Soul of the Mountain Spirit Thorns Druid In Progress Build

Primalist
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Hello. I wanted to share my current attempt at a build to get some thoughts and feedback. Here is the planner as I am now having more or less just reached empowered monos: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QDMZen7B

The idea is pretty straightforward, I just wanted to play a perma spriggand form build based around the new unique Soul Of the Mountain, which gives extra Vale Spirits based on attunement. That plus the attunement scaling on Hazelroot is the core of the build. It’s been normal or low corruption monos so far, so I can’t really say how well it will scale up, but I was pleasantly surprised by how the build feels at least. I’ve never used Spirit Thorns before so I was worried about whether or not it’d be too single target for general clear, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case. You get tons of extra projectiles from the relic, you can take piercing, and they track enemies. So it’s actually fairly smooth to just run around, hold the button for a bit, then move on.

So onto the discussion: I think the core parts of the build I’m sure about are the Spirit Thorns things and Maelstorm for the global phys damage and other buffs. Beyond that, I’m shakier on what I like.

  • Summon Spriggand is really nice for the buffs it provides. It along with the attunement gives crit avoid easily caps me without any other investment. The problem is, without more investment into minion life it’s started to die in empowered monoliths, which isn’t great when you’re relying on that to not get crit. I was actually pondering running DW with an offhand Hakkar’s Phoenix but that feels like it’s going too far to solve a problem that might just be one exalted affix away from fixing. Or if we manage to get way more attunement we could maybe drop it all together, but I like the other buffs and as we’ll see, I kind of struggle to find support skills that fit nicely into the build.

  • Gathering storm is some random extra bonus damage proccing from Maelstrom and Tornado. But without a convenient way to get storm stacks, a lot of the tree just goes to waste. Before when I’ve tried a druid build someone suggested using the node that makes summons keep the buff up, but I’d first need to go melee something at the start of a mono and that just seems like at best an annoyance and at worse a way to get myself killed.

  • Tornado is actually something I’ve been messing around with more recently since I was able to Equip Rule of the Simoon, which procs tornadoes on hit. The fact that they’re fire doesn’t really matter since we add spell phys anyway plus most of our scaling is going to be fairly generic because of the massive amounts of attunement we’re stacking. It’s kind of nice. With this many hits we proc it fairly consistently. What exactly I want to spec it for is the question. It can give a move/cast speed buff, but it doesn’t stack and it’s fairly short without a lot of investment. It procs often enough while fighting things, but the movespeed doesn’t do that much to help us move around the map faster. Charged Storm can give us storm bolts. Churning Orbs sort of fulfills the same function of random extra damage plus it’s a hit so it cares about all the crit we have. It does take a lot of points to fully invest in though. We could take pull strength to group things, but I don’t know that there’s that much of a reason to actually do that with this build. I don’t think Eye of the Storm makes much sense. We’re not a melee build and we’re gonna be pretty regularly proccing it on out enemies anyway.

  • Before Tornado, the slot was more in flux. Initially I had Ettera’s Blessing to proc with Thorn Shield, but it’s only direct casts and we just don’t cast Thorn Shield directly that much. Or at least I don’t think we should. The hoard of vale spirits just makes using spirit thorns too good to waste time on something else. I briefly tried the healing totems inheriting Thorn Totem’s tree then used the node that sometimes shoots Spirit Thorns from them. This got me some armor shred as well, but honestly it wasn’t a lot. Usually like 10-15 stacks tops. Plus I had to actually press the button, so that was a downside. It’s genuinely hard to tell what anything is contributing in this build with all the random projectiles flying around, so I don’t actually know how much damage they were doing. It also seems like it might just be overkill with all the thorns we already get from the vale spirits.

  • Beyond that… there’s basically just other companions, form swaps, and Entangling Roots eating all the Vale Spirits for no reason. So idk if there’s that much else for choices. I did briefly consider running werebear to run around procing storm bolts and then I could use Warcry, but that seems like it’d just be a worse version of Tornado Werebear and it seems like it’d be too jank to keep swapping for buffs and things. Also the Vale Spirits build up over time, so only swapping to Spriggand form when needed seems sub-optimal. I was actually considering the bear route partially to try to make the no movement boots work, but that just seems like stacking up bad ideas.

Moving onto the passive tree:

I don’t know much about what to prioritize beyond the big ticket passives. Attunement stacking is giving me increased damage and flat spell damage, so do I still value the random increased damage nodes on the tree? Do I value random flat spell damage? Or do I just ignore all that for more crit/cast speed/survival/utility? I’m not paper at the moment, but I could definitely stand to be tankier before I move up in corruption.

As for gearing: The build sort of has a lot of slots dedicated to uniques, so beyond getting 2 LP versions, it can be hard to upgrade those and that can also make it challenging to get more defenses and stuff I might need. That said, I’ve been wondering if maybe I don’t need all the rage generating things I have. I basically never dip in rage even a little currently. So it seems like I could either drop the belt, the necklace (for a decent Nihilis ideally), or maybe some of the rage related passives. For rings, at 80 at least one of those slots becomes a red ring with ideally T7 attunement. (although at the moment I don’t have any with attunement or LP) I’m not sure if I also get rid of the Silvafrond for one too. It’s nice having basically teleport, but maybe with enough movespeed it doesn’t matter and I’d just benefit too much from having another red ring. In general though, I feel like I need to find room for some more tank somewhere. Only having ~2000 HP and not nearly 80% armor seems not great. Although I do have a lot of Endurance Threshold, so there’s that.

I could definitely use frailty somewhere, but that would mean giving up an LP slot on my gloves or amulet if I don’t replace those with an exalted.

I’m not 100% sure what my BiS weapon is. I have a 2 LP Hazelroot waiting for a good slam. But what would be that slam? I guess it’s between cast speed, crit, and crit multi in the prefix and suffix is less desirable, but I guess it could be shared phys pen or stun chance? I feel like the cast speed is really valuable given the lost cast speed from the relic and to keep up Maelstrom, but at the moment I have no extra crit multi and since there are no base crit nodes in Spriggand Form, my character sheet spell crit chance just is my crit chance. With the Summon Spriggand buff, it’s decently high, but it does need at least exalted crit chance somewhere to cap if that’s a priority. Which maybe it isn’t so much with this. I’m doing a lot of little hits, so there’s not as much pressure on any given hit to crit, so it’s closer to the end of skills where the crit chance just approaches an approximation of a damage increase. If I wasn’t doing the Tornado thing, I could run the new gloves Grasp of the Blood Mage which gives more flat crit chance and some leech and I basically don’t get the downside since I’m not spending mana. Although I also don’t have one yet, so that’s sort of a moot point for now.

Thoughts?

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Ive been meaning to use that unique, but I have a different theory.

I plan to actually avoid attunement that way I get no extra spirits. So with 3 max spirits, every 3 seconds I can fire off a 120% more damage entangling roots, since the relic gives you a spirit for free every second.

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That’s an interesting idea. Definitely curious to see how you’d build it. If you’re actively avoiding adding attunement, you’ll need to rely on a lot of increased phys/spell damage mods to scale it up.

EDIT: I suppose this route also just gives you some more options. It could still be phys, but it could also be poison or cold/frostbite. Not sure the best option out of those.

EDIT 2: Another Thought, if you want to avoid attune but still want some stat scaling damage, you could go for Palarus for flat spell damage per 2 str. Then you get to take advantage of the Aspects of Might passive for a lot of armor and if you can fit it, the Natural Fortitude in BM for HP regen. Then for offhand you get to take advantage of either a Bastion of Honor or perhaps dual wield a Cleaver Solution for int and then… somehow get ward. That part no idea. If we didn’t have to use Soul of the Mountain it could have been Vessel of Strife, but oh well. We can get 15 Ward per cast of Spirit Thorns, but not sure if that’s enough to make the cleaver solution worth it over the shield or a catalyst.
Oh also if we’re ok with not using the Spriggand Chest we could go for Last Bear set affixes for a bunch of str/regen/endurance threshold. Or if we stick with the Ward route, Wall of Nothing to convert our endurance threshold into ward decay threshold.

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Love to see more player trying out Spirit Thorns :slight_smile: Though spoiler: Spirit Thorns alone is pretty weak… But it’s one of the most fun skill to use, for me at least, though it’s probably just my coping mechanism due to how outdated Marrow Shards is from Acolyte skill tree…

Anyways, if you’re looking for other sources of damage procs like you mentioned Gloves of Simoon for Tornadoes, you might try considering using Fragment of Enigma off-hand catalyst as well as Harbinger of Stars belt. But using the belt will give you Rage issues.

I actually tried this earlier. With my current set up I was running out of Rage too fast from the procs it does. And its damage is just in par with the Spark Charge and Meteor my build procs. For context, here’s what it looks like in my original build if you’re curious:

As for your passive, I think the only one worth mentioning are:

  1. Focused Wrath and Rancour. You probably don’t need this since you are using Legacy of the Quiet Forest belt.
  2. I don’t know how much difference having Eternal Nature would make as it adds flat spell damage.
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Looks pretty cool. What exactly is going on there? Do you have a planner I can see? What are all those explosions that aren’t the meteors?

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I do have a planner but it’s still unoptimized and still way too far from my current gear and items since I just built this myself. Even the current character is very unoptimized and squishy, still at 200 Corruption and biggest issue are some Champion enemies and timeline bosses and harbingers can take long… But “mapping” and killing rare mobs are fine, I rarely do run out of Rage with those meteor procs tho it can still happen… But here it is if you want to check (Ignore the affixes in the body armor, since I’m still deciding whether I would wanna switch to Swarmblade in the future):
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/A2ngbvbA

And the only thing I currently have so far are the amulet, off-hand, gloves, boots and a relic with T7 Spriggan form at least. I do have 3LP Mantle of the Pale Ox, but too scared to use it yet…

The other explosions are Spark Charges from the off-hand and Thorn Totem explosions. I’m using an idol with “chance on hit to summon Thorn Totem”. And in the Thorn Totem tree I’m using Rotten Core node, it does the explosion whenever they’re being unsummoned (I also haven’t tried Memories of Eterra node yet, not sure if that will give Rage back. I will test later). The Rotten Core explosions itself are weak, it just looks cool to me that’s why I’m using it tbh.

Edit 1: I also forgot to mention another reason for using Thorn Totem, I do benefit from the Shaman’s Totemic Fury. Gives lots of cast speed when there’s a totem active. You probably don’t need this too since you can just summon your Healing Totem directly. I just prefer this to be automated.

Edit 2: Changed the planner URL. I forgot to apply the changes I’ve made in the passive tree.

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Oh. Pale Ox is a decent idea. With either the vine boots, ring, or the summon thorn totems we could basically always have a summon up. It’s probably ok to be dropping levels in Spriggand form now that I’ve more or less settled on my setup I think. Those extra points kind of just go into some armor, so a replacement that gives more defense than whatever little armor I’m getting from the Thorn Shield stuff might just be worth.

EDIT: Oh but it’s highest health minion and that’s my summoned spriggand. So if I did this I’d probably need to ditch that and make up for the lost crit avoid.