Companion Druid Endgame Build Guide

Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:

Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.

Skill Rotation

• As you approach a pack, open with Ravens to deal damage in an area and improve Critical Strike Chance.
• Target Elites and other high health targets with your Wolves. With maximum cooldown, the Wolves will recover at least every 2.75 seconds. Continue spamming them on Cooldown, as they deal the most damage.
• Walk or Shred into the center of the pack and cast Poison Creeper to activate Envenom and Heightened Malice.
• In between Companion casts and packs, regularly alternate between Maul and Shred for a chance to recover Companion cooldowns with Pack Leader and activate and maintain bonuses from Quickshift, Heightened Senses, Skinwalker's, Iron Fur, Digitigrade Gait, Ancestral Guidance, and Ring of Starless Skies.
• Generally, you'll want to Lacerate on Cooldown to maintain the Skill damage bonus, but if a situation is particularly dangerous, you may want to hold the Immunity for an opportune moment.

Druid Spirit Boons

Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Companion Druid focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Yul + Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows you to execute at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other runeword, it also generates large amounts of offering.
• Xol + Ceh - The more pets, the merrier right? On a serious note, these don't gain most bonuses that your main Wolves do, but they can contribute to Shepherd's Bonus.

Alternative choices

As long as you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top Runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Gar - The Crit Chance bonus is great, especially early on.
• Mot - Dark Shroud is a strong and affordable defensive option.
• Lith - A surprisingly strong Invocation, provided you can afford to stand still.
• Cem - As a Magic Rune, it's a reasonable choice that you're more likely to find.
• Ur - Though the Offering generated is on the low side, this rune should be easy to acquire and activate frequently.

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

• Hired: Raheir

Raheir provides us with passive All Resistance, an area of effect Slow which increases our damage, a 90% damage reduction bubble that also increases damage, and prevents us from getting one shot every 30 seconds thanks to Valiance. Beware that he's not present when playing in groups and make sure you remain resistance capped without him.

• Reinforcement: Varyana

We utilize Varyana's Ancient Harpoons for a periodic grouping effect.

To enable the Companion Druid to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the Endgame with the Companion Druid, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

This section is designed to guide your Companion Druid from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.

Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.

What can I do to improve survivability?

The build works really well when you decimate everything in seconds, but may get overwhelmed if fights are long against high level monsters. There are several adjustments you can make when you have trouble with more difficult content:

• Check if your Armor & Resists are capped.
• Use defensive consumables.
• Roll Maximum Life instead of offensive stats on as many pieces as possible.
• Kite enemies when they become Unstoppable.

What is the best weapon choice?

We need to use a 2-hander, as the damage multiplier from Shepherd's is absurdly high. Of the available options, a 2-handed Polearm provides the most consistently applicable bonus.

Mechanics

So, what doesn't work with Companions?

In short, as of the Season 6 PTR, the Storm tag (granted by Storm's Companion) and Werewolf tag (granted by Alpha) are essentially cosmetic for Wolves. There are some exceptions based around the casting the skill. For example, Resonance's Earth Damage bonus and Overcharged can be activated by casting Wolves. But the vast majority of tested glyphs, tempers, skills, and paragon nodes have no benefit to damage. Most notable among these are Thunderstruck, Lust for Carnage, Fang and Claw, Earth and Sky, Petrify, and Werewolf/Storm Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed tempers.

You can safely assume that bonuses which specifically call out Companions will contribute to their damage. And while we never recommend relying on Attack Power as a metric for a character's strength, multipliers which contribute to Attack Power generally seem to improve Companion damage as well. A more exhaustive list will be forthcoming in the Druid Class Compendium slated for this Season. Extra special shoutout to our Game Mechanics Specialists for this!

Attack Speed Caps

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Druids, these two caps are distributed in the following way:

Cap 1

• Gear rolls
• Paragon nodes
• Elixirs
• Nimble
• Wild's Call
• Moonrise
• Artillery Shrine
• Wolves Attack Speed (Tempering)

Cap 2

• Accelerating
• Rapid
• Preserving Blood Howl
• Bestial Rampage
• Enhanced Shred
• Werewolf Attack Speed (Tempering)
• Earth Skill Attack Speed
• Basic Attack Speed (Gear Affix)

Read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Stagger

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

Coming soon!

• The Companion Druid brings a swarm of allies to the party, and enhances all of their damage with Shepherd's.
• Wolves will destroy most targets and the cooldown will be short. Use it repeatedly on the targets that somehow survive.
• We are very resilient and even have invincible allies to soak up some attacks. Very kind of them.

Written by IBoilerUp

Reviewed by Danger