Serpent is a DoT vehicle though, ive tried it with a high damage wep and Draalsting always performs better because from memory theres nothing that multiplies hit damage in the Serpent tree - you also need ‘end game’ gear to clear high mono’s with it - you want Aspect of the Viper effect on all your idols and now Helm/Chest to pull good numbers. The biggest issue its slow and needs lots of attack speed and has no Multi Aoe.
My idea would be to remove the snakes on kill as they are useless and change it to some Aoe-chain attack so you hit one mob and spears chain between them doing damage - I played Serpent BM to 100 Mono’s with single Raptor pet for more single target, had approx 70% dodge, 2kHP with Maelstrom healing from the stacks, biggest issue is Raptor dies on high monoliths, only AoE clearing and the Raptor were an issue, with over 100% attack speed feels pretty fluent and Aspect of Viper buffs you can generally 1/2 shot most white mobs from poison ticks
Swipe and Tempest are generally pretty awful, they are way too slow, Tempest Strike has no Attack speed scaling from memory and no node that converts melee into spell damage/vice versa so your damage is all over the place. Swipe is not bad on Werebear but requires mega investment to use properly if you dont want to bounce back to human form
Not if you DW Raider Axes (up to 5% crit chance implicit) with Slayer’s prefix (5% crit chance @ t5) for a total of 25% base crit chance without any increased crit. Then all you need is 300% increased crit chance which you can get 200% from Swipe’s Ambush node alone, then getting the other 100% isn’t going to be difficult.
Ive done werebear a long time ago with a Poleaxe for that with 93% crit and without abusing Kermodes which I never did back then you eventually slowly run out of mana from missing attacks (controller), using charge, non crits still, having to keep casting entangling roots to restore mana if so
Also what you described is still a big investment, you just need what perfect implicit Raider Axe (2-5) x2 then T5 base crit rolls and then usually to get to the top of Druid tree for increased crit, now you are also taking increased damage, you also now either lose T5 Added or T5 attack speed on the weapon - Spriggan form solves all of this by a single unique belt
Yeah I had this thought before. Perhaps some multiplier on Tempest Born’s mana generation or just a node on the skill tree doing something similar to help boost it up to it’s counterparts.
Absolutely agree. I’m having a better return with a Bleed Swipe dual wielding axes. Less investment needed and better clearing.
Late edit: I wanted to toss this in too. Another problem with having ASPD convert to Crit is Crit has a hard cap at 100% while ASPD has no cap which is another large negative against Tempest Strike.
Thank you for posting this, I came to the forums to rant about tempest strike and its issues as a utility skill. Im mostly bummed about how much you lose even when you care about attacks speed.
I am doing an Earthquake build and needed a mana generator. I thought Tempest strike would be perfect but swipe actually gives so much utility and I think the generalist part of the tree needs a nerf.
Tempest strike Invest into as a mana generator and was almost happy with it but there was no way to guarantee no skills proc. You can spend 17 points out of 20 to get all the mana generation and the nodes that stop the procs, but the tree actually say you always need to be able to proc atleast one. I also invest 8 point in that passive tree but i would use those anyways for the chill and hp. The only benefit i found was that you didnt need to hit anything so you can gain mana anywhere.
Swipe on there other hand give mana and 200% inc crit and +75% multi (+100% if you can get a +1 to swipe). The skill is absolutely insane and needs to be toned down. Honestly cutting it half wouldn’t be enough of a nerf.
i agree the others need to brought up to par. But the generic utility is SO HARD to overcome. it gives 200% inc crit chance and +75 multi while generating mana. im fine with swipe itself keeping that power but making it global means that for the other skills to ever compete they need to give something of similar power.
IMO tempest should be best when you have no attack speed. Swipe when you do have attack speed. Serpent strike when you want to do dots/poison. Swipe is honestly a pretty boring skill tree and just has alot of generic power. Also because that power is global it limits power from be distributed to other skills the primalist has.
Bear Swipe feels nice and powerful, particularly when you are levelling. When you start running hard monoliths and you encounter those massive health pools with other defences in the Empowered Timelines.
EHG has some nice options in there for your 20 points which you can build a few different ways to only support the skill from within the tree, or to synergise with other parts of your build (e.g. Swipe supports Bleed, but you’ll need to add investment to get the best value). The support of More damage against stunned is great and I love that you need to get to 22 for the best damage AND need to support that with your gear choices.
Then because there are no more ways to scale the attack by any great margin (you have all the multipliers and we are only looking at small changes from the various sources of Increased damage).
As other posters have said attack speed availability is very low for a Primalist/Druid. The only place I could see to find it in any amount to feel impactful was the attack speed with an active totem Shaman nodes which, placed at the bottom of the tree, I assumed were there exactly for this type of late-game min-maxing.
It isn’t perfect, but even as is I find it one of the nicest skill trees I’ve used in ages in any game.
Some of the other weakness are not directly related to the skills, but to other interactions which are unclear or possibly bugged. Ice Thorns (with the cast when hit build for a 1 second armour buff) helps out in the early game against those big packs of small ranged mobs that otherwise kill you in the first barrage of tiny missiles), but by the time you have a companion out and a pack of thorn totems it becomes mostly useless as it casts on your companions or totems randomly instead of you. Its very hard to judge the skill, and by extension the werebear as it looks like the devs consider this a core skill and it is currently “broken” as I see it. We have to see what is coming down the road in that direction.
Ninja edit: Having done 100 and all the content I could find on my bear I spent the last few days grinding with a vague hope of gear to fit the perceived holes I saw in the late game build. If there are new bases coming with some different implicits specifically useful to bears it would resolve some more apparent problems which are only a result for itemisation.
Im having trouble interpreting your post.
From what i understand you have been using swipe on werebear as your main dmg.
My issue with the skill was how globally powerful it is for other things. Specifically the GLOBAL 200% inc crit chance 100% multi while also being the best mana generator with attack speed.
The reason i say it is too powerful is if you just give the other skill that much power then you get with 2 skills that give a total of 400% inc crit and 200 multi. The bonuses needs to be more tailored or stay global but be weaker.
For refrence this is my build: EQ using swipe to recover mana.
I’ve tested it on multiple builds and fully agree its the best auto attack skill hands down I am just saying compared to other classes primalist as a whole is still weak so rather than nerfing the most recent reworked skill we have we should focus in bringing the rest up to par.
I’ve checked out your build and I can see why we are heading in different directions – I’, talking about things from a Druid/100pcWerebear build, whereas you are coming from Shaman (and are not transformed?).
I stand by my assessment from a Bear perspective and found yours very interesting from the other viewpoint.
The global crit buff from Swipe in Werebear form is needed to actually make a permanently transformed Bear, but the generous mana return isn’t a useful node as you only get that mana in human form. This part of the design seemed to support a more actively transforming playstyle. The recent dev stream said permanent bear/spriggan was part of the plan, but the actively changing needed more work, specifically for a third form to be revealed.
I re-read your comments now as specifically focused on NON-transformed, and how you use Swipe and Earthquake together.
While checking out your build I had two questions (if they derail the thread and you want to talk about them we cna take it to a new thread).
I saw you are using Titan Heart, I imagine in main part for the 15% damage reduction. I could not find a combination of defences (between nearly capped armour, overcapped all resists, Berserker, and Aspect of the Boar that took me through the hardest empowered mods. I needed Titan Heart’s additional 15% to survive. Was that your experience? I’m finding Bear survival dropping off the higher I go and only Titan Heart gets me up to a safe level.
Second was for attack speed. I found attack speed very heart to find. I had to always used gloves with a good tier of attack speed or my damage and proc rate were poor. I resorted to using Totemic Fury at the bottom of Shaman to find a bit more and that was it. How do you cope with none on your gear and using a 2-h with the lowest chance of proccing? When I am on ~1 attack per second, even with 14 seconds on my specialised Thorn Totem there are long periods it is absent with only a 10% chance to proc. It is my understanding there are no proc coefficients and that simply faster attacks will have the lowest downtime between procs.
I’m getting off track
Primalist is actually one of the strongest classes right now. So you are incorrect in that statement. Specifically, beastmaster and druid are the strongest, while shaman is the weakest.
No because spriggan form is even more broken right now going druid or beastmaster and you can abuse perma taunt on companions such as bear and raptor while in no transformation.
I think this would be a good change for druid especially since you can get the 30% of hp as threshold. titan’s heart no regen actually hurts my playstyle a bit but werebear should be alot better off b/c you attack alot more than I do.
I dont need AS because the whole build revolves around 1 big EQ. After having played with both Swipe and Tempest Strike, TS was actually the better mana generator with 0 AS but I have so much investment into to it and it barely won out on mana. The 100 crit multi especially is too much to overlook.
Even with all that swipe still didn’t feel right because I’m using +100 dmg every 5 secs and it is really hard to get the timing with Swipe. I would often be using Swipe only to have the buffs pop up as i was finishing my last attack. The difficultly in execution made me feel better about swipe having more power, though I still think the numbers are too much. If i were to change the nodes it would look something like:
I completely understand. The support built into Swipe to support Werebear builds is excellent, but it overshadows what is available elsewhere for other builds, making it mandatory and reducing build variety.
It reminds me somewhat of Cadence in Grim Dawn. Cadence was a terrible skill by default, but with many superb ways to multiply it. Unfortunately the way these multipliers were implemented I found so many of my builds where I specifically wanted to use something other than Cadence I was ‘forced’ to add it into my rotation to get the best dps. I called this ‘Cadence-weaving’ and it was indeed very effective (if somewhat unintuitive and awkward to use) but it ended up reducing the diversity of many of my builds.
My first thought would be that if these stats are needed for Werebear, but should be on other builds that do not use Swipe, then move the bonuses to places on the passive tree. We have most of the other Aspects in there, some easy to get for all builds, other more exclusive. In the example we are talking about now that would be something like getting Aspect of the Panther above 20 points in the passive trees that needed it?
