I haven't tried it yet (give me a few hours) but that preview image alone is pretty exciting. A couple of weird sprites aside, this might be the first new mod (Draconian started out in CoE3) for CoE4 adding in a nation that really fits in with the vanilla ones.

Some thoughts after a quick test: mechanically, conceptually and graphically speaking, this mod is fairly polished. There are two main issues that can be raised.

The first lies in the descriptions - they all look like placeholders, and tend to be short, spackled with grammatical and spelling errors, and are sometimes uninformative or misleading. They're not a huge priority, but I would recommend redoing basically all of them from the ground up. I could go into more detail than that, but it would take an awful lot of time, especially since I don't actually know your intent and thoughts behind these things. On a similar note, the mod's icon needs to be quickly revamped - it's messed up and contains a typo.

The second lies in balance, as you yourself have observed. Overall, the class is more balanced than certain other modded ones, but there's probably a lot more you could do. Theoretically, the fact that you need two special types of resources for your summons should make them more expensive - in practice, however, you generally end up claiming both settlements and forests as a matter of course, and so, while potentially problematic, it tends to be not as debilitating as one might think.

Balance is a really tricky matter. Overall, I think the class is on the strong side - with reliable summons and dual-casting mages, that's more-or-less inevitable. It does have the traditional nature-type weakness where most of its summons have average or below average magic resistance, making them theoretically vulnerable to classes like the Illusionist or High Cultist. Some summons are probably too strong for their cost, while others are too weak. Greater Crossbreeding is largely superior to Summon Ancient Primal One (with the notable exception of the Wild Lord - the armies from GC are very nice, but third-level Blood Mages are extremely delicious, especially at that price) despite being cheaper - the Spirit Bear, in particular, is in no way worth 200 sacrifices and 400 herbs. Ethereal is good, but not that good.

The Wild Hunt line is generally weaker than the other two lines - which doesn't sit right with me. "Stupid" summons should be more cost-effective than other summons, not less, since they cannot be directed and generally only patrol and harass.

There's a lot more discussion and thoughts to be had, but this is about the amount of time and effort I'm willing and able to sink into it at the moment.

Most of the descriptions were simple or generic to the type of summon they are because there are simply so many of them. I may some day get around to doing proper ones.

The balance certainly needs some work, I mostly play tested it with no costs while I was building and testing things so I need to play it more and change costs around. For the summons the strength of the summons is supposed to be a little bit random with some being stronger, like the Rat Monster summon in Lesser Crossbreeding being one of the strongest and the Headpig summon being one of the weakest.

The Wild hunt isn't ment to be too strong, they're mostly about controling forests without micro.

Known bugs:
Some sprites are missing shadows
Manikin Tangle vine is the wrong weapon.
Web on Spider Crossbreed is the wrong weapon.
I don't know the weapon numbers so I'm stumped to fix this.

Looks like a very cool mod this one. I like your idea with the dark druid.
There is just one very small error in it, though (or two):

On line 363 and on line 1102 there are references to a sprite file "Maneatermoosea.tga" (with a capital M), but the corresponding actual sprite file has the name "maneatermoosea.tga" (with a lowercase m). Which makes the game unable to find this particular one sprite file on Linux.

That’s it. Keep up the good work! 👍
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Regarding weapons, if the built-in "Web" isn’t defined the way you intended your spider weapon to work, then you can either try some other named weapon already in the game (like "Net"), or else define your entirely own weapon from scratch (with newweapon etc.).

Right on, will get to that

The documentation for weapons special abilities like netting isn't there yet so I just don't know the numbers.

Played with this a bit - very nice (hoping for longer, more complete description someday), but I was wondering...shouldn't the forest only rituals also be castable in ancient forests? Is this kind of restriction supported?

I probably won't get around to the descriptions, I have that bug fixed in the latest version but It's pretty half done. I haven't had much time for this recently sry.

I've heard good things about this mod. Is it still available for download somewhere, and does it work with the current version of CoE if it is?

I don't know why the links are down... But the new patch that introduced the Dryad Class Clashes with this mod.

Ah. Thanks for the answer anyway

Unit Preview
www.media fire.com/convkey/5e19/qn2c9k3h80ab6v3zg.jpg

www.media fire.com/download/trr82rtxteeikdy/BloodhengedruidV1.zip

Links were broken when Steam decided to block links to Mediafire. Addresses are above, copy/paste into web browser and remove the spaces from the word 'mediafire' and they should work (haven't tested, the file might not be there any more). Don't try clicking on my links, they won't work as the spaces make the browser think it's two separate addresses. Just select and copy that line of the text.

And in theory, mods should normally remain compatible across game versions. Modding in this game is limited to things that are not generally changed in updates. The exception was adding the Dryad Queen class, which screwed up some custom classes due to clashing IDs. It's an easy fix though, you would just need to open the mod file in a text editor (NOT MS Notepad, it messes up the formatting) and renumber things to not clash with the Dryad.

Thanks! I didn't know steam had done that.

And yeah the reason things clashed was because the Dryad Queen class also uses Pan's.