Druid companion build suggestions

Druid
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Hello! I’ve been playing Summoner Druid this season and while it’s fun, I feel like this build is unfortunately really lacking in development.

Summons do not have a Paragon tree, the seasonal effect of giving companions additional damage to crowd controlled is great but it becomes very apparent when going to do things like bosses that this effect has limitations as you can only get the bonus during short boss stagger windows.

There is also no way to tie in summons to most of the key passives.

I feel like having some Aspects that put pets into “Earth”, “Storm” or were categories would let them tie in to other builds and be able to get some synergies going, maybe a Paragon tree would be nice eventually?

Summoner is really fun and while it’s viable enough to play in a casual sense, it kind of sucks to have an entire skill set have very little support. With Abattoir of Zir coming I think it’s kind of sad that some builds like these will probably be under the bar needed to be viable. I hope they get some love someday!

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Would like to hear more about your build, aspects you used and where you put them (2-hander, 1 handen, amulet etc) and skills you used besides companion. Things that work well and what doesn’t.

I’m still levelling and trying out things, including companions, so interested.

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I ran companions this season, and it eventually devolved into Creeperslide. I had all the companions, and then:

  • +1 to all pets amount aspect
  • +core damage per pet (on the amulet, since this was the moneymaker)
  • the aspect that makes the creeper active cast landslide
  • double landslide aspect
  • lucky hit crits can reset pet actives via spirit boon

So Landslide did the heavy lifting and the pets were, other than the creeper active, pretty much there just to boost core skill damage and draw some fire. I was hoping at the start of the season to make companions the bread and butter, and as you mentioned, there aren’t really the paragon nodes or keystone passives to really make that happen.

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For sure! Just to start off with, if you want a powerful build, definitely build something else lol. This is definitely usable but it is not especially strong because of the lack of supporting buffs in the paragon tree and the lack of interactions with the rest of Druid’s kit. I started it for this season because of the extra power and wanted to see if it was fun and how far it would go:

Companions as primary damage dealers (goal met)

Strong enough to do most content (goal met) ~ Abbatoir of Zir is doubful from what I hear?

Originally it was all human but Blood Howl does make a wolf blink into appearance for a second.

Skills:

Blood Howl (Crit chance aspect) - Wolves (Werewolf aspect) - Poison Creeper - Ravens - Hurricane - Earth Spike (slow on hit aspect)

Despite being a “pet build”, this is an active build that relies on you to smash a lot of randomly glowing buttons and actually do stuff like pre-buff yourself. Once you get used to setting up a lot of crit you can be running through a crowd smashing poison creeper over and over or doing repeat wolf attacks.

I’m doing Metamorphosis, Sanguine Brace, Coven’s Fangs, Hectic and Ravenous

The rest of my aspects are the usual stuff to multiply damage like "extra damage based on how much resource you have, etc.

Key passive: Earthen Might

Companion builds revolve around resetting the cooldown by getting Pack Leader procs from the Wolf spirit boon. This resets all companion cooldowns with “Lucky Hit: up to a 20% chance on critical hit to reset the cooldown of your companion skills”

You want this to go off as much as possible. I’ve tried just stacking a lot of CDR and also using Hectic from the powers from this season, they do both help but the Pack Leader boon does the most work in getting companion skills available to use again by far.

The high crit chance helps both getting Pack Leader procs naturally as well as giving Earthen Might a higher chance to proc when you get crits, crits feed crits, then crits feed Pack Leader :slight_smile:

Hurricane is there to apply a wide area crowd control so everything nearby is automatically prepped for the Coven’s Fangs pet damage buff

Earth Spike is like rank 1 and I just use it to fish for procs and get Crowd Control for the pet damage boost outside of Hurricane (am using “Earth skills apply slow” on boots)

I have the companion damage boost on my amulet, I’ve been experimenting between using 1H weapons with a totem accessory and a 2H to figure out which one is better and I am sort of liking the 1H more because the faster attack speed as well as the extra crit and lucky hit you can get on the totem making a noticeable difference in the number of procs, but 2H has been good for a better damage multiplier too.

The biggest problem is being level 75 and literally having zero legendary nodes that are really helpful.

I’m still tweaking it to see if I can squeeze another multiplier in from somewhere to help.

Barrier (x) damage is something I want to maybe revisit. I tried the build with Bulwark instead of Blood Howl and Nature’s Fury instead of Earthen Might and it’s also effective but I’d only get the massive cooldown reduction from Symbiotic procs on either Hurricane or Bulwark from spamming one of the basics.

Honestly probably just taking off Hurricane and putting on a Core would open up some paragon options, although I don’t know if you’re building a pet build at that point?

What didn’t work was trying to rely on massive basic attack spam to reset cooldowns in a split second like with a puncture / trap rogue.

I’m not a math nerd but I am kind of looking at the Storm’s Companion pants I’ve tried and they don’t feel like they’re worth using compared to getting a multiplier. The storm wolves are also so awesome that I wear these for helltides and blood harvest because everything is paper anyways.

I’m level 82 with it now, Varshan / Grigoire / Beast etc are no problem, Helltides and Blood Harvest are extremely easy, Nightmare might be playable to like +20 monster level or so… Going to level up a bit more and then do Duriel, expecting its fine… Kill speeds on the bosses are low for me right now but not so low i’m getting bored at all.

Basically still experimenting with squeezing out more DPS by getting another multiplier or two. There’s a little bit of room to grow by using more glyph nodes too I guess.

I don’t regret making it at all. This build is probably only going to literally work for this one season and then be totally unviable in a few months unless companions get some love, so it’s a one time experience right now.

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I’m level 98 with Companions and am mostly based of the Icy Veins companion end build. Mostly works. I play mostly solo so the NM D. can be a bit challenging.

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I’m also running a full companion build with Crone Staff and almost perfect gear.

The build has really high gear requirements and you will have to make some tradeoffs for survivability.

With my current setup i’ve got maxxed out resists and about 14k armor when disobedience is fully stacked.

For the ultimate passives ursine strength, earthern might and nature’s fury all do work pretty well. Although in higher nm dungeons nature’s fury really stands by being able to reset bulwark and remove poisons by shielding yourself all the time which adds a pretty significant layer of survivability. If you take ursine strength or earthern might i would recommend using blood howl instead of bulwark

Im taking somewhat of a middle ground concerning companion damage (my wolves passive auto damage is at 50k non-crit).
If you really want to max the companion damage take ursine strength, tibaults will and use aspect of the alpha on a very well rolled 2handed staff . The maximum passive auto damage for the wolves i reached so far is around 100k and i didnt even have conceited aspect (barrier %dmg) on my gear back then.

Below there is a little showcase doing a nm99 dungeon with this setup.
You can also go for a 6th glyph instead of taking the constructing tendris paragon node but i found the added survivability and crowd control very helpful doing really high lvl dungeons

My current setup: https://maxroll.gg/d4/planner/alt290oi#2

NM 99 Dungeon Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y1_wZDOAkQ

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I’ve actually run out of interest in keeping up with the build because in doing testing it just seems like tons of interactions aren’t working properly and I’m getting sick of doing this again after doing it with Blood Lance.

50k wolf damage is nice, I was getting really slugger hits with a 2h 925 with 230% wolf damage on it but at the same time faster procs were also good. I had tried 6 glyphs and it was fun to do the board but then finding out that again, tons of those glyphs don’t actually work properly lol…

Having a 925 Crone, Flickerstep and perfect build is really nice. I’ve killed Varshan a few dozen times without seeing one, just have a random 851 that dropped off something in a blood harvest. How long did you work on your druid to get that finished?

It was kind of fun but between getting tired of broken interactions and constantly watching for cooldown refreshes, I think the novelty has worn off and I want to move on to something that has less proc fishing this time.

I hope companions get some more work in the future though.

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It took quite some time to figure out the paragon board, because this is completely selfmade.
But this board is very flexible, for instance when i want to go tornado with shepperds aspect i just need to swap gloves, weapon and amulet, change some skillpoints and im done, having a completely different build with almost no effort.
You can easily swap between melee and ranged combat and have many possible aspect combinations to adjust your playstyle (p.e. subterrean on gloves with aftershock on 2nd ring)

Finding some gear with very specific affixes like the helmet, chest, amulet and ring can be challenging, especially when you want to have high range rolls on them. That needs patience and much gold. My amulet cost me about 400-500 mil gold with the last roll being 31 mil