Suddenly I have a doubt. I am leveling a Primalist, either Shaman or Beastmaster. The build will be focused on cold damage, with wolves, thorns totems, tornado, tempest strike and ice thorns.
Most of these skills scale with Attunement and some also have the Spell tag. Should I use a Staff/Sceptre with Adaptive Spell Damage or a Melee weapon?
I think I need Adaptive Spell Damage, but I have a doubt.
There is no right or wrong answer, it really depends on what part of the build you want to excel the most.
Scepters and Staves are always a good middleground because they provide both Flat Melee Dmg and Adaptive Spell Damage.
If you want to spam ice throns and run into mana problems you might want to use a wand with the -3 mana cost.
Maybe a scepter with the -2 mana cost prefix will be enough too.
Also don’t forget, that Swords can have adaptive spell dmg prefixes.
(But swords are bad for tempest strike, since their upside is fast attacks, which doesn’t scale that well with Tempest Strike)
You can also DW a mix of Wand/Scepter + a Regualr Melee Weapon in off-hand (swords and axes are applicable for primalist (Raider Axe is very solid, since it has up to 5% generic base crit)
I’m in very early leveling and not sure. I’m still wondering if I will have a Shaman (with a primary focus on cold) or a Beastmaster (with a primary focus on minions). My first idea was a Shaman, but the builds has only one Shaman skill very low in the tree, and I’ll need many Beastmaster points (Aspect of the Boar and Aspect of the Shark mostly). Tempest Strike would be mostly here to proc Cold AoE but I guess the core of damage would be the wolves.
If you want to go Melee Focused Beastmaster i would probably not recommend Tempest Strike.
Especially ASpect Of The Shark seems wasted with Tempest Strike.
Rather go for Swipe with Lightning Dmg if you want to deal elemental melee dmg
Yes, that’s what I was wondering.
I wanted to go pure cold so Swipe would not fit, but I fear the build would not perform well. I’d like it to go further than the campaign or the Abomination, at the opposite of my previous Primalist builds. So it will probably be a BM with Swipe. And it that case, I may respec a guy and not level a new one, unsure.
I finally leveled my first Beastmaster to the endgame (skipped this class for a long time)
I went full melee with swipe as a buff and mana generator. Main damage skill is earthquake (converted into hitting 3 times - big damage!), fury leap, warcry and a bear companion.
The bear is super tanky and can hold aggro very well. Despite speccing mainly for melee damage I took the 2 passive nodes to double companion damage by setting limit to 1. The bear has great damage with retaliation and tanks everything in the game. Currently running my 3rd empowered timeline without issues.
Beastmaster is great with the aspects and the endurance stuff.
Edit: If you wanna go hybrid, I’d defenitely try shaman with either sceptre and shield/DW or staff. Cannot recommend because I didn’t try myself. Maybe you try what weapon fits best. Theres a lot of spelldamage stuff in the melee skills (earthquake, swipe, tempest strike). I’m just not entirely sure if it pays if to go hybrid or just go balls to the wall with spelldamage.
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