Dark and Darker Druid Guide

Welcome to our Dark and Darker Druid Guide. This guide covers everything you need to know about the Druid. This guide updates as balance patches happen, new spells & perks are added, and more! Currently, the Druid is newly released but not finished, as a result, things can change frequently.

Skills

Skills in Dark and Darker are the core abilities that each class has unique access to:

Shapeshift Memory
Spell Memory

Spell Memory

Spell Memory allows you to memorize spells to use in your dungeon adventures. With Spell Memory, you can also memorize up to 5 spells.

Shapeshift Memory

Shapeshift Memory lets the Druid shift between various forms of natures wild beasts. The current animals you can become are:

Bear
Panther
Rat
Chicken
Human

Recommended Skills

Currently, Spell Memory and Shapeshift Memory are the only two skills you can select for the Druid. As a result, you’ll be using these until further updates!

Perks

Perks in Dark and Darker serve as unique passive traits. Each class can slot up to 4 perks once they reach max level:

Natural Healing – Recover yourself and nearby allies 1 health every 3 seconds.
Enhanced Wildness – While you are in animal form, you gain 5 additional move speed and 10 armor rating.
Force of Nature – When you heal a target, the target gains 3 physical power for 3 seconds.
Herbal Sensing – Detects nearby herbs.
Spirit Magic Mastery – When you cast spirit magic, you gain 10 magical power.
Sun and Moon – Nearby allies gain 3 vigor and 5 magical power.
Thorn Coat – When melee attacked, return 5 true physical damage to the attacker.
Dreamwalk – When receiving damage while in human form, gain 5 Magical Power for 4 seconds and become spiritual, phasing through targets and becoming invincible, but being unable to attack or use skills, but can still cast spells. 12 second cooldown.
Spirit Bond – Every second you receive 15% of damage received by party members in their place, limited to 20 damage per instance.
Animal Kinship – Not all animals and insects attack first.

Recommended Perks

Currently, we recommend taking Shapeshift Mastery, Dreamwalk, Thorn Coat and Enhanced Wildness. Shapeshift Mastery is the most important perk by far, as it lets you instantly shift into a new animal form. This allows for certain powerful mechanics available only to the Druid. Dreamwalk is a safety net that helps you escape bad situations or even escape entirely if you’re opening a portal and get hit. It also gives you magical power to assist with healing while you’re phasing. Thorn Coat and Enhanced Wildness, finally, are no-brainer perks that provide passive benefits like damage reflection and movement speed.

Spells

Spells are unique to the classes that can wield Spell Memory as a Skill. Currently, these classes are the Wizard, Cleric, Druid and the Warlock Class. However, any class can attain this Skill with Multi-classing. These spells are the ones you slot into your Spell Memory Skill and take with you on your adventure. Something to know when starting out, however, is each spell has a cost to even use it. To see this, check the bar at the bottom of the screen when selecting spells to know what your Spell Capacity is.

Spell List

Currently, the Druid has access to the following spells:

Lower Tier 1

Nature’s Touch – The target gains 15 additional recoverable health. Also, healed 15 health over 12 seconds. Casts instantly and casts on yourself is no target is found.

Low Tier 2

Barkskin Armor – Increases armor rating by 20% for 8 seconds, encasing you in a protective bark.

Middle Tier 3

Summon Treant – Summons a treant to fight with you for 24 seconds. Treants become more powerful when summoned underwater.
Dreamfire – Deals 15 magical damage within a radius. Any allies or self currently affected by Nature’s Touch are instantly healed for 10 health per target damaged.

Upper Tier 4

Thorn Barrier – Creates a thorn barrier that lasts for 8 seconds. Any character that stands near the thorn barrier will take 3 physical damage per second.
Entangling Vines – Spreads roots across the floor in a 1m radius that last for 6 seconds. Any targets that pass through the AoE are frozen in place for 3 seconds. After the effect is removed, the target gets immunity to the entangling effects for 3 seconds.

Higher Tier 5

Restore – Restore the health of all allies within a 3m radius by 30 health for 10 seconds.

Elite Tier 6

Tree of Life – Sprout a tree of life, granting 5 all attributes and granting 40 additional recoverable health over 8 seconds. Cannot cast on self.
Mending Grove – Create a forest area centered around you within a 3m radius. Targets in the area gain 10% max health bonus and are healed for 10 health per second.

For spells, we recommend using in order:

Summon Treant
Restore
Thorn Barrier
Entangling Vines
Dreamfire

With base gear, Dreamfire is only 1 or 2 knowledge away from being usable. As a result, simply buying a grey piece of gear from the merchants or finding any knowledge gear mid-dungeon activates your full kit. Of course, however, if you’re running High Rollers, this doesn’t apply.

Weapons

The Druid can use the following weapons:

Staff
Spellbook
Crystal Ball
Torch
Spear
Clubs
Quarterstaff
Ceremonial Staff
Maces

We currently recommend the Spellbook and Spear as the best go-to set-up for the Druid.

Stat Priority

Different stats in Dark and Darker have other properties, as a result, our predicted stats you’d want for the Druid is:

+Additional Magic Damage
Will
+Additional Physical Damage
Strength
Movement Speed

Due to the nature of the Druid, a mixture of Physical and Magical Damage sources is a good option to start with. The Druid can play an aggressive frontline playstyle or a backline caster playstyle. As a result, these stats may change depending on which style is used (for example: more Strength or Physical Damage Reduction for frontline Shapeshifting).

How To Play Druid

The playstyle of the Druid is focused around the following:

The use of a unique Shapeshifting mechanic. Shapeshifting allows the Druid to switch between powerful beasts such as a large bear and panther. This is a drastically different playstyle to most other classes.
The Druid shares a similar base playstyle to the Wizard, starting also with a Staff to be able to cast Nature Magic.

The main way to approach the Druid class is to know when each Shapeshifting form becomes relevant. For example, using the Bear to frontline & pressure players and using the Rat form to scout out or hide from players.

Alongside Shapeshifting knowledge, being able to weave between your animal forms and humanoid form to cast Nature Magic is important. A lot of the Druid spells involves shielding and healing yourself and allies. As a result, your role is very flexible and can switch from being a damage dealer to a healer very quickly. Crowd control and Summoning are mechanics present in the Druid’s kit. Currently, the Druid can summon Treants to assist in battle while summoning vines to Entangle and trap enemies. Because of this flexibility, come into each match prepared with a strategy for your default form and your animal forms.

PVE & PVP

To navigate PVE as a Druid, it is important to enter most rooms through the use of the Rat Shapeshift form. Utilizing the Rat means you can enter the room fairly hidden, giving you time to scout the room before clearing the mobs out. Clearing out mobs is pretty easy and can be done just by using weapons or a couple of magic spells on a large pull, such as Dreamfire. Fortunately, moving between rooms is easy with the use of the Panther form. This means you can both clear and move on to the next room with great speed – this can throw off PVP players as well. Remember that you’re able to heal yourself and allies around you, the team being topped up between rooms is crucial to surviving the dungeons. We also recommend utilizing Summon Treant as a way of assisting mob clear and being a “taunt” of some kind.

Navigating PVP as a Druid can be both fun and skill intensive. There is multiple options available to the Druid to engage in combat with players both solo or as part of a team. For example, a Druid can play fully as a caster, healing allies and dealing damage to enemies. Between combat, we highly recommend utilizing the Rat form and the Panther form to chase for the kill, and to kite or reposition mid-fight. The Rat is perfect for repositioning as you become quite nimble and incredibly tiny – which is very hard to detect in the middle of a fight. Using the Panther form to deal damage or dive in for the kill from flank positions after using the Rat form is a great way to secure kills. As a result, remember to utilize every shapeshift available to you when it makes sense, heal yourself and your teammates and look to apply CC and deal damage with spells.

PVP Engagement Examples

A good example of how to effectively use Druid in a fight, starts from the initial engagement of any fight. The first thing you should look out for is the nearest exits for your opponent. Should you catch them on the back foot, casting Summon Treant or Thorn Barrier can easily cut off their escape route. From here, whichever spell was not casted first, can be casted on the other side of the player or on another exit to truly box in the opponent. With the player being pressured by the Treant, your main two options is to cast from afar with Dreamfire, or move in and deal damage in Bear form or Panther form. Fights can end very quickly in your favor the moment you catch your opponent off guard and cause panic.

Movement Tricks

For those that’re looking to become as skillful of a Druid as possible, look no further. This particular movement trick uses the mechanics of the Shapeshifting skill to cover very large distances in a short period of time – at varying heights. To make the most use out of this trick, make sure to do the following:

Find a height spot or small object to jump from
Transform into the Panther form and use the Rush pounce Skill to jump fast and high into the air
Immediately transform into the Chicken Form and double jump in the air
Reach your target destination

To pull this off successfully, it is VITAL that you have the “Shapeshift Mastery” Perk equipped so you can transform instantly. The reason that this movement mechanic works so well is that the Panther jump provides a ton of momentum. This allows the Chicken form to instantly be casted (without a cast time thanks to Shapeshift Mastery) and pull off the double jump with maximum momentum. This type of mechanic is incredibly powerful when chasing down enemy players or moving between parts of a room – you can even find new ambush spots.

Rat Hop

Another game changing mechanic available to the Druid through the use of Shapeshift Mastery is the Rat hop. The Rat hop can only be used in the Ice Caverns and Goblin Caves maps. This is because this movement mechanic requires the doors to have the classic grated window on the top half. To pull off this mechanic, you have to run towards a door. As soon as you get close to it, jump into the air and transform into the Rat. If timed right, you’ll fly through the grated window – completely ignoring the need to open any door!

This particular mechanic is great for several uses. For example, moving fast across the dungeon, chasing enemies, escaping danger – even hopping into a room undetected can surprise other players. As a result, combine the usage of the Rat hop and the Panther + Chicken movement tricks to massively outplay your opponents.

How to use Shapeshifting

Shapeshifting is a core part of the Druid’s kit. As a Shapeshifter, you need to have a great understanding of what each form available does to use the Druid’s full potential. Below is each of the Shapeshifting forms and the unique Skill each also possess:

Human Form

Human Form (return to normal form). This is a simple Shapeshift that puts the caster back to their humanoid form. As a result, return to this form when you want to cast healing spells or other Spirit Magic.

Bear

The Bear is large, slow and cannot fit through single doors. However, the Bear form is very resilient, gaining physical damage reduction and 50% max health bonus. This form can be used to aggressively push players while taking some damage. Much like a real life grizzly bear, this form is truly terrifying to be on the receiving end of.

Left-Click with the Bear form swipes with the right claw, dealing damage and pushing targets away. Right-Clicking raises your body and deals large damage with both hands. This second attack also pushes targets away and destroys normal doors and containers.

Bear “Wild” Skill

The Skill exclusive to the Bear form is called “Wild Fury”. For 6 seconds, physical damage bonus increases by 15% and physical damage reduction increases by 15%.

Chicken

In Dark and Darker, there has never been anything as comical as the Chicken form. As a chicken, you’re fast and agile while people quite short in height. As a result, you can avoid and hide from players pretty well (apart from the loud Chicken noises you make). However, being a Chicken means you lose 60% max health bonus, incoming physical and magical healing. Additionally, the Chicken form can fly or “glide” for a short period of time.

Using the Left-Click pecks at opponents, inflicting damage and penetrating 30% of the target’s armor. Although, hilariously, the Right-Click simply makes you cluck very loudly. Use this form when you need to make certain long jumps or for a quick escape.

Chicken “Wild” Skill

The Chicken form’s unique skill “Insect Predation” starts to peck at the ground, eating crawling insects that heals you small amounts.

Panther

The Panther form is a fantastic attacking option in the Shapeshifting Memory list. Sporting high mobility and decent damage. However, the Panther can also perform wall jumps to create more options in traversing the dungeon. Being in the Panther form gives 5% move speed bonus, however, you lose 30% max health bonus, incoming physical and magical healing. Finally, the Panther can jump 20% higher than a normal character.

Left-Clicking with the Panther claws the target with the right hand, dealing decent damage and inflicting a physical damage bleed for 3 seconds. You can also bite into the neck of your target with the Right-Click, dealing large damage. However, if you neck bite while frenzied – silence the target for 0.5 seconds.

Panther “Wild” Skill

“Rush” is the unique Skill available to the Panther form. Rush forward, entering a frenzied state for 3 seconds after starting the rush. You can use attacks while jumping, and this can be used in the air.

Rat

Rat form is perhaps the most powerful Shapeshifting form when used correctly. A feature unique to the Rat is the ability to run underneath regular doors. This is an incredible trait to have in a game like Dark and Darker. Additionally, using the Rat to hide from players is a great tool in tough situations. For example, the Rat is small enough that you can hide in very hard to see places – even behind chests. As a result, you can find ways to not only hide from enemies, but also ambush them or even scout them out. Be warned that the Rat form is very squishy, losing 95% max health bonus, incoming physical and magical healing. In conclusion, the Rat is a fantastic scouting tool, and escape method.

While in Rat form, you’re also 10% faster. Left-Clicking uses Infected Fangs, biting the target and spreading a plague that deals magic damage over time for 3 seconds. You can also make a squeak by using the Right-Click with no real function to it.

Finally, the Druid takes a -100% penalty to Physical Damage Reduction and Magical Damage Reduction.

Rat “Wild” Skill

“Survival Instinct” is a Skill unique to the Rat form. Survival Instinct increases movement speed by 20% for 6 seconds. When the effect ends, you lose 20% movement speed bonus for 3 seconds.