Lets look at the 2 companion aspects of the two classes
Necro:
4 skeleton melee
3 skeleton casters
1 golem
(a potential for 5 melee if spec’d that way) For a total of 8 to 9 total pets taking up 2 skill slots.
Druid:
2 Wolves
1 Raven
1 Creeper Vine
(a potential for 2 ravens via a skill point). For a total of 4 to 5 total pets taking up a 3 skill slots.
These aspects alone already make the two classes quite different from each other. From the number of pets, to the remaining skill slots they have available for other skills.
Taking some other core aspects into consideration:
Every Necro pet has a health bar and can take damage instead of the necro taking damage
Only Druid wolves can take damage. Ravens and Creeper cant be hit or tank damage for the druid.
Each type of necro pet has multiple spec options allowing them to play slightly differently. (Ie: being able to choose if your skeletal mages do shadow damage, cold damage, or even heal your minions.) Druid doesnt have anything like this.
Conclusion: The concern is completely unwarranted as the current foundation design of both of these builds is already unique enough that they play and feel quite different.
I just don’t understand why they even put them in the game if they didn’t intend for you to make a companion build? I can somewhat understand poison creeper, cause at least it does mass immobilize and poison. What’s the point in using wolves or ravens in a build if they aren’t suppose to be damage? Are these devs just dumb?
Worse than that, even creating aspects (including an unique pants) focused on them which, when combined, still doesn’t help them to make a slightly decent ammount of damage. It’s very disappointing, to say the least
there is a lot of games in this world that have classes and use pets or summons in 1 game and all good ??? all strong and do what it made for ??? nothing new ???
…
i hope just hope ←
they think like normal ppl and do it right and make Glyph and paragon support our companion
You need stampede aspect and wolf heart and you can start to get a pet build rolling with Alpha aspect. They are buffing that too so might be good.
So we have 4 wolves, 4 raven, 2 creeper. For 10 companions. This also boost the core by 20% per companion on 2h weapon too 200% dmg to core skills. So poison creeper 1 shots.
Shepherd’s aspect is the only worthwhile way to use druid companions (outside of poison creeper) at the moment. Wolves can perform slight tanking and provide a slight amount of fortitude while Ravens can add vulnerable, but none at a rate high enough to make them worthwhile on the toolbar (again, aside from shepherd’s aspect) once you get over level 20.
The main issue is that companion damage is bugged - items/aspects/skills/paragon which boost the tooltip don’t actually increase the damage. If you guys can help us get the word out to Blizzard, that would be great.
Here are a couple of subforums we have going discussing the core issues:
I have been testing this a lot and I can’t replicate you data. Companion damage seems to scale with tooltip damage.
From my testing, I have concluded Wolves and Ravens and most likely coded as level 1 entity. This is why they get weaker as you level. The formula for armor has mostly been cracked and the two major components for how much DR you get from armor is attacker level and armor value. Mobs get more armor as they level. The max DR an entity can get from armor is about 85% or you hit for about 15% of tooltip damage. This is what wolves and ravens seem to do for damage at high levels.
I tested this by leveling a druid to 33 with a thorns gem equipped and wolves and ravens and noting the lower % of tooltip damage and thorns as I leveled.
It’s not that they are bad… it’s that they literally don’t work. Only the tool tip damage increases and not their damage. They are buffing the Alpha aspect and it doesn’t work. The wilds Glyph doesn’t work. Companion damage doesn’t work. Game is trash.
If these things worked it literally would be fine. Minions would be killing mobs easily.
With that said played some D2R this morning to cleanse myself of this bad, broken game.
They work. I tested alpha aspect. My wolves went from 250ish damage to 350-400.
Whats going on with the tool tip is the number you are seeing for the wolves is actually being split for every wolf you gain. So the more wolves you gain, the less damage each individual wolf does. Think of each wolf as an attack speed modifier and not as a source of damage. Is this good design? No, but it’s “FUN,” huh?
As i said in another post the wolves and ravens wouldnt be so bad if the unique pants gave them the storm tag so they can help proc earthen might. Right now the wolves and ravens have really high lucky hit but druids have nothing worth proccing with lucky hit besides earthen might.
I go to world tier 2 (on a level 100 druid) and let the wolves attack polar bears without any paragon boosts, skill boosts, or equipment aside from a low-level club. I then record the damage, which is between 32 and 45 when the wolves’ tooltip is at 99 (for max damage). I then add to the paragon board until damage is up to 206, but the wolves are still dealing 32-45 damage. I’ve also tested with [x] companion skills and gear, to bring the tooltip damage up to 167 (from 99) and found that again the damage didn’t change. I’ve invested 30mil gold and many hours on this testing.
If you replicate my testing you should get the same results. It won’t work if you simply play and eyeball it, because there are too many other factors. World changes (like vulnerable and effects from changing form) along with weapon damage both effect actual damage output. I haven’t tested every factor out there, nor have a strenuously tested with all companions, as I’ve focused on wolf passive damage - but i have tested wolf active and raven passive a fair bit and found consistent results with wolf passive.
If you find further, or different results, from the testing then please let me know - but you need to test and not just play as usual, otherwise it’s not helpful.
Add: I make sure to test on several polar bears each time. They usually take up to a minute to kill (less depending on how many times they hit me and trigger thorns).
