I swear I never thought of this when I jumped into the aegis spam bandwagon before the test patch arrived
When test patch came out I was at work and I was already thinking of playing some pierce aegis when I get home but I wasn’t able to find time for GD that day until the time to sleep came and suddenly I realized…
No one actually had high expectations of it (including me) considering the state of all the other retal builds but I woke up the next day and there’s already a sub 4:20 acid retal build of it. Naturally experimentation on other damage types follow and I’ll leave those to the people who made those builds if they choose to share it. Mine is a physical build focused on converting acid to phys (since you can’t play physical spam aegis the traditional way).
You can try to add stuff like more cast speed by getting some points in jackal or spider.
Gear
Aegis Conduit - obviously
Full Sentinel Set - I chose to go full set instead of going 3 piece + targo armor (for nearly full convert) for stronger Counter Strike, good chest proc and more OA on the shard. I haven’t tried going for the targo chest yet (cause I haven’t played GD for a week until yesterday) but it should be good. Just don’t go perdition if you have sentinel set. Perdition kinda sucks.
Belt - requirement for conversion. Get as close as you can to 60%.
Gloves - Acid retal and cast speed. Perfect fit
Helm - more rata to Aegis
Rings - Acid retal, and it can roll casting speed suffixes so it’s better than the classic sethris.
Medal - for lifesteal on Aegis and reprisal points
Pants - best pants for retal even after all the nerfs (says a lot about the other pants).
Boots. Needed 2 points to reprisal for the hardcap.
Crucible
POST NERF 4:22
That’s my fastest buffed. On average it goes around 4:30 and can go to 5 mins if I’m really unlucky.
That’s naked EX. And that’s like the first naked EX clear I made since like AoM times. I guess that’s good.
Overall this guy is monstrous in crucible. But the game’s not just crucible right? Right?
Ravager
I did ravager and video below is the first superboss kill I ever did in my GD life that isn't lokarr (murdered that guy many times during AoM) or Bourbon (didn't have anything else to do in vanilla). I don't know anything about superbosses so I just drank some pharma and facetanked. It's not 100% winrate but maybe I just suck.
Shattered Realms (there's no video here)
I tried SR 90 and died to benny on boss chunk. Tried again and died to Kaisan. It’s weird cause fabius who everyone complains about is easy here. Tried going for full physique dump and maxed out overguard but still can’t tank Kaisan. So this guy isn’t SR 90 capable and that’s a no no for retal. If I tweak everything to be super defensive then I get 6 mins on crucible which is an even bigger no for me.
Closing (and some feedback)
I guess retal part of spam aegis is gonna get nerfed next patch now that some people outside the veteran builders have discovered it (saw some on reddit talking about it already and one guy in this forum) and the question now is just when. Maybe soon since there might be some xbox bugfixes that it can latch into or maybe it stays for a long time on a big balance patch. I get that the conduit not having some negative retal mods looks like an oversight. All I’m pleading for @zantai is to please don’t do it too harshly as aegis has always been the worst retal skill on its own and this spam conduit finally makes us able to do a fully functional pure aegis retal build. It would be really sad if the conduit becomes unplayable for retal next patch. After all, this build isn’t really broken in terms of “it can do all of cruci, superbosses and SR90+ easily”.
Time to get to the nonretal spam aegis builds (they’re good). Shoutout to the usual guys.
Yeah the conduit didn’t feel that broken to me, maybe just slightly overtuned. None of the direct dmg builds is the best in existence, and RtA builds can get very good times in Crucible thanks to the skill’s range that allows to abuse Vanguard banner. Also the dispersion of timers on the same build is very high.
Retal portion of the conduit is one of those things that look broken in a vacuum but requires a lot of sacrifices to get the full effect. I bet going for sethris rings and better boots (frees a lot of points for maxing things like haven), then going for field command instead of squad tactics makes the build be able to go for consistent SR90 clears but when you’re sacrificing that much damage you might as well play stoneguard who’s normal setup looks like that.
The real reason? Phys was the best (in terms of crucible clear time) out of the three main retal types when I tested it. Also, @banana_peel and mad_lee made acid and lightning builds. I’d leave it to them to post those if they want to.
I mean I know there’s a nerf incoming. That’s kinda obvious looking at the conduit statline. I just hope it’s not gonna make retal spam aegis as a whole unplayable.
No, even switching to full physique dump in your GT only nets you 2677 DA. Unless you also changed something else you didn’t mention, that’s hardly enough for 90 for a tank- I’m not surprised you can’t tank Kaisan with that, you’re just gonna get crit.
Probably yes, it’s just that you pointed out the initial 2.2k DA which isn’t the only thing I tested. Tho as I said in a previous reply,
I’m still primarily a crucible player so I’m not willing to make the sacrifices needed for the build to be a consistent SR90 runner, which is fine. The point I wanted to make by highlighting the “can’t do sr90” part is that this build ain’t the broken “can do anything build” that people might expect a fast retal build to be, as is the case for fast retals in previous patches. This then ties in to my closing “I hope the incoming nerfs aren’t too harsh” part.
(Also that DA used to not be a death sentence to retal at high SR. People ran SR100 on stoneguard with 2400DA in the past and I did consistent sr90 on retal DE with 2300ish. But we’re not living in the past so )
Yeah, that’s understandable. Playstyle differences and all, different horses. To your point about hoping that nerfs aren’t too harsh, I actually think this might signify to Zantai that retal is in an “acceptable” place now- you have to choose damage or tankiness, you can’t have godly amounts of both in one build anymore. That’s how this build looks to me anyway, with your words. But then, I’m not Zantai and we’ve seen some rather… bizarre balance decisions in the past so.
I’m selfishly also hoping that spam aegis won’t be nerfed into oblivion before we get the chance to have fun with it.
Went from 4:30 average on buffed crucible to 4:45. Still an okay build on that matter. Tho now it’s more mutator dependent. I’ll be testing banana’s acid build if I get the time for it.
phys is more sensitive with these value changes because it is always reduced by armor. my Chinese friends have tried Acid: Sheet DPS went down from 240k to 210k. It’s just a piece of cake for retal because retal does not rely on only one spell.
Still super good (both tankiness and damage) unless a super high retalitaion modifier comes, or some mechanism changes happen.
Yeah i don’t think anyone was gonna light the torches on this one, 60-80% rta spam skill is smth that basically overshadows every retal option so -20% looks ok dmg-wise.
But it would help if leech modifier on the medal would be buffed to 6% because sustain really isn’t great and it’ll force you to run around quite a bit which goes somewhat against retal nature or spam skill nature for that matter.
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