Forget about Earthquake. Oldschool swipe is here!
I wanna share my experience with Druids Werebear in the new patch. I´ve been playing it for over a year now and wanna motivate other to enjoy it, too. …Especially without the combo of “Earthquake” and “Charge” which is in my opinion a thing that drastically needs a change THIS patch 
This Build was and still is for more than a year the regular way to play Werebear in LE. Some things changed here and there like the the roots mana cost or the remove of mana efficiency as an affix but the basics are still the same.
If you love stacking Armor and HP till eternity, this is how!
THE BUILD
STATS:
Crit Avoidence:
100% and nothing under that. Most important next to resistances.
Resistences:
Reach the cap of “all” of them. Last one to gear for is poison (2 out of idol suffix, passive or Chest piece = cap). You can avoid it completely if you dodge it with your playstyle.
Armor:
- The change this patch + the oppotunity to get a lot of Armor with primalists is an importnat thing you wanna aim for. Instead of only HP everywhere i swapped out “flat HP” suffixes to “flat Armor” suffixes and took the class specific prefixes for “Armor/Minion Armor” too.
- With very good gear armor will be between 50%-75% armor (unbuffed). Buffed Armor reaches the armor cap of 85% in battle with big groups of enemies.
Health:
- The next very importnat thing here is to max out HP after that as high as you can do without reducing your armor too much. This is especially on Druid not hard to do thanks to all those HP passives in the tree.
- With very good gear your HP will be between 4500 - 5500hp.
Endurance + Threshhold: and DMG-Reduction
- You reach the cap of 60% endurance with an “Endurance Blessing” (Spirits of Fire Timeline) and maxed out passive on Druid tree “Barkskin” (20+27+14=61).
- The threshhold depents on your Gear. The more hp you have the higher is your thresshold. You definitely wanna max out the Druid passive “Hideskin” to increase it a lot. With very good gear it will be between 1200 and 1600. The passive “Berserker” on Primalist helps as a “2nd” endurance when its active at low life (which is basically the time when you enter your threshhold).
- At this point i quickly summarise the dmg reductions for this build for those who wanna know: in best case and some only temporarily 85% (armor), 60% (Endurance only in Threshhold), 30% (Berserker in low life (<35%hp)), 30% (Aspect of the Boar when hit and getting hit by %chance), 16% (by nearby enemies through passive Ursine Strength).
Dodge Rating:
- Not needed! Just grab T5 or higher “Dodge on Potion use” on your Belts Prefix (T5 = 15% for 4 sec.). The rest depends on player skill.
Leech:
- Werebear takes advantage of a massive pool of leech. A big amount of HP and armor alone wont save you in high Arena waves. You need a lot of leech on top. You have 4% on “Swipe”, 12% on Druid tree, 9% on Beastmaster tree and another 3% on the general Primalist tree combined with the 50% “Leechrate Blessing” (The Black Sun Timeline).
Attributes:
- If you wanna stay as long as possible in “Werebear Form” the first you wanna get is 25 “Attunement” to make the mana cost of Swipe 2 mana and lower the cost of every other skill too. Last patch you took T5 or higher mana efficiency on amulets to reduce the requirement of attunement about 10 or more. Now you have to go Att on both rings and get the rest with passive points.
- After that you mainly focus on massive amounts of “Strength” to increase both your armor and your dmg by 4% each point. i ´m currently runing 104 Strength which gives me over 400% increased dmg and made my Armor 75% unbuffed.
- In the end “Vitality” here and there is needed to reach the passive point breakpoints and grants hp and hp regen as well.
DMG output and mobility:
- Although we all like to see big numbers on screen (and leech more hp with more dmg) i decided to focus more on defenses than offense. My Dummy dmg is up to 50k dmg and 100% Crit chance. This was enough to beat mobs fast enough on Waves 500+ before they beat me. Werebear can achiece a much higher dmg output when using your ressources you spend for defense on offense. I would say the dmg is nearly doubled then.
- A big reason for my choice is the limited mobility. Our “Movement Speed” is under 50% and the only mobility skill we use is “Charge”. I used Charge with a cooldown of 2 sec. (maxed reduced is less than 1.6 sec.). If we now compare this to another melee class like “Sentinel” we see that we miss the awesome skill “Volatile Revearsal” on our Bear which opens a whole new story of gameplay for Sentinels. That means we will be hit more often and to survive we need more defense. For that reason you will mainly see defensive idols on the planner.
GAMEPLAY:
- Till wave 300 you basically charge into everything as fast as possible and swipe all the time. This is the same for Monos.
- From Wave 300+ (depending on your gear) you start using “Ravage” against enemies with big HP pools or enemies you wanna kill as fast as possible. you wont have mana issues if done correctly. Next to that you wanna stack as much as you can of the Werebear node “Rip and Tear” for capping crit chacne and increasing your dmg. You better combine this with “Roar” to get “Frenzy” and the last 10% of missing armor thanks to the skill node “Rallying Cry” This means you charge into big groups as soon as you dodge their attack, roar and kite them away. Repeat it as soon as possible. When getting hit you might proc the skill “Ice Thorns” to increase your armor even more.
- "The “Hit and Run Tactic” you can “easily” do with Sentinels thanks to “Volatile Revearsal” is way harder (but still possible) to do with Werebear. So keep practicing kiting with melee chars and stop facetanking everything!
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For Emergency-Situations: Once you notice you clicked the wrong button and transform back into humanform (this gets scarry in arena…
and you might need new pants after this…): Run away and use the skill “Warcry” for Haste, Heal, Ailment cleanse, Frailty apply and blocking projectiles till you can transform back to Werebear… Dont forget Leap! - Fun Fact… For Earthquake Werebear you only need to move and autoclick “Charge” the see same results in arena (1 Finger Build). You need way less of everything for even better results. EHG pls… So for those of you who wanna try Werebear, i can recommend to skip the Earthquake Combo and get a better practice with this version.
Opportunities for improvement:
- If you manage to get 100% Crit chance with a single Raider Axe (T7 melee crit chance for example, you can change the other axe to “Undisputed” (axe) this will increase your dmg by alot. You also want to change 1 of your affixes on Helmet and Relic to “+2 Werebear” and “+2 Swipe” to increase your bleding chance for the most efficient use of Undisputed.
- Thanks to the new 2Hand “Lucerne” you can try to go 2hand with 100% Crit chance and also take advantage of another 50 flat dmg (Primalist tree). This also grants you the 15% dmg reduction you otherwise lose while dual wielding.
- Druid as access to a lot of “Stun” and “more dmg against stunned”. Let me know if you figured out how make a “perfect” “Stun Version” of this
- If you have problems with damage over time based enemies and keep dying, you should increase your hp rather than your armor (6000+hp is possible on Werebear). This has a higher EHP against that. Otherwise i recommend more armor.
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Replace Warcry. Since Roots cost too much mana now you wanna avoid it here (you get the slow effect from your axe for the Swipe node “Trapper”).
I didnt test it enough but since you normaly dont need “Warcry” you can change that skill to a companion skill like “Storm Crows” for more “Armor shred” for example. But from what i saw the companion died too quickly in this build…
Because this already looks like a wall of text, ill link the planner below for the rest. If you have questions feel free to ask
Gear: Druid, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
Gear I had for pushing: Druid, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner
Hope you all enjoy your time in Last Epoch
