Raven

Summon ravens to peck out the eyes of your enemies.

Raven is the Druid's level 1 Summoning skill, with no prerequisite; it is the root of the wolf line, unlocking Summon Spirit Wolf. Each cast adds one raven to a flock of at most five. A raven is not a pet that lives until it dies: it has a number of pecks, 12 at level 1 and one more a level, and vanishes when it has spent them. The two numbers that decide the skill are the flock size, capped at 5 from level 5 on, and the per-peck damage, which starts at 2–4 and reaches 73–94 at level 20.

The numbers

• Ravens is min(lvl, Param2) with Param2 = 5: one raven a level until five, then no more. Mana is a flat 6 per cast at every level.
• Pecks come from Param5 (12, "# of hits baseline") plus Param6 (1) a level: 31 at level 20, 41 at level 30.
• Damage is the MinDam/MaxDam columns with the usual five brackets. Minimum: 2, then +1 a level to level 8, +4 to 16, +8 to 22, +14 to 28, +20 past that. Maximum: 4, then +2, +5, +9, +15, +21 over the same brackets. That is why the range jumps from 17–28 at level 10 to 73–94 at level 20 and 213–244 at level 30.
• Attack Rating is ToHit 100 plus LevToHit 30 a level: +670% at level 20.
• The raven's level is ulvl + Param1 + lvl (calc2): your character level − 2 + the skill level.

Every line reads lvl, so +skills from items raise the flock, the pecks and the damage. The table shows levels past 20 for that reason.

How it works

A raven is a flying summon that dives at a target, rolls an attack against its defense (see Chance to Hit) and deals physical damage on a hit. The Basin's page says ravens cannot be targeted or harmed and unsummon only once their pecks are used up; auras, buffs and debuffs do not apply to them. On a successful attack a raven casts Dim Vision to blind the target (see Hit Blinds Target); the Basin gives the chance as 40 + 5 × (raven level − monster level) percent and the Dim Vision level as min([(chance − rand(99)) ÷ 5] + 1, 20). Ravens have a 5% chance of critical damage per the Basin.

The row carries item_pierce_damage_immunity as a passive stat, which is the current game's way of letting the caster's Monster Physical Immunity is Sundered apply to the ravens' hits; the Basin's page states the same for D2R. The Basin also notes that in D2R summoning a raven onto an enemy commands the other ravens to strike it, and that the ravens' AI attacks more often than it did in the 1.10–1.13 era.

Ravens expire by count, not by time: a level 20 flock is 5 ravens × 31 pecks = 155 attacks, then nothing until you recast.

Synergies and +skills

Raven's damage reads DmgSymPerCalc = (Summon Spirit Wolf.blvl + Summon Fenris.blvl + Summon Grizzly.blvl) × Param8 with Param8 = 12: +12% damage per hard point in Summon Spirit Wolf, Summon Dire Wolf and Summon Grizzly. The three lines read blvl, so +skills on items do not feed them, only points you placed. Raven gives a synergy to nothing. Its own level, flock, pecks and attack rating all read lvl, so +skills do count for those.

Against players

The Basin's page says nothing about Ravens against players. See Player versus Player for the rule that cuts a player's own hit on another player to 17%; the raven is a pet, and the only player-specific effect on its page is the blind, which is a Dim Vision cast.

Build notes

• One hard point gives one raven; the flock is complete at level 5 and from there each level buys only one peck and one damage bracket step, so +skills do most of the growth past the fifth point.
• 60 points across the three wolf and bear skills are worth +720% raven damage, and those must be hard points.
• Mana is 6 at every level, so recasting the flock is never the constraint; its finite pecks are.
• The blind is the reason to keep a point in Raven on a summoner: it is cast by every raven on every hit, at no cost to you.