What are you guys using to be able to survive after wave 100 in the arena?
Druid seems more of a melee no pet spec and this is how I’m building it, but there’re no tools to help me stay alive. The active skills only one seems to give some defenses boost, Thorn Burst the rest is just damage, pets, totems, healing, but heals will not help me if I get one shoted. And I can’t seem to find any good defensive passives either to make me a Tanky bear, not even the passives of shaman or Beastmaster have anything decent for the first 20 points if I wanted to go there.
I have Life leech and against minor mobs I can survive ok, but some bigger mobs just 1 shot me.
So I come here asking for your wisdom and help, what affixs should I try get on gear, I use 2h spear and I don’t really want to use a shield.
Do you get oneshotted in melee or by big attacks? Things like the Hoplite Soul Spear or Bear casts should be avoided…apart from that, I found Vitality to be worth it. Apart from Protections there is not really anything you can do. Chill and Freeze from Thorn Totems might be worth looking at… I also hope that we’ll get some more defensive buff options when the heal spells get skill trees.
As caster druid it’s basically the same thing. Spamming Thorn Shield takes care of armour, Attunement and Vitality gets the protections up (though you still need +elemental prot), but every now and then you just go poof
Do other classes have the same problem? If not, what do they get to protect against oneshots?
I suspect that werebear form is the tree you need to play the way you want to at the moment. Just switching into werebear does provide a hefty boost to all defense. Until that tree is in Druid doesn’t have a whole lot going for it as a solo melee character.
There are the 5 points in Beastmaster that’ll get you 15% total reduced damage taken. Other than that it looks like the best defensive node for the druid requires you to run exactly one companion. Then Strengthened Bond would get you a 50% defensive boost in all categories.
My idea for the problem was the same as Elgareth proposed, freezing totems. I’m not sure the freeze rate is going to be high enough though; I’m slowly working my way up with that character. At the very least the totems provide distractions that occasionally freeze things.
They have however also gotten me killed in spots where I wouldn’t have been because of a Soul Spear thrown at a totem that I didn’t notice which then pierced through to me. Not sure if it was thrown from off screen or I just failed to watch the edges of the screen well enough, but totems do increase that risk by just making things a bit more chaotic.
There is one node from summon thorn totem that is called frost attunement and it gives 25% chance to freeze to your thorn totems + 5% more for each point in attunement. In one of my primalist I had 59 attunement points, that is 295% chance freeze + 25%. I only saw one or two adds getting freeze for 1 or 2 seconds every few minutes. I thought with 320% freeze chance everything that is not immune to freeze should be perma freeze but I was wrong. Also I had 150 cold penetration and still didn’t work.
Freeze is based off the on hit damage so something like thorn totems that hits fast and not that hard is never going to be good for freeze just because of how the mechanic works.
but if you see the formula, you can image, that freezing is caclulate with base dmg * % freezing modificator in some way against enemy defence vs freeze.
In the end you get something like 10 totem dmg * 300% = 40 freezing dmg - enemy defence. when defence is higher than 40 + vs freezing, no freeze.
To get high freeze chance, you need high base dmg. But it is only my guess, snap freeze from mage is counter to this theory, or snap freeze has a very high base freeze dmg.
Primalists are extremely squishy. Claw Guard from beastmaster is a must for 15% less damage taken. The druid %armor/protection nodes are quite good too but situational.
I think some missing skill trees will help immensely. Healing wind, ettera’s blessing, and the spinning thorn thing all have potential for defensive buff skill trees.
But for now it really is just avoidance: glancing blows, dodge, and manually avoiding big hits. If swipe is your primary DPS…it’s kind of just a matter of time until you die.
I played mage and they can equip shield without losing dps since their weapon is a wand, and they also have the ward system which is a extra layer of protection.
I havent tried the other 2 classes acolyte and sentinel, but I asume acolity can use shield without losing dps, and sentinel seems to be a class that relies on shield for damage and protection, I could be wrong here.
Freeze is not really what I’m looking because most of the big mobs can’t even be frozen, and I just want to go on their faces and melt them not frezee
Yeah I noticed that passive and its on my plans to get it, for now I did get Strengthened Bond, and defense of the Hearth, this talent makes a huge diference and probably the best thing we have for survivality, for my thorn burst points I did use them to cast thorn burst when I get hit, so my armor gets to some insane values without requiring me to casting it.
This is pretty much what I can do with my passives and skills, for my gear I have a spear for the nice crit chance (need to keep ‘defense of the heart’ up at all times), and I pretend to get gear with VItality, Glancing blow and some elemental resistances.
I wanted to use Werebear, but I ended up using Swipe to boost my offensive stats and Serpent Strike as my main attacking skill.
Theres still a few skills that dont have the points, so I hope we can see some defense options there in the future.
I haven’t tried yet beastmaster and druid trees, this is my 4th primalist shaman, I’ll try 1 or 2 builds more that I have in mind with shaman and then I’ll try druid. Those are my stats buffed http://imgur.com/HdtjEnX , my gear is not optimized, still thinking about what affixes to use. Now I’m hitting from 1k to 3k
The crit nodes in the top left corner of the druid tree make you bananas if you gear towards crit and built a bit of tank here an there. If you switch into Bear on top of it you can stay in most attacks that oneshot everyone else.
