My Thoughts: Werewolf+Direwolf hybrid PTR playthrough Testing

I did some testing on druid, specifically

Werewolf, the changes to dire wolf, Insight built in various bows, along with the act 1,3, & 5 mercs.

I did a play-through of all of normal & nightmare, and then tested hell with the level 85 premade druid that was provided.

Below are my thoughts on all of it what I like, and what I wish would be better.

My Build

With the summoning buffs a hybrid

Werewolf/summoner was on my radar, where the summons are carrying their weight in damage instead of just operating as tanks/distractions.

Skills that would be maxed if this build was taken into late game would be: Fury,

Lycanthropy, Direwolf,

Summon Grizzly, Heart of the wolverine

I threw 1 point in

Werewolf, a handful in

Lycanthropy, 4-5 points in heart of the wolverine, and the rest were split between direwolf/Fury. Direwolf being favored, and maxed first.

If you have the correct gear

Werewolf doesn't need to be maxed as it stands. It gets you IAS which is important but it is hit by hard diminishing returns at level 9. So If you can get some +skills gear you are covered. The attack rating is needed but the balance changes this patch really help here.

If I max Fury, &

Lycanthropy with 1 point in the prerequisites that covers being a wolf. In my own opinion,

Oak Sage or heart of the wolverine is user preference, then you have 40 points for summons so I went

Summon Grizzly & dire wolf.

Dire Wolf

The damage and base life buffs are noticeable. These wolfs were good tanks even without

Oak Sage, and their damage was helpful through the entire normal/nightmare run. There were only two times that they were completely useless.

Normal

Duriel I guess I was too low level, and then normal Diablo. Diablo's abilities just deleted all of my summons + my merc. Everything else bosses and all they proved pretty useful. They tanked, they dealt damage. It felt really good most of the time, and I felt like I was clearing through areas a little faster than I normally could. Things that die when you don't have to click anything feels good.

For example when you have to heal, but your hp pool is so high you have to wait years for your health globe to refill, the wolfs put in work.

Insight Runeword

Absolutely Incredible.

Being aware of the power Insight provides to us in a polearm. I was really interested to see how it performed in a bow.

Well why a bow over a 4soc pole arm? Firstly if you are playing online with people competing for gear. Good luck trying to grab any 4socket class polearm weapon. Everyone is after one for their mercs. Plus the fact of Insight being able to be built in new types of bases makes it much easier to build said Insight.

In act 1 nightmare, razor bows were very common.

Larzuk on normal gave a

Razor Bow 4 sockets. It was so good for Fury I was able to use this through the rest of nightmare. I found

Sander's Taboo which was a significant speed boost, which I'm assuming is due to the new IAS changes?

Later on I found a 4 socket

Gothic Bow which I turned into an Insight as well. This gave me killing power in hell when I tested some of the new level 85 areas.

Mercenaries

My favorite was the a3 fire. Through normal the

Enchant bonus was great for me and the wolfs, though it dropped off hard in nightmare/hell. I wish this scaled better.

Though the main reason I was using the

Enchant merc was for the attack rating boost. With

Enchant, plus the large attack rating bonus that Insight provides I had minimal issues with my chance to hit. Add to the fact that Fury's attack rating was buffed.

This is another reason why I was okay with a lower level

Werewolf, I was more than making up for my attack rating elsewhere. With a Insight and this merc I believe this will solve a lot of the chance to hit issues I would normally have on a playthrough.

Here is a hot PTR take. I believe this merc is better than the

Blessed Aim merc if you are going for an attack rating bonus for your character. Now I can hear you running to google to compare the attack rating of

Blessed Aim to

Enchant. But even if

Blessed Aim is better on paper there is one thing it can't do; provide a bonus after the merc is dead. Much better for boss fights.

The merc's damage was higher than I expected too. I was bracing for a hard drop off in usefulness in a similar way

Enchant's damage dropped off the face of the earth. It remained decent. Even in hell in different lvl 85 areas he was pumping out some okay killing power versus what I expected.

The a1 merc was great but I didn't use it on my play through, I made a Faith and tested it out on the lvl 85 character with dire wolfs.

There are a lot of complaints about ranged mercenary AI, through one good thing I can say is that the mercenary was very good at positioning itself behind me and my summons. Even if they are on paper more frail than an a2 or 5 mercenary I feel like they weren't dying as much. Because of this I've seen the a3 merc survive fights that I feel like the a2 merc would die in.

my merc lauching fireballs at safe position behind my summons/me was common

I'm not a fan of the a5 mercenary change. Normally I would use a5 merc with a Lawbringer in the past the

Decrepify on striking would remove physical immunity. I feel like

Battle Cry gets in the way of that.

I wish there was a way to toggle his use of

Battle Cry.

New Level 85 areas in Hell

Clearing nightmare to entering hell is a big power

Leap, I didn't want to grind that out so instead I went back to the premade level 85 transfered over some of my gear I found on the playthrough, and tried to create a druid that wasn't an endgame monster but something that still had more entry level gear.

I played the same build as before, and tested the

Mausoleum, the pit, stony tomb,

Ancient Tunnels, and the

Arachnid Lair.

I think stony tomb is my favorite addition to the lvl85

Club. My wolfs/merc did really well in there. There were times when there was super unique monster with nasty mods, and I had to resummon a bit, but it wasn't bad. Anything that wasn't fire immune the a3 was putting out good damage too. I think I will be spending a lot of time there when the ladder goes live.

Things I wish were better/different

• I wish we could summon both dire wolf and grizzly at the same time. It would help all types of druids from summoner to hybrid.

• The a3 merc's
  Enchant damage could be a little higher. Even without the damage I'm happy with the AR buff.

• I wish I could turn off the a5 merc's
  Battle Cry so it doesn't interfere with curses.

• One way to add more damage to summons is through itemization.

A mod called Path of Diablo handled this really well. They created an item modifier that you can find on amulets, pelts, circlets, etc that gives +% damage to summons. This would be an interesting way of increasing summons damage and also giving blizzard room to design more itemization for druids in the future if they choose to.

Here are some examples from that mod.

• Carrion Vine needs more life so it can survive, all the vines do.

I can't wait to see what balances changes they make next, but I feel these won't be the last summoning buffs we see so I'm excited to flesh out this build more.

havelox wrote: 2 years ago

• I wish we could summon both dire wolf and grizzly at the same time. It would help all types of druids from summoner to hybrid.

blizz should try to let druid use all summons at the same time on ptr. to test if it feels good to play it. including spirits and vines. this has to be the best option. and it can't really be that overpowered. because you simply don't have enough skill points to max all, if you also wanna use other skills like

Werewolf and Fury. you can have 20 max skill in maybe 2 spirits types or 2 animal types. unless you go full summoner build. so the positive effect of the change would be be more choice for mixed builds and stronger summoner.

Udyret wrote: 2 years ago

havelox wrote: 2 years ago

• I wish we could summon both dire wolf and grizzly at the same time. It would help all types of druids from summoner to hybrid.

blizz should try to let druid use all summons at the same time on ptr. to test if it feels good to play it. including spirits and vines. this has to be the best option. and it can't really be that overpowered.

Path of Diablo has this change, and it really helped the build. It is a solid, yet still slower build.

(by slow not clearing as fast as a javazon, which is fine.)

i kinda like that not all the characters are as quick. it's fun to play java from time to time. it's very efficient. but it can feel more rewarding sometimes to play the melee characters. when you go from weak to get strong
from gear. i don't know why. it just feels better to me. on many of the meta casters stuff just melts away even if you are naked, when you start to get things like blizzard. and it just doesn't feel right. however, it would be nice if you didn't stop auto attacking after each target died. it can be a bit much clicking with single target spells.

Udyret wrote: 2 years ago

i kinda like that not all the characters are as quick. it's fun to play java from time to time. it's very efficient. but it can feel more rewarding sometimes to play the melee characters. when you go from weak to get strong
from gear. i don't know why. it just feels better to me. on many of the meta casters stuff just melts away even if you are naked, when you start to get things like blizzard. and it just doesn't feel right. however, it would be nice if you didn't stop auto attacking after each target died. it can be a bit much clicking with single target spells.

Fully agree on it being nice to actually see progression with gear. Physical builds are way more satisfying in that regard than most casters. But if you're comparing top-end vs. top-end, the gap between a lot of them is so massive that even if you speed up a summoner's clear speed by giving him all of his summons, it still wouldn't be anywhere even remotely close to a java or sorc or hammer or trapsin or ... the list goes on.

What it would do though - and that is the main reason I'd like to see it - is take out the "aggravation factor". That is if all you have is 3 dire wolves and you sit there, watching all 3 of them twiddle their paws due to crap AI and just stroll back and forth, rather than attack anything, it genuinely makes me want to punch something. Whereas if you had those same 3 idiot dire wolves but 5 Spirit wolves and a grizzly on top of that, even if half your summons are taking an AI break again, you still see 4-5 mobs actually do something. So it isn't quite as obviously bad.
And again, even if all of them always attacked something and even with the

Raven buffs added on, everything is still single-target. Meaning they'd finally actually compete on kill speed for bosses but the clear speed on the way there would still suck, compared to just so, so many other classes and builds.
At the very least, it deserves a shot for PTR testing.

Well and then there's the obvious point to make where a summoner just isn't really a summoner when the number of viable summons is the exact same as an elemental druid.

yea. the summons have pretty bad AI. i usually just summon them into the pack that i'm going to fight as shield. most of the time i'm using grizzly as he has a ton of life. he hit pretty decently hard. but pretty slow. so mostly just used as to absorb damage. guess he is a bit better if you got the Beast runeword. as he can get close to his best attack speed with

Fanaticism.

I still believe Grizzly is actually the highest DPS summon.

Given, speaking purely in terms of paper math, Wolves do win out. But since a Grizzly doesn't suffer from that idiotic "ohh, I smell a corpse, let me not do anything for an hour!" AI, the actual attack time of a Grizzly in the long run tends to be so much higher that I can't see Dires ever truly competing with it.

Which is sad..cuz at least there's 3 of them as opposed to just 1 measly summon.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

I still believe Grizzly is actually the highest DPS summon.

Given, speaking purely in terms of paper math, Wolves do win out. But since a Grizzly doesn't suffer from that idiotic "ohh, I smell a corpse, let me not do anything for an hour!" AI, the actual attack time of a Grizzly in the long run tends to be so much higher that I can't see Dires ever truly competing with it.

Which is sad..cuz at least there's 3 of them as opposed to just 1 measly summon.

looking at the druid pet calc. it does look like the grizzly has the best dps. even if the wolves are enraged.

http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~gottwald/druid ... lator.html

Udyret wrote: 2 years ago

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

I still believe Grizzly is actually the highest DPS summon.

Given, speaking purely in terms of paper math, Wolves do win out. But since a Grizzly doesn't suffer from that idiotic "ohh, I smell a corpse, let me not do anything for an hour!" AI, the actual attack time of a Grizzly in the long run tends to be so much higher that I can't see Dires ever truly competing with it.

Which is sad..cuz at least there's 3 of them as opposed to just 1 measly summon.

looking at the druid pet calc. it does look like the grizzly has the best dps. even if the wolves are enraged.

http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~gottwald/druid ... lator.html

Depends on the overall +skills, it shifts around at some point. Though I was looking forward and already basing my comment off of the latest 2.4 numbers in top-end gear, seeing how I went through the effort of doing the math behind all that. For those, dires theoretically win when assuming a realistic enrage uptime. But not by a massive margin. Hence the assumption that the horrid corpse-smell AI alone is more than capable of making them actually be significantly worse.
Subjective test runs seemed to confirm that but I didn't actually time those.

looking at the changes from patch 2.4 makes me think that unless they let druid use both wolves and grizzly. then grizzly will just become pretty much useless. outside of the damage synergism.

Well, not quite. Even for a full summoner, it is only slightly worse on paper and as noted above likely significantly better in reality, due to the much less crap AI as compared to dire wolves.

Additionally, Grizzly has a clear and massive advantage over Dire Wolves for hybrid builds:
It gets by with no noticeable difference with 19 less skill points.

Dire Wolves pretty much need Grizzly capped to get their dmg up. Both, Dire and Grizzly would preferably want Spirit Wolves capped to get their AR up, again just buffing their overall dmg output. And Dire Wolves obviously need themselves capped to work as intended. Grizzly however doesn't need more than the 1 point in Dire Wolves to unlock it. All they add is even more life, for a bear that has so much life to begin with that there really is no risk of him dying anyways, even without

Oak Sage.
That's a full 19 skill points to invest elsewhere in your hybrid build.

yea. i guess if you think about his dps it makes sense like that. but for my

Werewolf build as a tank his dps is pretty much insignificant. and with the health buff to dire wolf. if they become tanky enough. then i don't need grizzly to tank.

I think hybrid druids aren't going to work out for one simple reason: not enough skill points, Melee shifters need at least 60 points (

Lycanthropy +

Werewolf or

Werebear) + (Fury or

Maul) plus they are going to want points in

Oak Sage or HoW, plus prerequisites. There just aren't enough skill points left to make a powerful second tree addition. Elemental druids and summoners have the same problem, there aren't enhough skill points to usefully delve into another tree. The one attempt I've seen played out, a

Hurricane/Fury druid, just made a worse Wind druid since Wind druids already have all the physical damage they need from

Tornado.

The changes to fire claw look like it at least would be a useful addition to a shapeshifter, and maybe you could get enough

Hurricane damage to help with the riff-raff and slow creatures, but that's about it.

Edit: I was going to say that maybe it would work in the end game, but then you have the problem that you'd need skillers from two trees.

I'd agree on elemental (on the cold side at least, haven't looked at fire in ages). But a hybrid shifter/summoner really doesn't need to

Cap

Lycanthropy. There's plenty of points to go around for that. For example, if you max out Grizzly as your summon, Spirit wolves to buff said grizzly, HoW for obvious reasons and then

Werewolf and Fury with 1 point in

Lycanthropy, you actually still have 4 points to spare, all while capping both, Fury and grizzly dmg performance.

You obviously wouldn't cover 2 trees in your skill charms (if you go for skillers at all) but you don't need to. There's nothing wrong with one side being favored more heavily than the other in a hybrid build. Be that summons with you as a supporting dpser or a shapeshifter with supporting summons. Either one does work.

But yeah, you'll obviously always be "worse at the same thing". That's the natural cost of doing more than that one thing at a solid level instead. A hybrid summoner will never do as much with just summons as a pure summoner (after 2.4 that is, because you won't have ravens capped with full synergies - right now, you're actually just as good..which is kind of sad) - and if you focus on the summon side of things in gear, then you obviously won't do as much dmg yourself as a pure shapeshifter would as you drop dmg focused gear in favor of +skill.

Schnorki wrote: 2 years ago

I still believe Grizzly is actually the highest DPS summon.

Given, speaking purely in terms of paper math, Wolves do win out. But since a Grizzly doesn't suffer from that idiotic "ohh, I smell a corpse, let me not do anything for an hour!" AI, the actual attack time of a Grizzly in the long run tends to be so much higher that I can't see Dires ever truly competing with it.

Which is sad..cuz at least there's 3 of them as opposed to just 1 measly summon.

Someone did the math on it with calculators, and you are right.

https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/commen ... _more_dps/

I don't how much of this changed with the damage buffs to dire wolf though.