I really hope they give rabies another balancing pass, it is almost ready to be used as a core skill for the proliferating dot playfantasy, but it’s really behind other damage options.
you have to decide between useful aoe or hardly useable singletarget with it’s two dot centric variations. i have to spam the 1500% damage variation and stack the dot to kill magic and rare monsters and lose all my aoe or i use a basic damage version with around 300% damage ( if it stacks 3 times on an enemy) and it spreads, but it is unable to kill magic monsters in a timely manner.
i reached tier 9-10 with 3 strong mythics and a full suite of uniques with pure damage multipliers (skill level 34!) for the build and it takes forever to kill anything.
my lunatic warlock was able to enter t8 with the same amount of paragon points, no mythics and no ancestral legendaries, has full aoe and st capabilities in his basic attack using only 2 uniques and i am certain i could crush t12 with the same amount of invested time and gear.
please increase the base damage of rabies, remove the reduction in spreadability from the 1500% damage version or let the stackable version stack endlessly. the skill needs one, multiple or all changes at the same time to compare to most other skills.
i wouldn’t bother asking for buffs as there are other options to play, but this is literally the only type of proliferating dot gameplay in the game and it seemed to be supposed to be a playstyle we can use considering the chanmges and the added unique for it specifically
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Yep, pretty much. If you take the 1500% node it can hit pretty hard but you’ll have no AoE potential. If you push for rapidly spreading around the herpes it hits like a wet noodle. Even if you play into the Wildheart unique.
I used it to level and messed around with it for a bit. I did clear Tower T105, T8 Lilith, T10 Meph and complete most of the seasonal stuff with it. But then it felt like it runs into a damage wall. You just can’t kill stuff effectively to push further. Sooo… I migrated over to a Companion setup to be a proper tree hugging, animal friend.
I will say the ability is surprisingly not complete garbage for leveling. Since the 1500% node makes the skill damage coefficient/multiplier insanely big. So you don’t really need any to have much else in the mix to get it “online”, so to speak.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Rabies not be complete trash now, but I’m generally bad at understanding how some things work together so my progress hasn’t been great. What’s the build / set up you guys are using? I’d like to take Rabies further if possible.
Thanks for your time.
I agree with Furious.
Im running rabies also. Cleared pit 85 on hardcore, paragon 207.
I think its still early to tell what needs balancing. Im also pleasantly surprised with the playability of rabies.
Im using both relapse and superinfection. For pitpushing I use superinfection.
Of all the skills in the druid tree Im most impressed with rabies. Think the easy switching between relapse and superinfection is a great solution to the single target problem with rabies builds.
The fact that one of the side upgrades even changes when selecting superinfection shows the work they put in.
I currently can do T8 content well with relapse. I hope to push this to T10.
What I’m not liking so far is having to switch back and forth between the two Core nodes for the AoE / Single Target choice. Adds a level of clunk the game just doesn’t need.
Also, and I’m sure I’m doing something wrong, but I find Lacerate just not hitting as hard as I feel it should to explode the poison. Even needing to use it to make the poison “good” feels annoying to me. If I stack the absolute heck out of poison/damage over time effects, I should be able to do some dang damage.
What are you guys looking at for your current poisoning over time %? My gear is bad, I know, but I’m currently at 189.5% poison and 379.3% poisoning, and it just doesn’t hit as hard as I’d like it to.
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Im using the bearform with 5 setpiece den mother. Last step gives a x250% temperary buff.
Not using an ultimate. Looked at it, but I dont want to waste stats on CDR. Im using maul + rabies. Maul gives overpower wich now gives a x15% stacking damage increase. A very simple rotation.
But it makes it very tanky for hardcore.
had a bit more success switching off from werewolf rabies into bear, but it’s mostly carried by grizzly rage windows and it’s 200% damage increase.
currently in t10 (will likely need ancestrals with multiple buffed stats in every slot to progress higher), but it really feels like it’s needlessly handicapped between singletarget and spreadability.
i really have to spam to kill stuff.
100-200% additional increase to damage would likely bring it closer to other builds while still killing slower than bursty skills but with a satisfying playstyle ( rabies made me dislike playing any other classes and skills even)
@Furious 268% poison, 287% with poisoning out of combat
I went full wolf and think I settled on rabies, earthspike (for overpower), cyclone armor (resist/clumping/interrupts), debil roar (DR), poison creeper (moar poison via the aura node) and grizzly rage (big damage).
Ifeh’s dire totem, dark howl and malefic cresent were equipped originally as uniques go. The first two to make debil roar and grizzly rage wolf skills. The latter was so I could slot points into blood howl without having it on the bar for self-heal spam. You can also get perma berserking from it and the damage multi from the amulet on top.
I started out using runes for bulwark but then just ended up swapping to temerity. The constant-self healing spam refreshes the barrier and makes you borderline immortal unless something can 1 shot through the barrier spam.
I did pick up wildheart boots but they don’t synergize so well with the 1500% damage node. It just doesn’t spread enough. It did feel like it gave a slight damage bump but wasn’t terribly impressive.
For the most part it involved zooming around slapping rabies on everything, letting the wolf charm set warp you around. Then run around smacking em again until everything was dead or low enough to move on and let the DoTs kill it.
In the end it just felt like damage fell off a cliff eventually. It was fun to play but by no means competitive. Part of it was the lack of AoE damage. That just doesn’t work in D4. And DoT’s have never been amazing, given you often want to destroy stuff quickly.
I had considered that. Frankly, it probably is better in bear form. You’d be able to abuse resolve stacking with might of the ursine and have greater flexibility for unique slots.
The trouble with running it paired with grizzly rage is, as you say, damage tanks when the ultimate is down. I’d assume something like flickerstep could help there to bring it off CD.
You pretty much nailed it. Resolve stacking and more space for aspects somehow makes a massive difference even though the %increases on the uniques looked as big as those.
I really miss wolf mobility, but at least I can somewhat kill magic monsters on t11 now without switching to superinfection
I saw someone recommend flicker step instead of wild heart and I decided against it. Same with lacerate spam - I want to play rabies-focused.
My dream would be a rabies version that stacks damage as long as you don’t use it, so you get rare massive dots that you want to spread. This spam feels really counter-intuitive right now.
I switched back to t8 for fun and playing with rabies suddenly felt like the most fun spell in the game again, especially down in the under city, having time added pop up from white monster kills 2 screens away and seeing the minimal die out is so good
When I first got Rabies sort of built up I was in a nightmare dungeon trying to figure out why it was so sparse, only to realize Rabies had cleared all the way to the other side of the dungeon map. It’s got such cool potential, but even with the aspects that support it now it still feels like it is missing something. Maybe a class boon that somehow affects poison damage or something.
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Compared to Spiritborn Evade Swarm, Rabies is absolute balls. To even begin to sniff the crotch of that level of power and quality of life, these changes would need to take place:
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Revert the nerf on Toxin Outburst Lacerate back to 140%
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Allow it to double dip like was initially theorycrafted
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Increase the Superinfection dmg increase from x1500% to x2500-3000% based on whether first 2 changes occur
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Combine the Superinfection and Relapse nodes and create a different 3rd option. The power level of Superinfection is nowhere near strong enough to justify limiting its spread speed. Being able to kill things quickly in the overworld vs in actual end game content like pit/tower or t12 bosses are entirely different universes. Rabies has literally zero punch post t11.
The wildheart boots should give rabiës a 20yards splash in stead of a faster spread. This way you can rabiës one enemy and half the screen is also infected..
Let’s not forget the spread radius. The skill node to increase the distance should have been baked in ages ago.
A splash effect would go a long way in fixing Superinfection’s issues. In their current form, I honestly don’t understand which niche Wildheart boots are supposed to be filling. You would think it would be for Superinfection, given its limited spread, but you will rarely, if ever realize the affix’s full potential unless you’re pushing high-end pit or tower.
We are then left to the assumption that it’s basically used to turn the Relapse node into a super-spreader that realizes the full affix potential, but the problem with that is that unless you’re playing below t11 or using a lame Bear Rabies variant, Relapse lacks the punch to make the loss in utility worth it. If it is for Relapse, then the multiplier needs to be increased rather substantially.
Much like most other uniques at the Druid’s disposal, Wildheart boots are half-baked. Most of them seem to sit within this weird “man, if they just tweaked this a bit, this piece would be awesome” territory.
I feel this way about the poison related aspects as well. Like Sickfoot, for example. Move speed and damage over time speed sounds like it should be pretty good, and maybe it is, but other than the move speed it’s basically invisible.
Then you’ve got the DR for 2 seconds on close poisoned enemies, which seems like extra steps for DR.
And so on.
So I figured out a way to mob with Superinfection. It isn’t great but what you can do is use the Greenwalker Oath Boots that cause enemies that die while poisoned with Poison Creeper to have a 20% (needs buff) chance to proc it again on everyone around them. So the bigger the mob the bigger the odds that the Posion Creeper proc will cascade and just keep going off. So the rotation is to put the pull enemies in with the group pull node on Cyclone armor Then go:
Cyclone armor to pull
Poison Creeper
I then use Bloowhowl
Rabies the mob members until Greenwalker Oath procs
Sometimes it will proc once rarely never but sometimes it cascades out of control and will delete the whole mob. I also am using shattered vow for this to get DOT executes to make these things happen faster.
What torment level are you in? No way this works in t12 , or even t11 while using Shattered Vow. I’ve played around with various ideas to get poison builds to work and the highest I ever got using Creeper and even Andariel’s to act as a splash effect was t10. If that’s your goal, cool, but there seems to be a hard ceiling on Druid, particularly Werewolf poison(sans lame a** Bear Rabies, MotU ring, and Old Mountain). If you’re using that setup, then it makes sense, kinda…
I farm 10 and decimate in it. My gear is mostly maxed aside from max rolls or more GAs. All master worked etc. I opened 12 clearing pit 100. Haven’t really tried anything in it. I am doing 99’s to level my glyphs now so T11. It certainly isnt fast. The harder it gets the longer time to kill the less it will proc. In T10 its absurdly good with green walkers and shattered vow. I can get you a vid running something if you wanna see it work. Andariels is terrible. 20% chance for 40% nova I use shako for defense
Hitting about the same wall as everyone else in here with T11 and beyond. Rabies just isnt enough dmg as a slow burn. It definitely is in a significantly better spot than before. But it still needs some buffs. T10 is no problemo, but anything higher than that starts to really slow down. Meanwhile there are builds out there that delete the screen in seconds. Classic blizzard balancing.
