Welcome to the Boulder Druid Endgame Guide for Diablo 4!
Thanks to the addition of Mjölnic Ryng we get a new spin on the Boulder Build. This build focuses on using the Dolmen Stone to empower our Boulder skill in the Endgame. Leveling to 100 is not advised at the moment with this build due to the gear requirements.
Without Dolmen Stone and enough Nature Cooldown reduction with a nice Endless Tempest on Mjölnic Ryng, the final version of the build will not function properly. Start out using Flickerstep to make sure Cataclysm won't fall off.
We use the new ring to solve the high spirit demand and Flickerstep will allow us to easily reset our Cataclysm as long as enemies don't evaporate in your wake. You will need to evade through enemies for your ultimate cooldown which may make the build feel more clunky than before but with the new ring and tempers, we can give up the classic Nature's Fury key passive and get some extra damage in Bestial Rampage or Ursine Strength.
This version of the build will use Vasily's Prayer to make us the Boulder Bear which also means we have access to Insatiable Fury, this makes the argument for Ursine Strength over Bestial Rampage.
In this guide we teach you everything you need to know to be successful with the Boulder Druid in Diablo 4. Let's get to it!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up one of our Druid Leveling Guides.
Season 5 - Infernal Hordes
In Season 5, the Season Theme brings your hero back into the bowels of Hell, in the Infernal Hordes endgame activity. You're first introduced to Hellbreach Dungeons, miniature Horde-like micro-dungeons that teach you the new mechanics and rewards systems. As you slay more powerful Demons and Bosses, you're rewarded with the new Reputation progression that comes with amazing rewards. These include Crafting Materials, unlocking Season's Journey tiers and even the coveted Resplendent Spark, needed to craft a mythic unique.
Follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the Reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 5 guide for more information.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
Your general rotation goes like this: use Hurricane, then use Cataclysm, next start using Boulder to get up to 10 going at once, thanks to the weapon temper we won't need 10 casts. Shred will stick us to enemies as our Boulder bounces them around. We will switch between Boulder as a Werebear and Shred as a Werewolf to maintain Quickshift and Heightened Senses.
The most difficult part of this build requires you to evade through enemies, meaning you will need to evade after a Shred and before the enemies get knocked away or perish. Our Hurricane will last long enough to cast at will but we must focus on reducing our Cataclysm cooldown through evades.
Wildheart Hunger
With near pefect gear, we can give up Flickerstep and maintain both Cataclysm and Hurricane without any help. This makes the build significantly easier to play. Wildheart Hunger also requires a shapeshift every 5 seconds to maintain stacks, Insatiable Fury will not maintain the stacks for you.
Active Skills
- Boulder is your main damaging Skill
- Hurricane makes your Boulder rotate in a circle around you. It also provides great utility by slowing down enemies, poisoning them with Tempest Roar and reducing their damage.
- Shred acts as our movement ability, keeping us close to the enemies we knock away with Boulder
- Earthen Bulwark will be our emergency button that breaks crowd control and allows us to absorb a bigger hit.
- Cataclysm is our source of resource with Mjölnic Ryng and the most difficult part of the build is making sure you get the cooldown back before it ends. This shouldn't be too difficult on bosses but on weaker enemies they may get destroyed quickly and requires quick evades after Shred sticks you to your target.
- Trample gives us an extra Unstoppable for breaking crowd control.
Passives
- Ursine Strength is buffed by our Insatiable Fury and a great choice. You could drop some of the tankiness for more attack speed and slightly more damage in Bestial Rampage, which requires maintaining buffs.
- We get various damage increases through Quickshift, Stone Guard, Wild Impulses, Natural Disaster, and Defiance. Provocation will provide some free overpowers for nice boosts in damage, pay attention to when it is available because you can overpower your Boulder, Hurricane, or Cataclysm, but you may also just overpower a Shred which will feel worse than any of the above.
- Extra damage reduction and mobility from Heightened Senses and Iron Fur.
Spirit Boons
Druids can choose 5 out of 16 Passive bonuses (Boons) from 4 different spirits. You have to bond with one of the Spirits in Túr Dúlra to activate two of its Boons. The remaining Spirits can only have one Boon each. Use the following Boons:
- Deer Spirit: Wariness for additional defense where we need it most.
- Iron Feather: Iron Feather gives us a massive increase to our Max Health.
- Wolf Spirit: Calamity extends our Cataclysm uptime.
- Snake Spirit: Obsidian Slam provides a little bit of extra damage, you can use Calm Before the Storm to help with Cataclysm uptime.
Bond with the Eagle Spirit and activate Avian Wrath for a multiplicative increase to your Critical Strike Damage.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Druid Spirit Boons Guide.
Resource & Cooldown Management
Managing your resources is a very easy concept but requires good execution. As long as you can use Flickerstep to reset your Cataclysm, Mjölnic Ryng solves all resource issues.
Cooldown Reduction
With a good Dolmen Stone and Mjölnic Ryng, we may be able to replace Hurricane Cooldown Reduction on ring for Cataclysm Cooldown Reduction and an easier time resetting, but at first we need to make sure our Hurricane is always up.
Paragon Board
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!
Glyphs
We need to level up our Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.
Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Earth and Sky
- Outmatch
- Fang and Claw
- Spirit
- Tectonic
- Dominate
Level 21
- Spirit
- Tectonic
- Fang and Claw
- Outmatch
- Earth and Sky
- Dominate
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Gear
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final version of the build. We start out with Flickerstep until we can get the perfect setup.
Progression Goals
Many of your Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. While we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!
- You must have access to a large number of unique items to start playing this build.
- Unlock the following Aspects from Dungeons:
- Changeling's Debt in Conclave (Kehjistan)
- Skinwalker's in Fading Echo (Kehjistan)
- Retaliation in Seaside Descent (Dry Steppes)
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Metamorphic Stone: Gamble Totems.
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Steps
Note: This build does not have a Starter variant since it requires Endgame items and Aspects. An easier to pilot version of the build will come soon.
We start out using this Flickerstep setup until we can get the needed rolls for Wildheart Hunger. Not much will change besides a few gear pieces.
Gear
- Vasily's Prayer enables Boulder Bear variation. We pair it with Insatiable Fury for Damage on Chest (and a lot of defenses too).
- Flickerstep combines with Mjolnic for unlimited spirit, a much needed solution to Boulder's high resource demand.
- Dolmen Stone is what the Boulder build functions on.
- Skinwalker's keeps us healthy, a max version should keep us going against the most difficult foes. Consider Might if you don't mind using potions often.
- Metamorphic Stone is our main damage boost, followed by Changeling's Debt and finally we round out the build with the simple Retaliation.
This set assumes you have the needed Nature Magic Cooldown Reduction and Endless Tempest masterworks to reach 100% uptime on Cataclysm.
- We replace Flickerstep with Wildheart Hunger. We replace Hurricane Cooldown Reduction with Cataclysm Cooldown Reduction.
- Mythic variant simply adds Ring of Starless Skies once you can keep Cataclysm active without the temper.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successfully navigate this build through potentially dangerous situations. Take Maximum Life over Willpower on gear and masterwork it instead. Make sure your armor and resistances are always capped before focusing on general offensive stats.
Check out our dedicated in-depth guide to learn more survival tricks in Hardcore.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
- Spirit: We solve this with Mjölnic Ryng.
- Cooldown Reduction: Our priority is getting enough cooldown reduction on Hurricane for permanent uptime and enough on Cataclysm for a more relaxed reset.
- Attack Speed: Difficult to find in this current build. Ursine Strength can be replaced with Bestial Rampage for more damage at the cost of maintaining more buffs and less defense.
- Critical Strikes: Our slots are limited by unique items but we can get tempers of Earth Critical Strike Chance.
- Vulnerable: Supreme Cataclysm should provide us with enough Vulnerable.
- Crowd Control: We will be knocking enemies around and providing a large amount of control to any enemies that get close enough.
- Life: This build stacks A LOT of life. With the changes to damage reduction, life is one of the best defenses. We are aiming for over 40K life on this build which will allow us to soak up damage and prevent one shots.
- Fortify: We will easily maintain this with Skinwalker's but can consider a point into Safeguard also.
- Armor: Provides damage reduction against Physical damage. We are aiming for 9230 Armor as this is the new cap. We should easily hit this with a greater armor masterworked Vasily or an extra armor roll on pants.
- Unstoppable: Enhanced Earthen Bulwark will allow us to break any crowd control, generally saving it for the dire situation.
- Resistances: It is important to cap your Resistances and increase your survivability against Elemental damage. A combination of Gems, Jewelry Implicits, Paragon nodes and Armor pieces makes this possible. Druids also have access to Ancestral Fortitude which helps achieve this goal.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Stat Priorities
To enable your build to perform optimally, you need to reach certain Stat "Breakpoints". Some examples are reaching 100% Chance to Critically Strike, or 20 Resource per second. Since there are many values of these stats on different pieces of gear, read the checklist below and refer to the recommended Tempered Affixes ⚒️ and Masterwork Crits ↑. Desirable Greater Affixes will always be the top three recommended Affixes.
- 50% Critical Strike Chance
- 25% Attack Speed
- 20% Hurricane Cooldown Reduction
- 30% Nature Magic Cooldown Reduction
- +3 Ranks of Endless Tempest
- Armor Capped 9230
- Resistance Capped 70%
- >35,000 Life
- Helmet: Vasily's Prayer
- Willpower ↑
- Maximum Life
- Armor
- Defensive Posture
- Chest Armor: Insatiable Fury
- Ursine Strength ↑ (Unless using Bestial Rampage)
- Iron Fur ↑
- Maximum Life ↑
- Werebear Overpower
- Gloves: Changeling's Debt
- Core Skills
- Critical Strike Chance
- Attack Speed
- Willpower
- ⚒️Earth Critical Strike Chance
- ⚒️Crowd Control Duration
- Pants: Skinwalker's
- Willpower ↑
- Maximum Life
- Armor
- Dodge
- ⚒️Maximum Life
- ⚒️Crowd Control Duration
- Boots: Wildheart Hunger
- Shapeshifting Attack Speed ↑
- Heightened Senses
- Movement Speed
- Cold Resist
- Boots: Flickerstep
- Damage Reduction Close ↑
- Movement Speed
- Ultimate Damage
- Lightning Resist
- Amulet: Dolmen Stone
- Nature Magic Cooldown Reduction↑
- Wrath Skills
- Crushing Earth
- Movement Speed Hurricane
- Rings: Mjölnic Ryng
- Endless Tempest ↑
- Critical Strike Chance
- Willpower
- Movement Speed Cataclysm
- Rings: Retaliation
- Critical Strike Chance ↑
- Attack Speed
- Willpower
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Earth Critical Strike Chance
- ⚒️Cataclysm Cooldown Reduction
- ⚒️Hurricane Cooldown Reduction ↑ (Flickerstep)
- Weapon:Metamorphic Stone
- Willpower
- Maximum Life
- Critical Strike Damage
- Vulnerable Damage
- ⚒️Chance for Boulders to Cast Twice↑
- ⚒️Damage vs Crowd Control
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Where can I find Dolmen Stone?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Dolmen Stone
Summary
This build currently demands high quality gear and an active playstyle. Once you get the required gear for Wildheart Hunger, it becomes a very easy to pilot build. If you are up to the challenge, this build is expected to tackle all content and have fun while doing it. Get ready to rock!
Credits
Written by pandaglassjaw
Reviewed by IBoilerUp