DIABLO 4 SEASON 9 - THE PULVERIZE MEASURING STICK
Hail Adventurers and welcome back to…THE MAZE!
I just wanted wanted to just drop in quickly here with a cool video from the “Druid Master” Zaior on Youtube. I haven’t had a ton of time to play this week but hope to this coming weekend. I’ve follows Zaior for a while on Youtube and he’s always got some insanely powerful Druid builds, and his Pulverize is no different. Below is a video of him playing a Tier 111 Pit, which for people who don’t play D4 is a VERY VERY VERY hard dungeon, like exponentially harder than the “endgame” difficulty level of Torment 4 (roughly on par with a Tier 55 Pit level I believe), so the fact he’s not killing everything in one shot does NOT indicate this build is not strong, his pulverize is one of the strongest I’ve seen hitting for HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of damage per OP shot, with permanent OP uptime with the new unique. This build is cracked and imo EASILY the best Druid build in the game right now, which is amazing seeing how Pulverize has been on life support since the early seasons of the game for all content other than leveling. This build showcased in the below video is my measuring stick for the build I want to get done before this seasons over, and I wanted to have some gameplay on the site for people to see what all the fuss is about, click the image below to check it out and enjoy!
Click me!!
UPDATE 7-14-2025
After some serious grinding this weekend, I have a very nice Pulv build online, got to T4 with FAR from optimized gear and an item level 750 Rotbringer AND Tibaults, FAR from the ideal multiple greater affix/ancestral copies of these. I eventually dropped the BiS Tibaults bc the non-ancestral just limited my armor compared to a normal leg slot with tempers. I’m INCREDIBLY tanky and every Pulv OP hits for like 700-800 Million damage, that’s with the “meh” gear I have now and an amulet that doesn’t even have Envenom ranks. This build is VERY good and has trivialized all of the game other than higher pits (I’m still doing 70s in 2-3 min which is the most efficient for farming anyway) and solo I can 3-4 tap any lair boss. This build will be min-maxed over time and I am also playing a “ZDPS” Support Druid to push my buddies higher that’s been a lot of fun. Basically my whole function with that is to do zero actual Damage, instead I’m de-buffing enemy damage, providing crit chance and healing to teammates and a TON of crowd control, so that my buddies can play less optimized builds but still push farther while trying to get the gear/affix rolls they need. All in all, and this build isn’t maxed and I did use Boilers build as inspiration but my build goes about it a bit different but provides a-lot of the same boons to teamplay:
Offense - Shattered Defenses is just so strong for teamplay, my Aspect isn’t maxed but is ~75% Damage buff to enemies affected. Basically spam this as much as possible, with double cast tempers, you can cover a whole room in 1-2 casts and chill for a bit and work on CC/Defense. This and Cataclysm is enough to make this strong offensively on its own, and will only get better with better Horadric spells, I just cant allow myself to run any more strongrooms.
Defense - Debilitating roar - Huge DR, tempers for duration make this insanely high value, just rush into the pack, cast this to keep your teammates from taking too much damage with a huge 40% nerf to enemy damage. Then hit Blood howl when they need heals and crit chance. Nighthowler’s aspect allows us to use this for teammates. 2 other key powers and aspects, Cyclone armor with Aspect of Cyclonic force allows us some CC by a mob pull with 20% of both phys. and non phys. damage resist which is massive for a lot of teammates. Combine that with Hurricane with the Savage node to get another 20% damage resist against enemies who get hit by it, easy to do when your diving into packs to spam debilitating roar to reduce their damage as well.
Utility - This kit has more utilities than I can count but the easy one is crowd control. Cyclone Armor and Cataclysm with Aridah’s ring allows you to reliably pack enemies CONSTANTLY. Compasses are hilarious with this build since I can just pull the whole room to the middle area constantly for teammates to be able to burst them down.
My runes are far from ideal, but currently running Decrepify & Vortex to weave into the other CC. The obvious gap here would be filled by ditching one of those, and grabbing War Cry for move speed and all, once I can find that I think that’s BiS as Boiler claims in the build below. All that being said, none of my party has anything completely optimized, my glyphs and board for this build is atrocious, level one glyphs we ran a 55 Pit run WELL before we were even ready for T4 and it was a breeze, only dropping one death when an Elite got CC immune and pushed one of them. More to come, but having fun!
