End game for Shape Shifters

Druid
1

Hey all, I recently created another Fury Druid for Ladder Season 8 softcore, and I realized that I have never really gotten into end game with a Shape Shifter mainly due to the fact that they cannot teleport. (Every season again i make a new Fury Druid as a secondary character and deck him out mostly by farming with my primary character which always happens to be a caster.)

I wanted to break this vicious circle this season and finally farm with my SS Druid. As a result I ran numerous p1 cow runs and found out that a well equipped Werewolf is quite capable to dominate the cow level. I even joined p8 cow runs, but it turned out I’m ill-equipped for high player counts (but that is another story, I guess).

However, the cow runs came to a halt as I created a Trav Barb to earn enough Jah runes to deck out my Werewolf with 10-76-7 Grand Charms. I feel like I have failed and that I will never truly grind myself to the top with a Shape Shifter.

So I would like to hear your story of success/failure regarding the end game of your Shape Shifters. What places do you farm, what equipment do you use, and do you support your Shape Shifters with gear found by other chars?

As for my setup, I’m running a Stormlash Fury Druid (char lvl 91), so I centered my build around that unique Scourge. My setup goes as follows:

Weapon: 300ed eth Stormlash (I’m very proud of this item as I gained it from a very fortunate deal with a very nice person on Traderie)

Shield: 375ed Phoenix Monarch

Armor: Fortitude

Helmet: rare Earth Spirit with +2 to Druid, +2 to Fury, 39 to Life, 2os (Socketed with Cham and Thul)

Gloves: Laying of Hands

Boots: Gore Rider

Belt: rare Demonhide Sash with 17 Fhr, 20 Str, 41 to Life, +20% Lr, +28% Pr

Amulet: Highlord’s Wrath

Ring 1: Carrion Wind

Ring 2: Blood Ring with dual leech and some other useful stats

Skillpoint allocations go as follows:

Fury: 20 points

Werewolf: 10 points

Lycantrophy: 5 points

Cyclone Armor/Twister/Hurricane: each 20 points (to synergize the Tornado procs from Stormlash)

Arctic Blast: 4 points so far (to synergize the Twister procs from Carrion Wind)

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This is an incredible build. I’ve been so intrigued with using stormlash on a fury druid. Do you feel like the clear speed is decent with the tornadoes or do you think it’s faster not putting points into tornadoes synergies?

3

I’m afraid that it’s not really worth investing 60 hard points into Tornado synergies. The Tornados that Stormlash procs when fully synergized deal about 1,8 k damage, which is a joke in Hell difficulty. Furthermore, the proc chance of those Tornados is just 20%, which means that only about every fifth strike might proc something. Eventually you will not even notice the single Tornados that fly about your enemies here and there. The damage of Stormlash comes from its high physical one-handed damage plus Static Field, which procs from time to time.

If you ask me, it’s a fun weapon and I would surely want to use it again. But in it’s current state, I would no more waste any hard points on Tornado synergies; not unless Blizzard would bump up the proc chance of those Tornados to reach about 50%-60% and increase Tornado level to 28 or more. Now such an updated weapon could become quite interesting in p1 and would look very cool at the same time.

There are many unique items that could become much more useful and fun, if Blizzard would only invest a little time to fix them. The ideas are here and free :slight_smile:

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