.

WTF does that mean?

Then it says: Hastens Berath's Wheel, causing rejuvenating plants to spring up in the corpses of the fallen and heal allies in the area of effect.

Again WTF does that mean?

[TaKo]

basically: if theres dead bodies, u'll create healing fields

if theres no corpses, no healing, should work akin to the chanter's "white worms writhed" invocation but healing instead of dmg

i'd guess the weird wording is a mistake and that the 6 is the duration of each field and the 3 is the interval between healing pulses

if that sounds too weird, just pick Moonwell or The Moon's Light for healing

[Gregorovitch]

I'm glad I asked becasue it seems that like Confusion they've nerfed the hell out of it from PoE1 tro the point of uselessness. The whole point of over time healing AoE's is to survive the initial enemy mob's onslaught until you can thin them out. Once you've killed a few you've more or less done the job. Which makes healing based on dead enemy bodies more or less pointless.

[feralgal]

It sounds like it might be useful if some of your allies have fallen in battle or if you're near the end of a close fight with casualties on both sides and you want to give your team an edge. But, yeah, pretty situation specific. I plan to try it later bc I've been wondering what it does too.

[Gregorovitch]

Thing is when you can fill your spell book with situational options or you get a whole levels worth of spells automatically like you did in PoE then this situational stuff is fine and dandy, but here you have to choose a very limited number of passives, active abilities and spells. Situational just doesn't cut it. You need to pick stuff that is always usefull, always reliable, all of the time.

[Hobocop]

Yeah, situational tools like this are going to fall by the wayside in favor of all-purpose tools when you have to spend your valuable perk points on them. Wizards have it a bit better thanks to Grimoires, but for other classes, it means contending with the currently broken respec system.

[feralgal]

Gregorovitch, in general, I agree. I'm not at all trying to say it's a good spell. Over 90% of the time, you are much better off with another spell (or ability, if it's a situation specific ability). The only time I could see picking something like that is if, e.g., you have more than one druid and one covers the general and the second (or third, etc.) one covers more situation-specific stuff. Or, e.g, if you wanted to limit yourself to healing type spells with your druid for role-playing reasons. In general, it sounds like a bad spell, esp for a level 6 spell. I'd still like to try it out just bc I like trying out all the spells and abilities and this was one I'd seen recently and didn't know what it did.

You can craft the scroll. I'm not sure if even that would be worth it bc it would take up a quick slot that would probably be better used for other items.

[Gregorovitch]

I'm just a bit antsy about it because, like Confusion, the spell description is very ambiguous and hides it's uslessness. It's like it's designed to con you into taking it.

[Memnarch]

Awful over situational spell at a higher level that does less healing than the lower Moonwell which is much better...dont bother with these rubbish spells

[zeromblade]

It's a fine pick up if you are solo druid. You won't always have healing available from other tiers, so even if you don't use this spell 90% of the time, it's worth having it around for the 10%. Of course, if you are multiclass druid then forget this spell, since your skill points have better things to go to.

[Wlerin]

Uh. Pretty sure the confusion spell description tells you what confusion does (if you mouse-over/click the affliction).

And yeah, it's been "nerfed", because everything had to fit into the new Affliction/Inspiration system. Confusion is the weakest Intellect Affliction, Charmed the next, and Dominated the strongest (for now).

[Gregorovitch]

Originally posted by Wlerin:

Uh. Pretty sure the confusion spell description tells you what confusion does (if you mouse-over/click the affliction).

Technically it does, but it's only really understandable as such if you already know what the spell does, or rather what it now doesn't do.

What's egregious about it in my view is that Confusion is a standard spell going back to AD&D, Baldur's Gate etc for years and it has always done the same thing, the same thing it did in PoE1, which is make enemies attack the nearest combatant regardless of which side they are on. That's what made the spell useful, almost an auto-pick goto spell.

This is what I automatically expected it to do and the wording is insuffciently clear to warn me that it doesn't do that anymore and has been collossaly nerfed. The wording is unbelievably obfuscated:

"Confused characters are -5 Intellect and all of their abilties and attacks are friend or foe".

For someone who has used Confusion in games like this for decades they will take that as a badly worded confirmation that the spell does what they expect it to do. What it is actually trying to say (or trying to hide depending on whether you think this obfuscation is deliberate or not) is that all it does is turn enemy Foe only AoE spells into standard AoE spells. That IMO is what the spell description should say in precise terms so people are not conned by it and can choose something usefull instead.