I tried this build and this is the question I have right now :
- other than summoning your full army before you start your game and occasionally refreshing your Spirit or vines or even ravens, what action your druid will do?
Comparing this to a summon Necro - which I found it prtty boring also, at least the Necro can use curse and CE to speed up the process or helping his minions.
I just dont see what else can the druid do other than clicking Teleport and then stand still.
As a "full" summoner, your main job is indeed to coordinate via telestomping. And considering just how bad druid summon AI is, that's kind of a fulltime job if you really want to max out your dmg.
The classic side-tree would be shape shifting down to Shock Wave at which point you'd also go bear and Stun stuff. But honestly, 99.9% of the time that's completely unnecessary because nothing other than your vine will ever be threatened anyways. Not to mention super annoying because you keep having to go in and out of bear since you can't Teleport as a bear.
Apart from that, all you do is occasionally rebuff BO and resummon ravens. That's pretty much it and the reason summon druids are quite possibly the most laid back class out there because..well, you can literally just lie back.
There is a more active alternative in which you'd drop a little bit of summon skilling (ravens imo) and instead invest that into becoming a wolf. Adjust the gear just slightly and you've got a decent hybrid that then has you actually attacking as well.
Katonda wrote: 2 years ago
Does Enchant work with Summon Spirit Wolf? Does the fire damage apply? I've heard auras like Might and Concentration don't increase those summons' damage. Is this true?
Enchant does work but so do auras which makes an Act 2 mercenary superior.
The only Summons that do not profit from auras are the Raven but those can't be enchanted either.
JustinBarber wrote: 2 years ago
- other than summoning your full army before you start your game and occasionally refreshing your Spirit or vines or even ravens, what action your druid will do?
Regarding other actions a Summon Druid does besides Teleport and re-casting Raven there is basically nothing except Shockwave if you decide to invest the points for that.
If you want to do more you have to try some sort of Hybrid builds which will inevitably reduce your Summons damage by quite a bit.
Shockwave. I'm currently ripping through player 1 Hell Chaos Sanctuary with a breeze. Shockwave is extremely effective now especially with Wolverine instead of Oak. 10f FCR breakpoint makes all the difference.
for physical immunes I recast/retarget Spirit wolves and use spellsteal Decrepify on switch.
I was able to farm a player 8 game easily with minimal close calls. Summon shockwave is the new meta.
Lastly investing into Maul is mandatory. At least 10 points. It makes shockwave damage effective
Honestly I really dont think Shockwave is a good option.
You are wasting points on another tree that helps nothing for your damage output. Crowd control is pretty much meaningless for a summoner build because your now have the numbers needed to cover yourself in most situations.
Depending what weapons your merc will use to counter the physical plus cold immue, if you will have any extra points, I would rather dump it into poison vine.
Again I think this is a pretty strong build after 2.4, it just will get bore very fast because you almost have nothing to do with your own characters, even for re-casting Spirit/animals/vines, you dont even need to aim at anything.
Shock Wave is what you go for from 93 to 95 when you've maxed out all of your summons + 1 in vine and have literally nothing else to use the points on.
It's basically a nice to have for very, very few situations in which it might actually make a tiny bit of a difference.
The dmg component of it will always blow. The crowd control component is amazing but usually unnecessary.
tmGrunty wrote: 2 years ago
Shockwave is good but just as a 1pt skill for the safety when you need it. It only costs you 3 points total to get it which is well worth.
A Summon Druid doesn't really have many spare points though and you'll never get a Poison Creeper to a level where it does meaningful damage either.
Well, with 7-8 summon GC plus your reasonable gears, its no hard to dump couple points into this to get it to lvl 25-30 range.
In fact if you dont use a toll on your merc, I actually found the vine is doing a more than reasonable work on double physical/cold immues.
I'd probably get the Shock Wave early on right at level 30 because it help you while you are questing / leveling and don't have the Teleport yet.
Once you have an Enigma you could respec and drop it and only pick it up way later as Schnorki said.
You should 100% use a Reaper's Toll on merc though.
My Poison Creeper is level 26 just from the 1pt pre-requirement and the ~700 damage it does is laughable in hell.
Another reason going against using vine is this : since this game had druid in the old days, there were serious issues in the coding with the vine skills.
In the old days, I can use a naked druid and went into any open PK rooms and just stand near the gate and keep casting vine and bear and it will almost kill most of the characters except for some bars with insane amount of defense.
The issue is the corpse of the vine left behind will cause serious lag and sometime even crash the game.
Since 2.4 patch, I had so many game crashes when I was playing my summon druid and I am thinking they may be all related to the vines.
Katonda wrote: 2 years ago
Does Enchant work with Summon Spirit Wolf? Does the fire damage apply? I've heard auras like Might and Concentration don't increase those summons' damage. Is this true?
Enchant does work but so do auras which makes an Act 2 mercenary superior.
The only Summons that do not profit from auras are the Raven but those can't be enchanted either.
I run Fire Merc because the 200 fire damage from Enchant x 9 pets, combined with his 2k Fireball allows me to deal with Phys and cold immunes with ease. I have yet to find any boss combination that is an issue, and I can farm hell Chaos and Hell Baal. A2 Might Merc does more overall damage, but it's all physical which is worthless against Physical immunes.
JustinBarber wrote: 2 years ago
- other than summoning your full army before you start your game and occasionally refreshing your Spirit or vines or even ravens, what action your druid will do?
Summon Druids are tactical Summoners, unlike Necros which are passive. As a Summon Druid you should be recasting your pets (primarily Bear and on occasion Spirit Wolves) to engage monsters and keep them away from you. Monsters will generally stop if they have a target nearby, so use your pets to control the battle field. Bear moves slow and does the most damage, so you always want to cast him into the thick of battle. Dire Wolves get rage from eating corpses, so you want to not recast them if possible as this resets the rage. Spirit Wolves have cold damage so you can throw them into combat against phys immunes and move your bear elsewhere.
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tmGrunty wrote: 2 years ago
Your Shockwave damage is completely neglible compared to what your Summons do.
You only use that skill for the Stun it provides.
You don't need to try to boost that damage by investing points into Maul.
I don't even know how you would even have spare points for it.
This is post 2.4 End Game. right?
I am level 88 and everything you said is just completely wrong. Maul is needed.
People keep focusing on the Stun effect , but are forgetting shockwave is an area effect spell with a wide ass range. When it starts doing decent damage (10+Maul+10Shockwave), it's extremely effective.
Shockwave also has a weird mechanic where it double hits an opponent for 2x damage.n At least from what I see
It also seems to get the bonus from Wolverine now.
tmGrunty wrote: 2 years ago
Your Shockwave damage is completely neglible compared to what your Summons do.
You only use that skill for the Stun it provides.
You don't need to try to boost that damage by investing points into Maul.
I don't even know how you would even have spare points for it.
This is post 2.4 End Game. right?
I am level 88 and everything you said is just completely wrong. Maul is needed.
People keep focusing on the Stun effect , but are forgetting shockwave is an area effect spell with a wide ass range. When it starts doing decent damage (10+Maul+10Shockwave), it's extremely effective.
Shockwave also has a weird mechanic where it double hits an opponent for 2x damage.n At least from what I see
It also seems to get the bonus from Wolverine now.
A level 30 Shock Wave with a full 20 in Maul for the synergy still only does barely over 500 damage. Sure, it's an aoe spell which makes that a bit better but the damage is still just terrible and in no world worth investing skill points into that you could instead put into your summons.
And no, it does not benefit from HoW (or any such aura for that matter). If it did though, it'd actually be seriously good, seeing how all of it would count as base damage and you'd end up with like 5k+ average when actually going for it.
Don't you need to max every summon skill to be effective. Spirit wolves can be neglected a bit. I put a hard 5 in it. Focus on Grizzly as it further increases damage by all summons.
tmGrunty wrote: 2 years ago
Your Shockwave damage is completely neglible compared to what your Summons do.
You only use that skill for the Stun it provides.
You don't need to try to boost that damage by investing points into Maul.
I don't even know how you would even have spare points for it.
This is post 2.4 End Game. right?
I am level 88 and everything you said is just completely wrong. Maul is needed.
People keep focusing on the Stun effect , but are forgetting shockwave is an area effect spell with a wide ass range. When it starts doing decent damage (10+Maul+10Shockwave), it's extremely effective.
Shockwave also has a weird mechanic where it double hits an opponent for 2x damage.n At least from what I see
It also seems to get the bonus from Wolverine now.
A level 30 Shock Wave with a full 20 in Maul for the synergy still only does barely over 500 damage. Sure, its an aoe spell which makes that a bit better but the damage is still just terrible and in no world worth investing skill points into that you could instead put into your summons.
And no, it does not benefit from HoW (or any aura for that matter).
Don't know what to tell you chief
Maybe you should go build one instead of trying to be a know it all
I really don't think you know what the f you are talking about
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