Path of Exile 2 Best Fire Bear Druid Leveling Build

The Druid in Path of Exile 2 mixes primal might with natural magic to create an absolute wrecking ball of class that’s both strong and fun to play. Players have several build paths to choose from as a Druid, and if you’re looking to make a flaming freight train on legs, then the Druid’s Bear form is for you.

Bear Druid is all about pulverizing, igniting, and detonating enemies. It’s not as agile as the Wolf and Wyvern forms, but once you get a good build going, you’ll be flying through maps and blowing monsters up all the same. Here’s an early Bear Druid build for Path of Exile 2 designed to breeze through the campaign as quickly and easily as possible.

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Path Of Exile 2: Best Level 2 Support Gems, Ranked

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PoE 2 Bear Druid Leveling Build

To start with the Druid’s Bear form in Path of Exile 2 is to commit to a fairly slow but tanky melee playstyle. In a lot of ways, it’s similar to how Slam Warrior feels in PoE 2 — both make heavy use of Slam skills, and both trade speed for toughness and raw power with high area of effect damage.

This setup, however, is intended to be a starter for a Rampage/Walking Calamity build, which means we’ll eventually pivot toward stacking a ton of Fire Damage.

Skill Gems

How to Play the Build

First, players need to understand that Druid Bear builds rely on Rage, which is a resource that’s generated by certain skills like Maul and Fury of the Mountain. Rage increases the damage you deal, and it interactis with skills like Furious Slam too.

Enraged Furious Slam deals more damage over a larger area, and by default, it consumes 10 Rage to become Enraged. Meanwhile, Maul generates 5 Rage by default, so your early game is going to be two casts of Maul followed by Furious Slam.

Later on, you can replace Furious Slam with Rampage since it hits more often. Use it together with Walking Cataclysm to bulldoze through maps.

What About Fury of the Mountain?

This skill is very similar to Volcanic Fissure skill under the Mace tree, except it can be channeled until you run out of Mana. Since we’ll be using Slam attacks, it’s a good idea to use Fury of the Mountain at least once when you’re elites, bosses, or anything that doesn’t get demolished by Furious Slam.

When you get this skill, your combo becomes Fury of the Mountain → Maul → Furious Slam.

Why Use Volcano?

Volcano doesn’t do much by itself, but when you repeatedly slam near it using Fury of the Mountain or Rampage, its damage adds up quickly. It also helps you Ignite enemies, making them vulnerable to certain passives and item effects while taking damage over time.

More importantly, Volcano is going to be our panic button, but more on this later in the Passives section.

Ferocious Roar and Infernal Cry

If you equip Infernal Cry as a Support Gem for Ferocious Roar, you’ll be able to use it without having to swap weapons. This does mean that Ferocious Roar will get replaced by Infernal Cry, but that’s fine, since we’ll be going with Fire damage anyway.

As mentioned earlier, Ferocious Roar makes your Bear Druid stand up, accelerating the next cast of Furious Slam, Rampage, and Walking Cataclysm. Use Ferocious Roar right before casting any of those skills to empower them and make them cast faster.

Passive Tree

There are a ton of ways to build a Fire Bear Shaman Druid in Path of Exile 2, so it’s hard to pick what exactly might be the best options. Instead, we’re going to explain why we built our Druid this way to help you make decisions of your own using the limited passive points you get early in the game.

First, we took Guardian of the Wilds along with the generic damage boosts early in the Druid path to help with DPS. Then, we beelined straight toward the Primal Rage and Intimidating Hate nodes to the left. This enables two things:

• The minor Primal Rage nodes let us cast Enraged Furious Slam with a single use of Maul buffed by the Rampage Support Gem. Primal Rage itself increases our max Rage, which translates to increased damage.
• Invigorating Hate turns Volcano into a healing skill. It consumes all your Rage to instantly heal you for 1% of your Max Life per Rage consumed. This becomes much stronger once we start generating Rage passively.

The next stop in the skill forest is the Projectile Bulwark wheel for added survivability. You can also take a detour and get Resilient Soul next to Guardian of the Wilds for health regeneration and damage.

After that, make your way to Molten Being for more Fire damage, then path straight to the Bear constellation above for Molten Claw and the minor nodes on the right side.

At this point, you’re free to get skills based on what you need. We recommend either taking Physical Damage skills if you’re not having any luck getting Fire Damage on your gear, or just get more Armor and Resistances so you don’t get killed instantly.

Ascendancy

For this build, we’re taking the Shaman Ascendancy primarily for the Furious Wellspring node, which does the following:

• Removes inherent Rage loss
• Generate 6% Max Rage per second
• +7 Max Rage
• Skills that use Rage have their Rage costs increased by 5

Equipment

Since this is a leveling build, gearing up isn’t that complicated of an issue. Just get whichever has the highest base numbers, and try to get good affixes for them. Ideally, you should get the following:

The many league mechanics in Path of Exile 2 will help you gear up more easily. If you see something that”s tied to the current or previous leagues, do it immediately.