The Root and the Crown:
Lightning Retaliation Grasping Vines Warder
Foreword
I threw darts at the list of items that add retaliation damage to skills until I landed on one that sounded fun to build around, and then I put this together. Unlike what usually happens when I do that, I ended up with a decent build instead of hot garbage, so now I’m posting a build guide for it.
Hat tip to mad_lee, who did it before it was cool (with acid instead of lightning).
1.1.9.1. updates:
- No major changes, build is still strong.
- I decided I liked the Ikrix Scale medal option best, so that’s now the main variant.
- Less points in Overguard required to hit 100% block recovery than in previous versions. This allows swapping out Mythical Anchorite’s Seal for Mythical Open Hand of Mercy to complete the Judicator’s Seals set, as well as shuffling a few skill points to more useful places.
- I stopped being lazy and ground out the last 10 shards of SR, so now we have an SR 75-76 video.
Build
Tooltip DPS is Savagery with stacks up but no procs
1.1.7.1 build variants:
- No greens version
- High Ultimate SR variant (medal swap and augment shuffle to improve resist overcaps)
- Mogdrogen variant (medal swap to improve max lightning res)
Videos
1.1.9.1 videos:
1.1.7.1 videos:
Leveling
This is an endgame build, not intended to be played in this form until level 94+
I personally leveled this build as ranged Primal Strike, using twink gear and Ugdenbog Sparkthrowers to carry me through the campaign. Here’s what my character looked like at a few key points along the way:
- Level 20, early/mid Normal
- Level 50, ready to enter Elite
- Level 72, ready to enter Ultimate
- Level 93, immediately before respeccing into endgame build
The twink gear and Lokarr set are not necessary for this build; using random self-found greens will work perfectly well, you just won’t get the XP bonus from Lokarr and friends.
Other viable setups for leveling a Warder include:
- Melee Primal Strike, using a Korvan Storm Halberd
- 2H phys Forcewave, using an Obsidian War Cleaver and a Shambler’s Heart
- Lightning Caster, focusing on Wind Devil and Storm Totem, using some combination of Segarius’ Sacred Blade, Ugdenbog Stormstrife, Groble Sky Effigy, and Yeti Horn
- Vitality Primal Strike (melee or ranged), using a Rylok Mark along with one of the MI weapons mentioned above, plus Devouring Swarm and transmuted Storm Totem
If you’re truly desperate to play your character as retal Grasping Vines as early as possible, you could put together a scuffed version of the build at level 40 using the Perdition set, or at 65 using the lower level version of the Dawnguard set. However, this isn’t recommended; I’m guessing that without the item skill mods from the shield and amulet, the build will feel pretty bad.
For general leveling advice, check out these resources:
- Nery’s beginner build guide collection
- sir_spanksalot’s leveling advice
- Droppin’s mini guide to Crucible leveling
- Armored Otter’s video leveling guide
- RektByProtoss’ video guide to making your own build
- This reddit post where I blathered about my leveling process for alts
Thanks for reading!