I was thinking about several things that could or should be included with the upcoming* academy druid, (according to the commonly assumed timeline)*:
-According to the information I have collected on this forum, it seems that the Samara tree is in need of a buff. There are two main differences in playstyles between samara tree and the more popular vine tree, is that the vine tree can spawn only plant units that are vines, whereas the seedling pods can spawn any plant unit, and that the samara tree takes a much longer time to become setup for spawning units. Decreasing this down time, such as with tataree, diminishes what makes this spawnpoint unique. Therefore, it would be better to increase the other advantage of the samara tree, being a greater array of spawning options. The academy druid should reflect this: academy occurs in one zone, so that a plant unit without vine will not be as significantly negatively impacted. Including non-vine plant units that are useful to the druid should create the necessary buff for the samara tree.
-The majority of players use vine tree as their treebond, and the rest usually use samara tree. Etherian and Mohktari are rarely used. One way of fixing this is to add swarms to druids, which can be both weaker plant(vine?) units, (level 1), or insect swarms, (as the hornets seen on the cover art for Druid vs Necromancer). Considering how both these would be more numerous than before, it would support mainly the Etherian. Adding mobile creatures, such as ents lesser than togorah, who have low(1) or no regeneration, would greatly benefit both samara and mohktari.
-The current druid likes to spread across the board with her vines to provide better casting flexibility. Seeing how academy has only one zone, that concept will not be very transferable. It would mainly be another resource to exploit, somewhat like burn conditions to the female warlock. Another idea would be to create cards that would increase in strength according to the amount of vine markers, similar to the card Bolt of V'Tar. When used in arena, it would allow the player to decide which zones would be strategically valuable to invest in, and would place value to the academy play late game due to stacking in one zone, (balance made for academy by increasing costs for lower level mages?).
-----Instead, or in addition to it, it could use a similar yet different idea developed by myself and my some of my peers on this forum: root markers. These do not hinder, but cannot be targeted. They may be able to be used more than once, (twice/indefinite?).
Please, reply and provide feedback!
