Feedback on a Lacerate build

Druid
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I made a Lacerate build on Hardcore to see how far I can push it.

Gear I used: Airidah’s inexorable will, Flickerstep, Mad Wolf’s Glee and Locran’s talisman.
Masterworked: my 2-hander to 12/12, rest of gear 9/12.
Paragon level: 260
Skills: Lacerate, Hurricane, Maul, Wolves, Debilitating roar and Cyclone Armour.
Aspects: Stormshifters aspect, aspect of the Unsatiated, Edgemasters aspect, Changeling’s debt, Spirit bond aspect.

Build explained:
Maul is to make use of the Bestial Rampage keypassive, build fortify, Heightened senses, Iron fur and mending.
Wolves are for the Spirit Bond aspect and to help build fortify.
Hurricane is for Stormshifter’s aspect (+5 to shapeshifting skills) to increase damage of Lacerate and lower its cooldown.
Cyclone armour I pretty much use in every build, cause it gives damage reduction to non-physical.
Debilitating roar I picked for the +15% damage buff. I combined this with 3 points in Backlash (+12% damage). I use this to set up Lacerate with two extra damage buffs.

Result:
I began to struggle in the pit on low 50’s. I couldn’t level my glyphs to legendary. I decided to add some companions for extra damage. I only replaced my aspects and switched one glyph (added Wilds).
The result was that I could do low 60’s in the pit.
With my glyphs now at level 53 I reverted back to pure Lacerate, because that was the plan the whole time and not a half baked companion build.
But I’m still stuck in the low 50’s. The damage is too low so I run out of time on the Boss. This is with 90% crit chance, +1217% Ultimate damage, +1168% critical strike damage.

Feedback on aspects and skill-tree:
Changeling’s debt: the werewolf part requires crowdcontrol. This means this aspect doesn’t work on bosses cause they can’t be crowdcontrolled.
Toxic claws: this passive skill almost doesn’t seem to do anything. With 3 points invested I really have to look hard to see a minimum of poison added to the healthbar.
Finding aspects to increase the damage of Lacerate is hard, so thats why the strange choice of adding Aspect of the unsatiated in a build that doesn’t use spirit. For that reason I also went for Locran’s talisman.
Useful tip: if you put Stormshifters aspect on an amulet, it gives a whopping +8 to shapeshifting skills. With utility tempers you can increase the duration of hurricane so it has permanent uptime.

Conclusion:
I had fun pushing this build as far as possible. Lacerate forms a great combination with Airidah’s Inexorable will, in my opinion one of the best designed uniques. But from all skills we can choose, I think Lacerate might be the most undertuned.
For a companion build its a nice addition because of its damage buff, but stand alone it works till T2. I did a Maiden in T3 Helltide and I just did no damage. Because I couldn’t do T3 horde’s, masterworking my gear took a lot of effort.
All the tools are in the game (tempers for increased duration, lower cooldown and +Ultimate damage), but the result isn’t there yet. I don’t expect every build to do T4, but it would have been nice to at least be able to do open world content with it on T3.

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Awesome for trying. A few things I would throw out there.

Airidah’s is not designed well. It takes up a ring slot, which is premium for most classes and has a nice utility function, but it doesn’t provide damage for the most part. It should function more like Catastrophe, where you deal more damage after casting an ultimate, because even with the upcoming buff from 2% to 10%, the damage it deals will probably be useless from T2 or T3 on.

Toxic Claws is trash outside of Hard/Expert, the only reason to put a point in it is to activate poison for Envenom, which is Druids best passive. Your Ultimate damage is great, but it’s also just dumped into the main damage bucket, and doesn’t make a huge difference the better your gear gets.

Hunter’s Zenith is probably the best shapeshifting damage ring for druids, I’d dump the wolves and spirit bond, using Shred for movement and in between, you could throw in Starless skies for the extra damage. I don’t know what you’re using for helm, Harlequin would probably be best overall, Heir of Perdition for Damage. Use Retaliation instead of Edge or Changeling.

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Check different combinations to see how your damage changes.

I gave up on Changelings, but some of the top shred pushers use it. I think their plan is to burn the bosses in their staggered phase similar to rogues.

Aridah’s will is really good after the patch. I mean, like really good. Make sure you have your ring as close to the 932 damage as you can.

I wish stormclaw worked with Lacerate.

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Hello Worsaw,

I tried Aridah’s yesterday after patch to see how it performed now.
I agree that the damage boost is noticable.
Previous all my damage numbers were in the K’s, not the millions (M). Now I finally saw millions, probably from the ring.

Its nice, but it isn’t really the boost I was looking for. I levelled a 2-hander to 12/12 to make use of the increased duration tempering. But now its probably better to ignore this and try to have as many lacerate’s as possible, to proc the ring.
But then the build is based around Airidah’s doing the damage and not Lacerate.

Maybe im too much of a perfectionist.

But there’s no problem. I parked my character and began levelling a new build. Another Rabid bear. I want to see how it performs with the many buffs it had this patch. I lost my previous one on Hardcore. That one didn’t have shattered Vow. Now I have it and want to see how it performs.

Sidenote: the +23.000% increased damage on my ring sums up pretty well the state of damage calculation in the game.

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It’s pretty nice, I am using petrify with a ring that’s 932 dmg, and 28,000%, and a 9.5 second cooldown on petrify, if I kill 10 enemies or hit a boss that’s 0 cooldown, which is rather fun, then it relies on your attack speed.

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Hello Paul,

Petrify is an ultimate I never use, so its easily to miss that its worthwhile to make a build around. Glad you did.

Was thinking, if you couple it with Nature’s Fury then you might be able to trigger also a decent amount of Cataclysms.

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Are you able to get hit while in lacerate? Could something like thorns along with flickerstep work? I feel like a lot of the wolf skills fall behind because they lack the ability to become a storm skill as well. Where as like pulverize, trample, you can make an earth skill, and all storm and earth skills you can make wolf/bear skills as well.

Yeah you can def get it to cast cataclysm.

And yeah I have been using petrify all season, even with my landslide build, as pulling all the enemies to one spot for landslide works really well. I would cast petrify, then cast creeper, then landslide. and used flickerstep, and that spirit boon to lower cooldown.
I am now on a boulder build, doing somewhat similar but with boulder.

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I need to partially retract what I said about Airidah’s, I thought it was 10% /100WP, not 10%/1. I’m going to test it out and see. It might actually be pretty powerful now, but I have a feeling it probably still won’t be but maybe enough multipliers will work.

Good news is, it works with Yom rune. So the question is, can we get multipliers high enough for it to be a build, or is it just a booster that helps along the way.

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As an aside, Airidah’s is effected by Fists of Fate

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Lacerate gives immunity. Besides the effect you don’t take damage, I also notice that monsters ignore you and try to find a different target. In Infernal hordes I saw The burning butcher switch targets to my wolves when I used Lacerate.

So pairing it with Thorns, probably doensn’t work well.

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Another follow up, I did some calculations, it looks like Airidah’s can get up into the 10+ billions. I was having issues with it fully geared that I didn’t have with initial testing though with Yom rune, which it stopped proc’ing the ring damage for some reason and then started again randomly. I did not try to make a Lacerate build though, but it would be easy to include since the damage stacking is aimed at generic to get the most out of Airidah’s.

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Single target is still a thing. Bosses with adds can be done decently. Bosses without adds are a slog.