Summon Druid Endgame Guide

tmGrunty wrote: 2 years ago

That 170 less damage has such a huge impact?
I really doubt that.

Well, ~150-200 times 5 ravens. And Lore wasn't THAT far ahead to begin with. So yeah.
(Just pulled the current numbers from the PTR and plugged them in)

Well good thing i can switch between both builds seeminglessly.

A boyscout is always prepared...

Though I do hope they buff them again. Don't wanna have to still go and get a Faith (though I already kept the last base I found for it..just in case).

I wanted to post an update on my Druid.
I've been working on gradually (although very expensive) improving my build.

Most importantly I'm slowly leveling him up to get to the necessary level 95 for the

Raven build.

Then I've made improvements to my resistances getting them all to maximum.
I've added 2 small charms with 7 mf + 11 fire resist each to max out my fire resist (only 15 res was needed so you can safe some there).
Same with 1 small charm each with 7 mf + 11 light resist and 11 poison resist repsectivly. The former was needed for both builds (only 10 res was needed), whereas the latter was for the

Raven build (only 5 res was needed).
Then I filled out the remaining inventory slots with plain 7mf charms due to the lack of other useful modifiers. You could do defense or mana but doesn't really do much and the extra cost isn't justified in my opinion.

I'm also slowly improving the quality of my Summon Skill + Life charms but for whatever reason the prices for those went up massivly.

And last but not least I've gotten myself a better

The Reaper's Toll with more damage on it. Still trying to get on with 240ed but those are expensive.
Also still in search for a pair of perfect

Sandstorm Trek.
Unfortunately it seems to be impossible to find a Pride with lvl 20 aura in an ethereal

Great Poleaxe

Link to the build: https://d2.maxroll.gg/d2planner/mr0106fd

PTR just updated but you can only play offline chars for now.
Luckily I have a Summon Druid offline.

I see no changes to the the summons individually.

Raven, Spirit/Dire Wolves and Grizzly damage, life and attack rating seems unchanged.

Raven still don't benefit from auras.
Vines, Heart of the Wolverine and

Oak Sage are unchanged.
You still can't

Teleport in

Werebear form or use buffs from Call To Arms.
I see no new or removed synergies for any of the Summon Druid related skills.

But ...

New thing I'm most excited for: dual weilding a5 mercs. Double weapon effects/procs should be interesting

Not worth it a all for Summon Druid.
There is no proc you'd like to have from a Act 5 merc that comes close to having Might +

Decrepify (

The Reaper's Toll) or Might +

Concentration (Pride) from an Act 2 merc.

I also did some calculations on Maxroll.
A pure

Raven build is much weaker now (relativly speaking). There is no reason to get for max +skill on

Raven with an item like

Ravenlore over a

Jalal's Mane because you now "lose" damage on 3 types of summons at the same time instead of one.
For the same reason Beast as weapon is now much better again than Hoto because you buff so many more summons with the aura.

I dare disagree. Assuming the numbers stay the same as the previous PTR version,

Ravenlore still beats Jalal's. However, the gap has decreased quite a bit.

One of the reasons is that regardless of how Spirit wolves may or may not scale with friendly effects (see further down), their cold damage will not scale with

Decrepify whereas ravens do.

Adjusting all of the calculations for "all pets up", the gaps change a fair bit but the overall result stays the same. The highest total dmg output would be achieved with a Faith bow on the druid and a reaper's toll on the (might) merc. Faith beats Pride in terms of overall dmg added which is why you want that on the druid. And replacing reaper's with Pride on the merc not only takes out

Decrepify (which conc already doesn't make up for) but also drops the merc's dmg to ridiculously low levels by comparison.

Faith being the top (100% of top dmg), the order then becomes:
1) Faith (100%) [102.81% when compared to Jalal)
2) Pride on Druid (~93.74%) [105.93% when compared to Jalal]
3) Beast (~92.56%) [103.19% when compared to Jalal]
4) HotO (~89.34%) [106.50% when compared to Jalal]
5) Faith on Druid + Pride on Merc (~56.47%) [102.62% when compared to Jalal]

That's assuming realistic uptimes for dire enrage as well as

Decrepify and assuming Spirit wolves do not scale with friendly effects. The latter is something I didn't actually get around to testing last PTR but generally there's 2 options for it:
- Spirit wolf attack is flat elemental damage in which case it will not scale with fana, conc, might, decrep, how or any of that (much like most elemental skills)
- Spirit wolf attack is technically physical but their attack skill converts it to 100% cold damage (similar to a zon's

Magic Arrow) in which case they would scale with all friendly ed effects (might, fana, ...) and would only not scale with

Decrepify/amp

Checked for both though and regardless of how they do or do not scale, the only thing it does (again) is shift the gaps around. The order of gear choices from good to bad stays the same.

Added note:
HotO is actually a little bit worse by comparison than shown above, due to the

Raven hit count having been increased again end of last PTR. Originally, I assumed you'd be casting ravens with Faith equipped because you can't afford to keep switching to cta/Spirit off-hand for it every other second without losing too much aura uptime during re-casts. With hit count being up again though, you can pre-cast ravens with your off-set just fine and hence gain an extra skill point on them by comparison to having to constantly re-cast (decreasing the skill gap as compared to HotO). That difference is comparatively minor though so it doesn't change anything significantly.


As a bottom line, personally, I'm expecting to continue to use

Ravenlore + HotO + Reaper's.

Raven and Reaper's are the obvious choice to max out damage. HotO does come with lower damage compared to Faith but the extra cast frame for faster travel, along with the quality of life improvements (res for more flexibility in charms, significantly more mana to not run out during

Teleport, again improving travel speed [or forcing mana pots..ugh..f that]) should make up for that in my mind.
Naturally, the whole thing will be updated/re-tested for potentially changing numbers come tomorrow's PTR version.



With regards to the mercenary change, that could actually become VERY interesting.
An act 2 merc basically offers you might +

Decrepify + damage. That's what an A5 merc would have to make up for.
Now...if an act 5 merc can dual wield:
- Lawbringer covers

Decrepify
- Last Wish gives you a slightly lower but still comparable might
- Their own damage with that should exceed an A2 merc's damage
- Their new

Battle Cry not only adds survivability (through dmg reduction) but also buffs the damage for all of your pets indirectly as the -defense would improve their hit rate

The problem with the above (other than requiring 3

Jah and a

Ber ) however is that the only way to get that is to also accept that Last Wish comes with a chance to proc

Life Tap. Sure, that's great for even better survivability all around but it will also override

Decrepify everytime it happens, leading to reduced uptime of that. Plus the blind will make the decrep uptime for the barb's target a flat 0 on any non-boss. Whether that ends up being better, worse or on par overall I would honestly say is too close of a call to make without real testing.

On a druid-unrelated note, for a second there, I wanted to celebrate the fact that Lawbringer + Grief would finally be a better version of Reaper's A2 on a Horker's Trav Merc. Until I remembered that Lawbringer, too comes with cold damage.

Spirit Wolves do pure cold damage. So they only scale with Fanatism giving them faster attacks.

I run the numbers on Maxroll with my current gear.

However the

Raven numbers are wrong as Maxroll only has the values from the first iteration.
In reality they do ~200-300 damage less per hit (depending on the exact skill levels).
This results in their "true" dps being 600-1000 dps lower than shown in the chart and that ultimately makes

Jalal's Mane superior as the damage is pretty much equal but

Jalal's Mane provides so many more useful stats compared to

Ravenlore.

If anything I can say that Heart of the Oak loses out big time being over 10% worse than Beast.

Also according to my calculations Beast beats Pride (both on Druid). And the reason for that is the mercenary damage.
The summons do indead more damage with Pride but only about 500 dps total.
The mercenary however loses out over 2000 dps because he misses a fps breakpoint without the fanatism that can't be regained.

Faith obviously beats Beast due to the higher level of fanatism.
But I'm very hestitant to use a 2-handed weapon. You lose so many stats from the Spirit, most noticably the FCR for

Teleport, FHR and lots of resist.

I'm am really curious though why your numbers are so different compared to mine.
It probably has something do with the target we chose and therefore the hit chance and physical resist. I also assumed 100% uptime of Dire Wolves' Rage.
I'd also suggest for your next test you use a 1hand + shield as your base 100% and not the 2hand Faith.
Most people won't go 2hand and a 1hand setup seems like a better baseline to compare things.

Regarding Act 5

Frenzy mercs we need to wait.
The Warcry doesn't matter much because all the summons have enough attack rating anyway.
And Last Wish is crazy expensive and does have a lower aura level than what an Act 2 merc provides (17 vs 22).
He needs to do a lot more damage than the Act 2 merc to compensate for that.
There might also be problems with Last Wish overwriting the

Decrepify proc from Lawbringer with

Life Tap as well as Slain Monsters RIP from Lawbringer leaving no corpses for the Dire Wolves to consume.

The RIP I wouldn't expect to have to worry about. With 8 wolves, 5 ravens and a bear, the odds of your merc getting the killing blow so often that your 3 dires don't have corpses to consume should be more than low enough.

As for the calculations, I'll stick with my own.
The two of us are bound to get at least slightly different results either way I guess (simple example being Pride vs. Beast), due to different preferences in merc gearing (I've never been a fan of

Andariel's for example). Plus I go for generalized damage, not specifically against Diablo and don't apply some buffs in some cases but not in others (given, your decrep vs. resist assumption won't change much but still).

I've long since learned to not trust random website's math, no matter how established they may be. Even more so if the formulas aren't shown and the final numbers don't match the expected numbers (i.e. the hit damage, hit chance, block chance, attack rate and crit rate shown, when combined, do not actually match the shown DPS).
Additionally, seems to be a bit hard to even reproduce exactly:
Looking at your listing, your 46 dire wolves get 5955 dps against diablo. Now, rebuilding that on maxroll (including anda to match your setup/might lvl), it claims 6110 dps for dires against him for me.

Either way, regardless of what we all end up going with, at least a druid can finally feel like a real summoner and will perform much better than they do today. So...huzzah!

Did you also make sure you summoned your Heart of the Wolverine and at 46 and all the synergies are 46 too?
If yes the dps is most likely due to different attack rating / hit chance.
Mine have 27005 AR resulting in 93% chance to hit against Diablo.

I specifically used an act endboss for the calculation because if we talk about anything else it pretty much doesn't matter.
Trashmobs pretty much die instantly anyway and uniques, superuniques can be 1 shot using telestomp.
DPS only matters if you are actually hitting the same target for at least some time.

Regarding the accuracy of the calculations.
I have confirmation from Maxroll that they basically use this calc which to my knowledge is correct: http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~gottwald/druid ... lator.html

Did you not

Battle Command your HoW?

Closed it again by now but mine had I believe 95% hit chance.

On a semi-related note:
Why do you even have lvl 46 summons with HotO and

Ravenlore? Do you actually use 9 skillers instead of the typical 8 + cube?

The level 46 was including

Battle Command.

And it's 8 skiller but the amulet is a +3 Summon Skills which I used for all the calculations.
I thought since we were trying the max

Raven setup this would be the approriate amulet to use for the test.

Ah, ok. That'd do it.

But you are right.
I did forget to re-apply the

Battle Command after summoning the Dire Wolves which resulted in the Rage being 1 level lower than it should be.
I also did the calculation with a level 95 char and merc instead of 99 (98 merc).

After going to 99 and re-appling the

Battle Command I also get to 6110 dps.
Apparently the attack rating of the Dire Wolves changes with the char level. Not sure why though.

I changed the picture with the correct values.

Quick update as PTR is live.

1.

Raven damage numbers are indeed actually lower. I will recreate my char in SP on PTR and provide accurate numbers soon.

Lower as in they reduced them from the previous PTR version?

Didn't get around to checking summoner numbers yet. Just enjoying the fact that there's actually summons with me now!

And much to no surprise..it is much better but still nowhere near top-end builds. No idea why this wasn't the very first change made to summoners tbh.

Lower as in lower as the numbers currently shown on Maxroll.

Also Act 5

Frenzy merc sucks. Yes he hits hards but that man is he annoying.

The uptime of

Decrepify from Lawbringer is so much lower than it is from Reaper's Toll. I hardly ever saw it proccing during a Chaos runs.

Speaking of which ... The

Sanctuary Aura is super annoying because it constantly knocks back the monsters from the others summons.

Hm. Yeah, would be annoying against undead I suppose.

Only tried the

Frenzy barb for trav so far. Not bad..not great, but not bad. Could work fairly well actually with better bases. Though it does seem just slightly less dmg than A2.
(Hard to judge fairly though, considering the PTR fail gear)

I tried it in SP on PTR and used Phase Blades.

But on PTR you do get a 4os

Sacred Armor for Fortitude, 6os

Phase Blade (runeword char) for Last Wish and an

Andariel's Visage.
Not sure about a 3os base for Lawbringer.

Also one thing we did not mention yet is that Act 2 is more flexible.
If you happen to play in a party with e.g. a Necro or a Melee char who already has

Amplify Damage /

Decrepify you can switch out

The Reaper's Toll for a Pride and have an additional useful aura.
Not sure how relevant that is but it is something.