Hello again gents. I like to think outside the box for builds, especially when I don’t see one shared on talked about too much on here. Today I present my Bug Bleed build that I am currently working on. I would like some critique and would also like to open some thought to going bleed instead of poison for Swarmblade.
At the moment, when I am ramped up, I can have ~55% doge rating and ~2k armor. I am taking a page from Mr. Dredd (shout out to Dredd builds for ideas) and using Eterra’s Boots and Spriggan tree to generate rage through vines. Since I had extra points, I toyed around with where to put them and think I like where I settled. Taking the thorn shield passive in the druid tree, then using Spriggan to both buff thorn shield’s armor/duration/procs adds a nice defensive layer to the doge you are generating. This is by no means finished and would like some thought/critique about where I should take this.
I have been messing with bleed duration here and from general game play and hitting the dummy, it seems to bring out the highest bleed ticks. It seems counterintuitive as you generally want bleeds to tick faster, but what I am finding is that with the super high attack speed (~200%), the duration comes in handy to keep stacking bleeds. It does ramp up slower at first than bleed builds without duration, but then the ticks that start rolling start doing big chunks off of boss bars. I am still missing a few more passive in druid to help this out as I went for defense first then offense as the dps is fine currently.
Now, I know I am missing crit avoidance. I can’t seem to find a way to squeeze this in outside of a blessing probably as I am going for doge rating and capping resists plus adding life in any spot as this build is using quite a few uniques. Ideally, Salt the Damn Wound will finally drop for me and I can do some more messing around. Currently, you have 80-90k dummy bleed ticks after about 3 seconds. Wengari Axe seems to be the end axe as Dragonborn does not have bleed increased effect and you have plenty of bleed stacks through dive and just attacking with arm slash. I do have idols I can switch around for more dps, but I am enjoying my HP pool and the buffer with it.
Note: I am not using bleeding heart. I originally thought that maelstrom and tornado will stack bleed on me but after watching some other game play, I guess it isn’t the case as you are not directly casting it. Irregardless, it has not been needed currently and gives you more flex as that would eat another slot with a unique.