Out of 30+ builds we know so far, only 2 are summon builds, and one is vastly superior to the other (because of amplify damage, corpse explosion, and the huge quantity of summon, easily 20+). On a side note, rabies druid purely sucks.
Proposal:
Raven: increase all 3 synergies from 12% to 24% (basically x2 damage)
Spirit wolf: increase synergy from grizzly from 10% to 40%, to account for the damage loss from fanaticism (beast runeword), might (act 2 merc), and potentially heart of wolverine
Spirit of barbs: change to a new skill called force of nature, having 2 parts: a passive and an active. Passive: give 0.25% life leech per skill level to dire wolf and grizzly bear. Active: mark a target and all summons will attack marked target
Poison creeper: change to poison vine, stationary vine that shoot out darts to poison enemies. Maximum summon is 5. Each poison vine deals separate instance of poison damage if attacking the same enemy. Every skill level of poison vine increases poison dart piercing chance by 2%. Can be affected by force of nature.
Grizzly: add 5% crushing blow chance per hard point, up to max 100% at level 20. This will help with single targets like bosses, and maybe uber tristram as well.
Rabies: double the spreading range, reduce the poison duration by half while flat poison damage remains the same. Someone calculated before that dps of rabies is only half of poison nova, in a smaller aoe, so its clear speed is about 2.5-3x as slow. We need to buff this D- tier build (ranked by maxroll) to make it perform better.
There changes will buff summon druid and rabies druid. For summon build, things are better in general and you now have a reliable source of poison damage (beside physical and cold), thus dealing with immunity is easier. For rabies build, it’s just pure buff in terms of damage. Plague runeword will actually be usable on a character instead of being exclusive for act 5 merc as of now. Combining the above changes with some crushing blow gears, rabies druid maybe will clear mobs and packs considerably slower than poison nova, but it will have much better single target damage. And definitely ways better than the current rabies build.
Poison creeper is fine as it is. In the old days it was used to level to 18 to get Rabies. Now it can still be used that way, but it also just does more damage than Rabies.
Rabies needs more duration not less. But I agree that the damage is too low. My main problem with Rabies is that it’s useless against enemies that are even a little resistant. A good fix would be to give Rabies -% enemy poison resistance. 1% from poison creeper synergy and 1% per level of Rabies. So level 30 Rabies would have 50%
I’d honestly keep rabies the same and just keep its duration fixed to 4s. You either want the target you hit to die NOW, or just swing again to hit another member near a monster pack.
DOUBLE the movement speed of your summons. This would have them actually run up and start attacking much much sooner! This would probably equate to like a 30%? DPS increase.
So more or less rabies duration is good?
Right now rabies is at the lowest tier according to maxroll. That’s pathetic. Summon druid is not much better, only a tier higher.
Spreading more is not that important imo. It can’t really compete with poison nova or plague javelin anyway. A realistic way is to make rabies a single target/small group poison dealer instead of big AoE poison like the other 2 builds. Making its own identity as a different kind of poison damage dealer. Or if we need to increase the DPS, maybe we should triple the synnergy from poison creeper (vine) to 60%.
As for spreading mechanism, I’d propose changing the current spreading mechanism to the following:
Enemy killed by rabies spread to x nearest enemies (with x increased by hard points into rabies, maybe increased by 1 every 5 hard points, to the max of 5 enemies
While enemies are affected by rabies, if it attacks another enemy (by confusion skill, maybe from delirium runeword), the attacked enemies are also infected with rabies
With these 2 spreading mechanisms and a significant buff in damage/synergy, rabies can totally be the next great cow clearer.
It already is (quite obviously) different than those other poison skills.
The fact that it is, in-part, spread by infected monsters coming in contact with other monsters IS its own identity.
The ask here is for a change that allows it to compete with the damage done by those other skills, either by increasing its duration so it spreads further, or by increasing the damage done with each tick within its current duration.
One thing that I would also like to see, personally, (in addition to it being more competitive with the other poison skills) would be for BOTH forms (wolf AND bear) to have access to the skill, rather than just the wolf.
Yes, I mean, a rabies druid with a merc wearing delirium runeword, perfect cow genocide. Except that instead of using a potent poison, rabies druid only has poison as potent as fart
