I've finally found my tempest roar and respec'd into lightning storm yesterday. I've initially gone with earthen might for context, but I'm debating which key passive is best and I've seen a variety of choices throughout build guides. Looking to put together some sort of consensus around which key passive is best in which situations, and why.

Earthen Might
+ 5 seconds of critical strikes is a noticeable increase in dps when it procs
+ Spirit restore is a nice added bonus as well and along with dire wolf and some paragon points, spirit sustain is no problem
- Pretty heavily reliant on lucky hit chance to proc. Given Lightning Storm is an AOE skill it handles this better than most (despite only 15% inherent lucky hit), but lucky hit still does not scale very well. Are we perhaps missing out on extra dps by having to spec for lucky hit on gear or is this worth the sacrifice?
- Requires a legendary aspect spot to make this viable
- I've also heard the barber heart is not very effective with lucky hit mechanics (not sure how this all works), meaning perhaps we need to shift away from lucky hit focus if we're going to use barber?

Lupine Ferocity
+ Every 6th hit critical striking for extra damage is nice
- Lack of spirit sustain from key passive means we are almost forced to wear an umbral ring to compensate (not the worst thing, but still a consideration)

Perfect Storm (Have yet to test this out myself, but I've seen it in some builds and it appears to synergize quite well)
+ Spirit sustain built into passive should help alleviate some of the issues, but I assume this is probably not quite as good as Earthen Might's spirit regen
+ Increased lightning damage on enemies that are vulnerable, which we can guarantee with exploit glyph, should be a consistent increase in damage
- Damage potential at high end is probably lower than Earthen Might when it successfully procs

Depends on the rest of your build honestly.

After 1.1.1 I seems to proc Earthen Might way more often when using The Barber.
So I went back to using that from Perfect Storm.

Using the heart with 85% extra crit damage and 100% crit chance from Earthen Might is quite crazy.

even in wolf form, you can use Ursine Strength for the 30% dmg while healthy.
good damage boost, but should only be used if spirit generation isnt an issue imo.

I’m definitely curious to try this once I finally hit a TR. I know the latest patch fixed most barber on-hit, on crit, on-damage interactions. I saw some folks say that barber was still affecting earthen might but sounds like you’re having succes though. Did you try EM with barber prior to the latest patch a few days ago outta curiosity?

I know even before the patch the barber actually seemed to synergize really well with the pack leader boon specifically and was causing my poison creeper to reset way more with it since the barber explosion seemed to give me yet another opportunity for the on-crit lucky hit to proc.

It's pretty noticeable after the patch that earthen might is proccing decently often.

Still not sure how to quantify if this is superior to perfect storm though. Perfect storm has a higher average damage I believe, but when earthen might procs there's no competing with it.

Hmm interesting. Ty!

Yeah prior I saw it proc maybe 5-10% of the time in fights.
Now it's at least 50%+.
Going from 44.5% to 100% crit chance is quite insane, as in peak fights I reach 700%+ crit damage.

This post was edited by Roneye on Aug 11 2023 02:18pm

So did 15 minutes of Tier 70+ testing

the 50%+ in fights is even low set. It just almost never show up in the bar because the crazy amount of buffs.
And with the crazy amount of crit damage % it's a no brainer for me.





This post was edited by Roneye on Aug 11 2023 03:21pm

Holy buckets Batman. That’s a lotta crit stacked with werebeast!

Ty for the info!