Druid or Spellbinder (or other)?

[Brian]

Just wondering what you all thought might be most fun for a ranged caster. Already have Arcanist and just need a mastery to pair with it.

[butula13]

What's your primary skill?

Edit: Every class combination has viable builds, both for leveling and for endgame gear farming, but depending on how you want to play (do you want to spam replicating missiles, blast aether rays, or drop sky shards) there will be good and bad second masteries for that play style.

[Brian]

I guess...which one would offer a good variety of fun ranged attacks? I don't even necessarily have to make the arcanist skills the primary. And am I right in assuming that druid would be more like a lightning mage and Spellbinder would be more of a pet class (due to skeletons and such)?

[Matthew]

The main perk of combining arcanist and shaman together is reaching ridiculous levels of crit% damage with stacking stormcaller's pact and elemental balance together. Keep in mind stormcaller's pact keeps scaling rather well into the master ranks.

This game has a lot of flexibility and you can do a lot of different things, especially when considering green MI's which change damage types or modify skills. But crit lightning is the most obvious theme and pairing.

Both shaman and necro has pets. Arcanist with either and going hybrid pets can technically work, but most people are going to tell you if you want to go pets then just combine two full pet classes.

I'd say the more obvious direction to go is with either aether ray or drain essence. The mastery combo was a bit trendy a while back. The purpose is to combine mirror and mark to reach very high levels of damage absorption making it surprisingly tanky for a "caster" class.

BTW aether ray melts everything and you can basically combine that skill with any mastery you want. There are ways to convert it to a few different damage types and it does all the heavy lifting so the 2nd mastery is mainly just support.

[butula13]

Most effective builds don't have a ton of variety, at least while you're leveling up. In order to keep up with enemy health and resistances you're going to want to focus on one, maybe two primary attacks and max them out.

If, for instance, you go with Aether Ray that can be cast continuously and will be far and away your main damage dealer, any other active abilities will be for healing, crowd control and maybe an "oh ♥♥♥♥" button if you get in trouble.

A Druid (every class combo has its own name, and a Shaman/Arcanist is called a Druid) has a lot of options. Shaman doesn't support Aether Ray particularly well but it can work well with Sky Shards. You can also put more focus into Shaman and use Storm Totems or Wind Devils as your primary means of attack, getting support from Arcanist.

Don't be afraid to experiment; respeccing is easy and relatively cheap.

[Matthew]

https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/12534
https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/12216
https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/7856

Druid does just fine with aether ray. I wasn't lying when I said that skill can be combined with any mastery. It offers resist reduction, health and regen, and mana regen. Can even go wendigo to help stand and spam AAR.

Can also go star pact for the aether conversion, but imo stormcaller's is the stronger option if you can convert the damage through items.