Meanwhile, Werewolf poison is still a joke. Rabies? Psh. Raging Shred? Bah.
But sure, let’s keep making neat poison stuff for the bear to go with all of it’s other strong play options.
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Truly being stoked about Druid receiving another unique that no sane person would ever touch.
It’s becoming a tradition.
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Maybe with some grizzled rage changes that they are talking about, it could be interesting. Not holding my breath though
The huge issue is that you cannot have the puddle be up 100% of the time. At best (with a glyph) you can have it 8.4s out of 10s.
That + the fact that we have no good way to scale/take advantage of that poison makes it a bit questionable.
EDIT: Quick maths.
Let’s say you use Changeling Debt on a 2H (you are going to use Shockwave, but lets imagine you’re just an idiot for a second).
Base Damage - 100
Damage after Changeling on a 2H - 230
Damage after any non-Tracker Glyph - 253
Now let’s assume you use the new Unique with Tracker. The 400%x you don’t care about, realistically you care about the extra puddles that spawn, because those deal 160%x of the Pulv damage.
Base Damage - 100
Damage of Pulv + small puddle - 260
Duration of big puddle - 8.4s, 1.6s downtime
Average Damage - 234.4
So with a worse setup (Changeling on 2H instead of Shockwave) it is still worse … and that is not taking into account that if you do not OP during the initial hit that spawns the puddle you’re already on such a DPS loss you might as well not even consider it.
EDIT2: Realistically it needs to have 6/12s cooldown and 12s duration so it can line up with Provocation/Enhanced Pulverize. Unless you can guarantee an OP on the puddle spawn it’s just unusable.
TL;DR - It CAN be good, but only if you guarantee that the puddle triggering hit is an OP (and also assuming that the puddle damage is based on the hit it triggered it and not just a blanket 400% pulverize damage)
Yay! THANK YOU BLIZZARD! For an item that literally NO Druid has EVER asked for or even remotely wanted for our class.
They really do hate this class.
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Looks like they are trying to push poison more this coming season, toxic claw now is a poison damage bonus, the grizzled rage poison aspect now converts direct damage to poison damage, and rabies spreads passively.
The once every 10 seconds is kind of sad, wish there was a way to increase duration or frequency, but but at least the resource cost reduction could be interesting with a GA, maybe there will be something there with that.
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Just delete werewolf at this point. Rabid Bear aspect probably won’t even work with Dire Wolf because to heck with it, and one more aspect to have to use just to make it partly viable as a Shred werewolf is going to suck.
If it does work, I think I’ll be dropping Stormclaw’s in the hope that the poison will actually be worth half a damn, but I’m not optimistic.
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To add, they nerfed runework’s conduit so bad that instead of getting over 700% now it’s 40%. lightning bolt is dead and poison grizzrage about to be the second coming of human/stone busrt build of s8 with no patch to buff them. They lied and is expecting them to lie again in s9. I’m just happy as a druid community we still find ways to make druid relevant with all the fumble the druid devs are making.
Responding to your tl;dr.
I had the same thought about the trigger. Hopefully it gets changed to being triggered by OP pulverize only. That would make the item less awkward to use optimally.
Also no max life on a 2h weapon is a major L.
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Never really crossed my mind (already 4AM in here, might be the reason) but it does sound like the most elegant solution to the issue.
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Have you ever played a Necro? 
Unfortunately not enough to be as mad about it, but enough (and exactly Affliction) to question some of the changes in the patch notes.
That is questionable, but nothig stays as it is now in the PTR patch notes, going into the Live version. They always swing big in the PTR patches because it is easyer to see the difference, and then tweek it accordingly.
Also I was refering to useless uniques. Necro has like 3 uniques that are actually usable.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they do but they make it even worse. I can’t really base my expectations around trusting the developers.
I can only react to what I am presented with at the moment.
And that is best case. Realistically either you or the target have to move and the puddle becomes useless. Especially with the lair bosses and the new nightmare dungeons you will move a lot and you have no control over when the puddle spawns.
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This would be better?
Noxious Spine-Breaker: Unique 2H Weapon
Affixes
- Inherent: 110% Damage to Poisoned enemies
- 14-18% Willpower
- 114-150% Poison Damage
- 848-913 Maximum Life
- 26-35% Resource Cost Reduction
Power
- Pulverize forms a puddle that deals 200-400% of its damage as Poisoning damage over 6 seconds. When Pulverize Overpowers the puddle splashes an additional 20-40% of the puddle’s total damage within the area and around it.
The idea was the other way around.
So more like
When Pulverize Overpowers it forms a puddle that deals 200-400% of it’s damage as Poisoning damage over 6 seconds. You can have only one active puddle. Pulverizing the puddle splashes an additional [20 - 40]% of the puddle’s total damage within the area and around it.
That way the big puddle (from which the small puddlers are based on) will always have the top-end damage.
My idea was that when we OP it puts down the puddle and also splashes it at the same time.
What would be fun, if Shockwave aspect could spread the puddle. 
Probably it won’t though.
If it splashes just on OP it would be worse than currently.
Hmmm. Yeah. We would be spamming Pulv anyway, so hiting the puddle 2x is not a big deal. But if it only forms the puddle when Pulv OP-s, than you are not forming the puddle all the time, which would be the goal. That is the problem with the 10 sec CD the first place.