Diablo IVDeep Dive

Deep Dive: How to Do Millions of Damage with a Druid Build

Cocaine Bear Guide: How to Maximize Diablo 4 Druid’s Damage

Druid, often underestimated, always meme’d for doing ‘’17’’ damage.

But today we’ll show you how to scale this bad boyo to space.

By the end of this deep dive, you’ll know how to optimize Druid’s damage!

Check out the rest of our class guides here.

Aspect of the Rampaging Werebeast: Cornerstone of Most Druid Builds

Aspect of the Rampaging Werebeast (AKA Cocaine Bear) has the ability to almost infinitely scale damage.

aspect of the rampaging werebeast larger

This is how:

  • Every instance of Critical hit while in Grizzly Rage will give us a scaling 10% Critical Strike damage for the entire duration of the buff
  • A skill that hits 4 times per cast would mean a 40% Crit damage bonus for just hitting one mob, once.
  • Use a skill like that, 5 times on 6 mobs, that’s 1200% Critical Strike damage bonus you are getting.
  • 4 hits/per cast x 5 casts x 6 mobs x 10% Critical Strike damage per hit = x1200% crit damage (multiplicative)

Find Issues, Fix Issues

Now we just have to solve all the related problems, so let’s take a look at what they are:

  • We need Grizzly Rage to never be on cooldown,
  • We need to extend the duration so that we can scale our buff more and more.
  • We need 100% Critical Strike Chance, more crits = more bonuses
  • We need to spend as little time as possible to generate spirit, and all our time clapping with crits
  • We need to find an ideal skill to hit as many targets as many times as
  • possible, MORE HITS MORE CRITS, MORE MULTIPLIERS

grizzly rage

Grizzly Rage, permanent Duration

The first problem we want to solve is the duration of Grizzly Rage, we want 100% uptime, and we want it to last as long as possible because it will be stronger the longer it goes. It’s worth noting that the buff will reset every new Grizzly Rage.

aspect of the rampaging werebeast smaller

Grizzly Rage has a 60 seconds Cooldown and a base duration of 20 Seconds, up to 30 seconds with Rampaging Werebeast Aspect.

grizzly rage

If we want to put it on the 2H-Weapon slot, combined with the Druidic boon, ‘’Calamity’’ we can get to 37.5 Seconds duration.

calamity explanation

37.5 Seconds duration means we are almost always in Cocaine Bear mode, we just need an extra push.

If you don’t know what boons are, it’s the Druid unique mechanic, you choose 5 unique buffs for your build.

iron feather boon

Another Boon you can take is Calm Before the Storm, which will help you reduce your Ultimate Cooldown by 2 seconds per proc.

calm before the storm explanation

Not mandatory: Gear with CDR

Another thing you can do to shave off that remaining Cooldown is to have some good old Cooldown Reduction on gear.

Late-game items can provide 9/10% Cooldown reduction, so one of two items would be more than enough to guarantee a permanent Grizzly Rage, and maybe it’s not even needed.

How to get 100% Critical strike chance and Infinite Spirit, 2 Birds 1 Keystone

Now that we have an almost 40 seconds duration of Grizzly Rage with virtually no downtime, we can focus on tackling the next issue, how do we get 100% Crit chance and infinite mana?

earthen might

Something like Earthen Might is the perfect low-hanging fruit. Earthen Might is a buff that procs on lucky hits and provides both:

  • 100% Critical Strike chance
  • Infinite spirit.

This effect has a Lucky hit chance of 5 to 25% to proc. To guarantee Earthen Might we need to use skills that

  • Hits multiple times
  • Hits multiple targets

which goes hand in hand with stacking our Grizzly Rage buff. Unfortunately, there is a problem as Earthen Might only works for Earth Skills, and during Grizzly Rage only Werebear skills can be used.

grizzly rage

Vasiliy’s Prayer

Vasily’s Prayer, just like Jesus turned water into wine, Blizzard turned Earth Skills into Werebear Skills.

vasily's prayer

Now your cocaine Bear build can now be used with Earthen Might.

Almost ready, time to find the perfect skill

Now that our Cocaine Bear buff is always up, we have no spirit problems and we always crit.

Let’s find out what makes a good skill for the build.

The best options are Landslide, Tornado, and Pulverize.

pulverize

They are all good options and played in different builds (that we will cover in the future).

tornado

My favorite is Landslide because on bosses Earthen Might is not always up, it’s much harder to proc Lucky Hits on only one target.

I can use the Terramote stacks that Landslide can Generate to guarantee Critical hits. Overall the Primal Landslide passive makes the skill so much more consistent and less reliant on Earthen Might than Pulverize and Tornado are.

primal landslide

But that’s not the only reason, Landslide overall has the highest damage and a moderate AOE size.

landslide

Landslide summons 2 pillars, but it can be modified to hit enemies 4 times with the Aspect of the Aftershock.

That’s 4 stacks, of Juicy Cocaine Bear buff, for each mob that got clapped, that’s x40% Crit Damage per mob, each cast.

If you hit just 6 mobs 5 times you get x1200% Crit Damage. How many stacks do you think you can get in almost 38 seconds?

aspect of the aftershock

Pro Tip: Raging Landslide is a bait

A common misconception is that you can add a third Pillar and go from 4 hits to 6 but the passive to do this is a bait, the third Pillar is only visual and the passive only serves to increase the size of the AOE (possibly a bug).

raging landslide

Finally, I will leave you with a few more options to Abuse Grizzly Rage and Earthen Might

Pulverize

We can turn Pulverize into an Earth Skill with Aspect of Ursine Horror, and then make Pulverize hit twice with Shockwave Aspect.

ursine horror and shockwave

Storm Skills

Tornado and Lightning Storm can also be used, on top of this aspect you will also need to transform Grizzly Rage into a Werewolf skill and Storm Skills into a Werewolf skill, very convoluted but we are just waiting for them to buff Lightning Strike more.

mighty storm's aspect

Final Words

Rampaging Werebeast builds have a reputation as some of the best end-game builds in Diablo 4.

Rumors of their prowess in the End Game Beta have reached far and wide, unfortunately, it’s not a class that has performed well in the Early game but we promise they are a late-game monster with a lot of very fun and complex builds.

Thanks for reading our deep dive! For more awesome content, head to our Diablo 4 blog.

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