TABLE OF CONTENTS
- INTRO
- REASONS TO PLAY
- REASONS NOT TO PLAY
- MAIN STATS
- ENDGAME SKILL BUILD
- EXAMPLE GEAR
- MERCENARY EXAMPLE
- GAMEPLAY LOOP AND TIPS
- SCREENSHOTS AND EXTRA STUFF
- CONCLUSION
1. INTRO
Following the habit of falling in love with builds that require copious amounts of Heaven Facet to build min-maxed, the Raven Druid is a boss killing machine with a playstyle that may make or break the character for you, specially during leveling. It is a super strong and rounded build.
2. REASONS TO PLAY A RAVENS DRUID
- Its a druid. May sound dumb, but some people (like me) just like the class. This build offers everything you like in druids, as in furry friends, suicidal spirit friends, and on this one, homing feathery missiles of death.
- DAMAGE. The build completely SHREDS bosses, or any specific target once they converge into one or few targets.
- Besides a couple hard requirements, gearing and specially optimizing gear is very forgiving, unless you go complete maniac and try to farm every single piece to 1% corruptions.
3. REASONS TO NOT PLAY A RAVENS DRUID
- Gameplay. I seen a lot of people complaining about the constant recast necessary for the build, specially during leveling when you might not have maxed number of hits per raven. So basically you gotta test if the build is for you or not.
- Trash cleaning is not the fastest. Once you get into the custom of “desynching” ravens, the trash clear speed is not as bad as it may seem at first, but even so its not one of the best.
4. MAIN STATS
Regular decades-old D2 stat logic. The bare minimum you need to equip gear on STR, whatever you feel you need on DEX for both gear and block rating and everything else on VIT. At the endgame, I don’t have a single point on STR and DEX, due to charms and other stat boost on gear.
5. ENDGAME SKILL BUILD
During game progression, you can swap stuff around as you feel useful, but the quick summary is to max Ravens ASAP and get one point wonder on the way. After Ravens, the best second skill to max is Spirit of Barbs, and then put 10 points into Grizzlies. After that, you are free to basically do whatever. Oak Sage is pretty good before you start stacking absurd amounts of +skills, but at the end gear you need only the necessary points to barely hit 100% increased life (the cap) and then you can put the points anywhere else. On my gear I only needed 6 points to precisely cap it.
For lvl 100 with all extra skill points, this is the build to use:
- 25 Ravens
- 25 Spirt of Barbs
- 1 Heart of Wolverine
- 10+ Grizzly Bear (all the rest of the points)
- 25 Solar Creeper
- 1+ Oak Sage (just enough to cap 100% effect with your gear)
If you fill up the requirements for capped Oak, maxed Bears and still has points left, put them wherever. They are basically just synergy dump at this point.
6. GEAR SETUP
You are, obviously, locked into using the Ravens set. That set locks your hand, feet, weapon, shield and armor slots.
The optimized corruption on every possible slot is +1 all skills. That is a 1% corruption though, so good luck farming that legitimately. So, besides that, you can practically use every non-melee specific or elemental damage corrupt with no other mods that you get.
6.1. THE RAVEN’S NEST
The Raven set makes the build a lot better to play, increases its damage to even better levels, and round up some holes that exist in it when compared to other casters. Warmth oSkill serves as your mana sustain tool since you cant get MPK as the Ravens are your companions, and Amplify Damage oSkill fills up the -res gap you would have as you deal only physical damage, and compliments Spirit of Barbs in debuffing your enemies and making you completely lethal.
6.1.1. GLOVE SLOT – THE RAVEN’S TALONS
This is a priority target while leveling. With 2 piece (along with boots), playing the spec to level becomes a little easier due to increased Ravens numbers. The upgrade I slapped here was just flat life and LPK (that you don’t benefit from, but the flat life is nice).
6.1.2. BOOT SLOT – THE RAVEN’S FEET
The second prio target early while leveling. With 2 pieces it gives a good boost on resists. The upgrades I did on this one were %life and mana.
6.1.3. ARMOR SLOT – THE RAVEN’S FEATHERS
Not much to worry about this slot. Just put 4 sockets and 4 Heaven Facets on it. For upgrades, I think the best ones would be PDR% or res/maxres depending on what you need, but honestly, at the time of writing, I didn’t even bother to put anything here.
6.1.4. SHIELD SLOT – THE RAVEN’S WING
When you have enough strength, I like uptiering this piece to the E version to get some bonus armor (its a Barbed Shield base). Max sockets you can have here is 3, so put 3 Heaven Facets here. Upgrade with res/maxres
6.1.5. WEAPON SLOT – THE RAVEN’S BEAK
This is the tricky slot of the set, although, compared to other stuff, its pretty tame. It can random roll 1 to 2 extra raven hits on it, and you really want 2. May seem minor, but it helps a lot. So only worry about corrupting and upgrading one with 2 extra hits. For upgrades, depending on your other gear FCR rolls (that are all range rolls) and your choice of jewelry, you will need anything from two to five 15 FCR upgrades to get the 163 FCR breakpoint. If in doubt, just slap 5 FCR upgrades as theres nothing else that matters much; but if you are comfortable, you can put some MF on the rest of the upgrades. If you uptier it (its an Stiletto base), you can add 3 sockets to it and 3 Heaven Facets.
6.2. HEAD SLOT – SANCTUARY SCION
There are a few options you can put to use on the build, but currently the best one, by far, is a Sanctuary Scion with a +7 to Raven roll. This headpiece has a random +7 roll to ANY druid skills, making it very expensive on average to target farm. Once you get it, though, slap 4 sockets on it and put 4 Heaven Facets. Upgrade with 3 all skills. For corruption, anything that is not CBF (as you already has it on the set) works, but I didn’t have the courage to corrupt it due to how hard to get it was.
A cheap alternative for it can be a Mystery runeword made on a +3 Ravens base, but nothing is close to SScion IMO.
6.3. BELT SLOT – LEASH OF CERBERUS
The main thing to focus on this one is getting +3 Summoning Skills on it, since it rolls 1-3. For the wolfies mods, whatever you get is good enough. You can only summon one wolf even if you put points into them (and IMO you shouldn’t) due to the Raven’s Set penalty. Upgrade with life and mana. I uptiered it once to get a little bit of armor, but its not a big deal since base belt already has max potion slots (its a Plated Belt base).
6.4. JEWELRY SLOTS – LORDS OF HELL 2-PIECE + FAERIE RING
Amulet and ring slots on Reimagined have a HUGE field of variance regarding power level. Crafted amulets and Rings with multiple rolls of all skills, class skills and tab skills along with other nasty mods are the de-facto end-gears, but I will list a combination of amulet and rings that are perfectly fine to end your gearing process with them, so its something more palpable to gun for (especially if this is your first char). But if you are lucky to get rings and ammy with big +druid and +ravens modifiers, use those.
For the amulet + 1 ring slot, use the Baal’s Cryptic Amulet + Diablo’s Soulstone Ring combo. This combination gives you a lot +skills, life and mana and get your base PDR% with the gear setup to 50% without any upgrades.
For the other ring, I chose to go with Faerie Ring. There are options with 2 skills or 1 skills and another stats (like the Fellowship’s Hope), but I decided to go with this one due to FHR, block chance and BIG life and mana.
For upgrades, amulet is locked into Druid skills. For rings, just choose whatever you feel you need, theres really nothing that achieves much extra of what you have. In doubt, just slap resists to overcap them and call it a day.
6.5. ALTERNATE SLOT
On alternate slot, for this build the uncontested swap is Warriors Untamed with 3 Heaven Facet and Savant’s Sin (For the Holy Shield oSkill) with 4 Heaven Facet (I’m currently using a Knight’s Dawn with 3 Facets, but that is not 100% optimal, I just didn’t bother to farm the best option).
This combination provides you Battle Command, Battle Order, Shout and Holy Shield. This bumps your defense to huge levels, caps your block chance, and make your meatshields and spirits CHONKY AF so they survive no problem.
6.6. CHARMS
Besides the regular normal charms (Anni, Torch, Queen's Call, other uniques), the best crafted ones to use here are the +1 All Skill charms. There isn’t really a hard requirement besides that for this as well.
7. MERCENARY
As with most things on this build, there isn’t really a de-facto “best” option once you are at endgame. During leveling, an A5 merc to help with -physical res debuffing is perfect, but at the end, you are basically capped on that with your Barbs and Amp damage, so it opens you up for other options.
Because of that, I went with a A2 merc with triple-stacks prayer and a holy freeze setup - both because its cool and because I couldn’t think of anything being much better. I also focus on Heaven Facets on him because what I care about here is that he stays alive and that his Prayer aura is as strong as it can, and those Jewels do both of this.
There is an alternative setup with almost same effect in Cure Helm and Knight’s Vigil Chestpiece that leaves you with a free weapon slot if you prefer, but I liked this one due to also being able to use a Salvation helm.
A2 Prayer Merc:
Helm: Royal Diadem with 4 Heaven Facet. This help your fwends to stay alive even more.
Weapon: Insight on a good base, like Giant Thresher. You don’t need the mana, but it is the vehicle for an extra Prayer ping.
Chest: Mephisto’s Misty Aura with 4 Heaven Facet. Level 1 Cleansing (for the extra Prayer ping) only, but since you are usually teleporting and he is close to you and your summons, its ok. Upgrade with PDR% to overcap it. I haven't done this myself yet though xD
Gloves: Mephisto’s Claw for a bigger range and extra slow on Holy Freeze.
Belt: Ogre’s Embrace. If you happen to get an Iron Skin oSkill corrupt on gloves, you can swap to Kashya’s Ward.
Boots: Zero Effect.
Rings: 2x Chiads Set Ring for Holy freeze.
Amulet: Baal’s Cryptic Amulet. Along with the armor will give him 4 skills, so worth it imo.
8. GAMEPLAY LOOP AND TIPS
Regular gameplay loop consists of:
- Swap to alternate gear.
- Buff Battle Command.
- Swap back to main set (due to more skills), cast all your spirits, bears and vine.
- Swap back to alternate gear.
- Buff Battle Command again, Battle Orders, Shout and Holy Shield.
- Swap back to main setup. Precast 20 Ravens.
- Go out into the wild and kill stuff.
8.1. “DESYNCHING” AND YOU – NO CRY, LTP.
Raven’s have a tendency to overkill mobs and despawn all at the same time. If they start their swoon animation, it is counted as a hit either it actually hits something or not. If you let them at their own device, at some point you will see like 10 or all ravens despawning all at the same time, and you will have to sit there recasting 20 ravens, doing nothing, before keep going.
One thing I found out to reduce that is “desynching” the birds as you play. The actual downtime is the same, but the “virtual” downtime is not. You don’t feel like you are completely stopping.
The idea is, when you engage the first pack, even though you just put Ravens up, you cast a few of them again after the first one start hitting their targets. Then you teleport to the next pack, do it again. 3 or 4 Ravens at a time every time you teleport. This will guarantee that your Ravens that are up have different # of hits left in them, so you don’t have them despawning all the same time and you can keep the flow going, just recasting the few that expire every time you engage a pack.
9. SCREENSHOTS AND EXTRA STUFF
Character stats I have with the char mostly as listed in the guide.
The mains spells used:
10. CONCLUSION
If you decide to go with a Ravens Druid, hope you enjoy it and that this serves as a good starting point. I'm sure there are multiple ways to do stuff, but this worked perfectly for me. I anticipate this char to be a very strong option if we ever get some nasty bosses in the Mod's future. :D