In what is undoubtedly the most meme-ridden build I’ve ever put on these forums (and my first build post since last July), I present to you… Counter Strike with a 0.17 second cooldown and Fevered Rage!
Stats with Blood of Dreeg+Deadly Momentum active
Grimtools: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/M2g4AzBV
The build boasts a whopping amount of shield-block potential, overwhelming damage mitigation with War Cry, Overguard+Markovian’s Defense, Menhir’s Bulwark/Menhir’s Bastion, and Stone Form (Obelisk of Menhir), potent levels of health recovery with Dryad’s Blessing, Blood of Dreeg, and Menhir’s Will (as a circuit breaker) and is pushing 85%+ with more than half of its resists (Elemental + Pierce/Bleed). Killing this thing off is very hard to do; in fact, I’d wager that nothing outside of Ravager in the base game even can, and its questionable whether Ravager can do it if you prepare well enough.
The OA, however, seems a little questionable doesn’t it? Worry not; thanks to the grand power of Fevered Rage, we can maintain a 20% Critrate on most bosses in the campaign and even higher than that in the Crucible.
Let’s discuss skill selection and usage before we get into gearing.
Skills
Well, Counter Strike, really. Counter Strike is a “retaliatory” buff that releases a PBAoE once in a while whenever you’re hit, on a cooldown. It does not entirely scale with Retaliation Damage (despite giving a minor increase to the type), and instead prominently grants us a flat amount of regular damage. This is great as a quasi-retaliatory build, as it means that ranged enemies obliterate themselves on Counter Strike procs.
There are three ways you can amplify the damage potential of Counter Strike, outside of core stat boosts like % Damage, OA, or RR:
- We could increase the chance that Counter Strike activates whenever we’re hit.
- We could decrease the cooldown between possible Counter Strike activations.
- We could be hit more often to be more likely to activate Counter Strike in a short span of time.
This build employs all three methods. As of this writing, there is no way to get more Counter Strike proc chance from gear, only by increasing the rank of the skill to 26/16 - so we get that done with asap. Decreasing the possible Cooldown of Counter Strike can be done in various ways, be it by the Blood Knight Helmet or the Colossal Fortress MI shield…or the Dawnbreaker’s Oath 4pc set bonus. We employ the former and the latter, cutting down on the ‘expense’ of the build by not needing a particular MI roll. Finally, we need a means to make us be hit more often…how to do that…
Oh, right, Fevered Rage. That one super-dangerous-skill that retaliation tanks love and everyone else hates. Well, we’re kind of a Retaliation tank, but better. So we really love Fevered Rage. We don’t need to be hit by melee attacks, nor do we need to block anything, we just need to be attacked in order to activate Counter Strike. This means that everything under the sun that an enemy can do, even debuffing us, can make us release a massive AoE burst of damage. With Fevered Rage, enemies will be doing a lot more to make us release exorbitantly more instances of Counter Strike.
Of course, because we want to be bashed around in every way possible, we also will want some means to survive that thrashing. So virtually every other skillpoint available to us is spent on bulking up. All said and done, we get to walk around as a more-or-less indestructible ticking time bomb on a very short fuse.
Which items can we use to make our time-bomb even more explosive, and how can we be even sturdier, and can we get any solid metrics on those features?
Gearing
All things considered, the build is pretty cheap and reasonably beginner-friendly to gear (albeit caters to Veteran game knowledge to use effectively). It requires one MI with no affixes in particular (though you want Chaos res, so Ordered or some other affix combination is desirable). Five of our other slots are blues (Epics):
- Our rings are 2x Mythical Sentinel’s Seals for all the shield stats they offer as well as the proc.
- We use the Mythical Sanctus Crest for the shield stats as well as boosting our resists through the roof. I secretly love this item, and if you’re not hurting for OA, I’d recommend considering its use for any build in the game. Craftable.
- And we use the Mythical Eastern Legguards and Mythical Eastern Gloves for a buttload of OA, Lightning Damage, and resists that this build in particular desperately needs (Vitality). A little known fact about the Eastern Oath set is that the 2-piece set bonus gives us 7% OA, and the pants give us another 4% (base, can roll higher). This bonus is very significant. Mythical Chausses of Barbaros + Mythical Colossal Grasp has been suggested to me a lot, and while this would result in a significant increase in defensive potential, I don’t think this build needs it. The Chausses would result in an OA-loss compared to the 2pc Eastern Oath set.
At the forefront of offensive power for the build are the unique Counter Strike-related items:
- The Dawnseeker’s Light set is a 4-piece set involving the Mainhand Weapon slot, the Shield slot, the Amulet slot, and the Shoulder slot. It is a Lightning-focused Counter Strike/Shaman-skillset Retaliation-based set. At four pieces, it gives us -0.6 seconds to the cooldown of Counter Strike (-0.1 seconds more than the Colossal Fortress) as well as a bonus to Counter Strike’s radius of damage and a very nice chunk of flat Lightning Damage. For the purposes of this build, there is no reason to use anything less than the 4-piece set bonus of the Dawnseeker’s Light set. The 2-piece and 3-piece bonuses are trash (for all builds, frankly) and I would fondly love for them to be improved.
- The Mythical Dawnseeker’s Sledge is a 1H Mace that gives us flat Lightning Damage, Phys -> Lightning Conversion, Shield Damage Blocked, % Health, and nonstacking RR. It gives us (for some reason) no % Damage at all. It also gives us a proc which, while it does decent damage, will stun non-boss enemies. This is actually quite bad for our purposes, as we don’t want to CC enemies, we want them to be hitting us! The Sledge is a very mediocre item overall; do not use it without the rest of the Dawnseeker’s Light set.
- The Mythical Dawnseeker’s Beacon gives us more Phys -> Lightning conversion and a lot of +Maxres. Combined with the aforementioned Mythical Sanctus Crest, this makes us nearly invincible to a good number of damage types in the game. Not a terrible item outside of the set bonuses, but there are alternatives for this slot too if you don’t have it yet.
- The Mythical Dawnseeker’s Duty is a shield that is by far the best standalone piece of the Dawnseeker’s Light set. With a boatload of flat Health, Phys -> Lightning Conversion, moderate % CDR, +2 to War Cry (freeing up points to be spent elsewhere), and giving us even more flat Lightning Damage to Counter Strike, this item is highly desirable with or without the rest of its set. Take it as soon as you get it, unless you’re sitting on a godly Colossal Fortress. In that case, use the Fortress until you finish the full Dawnseeker’s Light set.
- The Mythical Dawnseeker’s Shoulderguards give the most ±skills to Counter Strike of any possible shoulder piece. Outside of that, they’re terrible and in dire need of a general buff for other builds. Use only when you finish the rest of the set or unless you have literally nothing else.
- Finally, we’re using one piece of the Blood Knight’s set, being the Blood Knight’s Visage. It gives us a small amount of % CDR, -0.2 seconds to the base cooldown for Counter Strike, and +1 to all Skills in Soldier. Outside of that, it’s completely irrelevant to our build. Which is kind of nice, actually, because it means that we don’t need a perfect roll of any of the variable stats in order to be satisfied with the item. Craftable.
The very last non-relic item in use is the Mythical Hammerfall Girdle. This is something of a flex slot. You can get away with other alternatives, such as the class belts or well-rolled MIs in Hammerfall’s instead if you so desire. But Hammerfall gives us a fantastic boost to our Armor values, solid resists, and +maxres to Bleeding (not that it matters, because we’re actually immune to Bleed damage with the right procs active). In addition, it gives us a better version of the proc from the Sentinel’s Seals, being on a lower cooldown. Nothing spectacular, but definitely fine in its own right. Craftable.
Our choice of relic is Menhir’s Bastion, and we make use of precisely zero of the completion bonuses the relic can possibly offer, meaning we are free to simply take one with good base stats. If possible, get one with 5% Shield Block chance. It’s doable, but my own one is only at 4%. A travesty. As with almost all relics, Craftable.
Gameplay
If I’m being honest with you, this build is pretty braindead in terms of what you need to do. Anything is gonna die to it eventually. But if you want to expedite that process, you have to know when to use what skills.
Fevered Rage effectively deletes the defenses of every enemy in the game, but makes every enemy in the game hit like a Nemesis, and makes Nemeses hit like something else entirely. Choose wisely when you cast it. The build can facetank pretty much everything in existence with or without Fevered Rage in the campaign, but if you’re not paying attention in Crucible, the wrong cast of FR can kill you. FR on Moosilauke’s first form will see you taking around thirteen thousand damage past a block on his overhead attack. It’s safe to use FR on him in his second form, however. Anasteria is incredibly scary with FR on her, and kind of a pushover without, but both can be facetanked reasonably well.
Overguard is your primary means of getting off as much damage as possible…kind of. With the Markovian’s Defense transmuter, we do suffer a global damage division to our overall dps, which doesn’t really matter against the hordes when we’re being attacked a bunch, but can matter against slower, less attack-heavy bosses or some heroes. If you can get away with not casting Overguard in the presence of a caster boss or hero (Valaxteria, Support/Regen heroes, etc.), don’t use it. They don’t hit you often enough anyways.
Blood of Dreeg and Menhir’s Bastion (the skill, from the same-named relic) are both mostly well-known for their defensiveness, but did you know they both give you Flat Damage, and a lot of it? Keeping them up as often as you can even when you don’t need their defensiveness is advisable to amplify the potential of your non-Counter Strike hits.
Prioritize healers and casters if you can. They tend not to actually attack you much, meaning a one-on-one situation with them is going to be very long and tedious. But if you get up in their face with a bunch of bosses and trash behind you, you can obliterate them in seconds and then eviscerate their more aggressive allies. Summoners are your friends; they make trash mobs for you to get more Counter Strike procs from! Save them for last if they don’t die in the onslaught of AoE damage you’re releasing.
I’m not a Crucible player, but without using any buffs or Banners, I pushed up to wave 166 fairly mindlessly with this build. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you actually use all the things Crucible has to offer you, wave 170 would be a cakewalk for this monster. But, if you happen to run into Valdaran, you have my pity, as that’s around a 2-minute fight unto itself.
Leveling
I’m not a huge fan of leveling guides inside of build guides because when it comes down to it, there isn’t much to say. When you’re looking at a build like this, for heaven’s sake, don’t level with the point distribution of the final build. Pick an AoE skill and flatten hordes with it. Good contenders in the Witchblade dualclass are Transmuted Dreeg’s Evil Eye, Transmuted Blade Arc, and Untransmuted Forcewave. To that end, take items and use devotions that fit the playstyle of your selected leveling skill.
If you choose to level with Counter Strike as the build’s posted above, you’re going to be in for a bad time regardless of your other choices. So just don’t.
And that’s about it. Questions, comments, or concerns? Let me know in the comments below!
