-212 Vitality RR and 15% RR, -16% Life Leech Resist
Preface
Haven’t posted any builds lately but I thought this one was interesting enough to warrant making a thread.
Vitality casters are a fan favorite because hey, who doesn’t like having nearly infinite sustainability and regaining Health when hit?
Many of these builds tend to be similar: in the Devotion setup Rattosh and Dying God are set in stone, but do you get Wendigo or can you also fit in Scales somehow?
These are common questions, and after thinking about it for a while, this is my take on the Vit caster using the Valguur set.
I made the build on Hardcore to prove it’s nearly unkillable. I switch between both SC and HC, but for HC I always go for the tanky builds since it’s easy to lose some DW melee char in Gladiator HC in 0.5s, and ain’t nobody got time to relevel that.
Build mechanics
Vit casters always have good survivability, but sometimes they struggle with dealing damage because everyone and their dog seems to come with innate 100%+ Vit res.
This build seeks to overcome that by stacking an enormous amount of RR and having a high damage shotgun ability in Ravenous Earth.
At rank 23+, RE shoots 7-9 times, so on average it can hit a target 8 times with each volley and you can have multiple instances of RE up at the same time.
The shotgun nature of the skill means it’s very effective to stack flat damage from skill modifiers on it, but unfortunately Vit RE doesn’t get that many.
Poison/Acid RE on the other hand has a ton of damage skill modifiers, but that’s another story.
Besides RE, you also have many different procs that trigger when you are hit, several of them have a high Life Leech component which will heal you even when you’re not attacking.
The build functions as a damage sponge: it doesn’t have any real defenses besides a high Health pool and Life Leech, and by reducing the enemy Life Leech res, any damage taken will be healed almost instantly.
Pros
-Nigh immortal
This is a build that doesn’t die, so even if you make some mistakes it’s very forgiving.
-High damage output
The RR shred guarantees that any target will melt to your RE.
-Relatively low gear requirements
As with all my builds, you will never see a Stonehide/Thunderstruck MI of Kings or other “perfect” double rare MIs. (Unless I happen to find one, then it’d probably find its way into every future build I make.)
As long as you farm Crucible a lot, you will get the Valguur set eventually. The nice thing is that even with self-found gear, you can make this your Challenger Crucible farmer immediately at level 100, and work your way up to Gladiator 150.
The build uses 4 greens which might seem daunting, but you really only need 1 Thunderstruck prefix on 1 of 3 potential slots, the rest is luxury.
Since this build is essentially a CD caster, you don’t need to stack Cast nor Attack Speed, which makes gearing much less restrictive.
-No Energy issues
This isn’t one of those builds that requires the Crucible blessing to not run dry within seconds. You have very high Energy regeneration so you rarely have to use a potion unless you misuse your skills.
Cons
-No gap closer
Some people hate builds without a gap closer, I don’t think it’s a deal breaker for this character, but it’s something to keep in mind.
If you really want to, you can put a Riftstone in your weapon slot, but I don’t find it necessary.
-Low Run Speed
Since neither mastery gives Run Speed, this build only has ~121%, which is pretty slow.
-Not a One Button Build
The build has six skills in its regular rotation, which might be too much for some people.
Grimtools (click me) <- All-round setup
Equipment choices explained & alternatives
Not going to do a full breakdown of every slot, since Vit casters almost all have the same items anyway.
I’ll just mention the irregular parts:
Amulet
Mythical Soulcatcher is the best option. The skill modifiers slightly boost Devouring Swarm, and the added Chaos damage to RE is partially converted by the chest armor.
Even if you only get ~25 converted Vit damage, keep in mind that it’s multiplied by 7-9, and the Chaos part isn’t entirely wasted either thanks to Dying God.
For alternatives, any +1 Necro amulet will do until you get Soulcatcher. The Epic Death Ward is a very common drop, and you can also buy Reaver’s Hunger from Barrowholm at Revered reputation.
A +1 to all skills amulet isn’t that valuable for this build, since it uses very few Shaman skills.
Weapon
You want a Bonespike for the skill modifiers to RE.
Realistically, the best weapon you can get is a Necromancer’s (Magic prefix) with +1 to RE, and hopefully a damage suffix (either Spellweaving or Decay).
There are 20+ different Necromancer prefixes, so even though it’s a common drop, it can take a while to farm, but it’s definitely not impossible.
I got a Necromancer’s of Spellweaving (wrong damage type though) after 2-3 weeks of on and off farming, doing a few Mountain Deeps runs several times a day.
If you don’t want to farm for this, you can easily farm one with 360%+ Vitality damage and not much else, this shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
That way you lose out on some damage, so you melt stuff 0.1s slower.
If you use an item editor, you can make a dream dagger that gives like +7 to RE and loads of Vit damage, the final few ranks of RE have a large amount of damage locked in them. I’m not a fan of doing that since I like to keep the mystique in the game.
If I tested every build with an editor I would be immensely bored very quickly, and run out of goals to reach.
I do however like to spend endless hours theorycrafting in Grimtools though. 
Medal
Basilisk Crest is our item of choice so we can plant REs more often.
These are dropped by the stronger Basilisks in Ugdenbog, the vendor in Ancient Grove always carries a few of them as well.
The best place to farm these is thus the AG vendor, or in the Barrowholm Mines.
This is one of the slots you can get the elusive Thunderstruck prefix on, but anything with resists or HP is fine too.
If you can get one with a Defiler’s prefix that boosts RE, that would be great too, but like the Bonespike, you won’t get one without 3rd party tools.
Pants & Shoulders
Grava’Thul’s Legguards and Moosilauke’s Pauldrons are used to supermax Devouring Swarm and Spectral Wrath.
Supermaxing these 2 skills doesn’t really have any extra strong boost at the final rank like some other skills do, but it’s still nice to have.
If you have good other MIs, you can easily replace the above ones with little loss though.
For the pants you can also use Scorchrune Legwraps for +2 to RE and good Health and resists.
Relic
Impurity is used for this build, it’s better than the Lv. 90 Relic because it has a passive proc that fits the build more.
For being a lower tier Relic, it’s also much easier to craft, so you can attempt multiple tries to get +1 to RE.
Every craft gives you 2 potential shots at getting a completion bonus to RE.
Belt
Boneweave Girdle is used for the proc, which is a very strong heal. Neither class has a belt with Vitality damage or fitting skill bonuses, so this belt is the better option.
You can use a Girdle of Stolen Dreams as well if you want more OA, but I feel the proc is better than the ~150 OA that belt gives.
Boots
I use Boneshatter Treads for the final ranks to Devouring Swarm and the Slow resist. You can replace it with a pair of Stoneplate Greaves with good affixes too (Stonehide/Thunderstruck/Impervious of Kings/Arcane Winds/Vitality).
Components
This build doesn’t have high armor, so no focus is given to Armor Absorption or Armor % bonuses. Instead it uses Sanctified Bones to pad resists and give relevant racial damage bonuses, since these two enemy types tend to resist Vit highly.
Many Ugdenbog Leathers and Runebound Topazes are used to boost the build’s low DA. Together with the -200 enemy OA from Blood Boil, you’re in a healthy range of effective DA.
Strategy
Since the build uses 3 turret style abilities, it makes for a very good camping playstyle: drop both totems and an RE at a spot, and wait for enemies to come to you in the Crucible.
When the above 3 skills are on CD, use Devouring Swarm and Solael’s Flame to RR every target.
Acid Spray and Will of Rattosh are bound to both totems to easily spread their RR.
Note that Siphon Souls is one of your RR abilities but it has a ~3.8s CD.
This means you can’t just blindly mash it, you should save it for when bosses come near before you use it.
Luckily at rank 22 it has a huge range, and is even a damaging ability by itself.
Some of your Devotion skills have a WD% component which applies the 15% RR from your weapon augment, but only at ~20% value.
When the 3 main skills are on CD and you already applied the other RR to a boss, you can use a normal attack to whack them to get the full 15% RR.
I recommend you bind the main skills to something like QWER or 1234 for easy access, and put Swarm on your LMB.
Bosses
The amount of RR makes every boss easy in the Crucible, but the most dangerous is probably Alek and his meteor, so you should either use the environment to block them, or dodge them manually.
When you’re facing multiple Nemeses at once, use Mark of Torment when you start taking damage. While MoT is on, you’re practically immortal, which gives you the time to dump 3 good REs.
Mad Queen can probably be tanked with MoT on, but since I’m playing HC I never try it, I just wait out her red aura and you can kill her before she uses it again.
The other bosses such as Reaper are mostly harmless and can be killed with minimal kiting. In the video’s 2nd run I had 2 Reapers, Iron Maiden and Fabius for example, and my HP bar barely budged.
The reason for this is partially the Life Leech RR: Nemeses have 85% res to LL normally, so you only leech 15% of your damage.
With the -16% LL RR, your effective leech is doubled, which is a very strong boon.
Note that this also lets you leech from targets which are normally immune to LL, such as Zantarin and Bane’Gargoth.
In 160 and 170, make sure you hit Siphon Souls on multiple Nemeses as it provides a huge amount of continuous heal and the -OA debuff.
Some notes
- Shamelessly stole the layout from my previous builds yet again.
- You can take the extra points out of MoT or other skills and put them in Tenacity of the Boar for better OA/DA, I don’t think it’s needed for this build though.
- The Devotion skills are bound in this way for a reason: Flame Torrent might seem good on RE, but despite the 0 CD it has some hard cap that prevents you from having 20+ instances up at once (which would be horribly broken).
Furthermore, this build doesn’t have good WD or damage conversion to use Flame Torrent well, so it’s mostly an afterthought chosen for the Devotion completion bonus and lack of alternatives.
Twin Fangs is bound to RE instead for its high proc rate, and as an extra source of sustainability for when you’re disabled or kiting.
Wendigo’s Mark is bound to Swarm for another source of continuous sustainability: Swarm is a good Devotion trigger ability and it’s also a source of heal itself.
4) Not sure if this is common knowledge, but if you are low on Crucible Tribute (too low to do 100-150 + 130-150 safely to refill), a good way is to do 1-10 and reset at 10. This gives you 7 Tribute on Glad each run, repeating it a few times will let you buy the buffs again.
5) More to come if I think of anything.
Videos
Gladiator 150-170 x2 (click me)
2 runs of Gladiator 170 using the same set of buffs, so you can see a variety of Nemeses and Mutators.
Each run is generally between 8 and 9 minutes, with easy Mutators or a good run you might get as low as 7 min, but more importantly: even with the hardest Mutators, you can do 2 runs with one set of buffs.
I actually almost got wrecked at 161 in the first run, because I ran in the middle of the top right pack and took some strong burst from -40 total RR on me.
Run 1
160: Alek, Fabius, Reaper
170: 2 Reapers, Valdaran, Zantarin
Run 2
160: Alek, Benn’Jahr, Kuba
170: Fabius, Iron Maiden, 2 Reapers
This is probably the last build I’ll post until after FG, or I might post one more build I’m working on if I finish it and find it worthy.
Enjoy.
Attachment: screenshot01.jpg
