Bloodkeeper’s Nest grants bees +12-16 health per attunement (from 7-12) and +6-8% physical penetration with bleed per strength (from 4-6%).
BEES? Discuss.
EDIT: I still have to do the planners, which I’m always terrible at, but I’m just going to leave my ideas here for people to pick up on:
I think we can use the wildcard set ring to be able to use The Last Bear set while still getting to use another important piece of gear in helm/chest/gloves. I think we don’t give up that much by losing 1/2 ring slots and we stand to gain a lot with a unique in one of those slots. While also gaining from all our str stacking. I also don’t think any of the other primal uniques fit that neatly into this build. Maybe the amulet that summons the rift beast? Idk.
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In the helm slot we could use Herald of the Scurry to supplement the bee bleeds with squirrel bleeds. This also gets us phys res shred. The squirrels also scale off str and even have an attuenement scaling node, although I’m not sure how reasonable it is to pick it up because it requires quite a bit of traveling.
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In the chest slot we have two options: Doublet of Onos Tull for minion bleed stats or Mantle of the Pale Ox to take advantage of our swarm of bees to sac for DR. Of course the problem with the Palx Ox option is that it doesn’t work so well if we end up going for a single companion for support since that companion will likely always be higher health than the bees.
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In the glove slot we have Julra’s Obsession mostly to just give melee attack speed to the bees. This I’m probably least interested in because the glove slot can give us more str/attune which wouldn’t do anything for our minions directly.
Onto Skills:
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Obviously we must run Spriggandform. We pick up Barbed Thicket so that all those Thorn Shields going on the bees make them bleed more. After that we probably just take defensive nodes.
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Option One for Companion is Wolf/Squirrels. Idk exactly what the tree looks like for this, but we’re just going to be building them to be another source of minions bleeding stuff.
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Option Two: The Bear has a node called Wounded Prey that make it move faster and deal more damage the more bleeds are on the target… the lame thing is it caps out at 30 bleed stacks. So the dream of using a bee swarm to apply tons of bleeds to scale this to the moon is DOA, but maybe the bees making it easy to get 30 stacks going easy for the bear is enough to make this a build? You’d probably want to take the solo companion passives for this, so this would likely be a beastmaster variant instead of druid. Also the bear can use Earthquake or Swipe, so that could fill in another skill for us.
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Similar to the Bear, Raptor has some bleed synergies with Ravage for more melee damage, Dripping Blood to speed up bleeds, and In For The Kill to gain haste on bleeding enemy death.But of course, this is exclusive to BM.
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Summon Spriggand is the most boring option, but it does give us crit avoid and attunement scaling dodge rating. It’s also the option that is least directly involved in damage so the bees can be more of the focus.