Aldur rabies wolf

Well, I was inspired by this old thread to play a druid wearing Aldur's set. Instead of a summoner however I went for a rabies/fury build, to try something different and because I prefer to play melee characters (also the werewolf looks better with the aura than the werebear :P).

Despite the fact that Aldur's is considered crap and that I heard from a few people that it isn't viable for melee builds, I thought it quite functional in hell. Surely, it can get difficult at times, but I was able to solo all my way through the game using the set combined with other equipment I already had stashed on mules (i.e. nothing very fancy).

Well, I'm sharing my experience here in this thread and some comics I have made myself, note that this is not a guide and that there's nothing new at all in here - and it probably won't interest most people, who seem to have a strong opinion on aldur's already...

Intro

[comics attached] couldn't find a way to add an image to the text :/

Equipment

Helm: Aldur'd Gaze (socketed with 2x 3/4 poison rainbow facet);

Armor: Aldur's Deception (socketed with 3/4 poison rainbow facet);

Weapon: Aldur's Rhythm (socketed with 3 shaels for 5 frames attack speed);

Shield: Stormshield (socketed with PDiamond);

Gloves: Trang-Oul's Claws;

Belt: Nosfetu's Coil;

Boots: Aldur's Advance;

Amulet: rare with +1 druid skills, +15 stg, cold and poison res and some other mods;

Rings: 1) low Raven Frost and 2) rare with +10 dex, +35% lightning res and 7% other res, 6% life leech, +64 ar and other mods;

Charms: low anni, low dtoch, a summoning and a shapeshifting gc plus a few res, fhr and ar scs and lcs (I have all res at 75 except poison).

As I said, I used equipment I already had, so I didn't spend a nickel on this char. The poison facets were given to me by a friend and the anni I got from another char that I wasn't playing anymore...

Skills

For skills and attributes I followed what I believe would be the generic rabies wolf build:

max Rabies, Poison Creeper, Lycanthropy and Fury (for a total of 29-30 with charms on);

5 points on Werewolf;

1 point on Grizzly;

1 point on Oak Sage;

a few points on prereqs.



now I'm working on maxing Oak Sage since it doesn't stay alive much with only a single point (I'm hoping more points will help, the ai is pretty dumb, it always run to where the monster are and gets killed before I can save it)

Merc, strategy and other observations...

As it's well known, damage is quite low if you're using aldur's mace, at level 82 I'm doing 1332-1840 dmg with fury. Even with quite fast attack speed it takes sometime to kill certain monsters, especially if they are immune to poison.

Poison damage is currently 16-17k, which is not bad. I'm considering getting another ss gc as it increses rabies dmg considerably at this point (and they are very cheap I believe).

The mercenary plays a quite important role by slowing down the monster. I'm using Act 2 nightmare defensive merc with holy freeze aura (which is the obvious choice for the build) equiped with stone eth dusk, tal mask and a non-eth reaper's toll. As far as I can tell the holy freeze aura stacks with the decrepify from reaper's toll reducing almost all monsters on the screen to a pachydermic pace, then I just infect them with rabies and let the poison take its toll while I hurt them some more with fury...

That works pretty well, poison immunes can be a problem, but usually I can take them down without struggling too much with fury and decrepify from merc. I had a hard time doing chaos sanctuary the first time at a lower level and the last wave of baal's minions always give me a hard time, I usually have to bring a good stock of full-rej potions to survive them.

Soloing Act 5 hell was much easier then I thought it would be, after chaos I didn't have much trouble finding my way to the Worldstone Chamber. Even the Ancients weren't a serious threat. Gloams and Black Souls are always a pain when you meet too many of them at once, but this is not an exclusive problem of an aldur's char I guess...

Findings

Lo on Outer Steppes- Act4 hell, Um from Hellforge hell

Conclusion

Aldur's Watchtower set is certainly not the best option for the build, it kills slowly and you have to rely on the rabies poison damage to kill way more than if you were using a grief pb and fortitude for instance. But it's still possible to solo hell using it. Also the werewolf looks great with the aura and the challenge the set poses makes it a lot more fun than going with expensive high end equipment (at least for me). Oh, and it's really cheap.

I know this thread is probably quite uninteresting, but I hope the two pages comics I've made makes up for it, at least in part |||aldurs with 3 shaels are 5 fpa fury, 6 fpa rabies, not 4 fpa...|||Quote:








aldurs with 3 shaels are 5 fpa fury, 6 fpa rabies, not 4 fpa...




oh, you're right, my mistake... ty for the correction|||Quote:








oh, you're right, my mistake... ty for the correction




Yup its impossible to get 4 fpa with aldurs weapon.|||yeah, I made confusion between my wolf druid and my wolf barb... barb hits 4 fpa with shael'd gris caduceus... already edited the original post...