So I think I’ve finally made a breakthrough in making a Hybrid Werewolf and Pet Build.
Here’s my changes from the standard lightning shred build:
- I’m replacing Cyclone Armor with Wolves (Either Brutal or Ferocious).
- I’m replacing Edgemaster’s, Retaliation, and Accelerating with Shepherd’s, Alpha, and Stampede.
- I’m also replacing my pants with Storm’s Companion in exchange for Tempest Roar to compensate for the defensive aspect loss. (as if I’d get a Tempest Roar any time soon)
Probably not the best build but it would be awesome leading a pack of werewolves while shredding everything that moves. But let me know if I can make some more improvements to it.
Edit: I did not look up any old forum posts with this topic so apologies if this turns out to be a duplicate
Hope it works, hoss. Let us know how it rolls.
As someone who has run a shred/companion build for well over 200 hours, here’s my take:
- Go for ferocious. Companion damage is crap due to the double/triple skill multiplier.
- I use accelerating currently (although it’s not a deal breaker for the build). Would recommend against alpha (see above), although may be worth checking with the slight buff and fixes on the next patch.
- Max shepherd’s on a 2h is key for this build (stampede on ring or gloves).]
- Also don’t have a TR. Wouldn’t recommend storm’s companion (see above). I use temerity currently and it’s getting a very large buff on the patch.
The only perk of using werewolves is the ability to spread rabies. The general feedback (and my own brief usage) is that the spread rate is very lacking - and if you aren’t going heavy poison, it’s pretty pointless (although rabies is getting a buff in the patch, so werewolf/poison may be worth exploring).
I have to warn you, I used to kill insanely fast, and still do, but where I was capped in the low 70s (NM) I’m now capped in the mid 60s due to the last patch. The nerfed WW survivability by an insane amount. I typically never use the wolf skill as the damage isn’t worth it - but they’re good at off-tanking, and situationally bad because they can spread out the enemies. Ravens are pretty useless unless you need additional hits (damage sources). Vine creeper is handy when activated (immobilize and crit chance), not very useful passive.
I’ve tried running this build without a basic skill, but once you hit a boss (or butcher) you will need the basic skill - stormstrike is useful here for the vulnerable, damage reduction and form change. Hurricane (with 20% DR) is very helpful if trying to run w/o a basic skill. The 6th skill (after 3 comps, shred and basic) is the key - I’ve used blood howl the most…but there isn’t a perfect answer.
It’s a strong build that kills fast and hits hard, probably better than lightning shred if you don’t have TR, but it’s squishy.
I’ve got perfect rolled aspects, just looking for the right equips to imprint them to. I’ll post as soon as I try it out, Skippy.
Noted on these points. I still wanna try out how it works with the storm werewolves and then I’ll adjust accordingly if it sucks lol.
Good luck! Let us know if you get it to work
So I finally got to try it with my initial plans and here’s my findings:
Pros:
- Storm’s companion also changes the wolves active skill to making them become lightning balls that rush the target making it less clunkier and when they arrive they also do damage in a small AoE.
- Werewolves are pretty decent meat shields and are viable in WT4 and helltide, even in a very anti-pet dungeon like spiderhosts + bloated undead with fire/plague enchanted.
- Losing cyclone armor wasn’t that much of a defense drop.
Cons:
- Werewolves did around 10% of my damage with their strongest attacks so we can’t rely on them to take down even the most mundane of mobs.
- The active damage still sucks even after all the skill level and companion damage boosts that I got without sacrificing shred damage. It can barely oneshot low hp mobs and does around 40-60% for larger ones like the giant khazra or bloated undead.
- Spirit generation was a bit harder due to giving up accelerating.
- The WW companions seem to use storm howl and rabies randomly and not immediately after cooldown.
- Their auto-attack is so slow that they miss when their target moves.
- I constantly had to use the active skill to reposition them since their movespeed buffs were not enough.
After this I moved on to Fenris’ suggestions and had wolves adopt a more defensive role by taking ferocious and bringing back accelerating in exchange for alpha. This improved my damage and defense even more but still not as good as a solo werewolf build.
So it’s completely viable and cool to look at but unfortunately companions are just glorified meatshields and I hope they get more buffs. I think a few that I want to see would be:
- Alpha aspect making wolves a werewolf skill and then improving their damage and attack speed even further (I think them doing around 20-30% of your shred damage would be great)
- Shepherd’s adding damage reduction an addition to damage for each companion.
- Improve their AI so they use skills immediately after calldown
- Improve their movespeed as they still lag behind even after a 50% mspd buff from storm’s companion.
Question do your wolves just always poison with rabies or only after you cast it. I was hoping to try this build with rabies not on my bar and just wanting my wolves to spread it then I use a werebear skill to do the instant 120% dmg
they cast it randomly. I don’t have rabies on my bar though. Do they cast it when you use rabies?
Hope you haven’t changed your build yet as the patch is just about to drop. Unlikely to bring the damage to a point you would like, but the boost should be ~41%-280% for wolf passives and ~53%-358% for raven passives, and that isn’t counting the 30% overall boost from call of the wild (has been broken) and 26-52% overall boost from aspect of the stampede (has been broken).
You’ll likely still be disappointed, but those numbers are quite large and the difference should be quickly noticeable.
Your last 2 suggestions seem reasonable, but I doubt Blizzard would give a boost based on shred damage (can’t think of a similar boost like this) due to how quickly it could get accelerate damage and Shepherd’s aspect is already one of the strongest in the game with the 90x-180x (more with hearts) core damage boost.
the patch did nothing for companions. waste of manhours
I switched back to standard shred but the equips are still there. If they still massively suck post buff then I have to imprint lightning storm aspects to them since I want to try that build too. On another note I wish they would keep Lightning storm and tornado human builds their animations look wonky when you’re in werewolf form.
also, not saying they should base their damage off shred but when your shred does 200k damage then they should be able to do 20k with their storm howls and crits too.
Crits seem to work as normal with passive damage (not sure about crit rate though - I haven’t tested).
Seems like you’re simply saying ‘they should do more damage’ and I agree. Right now the tooltip multiplier is affecting both Willpower and +damage buckets - if they removed the triple multiplier then that would be the case (my passive damage tooltip for wolves is currently 11% while my 3rd hit of shred is 154%; for example), but I doubt they will do this (if they just made to tooltip correct it would be nice though).
BUT, maybe they can be talked into removing just one of the additional multipliers. If they removed the multiplier from willpower-skill damage (assuming willpower = 1,000) then a 25% passive damage skill would go from 1,000 damage to 4,000, it’s not the 16,000 it would be if they removed both of the additional multipliers, but it’s a start.
There are some players who think that the developers don’t know that the triple-multiplier is even in there as it appears to be a relic left behind from D3 code. But based on their patches and talks, I think they know, but they don’t know how to fix that tooltip damage so that it accurately displays the passive damage.
alpha was changed to multiplicative.
So I retried it again after buffs and there is some noticeable increases in damage. My werewolves now do a respectable 700-800 (up from 400-500) damage per basic attack (my storm strike does 8k for reference) while their storm howl now does around 3.5k. Their active still barely one shots mobs. I’d say they now do around 12% of my total damage but they are still cool looking meatshields if anything else.
Field tested them on a T30 Nightmare dungeon and enemies were at lvl 82. None of them got killed during the dungeon run (although it should be noted that we didn’t have explode on death enemies on this one)
Eww.
Why though? Wolves are useless, will always be useless. Rod says we shouldn’t use pets as a Druid.
Because we can and we want to. We don’t have to follow builds to the letter you know.
also, trampleslide and poison shred druids use poison creeper.