I put this here in hopes of catching someone at Blizzard’s eye.
Companions basicly suck, my lvl60 companion focused druid’s 3 wolves combined do less damage than a single skeleton mage of on my lvl 40 necromancer.
So i’d like us as a community to find ways to make companions viable.
F.e. I’d like
- an aspect that reduces the druids’ damage by 50% but increases the companions passive damage by 5000%
- a dedicated paragon board for companions
- a focus target button
- a unique that increases the amount of ravens by x (5-12) and have them apply random debuffs (immobilize, vulnerable, poison, bleed,… ) on hit.
- aspect that makes creeper active targettable, or one that makes creeper infected mobs explode on death spreading poison.
- a companion focused key passive
- allowing companions basic attacks to scale with increased basic attack damage
- allowing companions basic attacks to proc lucky hit
feel free to add more and blizz please buff 
2 Likes
Don’t know that I agree with the specifics, but at level 30 I’m already having to give up my Companion build.
It would be great if there could be a buff for Companions.
1 Like
Yeah level 81, I tried the unique that infuses your wolves with storm ( lightning damage), then took the extra companion affix and the damage increase for each companion active and the glyph that increases companion passive damage by 80[x] and sure… they could crit for 11k and helped keep heat off me but getting rid of all that I can do almost twice that damage with just a sub optimal storm build, still no tempest roar for me. I recently went back to pulverize and I hate how bored I am about it. Endgame druid feels like you HAVE to play either a variation of storm+WW or Earth + WB. Really hoping for more build Diversity later down the road. I think minions overall need a buff and a way to draw aggro.
The companions are bugged and doing far less damage than the tooltip says
I’m still running all 3 pets at level 87 although that is not where the bulk of my damage comes from. Core skills are the bread and butter damage for most builds whether it’s pulverize, landslide or tornado and with pets you have to lean into those somewhat as well.
I chose pulverize because it’s easier to run on console and with passive points for generating spirit and damage while shapeshifting (pets you shapeshift back to human) it’s a self sustain build until you get into single target situations. Storm strike is my generator when I need it, but I also get rss of damage and rss on kill which poison creeper can do quickly if I run out while killing mobs.
So what I’ve done because I run pulverize is to take advantage of their most powerful legendary aspects like making it an earth skill, shockwave (on 2H weapon) and quicksand to add slow. For my companions I run stampede for the extra pet, and on my amulet I run an aspect that boosts my core skills by 12% for each active companion. If all wolves are dead that’s base of 60 but caps out at 96% with wolves alive. This replaces the aspect that pulverize build run on the amulets that caps at 60% and is conditional based on fortify. The difference is I start at 60 and cap at 96.
I also run am the aspect the boosts companion skill damage though I feel I may drop that for something better as I get a much more significant companion boost from my paragon glyph.
But that’s where pets are currently, relegated to support your build mostly. To make them viable as damage dealers and to justify 3 slots they need to have their base damage boosted and their cooldowns reduced slightly.
Also the packleader spirit boon needs to be reworked because it doesn’t proc often enough because it’s a percentage of a percentage chance to actually reset. I’m at 40% crit chance and I don’t see it reset that often. At 40% crit chance over time that’s 4/10 hits that will crit, but only 20% of those will reset the cooldowns. That’s less than a 1 in 10 chance. Not exactly leading many packs.
Even with boosts and changes companion builds will still fall behind the other powerful builds that have better synergies to the rest of the Druid skills, but it would still go a long way towards making them viable when pushing NM dungeons. The build I have can push up to +10 levels past your own but after that the damage doesn’t keep up and the survival is worse. It’s more of a fantasy role play build than a powerful endgame build. Odd that it takes so long to unlock any of them as well. It’s like they needed an extra tree to fill in and decided to throw pets in there at the last minute.
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This is only my third day playing. Looking just at the skill tree Companions have their own entire section. My assumption was that meant they could be a build. Just looking now I realized that there are Ultimates for each of the skill sets (Bear, Werewolf, Nature), but not for Companions.
That’s an oversight on my part. I still wish they would reconsider making Companions viable as a core build. (Glad to see the buff to Wolves in today’s update.)
They could easily fix Druid wolf companions by significantly buffing their HP or at least scale their HP properly when you level up.
I am in Tier 3 now and my wolf companions constantly die left and right to the point I cannot trigger their active skill half the time, because they’re all dead!
At this point, seeing how little passive damage your wolf companions do, they can just as well have unlimited HP/being unkillable. There is honestly no reason they have HP at all and can die so easily. Makes them completely useless!
At least if they are unkillable, you can use their active skill consistently! Which is kind of vital for your companion build!
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Going to be very blunt on the companions here. Outside of using them as a skill (active ability) we’re not going to see companion centric builds be viable until after Blizzard gets Necromancer there.
Just the honest truth when it comes to minion-centric classes.
You’re probably right. I think that now noticing that their is no Ultimate for Companions. Yet there are for every other skill set.