I’m playing a Swarmblade Tornado build with a focus on lightning damage, primarily through Gathering Storm (Storm Bolts) being cast by the tornados I generate (and maelstrom.) I’ve reached a point where I’m struggling to get better gear, and I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall. I’m around 250 corruption at this point, and while I can do it comfortably, I know I’m starting to hit my limit with my current gear.
What are your recommendations for getting better drops/gear? I’m running pure CoF, rank 11 at the moment. The upgrades I need are exalt drops, but also higher LP on my uniques. Any suggestion on uniques I could swap out for gear I’m currently wearing?
Your maelstorm and tornado are not doing much damage but you are wasting points buffing their damage. Increased/ more maelstorm & tornado damage does not effect storm bolts.
Tornado: Take points out of the tornado damage nodes and max out storm bolt frequency and aspect of the storm attack speed. Also take off the node that makes tornado follow you, you want to be summoning 2 tornados for double the storm bolts. Any left over points in “overcast skies” as your nados no longer follow you the extra range is good.
Gathering storm: take off 1 point from melee attack speed and put in “concentrated storm” for more damage. You are not attacking with gathering storm so the attack speed is useless for it.
Maelstorm: take out points from “growing storm”, “turbulance” & “strong tides”. Max out duration mana efficiency & “energized”. You should always have atleast 6 maelstorm if not more. More storm bolts from energized.
Items:
More attunement, less strength. Strength doesnt scale your stormbolt damage as strength only increases gathering storm “melee” damage (so strength only gives increased armor for you, this makes increased armor affix more valuable than strength affix if you had to choose).
Aim for T7 attack speed on gloves.
Oceareon rings gives 1% more damage per shock each and are a good choice. Try slamming with T7 attunement.
Eye of storms amulet gives increased lightning damage per active maelstorm is good for this build as you should have ~12 maelstorm active.
Crit multiplier is quite low, currently 300%. Should aim for 400% - 500% (crit strike multi while transformed on chest/helmet & blessing).
You have both reduced bonus damage from crit & crit strike avoidance. Choose 1 (crit avoidance is better since you get alot for free from druid passive per attunement).
Your blessings are not very good. You can get max mana, all res, crit multi, lightning damage, flat armor, increased armor ect…
Gathering storm node Excited Bolts seems to be useless, you don’t have mana in Swarm blade form. It is replaced with rage while transformed and node is missing “or rage”
I did have a few Eye of the Storm amulets, but all rolled bad slams. Oceareon I havent even seen drop once yet.
I went hard on defenses because I was consistently getting one-shot beforehand due to low armor, so I stacked armor + strength (I still am getting one-shot from certain rare/champ combos still…). At the moment, I am trying to get my crit multi up, but not at the expense of my defense. I haven’t found new gloves to slam onto, or I would.
I’ll try the other things you listed about the passives.
I actually just tested this by taking off everything that would auto-cast, and just let my storm bolts deal damage. I noticed my Rage going down pretty consistently with the storm bolt procs, (and the damage was nearly halved when I took away Excited Bolts) so I think Excited Bolts does use Rage for it.
