Showing Posts For Patrick R Beaty.5498:
Spirits or: How l learned to stop worrying & love ranger
I just wanted to share a non-meta ranger build that I have been enjoying the past week: Spirit Druid. I flew through the Amber and Emerald divisions with this build. I can’t yet speak for really high level play on it, and probably never will, but this build was a fun change from the meta glyphs build. I plan continuing to use this throughout Sapphire division.
Advantages
(1) Nature’s Vengeance, Fortifying Bond, and We Heal as One means your pet has very high uptime on full might stacks. Both Smokescale and Bristleback become a huge threat when they have these buffs.
(2) You also have a pretty decent uptime on boons. Even with the celestial amulet, longbow, sun spirit procs, and ancient seeds procs is still a threat to your enemies in teamfights with full might stacks.
(3) Using Staff and Longbow means you can stay at range as often as possible and stay alive. You’re a druid after all and your primary role is to survive and use astral form to support your allies. Both Longbow #3 and Staff #3 are there for escaping fights / avoiding damage.
(5) Longbow #4 with the Ancient Seeds trait is important in teamfights for focusing a target, and its also good for decapping and/or capping.
(6) This build has lots of protection uptime thanks to the combination of Stone Spirit and Durability Runes. Again, surviving spike damage so you can perform your role as a druid and heal is want you want to do.
(7) Since you’re not running glyphs, you get to enjoy the huge benefit of the Natural Stride trait. I absolutely love this trait.
Disadvantages
(1) Conditions: yes, this is a huge counter to the build. All you have is the Druidic Clarity trait for direct condi removal and then using Astral Form #2 as often as possible. Evasive Purity helps a little bit. The meta glyph build does not have this problem at all.
(2) Spirits means your ability to rotate points is limited, as you generally only want to rotate when the spirits are off cool down. I tend to go mid and support the heck out of it until the game ends, with the occasional rotation. High end play probably will not support this build because of this limitation.
(3) A high end Druid player will probably perform better with the meta glyphs build. This build is a fun and relaxing alternative for plebs like me.