Let’s say one gets to 75 without any decent unics drops. So which build should be played to level further in reasonable level of NM dungeons?
I am level 73 and can clear tier 33 nightmare dungeons with only the vasily’s unique playing a trampleslide build that I made up myself. If I didn’t have this unique I could play a very similar build with stormstrike and no grizzly rage instead but probably 5-6 tiers lower for nm dungeons. I personally haven’t come across any builds that really compare without tempest roar/crone staff.
The two pulv aspects (shockwave, earth tag).
The “use earth skill storm skills get extra crit chance, use storm skill earth skill gets extra crit dmg.”
The two nature fury-related aspects (cooldowns on trigger, bear and wolf skills also count).
The “earth skill slows aspect.”
Everything else is filler for comfort. I use attack speed after core skill crit, earthen bulwark duration, and shapeshifting heals/fortifies.
Skills are storm strike, pulverize, earthen bulwark, the wolf howl, bear howl, and hurricane.
Board I just copied a board from d4builds. Glyphs are exploit, werebear, territorial, spirit, and shapeshifter. I use shapeshifter instead of undaunted because I shapeshift to cast pulv and the extra crit chance is nice.
This is pretty much just a budget pulv build that doesn’t have prayer and is forced to go into melee range. Differences include storm strike giving dmg reduction and vuln (better coverage compared with builds that rely solely on exploit), and nature fury allowing me to spam def skills like no tomorrow. Gameplay is pretty much spam skills, basic attack to trigger all sorts of stuff, press pulv, and pray for a crit.
No mobility, so build is kinda slow. Also heavily depends on crits. I pushed to high 50s/low-60s, then hit lv100 and decided to quit. May come back after a bit to see if I can finally get TR.
Edit: a bit more comparisons to pulv builds. No grizzly rage, so unstoppable only comes from bulwark and that can be inconsistent, especially when enemies hit hard. Also no stacking crit damage, but mobs aren’t hard to clear anyway and this works fine enough even if you’re fighting one enemy, e.g. butcher. I once ran this with earthen might but I felt it was a bit too inconsistent so I ended up with nature fury.
2 Likes
I’d recommend the above build in general as well.
You can make some variations such as tossing in trample in place of bear or wolf howl along with the aspect that makes it an earth skill / landslide to squeeze a bit more out of nature’s fury cooldown reductions and improve your CC / unstoppable uptime. A full Trampleslide build is not that great if you are using a controller in my experience however.
There’s also an earthen bulwark aspect to extend it up to a massive 9 seconds which can easily maintain 100% uptime on unstoppable if desired and you are not face tanking too many elites.
Petrify is not too bad as an ultimate if you need it for troublesome elite packs that you can’t obliterate; the snake boon to reduce its cooldown contributes a fair bit of cooldown reduction.
Earthen might works as well until you get to the higher nightmare tiers and run into chain CC issues where the higher uptime on earthen bulwark or grizzly’s rage is a requirement.
Im personally using a Pulverize and Trampleslide hybrid build just for clearing NM dungeons, not the best single target but pretty strong, extremely fast at clearing. Went from 50-77 using it in hours. Combines the best of pulverize and the screen clearing of Trample with landslide and requires no uniques. Easily pushing NM dungeons 10 levels above me right now with it. Like everyone else, I would love to try tempest roar, but until then this is a very strong build.
I’m trying out a Lightning Storm human build with companions on my second Druid. In the low 50s right now and it feels pretty good. Damage is better than earth-werebear but the survivability is lower. Having a full suite of companions (for the +core skill dmg) does make up for a lot of the fragility. I’m not taking an ultimate, nor a stun-break. We’ll see how far I can ride this train.
Mind giving a brief overview of the build/glyphs?
some viable builds
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trampleslide
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all the various stoneclaw builds
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bulwark dps builds
Yea, give me a bit and I will link you the video build guide. I used this build to blast so fast tonight that I actually got Tempest Roar, The Waxing Gibous, The Greatstaff of the Crone, Temerity, The Penitent Greaves, Fists of Fate and Hunter’s Zenith, as well as one Mother ring… All withing a few hours using this build that had no uniques. Now I will transition into a end game build.
It took me from level 45 to 77 using this build, I got all of these drops though tonight just leveling 69-77 in matter of just few hours. Was blasting NM dungeons fast.
Same. No uniques in my build.
Nature’s Fury and aspect of Symbiosis to reduce CDs, Shockwave Aspect, Ursine Horror, Trampled Earth, etc.
Pulverize is main damage but even without investing in landslide and Aftershock it does decent damage but I use more for utility and a “free” attack when low on spirit or needing a CC break or whenever really. CD is low so you can just spam between Stormstrikes and pulverize.
It’s good fun and very effective for me so far at 72
Much appreciated. Will wait for a video.