Blight Wolf melee comparison and bugs

[SpartanKiller13]

Ok, so I recently ran a 11/8/1 Barb/Druid/FvS melee Winter Wolf and had a lot of fun, so I decided to try it with a Blight Wolf (11/8/1 Blight/Barb/FvS) to see how it does.

First off, Blight Wolf isn't using Natural Fighting. This is a big problem.

Per Torc in Preview 1 (link):



But as you can see from the following image I'm getting 12 Doublestrike, Melee Power, and PRR in Plague Wolf that I don't get in Blight Wolf:



Also even with Extra Wild Empathy (T1 Nature's Warrior) you don't get any uses of Wild Empathy = you can't use Flight. This is really awkward because you can't even pick the alternate "blightcaster" options (Dead Nerves T1 and Play Dead in T2) without having a point in Blightcaster, so you're forced into a dead enhancement if you want T3 Fight. Pretty sure this is a bug, or at least non-WAI?

Otherwise here are my thoughts from leveling 15-32, as a comparison between Blight Wolf and Winter Wolf. By no means comprehensive and obviously flavored by me running a T5 FB build not a pure Blightcaster Wolf build.

Pros:

• +10% Profane HP is pretty nice!
• Blighted Bite gives +3 Imbue Dice with any imbue, pretty nice.
• Acid/Poison Bite imbues are pretty nice early on where it's easier to scale spellpower.
• Blightcaster temp HP on-kill is really strong for leveling, although pretty useless in epics (since I'm moderate Wis and frontline it isn't a large shield and doesn't last long).
• Being a plant is pretty neat, +100 Fort and Immunity to Stun(tm) also you get Plant Growth instead of Animal Growth which is funny.
• Jaws of Doom is a +10[w] attack compared to Jaws of Winter which is only +6[w].
• Disease and Poison Immunity mean you don't have to carry those pots?

Cons:

• Winter Wolf gives 10+Druid level% MS (vs flat 15% of Blight Wolf). Since you're minimum 11 levels in that's at least -6%.
• Winter Wolf gives 20% Attack Speed (vs 10% of Blight Wolf) and +2d6 Sneak Attack (eh whatever). Losing the Attack Speed hurts, and even in a build with T5 Nature's Warrior you only get 25% vs 30% of Winter Wolf.
• No access to Flight from Nature's Warrior is really lame, that's a nice defensive clicky to lose for basically no reason.
• Requiring 11 Blightcaster (vs 8 Druid) limits multiclassing options a bit.
• No option for Bear form makes leveling a lot worse as you lack AoE options. WWA helps a lot, but it's not in the same league.
• Jaws of Doom is a Necromancy spell for the instakill part, I'm not sure how this could be more useless. A DC build might swap into Wolf to use this, but there's no way I could think of to get reasonable Necromancy DC's to kill normal mobs and the usual low-save suspects of Undead/Constructs are explicitly immune.
• Jaws of Winter has a 20s CD (vs 30s of Jaws of Doom) and the DC scales with Stun, something that's a lot more reasonable to gear as a melee. Also hurts T5 Nature's Warrior builds using it to power Jaws of the Wolf.
• Blight Wolf is a plant so you can't use Magic Fang
• Snowslide is a strict upgrade to Blighted Charge; it feels smoother, gives a sprint boost, and Freezes based on Stun DC's instead of helpless based on a Necro DC (again maybe ok for a DC caster but not ok for a melee wolf).
• Not getting immediate heals like Cure Wounds feels bad for party play.

Overall:
As far as I can tell Winter Wolf is better in ~every way possibly aside from off-tanking (10% HP and +100% Fort are nice). Don't play a Blight Wolf. Maybe try swapping through Blight form for Jaws of Doom & Blighted Charge on a Necro Blightcaster? I'm going to go raiding for a while and will report back, but I'm not impressed and would recommend against it

[Firebreed]

Great thread, I hope they address the bugs you point out at least.

[SpartanKiller13]

Great thread, I hope they address the bugs you point out at least.

Or nobody can mention anything XD

[elvesunited]

Ok, so I recently ran a 11/8/1 Barb/Druid/FvS melee Winter Wolf and had a lot of fun, so I decided to try it with a Blight Wolf (11/8/1 Blight/Barb/FvS) to see how it does.

.....

Overall:
As far as I can tell Winter Wolf is better in ~every way possibly aside from off-tanking (10% HP and +100% Fort are nice). Don't play a Blight Wolf. Maybe try swapping through Blight form for Jaws of Doom & Blighted Charge on a Necro Blightcaster? I'm going to go raiding for a while and will report back, but I'm not impressed and would recommend against it

I thought about it with my tactics wolf but then quickly realized that it wasn't viable.

The blight wolf is a DC necro/poison spell caster that uses melee as backup. Much better at casting Druid DC spells, but significantly weaker melee.
The standard wolf is a melee that uses tactics DCs as crowd control but probably couldn't land a spellcasting DC to save its life.

Despite both being wolves these characters are not the same animal. I would be better served turning my DC spellcaster into a blight wolf than my tactics wolf. It's not that blight wolf is bad ( though it has a lot of bugs ) It's a different playstyle.

[Kebtid]

Sadly it is in the name of the archeotype how they want it played.

Blight... caster

[droid327]

The blight wolf is a DC necro/poison spell caster that uses melee as backup.

Then the subclass is even more broken because that's fundamentally impossible to play at a high level, DC casting requires pretty much all your opportunity cost to stay competitive - and when not fully supported, quickly becomes completely ineffective, it's a very binary playstyle. That leaves very little available to keep your melee attacks at a minimally useful level. Especially so for wis classes, since falconry is the most expensive alt combat stat tree.

If that was their intention though they'd at least put wis to hit in the tree somewhere like with EK

[elvesunited]

Then the subclass is even more broken because that's fundamentally impossible to play at a high level, DC casting requires pretty much all your opportunity cost to stay competitive - and when not fully supported, quickly becomes completely ineffective, it's a very binary playstyle. That leaves very little available to keep your melee attacks at a minimally useful level. Especially so for wis classes, since falconry is the most expensive alt combat stat tree.

If that was their intention though they'd at least put wis to hit in the tree somewhere like with EK

I did say "significantly weaker melee".
But yes in order to get your necro DC high enough to get proper use out of the blight wolf spells you'd need to prioritize gear and feats to DC first.
then whatever you have left ( which won't be that much ) can go to chomp down on the DC rendered helpless enemies.

By running as a caster first and melee a distant second you could potentially make a DC caster wolf that could handle low reaper.
Though this unfortunate soul tried to run it as a 11 Druid 8 Barbarian 1 Favored multi-class and that was never going to work well.

[misterski]

I did say "significantly weaker melee".
But yes in order to get your necro DC high enough to get proper use out of the blight wolf spells you'd need to prioritize gear and feats to DC first.
then whatever you have left ( which won't be that much ) can go to chomp down on the DC rendered helpless enemies.

By running as a caster first and melee a distant second you could potentially make a DC caster wolf that could handle low reaper.
Though this unfortunate soul tried to run it as a 11 Druid 8 Barbarian 1 Favored multi-class and that was never going to work well.

I think the point is that you may as well go full blown DC caster at that point and forget about wolf melee completely if the melee is going to be significantly weaker.

[droid327]

I think the point is that you may as well go full blown DC caster at that point and forget about wolf melee completely if the melee is going to be significantly weaker.

Yeah, when "significantly" weaker means trying to run STR based melee on a STR dumped character with no combat style feats, wielding a caster weapon, etc...you'll be doing like 5 damage per hit and grazing on 15 lol. The to-hit is especially important since your special necro cc attacks can miss, too, which defeats the whole purpose

You need to have enough investment where your melee attack is better than just rotating your SLAs, and that's going to take more than just your opportunity cost table scraps

[K_9]

While we are on the topic of wolves.

I came back recently from an extended break and saw the removal of EDF that got incorporated into many T5 enhancements.

I see though a through lack for comptency hps in the Nature's warrior or blightcaster tree. Does this mean that wolves are inheriently worse of or bad now in high end content due to lacking hps? Are pure wolves no longer a thing?

[SpartanKiller13]

I thought about it with my tactics wolf but then quickly realized that it wasn't viable.

The blight wolf is a DC necro/poison spell caster that uses melee as backup. Much better at casting Druid DC spells, but significantly weaker melee.
The standard wolf is a melee that uses tactics DCs as crowd control but probably couldn't land a spellcasting DC to save its life.

Despite both being wolves these characters are not the same animal. I would be better served turning my DC spellcaster into a blight wolf than my tactics wolf. It's not that blight wolf is bad ( though it has a lot of bugs ) It's a different playstyle.

It just is bad though lol. Longer CD's for animal form wild shape = it's not viable as a caster build either. Just stick with Thorn form earlygame > Hive Keeper middle-late and call it a day, no? Maybe swap into Blight for Jaws of Doom every 30s, but like that's pretty uninspiring IMO.

First time you accidentally throw Wail in Blight/Plague and see the CD it's the end of that idea lol.

Then the subclass is even more broken because that's fundamentally impossible to play at a high level, DC casting requires pretty much all your opportunity cost to stay competitive - and when not fully supported, quickly becomes completely ineffective, it's a very binary playstyle. That leaves very little available to keep your melee attacks at a minimally useful level. Especially so for wis classes, since falconry is the most expensive alt combat stat tree.

If that was their intention though they'd at least put wis to hit in the tree somewhere like with EK

You definitely can't have separate melee and caster stats and have both be good lol. Especially with instakills that enemies have bonus saves for. I've had some luck with GCS + melee endgame, but that was one-stat wonder and I had to sac a lot of weird stuff like having Otto's filigree on my melee stick.

Yeah, that's why I went Str and Wis secondary w/FvS to get a trance. But that's not an option for an off-caster or off-melee for sure...

I did say "significantly weaker melee".
But yes in order to get your necro DC high enough to get proper use out of the blight wolf spells you'd need to prioritize gear and feats to DC first.
then whatever you have left ( which won't be that much ) can go to chomp down on the DC rendered helpless enemies.

By running as a caster first and melee a distant second you could potentially make a DC caster wolf that could handle low reaper.
Though this unfortunate soul tried to run it as a 11 Druid 8 Barbarian 1 Favored multi-class and that was never going to work well.

At the point where you're better off just throwing a Spike Growth or another Splinterbolt it's not really worth considering the melee though no?

I ran a Blightcaster as a DPS caster last life; had a surprising amount of luck with Necro DC casting as well. I wanted to try Blightcaster as a melee for testing/curiosity reasons since I've had a lot of fun as a Winter wolf melee lol.

I think the point is that you may as well go full blown DC caster at that point and forget about wolf melee completely if the melee is going to be significantly weaker.

Yep. Even blast-casting as a secondary on a DC-maxed Blightcaster will have more DPS than wolf swap melee (I'm assuming you're using this for bosses etc).

Yeah, when "significantly" weaker means trying to run STR based melee on a STR dumped character with no combat style feats, wielding a caster weapon, etc...you'll be doing like 5 damage per hit and grazing on 15 lol. The to-hit is especially important since your special necro cc attacks can miss, too, which defeats the whole purpose

You need to have enough investment where your melee attack is better than just rotating your SLAs, and that's going to take more than just your opportunity cost table scraps

Even worse if you take Natural Fighting and it doesn't work lmao. And yeah, missing Jaws of Doom after you swapped forms twice for your 30s touch-ranged instakill is super cringe...

[SpartanKiller13]

While we are on the topic of wolves.

I came back recently from an extended break and saw the removal of EDF that got incorporated into many T5 enhancements.

I see though a through lack for comptency hps in the Nature's warrior or blightcaster tree. Does this mean that wolves are inherently worse of or bad now in high end content due to lacking hps? Are pure wolves no longer a thing?

Perfect Natural Fighting gives +20% Competence HP to wolves (as well as +2d6 SA).

It was there before the EDF pass and they didn't move it and buff PNF, much to my dismay lol. Definitely awkward for MC wolves like mine getting +25% from FB, trying to decide how valuable PNF is XD

So you're worse off 12-21, but if you're running pure Druid you can (and IMO should) just run Bear form for leveling so you can grab Competence HP from NP. If doing a SDK chain wolf you probs kill stuff fast enough to not worry about it 15-21 either lol.

Blightcaster Wolf is just terrible IMO, at least as far as I can see. I wouldn't run a pure Blightcaster melee build.

[K_9]

Perfect Natural Fighting gives +20% Competence HP to wolves (as well as +2d6 SA).

It was there before the EDF pass and they didn't move it and buff PNF, much to my dismay lol. Definitely awkward for MC wolves like mine getting +25% from FB, trying to decide how valuable PNF is XD

So you're worse off 12-21, but if you're running pure Druid you can (and IMO should) just run Bear form for leveling so you can grab Competence HP from NP. If doing a SDK chain wolf you probs kill stuff fast enough to not worry about it 15-21 either lol.

Blightcaster Wolf is just terrible IMO, at least as far as I can see. I wouldn't run a pure Blightcaster melee build.

Thanks I was struggling to see where it was and didn't think of looking at PNF on the wiki lol