Hello. I‘m enjoying a mixture between Summons and Elemental skills. I have no experience with 2.4.
What are viable combos? 20 Grizzly, 20 Dire Wolfs with 20 Hurrican and Tornado?
Or maybe with fissure and firestorm? Are the fire/physical skills viable in player 1 then I dont skill all synergies?
Druid is kind of a jack of all trades.
Best way to figure it out is to test things which in my opinion is half the fun.
Going with the broad strokes I’d say you just have to pick a main tree and then a second one as support. If you try to get a little bit of everything you’ll struggle in Hell.
Your best support tree imo is summonning. As long as you put points in oak sage, You can then literally put 1 point in spirit wolf dire wolf and bear and let your + skill items raise them to a level where they’ll be tanky even in hell.
With patch 2.4 you can summon them all which means a small platoon of meat shields to protect you.
After that you have to choose to either
A) Fight alongside them as a werewolf or werebear
B) focus on elemental and blast the ennemies from afar while protected by your summons.
Once you have a basic understanding of those things then you can go into more details or out of the box builds.
For instance some elemental skills cannot be cast while in animal form but others can. So you could go for a lycan elemental hybrid and even throw in a few summons into the mix if you like.
Concerning synergies I would say those are your “bread and butter” for your primary skill tree.
You won’t get far in hell if you don’t take full advantage of your synergies. For your support tree it’s not that important but for your main dmg dealer you need them.
The more you’ll play with the skills the better you’ll understand how they work and which are either powerful, fun to use or a combination of both. From there you’ll come up with more ideas on what playstyle you wish to adopt.
Hope this helps !
Thank you for your detailed answer. I´m not interested in shape shifting, so this is no point atm.
Also I don´t like skills that comes from heaven like blizzard and armagedon. Because of this my idea was to use cold or fire and backup for immunities the summons. Are the summons effective without investing in the spirit wolf? Or is it needed for hitting? Figure out is difficult because I have no respec left: I have to use tokens for each test.
The lowest possible investment in Elemental tree is 20 points in Arctic Breath + 20 synergy points in Cyclone Armor, which leaves 70 points for summons; or just 20 in Arctic Breath is you just want to use is as chill source, without significant damage. Should be enough to do something useable, maybe like Diablo II Druid Skill Calculator - Diablo II
However, classic Wind Druid like Diablo II Druid Skill Calculator - Diablo II still is better.
I never tried to build a summonner druid without maxing spirit wolves so I can’t tell how it will affect dire wolves and Grizzly.
I’ve read online comments stating that heart of wolverine more than makes up for it and increases summons dmg on top of that, but since you said you’d use the elemental tree I assume you’ll use oak sage to boost your own HP ?
Reguarding elemental skills to choose from you have a lot of them.
The overall best in my opinion is fissure. Especially for dealing with groups but again, you’ll have to test it out.
Keep in mind there are more fire immunes than cold immunes in hell. However cold immunes generally cannot have their immunity broken some can but most can’t even with an infinity runeword whereas fire immunes generally can have their immunity broken( not all but a lot of them).
Also sinxe patch 2.4 some fire skills deal physical dmg on top of fire dmg. My own build uses amp dmg for my summons, but if I were to respect my build to add fire skills, some of them would benefit from that curse. That’s just an example of how you can mix things up with the druid.
Tornado is kind of an exception as It doesnt deal cold dmg if im not mistaken.
Anyways, hope this helps as well.
Have fun testing all this.
I don´t like tornado, because the strange aiming. What I like is hurricane or fissure. This was the reason to mix one of them with summons.
Well, you have to decide either you wish to have strong summons and you’ll be supporting them, or you wish to have strong spells and your zoo will support you. Can’t have both.
Im gonna second what master BLB said.
If you try to equally invest in both you’ll have fun in normal and with good gear you may also do good in nightmare but you will probably struggle in Hell.
Thank you both for your help. I’ve thought the damage from grizzly and dire wolves should be ok without the spirit wolves synergy. Of course I could use the second spitit too
Hurrican would be probalby weak with just one synergy. Maybe fissure could be good enough with just firestorm.
The problem with actual hybrids is that their skill damages are not that high than focusing on a specific build type. And if you take a look at the health of bosses in Hell and calculate your skills damage based on their respective resistances, you might find that it will take ages to kill them with a hybrid.
I personally really like the fire elementalist with 1 pts on the main summons and all the remaining pts on Oak. You dont even need a guide for this as that build is pretty obvious. You might need an Act 2 merc with Reaper’s should you encounter a fire/phys immune elite or an other merc that has a third damage type for this.
Basically, the thing to keep in mind is that if you go hybrid you loose synergy skill points that will effectively lowers the dps of your skills. And given that most mobs has resistance to a specific damage type you almost always deal less damage to them with your usable skill and maybe setting up your merc is also a bit trickier due to this.
You can always level up a new character when you already have some gear for him and play around with hybrid builds so you can test what works and what does not. I would strongly suggest not to do it with your first character, tho, because a test setup with low gear will be even weaker.
Ok. Thank you very much. I will test it.