Elemental Werebear (Swipe, Earthquake) Build Guide

This build feels really nice to play, the combination of Rampage and Maul while mapping feels super smooth.

Maul,Swipe and Earthquake can be scaled with PrefixIncreased Elemental Damage.

Druid is quite tanky through the use of a number of passives – Aspect of the boar,

You get a Thorn Barrier 1/1 for even more damage reduction.

Crits are super satisfying to play with.

This build is very Melee (Swipe, Maul, Earthquake). Earthquake means you don't have to be on top of the boss all the time, but you do need to be there at some point.

Keeping up Aspect of the Panther 5/5 with Swipe is important and means you really need to be in melee range most of the time.

There are is one mandatory unique in Bhuldar's Wrath. It's not that hard to farm but it is still required. Tears of the Forest can be replaced with Spriggan Form but it does cost you a skill slot.

Much of your recovery is based on leech. This is mostly okay since you're hitting things, but in some cases is really bad.

PrefixIncreased Elemental Damage is only on rings and amulets, so in this case we only have two direct items slots we can get it on (unless you're using Spriggan Form in which case you have three)

The majority of mapping is simply using Rampage to run around maps and then using Maul on big packs of mobs. For bossing you mix in Swipe in order to get Aspect of the Panther 5/5.

Mechanics

The most important mechanic to be aware of in my opinion is SuffixIncreased Cooldown Recovery Speed. The build works best if Maul is on a 2.5 second cool down (CD), which is exactly half of the Earthquake cooldown from Bhuldar's Wrath. This means you proc Earthquake every other cast (If you're spamming on CD). If you have a CD that is not 2.5 seconds you are in theory missing damage because you are not triggering as often as you could be. If for example you have a 2.4 second CD and you're casting on cooldown your damage looks something like this:

1. 0 Seconds - Cast Maul triggering Earthquake (5 second CD).
2. 2.4 Seconds - Cast Maul, Earthquake is still on CD for 3.6 seconds
3. 4.8 Seconds - Cast Maul, Earthquake is still on CD for 0.2 seconds
4. 5 seconds - Earthquake is now ready to cast
5. 7.2 seconds - Cast Maul triggering Earthquake. At this point the the cycle restarts.

As you can see by having too short a CD you actually delay the Earthquake trigger by 2.2 seconds which means you're doing significantly less damage.

I personally choose to level as Swipe and Summon Thorn Totem. I was also using Spriggan Form for rage generation (you can swap off of it once you get Tears of the Forest).

It would probably be faster to level using a non melee skill, Ice Thorns maybe. I'm not a leveling expert. I know there is a cool cold dot werebear build out there, maybe look at that.