Diablo 4 Season Build Guide: Companion Raven Druid for High-Tier Content
Why the Companion Raven Druid?
The Companion Raven Druid is designed around summoning and maximizing companion damage, with the ravens acting as your primary source of DPS. Unlike other druid builds that rely on shapeshifting or direct spellcasting, this build leverages stacking companions and passive bonuses, allowing you to constantly output high damage while controlling enemies. The combination of ravens, spirit wolves, and poison effects creates a sustainable and versatile playstyle, capable of both clearing mobs quickly and handling tougher bosses.
One of the reasons this build excels in high-tier content is its ability to deal with enemies that stay alive for a longer duration, as the passive companion mechanics scale over time. Additionally, the build's synergy with shapeshifting forms and cooldown-reducing abilities ensures that ravens are almost always active, maximizing your damage output.
Core Gear and Mythics
The build relies on two mythics and two uniques to reach its full potential:
Air Predition (Mythic): This weapon provides a massive 60% multiplicative damage increase. While its core skill isn't essential in this build, the stat rolls-including critical chance, lucky chance, and movement speed-are incredibly strong and enhance overall performance.
Shroud of False Death (Chest): This armor boosts all passives and increases stats across the board, synergizing well with rare nodes and paragon boards.
Kilt of the Blackwing (Unique): Essential for the build, this item massively increases raven damage. Using a companion skill or shapeshifting summons ravens that attack nearby enemies, with a chance to summon additional ravens, ensuring you always have a full flock in combat.
Flicker Step (Unique): Evading through enemies reduces ultimate cooldown by up to 10 seconds, allowing for rapid reuse of companion abilities and ultimates.
The combination of these items ensures a steady flow of companions, enabling high damage output and consistent battlefield control.
Skill Allocation
The Companion Raven Druid build utilizes a mix of core abilities, shapeshifting skills, and passive enhancements to optimize damage and survivability. Key skills include:
Claw (1 point): Used primarily to stack passives and trigger companion effects.
Cyclone Armor (1 point): Provides non-physical damage reduction; the passive effect remains active on the bar.
Debilitating Roar (1 point): Reduces enemy damage in an area. Upgrades increase damage output.
Raven (5 points): The main damaging skill. Upgrades increase the number of ravens and their overall damage.
Trample (1 point): Provides movement and grants unstoppable status when Grizzly Rage is inactive.
Grizzly Rage (5 points): Massive damage buff with fortify and unstoppable effects. Upgrades enhance survivability and damage over time.
The skill tree is further supported by passives, which enhance companion damage, survivability, and utility:
Predatory Instinct (1 point): Boosts offensive capabilities.
Iron Fur (3 points): Increases damage reduction while in Werebear form.
Backlash (3 points): Increases damage after using defensive skills.
Treasure Fortitude (3 points): Enhances non-physical resistances.
Vigilance (3 points): Provides 20% damage reduction after using defensive abilities.
Nature Reach (3 points): Increased damage to distant and CC'd enemies.
Pharaoh Aptitude (3 points): Boosts damage while healthy or moving quickly.
Call of the Wild (3 points): Companion skills deal significantly more damage.
Amending (3 points): Max life increase for survivability.
Neurotoxin, Toxic Claws, End Venom: Focus on poison damage and critical strike synergy.
Defiance, Natural Disaster, Resonance, Catastrophe: Enhance damage for nature and storm skills, especially against CC'd and elite enemies.
Quick Shift, Heightened Senses, Nature: Maximize form duration, movement speed, and companion skill damage.Paragon Boards
The paragon boards amplify the build's companion-focused damage:
Starter Board (Head Hunter): Boosts normal node bonuses within range.
Untamed Board: Companion skill usage increases damage, stacking up to 80%.
Thunder Struck Board: Storm skills deal increased damage to both close and distant enemies, aligning perfectly with lightning-based raven attacks.
Earth and Sky Abundance: Buffs magic nodes and increases nature skill damage against CC'd or vulnerable targets.
Height and Malice: Critical strike damage bonus against poisoned enemies.
Survival Instincts: Increased damage in Werebear form, scaling with health differences against enemies.
These boards allow for massive scaling of companion skills, ensuring that your ravens, wolves, and other summons are always performing at peak damage.
Legendary Aspects and Runes
The build heavily relies on legendary aspects and rune sets to maximize companion uptime and damage:
Legendary Weapon Aspect: Casting a companion skill has an 80% chance to trigger an equipped companion skill and reduces cooldown, enabling near-constant raven activity.
Rune Sets (Nagu Sass): Maintaining at least one active companion for 5 seconds summons a spirit wolf, which attacks enemies for 8 seconds and applies CC and vulnerability. This stacks with other companions to amplify overall damage.
Offensive Runes: Casting multiple skills guarantees critical strikes and overpowers, further increasing damage output.
By stacking these aspects and rune sets, the Companion Raven Druid maintains a constant presence of offensive pets, synergizing perfectly with passives and glyphs to maximize damage.
Legendary Aspect Bonuses
Additional aspects increase damage in multiple ways:
Poison Damage While Shapeshifted: Converts direct damage to poison, providing additional scaling.
Critical Strikes During Grizzly Rage: 3% increased damage per stack, up to 120%.
Raven Damage Boost: Ravens now deal lightning damage, deal full damage in half the time, and stun enemies, providing crowd control while maximizing DPS.
These aspects allow the build to control packs of enemies in the Pit or Tower, stunning and poisoning them while maintaining consistent DPS.
Mercenaries and Companion Synergy
To further enhance the build, mercenaries are used to supplement companion damage:
Subo: Provides tracking, movement speed bonuses, and critical strike synergy.
Variana (Bloodthirst): Boosts attack speed when using her skills, further enhancing overall damage.
Mercenaries work in tandem with your companion skills, resetting cooldowns, increasing critical strike chance, and adding extra layers of damage and control.
Divine Gifts and Gems
The Divine Gifts system enhances survivability and armor:
Essence of Lies: Fortify per second.
Essence of Screams: Increased resistances.
Essence of Sin: Increased armor.
Essence of Pain: Max barrier when injured, with a 20-second cooldown.
Gems and rune sets are carefully selected for increased willpower, resistances, and companion synergy, ensuring durability while maximizing damage potential.
Gameplay Strategy
Playing this build effectively revolves around constant companion uptime and shapeshifting:
1.Stack Passives: Begin with Grizzly Rage and activate abilities to stack damage-increasing passives.
2.Summon Companions: Ravens, wolves, and other companions should always be active, providing continuous DPS.
3.Use Abilities Strategically: Shapeshifting abilities not only trigger companions but also refresh cooldowns for critical skills.
4.Control the Battlefield: Use raven stuns, poison effects, and CC synergy to keep enemy mobs manageable.
5.Leverage Critical Strikes: High crit chance on gear ensures frequent overpowers and companion resets, maximizing damage output.
This build's strength lies in the synergy of companions, passives, and legendary aspects, allowing players to sustain high damage, control the battlefield, and tackle even the toughest high-tier content.
Conclusion
The Companion Raven Druid is a versatile and powerful build for Diablo 4's endgame content. Its reliance on companions, shapeshifting, and synergistic gear makes it incredibly effective in high-tier Pit runs, Tower encounters, and Tormant 4 challenges. While slightly weaker than previous seasons, this build remains one of the strongest for sustained damage and crowd control, offering a fun and engaging gameplay loop for both solo and group play.
By focusing on gear optimization, skill synergy, and companion management, players can achieve staggering damage outputs while keeping themselves safe in even the most dangerous encounters. Whether you're clearing large packs of enemies, make D4 materials or facing elite bosses, this build provides a balanced mix of offense, defense, and utility, making it a top-tier choice for Druids this season.