Rabies has been a lackluster skill since launch, and would like to share an idea to the devs for improvement. I think giving the skill more reliable means to spread and infect nearby targets in trash groups would be a huge step in the right direction.
Rabies
Double the radius for infected enemies to spread Rabies to other nearby targets.
There are tons of ways to improve Rabies without needing it to crit. The real issue with Rabies is that the damage is just too low. Compare it to Poison Creeper for instance which does around 10x the damage.
I would actually like to see Rabies have higher Lucky Hit proc chance, so you can wear Andariel’s and see poofs of poison popping up all over all the poor rabid zombies. Blizzard to afraid of DOT effects and things like Conjures, Companions and Minions and don’t want them proccing Lucky Hit effects. That’s sad.
Well, you could think of the crits for Rabies representing the damage caused by the virus itself, not the poison DoT. The DoT in this case is disease progression, hence the crits.
Forget critting, I want double the spread radius and half the cooldown. I’ve been playing a companion / Rabies druid the last couple days as sort of a stupid build to mess around with since they upped the damage.
I’ve found that while I’ve been leveling it after a few +Rabies damage tempers, the initial bite is strong enough to kill a lot of things, which means sometimes the Rabies doesn’t even have a chance to spread because enemies aren’t immediately on top of the thing I just killed, leaving me to wander around while I wait for the pointlessly long cooldown to refresh so I can hope to try again.
Even once I started doing NMDs where the enemies didn’t die to the initial bite, I can have an entire screen worth of enemies and half of them don’t even end up getting infected, which I’m not sure if it’s because Rabies has some sort of cap to the number of enemies it can infect, or if it’s the incredibly poor spread radius working against me.
Making it a more reliable application in trash groups would be a huge step in the right direction.
I just don’t see the need for it to Crit. It sounds like you want it to do something like X’Fal’s where it blows up in a burst after a while. That works I guess, but should be a separate upgrade in the Rabies tree, like instead of the rabies which does damage in 4 seconds it could do that instead.
Right now what you can do is wear the XFal ring, it does kind of what you want to happen.
Another thing I’d like to see is have the werewolves spread rabies more often. They almost never do it. Rabies build would be legit strong if the werewolf pets used their rabies attack more, and benefited from Companion damage buffs. That would be amazing.