The Druid is notoriously a bad leveler in Diablo 4, with its slow, and low damage profile early on in the game. However, the class starts rolling once you get to Scosglen, unlock your spirit forms, and get some very much-needed legendary aspects for some the class’ simpler builds. So, that’s the direction we are going to take you with several options for Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Builds for Season 1 you can try.

Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Builds for Season 1¶

Below we are going to list the archetypes of leveling builds that you can try and use, followed by a short synopsis of each build. You can click the blue links of the builds you like the idea of, then auto-scroll to those builds more detailed further down the page. Normally we give you a better idea of skill point usage per level, and what legendaries you want to fish up. Anyways, the builds you can expect are as follows:

1. Werewolf Leveling Build
2. Earth Druid Leveling Build
3. Tornado Druid Leveling Build

The Crit !Werewolf leveling build grants decent AOE and single target damage baked into your core skill, while the rest of your build aims to bolster your singe target damage via Rabies, Wolf companions for more burst damage, and other defensives to grant movement speed, crit, and defensiveness. It makes the build fairly well-rounded, but, it does have some damage issues early on. It’s also one of the fastest leveling builds thanks to the !Werewolf’s core skill granting dashes to targets.

The Earth build is perhaps one of the most bursty builds for the class, granting great CC, and defensiveness and awarding you with even more damage if you hit CC’d enemies. You also generate Terramotes using this build, which further empower your Landslide’s damage, allowing you to get even more damage opportunities out there, and that’s despite the nerfs to the skill from open beta to Server Slam. In a way, it is quite like a Barbarian build.

The other build we recommend is a nature build. This uses Storm Strike for melee chain damage, alongside Tornados to deal damage to packs and bosses. However, this is slightly harder to pull off, since you need to position mobs near corners and obstacles, to get the most out of your tornadoes pathing, since its movement is fairly RNG. But, it does solid damage, and you can pick up decent defensives and movement and feel fine all the way to 50.

Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Build: Werewolf Leveling Build¶

First on the Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Build is the werewolf leveling build. As mentioned, the main way to build this Druid leveling build is by taking as many !Werewolf themed skills as possible, leaving Caw out of the build in favor of Stormstrike instead. It generally offers better damage early, especially for AOE, while Claw gets better once you start investing in poison damage later on. With Shred as your Core Skill, you’ll be, dashing around, and ripping mobs and bosses fairly effectively. You also want Rabies, since that is a !Werewolf skill, and assists with your Elite and Boss killing speeds when you get it. You also want Blood Howl as a defensive skill, which also bolsters crit, and wolves for some added boss nuking and passive mob clearing speeds as well.

While leveling this build, you can get your hands on a surprising amount of legendaries really early on to get this build ramping. Nighthowler’s Aspect is one of them, as that grants critical strike for you, your party, and your companions, which is a great improvement to your build. You also want to get Stormclaw’s Aspect from Anica’s Claim, which requires taking down the Malnok Stronghold around level 20. You also want to get the Aspect of the Unsatiated, as that helps with Spirit Generation from your !Werewolf Skills. That’s three legendary aspects you get from Fractured Peaks, allowing you get the ball rolling on this build easily by level 20. You can also get Vigorous Aspect, but that comes much later on as it’s part of the Hawezar area, which you access in Act 5. Shepherd’s Aspect is also a welcome addition, since it buffs your Core Skill damage based on the number of active Companions. If you happen to get lucky while leveling and find the Alpha Aspect on an item, take that, as that allows your Wolves to spread Rabies.

As for the Spirit Buffs, you want

• Deer: Wariness - Reduces damage taken by 10% from Elites
• Eagle: 5% Crit Strike Chance
• Snake: Masochistic - Shapeshifting Skills heal you for 3% maximum life.
• Wolf: Packleader - Lucky Hit have a chance to reset companion skills.
• 5th: Eagle’s Avian Wrath - Grants 30% Crit strike damage.

With that done, here is the general leveling skill order you want to use. Feel free to swap things round if you desire it, for example, you may want to pick up defenses earlier, rather have your crit amps ready for your Capstone unlock.

1. Storm Strike (SS)
2. Enhanced Storm Strike
3. Shred
4. Fierce Storm Strike
5. Enhanced Shred
6. Primal Shred
7. Blood Howl
8. Enhanced Blood Howl
9. Innate Blood Howl
10. Shred x2
11. Wolves
12. Enhanced Wolf Pack
13. Poison Creeper
14. Enhanced Poison Creeper
15. Ferocious Poison Creeper - If you want more AOE, you can go Brutal, but Ferocious is better for boss encounters.
16. Rabies
17. Enhanced Rabies
18. Natural Rabies
19. Call of the Wild x3
20. Predatory Instincts x3
21. Digitigrade Gait x3
22. Shred x2
23. Neurotoxin
24. Toxic Claws x2
25. Capstone - Lupine Ferocity
26. Brutal Wolf Pack - this talent becomes more efficient here now you have a better crit chance from your passives, capstone, and legendary effects. Now it’s time to upgrade that final wolf skill node.
27. Toxic Claws x1
28. Envenom X3
29. Quickshift
30. Heightened Senses x3
31. Heart of the Wild x1
32. Wild Impulses x3
33. Abundance x3 - This grants around 2 extra Spirit a hit, which tallies for the 2 spirit increase in your Shred’s Spirit cost.

Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Build: Earth Druid Leveling Build¶

This is probably the second best druid leveling build to use, but, it can become the best if you get the Trampleslide legendary for greatly improving mapping speeds. The Earth Druid leveling build in D4 is a tanky playstyle, offering high burst, lots of CC, and defensiveness. The general idea is you want to clump enemies up, to empower your Landslide, immobilize enemies, burst with your Terramote Landslide, and then use Earth Spike to cleave CC’d enemies. You also get damage boost to cc’d enemies with Wolves, and your Trample movement skill can also be good at clumping enemies into obstacles for more damage, cc and of course, more opportunities for effective Landslide and Earth Spike Cleaves. It’s a fairly simple and effective build, but, you may need to get used to trample and mob kiting to be as effective as possible.

While leveling, don’t expect too many legendaries to be useful to you, as most are random class drops, and not sourced from the Codex of Power. Crashstone Aspect, which adds to your damage profile for stunning enemies, which you’ll find is easy to do with this build. Aspect of Mending Stone also increases your defensiveness when you kill enemies with Earth Skills, further increasing your defensiveness. These are the only legendary aspects you can get from dungeons, with the other more important Landslide improvements being random drops, so you likely won’t see them until later on around the level 40+ mark when legendaries are more common.

As for your Spirit Buffs, you want:

• Stag: Wariness - 10% reduced damage from Elites
• Eagle: Cythe Talons - 5% Crit Chance
• Snake: Obsidian Slam - Every 10th Earth skill Overpowers.
• Wolf: Bolster - Fortify for 10% of your Max Life when you use a Defensive.
• Fifth: Avian Wrath - 30% Crit Damage increase - Helps when you crit especially when you Overpower Crit. Nutty damage from your Fortify scaling and general critting.

Skill Point Order

1. Earth Spike
2. Enhanced Earth Spike
3. Landslide
4. Wild Earth Spike
5. Enhanced Landslide
6. Primal Landslide
7. Earthen Bulwark
8. Enhanced Earthen Bulwark
9. Innate Earthen Bulwark
10. Landslide x2
11. Wolves
12. Enhanced Wolves
13. Landslide x2
14. Nature’s Reach
15. Trample
16. Enhanced Trample
17. Savage Trample
18. Crushing Earth x3
19. Ferocious Wolf Pack
20. Petrify
21. Prime Petrify
22. Supreme Petrify
23. Defiance x3
24. Circle of Life
25. Resonance x3
26. Capstone - Earthen Might
27. Safeguard x3
28. Quickshift
29. Natural Fortitude x3
30. Defensive Posture x3
31. Nature’s Resolve x3
32. Stone Guard x3

Based on these skill talent nodes, you’re early game is looking to generate a solid leveling build speed, increasing your damage, movement and survivability. Once you get your capstone, you’re starting to look for ways to shift the build into Fortify methods, which will further empower your Overpower damage, and it wall also give you damage increases to Earth skills, making you more tanky, and do more damage. Also, you can respec your Innate EB into Preserving EB once you start looking for more Fortify, as that is a very large source of Fortify from that skill point.

Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Build: Tornado Leveling Build¶

Finally, the Nature-focused leveling build focuses on lightning spells to get the Druid rolling. This uses a mixture of cleave methods to increase your damage against packs and single target. However, it does require learning to position bosses to make your Tornados more reliable, at least until you get the lock on Tornados legendary towards the end game. Your build also grants quite a lot of Vuln, slows and immobilizes, which makes this build pretty easy to get CC off, which is decent for damage multipliers, and survivability, as well as getting bonus damage off certain passive trees later on.

While leveling, there are not any particular good aspect of power you can grab for your core skills. Instead, you want to get things like Aspect of the Umbral, which grants spirit when you get to hit CC’d enemies, which you will do fairly often. You also want Rapid Aspect for bonus attack speed for your close-range lightning attacks, fishing for Vuln and immobilization procs. Shepherd’s Aspect is also decent, providing a small passive buff for having your two wolf companions. Storm Swell Aspect is also an okay legendary, as it increases your damage to Vuln enemies while you have a Barrier, aka, Earthen Bulwark.

As for your Spirit Buffs, you want to use the following:

• Stag: Wariness - 10% reduced damage from Elites - maintains that Barrier of yours and your health pool during big fights.
• Eagle: Swooping Attacks -10% Attack Speed
• Snake: Calm Before the Storm - Lucky hit has a 15% chance to reduce your Ult CD by two seconds.
• Wolf: Calamity - Extends Ult durations by 25% -works with your Endless Tempest you get later on in the build to make Cataclysm last around 14 seconds, rather than 10.
• Fifth: Either Avian Wrath or Overload, depending on your crit chance modifier at this point.

Skill Tree Order:

1. Storm Strike
2. Enhanced Storm Strike
3. Tornado
4. Enhanced Tornado
5. Fierce Storm Strike
6. Primal Tornado
7. Earthen Bulwark
8. Enhanced Earhten Bulwark
9. Preserving Earthen Bulwark
10. Tornado x2
11. Wolves
12. Enhanced Wolves
13. Tornado x2
14. Predatory Instinct
15. Hurricane
16. Enhanced Hurricane
17. Savage Hurricane
18. Elemental Exposure
19. Charged Atmosphere
20. Bad Omen x2
21. Cataclysm
22. Prime Cata
23. Supreme Cata
24. Bad Omen
25. Electric Shock x3
26. Charged Atmosphere x2
27. Predatory Instinct
28. Capstone - Perfect Storm - You have decent Vuln application Via Storm Strike, and Cata also applies Vuln easily,
29. Charged Atmosphere
30. Endless Tempest x3 - Adds about 1 full second to Hurricane and Cata when you have the 15% duration bonus.
31. Predatory Instinct
32. Defiance x3
33. Natural Disaster x3
34. Resonance x3 - 6% damage boost most of the time, but, when you deal damage with a lightning skill after casting Earthen bulwark, you deal more damage, which is nice.
35. Circle of Life
36. Storm Strike to cap.

The good news is if you like this build, it can become a very solid end game build, when you get the storm wolf themed uniques, and get some Grizzly Rage modifying legendary effects. Meaning, you can run this build from level 50 onwars, and set up to make it even stronger as you get closer and closer to level cap with a few lucky drops. You can dcatch more on that with our dedicated Diablo 4 Tornado Druid Build.

This concludes the Diablo 4 Druid Leveling Builds you can run in Season 1. Hopefully, here’s a Druid build here that suits your tastes. No matter which build you go, we recommend playing on world tier 1, thanks to the incredibly low early-game damage, no matter which build you go. Once you get to the end game and can grab legendaries easily, the Druid can easily make the Switch to world tier 2, and start looking at end-game druid builds.

Looking for more leveling builds? Check out other class’ leveling builds below:

• Diablo 4 Barbarian leveling build
• Diablo 4 Necromancer leveling build
• Diablo 4 Rogue leveling build
• Diablo 4 Sorcerer leveling build