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Elemental Druid Review

(cont'd)

III. Player Attributes

Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Energy. An Elemental Druid has it easier than most in this regard. In the early levels the spending of stat points contributes greatly to the development of the character, but by mid- to high-level you may find yourself almost completely ignoring your stat allocation. Let's break it down.

Strength

The Elemental Druid does not use weapons in combat! Doing so completely violates the ethos of the subclass. Of course, at the very early levels, it is necessary, and there are a few situations that you might get into where swinging a sword or axe isn't a bad idea. And a few Elementalists might decide to become "warrior-mages" and combine their Elemental punch with a little bit of weapon-swinging. But in general, an Elementalist doesn't get involved in direct face-to-face combat. The primary purpose of Strength is to allow you to use heavy weapons, do more damage when swinging them, and wear heavy armor so that anyone who swings back won't hit you. For the Elementalist, none of these are important in the long run. The only real reason to put points in Strength at all is so that you can wear a wider variety of gear, so as to be able to get better magical bonuses. There are a few good stopping points:

Strength 45

You can wear a wide variety of useful armors, including Light Plate and a Breastplate, and a couple Exceptional armors like Serpentskin and Ghost Armor, at strength 45. Most of these armors give moderate protection which may be useful into Nightmare difficulty, but beyond the middle of Nightmare they are useless for defense. You can also wear Light Plated Gloves, Heavy Belts, some of the exceptional belts (which all have 4 rows of slots for potions), Necromancer wands, and both normal and Exceptional clubs. Also, you can wield a Crystal Sword which, as we'll see later, has distinct advantages. You can equip Large shields and wear The Spirit Shroud and Skin of the Vipermagi, two very nice armors.

Strength 55

Strength 50 allows you to wear Light Plated Boots and Demonhide armor. Strength 55, however, lets you use Mage Plate, which is the best armor you'll likely be able to get. Kite shields are available at 47.

Strength 60-62

Some nice options open up at 60, including Gauntlets, Plated Belts, Gothic Shields, and most of the Exceptional Druid hats. Strength 62 opens up the Exceptional version of the Falcon Helm, the name of which escapes me at the moment.

Strength 70-80

Allows you to use a Tower Shield (75) for the additional blocking. Also allows the use of Greaves (at str 70) and Goldskin (at 80), although Goldskin is pretty much obsolete with the advent of the Smoke runeword and Skin of the Vipermagi. At 79 strength you can wear Naj's Light Plate (which isn't actually a light plate at all), probably the best all-round armor for an Elementalist, but very hard to come by.

Strength 100

To wear Silks of the Victor, which is highly overrated. Most likely one of the rune words released later for armor will have +1 to all skills as a mod, which will pretty much make Silks obsolete since no one uses their other mods anyway. And there are three new exceptional/elite armors which give +1 to skills and have lower strength requirements.

In general, I prefer the low-strength options, because the extra points simply to wear 2 pieces of equipment which are of dubious value anyway aren't worth it for me. I'd rather have more mana at early levels and more life at higher ones. If you're not sure, I'd suggest sticking with 45. If you find a piece of equipment in the 60 category which you must have (Frostburn gauntlets, or a 2-socket Mage Plate come to mind) then it's only a couple levelups away to get there. Additionally, you can get Charms which increase strength: this is in general superior to getting +strength attributes on wearable items, since being able to equip all your gear is then dependent on the order in which you put it on. Nothing is more irritating than retrieving a corpse and discovering that you didn't auto-equip your hat, for example, and it's hanging around in inventory (or, worse yet, is still on your corpse since you didn't have room in inventory, leaving you vulnerable to dropping all your gear on the ground if you die again since you didn't completely loot your corpse!). Stat points for the Elementalist are relatively cheap, though, so if you find charms with large +strength bonuses, you'll get more benefit from giving it to another character who is dependent on equipping heavy weapons and armor.

Dexterity

Dexterity provides four functions: It allows you to equip certain weapons (but is meaningless to equipping other gear), improves your Attack Rating, improves your Defense Rating slightly, and improves your percentage to block using your shield. Of these four functions, only one is even possibly interesting to an Elementalist.

All the weapons an Elemental Druid is likely to use have no Dexterity requirement. These include: clubs (you can get +skills on clubs), Necromancer wands, and Crystal Swords. I'll go into detail about these later in the Equipment section, but until then you can just take my word that Dexterity will mean nothing to you when choosing a weapon to equip, since you have no motivation to swing it and so things like damage and attack speed don't interest you very much.

As you've probably picked up on by now, Attack Rating is completely worthless to an Elementalist. At the earliest levels, the druid will have to swing a weapon a bit, but even with the base dexterity of 25 he should be able to hit his foes almost all the time. Similarly, Defense Rating is worthless. Well, that's not entirely true, but the DR benefits to pumping Dexterity are so pathetic that it might as well be so. Pumping your Dexterity up to 100, for example, will only net you 25 points in DR.

Shield blocking is the tricky part of the equation. Blocking has been so heavily nerfed in the Expansion Pack that maintaining a meaningful block rate (over 40%) at high levels is not generally a worthwhile pursuit for spellcasters. Decent blocking can improve your survivability through about level 50, but beyond that, you'll probably find that keeping your blocking rate high by putting points in Dexterity takes away from putting more points in Vitality or Energy. Still, Elementalists have a lot of flexibility in choosing their stat distribution, so if you find you're happy with your Life and Mana totals, it can't hurt to start pumping Dexterity in an effort to increase blocking.

Let's investigate the blocking thing a little further, shall we? If you're going after blocking for your Elementalist, you're going to want to use a shield with a huge block rating, say a Tower Shield of Deflecting, perhaps even with an Eld rune (+7% blocking) or two socketed in it. For arguments' sake, let's say you have a Tower Shield of Deflecting with one Eld rune, for a total of 71% base blocking percentage. In Classic Diablo 2 this would be pretty much a cure-all for all your defensive ills. But in the Expansion Pack, three things combine to nerf shields pretty hard: (1) Your blocking rate is reduced to 1/3 of its level when you're moving. The Arreat Summit is not clear whether 'moving' means 'running' or 'running or walking'. (2) When you block an attack, a block animation is played, and your character stops moving, which could be a very bad thing. In addition, successive blocks can leave you in "block-lock" as it's called, and a mob of monsters can overtake and surround you, which is definitely All Bad. (3) Shield blocking is now dependent on both your Dexterity and your character level: the formula is (base %)*(dex - 15)/(2*clvl). Why does it go down as your character goes up in level? Who knows. It's silly, but then again, the whole game is kind of silly.

Let's examine two cases: in both we'll assume that you want to maintain at least a 50% total block rate when standing still.. For the first, we'll use the Tower Shield of Deflecting with an Eld rune, mentioned above (71% base block). For the second case, assume that you're using a Gothic Shield of Deflecting, without an Eld rune, for 58% base block. Note that by using the Gothic, you save 15 skill points in Strength, which can be applied to Dexterity, and without that Eld rune you can slap in a diamond for 19% resist all. The table below lists the dexterity you'll need at various levels in order to maintain 50% block:

Dexterity required to maintain 50% block with the listed Magical shields

As you can see, that's a pretty steep investment just to maintain 50% block, with a very nice shield. Add in the fact that for the Tower Shield you probably had to spend 15 or 30 more points in Strength than you otherwise might have, and you'll want to think twice before pumping Dexterity at all.

You have three options: (a) Ignore Dexterity and blocking. This allows you to put a lot of points into Vitality instead to just take the hits and grit your teeth. It also means you don't have to spend much in Strength just to use a Tower or Gothic shield. (b) Go for blocking. Spend the Dexterity points, and find equipment and charms with +Dex on them. This is a perfectly viable alternative, especially if you like to stand in the middle of a crowd and rain Armageddon on everyone and hose them down with Arctic Blast. (c) Some of each. This is what I did for my first Elementalist, and it works OK too. With Dexterity slowly built up to the 70's or 80's, you can maintain a smallish block rating in the upper teens and low twenties, given a halfway decent shield. It isn't guaranteed protection, but it saved a quick unscheduled town trip on more than one occasion ;-)

Vitality

Vitality is a strange one for the Elementalist. Like the Sorceress or Necromancer, he doesn't get hit often. However, there will be times when you will get swarmed, and having a lot of Life will come in awful handy. You'll also want to have enough Life to avoid the 1-hit-kill. Fortunately, getting more Life is very easy. Lots of equipment options are available (including Charms), and you always have Oak Sage to give you a 30% (or more) boost. The Druid gets 2 points to Life with each point spent in Vitality, and 2 points per levelup. It is quite possible to have a very large Life pool almost by accident with a Druid.

Generally, putting points in Vitality is a no-brainer. If you're happy with your Strength and Dexterity for equipment purposes, and you rarely have Mana problems, then by all means dump points into Vitality. If you're getting hit too hard too often and being forced to drink Rejuvenation potions, then put more points into Vitality. Once you've reached your target equipment requirements and your target mana pool goal, the choice becomes whether to pump Vitality or to pump Dexterity for the blocking. You'll have to decide this one - I would put a higher priority on having a Life total that I'm comfortable with, and then increasing blocking. Or maybe not bother with blocking at all and just keep cranking on the Life.

How much Life is enough? That's up to you, but personally I come from the "you can never have enough Life" school of thought. It's quite easy to have a life total greater than 1000 by your mid-sixties, with only level 1 Oak Sage. Think of it this way: adding to Vitality will at the very least allow you to ditch those clunky +Life charms you've been carrying around, so you can grab more loot. Having lots of Life increases your tactical options, because you can stand and take the hits if need be rather than running away in every situation.

Energy

This Druid's Energy stat requirements are somewhat strange. As he increases in level, his mana requirements actually go down somewhat. Sounds strange, doesn't it? But it's true - the reason is because all but one Elemental spell have a fixed (or nearly fixed) mana cost. This means that their mana efficiency improves dramatically with increasing slvl. It also means that in the early stages, an Elementalist is really going to be hurting for mana. In the early stages of the game, throughout Normal difficulty, mana, mana efficiency, and mana recovery will be your chief concerns. Later, in Nightmare and Hell, they will almost be an afterthought. Druids get 2 points in Mana per point in Energy, just like a Sorceress.

The only purpose of the Energy stat is to provide Mana, and to increase the chance that drinking a blue potion will give you double the reward. It's been suggested by a few people on the net that spell damage should be modified by your Energy stat, much like Strength modifies weapon damage. But that's not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future.

So what's a good Mana total? That's a good question. It mostly depends on how much you like to use Arctic Blast and Tornado. These are the two spells which really suck an Elementalist dry - Tornado in particular. If you're a heavy user of AB and Tornado, then a long-term mana goal of about 600 would probably be a good thing. If you're more into the casting-delay spells (all the fire spells plus Hurricane) then you can probably get away with a long-term mana pool goal more like 400.

Here's another way of looking at it: the casting delay of Armageddon (the most expensive spell) is six seconds, and it costs 35 mana to cast. If you were to keep up a continuous overlapping rain of fire by casting Armageddon every six seconds, you would need to regenerate a little bit under 6 mana per second. With no +mana regen gear, that means a mana total of 720 (you regenerate your entire pool in 120 seconds). Sounds like a lot, but remember: you won't actually be keeping up a continuous hail of flame, and you will also most likely have at least a little bit of mana regen gear. As another example, chain-casting Tornados costs 10 mana per cast, and you regenerate mana while chain-casting. Assuming you have a couple stacked fast cast rate items, you can cast a little over 2 Tornados per second. You'll want to be able to chain-cast Tornados continuously for about 20 seconds on a full mana pool - at approximately 25 mana per second that's 500 points without regeneration, and the regen would leave you with a comfortable margin..

You will be using blue potions at least occasionally - there's no getting around that. Your goal, however, is to avoid becoming completely dependent on them. I would suggest shooting for a mana pool of about 300 by the end of Normal difficulty, including +mana items. If you can hack it through Nightmare using only 300 mana, then you can call yourself a "low-mana Elementalist" and probably never bother increasing your mana beyond 400 or so. You may want to increase Energy, however, in order to shed some of those +mana items in order to gain resistances instead. Remember that your mana use between Nightmare and Hell will not increase as much as you might think - you'll have to cast more spells but they'll be doing more damage for the same cost since you'll be higher level. If, on the other hand, you're constantly scrounging for blue potions and using one every fight during Nightmare at 400 mana, start pumping Energy up, and get more +mana gear, until you are no longer a blue juice junky. If you can't hack it in Nightmare at 500 mana, you may need to re-evaluate your tactics, because getting much more than 650 mana or so in Hell is either going to require some very nice gear, or sacrificing your Vitality.

Attributes Summary

The Elemental Druid requires very small Strength and Dexterity investments. Sticking with only 45/25 is not entirely unreasonable for the entire game, although most will want to increase Strength to 60 or 75 and a few will want to pump Dexterity in order to maintain good blocking. Your main concern throughout the early part of your career is increasing your mana pool - an Energy stat in the 80's by the end of Normal difficulty (about level 33) is about right. Life comes cheap to an Elementalist, with +life items (don't forget charms) and the nifty little spell Oak Spirit. A high-level Elementalist has the luxury of being able to dilly-dally with placing his points, trying to decide if he wants more Life, more Mana, or better blocking, when in fact he needs none of these urgently. This makes up for the fact that skill allocation is critical in the development of the character.

Next up, we'll talk about skills...

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©2001 by Flickerstreak. e-mail: flickerstreak@yahoo.com

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