Now is a prime opportunity for druid's place and step forward

After just receiving nerfs to his bear and spirit link, not only have they taken away druid's offensive potential by making medallion a defense only item that doesn't reduce enemy armor anymore... The replacement is more expensive, defense exclusive, and only provides a flat amount of damage absorb (which is not as good on a higher life pool hero like druid)

Everything about the latest patch appears to be a direct attack on druid. Since blight stone only turns in to a desolator now, this indicates that future change is obviously on the horizon for items, but what about the bear?

Now, druid isn't in some divided/torn situation. He's what I describe as being in a Tri-vided situation(torn in 3 ways). To tap in to his potential strength you need to farm for your movement speed on each bear, two masks of madness, and two blade mails, and get this... you can't even cast both of the same item in one cast like he does with roar!! But someone should have been pointing that out this whole time. This is and has always been an obvious necessity.

If the new new Pavise item is going to cost more than the original medallion and be worse on druid then allow druid to stack Pavise if he has one on each bear and actually puts in the work to cast both. But I'm not sure if this is really the direction that they want to take bear in.

Druid is in sort of the same position that Zerg was always in in Starcraft. The zerg race has to upgrade every single speed upgrade for every separate unit. Comparable for druid, he has to spend gold on every single individual ability, whether shard/scepter or the tri-torn situation aforementioned. Everything seems to push the impression of druid's strength towards double midas and the talent of removing entangling roots cooldown. But as you can see, it's all a lame and boring and meaningless redundancy that forces one way to attain druid's strength when the alternative talents should be a viable option.

Druid is divided but it doesn't seem to yield an implication of his conquering so much that he seems more conquered, then roar unnecessarily wastes the cast on druid most of the time while if roar effect stacked, it might be a different story. Remember that would be stacking shard effect for roar as well.

I remember an idea I once had for blade mail where it could be turned on and off as an activation item that burns mana over time. Maybe bear should be able to do that. Makes me think of a Porcupine Bear theme. This would help take the focus off one or the other bear which is hugely problematic right now. Another idea is to rework one of the shards so that either bear would be able to activate invisibility which may also burn mana over time. Another consideration is to have the roar skill be an alternative way to increase the level of entangling roots, or to guarantee an entangling roots proc after savage roar is cast, sort of like how slardar gets a guaranteed proc of bash after 3 strikes. Honestly, everything here makes some sense to me all at once.

It seems like the situation could also turn in to one of those endless run arounds as well...

The ultimate thing to remember is that Druid is something of a "divided but also divided down the middle" hero. Entangling roots has a cooldown like a spell but doesn't cost any mana. If entangling roots could be activated to automatically cast a single target roar on the entangled hero after the entangled duration, but only use the mana and cooldown of 1 bear's roar to do this since it is single target, then I think this may be what the Druid has truly always needed. There really should be an option to spend mana on Entangling Roots since it is a cooldown ability, and for a greater purpose, and I think this might be the perfect purpose.

The only apparent strength of lone druid is physical damage on the bear and that's it.

Yet, how easy is it for the enemy team to slow that down or stop it from happening entirely?

And if that's druid's only real strength, then why have a 2 sided talent tree acting like there are two viable ways to play him?

Maybe you should merge his talent tree in to one where druid receives both sides of the talent tree at once and then come up with a set of further talents on the bear. At least try 1 skill point for 2 talent tree abilities at once or something for god's sakes....

Another way to look at it is that attack speed has never really been important on Druid perse. The way that root functions with it's cooldown is the same way that a Skull Basher works and that is a STRENGTH themed item. This is probably why Druid became a Universal Hero. But what does all stat really support of the Druid then? Going universal doesn't necessarily solve anything for him. Yet, we know that he doesn't need attack speed. The problem seems to be in the translation of agility. Agility used to add a movement speed bonus at one point. Since the attack speed on druid is not helpful to him with agility, then agility on druid should enhance his movement speed and not his attack speed.

But why movement speed? Think about it like this. Most strength heroes are melee right? Well when you are melee and tanky your movement speed becomes much more important.

There's probably other heroes in the same boat as Druid as the universal class who have this same problem where one of the 3 stats needs to be translated properly to support the theme of the hero so that the hero can actually have it's own strength/niche.

Here is another way of looking at it....

What if both druid and bear had 2 slots for neutral items each?

Meant mostly for helping Druid's movement speed problem....

If Druid is divided in to 2 heroes basically, then like I said, he could be divided and conquered. Divide him again for a strength.

Another way of looking at it is...

Divide both Druid and Bear's attack in to 2 attacks as if each of them had echo saber, but then nerf their damage to more or less balance the effect out....