Welcome to the Support Druid Endgame Guide, our first dedicated support guide for Diablo 4! This build is overflowing with defensive and utility options for group play, as well as a handful of offensive choices that aren't to be overlooked.
Though the buff management and gear requirements may take some time to navigate, the payoff is well worth it. This build is fully capable of enabling its party to clear the most difficult endgame content, including Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons and the Echoes of Lilith encounter!
Start battles by enabling personal defensive buffs, including Damage Reduction bonuses from Storm Strike. Gain Unstoppable and Barrier from Earthen Bulwark as you make your approach. Once in range, inflict a massive Slow and Damage Reduction debuff on monsters with Debilitating Roar while bolstering your party's damage with Blood Howl and Nighthowler's Aspect. If all else fails, use Petrify to push for damage or buy yourself time to escape.
We utilize the Nature's Fury Key Passive to maintain our personal defenses, replenishing the bonuses from Earthen Bulwark with Symbiotic Aspect and casts of Storm Strike. This 1-2 punch makes and keeps us tanky!
Offensive Buffs
- Vulnerable (Exploit, Storm Strike)
- +10% Critical Strike Chance (Blood Howl)
- +15% increased Attack Speed (Blood Howl)
Defensive Buffs
- x70% less enemy damage dealt (Debilitating Roar)
- 19% damage reduction (Cyclone Armor)
- 30% Max Life Heal (Blood Howl)
Crowd Controls
- 65% Slow (Debilitating Roar)
- Maximum Duration Stun (Petrify)
- Knock Back (Cyclone Armor)
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Tornado Druid Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Druid playstyle, check out all of our Druid Guides.
Season 3 - Season of the Construct
In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.
Recommended Stones
- Lightning Bolt - A ranged attack intended to incapacitate and group newly encountered enemies.
- Arcing - Improves the coverage and range of Lightning Bolt
- Mockery - A useful distraction for all enemies that also helps group melee mobs.
- Gripping - Further groups mobs as Lightning Bolt ricochets to Distant targets.
- Gyrate - A quick, AoE melee attack intended to lock down and debuff grouped enemies.
- Voluminous - Improves the range of Gyrate
- Dusk - Used for the chance to interrupt attacks
- Electrocution - because a stunned enemy deals no damage!
Alternative Stones
- Registered Damage - As our Construct's main focus is grouping mobs, this Support could be tremendous for clear if the damage Constructs do proves worthwhile.
- Initiative - This Support may prove useful or even necessary if the Construct struggles to position itself.
- Safeguard- An all-around solid defensive option.
If you are lucky enough to get Evernight from Uber Malphas, slot it over Electrocution.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
Active Skills
- Debilitating Roar is the star of the show. Use it to inflict a 70% Damage Dealt debuff and a 65% Slow to mobs in a colossal AoE. Although the damage reduction duration is not scalable, you can achieve nearly permanent uptime on the Slow with high investment in Cooldown Reduction and Crowd Control Duration.
- Blood Howl provides a sizeable heal and increases your Attack Speed by 15%. With Nighthowler's Aspect, these effects also apply to allies along with a Critical Strike Chance bonus. Thanks to Enhanced Blood Howl, this cooldown is up often in high-density scenarios.
- Cyclone Armor grants passive Non-Physical Damage Reduction that intensifies periodically via Preserving Cyclone Armor. When paired with Cyclonic Force, these bonuses affect allies and also apply to Physical Damage.
- Petrify provides a max duration Stun in a large AoE. Use it to engage, escape, or buy yourself time to resurrect fallen teammates. This skill has a long Cooldown which can be recovered to some extent by Calm Before the Storm and Flickerstep. But we can't sustain its effect permanently, so use this Cooldown wisely!
- Storm Strike gives personal damage reduction on hit and through Might when cast. It also serves as a reliable source of Vulnerable.
- Earthen Bulwark Fortifies for a portion of your life on cast and protects your Fortified status with a hefty Barrier. We bolster its uptime through Mending Stone and the combination of Nature's Fury and Symbiotic Aspect.
Passive Skills
Our passives are primarily used for personal defenses:
- Ancestral Fortitude and Vigilance are practically permanent defensive bonuses. Heightened Senses and Iron Fur temporarily provide additional damage reduction when we use our Shapeshifting skills.
- Defensive Posture, Nature's Resolve, and Natural Fortitude bolster our Fortify status.
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
- Eagle Spirit: Iron Feather
- Wolf Spirit: Bolster
- Snake Spirit: Calm Before the Storm
Bond with the Wolf Spirit and activate Calamity.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Druid Spirit Boons Guide.
Cooldown & Crowd Control Management
Managing your Cooldowns and Crowd Controls is crucial to the success of this build.
Cooldown Management
As mentioned at the top of this guide, maximizing Debilitating Roar's massive Slow and Damage Reduction is the main feature of this build. This is only possible with considerable investment in Ranks of Debilitating Roar, Cooldown Reduction, and Crowd Control Duration on gear.
Earthen Bulwark's Cooldown has a chance to be recovered by casts of Storm Strike with the synergy of Nature's Fury and the Symbiotic Aspect. This allows for high uptime on Unstoppable, Fortify, and Barrier.
Blood Howl's Cooldown is reduced by your party's kills, resulting in nearly maximum uptime of your offensive buffs in heavy density.
Petrify is your Get-Out-of-Jail Free card, but its relatively high Cooldown dictates that we use it judiciously.
Crowd Control Duration
Smiting Aspect, Exploiter's Aspect, and Calamity
Despite its tooltip, Smiting Aspect provides an additive bonus to Crowd Control Duration. Still, it's the largest source of Crowd Control Duration in this build. Keep in mind that you must be Healthy to gain the relevant bonus. Exploiter's Aspect is another nice bonus to the stat that is not roll dependent. Combined with affixes on our Helmet and Totem, we achieve nearly double the duration on Debilitating Roar's Slow and Petrify's Stun! Calamity provides a multiplicative bonus to the duration of Petrify.
Unstoppable Monsters
After being subjected to 10 consecutive seconds of "Hard" Crowd Control (freeze, immobilize, stun, etc.), regular monsters become Unstoppable for 10 seconds. For Elites, it only takes 5 seconds of "Hard" Crowd Control to activate this effect, decaying after about 8 seconds. "Soft" Crowd Controls, such as Innate Debilitating Roar's Slow, build up this immunity at about 1/5 the rate. Before provoking Unstoppable, you can leave the monsters to rest for a short time to let this buildup toward CC immunity decay.
It's important that we avoid activating this inherent ability in mobs because during that time we will be unable to apply fresh Crowd Controls or benefit from Crowd Controlled damage bonuses. With this in mind, it's worth looking over the Crowd Control effects available across your party to minimize the chances of this effect occurring. Some builds need to inflict their own Crowd Control effects to be effective, such as Barbarian's Challenging Shout. So, depending on your party composition, you may opt to substitute Preserving Debilitating Roar or shorten Petrify's duration further by removing Calamity or other sources of Crowd Control Duration on gear.
Note that the 4-second Damage Reduction from Debilitating Roar still applies to Unstoppable monsters.
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
Level 15
- Poise
- Protector
- Exploit
- Undaunted
- Human
- Territorial
Level 21
- Poise
- Protector
- Exploit
- Undaunted
- Territorial
- Human
Note that four of our Glyphs add only damage beyond level 15. After increasing the radius of all Glyphs and leveling Poise and Protector to 21, feel free to continue leveling these generally useful Glyphs or prioritize any others you may need.
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Progression & Variants
When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition to the final build version.
Progression Goals
Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. These are listed in priority order:
- Unlock the following Aspects from Dungeons:
- Nighthowler's Aspect in Forbidden City (Fractured Peaks)
- Aspect of Cyclonic Force in Collapsed Vault (Kehjistan)
- Aspect of Mending Stone in Sealed Archives (Dry Steppes)
- Rapid Aspect in Buried Halls (Dry Steppes)
- Aspect of Retribution in Abandoned Mineworks (Kehjistan) - Injured variant
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Symbiotic Aspect: Gamble Boots.
- Hectic: Gamble Boots.
- Exploiter's Aspect: Gamble Boots.
- Smiting Aspect: Gamble Totems.
- Ghostwalker Aspect (Speedfarming variant): Gamble Boots.
- Stat Requirements
- Cooldown Reduction: 33%+ from Totem, Amulet, and Helmet
- Crowd Control Duration: 85%+ between Totem, Helmet, Smiting Aspect and Exploiter's Aspect
- +Ranks to Debilitating Roar: 10 from Weapon, Amulet and Chest Armor (potentially more from Evernight or Harlequin Crest)
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops. Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!
- Fleshrender
- Airidah's Inexorable Will
- Flickerstep (used in Gauntlet Variant)
- Godslayer Crown (used in Gauntlet Variant)
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Harlequin Crest
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Endgame Variants
You can optimize your build further for certain endgame activities, such as Speedfarming, Nightmare Dungeon Pushing, etc. As this build is intended for party play, the variants listed below additionally depend on your party's composition.
(Poison DPS)
Although Druids have a few tools at their disposal to inflict Poison, they are tough to fit into this build without detracting from it. Adding Poison Creeper loses us a valuable skill slot and has the potential to make monsters Unstoppable when cast alongside Petrify. Using either Greatstaff of the Crone or Tempest Roar to take advantage of Toxic Claws loses you Cooldown Reduction and Crowd Control Duration rolls on your Offhand or Helmet, respectively, limiting your uptime on Debilitating Roar and Petrify.
However, if your DPS or any other party member consistently inflicts Poison, we can utilize its effect to further increase our toughness by making a few adjustments on gear.
Gear
Damage Reduction from Enemies That are Poisoned becomes an immediate stat priority on Chest, Pants, Offhand, and Amulet when playing with a party member that can inflict Poison. On top of these changes, we activate Damage Reduction bonuses from the Magic and Rare Paragon nodes in range of Undaunted.
Skill Tree, Gameplay, and Paragon
There are no changes necessary to the Skill Tree, Gameplay, or Paragon Board.
The Injured Support Druid trades utility, ease of play, and lower gear requirements for the ability to face tank all but the most difficult content. Depending on your party composition and target content, this may be desirable even when weighing the downsides. This changes quite a bit about the build:
Gear
- Damage Reduction While Injured becomes top priority on our defensive pieces. Similarly, Barrier Generation is newly prioritized on Helmet, Chest Armor, and Offhand to bolster the strength of Earthen Bulwark. Ranks to Earthen Bulwark pushes this even further.
- Damage Reduction While Fortified does not apply to Barriers, as we don't take damage to our Fortified life with a Barrier active. Consequently, this stat is dropped as a priority on Amulet, Chest, and Pants. If you have a party member that consistently inflicts Poison, Damage Reduction from Poison can be used in place of %Armor on Pants and in place of Lucky Hit Chance on Offhand.
- Socket Royal Diamonds instead of Royal Rubies in your armor pieces to further bolster Barrier generation.
- Smiting is swapped out with Audacity, since we can't benefit from Smiting's Crowd Control Duration bonus while Injured. Ghostwalker is also viable in this slot for additional Movement Speed.
- Since you can't Heal with Blood Howl either, Nighthowler's is exchanged for Retribution.
- Remove the Skulls from your weapon and offhand. Unfortunately, there is no suitable replacement for these gems, but we can't Heal from the Life on Kill or we risk losing the Injured status.
Skills
Remove:
- Preserving Blood Howl (3 Points)
Add:
- Savage Hurricane (3 Points)
Gameplay
- Before you engage with content, go to the overworld and let mobs attack you until you are at 35% or less HP, incurring the Injured status. Repeat this step if you inadvertently heal or die, as it is necessary to benefit from the powerful Damage Reduction values that accompany this status.
- Protecting your limited life pool with Earthen Bulwark's Barrier is paramount, as you can't heal. Make sure to regularly cast Storm Strike in and out of mobs' range to activate Symbiotic Aspect and reduce Earthen Bulwark's cooldown.
- Use Hurricane when approaching monsters to reduce their damage dealt and have a chance to inflict Vulnerable. The cooldown of Hurricane has a chance to be reduced by your repeated casts of Earthen Bulwark thanks to Symbiotic.
There are just a handful of changes from the default version of the Support Druid for speedfarming, most of which are intended to increase our movement speed with minimal impact on our utility.
Gear
- Move Hectic to your Helmet and replace Exploiter's Aspect with Ghostwalker Aspect and Dodge Chance with Movement Speed after Killing an Elite on Boots.
- Drop a Damage Reduction roll on amulet and replace it with Movement Speed.
Skills
Optionally, remove 2 points from Unrestrained and 1 point from Natural Fortitude to max out Digitigrade Gait. Even though the Movement Speed bonus is only active while casting or shortly after Blood Howl, the Fortify bonuses are overkill and every bit of Movement Speed helps.
Our Gauntlet variant sacrifices a bit of Armor (which is not necessary against T70 mobs), Crowd Control Duration bonuses from Exploiter's and Smiting, and the presumably unnecessary Damage Reduction from Debilitating Roar for significantly increased mobility, increased cooldown recovery, and an additional pull mechanic.
Gear
- Replace your Helmet with Godslayer Crown. This gives us an additional method of grouping monsters on top of Elites and Bosses, and can be activated by both Petrify and Storm Strike.
- For Boots, go for Flickerstep. Evade through groups of mobs while using these to drastically reduce the cooldown of Petrify.
- Aim for a Movement Speed and Shrine Duration Amulet. Ranks to Debilitating Roar are no longer necessary on chest, as we're dropping this skill for Gauntlet.
Skills
- Remove all points from Debilitating Roar. Put 3 of them in Shred, giving you significantly increased mobility for the Gauntlet. For lack of better options, use the remaining points to cap out Unrestrained and Elemental Exposure.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn all you need to know about how Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
- Debilitating Roar: There are few skills in the game that rival the Damage Reduction debuff from Debilitating Roar. We build around its more-than-screen-wide AoE by investing in +Ranks to Debilitating Roar and Cooldown Reduction.
- Cyclone Armor: grants you a passive non-Physical Damage Reduction bonus, which is augmented to affect allies and also apply to Physical Damage with Cyclonic Force.
- Healing: You Heal yourself and allies by using Blood Howl with the Nighthowler's Aspect. You can cast this in quick succession when fighting a dense pack thanks to Enhanced Blood Howl benefitting from party kills.
- Armor: Since you don't need to deal damage, your Paragon board and gear affixes are stacked with Armor. This keeps us survivable in even the toughest of situations.
- Fortify: Between Bolster, Defensive Posture, Nature's Resolve, Natural Fortitude, and the Fortify granted by Preserving Earthen Bulwark, you have little trouble maintaining your Fortified status. This makes bonuses to Damage Reduction While Fortified very valuable.
- Unstoppable: Earthen Bulwark provides Unstoppable for its duration. Reset its cooldown by attacking with Storm Strike and using the Nature's Fury Key Passive along with Symbiotic Aspect.
- Barrier: Earthen Bulwark also grants a Barrier which helps protect your Fortified status. Refresh this barrier as often as you're able and consider scaling its effectiveness with Barrier Generation on Rings or Helmet.
- Blood Howl: grants you a sizeable Attack Speed increase from Preserving Blood Howl. With Nighthowler's Aspect, this benefit affects allies and adds a Critical Strike Chance bonus to boot. You can cast this repeatedly in heavy density, as Enhanced Blood Howl benefits from party kills.
- Vulnerable: We have two great ways of inflicting Vulnerable on targets. Your first hits on mobs are guaranteed to inflict Vulnerable for 3 seconds due to Exploit's secondary bonus. Thereafter, we maintain Vulnerable on enemies by attacking with Fierce Storm Strike.
- Slow: Debilitating Roar Slows enemies by 65% for its duration, which makes kiting or escaping from mobs significantly easier. With the prerequisite Cooldown Reduction, Crowd Control Duration, and Debilitating Roar level scaling, this Slow has virtually permanent uptime.
- Stun: Use Petrify to completely incapacitate mobs for up to 10 seconds at a time (depending on your Crowd Control Duration bonuses). This is useful for both engaging and disengaging mobs, or to buy yourself enough time to resurrect fallen Allies.
- Immobilize: Enhanced Storm Strike allows for a chance to Immobilize all enemies struck. This can be scaled to happen more often with Attack Speed and last longer with Crowd Control Duration.
- Knockback: To escape from close quarters situations, utilize Cyclone Armor's Knock Back to create space. Since most damage dealers would prefer the mobs to be tightly grouped, it's best to save this as a last resort.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.
-When playing the Injured variant or with a party member that inflicts Poison, move the corresponding stat highlighted in Green up a tier.
-Likewise, when playing the Injured variant, the corresponding stats highlighted in Red become mandatory.
If you are running the Default setup with no Poison in your party, ignore these highlighted stats as priorities.
- Helm: Disobedience
- Cooldown Reduction
- Crowd Control Duration
- Maximum Life
- % Total Armor
- Willpower
- All Stats
- Basic Skill Attack Speed
- Barrier Generation
- Chest Armor: Mending Stone
- +Ranks to Debilitating Roar
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Poisoned
- Damage Reduction While Fortified
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Life
- +Ranks to Cyclone Armor
- Barrier Generation
- Ranks of Earthen Bulwark
- Gloves: Smiting or Audacity (Injured)
- Attack Speed
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Willpower
- All Stats
- Strength
- Pants: Cyclonic Force
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Distant Enemies
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction While Fortified
- Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Poisoned
- Damage Reduction While Injured
- Damage Reduction
- Maximum Life
- Dodge Chance
- Boots: Exploiter's or Ghostwalker (Speedfarming)
- Movement Speed
- Willpower
- All Stats
- % Dodge Chance
- % Dodge Chance Against Distant Enemies
- Damage Reduction While Injured
- Amulet: Symbiotic
- +Ranks to All Defensive Skills
- Cooldown Reduction
- % Total Armor
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Poisoned
- Damage Reduction While Injured
- Damage Reduction While Fortified
- Crowd Control Duration
- % Total Armor
- Ring 1: Airidah's Inexorable Will
- Ultimate Skill Cooldown Reduction
- Lucky Hit
- %Willpower
- Damage to Close Enemies
- Ring 2: Rapid
- Maximum Life
- Barrier Generation
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Fortify Generation
- Main Hand: Fleshrender
- +Ranks to Defensive Skills
- Damage While Shapeshifted
- Damage to Poisoned Enemies
- Damage While Healthy
- Off-Hand: Nighthowler's
- Cooldown Reduction
- Crowd Control Duration
- Damage Reduction While Fortified
- Lucky Hit Chance
- Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Poisoned
- All Stats
- Basic Skill Attack Speed
- Barrier Generation
This build benefits most from the following Consumables:
- Elixirs: Heady Iron Barb Elixir, Elixir of Fortitude, Heady Acrobatics Elixir, Elixir of Death Evasion, Elixir of Combatant Fortune
- Incense: Song of the Mountain or Reddamine Buzz
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.
Why not Temerity?
What are some builds that synergize with this one?
Mechanics
Learn all you need to know about how to scale this build in the endgame.
Unstoppable Monsters
Injured Status and Barrier
Hungry for more Guides?
Druid Guides
General Guides
Summary
The Support Druid provides an excellent blend of offensive, defensive, and utility buffs while establishing a stalwart frontline. With proper gearing and coordination, it weakens mobs considerably by alternating between Debilitating Roar and Petrify, while buffing party members with Cyclone Armor and Blood Howl.
Credits
Written by IBoilerUp
Reviewed by McFluffin