Decided to mess around with a companion / rabies build on a fresh druid that I got to T4 today. Mostly it’s just me running around like a doofus hitting Rabies on cooldown so I can watch the poison kill all of the infected enemies for the fun of it.
But with a few tempers and enchants, I have an increasingly stupid problem with Rabies -
I bite the guy… and it dies immediately, many times before Rabies can even spread. Virulent Aspect, which is already a band-aid, becomes useless because it doesn’t proc. The already too long cooldown timer means I am running around waiting for it to come off cooldown if Virulent doesn’t proc a couple of decent times, but this makes it so much worse.
And then there is the actual spread radius. Things dying too fast makes the tiny radius all the more noticeable since enemies a foot away don’t get the infection in time.
Next up - half the cooldown and double the radius, please! Thanks!
The problem i have is when facing boss. The cooldown isnt be enough to spam the skill thus making it really hard to run high pit tier (70+). Please also make virulent aspect cooldown reduction tripled when infecting Elites and boss. Or any other way to make rubies build viable.
The skill needs a rework. It should have charges, lower cooldown and Werewolves companions should use it more (plus should lower yours and their cooldown with the aspect). It doesn’t have any kind of damage to justify how it works today.
I made a rabies druid this season. Levelling was actually super easy. Barely an inconvenience. I was doing NM dungeons with the monster level being 40-50 levels above me so they wouldn’t die instantly. NM dungeons were easy. Take any rabies damage, DoT, and max will power that you can.
----I made a suggestion to have at the point of skill cast rabies also creates a poison cloud for 1-2 seconds that emits rabies as well. This would prevent the instagibs killing our rabies transmission to other mobs.
I can clear PIT 71 sooooo easily (with X’fals), but around Pit 75 bossing is horrendous so I didn’t push after that. Aspect of the Alpha helps some when the wolves spread their rabies too. The only way to get the wolves to spread their rabies is by not pressing the wolves’ active. It seems to reset their attack combo timer thing. Wish they were more consistent in timing with spreading rabies. If you move around a lot they seem to have issues spreading it.
Plus none of the poison glyphs give us DR, so i felt very fragile.
It’s par for course. Druid skills don’t scale well in the end game. There’s not really any good paragon nodes that boost our poison damage. We need to have a some boost for bosses, either CD reduction or damage.
Everything you said is right, but I almost feel like there should be a bit of “skill” to knowing how and when to bite. As in “don’t bite low health stragglers, bite high hp guys, or herd low hp guys into a group, then bite the group to enable the spread.” Positioning and situational awareness matters with rabies.
Below is my feedback for rabies fwiw. The spread speed should be baseline, it’s extremely synergistic with virulent aspect, it is the clear no brainer choice when combined with that aspect.