Overview
Mostly just a video. Short Q&A included as well.
Build in action
Not casting buffs = next level strat
Gear, skills, and mastery are shown at the end.
All feedback welcome. Leave any questions on the forums or in the comments here. I’ll be glad to add other sections (including pics), if people are interested.
Q&A
Originally posted by raphlaf:I actually have a ton of questions.
- 1. I see you use Frost Arrow to proc the slowing effect from the Amulet of Despair. How does that synergize with the rest of the build’s capabilities?
- 2. For that matter, why use Boom Shrooms? More consistent damage? Would another Druid skill work as well? If not, why?
- 3. The only things I can see a reason for is speccing into the Lightning tree to grab Storm Minder and that movespeed buff skill.
- 4. What other gear would be good to use aside from Amulet of Despair and the set? What are the builds weaknesses, and can they be shored up reasonably well with judicious gem choices?
1. Frost Arrow does proc the slowing effect from Amulet of Despair, and it has a couple other important purposes. It Freezes everything at range (I prefer this over Flash Freeze, which freezes everything in a radius around me), and it has an associated passive which multiplies all damage dealt by 1.15.
2. Boom Shrooms is one of the higher DPS poison skills, if not the highest. It can get a fairly large area of coverage, all 7 shrooms can hit a single target, and it has an extremely low cooldown. So it does great damage and it is able to trigger Pods well.
Other skills can certainly work here if you want a different playstyle. Also, the close range/melee playstyle of Shrooms can require frequent Storm Mender recasts, where a ranged ability would be much safer.
3. Skills choices:
- Physical tree: Attack Speed and Reach Passives: Reach gives the Shrooms a wider area of coverage. Attack Speed speeds up its animation – it takes ~145% attack speed for the animation speed of Boom Shrooms to become faster than the 0.35 second cooldown.
- Poison : Fairly straightforward. The mushroom passives are for a bit of extra damage, and the ultimate helps trigger pods and max out resistances @ 80% inside Anomalies.
- Lightning: Storm Mender is amazing for defense, and Sprint is important because the build relies on movement speed to get around.
- Frost: Freezing Shot for extra damage and great crowd control. The wolves are for facetanking bosses if you need to stand further away, and their passive gives a bit of extra damage.
4a. Build weaknesses: The builds biggest weakness is defense. Some monsters’ attacks will one-shot you without Storm Mender’s shield. This is less of an issue in earlier Anomalies before monster damage gets crazy.
4b. Gear: Any gear can work, it’s the enchantments that matter the most. Of the gear shown, Jeopardy and the Everspring set pieces are the most important.
Here are some enchantment priorities if you’re doing story mode or Anomaly level 0-250ish. After that, I recommend shifting your enchantments to the ones shown in the vid.
- 1) Cooldown – the higher this is, the faster things will die. Get this to 90% ASAP – even with 0 set pieces and 0 other recommended items, the build will perform fairly well if you can get close to max CDR.
- 2) Damage (including “Kill Damage” on ring or amulet) & Movement Speed (including gems in helm/armor/boots and “Kill Haste” on boots) – These are tied for 2nd. Things will die fast enough that you will be able to zip around the map.
- 3) Poison Damage
- 4) Crit chance – its usefulness depends somewhat on your critical hit damage, but CHD starts at 170% while CC starts at 5%, so this is more valuable to boost up. You can ignore this once you have Jeopardy.
- 5) Crit damage
- 6) Crystal Find (including “Kill Hoarder”) and Pickup Radius – Insane crystal find + pickup radius is a great way to get set pieces and non-true legendaries by gambling. Depending on the difficulty level and your need for new gear and more materials, I would rank this stat combo as high as #2.