From someone with a bit of playing druids in the past, present and likely at
this point not in the future, I will be sharing some thoughts on the guilds
current state.

As druids are more or less nonreplaceable offering unique protection spells
that don't have an equal from other sources, they are always in demand to an
extent. This however shouldn't be an excuse to let old, outdated mechanics
drag on for another decade.

While a complete overhaul for the guild isn't needed and likely won't happen
seeing as how flavorwise the guild isn't that interesting for any coder to
pick up, following are some changed I've been thinking about as suggestion to
what would remove some of the downright antifun gameplay design in the guild
that'd make it more fun to actually play, without affecting actual powerlevel
of the guild.

1
Flex Shield - Extremely powerful yet incerdibly annoying with the non-existant
duration, which I assume is in place to prevent party flexes which are such a
massive damage reduction. My suggestion on how to fix this would be to change
flex shield only affect melee hits, or optionally only work on targets in the
first row though (no smart "lore" explanation for that one though), while
increasing the base duration drastically and maybe upping the spellcost some.

2
ES and Mantle: Spells with utterly pointless stacking mechanic that only
serves to be a nuisance or making multiple druids in same party to actually
cause potentially hazardous situations since there isn't even a solid way to
check the amount of stacks. If the reason for this to exist is just because
someone enjoys having annoying mechanics for no particular reason in the game,
can the mechanic atleast be moved from druids to another guild that has some
fun gameplay aspects to counteract.

3
Staff: I don't personally care so much about overflow as a mechanic or even
the existance of the staff charge but can't the time it takes to charge it be
changed to something reasonable? 45minutes of standing outside with waino
metalegs and spr boosts to fix it after a 6 hour party is really, really not
fun.

5
Sidenote regarding congregation of the virtuous: while I don't disagree in
essence for the downtunes for it, not finding a spot where it's still a
reasonable option t o pick templars for a 3rd guild as tarmadruid saddens me.
I understand that nuns are powerful choice and now that templars are virtually
useless they'll be the choice people will flock to but it really was nice to
have an actual choice for the spells only primary healers guildcombos, in
particular for those of us who don't care for nuns gameplaywise.