Tornado Druid Endgame Build Guide

Season 7 is the Season of Witchcraft. It features two separate borrowed power mechanics in the forms of Witchcraft Powers and Occult Gems. Both Seasonal mechanics are unlocked and improved by new NPCs found at the Tree of Whispers after collecting resources from Headhunt Zones, Seasonal areas similar to Helltide that appear across Sanctuary.

There are 25 Witchcraft Powers, 6 of which can be equipped at a time. Each Power belongs to one of three Schools (Eldritch, Growth & Decay and Psyche), tags that promote synergies within themselves and with Occult Gems. Each School has a single Unique Witchcraft Power, only one of which can be equipped at a time. These Unique Powers max out and gain an additional effect at rank 5, while the other Powers max at rank 20 and gain their bonus effects at various levels. To unlock and improve Witchcraft Powers, defeat Headrotten or complete Whispers within the Headhunt Zones to collect Restless Rot. Lost Powers are an exception, requiring you to randomly encounter a Forgotten Altar in Dungeons to unlock them.

Best-in-Slot Witchcraft Powers

Alternate Witchcraft Powers

• Breath of the Coven - This power can be used to gain a sizeable Attack Speed increase when combined with Witching Hour, especially impactful if you have low Attack Speed.
• Hex of Flames - A good option if you're looking for more single target damage. In this case replace Abyssal Resonance as it is the only flexible Eldritch Power.
• Aura of Siphoning - A versatile Power that deals Poison damage to all nearby enemies while simultaneously restoring your health with each instance of damage dealt.

Rarely, Headrotten Bosses appear with a still-attached Fugitive Head stolen from the Tree of Whispers. Slay these enemies and return the Heads to Gelena to unlock and upgrade Occult Gems. These Gems are socketable in Jewelry and each provide +160 Armor and +8% Resistance to All Elements. More importantly, each Occult Gem grants a unique effect that synergizes with your equipped Witchcraft Powers to provide a variety of Offensive, Defensive, and Utility-based bonuses.

Best-in-Slot Occult Gems

• Witching Hour - This Gem grants Tornado the Eldritch tag on a very short Cooldown. As an Eldritch Effect, Tornado takes advantage of Purging Touch's damage multiplier every other second.
• Moonlight Ward - A powerful defensive option that supplies you with additional Damage Reduction and Maximum Resistance to All Elements based on your Unique Witchcraft Power rank.
• Killing Wind - Grants a good amount of Critical Strike Chance and Movement Speed for simply having three Eldritch Powers.

Alternate Occult Gems

• Heart of Anima + Wicked Pact + Toadling's Wish - These Gems are available early on and increase the potency of your Witchcraft Powers. As you work towards unlocking higher tier Occult Gems and Witchcraft Powers, utilize the specific Gem that corresponds with your unlocked Witchcraft Powers, Eldritch, Psyche or Growth & Decay to increase their lethality.
• Hungering Void - Another way, albeit not as effective, of pulling monsters together. A decent choice if you do not have Kry.

Skill Passives

• Bestial Rampage serves as our Key Passive. It consists of two components, Werebear and Werewolf, requiring both Shapeshifting forms to fully capitalize on its bonuses. Tempest Roar transforms Tornado into a Werewolf Skill, while Maul Shapeshifts us into Werebear.
• Envenom is our most significant passive multiplier. It increases your Critical Strike Damage against Poisoned enemies. In Season 7 this damage bonus is achieved with minimal effort by using Overload, which enables your Tornado to inflict Poison damage.
• Quickshift, Feral Aptitude and Backlash are all great offensive bonuses to have. Heightened Senses, Vigilance and Circle of Life contribute to our survival.

Skill Rotation

1. Stack your Shapeshifting bonuses by alternating between Maul and Tornado.
2. Cast Tornado to activate your Runes, specifically Kry, which pulls enemies in melee range. Cast Maul every 2-3 seconds in-between your Tornadoes to maintain your Shapeshifting buffs.
3. Use Blood Howl as often as possible to receive the bonuses from Vigilance and Backlash. Cast Cyclone Armor if Blood Howl is on Cooldown.
4. Activate Earthen Bulwark if you expect to get hit by a big attack, or to grant yourself Unstoppable.
5. Trigger Cataclysm as often as possible to take advantage of Mjölnic Ryng's damage multiplier.
6. If you run out of Spirit and cannot cast Tornado, use Maul to generate Spirit as a backup.

Spirit Boons

Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.

Glyph Leveling Priorities

You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Tornado Druid focuses on the following combos:

Best in Slot

• Igni + Wat - Decrepify helps stagger Bosses, provides Damage Reduction and Executes enemies at 10% HP. When combined with ‍Xol in your other Runeword it also generates large amounts of Offering.
• Xol + Kry - Vortex enables us to group up monsters, which in turn improves the reliability of Tornado and increases its total damage potential.

Alternative choices

If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:

• Tam / Bac / Lith - Are all great alternatives for generating Offering, but simply aren't used because of Igni's superior Offering generation.
• Jah - Teleport is a great skill all around and is especially used in the Speedfarming variant for faster clearing speeds. Pair it with Xol or any other available Ritual Rune.
• Ohm - War Cry offers a respectable damage bonus for a moderate duration.
• Xal - Aids with survivability.
• Gar - Provides a large chunk of Critical Strike Chance. Great option early on.
• Mot - Enables the Rogue's Dark Shroud, which is a strong defensive option.

Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one Hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a Reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.

Hired: Raheir

This mercenary offers us additional Resistances and a means to negate big hits in Valiance. We opt for Ground Slam and Bastion to increase our survivability, but also to take advantage of Inspiration's damage multipliers.

Reinforcement: Varyana

Bloodthirst provides the Tornado Druid with a bump of Attack Speed that lasts a moderate duration.

To enable the Tornado Druid to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.

Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds

Item Progression Goals

Before you dive into the endgame with the Tornado Druid, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.

This section is designed to guide your Tornado Druid from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.

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 2H Staff over 2H Polearm? What about Dagger + Totem?

Retaliation is a gigantic damage multiplier for this build. As such, we get the most damage out of using a 2-hand weapon over a 1-hand weapon + totem and the added benefit of slotting Runes into our weapon, freeing up our armor slots for more Willpower.

Use a 2H Polearm early on when you lack additive damage for its intrinsic Vulnerable damage. As you acquire more sources of additive damage from your gear and Paragon, swap to a 2H Staff as it is a faster casting weapon.

Why is Maximum Life prioritized on gear/weapon?

Maximum Life is essential to any build's survival. In the case of this build, it uses a large amount of Uniques, which negatively impact your total Maximum Life. Since Maximum Life nodes in your Paragon are % based, it is important to ensure that the Life value on your gear is as high as possible for the highest payoff.

Additionally, builds revolving around the Druid's Werewolf form are notorious for having weak defenses and contrary to the Werebear, have difficulty surviving against enemies that don't die instantly. While more Willpower is always welcome, in this case, the marginal damage increases do not outweigh the loss of Life and survivability that come thereafter.

How can I trigger Unstoppable?

Druids have only two non-Ultimate sources of Unstoppable. Trample and Earthen Bulwark. If you're not subscribed to their long Cooldown, Metamorphosis is a great alternative to those skills.

What can I do for better Spirit recovery?

In the early game you may occasionally starve on resources before you get Shapeshifting synergies online. It is recommended you invest in Spirit per second while you look for a Tempest Roar. Alternatively, utilize Gift of the Stag or Energize, or you can replace a support skill like Earthen Bulwark with Savage Trample for Spirit. Additionally, make sure to imprint Resource Aspects such as Umbral and Vocalized Empowerment.

Which adjustments should I make on Hardcore?

Generally hardcore and softcore share the same builds. Outside of being more prudent in your gameplay, you can also tweak the setup slightly to raise your survivability:

• Focus more on Armor & Resists, making sure that they are always capped especially as you transition into higher torment difficulties.
• Focus more on maximum life rolls, for example replacing DPS stats like main attributes, attack speed, critical strike chance and additive increased damage rolls. Also masterwork life more than normal if no other crucial stats have priority.
• Focus on adding defensive skills, passives and paragon nodes first as you level up.
• Play on a slightly lower difficulty than normal, don't push into difficult territory. As long as you can deal with all enemies swiftly, they can't retaliate.
• Include a source of Unstoppable if possible to get out of crowd controls.
• Use defensive elixirs and incense instead of offensive ones.

Mechanics

Wildheart Hunger

With these unique boots equipped, Shapeshifting adds a stack of Wildheart. Each stack of Wildheart increases the bonuses of your Bestial Rampage by 5%[+]. These stacks are additive, resulting in up to 50[x] damage and 50% Attack Speed bonuses. However, the stacks decrease at 2%[+] per second, essentially requiring a new Shapeshift form every 2-3 seconds in order to maintain the maximum stacks.

Attack Speed Caps

• While all the exact mechanics are much more nuanced, there are two separate Attack Speed Bonus caps of +100% that apply to all builds for a total potential of +200%. For Druids, these two caps are distributed in the following way:

Cap 1

• Gear rolls
• Paragon nodes
• Elixirs
• Artillery Shrine
• Swooping Attacks

Cap 2

• Werewolf Attack Speed Affix
• Preserving Blood Howl
• Bestial Rampage
• Wildheart Hunger
• Accelerating

For a more detailed explanation, read up more on Attack Speed in our dedicated guide by Ava.

Stagger

Bosses are immune to Crowd Control (CC) effects and instead take Stagger Damage when hit by one. The amount of stagger damage dealt depends on the type of CC and is proportional to its duration. After being hit by a CC effect, the Boss will temporarily take less Stagger Damage from a CC of the same type.

Effectively, this means that when you're just spamming one type of CC you don't need to spam any more of it than what you need to keep a normal enemy permanently CC-d. To stagger the Boss quickly you need to use as many different types of CC as possible. After the Boss is staggered it gains a certain amount of stacking Stagger Damage Reduction for the rest of the fight:

• After 1st Stagger: 20%
• After 2nd Stagger: 40%
• After 3rd Stagger: 60%
• After 4th Stagger: 90%

Bosses naturally regain 1% of their Stagger HP every second and when that regen is combined with 90% Stagger Damage Reduction it becomes borderline impossible to Stagger the Boss again unless you bring a serious amount of crowd controls.

The ‍Tornado Druid is a fun and dynamic build that focuses on grouping monsters to make the most of Tornado's randomness. It is not the powerhouse it used to be, but it keeps its classic charm intact.

• Acquire Tempest Roar as early as possible to enable Werewolf Shapeshifting synergies.
• Utilize Kry to group up monsters as you damage them with Tornado.
• Shapeshift using Maul every few seconds in-between your Tornado casts to maintain your Fortify and Shapeshifting damage bonuses.

Written by Danger

Reviewed by  IBoilerUp