I’m working on a build around the Bloodkeeper’s Nest unique relic that summons bees and gives them damage/hp/bleed pen based on str and att. I’ve been bouncing back and forth on a few different variations and I recently got to 70 and swapped over to the build from leveling and it’s pretty slow at the moment, although that could just be my gear isn’t all set up yet.
The center of any setup is obviously Spriggand form to summon and buff the bees. But there are so many possible things to put points into depending on the rest of the setup. Hopefully I can get a +4 levels soon.
Some possibilities in Spriggand Form:
Healing Totem stuff, either with Thorn Totem or just scaling the healing.
Deeper into the Thorn Shield buffs.
A bit of a wildcard, but since I’m already grabbing Barbed Thicket, I can go up and grab Creeping Underbrush and Garden of Rage to get more minions for bleeds and get rage generation so maybe I could drop Tears of the Forrest and/or Ettera’s Path for better items.
This seems least likely to be a good idea, but is there something to using Stinging Bramble since I’m making so many Thorn Shields anyway? Is that good enough if I’m not doing much of my own bleed scaling aside from getting shared phys pen?
Eterra’s Blessing seems like a no-brainer since I’ll just get it for free when I cast Thorn Shield. Question on this tree: Do the healing totems summoned by this get the benefits of the Spriggand Form healing totems? (Aside from the thorn totem thing since that requires a direct cast.)
The last 3 skills are a bit more in flux and will also end up impacting some other skill trees.
Summon Spriggand for utility. Has healing and until I can max out crit avoid, it gives that. But admittedly it’s taking up a slot that could maybe be wolves for more minions that do bleeds.
Summon Bear: Tanky minion that has some bleeds and also comes with str scaling since I’m gonna be stacking that anyway.
Not in this current version, but related to Summon Bear, Swipe: to make use of the bear’s ability to use swipe for more bleeds/buffs.
Thorn Totem: Goes with the nodes in Spriggand form to make the healing totems use the Thorn totem tree. I think I like being able to summon the healing totems quickly and to get there I pass through this node anyway. Another thing to do bleeds aside from the function of healing things.
Other points of consideration:
I’m currently using Tears of the Forrest + Eterra’s Path to try to maintain Spriggand Form easier since I don’t think the 15/s rage from the belt is likely to be enough on it’s own. But maybe I’m wrong. But these are kind of taking up reasonably valuable slots for items, especially the necklace since I have an Nihilis that I could possible use instead once I level up enough.
For Gloves: Is it worth using Jurla’s with melee attack speed over just eventually getting exalted Eternal Gauntlets for DoT DR?
Weapon: I think I’m considering 3 possible directions:
Go 2h for a Titan Femur for lots of str. This could also have the side benefit of giving 100% crit DR, which would mean I could drop the Summon Spriggand if I wanted to. Although I’m also getting some crit avoid from Harmonious Wisdom which I wanted for att anyway.
Go 1H + Shield: Obvious benefit that I get to be a bit tankier from block and other mods on a shield.
Use Hazelroot just to get some free Thorn Shields on myself. I have one crafted with Shared Phys Pen.
Use Monument of Protection with shared phys pen on it just for more block. I have a 2LP one and an exalted axe, but haven’t slammed them yet. So unknown if this will be an immediate option.
Stats:
What’s a good distribution if I have the choice? I can be scaling str/att alongside minion bleed affixes and then also survivability. I get some survival from str in the form of armor and HP regen (from beastmaster tree), but obviously I should be fitting a decent amount of health in there as well to take advantage of Hideskin if possible.
Lastly: From where I’m at now what’s the quickest way to make this suck less short of just farming for stuff on another character?
I play a frostbite spriggan druid quite a bit, but have never tried the bee build … Here’s my 2 cents
I would recommend going a completely different direction with weapons than what you suggested … Get a bleed weapon if that’s your focus. I would also ignore bleed penetration strength / attunement stacking … You don’t really need those if you can just stack 200+ bleed stacks on an enemy. You could save yourself a lot of affixes and just go for HP / survival instead of str/attunement which provide little to know survival besides some armor from str.
Your DPS would be fine if you can get 200+ bleed stacks. I really like Dragonflame Edict on my minion spriggan, it procs a LOT of ignite via minions, and also gives you a fire AOE that goes off frequently.
If you went for cold conversion nodes in your skills and took dragonsflame edict you could stack 200+ frostbite, 200+ ignite, and 100ish bleeds without much effort.
I personally would take gathering storm instead of summon bear, there’s a node in gathering storm that allows your minions to increase storm stacks if they hit with the same element as your gathering storm is. I use cold minions and cold gathering storm, I will be in human form and get 5 storm stacks then transform into a spriggan, summon my minions, and they will keep 15-20 storm stacks up at all times. This gives me a large amount of “on hit” effects because gathering storm is constantly hitting anything around you. It’s like an autocast spell that applies dots with your minions. If you take the idols that spawn thorn totems on hit gathering storm will constantly summon your totems for you and they are considered different than the healing totems that cast thorns so you can have about 15 thorn totems, 9 of which also heal, out at all times.
I don’t mean to suggest you just fully convert to my spriggan build … But I’ve found it very strong at endgame so maybe this helps give you some ideas of what is working for other spriggans. Here’s a link if you want to check it out https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QJZ8GnwQ
I’m a bit confused.Could you explain a few things?
How are the storm bolts applying minion ailments? It says it’s giving you the storm stacks, so wouldn’t it still work off your ailment chances?
What is the ignite/bleed for if it’s based around frostbite? Is the goal just to get as many of any DoT and not necessarily scale any specific one of them?
You have increased DoT on your gear, but isn’t that just for you? Not the minions?
I’m definitely interested in what’s going on here, although I might try to spend a bit more time trying to get the bees to work. F
unny enough, I actually have a 3 LP dragonflame edict I dropped a long time ago that I tried using for a fire necro that didn’t really go well. Unfortunately the mods aren’t really ideal for this. It’s got cast speed, minion spell damage, and got stuck with some melee fire. I have some 2 LP ones, but I’d have to actually get the right crafts on them. Also I guess I can’t really do that for another 11 levels anyway.
Ya I worded that poorly, when I said the following about gathering storm …
What I meant was, gathering storm and I are apply DOTs, and then my minions are also applying DOTs. They are separate.
Originally I built it as a frostbite build, focusing on damage over time affixes and/or elemental damage over time, but adding another source of DOT like ignite increased the DPS significantly and made the game a lot easier at higher corruption.
The increased DOT on my gear is just for me yes, it helps gathering storm.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the LP on Dragonsflame Edict, it’s great without any LP already because it gives minions ignite. LP is just a bonus.
It’s a pretty fun playstyle tho, you rev up gathering storm like an engine, then switch to spriggan and it just keeps casting storm bolts while you focus on minion summoning, healing, and avoiding enemy’s attacks. I think bees would probably work well in that framework too as DOT appliers.
Thanks. I assume with the bees though they won’t be proccing the gathering storms stuff, but I guess they can still apply the bleed/ignite. I’ll definitely consider this.
I think the main problem with both of your builds seems to be a lack of damage scaling, specifically you both seem to be lacking sources of +% Minion Damage.
“% Minion Damage” is like “% Increased Damage” for the player, meaning it boosts both hit and ailment damage of any type, so Makszi’s idea of having Bleed, Ignite, Frostbite (perhaps add other ailments too?) can use this interaction and boost the damage from all of them at the same time. As long as it’s the minions applying them
With that in mind, instead of Summon Bear I believe the best choice would be Summon Wolf.
It has bleed and damage bonuses to DoT in the tree, so even if you don’t go the route Makszi suggested, you can focus on just Bleeds and it’ll still fit the build.
You can summon up to 4 just from the skill itself, and more minions = more DoTs
You could combine this with Herald of the Scurry to convert them into 8 Squirrels = more DoTs and Bleed bonuses
Passives with minion damage would be Shaman talent “Sky Warrior”, which boosts your damage, minion damage and it also lowers cooldown on your Leap.
Druid has “Woodland Beings” which leads nicely into chance to poison for you and minions.
And Beastmaster has “The Chase” which boosts minion movement and attack speeds.
There’s also “Hunter’s Emanation” in Primalist tree, but that one requires you hit something every 3 seconds, so that one is skippable.
I don’t how big the problem with Rage generation is, but the Toxic Reach passive I recommended earlier seems to be a solution that replaces Eterra’s Path, at least for monoliths.
For other items:
Don’t sleep on stuff like “+ Level to Summon Raptor” on Chest. While you don’t use any Raptors, that affix also has 61-90% Minion Damage
That shield of yours isn’t doing much. Look at off-hands, Fleshbound Tome base has Minion HP and Minion Damage, and you can add those same affixes again, and use suffix slots to cover your resistances.
You’re not wrong, but I haven’t really had any issues with DPS. Granted, I’m not wrecking bosses in 10 seconds like some super builds, but it’s sufficient. I wanted a build that was fun to play, had an active playstyle, incorporated healing/support for co-op, and was semi-automated.
I realize ‘active play style’ and ‘semi-automated’ are mostly opposites … But what I mean is, sometimes playing ranged classes can be a bit tedious in that you cant really shoot projectiles while moving. And I like that totems have an upkeep / maintenance in that you have to keep summoning them and placing them in different spots, but they automatically do ranged damage.
At least for the bees/totems/spriggand, doesn’t the attunement already give increased damage? Or is this another multiplicative source or something? The bees are getting about 14% increased damage per attunement with the relic which point-wise seems good compared to the dedicated minion damage nodes at least for the bees. It’s more favorable for the other minions though since they’re only getting the usual 4% scaling.
That said, where do you think I can salvage the points from? Maybe if the healing from totems/spriggands is enough I could drop the HP regen stuff, so I could drop Natural Fortitude. I’m also not 100% sure how valuable the Spirit Warden breakpoint passive is since my costs seem pretty low, but it’s hard to tell and it is giving me HP.
It does sound funny to have both the bees and squirrels running around.
Yeah it’s kind of hard to tell. Most of the time just running around I’m fine, sometimes when I plant my feet and just spam it starts getting low, but then it’s fine again when I start moving or if I use my vines to move. What concerns me with Toxic Reach/Creeping Underbrush is that they won’t work well for bosses. But maybe that can be ok. At some point I’ll have to try things out without the vine rage gen to see how bad it is for clear/single target.
EDIT: Also, as I’ve been playing the build, I’ve been pondering just ignoring the minion stuff and scaling around casting thorn shield. The bees give me extra thorn shield casts and scale HP with attunement anyway. So I’d have the current spriggand unique setup, drop the str for just attunement, cast speed, spell damage, and crit stuff. I’d still be able to get the benefits of the attunement crit avoid, but could re-allocate the str stuff into damage or health nodes. I’d have to search my stash a bit to figure out if I have the gear I need to swap though.
Gonna be trying to get more of those bees per 10 sec relics. I looked at those gloves initially and honestly I don’t even know what the point of them is. They can’t be used easily with the spriggand bee relic and even if you built around it with melee, it’s got an 8 second CD.
Yes, it already gives increased damage, and no, it is additive with the bonuses from ATN.
Your current relic has 7% per ATN, and Bees also gain 4% per ATN, so you’re getting at least 539% + % minion damage you have now. And that’s not enough.
You see, skills with passive trees usually have sources of “% more damage” from their tree (for example, Wolf has 75% more damage and 60% more DoT damage), which Bees don’t have, which makes them inferior to skills with passive trees. So in order to use Bees, the goal is to get as much “% increased damage” as possible.
That’s also probably why Makszi told you that you shouldn’t focus on scaling the Bees with stats too hard, because even if you do, you won’t be able to reach the levels of a minion skill with passive tree available.
Natural Fortitude in BM and Aspects of Might in Druid.
Points from Spirit Warden will need to go to other passives, because you won’t have enough points invested to reach the end of the tree. You can either put them in River Spirits for the Frostbite suggestion from Makszi, or Focused Wrath which helps with your Rage situation. Or use points from Claws of the Forest and get both choices.
I didn’t realize Shamanic Infusion in Shaman tree also gives Phys/Cold Penetration to minions, that beats the 5% minion damage/point in Sky Warrior.
Well, that is an option too, but then it would be a caster build, and I’m not sure you can get all that gear while still using your current unique item setup.
Honestly the 1% Crit Avoidance per 5 ATN is nothing amazing.
Yeah. I think I’m mostly interested in making use of the bees somehow. The bleed stuff seemed like the obvious thing the unique was asking for, but it also comes with that line that gives me more thorn shields on them. So I could see using them as just vessels for a ton of thorn shield explosions, plus the side benefit of getting frailty into the build. But yeah I could definitely see needing to ditch the eterra’s path/tears of the forrest stuff, but then the tree has that rage gain on crit node, so I guess that can solve that problem then.
I noticed that too. Although it’s kind of nice QoL if I need the attunement for stuff anyway since it means I don’t have to find somewhere for crit avoid on my gear.
We can put less points in The Chase and keep exactly 8 pts in Harmonious Wisdom and Aspect of Might to keep their bonuses, that way you get all the passives I mentioned and also keep the armor from STR.
Thanks. I’ll try that out. Although I have another question: I put on the squirrel helmet and I can only summon 2 squirrels. I thought it’s supposed to be double the limit. I could already summon 2 wolves with the skill tree as it was. Any idea what’s up here?
I just looked into it, and it seems I made two mistakes.
I thought you can have 4 wolves just from the skill, but as it turns out I was testing it on a Beastmaster mastery, and BM gets +1 companion limit from the mastery selection.
So just from the skill, you can have 3 wolves = 6 squirrels. Still good.
However, it turns out your Spriggan is a companion too. So that’s only 4 Squirrels and a Spriggan.
Idols are probably a mix of plugging resists, health, and maybe some spell damage while transformed or with a totem, crit, maybe some bees/10 sec. idk.
