3/4/2 Lone Druid?

Every guide on Lone Druid has essentially the same skill build : max Summon Spirit Bear at level 7, and max synergy at level 9. At level 9 you end up with a 4/0/4/1 build.

I've always been very skeptical of that skill build and I was never really convinced that it's the most effective. So I've tried to experiment around.

Personally I think that skilling rabid early gives you a lot of what LD needs, because it gives movement speed and attack speed for both the druid and the bear.

Let's compare :

- 1 level in synergy gives 10 damage and 10 movement speed to the bear (nothing to the hero)

- 1 level in rabid gives 5% movement speed and 10 attack speed to both the bear and the hero

Let's take the bear's base movement speed of 330. The 5% movement speed from rabid gives 16.5 movement speed to the bear while synergy gives only 10 movement speed to the bear. And rabid gives about the same movement speed to the hero while synergy gives no movement speed for the hero. So rabid >> synergy for the movement speed, by far.

And for the DPS? I'm too lazy to do the math but for me 10 attack speed to both the bear and the hero is comparable if not better than 10 damage for the bear only.

When LD reaches level 5 and gets Entangling Claws, his ability to get kills rises from almost nothing to incredibly good. When you have your entangle you benefit a lot from additional movement speed for chasing. Which rabid gives you.

So here's my idea for an alternate skill build : go 3/0/2 at level 5 and from then on max rabid until you're 3/4/2.

I'm scrapping the 4th level of Summon Spirit Bear because it's only useful for pushing towers and it's useless in lane. 2 points in synergy because it gives decent attack damage to the bear at level 5, and then max rabid for the 20% movement speed that allows you to chase people down, as well as precious +40 attack speed for hero and bear = sick DPS. Rabid lasts for 30 seconds with 2 levels in synergy which is more than enough.

With that build, you "only" need level 9-10 to fully come online. Biggest problem of LD is that he's very level dependent but by cutting corners like this I think you can be useful way sooner especially if you can't get a solo lane.

What do you think?

Sounds like an interesting and strong build! Perhaps I'll try it some day.

Um... Synergy gives the hero health in True Form. Rabid has a duration and a cooldown, Synergy does not. Synergy increases the duration of Rabid, not the other way around.

With 2 levels in synergy, rabid has a 30 second duration (10 basse + 20 bonus), and a 30 second cooldown. So it can be active permanently.

You're not limited by mana either, LD has no mana problems. If by chance you have any kind of mana issues with that guy just make a Ring of Basilius, it's cheap and it build into Vlads.

Just spam rabid on cooldown and it's always active.

Cool idea. I too, always think that Rabid is super good.

To be honest, I'd get the 4th point in Summon Spirit Bear, just because Lone Druid is picked to push, not to fight.

4th point in Bear grants you Entangling Claws which is useful for fighting anyway.

The 3rd point gives Entangling Claws, the 4th point gives Demolish.

My bad. Demolish SO GOOD for pushing, though.

There's a reason why LD players go 4-0-4-1 build or 4-1-3-1 or 4-1-4-0, to get more damage out of Demolish and more survival. The survival of your bear is literally the majority of your damage and often takes a lot of damage before going back to base.

I'll be doing multiple experiments so let's say you're level 9 with no items and you're only using the bear to attack the tower until the bear dies...

3-4-2 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 961 hp before the bear dies

4-1-4 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 656 hp before bear dies

4-0-4-1 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 641 hp before the bear dies

Each of these results could be 1 attack more or less but either way, the 3-4-2 build leaves the bear way too squishy and deals a lot less damage to the towers, however let's do some more tests

4-4-1 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 824 hp before bear dies

3-2-4 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 898 hp before bear dies

4-1-3-1 build leaves the tower with 646 hp before the bear dies

After this point it's pretty clear your proposed build makes your bear squishier and therefor less damage. However let's change things up again to include the hero. The Lone Druid will now attack the tower along with the bear until both the character dies.

Each of these results could be about 2 attacks more or less...

3-4-2 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 443 hp before the bear and hero dies

4-1-4 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 247 hp before the bear and hero dies

4-4-1 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 486 hp before the bear and hero dies

4-0-4-1 build leaves the tier 1 tower with 23 before the bear and hero dies

4-1-3-1 build left the tower 1 tower with 44

The two True Form builds does considerably more damage and would've destroyed the tower if the Lone Druid and the bear didn't take creep damage.

So what does this result tell us about the builds? Your build sacrifice your heroes' and bears' survival to do less damage to towers but to gain more Entangle frequencies. The damage to a hero or unit will probably be somewhat close but then again you do a lot less damage to towers. In teamfights the bear will definitely die much easier and so will you since you don't have True Form. You lose more than what you would gained from the 3-4-2 build. The standard 4-0-4-1 or 4-1-3-1 offers both the bears more survival but also does about the same or less dps to a hero and more damage to towers. However it does lose out on Entangle frequencies. You gain reliable damage from Synergy and True Form but will probably lose out on some dps.

Most of the time a LD gets a kill on somebody is when an Entangle happens or when there's a gank happening so the Entangle really does not matter when you see the big picture. You never rely on chance to do something for you but it does help every so often.

edit: Even if you cannot get a solo lane, the majority of the time you're should be focused on farming up. You're not trying to kill heroes since.. you can't until your bear has entangle(If the opportunity comes then go for it). So the best way to play LD is 1. Survive 2. Farm as much as you can 3. push or teamfight then repeat numbers 2 and 3. If the enemy leaves the lane then that's more room for you to farm and the enemy tower will take considerable damage. Your build is for a VERY specific situation, like if the enemy hero always try to fight you 1v1 or ALWAYS out of position with a reaction time of 3 seconds. You're forgetting about the battle cry ability from True Form and the pseudo-random number distribution formula so you don't have to rely on having more attack speed to increase that chance to entangle.

A lot of people are thinking of a scenario where you're constantly hitting a target but for some reason he's still not getting entangled. The reason why players got more attack speed before was to make more chances for entangles. However, since the change to random number generators let entangle hit more reliably you no longer need more attack speed to make entangle more reliable. Hope you guys understand where I'm going with this...

edit2: Highlighting key notes with orange and grammar!