Werewolf is in dire need of a buff

I was beyond excited for the new shapeshifting skills and have gone full steam to make the werewolf character of my dreams. The reveal came and druid was very forcefully made a Hybrid spellcaster melee class. Theres no being one or the other you have to be both.

This being path of exile my brain got moving... so I made the best character I could with a WEREWOLF ONLY build.


The skills, combo, and synergy are great... in lower levels and low tier maps.

Now that I am pushing level 80, I find that I am struggling greatly to do any real damage.

The real issue is that the werewolf is too reliant on freeze for damage and half of its skills convert to ice elemental (on a fire specialized side of the tree) while the other half are physical.


To do real damage in werewolf form, you need to freeze enemies, if you cannot freeze you don't do much damage at all, talking like a third of a mid-geared smith of kitavas damage. You also need rage to fuel lunar blessing, the problem is that the duration is so short and it drains your rage. Both of which take up a great amount of investment to fix whether that is gear or points for a very small damage return.

After trying shapeshifting on druid I tried it on invoker monk. This class has much more synergy with WEREWOLF ONLY. However all the elemental damage is added extra elemental damage and again this is difficult to scale even on the side of the tree that specializes in cold / lightning damage. To make this work there needs to be some sort of damage conversion to elemental added to all of the werewolf skills.


All in all I am extremely disappointed. Werewolf is totally my dream fantasy character. The werewolf skills need a very large buff to make them viable. I would suggest buffing the attack damage % of all werewolf skills and making ALL werewolf skills have elemental conversion as well as a duration buff to lunar blessing.

Agreed that werewolf skills funnel you into a freeze only build.

I tried adding bleed, but than you are lacking in damage or survivability.

You don't need to focus on the cold damage part. Like you said, Werewolf is a mix between Physical and Cold. Scaling only the Cold part is a huge a missed opportunity. Attack damage increase, Melee damage increase, increase damage while Shapeshift, Max Rage, extra damage as Cold damage & Attack/Skill speed are all good damage boost that doesn't care about your initial damage type. And you have plenty of those inside the Druid part of the Passive Skill Tree.

lol, I havn't been clearing T15 so fast since being gemling legionare in 0.1.
Werewolf is like inifnite lunar + sprint then attack = screen explodes.
Bosses? I'm 89 with with weapon I've got at 65 lv (about 650dps) but i'm shredding them.
Of course there is a need for upgrades if I want to kill comfortably Xesht T1+ but overall wolf is great so far with limited eq I have.

it needs nerfs. A lot of them. You can basically life leech staying in poison and chaos dots not even doing any boss mechanics.

this helped me a lot. i got rid of the penetration stuff and elemental damage nodes and focused on melee, physical, attack, and area damage. greatly improved my build. thank you