How to Build the Infinite Damage Druid in Diablo 4
1. Core Concept: Boulder + Hurricane
At the heart of this build is the synergy between Boulder and Hurricane. This build revolves around dealing continuous damage and leveraging effects that empower both your Boulder and Hurricane skills. The key is maintaining consistent damage output while using specific skills, gear, and passives that help scale damage effectively.
The “infinite” nature of the damage comes from a combination of bugs and mechanics that cause your Druid to deal damage far beyond the intended caps, especially at high levels like Tier 110 or higher.
2. Key Passive: Survival Instincts Bug
A key part of this build relies on the Survival Instincts passive skill. When in Bear Form, this passive causes you to deal 30% increased damage (or 45% when at full life) and increased overpowered damage based on your difference in health between you and the enemy. This effect is bugged, and it scales in a way that doesn't properly cap in high-tier content, resulting in massive damage output.
· Bug Alert: The issue with the bug is that the game isn't properly displaying the true damage numbers, and instead, it hits the damage cap and results in a "minus" display. This causes the Druid to deal damage in the trillions (or quintillions in some cases), but this isn't intentional and likely won’t persist after the testing phases.
3. Gear Choices for Maximum Effectiveness
While the gear in this build doesn’t directly increase damage to the insane levels, it does help with survivability and effectiveness by ensuring you’re always in Bear Form or empowering your Boulder/Hurricane skills. Here are the key pieces:
Helm:
· Bas’Le’s Prayer: This ensures that your Earth skills (including Boulder and Bear Form) will fortify you. This fortification is crucial for the Survival Instincts passive to work properly.
Armor:
· Stormshifters (Pants): Focus on Hurricane duration and resistances. You want enough duration to make sure you can get through the cooldown process without interruption.
· If you have spare resources, stack resistances or critical strike chance for higher damage and survivability.
Gloves:
· Metamorphic Stone: Provides petrify duration, attack speed, and critical strike chance. These are all helpful to make sure your Boulder spins faster and hits harder. Critical strike chance is essential to ensure you reliably hit for massive damage.
Weapon:
· Two-Handed Mace (Retaliation Affix): The retaliation effect is perfect for ensuring that you’re always dealing damage when hit. This weapon, combined with willpower, overpower damage, and max life, helps to boost your overall survivability and damage output.
Amulet:
· Dolman Stone: When activated, casting Boulder while Hurricane is active causes Boulder to rotate around you, increasing damage and hitting multiple enemies. You can have up to 10 Boulders active at once, allowing for devastating AoE damage.
Ring:
· Changeling's Dead: This ring increases your damage when hitting poison-afflicted enemies as a Werebear. This fits well with the build's synergy, as we incorporate poison effects to further boost your damage output.
4. Important Skills and Passives
Core Skills:
· Boulder: This skill deals massive damage, and you’ll want to spam it while maintaining Hurricane uptime. The rotation speed and critical chance are essential to maximize your damage potential.
· Hurricane: While casting Hurricane, you’ll want to keep it active at all times to empower Boulder and create a continuous damage aura around you.
Shapeshifting and Wrath Skills:
· Use Shape Shifting skills frequently to reduce cooldowns and trigger additional effects, such as guaranteed overpowers. Combine these with Wrath Skills to ensure you're constantly maxed out on resources, which is crucial for uninterrupted damage.
Passive Skills:
· Survival Instincts (bugged): Increases damage based on your health difference with enemies. While it’s not fully functional due to the bug, it scales damage exponentially when enemies have extremely high health at higher tiers.
· Hunter Zenth: Ensures your next core skill is guaranteed to critically strike and overpower, stacking additional damage. This passive allows you to deal high bursts of damage when combined with your other effects.
· Hex of Siphoning: This passive creates an aura that poisons enemies around you. It's useful for ensuring you're always dealing poison damage, without needing to cast specific poison skills like Poison Creeper.
5. Witchcraft Powers and Mercenaries
· Witchcraft Powers: The Doom Orb and Pirano powers are helpful in maximizing your damage output and crowd control. These powers help you pull enemies toward you and apply vulnerable status, ensuring that you’re always dealing maximum damage to your enemies.
· Mercenaries: Focus on Verana Bloodthirst and Inspiration to boost your attack speed and resistances. This increases your damage uptime and survivability during tough fights.
6. Paragon Points
For the Paragon Points, focus on the following:
· Max out Critical Strike Chance and Overpower Damage to ensure you're always dealing high bursts of damage.
· Armor and Life bonuses will help you stay fortified, ensuring that your Survival Instincts passive is constantly providing damage boosts.
· Fortification nodes are key to boosting your overall damage, as the build relies heavily on staying fortified most of the time.
7. Gameplay Tips
· Keep Boulder Spinning: As long as Hurricane is active, your Boulder will spin around you, and you’ll continuously hit enemies. Keep Boulder up as much as possible to ensure that your damage keeps ramping up.
· Maximize Overpowers: Look for opportunities to trigger guaranteed Overpowers through various passives and gear effects. Overpowers deal significantly higher damage and should be prioritized during combat.
· Use the Bug Wisely: Since the Survival Instincts bug is active, focus on fighting high-tier enemies to capitalize on the massive damage scaling. Be aware that this bug is unlikely to remain in the game after testing phases.
8. Conclusion
The Stone Cyclone Druid build in Diablo IV is currently a fun and experimental setup that exploits the Survival Instincts exploit to achieve ridiculous damage scaling. While it may not be viable in the long run once the exploit is fixed, it is an exciting way to push the boundaries of damage and see how high you can go. Be sure to focus on attack speed, stone uptime, and suppression bonuses to maximize your efficiency. To further enhance the Stone Cyclone Druid build, players choose MMOEXP's Diablo 4 materials, MMOEXP introduces players to each weapon information and upgrade directions to help players save the trouble of searching for information. Good luck and enjoy unlimited damage! This build guide provides a basic overview of the current mechanics and strategies for exploiting the Survival Instincts exploit. Keep in mind that exploits like this are often patched, so be prepared for future changes.