Ive played companion build on my druid the majority of my time leveling. My druid is level 85 and I have all of the companion related legendary and unique items. The passive damage on my wolves with around 360% bonus companion damage, including the glyph which adds +80% to companion passive damage, is around 10k white damage and 20k~25k crits. This is with stacking vulnerability (~160% bonus) and using ravens to make sure wolves are hitting vulnerable targets. The use rate on storm howl and the rabies attack is like 1 every 15 to 25 sec. The active ability on the wolves can hit for 250 to 400k if its a crit. That kind of damage is okay for doing at level content, but cant push higher tier content. If you stack armor and resists wolf survivability increases, but even with high armor they often die against large packs with elites in Nightmare Dungeons that have monsters 10 to 20 levels higher than the player. Ravens have a potentially much larger damage possible because they can stack damage ticks on a target and proc bad omen, however this only occurs when you have a large group of mobs to get lucky hits with.
If you dont want to push high tier nightmare dungeons than a companion build can be effective for semi-casual gameplay. Use poison creeper for clearing trash, wolves to execute high health/dangerous/elite targets, use ravens for large packs of tougher mobs. Run lucky hit and crit on everything that can roll it. You can click companion skills while channeling lightning storm without interrupting the channel. Lightning storm has one of the highest proc rates for the cooldown reset spirit boon.
Once I get the right rares I am going to test a new build that I am hopeful for, will make a video or something if it works out.
Well your wolf companions dying constantly IS a problem, because itâs often complete chaos on your screen and half the time you trigger their active skill and nothing happens, because all your wolves are dead!
Itâs especially bad now I arrived in Tier 3, they get nearly one-shotted to death constantly! It makes the wolf companions completely useless at this point!
So not only is their damage output bugged! Their HP doesnât scale properly either when you level up / move up in Tiers!
Either way. Their passive damage is so low, there is really no reason why they should have HP at all and cannot just be simply immortal and not able to die!
This way their active skill is at least useful and work consistently.
Right now, my Druid is simply unplayable and not fun to play in Tier 3! I like to play the Druid in human form and run a companions build! Itâs the sole reason I play the Druid.
But itâs just not viable and fun anymore the moment you hit Tier 3!
At this moment, anyone that can still stomach playing a Druid in mid to endgame, pretty much 90+% of them are running Pulverize/Werebear build. Itâs boring!
So I am really disappointed in todays balance patch, that nothing has been done with the wolf compansions at all.
Theres an even bigger problem. Even if they buff the damage by 100% and its a bug fix, it wont be near enough. Show me 10-20million hits with your build centered around it and then itll be viable.
200 damage attacks are a far cry from the 20 million damage attacks it needs to compete.
This post shows that its not just their damage that is bugged, but the mechanical interaction they have with a LOT of passives, items, etc
For example, they do NOT gain any benefits from the âWildrageâ aspect unless your character is actually shapeshifted. Even IF you have the aspect that makes your wolves turn into werewolves.
I think the current issue with summons is not the damage but their overall usefulness. Itâs pretty clear Blizzard doesnât want high damage summons, which makes sense as it would lead to everyone playing a lazy âwalk around while your summons kill everythingâ build, which would then lead to a max exodus of the player base as the game would be pointless to play.
Iâd be happy if Blizzard simply gave them more utility.
Wolves off-tank and can fortify (lightly) but their other two bonuses are damage related, and therefore pretty useless.
Ravens do nothing useful on their base, increase crit chance by 5% on one upgrade, provide vulnerable for 3 seconds on 2nd upgrade but again increase damage on the alternate.
Poison Creeper Immobilizes, increases immobilize duration, then increases crit significantly with an alternate option of increasing poison damage/time, which can be used in wolf (or technically bear) poison builds.
4/4 Creeper abilities are useful while 2/4 wolf abilities and 2/4 Raven abilities are useful. Itâs not a surprise that people use creeper in non-companion builds (the other reason is that creeper 90% damage over 2 seconds in a large area is usually far more damaging). To make things worse, âcall of the wildâ is again only a damage modifier - if it enhanced the player in another way, it could be useful, but for now itâs only used by the few of us who d*ck around trying to make companions work. And of course most of the companion glyphs and aspects upgrade damage.
A current issue is absolutely the damage they deal. Tooltip damage is absolutely off for passive numbers, by a massive magnitude compared to other skills or even the active damage for at least ravens and poision creeper. If they did proper damage they wouldnât exactly help you push to insane NM or create new meta, but they would still give a substantial lift to companion/zoo builds.
A possible clue - this evening I was experimenting with the aspect that replaces your wolves with werewolves and gives bonus damage (mine rolled with +75% damage).
My wolves ended up doing more than +75% additional damage, which is the exact opposite of what I would expect from additive bonuses (which would be to be equal or less than a +75% bonus, thanks to additive stacking with other bonuses). They went from doing like ~500-600 a hit to ~1200-1400 per hit (read: more than doubling, way more than +75% additive bonus). This is despite the fact that their passive tooltip damage actually went down because the weapon with the werewolf aspect has less item power than my main gear. 1200-1400 per hit is still extremely weak sauce for me being lvl 90, but at least itâs a little closer to passive tooltip damage (though still off by like a third, and this is ignoring all the various conditional damage bonuses I should have active), and definitely indicates that something is just really busted with passive companion damage is being calculated.
when iâm feeling a bit more motivated, maybe iâll record myself with various damage numbers and set ups just in the distant hope that some blizzard dev sees this thread and can take some value from it in debugging the issue.
Personally, I doubt itâs a bug, but I donât get why not having an active companion skill equipped in the skill tray makes it so you donât have the companion at all.
I like running around w/WW companions for the VFX if for no other reason, but I donât like having to eat up a skill tray slot to do it. Skill point investment is costly enough, I donât think a skill tray investment should be required for anything other than using itâs active ability.
itâs either a bug with how much damage theyâre dealing, or with how the tooltip calculates the damage.
if they want to keep passive companion damage low, they should actually reflect that by having low weapon damage % values in the ability, not with some secret nerf.
more to the point, it definitely seems the case that active wolf ability is also bugged, whereas active ravens and active poison creeper are not (in fact i do an insane amount of damage with poison creeper and ravens). there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the companions that actually occupy the world space, e.g. the wolves, the pecking ravens, and the wandering creeper (as opposed to static effects like the raven active and the mass aoe from the creeper)
edit: if i were to wildly speculate, maybe the effective monster level for wolves, ravens, and the poison creeper in passive mode are bugged and set to like monster level 1, so theyâre getting a maxed out damage reduction (85%) against similarly-leveled foes. they should at least be doing 3-4x damage of what theyâre doing now, assuming ~50% DR is typical for similarly-leveled foes (going up from 15% of tooltip to 50% of tooltip would be ~3x increase). Coincidentally, 15% of my tooltip damage would be roughly in the range of what the wolves are currently doing. if i go down world tiers, they definitely do more damage, but i havenât actually done anything more indepth like actually compare to how other skills change damage.
The weapon with the aspect might have had another modifier that recalculated the damage buckets which is why you saw a bigger increase than you were expecting. Either way the damage is still too low to make them viable. Also if you are running the wilds glyph if could have had some interaction with that as well.
i mean, iâm not a doofus. both weapons have lots of damage modifiers on them, but the results i saw were outside the bounds of reasonable possibility. something is just busted with druid passive companions, and wolves especially.
I think you mistook what I was referring too. I was referring to when a companionâs actively ability is NOT equipped in the tool bar the companion doesnât show up at all regardless of how many skill points are invested in it. Iâd prefer to have the companionâs Iâve skilled up there, but just theyâre active ability be unavailable based on if itâs slotted or not.
Edit: A bit OT from the OP, so I understand the confusion.
no i was just directly responding to your speculation that maybe the passive companion damage being wrong isnât a bug. itâs a bug one way or another. no comment on your suggestion about companions showing up without putting the skill on the toolbar.
Yeah, again the âitâ I was referring to wasnât about passive companion damage, but not having a skilled up companion at all if itâs active isnât slotted. Anyway rather then go round and round, Iâll just say sorry for the confusion I couldâve worded the post better by not using a pronoun at the start of it.
ugh, itâs even worse than i thought. i was messing around with the companion abilities just now, and while i previously thought the active ravens and poison creeper were fine, they are also seriously under-performing their tooltip damage - when really with my build they should be significantly over-performing their tooltip damage.
basically: none of the companions function correctly. at least poison creeper still has poison synergy for Heightened Malice paragon board and various glyphs and still has immobilize synergy for landslide.
whatâs really lame is that i un-socketed my level 20 wilds glyph, because i just wanted to see whether or not itâs just the fact that damage buffs arenât applying correctly. whelp, wilds is definitely doing something, because when i unsocketed it the passive damage on my poison creeper went from ~200/tick to ~30/tick. 30 damage per tick, for a level 94 druid. whatever wilds glyph is doing, it basically doesnât matter because these abilities are just too dysfuntional⌠i should be doing several orders of magnitude more damage.
Even if wolves did 10x the damage they do now I am not sure they would be useful. They die way too fast and it disables the active skill. Raven passive damage is nothing and active skill is tiny, everything moves out of it, has targeting issues and provides a debuff that druid has lots of other sources for⌠You would have to try to not have vulnerable pop up in your build somewhere.
Well you donât just use companions, you still have lots of skill points to spend elsewhere, but the companions would have been more than half the damage of my buildâŚif they worked as intended.
