Thank you, i appreciate it! It's a fun build, poison gets overlooked by a lot of players, but if done right, such as with the rabies druid, it can be both very powerful and a lot of fun! More videos coming soon, and im always open to suggestions and ideas for future video topics!
You are presenting cool bulids and in overall your videos are very good, above average. What I'm missing is presentation on online character, it at least without editor. Thank dude!
I appreciate hearing you enjoy the videos! Unfortunately, the online showcase is something I'll never do, solely because I dont have the time to dedicate to a character in getting through all 3 difficulties and then farming the gear necessary to make these builds. I have maybe 15-20hrs/week to do whatever I need in my free time, and for these youtube videos, that includes writing the script, voice recording, editing down the recording, gearing up the build and ensuring everything is balanced, getting the game clips, editing them into a video, making thumbnails, and writing out all the descriptions. I also like to have a YT short come out with each video for those who watch on mobile to get a glimpse of the main video. If I had the free time necessary to dedicate to online play, Id be happy to make more online focused content, however, with Diablo 2 being over 20yrs old, and D2R being an extension of the same game, I focus on offline play as it's easier to gear the build out vs spending countless hours playing, leveling, and farming, and at this point in the game's life, it's better to make a generalized build guide so offline and online players can use it for reference if they desire, where online specific videos have a shelf life if focusing on the seasons...at least they use to when Blizzard cared about D2R. I do appreciate the feedback, if i had the time, I'd consider an online showcasing of builds, but it's better and easier to make a generalized build guide everyone can reference, vs making it specifically for online or offline.
I understand online can be more fun, however, the biggest factor for me, is the lack of time to dedicate to leveling and making builds, to then make videos about them. It's easier and more effective for maximizing my time with hero editing over playing online, as I can get more done offline than to slowly grind and maybe only put out a few videos a year playing online. Plus, I enjoy the SSF experience for my own personal builds I continue playing from Plugy, I just make these videos to test out for myself and make a video about it.
One of the cool things about this build is that with a couple of swaps you can switch from a brutal fury wolf to a rabies one in 5 seconds. That's what I did when I realised that killing baal and even lister and his boyfriends was a pain in the ass. You can even do it without going to town if not using dweb just by carrying everything on you and choosing the armor (fort, bramble, enigma and hustle would be my options of choice). Spec A (rabies) is grief, facet monarch, bramble, trangs, act v plague. Spec B (fury) is death+phoenix or 2h weapon (rib, death axe, tomb reaver, etc), fort, loh, act v lawbringer. If resistances are a problem (wolfie should be particularly wary of lightning) play around with charms, boots and jewelry until you are happy. If you feel slow and hate feral rage, hustle is cool. 2 in 1 droid!
That's one of the best things about the Druid: he is the swiss army knife of builds within this game, with so many different builds being able to intertwine with different ones without too much needing change. He is the Jack of all trades, and although he isnt a master of any one thing, he never feels boring to play since he can do damn near everything!
@@switch209gamingyes :) and in this particular case rabies was clearly designed to work in tandem with something else. Fury + summons (the strongest choice imo) or fireclaw (which I think works better with armaggedon). Another *really* cool thing about the druid is that a high level heart of the wolverine gives a ton of dmg and attack to merc and summons. Act v really struggles with ar. You often build a superstrong, tanky barb merc and take it out there full of excitement, only to realise that he misses half of his attacks. HotW is basically like fanat without the speed. Invaluable.
2:55 you can have a 3 rabies base making it 8 to rabies overall. You can even get 3 oak or 3 poison creeper if that’s what you would like on top of it. 3 rabies/3werewolf/3 lycatherpy would be the idea base imo. Metamorphosis is so much better than Jalals.
I appreciate the feedback! True for the potential of a great metamorphosis with a base with the plus to specific rabies Druid centered skills, but I didn’t have the appropriate base, as well as I doubt people would prioritize making a Metamorphosis for a rabies Druid, but would rather make one for a fury Druid or a werebear build. I use Metamorphosis for my Uber run coming up, however, to add more into Rabies is overkill for normal farming, as the damage still takes time to fully take affect, and the difference of a few hundred points of poison damage wouldn’t be felt by the player. Metamorphosis is great for melee builds, no question, but for this build, its use is felt less overall compared to Jalals that benefits more, and is much cheaper,
The + to skills you get in poison creeper from Jalal's Mane do NOT count on the rabies damage. On synergizing skills only the hard points matter. As for the Bonus to Oak Sage its usefulness is debatable considering that the little spirit is killed so easily. In your video you don't have the spirit active either except before getting Into Baal's Room near the end. Even then he actually kills it almost immediately. You can obviously recast it but at some point it becomes just a waste of time. With that said spending so many points on it perhaps is not a good idea since its usefulness is severely limited. There have been requests in the forum of the game to make the spirit untargetable but I don't see it ever happening. Other than that I kinda like this build.
I appreciate the feedback! I only claimed the + skills from Jalal’s benefited the other skill trees for the skills that players may want to use, I understand that it’s only the hard points for poison creeper that will synergize with Rabies, but some may want to use poison creeper as it does add more poison damage, and somehow is a “different” poison damage than rabies, so using both simultaneously is good for the incredibly dense mobs. Also, I mentioned the heart of the oak being used because, this build is focused on farming areas with large mobs, and that includes terror zones. I gave the option because I may not have said it outright, but one thing I’ve enjoyed hearing from viewers is that, after watching the videos, they took the builds to areas they prefer to play in, and that includes terror zones, and because they used what I told them and understood its importance within the context of the builds playstyle, they had a lot of fun with it and it surprised them how well it handled. That’s why I will add different options, even if they may not be utilized by the masses, for those who would like the option, they’ve seemed to appreciate it. But I do agree, the spirit dies rather quickly and it’s very inconvenient to have to respawn them, which is why I rarely did it. I gathered up around 30 min or so of gameplay and narrowed it down to what’s in this video, trying to show some areas in depth instead of showing maybe 30 seconds of a larger variety, because I want the viewers who are interested in this build to discover for themselves where else it can play well in, and find out what they like best about it overall. If they could fix the spirits being able to be not targeted, that would be awesome, however, Blizzard no longer cares about D2R as all their resources are about trying to fix D4 and get players coming back to that game, so I agree, I doubt they’ll ever rework either Spirit being not targetable. However, if you end up watching the Uber run that’ll be coming out soon, you’ll see this build utilized in ways you described it not working efficiently here, as I mentioned in the video, some of what was shown here was to foreshadow that run coming up so there’s less to change from this build guide, to that run’s set up. Again, I appreciate the feedback and constructive criticism, it’s always welcome, and I hope my comment helped to better understand my point of view on why it’s built up, and played, as it was.
Hey, Any thoughts on incorporating an item with 100% chance to cause enemy to flee into the build? basically rabies drone running away from you spreading more rabies as it runs by other enemies.
I tried something similar to that just to see if it would help with spreading the poison, just for S&Gs, and it showed that having enemies aggro toward me instead of running away was a better tactic. Those that flee don’t guarantee where they go, so they may run into other enemies to spread the poison, or they may run where nobody is, however, having large mobs (anything less than 10 enemies I didn’t really consider since it’s not a huge mob and it didn’t guarantee consistent results) aggro toward me helped with those behind the infected run into them and become poisoned. Also, something to consider, because the poison that transfers from enemy to enemy is less concentrated, meaning less damage, the faster the poison spreads, the better the results, and I personally got better results herding large mobs into a large ball and poisoning one enemy to spread among the rest as they all cluster up well, instead of having one enemy flee and hope they run into the mob. However, take this with a grain of salt as I didn’t test this out for more than 15 minutes max, and I tested it in Cows/Eldritch because I wanted to see what would happen from the large mobs in cows, to a smaller group at Eldritch. But overall, I felt them aggro-ing me and grouping up toward the infected, worked better than a fleeing infected enemy, however, I’m sure you could make a fleeing poisoned enemy fun to try out.
I’m stoked you enjoyed that! If the cows stayed their distance, the mad cow disease wouldn’t have infected the herd…but they will never learn what personal space is when trying to kill us.
With Rabies, does its heightened damage last only while deaths web is switched out? Or does its heightened damage persist even after switching back to your original weapon set?
To my knowledge, with deaths web used for the initial bite, anything after would have the same negative poison effect as the poison spreads. However, once it’s switched out for another weapon, anything further getting the spread of the poison damage wouldn’t have the same negative poison resistance effect, however, anything prior bit or received poison damage from the spread when DW was the main weapon, retains the same negative poison resistance. This is a similar mechanic to how it works with a plague javazon, so unless something changed after patch 2.4, I believe that’s still the accurate information regarding DW negative poison resistance when using rabies and it’s spread of poison damage.
@@switch209gaming amazing! I had no idea. Thank you for your very detailed and insightful answer, I appreciate it immensely - been scouring the internet trying to find a decent answer. Definitely subscribing 😀
@@Venn922 youre welcome, im glad i could help you out! Its the least i could do, you checked the video out, and i want to help with whatever i can info wise, but if anything, steer viewers in the right direction for where to find what they’re looking for if I can’t answer it myself. Thank you for subscribing, i hope you’ll enjoy the content! I’m working on a lot of videos as i write this, and there’s countless ones already on the channel i hope you’ll enjoy in the meantime while i make more. Have fun playing the game!
I understand that and put it to the test when I run it through Ubers in an upcoming video, however, this build was never considered for boss farming, as the poison damage is damage over time, so this has always been a build for farming lvl85 areas with larger mobs to utilize the poison spreading aspect to take the whole mob out faster. But for Ubers, metamorphosis destroys Jalal’s, especially with constantly having the mark of the wolf active, and all the stats a werewolf Druid could use to defeat enemies faster with Physical damage.
I understand that you understand this build, but I’ve been pondering variants that might be even more effective while maintaining the flavor of the build, but using rabies more as a support skill. Helm: metamorphosis of course. Gloves: crafted blood, maybe Dracs Belt: crafted OWs Boots: Gores Armor:Enigma Weapon: Beast, Plague or Grief on swap Shield: Medusas gaze, stormshield, Phoenix The idea is that open wounds and Rabies can stack, and with psn resistances, OW might do just about as much damage. We’ve dropped Trang and Bramble to get extra STR to use Medusas Gaze (it sounds like you might be able to tele with Mark active while in wolf form? Also, Beast gives +werebear if Mark of both can be applied). Here’s where it gets boring, just use a reapers merc. With high crushing blow, decrepify gets full dmg out of CB. Fana for merc goes a long way, and you could give him Bramble for the thorns, especially if you throw out some pets. If you use treachery, then GFace makes merc a killing machine. It almost turns into a rotation like Diablo 3. Fury to soften them up and get OW going, then Rabies, then swap to Plague to get Lower res to finish them off. You can also just Fury away with the occasional Rabies.
The Blizzard website’s store has a similar design to the one im wearing, it says “Diablo 2” with the D2R design of the wanderer behind the logo, however, the exact sweatshirt I’m wearing is no longer available, it was apparently a limited run when D2R initially was released years ago,
Great content. Playing an HC Rabies right now. Loving it. Subbed.
Thank you, i appreciate it! It's a fun build, poison gets overlooked by a lot of players, but if done right, such as with the rabies druid, it can be both very powerful and a lot of fun!
More videos coming soon, and im always open to suggestions and ideas for future video topics!
You are presenting cool bulids and in overall your videos are very good, above average. What I'm missing is presentation on online character, it at least without editor.
Thank dude!
I appreciate hearing you enjoy the videos!
Unfortunately, the online showcase is something I'll never do, solely because I dont have the time to dedicate to a character in getting through all 3 difficulties and then farming the gear necessary to make these builds. I have maybe 15-20hrs/week to do whatever I need in my free time, and for these youtube videos, that includes writing the script, voice recording, editing down the recording, gearing up the build and ensuring everything is balanced, getting the game clips, editing them into a video, making thumbnails, and writing out all the descriptions. I also like to have a YT short come out with each video for those who watch on mobile to get a glimpse of the main video.
If I had the free time necessary to dedicate to online play, Id be happy to make more online focused content, however, with Diablo 2 being over 20yrs old, and D2R being an extension of the same game, I focus on offline play as it's easier to gear the build out vs spending countless hours playing, leveling, and farming, and at this point in the game's life, it's better to make a generalized build guide so offline and online players can use it for reference if they desire, where online specific videos have a shelf life if focusing on the seasons...at least they use to when Blizzard cared about D2R.
I do appreciate the feedback, if i had the time, I'd consider an online showcasing of builds, but it's better and easier to make a generalized build guide everyone can reference, vs making it specifically for online or offline.
@@switch209gaming Just go buy 20 jah runes for a few $ and you can outfit most of these offline toons. Online >>> Hero Edited in my opinion.
I understand online can be more fun, however, the biggest factor for me, is the lack of time to dedicate to leveling and making builds, to then make videos about them. It's easier and more effective for maximizing my time with hero editing over playing online, as I can get more done offline than to slowly grind and maybe only put out a few videos a year playing online. Plus, I enjoy the SSF experience for my own personal builds I continue playing from Plugy, I just make these videos to test out for myself and make a video about it.
One of the cool things about this build is that with a couple of swaps you can switch from a brutal fury wolf to a rabies one in 5 seconds. That's what I did when I realised that killing baal and even lister and his boyfriends was a pain in the ass. You can even do it without going to town if not using dweb just by carrying everything on you and choosing the armor (fort, bramble, enigma and hustle would be my options of choice).
Spec A (rabies) is grief, facet monarch, bramble, trangs, act v plague.
Spec B (fury) is death+phoenix or 2h weapon (rib, death axe, tomb reaver, etc), fort, loh, act v lawbringer.
If resistances are a problem (wolfie should be particularly wary of lightning) play around with charms, boots and jewelry until you are happy. If you feel slow and hate feral rage, hustle is cool.
2 in 1 droid!
That's one of the best things about the Druid: he is the swiss army knife of builds within this game, with so many different builds being able to intertwine with different ones without too much needing change. He is the Jack of all trades, and although he isnt a master of any one thing, he never feels boring to play since he can do damn near everything!
@@switch209gamingyes :) and in this particular case rabies was clearly designed to work in tandem with something else. Fury + summons (the strongest choice imo) or fireclaw (which I think works better with armaggedon).
Another *really* cool thing about the druid is that a high level heart of the wolverine gives a ton of dmg and attack to merc and summons. Act v really struggles with ar. You often build a superstrong, tanky barb merc and take it out there full of excitement, only to realise that he misses half of his attacks. HotW is basically like fanat without the speed. Invaluable.
2:55 you can have a 3 rabies base making it 8 to rabies overall. You can even get 3 oak or 3 poison creeper if that’s what you would like on top of it. 3 rabies/3werewolf/3 lycatherpy would be the idea base imo. Metamorphosis is so much better than Jalals.
I appreciate the feedback!
True for the potential of a great metamorphosis with a base with the plus to specific rabies Druid centered skills, but I didn’t have the appropriate base, as well as I doubt people would prioritize making a Metamorphosis for a rabies Druid, but would rather make one for a fury Druid or a werebear build.
I use Metamorphosis for my Uber run coming up, however, to add more into Rabies is overkill for normal farming, as the damage still takes time to fully take affect, and the difference of a few hundred points of poison damage wouldn’t be felt by the player. Metamorphosis is great for melee builds, no question, but for this build, its use is felt less overall compared to Jalals that benefits more, and is much cheaper,
The + to skills you get in poison creeper from Jalal's Mane do NOT count on the rabies damage. On synergizing skills only the hard points matter. As for the Bonus to Oak Sage its usefulness is debatable considering that the little spirit is killed so easily. In your video you don't have the spirit active either except before getting Into Baal's Room near the end. Even then he actually kills it almost immediately. You can obviously recast it but at some point it becomes just a waste of time. With that said spending so many points on it perhaps is not a good idea since its usefulness is severely limited. There have been requests in the forum of the game to make the spirit untargetable but I don't see it ever happening. Other than that I kinda like this build.
I appreciate the feedback!
I only claimed the + skills from Jalal’s benefited the other skill trees for the skills that players may want to use, I understand that it’s only the hard points for poison creeper that will synergize with Rabies, but some may want to use poison creeper as it does add more poison damage, and somehow is a “different” poison damage than rabies, so using both simultaneously is good for the incredibly dense mobs.
Also, I mentioned the heart of the oak being used because, this build is focused on farming areas with large mobs, and that includes terror zones. I gave the option because I may not have said it outright, but one thing I’ve enjoyed hearing from viewers is that, after watching the videos, they took the builds to areas they prefer to play in, and that includes terror zones, and because they used what I told them and understood its importance within the context of the builds playstyle, they had a lot of fun with it and it surprised them how well it handled. That’s why I will add different options, even if they may not be utilized by the masses, for those who would like the option, they’ve seemed to appreciate it.
But I do agree, the spirit dies rather quickly and it’s very inconvenient to have to respawn them, which is why I rarely did it. I gathered up around 30 min or so of gameplay and narrowed it down to what’s in this video, trying to show some areas in depth instead of showing maybe 30 seconds of a larger variety, because I want the viewers who are interested in this build to discover for themselves where else it can play well in, and find out what they like best about it overall.
If they could fix the spirits being able to be not targeted, that would be awesome, however, Blizzard no longer cares about D2R as all their resources are about trying to fix D4 and get players coming back to that game, so I agree, I doubt they’ll ever rework either Spirit being not targetable. However, if you end up watching the Uber run that’ll be coming out soon, you’ll see this build utilized in ways you described it not working efficiently here, as I mentioned in the video, some of what was shown here was to foreshadow that run coming up so there’s less to change from this build guide, to that run’s set up.
Again, I appreciate the feedback and constructive criticism, it’s always welcome, and I hope my comment helped to better understand my point of view on why it’s built up, and played, as it was.
Cool Vid, how much did that Grief cost? :D
I play SP Offline, I rolled a perfect Grief years ago when playing on Plugy. I got really lucky to get it within 5 or 6 tries!
U should use plague and hit with fury to active lower resist much faster
If only plague had LR on striking vs when being struck, it’s one of the aspects of that runeword I think the Devs really screwed up.
Hey, Any thoughts on incorporating an item with 100% chance to cause enemy to flee into the build? basically rabies drone running away from you spreading more rabies as it runs by other enemies.
I tried something similar to that just to see if it would help with spreading the poison, just for S&Gs, and it showed that having enemies aggro toward me instead of running away was a better tactic. Those that flee don’t guarantee where they go, so they may run into other enemies to spread the poison, or they may run where nobody is, however, having large mobs (anything less than 10 enemies I didn’t really consider since it’s not a huge mob and it didn’t guarantee consistent results) aggro toward me helped with those behind the infected run into them and become poisoned.
Also, something to consider, because the poison that transfers from enemy to enemy is less concentrated, meaning less damage, the faster the poison spreads, the better the results, and I personally got better results herding large mobs into a large ball and poisoning one enemy to spread among the rest as they all cluster up well, instead of having one enemy flee and hope they run into the mob.
However, take this with a grain of salt as I didn’t test this out for more than 15 minutes max, and I tested it in Cows/Eldritch because I wanted to see what would happen from the large mobs in cows, to a smaller group at Eldritch. But overall, I felt them aggro-ing me and grouping up toward the infected, worked better than a fleeing infected enemy, however, I’m sure you could make a fleeing poisoned enemy fun to try out.
"this way he can spread his infection to all those who refuse to practice social distancing" LFMAO
I’m stoked you enjoyed that! If the cows stayed their distance, the mad cow disease wouldn’t have infected the herd…but they will never learn what personal space is when trying to kill us.
With Rabies, does its heightened damage last only while deaths web is switched out? Or does its heightened damage persist even after switching back to your original weapon set?
To my knowledge, with deaths web used for the initial bite, anything after would have the same negative poison effect as the poison spreads. However, once it’s switched out for another weapon, anything further getting the spread of the poison damage wouldn’t have the same negative poison resistance effect, however, anything prior bit or received poison damage from the spread when DW was the main weapon, retains the same negative poison resistance.
This is a similar mechanic to how it works with a plague javazon, so unless something changed after patch 2.4, I believe that’s still the accurate information regarding DW negative poison resistance when using rabies and it’s spread of poison damage.
@@switch209gaming amazing! I had no idea. Thank you for your very detailed and insightful answer, I appreciate it immensely - been scouring the internet trying to find a decent answer. Definitely subscribing 😀
@@Venn922 youre welcome, im glad i could help you out! Its the least i could do, you checked the video out, and i want to help with whatever i can info wise, but if anything, steer viewers in the right direction for where to find what they’re looking for if I can’t answer it myself.
Thank you for subscribing, i hope you’ll enjoy the content! I’m working on a lot of videos as i write this, and there’s countless ones already on the channel i hope you’ll enjoy in the meantime while i make more. Have fun playing the game!
metamorphosis would make u kill bosses 1000% faster since it has crushing blow. Way better than jahlals
I understand that and put it to the test when I run it through Ubers in an upcoming video, however, this build was never considered for boss farming, as the poison damage is damage over time, so this has always been a build for farming lvl85 areas with larger mobs to utilize the poison spreading aspect to take the whole mob out faster.
But for Ubers, metamorphosis destroys Jalal’s, especially with constantly having the mark of the wolf active, and all the stats a werewolf Druid could use to defeat enemies faster with Physical damage.
I understand that you understand this build, but I’ve been pondering variants that might be even more effective while maintaining the flavor of the build, but using rabies more as a support skill.
Helm: metamorphosis of course.
Gloves: crafted blood, maybe Dracs
Belt: crafted OWs
Boots: Gores
Armor:Enigma
Weapon: Beast, Plague or Grief on swap
Shield: Medusas gaze, stormshield, Phoenix
The idea is that open wounds and Rabies can stack, and with psn resistances, OW might do just about as much damage. We’ve dropped Trang and Bramble to get extra STR to use Medusas Gaze (it sounds like you might be able to tele with Mark active while in wolf form? Also, Beast gives +werebear if Mark of both can be applied).
Here’s where it gets boring, just use a reapers merc. With high crushing blow, decrepify gets full dmg out of CB. Fana for merc goes a long way, and you could give him Bramble for the thorns, especially if you throw out some pets. If you use treachery, then GFace makes merc a killing machine.
It almost turns into a rotation like Diablo 3. Fury to soften them up and get OW going, then Rabies, then swap to Plague to get Lower res to finish them off. You can also just Fury away with the occasional Rabies.
venom procs from grief is gonna kill your poison damage
No
Does someone know where he got his sweatshirt?
The Blizzard website’s store has a similar design to the one im wearing, it says “Diablo 2” with the D2R design of the wanderer behind the logo, however, the exact sweatshirt I’m wearing is no longer available, it was apparently a limited run when D2R initially was released years ago,
@@switch209gaming thank you
Acrid acrid acrid acrid
What?