TLDR - Apiarist set is clearly a heavy ‘minion’ centric set, however the only option to Reforge the weapon (a 1h mace) doesn’t allow for any minion affixes. Is this an oversight? Purposeful? Is this to forcefully pigeon-hole the ‘Bee’ set into joke status? Set Reforging should allow you to reforge an item based on it’s ‘slot’ rather than it’s original base. So a 1h Set Mace could be reforged as a 1h Sword (Dagger or even Wand). An offhand Set Catalyst could be reforged into a Shield. (/ end TLDR)
So I’ve been playing a beastmaster horde master, centering around the apiarist suit and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I’m trying to push into the upper content - higher lvl corruption and the set is gasing out. I’ve been planning to reforge it for a while and I’ve finally got all the ducks lined up, but once I’ve gotten into the heart of it - I can only reforge with ‘like’ items. So the weapon can only be reforged with a 1h mace. This would be fine, except 1h maces are apparently the only weapon that can’t roll minion affixes. WTH? This frankly felt like a betrayal. Ultimately to progress I had to drop the Apiarist’s set all together and now I just feel dead inside. (I should probably mention, yes I ‘could’ equip the Legends Entwined ring and then use ‘any damn’ weapon I want, but there are two problems with this. First and most importantly, I’d have to give up my T-Rex and he’s my bestest boy. Can’t do that. Secondly, I’m still stuck with Apiarist’s Smoker).
This got me thinking about the larger Set Reforging mechanism as a whole. Everyone agrees Sets are in a quasi bad / weak spot right now. I like the idea of Set Reforging - in contrast to the Unique / Legendary upgrade path. Let’s start small - we don’t need big changes but I think consistent small changes can eventually get us to a really good spot. For starters, I think Set Reforging should be based on the item’s slot and not the item’s base subtype. So in this situation, instead of only being limited to 1h mace - I could reforge the Apiarist’s Comb into a 1h Sword, Wand or any other 1h type that had the affixes I desired. I could also reforge the Apiarist Smoker into a shield if I was desiring more personal survival. This will make the set’s slightly more powerful overall, but it’s a small enough change that I don’t think it will be game breaking or meta-shifting.
Additional Set Reforging Recommendations:
One aspect of the set reforing that I don’t like - is how the transferred affixes of the set are hard-coded. For example - for the Apiarist’s Smoker, the reforged affixes are Reduced Damage Over Time for Summoned Bee and Summon Bee Movement speed. These are literally the least desirable affixes for me, frankly trash affixes. Granted for some people / builds these are probably incredible affixes so why not offer 2 different sets of stats for Set shards? The Apiarist’s set seem to all use prefix slots - so why not also offer the ability to set it to an suffix slot for 2 different Set stats? Additionally, why not allow them to stack both?
I think the reason they went with mace is so primalists and rogues don’t offhand 2x reforged combs. Honestly, it’s BIS as-is without reforging it exactly because of what you said, maces can’t roll minion affixes so you’re just throwing away minion attack speed and bleed.
I don’t think this is an issue with the Apiarist’s set as much as they really need to revisit the limitations on affix/type combos.
I was going to suggest that you craft it onto a mace, havoc it to t6/7 then slam it onto a unique, but there aren’t any minion dot focussed unique 1h maces only Arek’s which would give them minion shred.
The comb is pretty good … but the issue I was running into was it felt ‘soft’ trying to push into the mid corruption (trying to push above 300 to get to 500+). My group was mostly physical and as beastmaster I had ‘plenty’ of minion attack speed. The +X damage to minion bees, doesn’t help the rest of the pack when a standard minion weapon has +X damage to all melee / spell / bow minions. Then you top that off with +X% minion physical penetration – and that stat was really the one I was chasing after. I didn’t want to give up my bees, but the physical pen really did help a lot with clear speed.
And I get it … not all things are compatible with everything else. I’ve got some ideas to really ‘focus’ on the bee suit for future builds, it just turns out that it wasn’t compatible with what my horde organically grew into. But on the other hand, I look at it and ask … “Why can’t it be this way?”
So just FYI, bee melee really doesn’t work well once you start pushing corruption. Bees have an inherent “50% less damage” that you have to overcome, and no real multipliers outside of penetration that you can get on items. You can stack %minion damage, +minion melee, run items like Yulia’s Path, but you’re just going to hit a DPS wall around 200-300c like you’re observing.
The key to making bees viable is to lean in to the extreme penetration scaling with ailments you get from Bloodkeeper’s Nest, or Hive Mind if you’re a rogue. Nest only works on bleed, and while Hive Mind works on all damage of those types, you’re still really limited on +damage options. This is what makes Comb BIS for bee builds: you get 2 of the most important stats (in addition to +x bees): Minion attack speed, chance to inflict bleed. You need to stack your primary stat to get 1k+ penetration, idols for more bees, and attack speed to apply ailment stacks as fast as possible,. then make the rest of your build revolve around survivability. Any other minions/companions should be for survivability, like bear to pull aggro and be a meat shield, or spriggan for healing/crit avoidance.
Last season I did BM bees and got to farming 1k corruption, Druid bees this season and got to 400ish easily before I hit an item progression wall and just didn’t feel like grinding against the nerfs this season. You want to be running around with massive amounts of armor+endurance and (depending on your setup) ward generation, 24 bees (50 this season) applying massive bleed, and just running+healing+buffing. For times when you need burst, use a brewmaster or preferably jungle queen’s belt with T7 bees on potion use. Because it’s a DOT build, your playstyle has to adjust to needing a ramp-up time for damage on non-trash mobs, you aren’t gonna be running around 1-shotting everything.
This really isn’t an issue with the apiarist set specifically, and more about the weaknesses of minion builds without passives/active skills to buff minion damage and relying entirely on items.
