Druid werewolf thoughts and woes

I gotta say more than a few of these were a bit predictable, and ultimately there's some neat stuff here, but I think some of the same old pitfalls are a bit disappointing to see crop up league after league.

The wolf minions are, exactly as expected, kinda just weak fodder. Pounce has basically no ability to give them supports and while Cross Slash provides some uptime on bosses and all they just get one-shot again anyways.

It's also weird that they are limited non-reviving minions yet Wolf Pack ARE reviving non-limited companions? Why are there two weirdly different types of wolves that take entirely different tree nodes with zero synergy?

I feel like it'd make sense to encourage synergy, instead. Having Wolf Pack active should provide its supports to the Pounce wolves if anything, give a reason to push both.

Werewolf also just doesn't feel like it has any good heavy-hitting skills without pushing into spells or another form. Cross Slash is neat but not very damaging, it's more utility for the marks. Lunar Assault is freeze-y but, like many other such skills, has a horrid damage mod, and the basic Shred is just a flurry of little slaps that has an unnecessarily long attack chain for a bigger 'final strike' hit that fails to repeat most of the time with the support.

The ice fragments are cute but don't really seem to add much punch even when you really spawn a ton and pull them in with Cross Slash. What's worse is that it's awkward - a dodge-out ability that doesn't have a good re-engage besides Shred, but shred isn't a hard hit to re-engage.. you can pounce but that might mess with your marks/curses depending on what your using - consuming freezing mark for a buff is neat but you kinda sometimes also want to have it active to actually freeze with lunar slash because that's the only way to get the fragments to get some kind of burst boost. You also can't use Cross Slash to pull into a fresh pack/next rare because it's a dodge back and just throws your fragments off into space.

Arctic Howl is just kinda clunky and weird to use and doesn't feel like it really adds any significantly worthwhile oomph to neither your pets nor your own attacks plus it's a bit slow, may as well just slap another Lunar Assault rather than bother with it.

Druid feels like a lot of little ideas that kinda work but then stumble ovr each other in the process and really just don't fit together.

There's also a lot of anti-synergy within the skills too.. you don't have any real choices if doing werewolf and have to use basically all that's offered, but half of its cold and half is physical and with the way conversion works in POE2 you get kinda spread thin trying to reach for nodes/gear that works for both.

Some of the much bigger problems I've had - hitbox. The hitbox is SO awful. It's gotten me killed so many times when I get cornered in a room (or a Temple doorway that a mob is camping..) I get stuck on party members, I get stuck in hallways, and the dodge does NOT move through things nearly as well as when not shapeshifted. This just compounds all the usual problems of being forced into melee and not having a skill/build that just insta-gibs entire packs.. which leads to another big POE2 frustration.

The biggest threat to many melee builds that aren't running projectiles-but-its-melee or screenwide-slams or something are the widely spread out, off-screen shooting random casters/archers that are ALL over. You have to slowly walk around, one by one, and hit them.. and you can't ignore them because, for some reason, they hit for huge chunks of your health so you can't prioritize the rare and mop them up after. And many of the werewolf abilities, besides Lunar Assault, are VERY single target. Until I took melee splash it felt *miserable* and I'm a little annoyed to kinda be pushed into having to squeeze in melee splash somewhere, but it did help a lot at least. There's also Herald of Ice but I get so, so tired of using the same solutions to the same problems league after league when those problems shouldn't be baked in to so many skills to begin with.

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Losian#0040 wrote:

There's also a lot of anti-synergy within the skills too.. you don't have any real choices if doing werewolf and have to use basically all that's offered, but half of its cold and half is physical and with the way conversion works in POE2 you get kinda spread thin trying to reach for nodes/gear that works for both.

yeah this aspect is so bad.


i had this convo with my mrs when she was trying to build for it, all the previews showed it being a hybrid of spells and attacks etc. but wheres the support for that?

we had a convo of youre casting spells in human form so its not while shapeshifted so those nodes dont work and spells/attacks different so they dont work and if you take cold nodes your shred dpesnt work cause your weapon is phys and lightning. "so i need a cold weapon?" well no cause that doesnt exist because their itemisation for weapons is really shit and a weapon in practice is either physical or tri elemental you cant make a 'cold' weapon, but you need to do cold damage for the procs of shred to work you just cant do cold with shred nor scale shred with it...


it went on and on of the endless things she intuitively wanted to do, couldnt because all the mechanics dont have synergy and then her intuative work around couldnt work because of another thing. as a player with 20k hours in poe1 of making my own builds it was annoying for me trying to work out how i was going to scale the character to be hybrid of damage types. i thought poe2 was eleminating noob traps? this is impossible for anyone who isnt a poe mechanic expert to even make an efficient build.


all this talk of it being a hybrid character then you go into the game and realise that poe1 had 10x the support for hybrids of damage types or hybrids of spell/attack etc than poe2 does. and yet virtually no one really plays hybrid spell+attack and scaling both in poe1 because even with 10x the support poe2 has its still not supported enough to be an efficient way to make a character.


i was so frustrated when i saw that they had done almost nothing to support the design they advertised. a few node clusters that are hybrid here and there, hard to find, spread out, all the skills naturally having anti synergy with the way damage conversion and scaling works in poe2 and the options we have. i dont understand, why is it this bad?

i just dont get it.



so basically its like any poe1 class where you pick just 1 thing and stick to it rather than being hybrid because thats so much better scaling wise.



lol, ok...

The way I see it is too many gems packed into one gem. minions and marks so getting wolfs to be usefull you will need to support it with minions. but on the other hand you lose the empowers for the mark.

So you have to sacrifice them . They are useless minions that can be usefull only in acts and story.