Hurricane 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 Passives

• Ursine Strength naturally harmonizes with the Hurricane Druid due to its fantastic Overpower multiplier and Max Life benefits. Likewise, the Healthy damage bonus is a nice addition as this build prioritizes playing at full health.
• Clarity is our main damage passive. We utilize ‍Clarity to snapshot large amounts of Critical Strike Chance and significantly improve our damage for the duration of ‍Hurricane. It functions on a stack basis, receiving 1 stack when you cast a Companion Skill and requiring 3 casts of Companion skills per ‍Hurricane to gain the full benefit.
• Provocation allows the Hurricane Druid to Overpower. You can snapshot it, granting Hurricane the ability to deal Overpower damage over its entire duration. Maul is used to Shapeshift us into Werebear.
• Envenom boosts Critical Strike damage as long as enemies are Poisoned. This damage bonus is achieved rather easily with Tempest Roar and Toxic Claws, enabling our Hurricane to Poison on Critical Strikes.
• The Hurricane Druid leverages Quickshift and Nature's Reach for additional damage. The former activates when Shapeshifting, while the latter requires you to damage enemies with the edges of Hurricane's radius.

Skill Rotation

• The Hurricane Druid requires time to fully stack its passives, both when entering a new zone and between each cast of ‍Hurricane. This requires at least 3 casts of Companion Skills before each Hurricane, as well as 20 seconds spent in Werebear form to trigger Provocation.
• Begin your rotation by casting Companion Skills in order to stack Clarity. Make sure to use ‍Maul immediately after casting skills to return to Werebear form and continue developing ‍Provocation. Be very mindful as you near Provocation's 20 second limit, as any damaging skill will consume the proc and severely disrupt your rotation.
• When you have 3 Clarity stacks and Provocation ready, cast Earthen Bulwark to enable Resonance, and then cast Hurricane to snapshot all the benefits. Once ‍Hurricane is active, try to deal damage using the edges of its radius when possible.
• Use Cataclysm at the tail end of each Hurricane when ‍Tempest is at its strongest to inflict Vulnerable and double your damage with Mjölnic Ryng. Exactly when you should use your Ultimate Skill will depend on both your Hurricane and Cataclysm durations, but aim to have it active just through the end of Hurricane's Duration.

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 Hurricane Druid focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Wat - Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows execute at 10% HP. When combined with Xol in your other runeword it also generates large amounts of offering.
• Xol + Ohm - War Cry provides a moderate damage bonus that is almost always up thanks to its generous duration.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Xal - Grants a hefty amount of Max Life, effectively increasing Overpower damage and survivability.
• Yom - Petrify offers an alternative way to enable your Crowd Control bonuses, Stunning enemies and Staggering bosses.
• Lith - A solid alternative to Bac that requires a more stand-still playstyle.
• Gar - Provides a large chunk of Critical Strike Chance. Great option early on.
• Mot - Enables the Rogue's Dark Shroud, which is a strong defensive option.
• Cir - A decent option that can be used with Maul early on.

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

We hire Raheir for Valiance, a Mercenary Perk that helps us remain Healthy and Fortify by negating big damage. He also provides us with Raheir's Aegis, a valuable source of Resistances early on. Lastly, Inspiration is a sizeable damage bonus that is manipulated by casting Bastion and Ground Slam at the tail-end of our Hurricane for significant damage gains.

Reinforced: Aldkin

The Hurricane Druid takes advantage of Field of Languish's Damage Reduction to remain Healthy and retaliate with big Overpower hits.

To enable the Hurricane 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 Hurricane 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 Hurricane 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.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

Druids have only two non-Ultimate sources of Unstoppable. Trample and Earthen Bulwark. If you're not subscribed to their long Cooldown, Metamorphosis is a great alternative to those skills.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Include a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
• Use defensive elixirs and incenses instead of offensive ones.

Tempest Roar

• With ‍Tempest Roar equipped, ‍Hurricane becomes a Werewolf Skill and is able to inflict Poison via ‍Toxic Claws. In addition to some Damage Reduction, this interaction enables several multipliers in the build, including ‍Changeling's Debt, ‍Unsatiated, Envenom, Lust for Carnage and ‍Heightened Malice to list a few.
• The act of Shapeshifting into Werewolf activates ‍Quickshift and ‍Heightened Senses.

Mechanics

Clarity

• We utilize ‍Clarity to snapshot guaranteed Critical Strikes and significantly improve damage for the duration of ‍Hurricane. It requires 3 casts of Companion skills per ‍Hurricane to gain the full benefit.
• You don't necessarily need to cast each type of Companion to reach max stacks - multiple casts of the same Companion Skill (i.e. 3 Poison Creeper casts) still contribute.
• Poison Creeper has the added benefit of not consuming Provocation, allowing you to stack even when Provocation is ready.

Provocation

• We utilize ‍Provocation to snapshot guaranteed Overpowers for Hurricane's entire duration.
• Provocation can only Overpower one skill at a time. If you Overpower Hurricane and use Provocation again to Overpower something else, the active Hurricane will lose its ability to Overpower.
• For Hurricane durations of 20 seconds and higher, use Insatiable Fury's Unique effect to remain in Werebear form, as you are not be able to cast damage skills without overriding Provocation's existing snapshot.
• It is possible to upgrade Provocation for faster Hurricane rotations (20s-16s-12s). However, this puts a lot of pressure on your ability to stack Clarity to 3 before Provocation is ready and severely reduces the damage of Hurricane as you limit the value of Tempest.
• Note that the counter for ‍Provocation pauses, but does not reset when you leave Werebear Form.

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.

The ‍Hurricane Druid is a walking fortress that retaliates as hard as it tanks. While requiring a clunky micro-managed playstyle, the payoff of snapshotting Hurricane into a devastating AoE aura is well worth it. Few builds can complete difficult endgame content by walking around it, and the Hurricane Druid is the best at it.

• Cast Maul to stack Provocation for guaranteed Overpower on Hurricane.
• Utilize your Companion Skills to stack Clarity to 3 before casting Hurricane for guaranteed Critical Strikes.
• Acquire Tempest Roar as early as possible to enable Werewolf Shapeshifting synergies.
• For Hurricane durations of 20 seconds and higher, use Insatiable Fury's Unique effect to remain in Werebear form.

Written by Danger

Reviewed by IBoilerUp