Hello, I started playing recently and I am totally hooked to this magnificent game. It made all my frustration related to Diablo 3 go away and then some. This is my first (and only so far) character:
Real resists are all capped out except fire (75%) and chaos (74%), poison is at 82%, pierce is at 78%, physical resist is at 13%/21% after Savagery (gotta get lucky with Ultos hood craft), armor absorption is at 98%. This is a hybrid build that has a lot of debuffs/cc and can fight as a caster if needed.
I am face tanking anyone on Ultimate except Mad Queen (got to kite when she turns her aura on) and that nasty trio from Port of Valbury. I probably won’t be able to take out Avatar (since he is lighting based too) and got killed quite a few times against clones of John Bourbon (can face tank them one-on-one, but when they swarm me I die quickly) but took them out eventually. Everything else melts pretty much, I want to make a guide to this build since the ones I based it on (ones in the compendum) are outdated and feel less optimal than mine.
I also want to try soloing Gladiator (not sure if this build is even capable of it).
So need expert opinions on what can be improved here. All gear is acquired from legitimate grinding/trading, shout out to Seamann and Krawlcc for making some godly trades with me that helped me build my char.
Why use grasping vines and wind devil? Why not elemental storm devotion proc for resist debuff instead of wind devil? I can see the logic behind most of your other choices but I feel that your devotions and how you proc them could probably use some tweaking. It seems like you’re building as an attacker, so it seems to me that your casting abilities are getting in the way of maxing out your attack damage and procs. I’d grab a point in storm totem and bind elemental storm to that and ditch wind devil and grasping vines unless you have a reason to hold on to them.
As for items. You should work on getting a double rare exalted treads for your feet if you can, golemborn is pretty good but you can do better. Rings, you need attack speed more than lightning damage, so I’d say go get some cronley’s signets with good resists on them. Might take some farming.
I increased your brute force to add flat lightning damage to make up for the loss of spear of heaven plus increased your feral hunger to increase your healing and AoE while attacking with savagery. Decreased primal strike because you don’t need it maxed to use it as a burst AoE and you can use the points elsewhere.
Vines is an extremely useful cc skill that procs arcane mines very well. It’s very spammable and it synergizes with mines perfectly - mobs get slowed down and cc’ed and mines go off. Helps a lot when I am getting swarmed in Crucible or kiting Mad Queen.
Wind Devils is a skill I discovered recently, put couple of points in there just out of curiousity to see how it holds up against Storm Totem - a skill that I feel is very underwhelming and does not synergizes well with the build flow. And Wind Devils turned out to be pretty amazing support spell. Raging Tempest (as well as the main skill) debuff mobs pretty well, plus I can have up to 3 Devils homing into every mob on the map. Then I tried putting 1 point into Maelstorm and it turned out to be a very decent damage buff as well. One of the key features however is that they proc Reckless Tempest Devotion like crazy (might be a bug tho).
Spear of Heavens is a very solid skill tree that offers tonns of OA and lighting damage. Proc is decent in stunning ranged archers/casters, some okay damage too.
Not sure about Brute Force at all, seems like 1 point is more than enough there.
Devotions tho, got very offensive setup there. But I’ve heard that Chariot heal is pretty weak (given that I already have 1200 hp per second or so heal from Wendigo totem). Don’t know much about Giant’s Blood. I do know tho that Ghoul saved my ass multiple times (and 4% ADCtH is extremely useful, since it’s so hard for my build to get it on gear).
Boots: I have some green options here, but 5% phys res and proc makes Golemnborn bis if you have all resists covered. Rings: not sure here too, got around ~160 OA from both of mine rings as well as some Spirit/Casting Speed/+4 skills. Don’t know what I will be getting in form of Cronley rings (except little bit extra of OA and resists that I have got covered).
I don’t see the point of making a build guide for this given that no matter how much you optimise it, Druid is a poor class choice for a Savagery build. Conjurer, Elementalist and Warder are all superior for that purpose.
EDIT: I’m not saying this to be mean, the fact is that I spent a while thinking about how to improve the build and the most significant improvement always came from picking a different class. Arcanist offers no attack speed nor RR, and maiven’s creates energy issues while having anti-synergy with sustain through lifesteal. The build without super gear also lacks the OA required to actually make its huge crit damage worth it. I have no doubt that one can make a functional Melee Druid, but the most honest guide to it would be “I’ve tried the concept and this ain’t the way to go, roll a Conjurer/Elementalist instead”. IMO a build guide that doesn’t present the most optimal setup would need to either have a special fun gimmick that justifies it or be less gear dependent. Druid fits neither category.
I know it may not seem so but after trying all these in crucible i’d choose druid over elementalist. Unless you are caster or dot burn build that generally uses hit and run tactics, thermites are an absolute pain to use in sustained melee range. They get crushed by all the aoe crap and you don’t allways have time to keep recasting them
Top choice is conjurer for me regardless,vanilla or cruci, but just saying druid is not totally useless
Not every build is done with absolute min-maxing in mind. Also, there are not many challenges in GD to do min-max for in the first place. As long as one can do what one wanted to do with that build, I’ll call it a success.
