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Frost Maul Werebear Druid Build Guide

Posted by tridanium on March 16, 2024
Last updated on March 19, 2024

Overview

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The Frost Maul Bear Druid build utilizes the Kermode's Cage body armor, which turns your fur white to really lean into the angry polar bear theme. This is a mid to late-game guide so it is recommended you start this guide at the end of the campaign or when you reach monoliths.

The primary focus of this build is to scale our damage alongside defense to be able to sustain ourselves while clearing all endgame content. The longer we stay off the ground, the more damage we do.

This build uses the set effect from the Shard of the Shattered Lance and Fragments of the Shattered Lance to convert our health regen into damage, and with Aspects of Might 10/10 which gives us 1% increased melee damage per strength as well as the 4 armor per str, we can efficiently scale our damage alongside defense.

The Shattered Lance Set is not required for this build to function, but keep in mind if you do plan on following this guide, the scaling will primarily focus on cold damage and health regen which will not be the same if you plan on foregoing these set items. I will include a 'pre-Shattered Lance Set' variation below. The rest of the uniques in this guide are also not required for this build to function but are highly recommended to push this build further and allow us to become strong enough to push higher content. Starting, BIS and all variations will be included for reference.

Ward builds are meta right now and running a melee class has it's challenges but this build can definitely keep up. I wouldn't say this build is broken by any means, but it holds it's own and allows you to do whatever endgame content you want to do. Since its quite 'off-meta' all the gear is pretty cheap and you can all the affixes you need, like T7 PrefixLevel of Upheaval and T7 PrefixLevel of Werebear Form. Exsanguinous can be quite expensive and hard to find, but if you want an alternative to low-life ward builds, and want to use cool sets of armor and gear this could work for you.

But most of all if you enjoy rampaging, smashing, shredding, or just bear things, this build will be able to satisfy your needs.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Big AOE

Very Tanky

Clears maps fast

Cheap gear in Merchant's Guild

Bear

Cons

Weak single-target

Melee puts us in scary situations

Needs to build stacks for max dmg and tank

No ward

May trigger Arkoudaphobia

Gameplay / Mechanics

Our main focus in this build is stacking high Health Regeneration and Strength wherever we can, allowing our Upheaval, which is converted to Cold Damage, to scale higher alongside our Health Regen and Armor. All of our skills and abilities center around pumping up large damage output from our Maul ability while at the same time we stack so much HP Regen, Endurance, and Armor, we can face-tank just about anything, allowing us to stack our buffs.

We use Rampage to traverse around the map very fast which allows us to clear monoliths very quickly and push Corruption. DPS on bosses is quite low but as tanky as we are, we're able to take them down with ease, it just may take a little longer than higher DPS focused builds. We kill them before they can kill us.

For our damage rotation against bosses, we use Swipe to build up stacks and do single target damage while using Maul as our big burst damage to chunk their HP and do big damage while spamming Warcry to buff ourselves up when off cooldown and Rampage into the boss if its moving around or to simply proc Frenzy from our boots for more added attack speed.

Maul scales off of the Upheaval and Fury Leap skill tree utilizing the Tremor Slam, Skull Crusher, and Violent Upheaval nodes allowing the ability to stack multipliers from all the trees to be able to do a lot of damage.

For large waves and mobs we simply just use Maul on big packs, letting Upheaval do massive AOE damage, and when Aspect of the Mantis 1/1 procs, we get another free Maul to clear the screen using Rampage to traverse to the next pack quickly for more jumping and smashing. With the cooldown reduction from Panther Strike, and Sky Warrior we have a cooldown of just 2.5 seconds, so the skill is very spammable.

Damage Rotation against bosses:

  1. Jump in with Maul to start cooldown timer.
  2. Warcry to buff and start Berserker stacks.
  3. Swipe to build Aspect of the Panther stacks as well as Impervious, Boar Heart, Ambush, and Frailty, Shred Armour, and Throne of Ambition if you have it.
  4. Then continue to Maul and Warcry when off cooldown.
  5. And keep Swipeing to sustain stacks.
  6. Rampage behind the boss if it's moving and to proc Frenzy from boots.

Damage Rotation against crowds:

  1. Rampage towards large packs
  2. Jump in with Maul
  3. Warcry
  4. If Aspect of the Mantis procs, Maul again to wipe the remaining enemies
  5. Swipe any remaining enemies and build stacks
  6. Rampage to next group of enemies and continue the rotation while sustaining stacks.

Skills

Passives

Stat Priorities

Equipment

These are all the affix priorities for each piece of gear along with their Unique/Legendary progression. Keep in mind these are affix priorities for our setup WITH Shattered Lance Set. You can refer to the starting variant at the bottom for reference on how a pre-Shattered Lance Set setup would look like.

Priority follows from top to bottom. Prefixes are always showing on top.

Remember you can play around with your affixes and setup to make sure you cap your resistances and balance your builds damage and defense making sure we don't go too far over 100% crit rate, or any other stat that caps.

Slot
Item
Stats

Idols

Health idols can be very expensive in the Merchant's Guild or the perfect one can be hard to find in Circle of Fortune but we want to make sure we fill in any gaps we have from our gear with idols. Make sure all your resistance is capped using strategically placed idols, and/or add more damage and health regen wherever you can here. If you have room for it, I'd recommend fitting Throne of Ambition somewhere in your idol inventory to help with fighting bosses.

Blessings

We can get some big bonuses from Grand Blessings, so lets take the ones that'd benefit us the most. Hopefully we filled all of our resistance gaps with idols but we can get Grand Resolve of Humanity to top us off.

Timeline
Blessings
Ending the Storm
The Age of Winter
Spirits of Fire
Fall of the Outcasts
The Stolen Lance
Blood, Frost, and Death
Fall of the Empire

Build Variants

Leveling

I started running this build at around level 60 when I found a Kermode's Cage and ran it ever since picking up pieces along the way. It had brought me all the way to the endgame from standard monoliths and continues to push further.

I'm sure you can run a similar setup pre-monoliths without the Shattered Lance Set and focus on health regen and cold damage.

The starting variant can be referred to for leveling 1-60.

Endgame

Monoliths

This build has taken me past 500 corruption with a few hiccups here and there, but after small upgrades to gear and skill rearrangements, I was able to get past those speed bumps fairly easily.

It's quite nice being able to run through Monolith maps without the fear of getting 1-shotted and taking on huge packs of mobs.

Monolith Approach:

As we progress through the standard Monoliths we can get away with stacking our damage as much as we can and shouldn't run into too much trouble but once we hit the Empowered monoliths, we'll have to start focusing a lot more on defense. Make sure all your resistances are capped and your HP is over 2000. At this point you should have the Shattered Lance Set already so we're stacking our health regen and strength. You'll find that by stacking these 2 stats as much as we can, we're starting to get a little beefier, while dishing out more damage. As we are progressing through corruption we will want to also start maxing out some of our stats like crit chance, crit multiplier, endurance, and endurance threshold.

Once we max out all the stats on our gear we can start putting those affixes onto LP Uniques and craft Legendary gear to really push further.

Arena

I like to test builds out in the Arena out and this one gets me to wave 200 pretty consistently. Since this build excels in clearing waves while being extremely tanky, I feel like it makes for a great Arena build.

We are currently sitting at wave 217 but I wanted to finish this guide before working on pushing further. On the Leaderboards we're at Rank 1456 overall and within the Top 30 Druids.

Arena Approach:

When running the Arena, we can change our approach to fighting large groups by circling mobs to gather them up to then stomp on them with Maul. Doing this, we'll also be able to dodge their first attack, which can be deadly if the wave is large enough.

We can rearrange our skills and passives to more optimize our Arena run like adding more points into Ambush Predator, to clear waves faster while not worrying too much about Swipe and Throne of Ambition and other boss focused skills and items.

Overall, Druid may not be the fastest, strongest or greatest, but they can be a lot of fun and completely viable for doing endgame content.

FAQ

Video

Changelog

  • -1 pts 'Frigid Breath' in 'Warcry' and +1 'Totemic Heart' in "Warcry'
  • Reallocating all points from the 'Ambush' and 'Warrior's Entrance' in the 'Fury Leap' tree to 'Crater' to reduce rage costs.
  • Reallocating all points from the 'Ambush' and 'Warrior's Entrance' in the 'Fury Leap' tree to 'Crater' to reduce rage costs.
  • Build guide was published

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