Shred 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

• Start at range with either Debilitating Roar or Petrify to weaken or incapacitate enemies while bolstering your damage. Save the other Cooldown to use in a defensive manner after the first expires.
• Use Shred to leap into the pack and apply Poison. Either step far enough away from your main target to evoke a Dash on the next cast or hop back and forth between another nearby enemy to maintain the bonus from Blurred Beast. You can also use Cyclone Armor to create distance.
• Blood Howl on Cooldown to Heal, recover Spirit, and maintain both Vigilance and Backlash.
• Use Trample to move between empty spaces or as a means to break free from Crowd Controls.
• Manage your cooldowns so that you regularly exit Werewolf form in order to maintain Wildheart Hunger's bonus. If this proves too cumbersome, you can swap Debilitating Roar for Maul to have on-command Shapeshifting.

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. Shred Druid focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Bac + Wat - With this build's extreme mobility, Bac is easily one of its best Offering generators. Decrepify helps with stagger, defense and allows an execute at 10% HP. It is combined with Xol in your other Runeword to generate large amounts of offering.
• Xol + Yom - Keeps the Spirit generation, Stuns, and Critical Strike Multipliers flowing!

Alternative choices

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

• Ohm - Though heavily nerfed from the PTR, War Cry remains a popular choice.
• Vex - The extra skill ranks are a nice boon all around.
• Gar - The Crit Chance bonus is great, especially early on.
• Mot - Dark Shroud is a strong and affordable defensive option.
• Tam - A reliable Offering generator for Core skill builds.
• Cem - As a Magic Rune, it's a reasonable choice that you're more likely to find.

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: Varyana

She offers a Massacre bonus to close any gaps in Movement Speed, but we hire her primarily for the intermittent Vulnerable from Recklessness and to group mobs together with Whirlwind.

• Reinforcement: Raheir

Raheir packs mobs even closer together with his Crater ability.

To enable the Shred 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 Shred 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 Shred 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 Stormclaw's is absurdly high. Of the available options, a 2-handed Polearm provides the most consistently applicable bonus.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

Druids have only two non-Ultimate sources of Unstoppable: Trample and Earthen Bulwark. If you're not subscribed to either, 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.

Mechanics

Wildheart Hunger

• With these unique boots equipped, Shapeshifting adds a stack of Wildheart, which is visible on your buff bar. Each stack of Wildheart increases the bonuses of your Bestial Rampage by 5%. These stacks are additive, resulting in up to 50x damage and 50% Attack Speed from these boots alone! However, the stacks decrease at 2%+ per second, essentially requiring a new Shapeshift form every 2-3 seconds in order to maintain the maximum stacks.

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 Shred Werewolf is easily one of the fastest builds in the game, flying around the battlefield as it Dashes from enemy pack to pack. It is one of the best Speedfarming builds in the game, but can also push Nightmare Dungeons and the Pit reasonably well.

Written by IBoilerup

Reviewed by Thomasdatrain