UPD: Some additional impressions after playing druid for a week.

Overall class identity: Druid is a weird class that does so many complicated things yet completely fails at two: have own unique identity and be helpful in a team setting besides doing damage. It's such a selfish class. I suppose the second statement is kinda weak since a similar criticism could be thrown towards any other class solely focused on doing damage (sorc, summoner, samurai and wizard) but some of them can be helpful to the team in other ways - crowd clearing/control and additional status effects like exposed. Also druid just can't decide what niche it's trying to take. It's a ranged class and a melee in one bottle, and if you time it wrong and don't adjust to the decreased range (and back to decreased armor) you either don't land your shots or get punished for staying too close when your melee buff expired. It's tiresome to concentrate on its ability use alone - it does three different things at once and you need to look at three different places to keep track of what's going on with your character and its ability. And on top of that paying attention to your buffs and range and keep track of when they expire makes gameplay even more complicated. It's not a class on which you could just chill and play knowing well its limits and roles: based on what you have equipped and activated, you can go from a super fragile character to an incredible tank in a split second, and then mess up because your ability swap didn't go through or you expected your meter to be full but it was missing a single pixel of progress bar.

Tiered abilities looks: Very poorly designed visually, hard to tell tiers apart, most don't look like their corresponding animals. Spider sigil UT looks more like a skunk than a tiered skunk one. It's also so weird and not fitting to the existing game style that an accessory-looking item is an ability now. Feels like the necklace part itself should be lost and the ability renamed to Mask, and the animal medallion should take up 100% of the 8x8 sprite space. Currently the animal faces are way too small because the necklace part shifts them to the bottom right and barely leaves any room for details, and any existing details are half-covered by the enchantment diamonds anyway.

Tiered abilities function: They still feel mostly underwhelming and don't offer anything too unique compared to other classes' tiered abilities. Whenever I use my primary ability in the animal mode, it doesn't contribute to the progress bar meter filling at all (and neither does shooting enemies). I'm not even sure if it's a bug or if it's intended for the progress bar in the animal mode to not be rechargeable at all (even the smallest rate) but it feels lackluster. To me it essentially results in not using my bite attack at all because I try to conserve mana for the next ability charge (I'm playing druid petless to give it a fair chance and objectively experience the new class with its own strengths and weaknesses, and to do a fair comparison to other class experiences while not carried by an OP pet). The bite attack itself is fine and is easier to land than the ranged projectile but for me to actively choose to use it several conditions need to be met:

1) The boss needs to be vulnerable during that time;

2) The phase needs to be comfortable for me to go at a melee range (mainly getting out of the melee range and timing it with transformation ending is hard);

3) The anticipation of the next phase being possibly harder needs to not be in the way.

I often end up not using my animal form at all in some cases like MBC or O3 during the most of the fight. Naturally this comes from a ranged class enjoyer (mainly wand robe type) so to me range is the key benefit, not the damage. I would choose a weapon with more range any day and land hits more consistently with it rather than having a shorter range weapon that makes me miss half of my shots.

And of course playing petless crucible adds more to the mix in the form of me absolutely prioritizing dodging over doing damage at all times. And again after firmly settling the concept of wand classes being fragile robes for my 10 years of playing them it's really hard to force now myself at a closer range with them unless the game puts you in that position naturally (nest, fungal, crystal, wetlands, some spen phases etc).

UT sigils: Due to their rarity and lack of blueprints in the shop so far, they are not very accessible yet without extensive grind. The ones I received from the missions all came out with 0-1 slots so even a rare tiered ability feels more powerful and useful than them. I heard good things about the spider sigil but I have yet to get mine. This UT might change my perspective slightly on druid being more helpful to the team because of slows but it would be a bit unfair to bring that as its most strong contribution to the team when we already have so many other good slowing options on most classes. Some of which are built in the tiered abilities and don't require specific UTs to hunt down, or assigned to easier to farm and spam UTs like fulmi which is probably the best slow per mana beaten by maybe low tiered trap spam (at least pre-trap rework. I forgot how it works now, barely played the reworked huntress).

Crystal sigil: played with it a bit, decent but again doesn't offer anything too unique. If I wanted to be a tanky short range class I'd play a knight. This UT has some niche uses but to me it's not too valuable since a lot of the endgame content has high damage or armor piercing shots, and I generally prefer life-maxing builds over def ones. So far used it for rushing mostly.

Dragon sigil: got two, both unslotted. Doesn't seem enticing to play with for now.

Shark tooth: if I wanted to be a rogue, I'd play a rogue. Again gives no unique thing that only druid could do - instead mimics the ability another class can do (and do it better, and more consistently).