[1.1.7.2] The Dryad's Apprentice - Heal-based Trozan Druid

[Monceaux]

Trying to build around Dryad, I wondered what build would get the most out of it, and the chosen one for this proof of concept is the trozan druid : it has high CDR, hungers for sustain, and is a natural fit thematically.
Instead of the conventional Chains of Brandis + Bat, I use for sustain the same defensive devotion trio that proved to be quite good on my beginner Trozan guide : Dryad, Chariot of the Dead, Behemoth. We don’t use life leech here (unless you 1-point Blood Pact for extra safety).
Thanks to the huge CDR (45% average, 50% with top rolls) and Eternity, we achieve nearly 100% uptime on Wayward Soul and Arcane Will, and low cooldowns on our chunk heals.

Grimtools Link

Gear Alternatives

Only the hat can be crafted, I chose movement speed since it’s not capped and important to kite.

• Rings
  Purple Anubar rings are probably best in slot, but rare ; the blue version has the same stats, minus the proc.
  Other options are Allagast rings, Living rings (preferably with acid or chaos resistance).

• Medal
  Mark of Calamitous Desires, it’s craftable and provides the acid resistance we are short of.

• Off-Hand
  Rolderathis’ Tome is best in slot. Any affix works, but prefer a prefix with physical resistance for sturdiness (Thunderstruck, Glacial). I took a Celerity suffix to maje the skill rotation smoother, of Fallen Skies would provide more damage.
  
  

Performance

The build farms SR75-76 very easily, even with bad mutators like Resistant. Be careful with heavy physical hitters. You can adjust the physique/spirit ratio for more safety.
It has not been tested higher or in crucible (yet).

SR75 completed with rather bad mutators, against Reaper, Gargabol, Valdaran and some useless Void Leech boss.

Levelling

If you want to level this build, you can adapt my beginner Warlock guide to a Druid :

[1.1.7.2][Guide] Trozan's Ice Shard - A cold Warlock Beginner Guide

[char] permanent buffs, Blood of Dreeg and Dryad’s Blessing active Introduction This is a Trozan Warlock guide for beginners, whose purpose is to offer a levelling guide and a lv100 spec that don’t require any gear, that fresh players can follow to later transition into one of the end-game specs created by our builders. The guide features a cheap and flexible budget build, a section for skills, devotions, attribute points and faction choices, a section explaining the purpose of the skill…

The guide focuses on cold damage while this build is cold+lightning (with some emphasis on the lightning) thus the devotions are a little different, but the core is the same.
The equivalent of Vulnerability is Raging Tempest, your “heal” is Wendigo Totem, free resistances are from Oak Skin. You can get extra damage with Maelstrom or Storm Totems.

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[Tarazet]

Very nice idea, Dryad is a great way to get more sustain on a caster.

FYI, I was fooling around with a Warlock and it turns out Curse of Frailty is perfect to proc Dryad. Doesn’t interrupt your casting (AAR or Panetti etc), and as long as you keep it up it practically always auto-refreshes to keep 100% uptime on Dryad’s Blessing.

I have this PRM build planned out for Hardcore, and if the experience leveling up is any indication, it should be quite effective: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4NOGpWPN

[Monceaux]

The point isn’t to keep the buff up (it’s not a massive buff nor hard to achieve) but to get the heal as soon as it’s off CD, CoF is terrible to do so on a single target, you could be doubling or tripling the CD when unlucky.

[Tarazet]

Well, that’s a bug. I really want to keep it simple with just PRM and CoF as actives. Maybe Seekers to CoF and Widow to PRM? Anyway, I’ll experiment on my own time so I don’t hijack your thread.

[Monceaux]

Not a bug, just that a 33% proc rate on a debuff ticking once per second is very inefficient especially when you rely a lot on it
But if you use Scales, leech on Panetti, Ghoul and Behemoth, the heal isn’t such a big deal, but keep Dryad as its nodes are really good.

Seekers on CoF or WoP is a really good bind when you drop its cooldown just below 1s, it works wonders in every situation.

[kompaniet3462]

Respeced my druid into this. Fun build. Lots of damage. Did an sr 55-56 and the lost oasis rogue dungeon. Had some generic problems with hard hitting fast bosses that get in my face. Morgoneth was quite hard to kill also but my devotions were all low level so it’s probably easier when i level them up.