[1.1.9.4] Silver Crystals - Ranged Cold Cadence Tactician with Bonus Elemental Discord Tactician

[thepowerofmediocrity]

Silverbolt is a neat weapon - it has a large racial damage component as well as being the only weapon to give +3 to all skills. It was used recently in Nery’s Silverbolt + SR set Purifier, but a weapon with this much flexibility couldn’t be shoehorned in as a Pierce weapon.

A neat thing about Armor Piercing is that it is last in the damage conversion order, after standard conversions and conversions baked into skill modifiers. Essentially, this means that if you have plenty of Physical to X conversion, that happens in calculations before Armor Piercing. With regards to our main ranged AA’s Savagery, Cadence, and Righteous Fervor, there are few options that provide 100% conversion that don’t take up the weapon slot; Righteous Fervor has a conversion baked into its transmuter, but it also converts 100% of Fire to Vitality, which makes building for it difficult. You also have to consider Pierce to X conversion if you want to get the absolute out of this weapon.

Mythical Executioner’s Judgment is the perfect modifier, and Cold Tactician is the perfect outlet for this conversion. There is one 1H gun for Cold Cadence, but doesn’t give nearly as many skill points, and Tactician is a hungry class that could all the skill points a player can afford it. Cadence being a three node skill, Soldier passives, Word of Renewal, 90% WPS, Inquisitor Seal, Aura of Censure; Silverbolt’s skill bonuses allow you to fully invest in nearly all of it.

1.1.9.4 Cold Silverbolt Tactician GRIMTOOLS

1.1.9.4 UPDATE: Since the Piercing to Elemental conversion was taken away from the Luminari medal, I replaced the Chest with the Luminari Jacket to bring back the conversion as well as get an additional 100% damage for the 2-pc bonus. Additionally, I replaced the Legendary Cadence Pants with Green Kuba pants to get 22/12 Deadly Momentum. I think 22/12 DM is well worth only having 25/16 Cadence points.

Thanks to the additional conversion equipment in this build, you can get 70% Pierce to Cold conversion assuming average rolls in the Allkamos Rings (which I acknowledge are stupid hard to get), which helps beef up the WPS hits in between the Cadence hits. Chilling Rounds in particular gets mention for easily getting 20/10 with extra damage from the gloves as a bonus.

I’m providing my pictures in spoiler form to not clog up the page. Note that the Cadence damage stats are missing the bonuses from Word of Renewal; the damage has a floor of roughly 95K.

Stats and Cadence Damage

Skill Distribution

I have a completion image for Crucible, but its real strength is in running SR 75-76. With Inquisitor Seal at 22/12 and Aura of Censure at 21/12, there is very little that could provide damage spikes, and with 18% Life Steal on large Cadence hits and roughly 190% base attack speed (IIRC, Ranged Expertise is not calculated properly for 2H builds), you can recover your health easily. It’s ranged combat at its simplest - drop a Seal, use Storm Box for proccing, and shoot things until they’re dead.

Crucible Completion - 08:30

SR 81 with Elemental Resist mutator complete

[Ulvar1]

Fun build!
Surprised not even one point in decorated soldier for some (needed?) slow res

[hammyhamster1]

Ahh, good stuff to see some variation thinking on these items.

I could see it used for all sorts of stuff with various equipment conversions (gloves-RF, etc) or with Witchfire modifier + reduced cd Abdominable Might (maybe?). Or aether Primal Strike with conduit…

[thepowerofmediocrity]

Ahh, good stuff to see some variation thinking on these items.

I could see it used for all sorts of stuff with various equipment conversions (gloves-RF, etc) or with Witchfire modifier + reduced cd Abdominable Might (maybe?). Or aether Primal Strike with conduit…

I’ve looked into conduits, item modifiers and the like, and I found it particularly difficult to get other combinations to work as well as this one. The general weakness I’ve found trying to build around the conversions was a lack of weapon damage and/or another weapon does the same job better.

Aether Primal Strike, for example, is already done by Vortex of Souls. Vitality Primal Strike might be a good idea, since we have the Rotgheist Set to convert all the damage and Namadea’s Eye converts Piercing damage to Vitality. Other ranged auto-attacks have a hard time getting good WPS, as you’re really limited to Inquisitor WPS or Smite, as things like Necrotic Edge are much better in melee than they are ranged.

Even if you have good WPS in order, the other thing to worry about is getting enough % damage, as the weapon slot typically gets 300% of your damage type, and giving that up is a steep price if your skills don’t have a lot of damage bonuses. All things considered, Silverbolt doesn’t bust things open nearly as much as I originally anticipated.

[eardianm]

I like it, and covers the difficulties I kept having trying to force dual Mythical Hagarradian Enforcer into a cold cadence build

[hammyhamster1]

Even if you have good WPS in order, the other thing to worry about is getting enough % damage, as the weapon slot typically gets 300% of your damage type, and giving that up is a steep price if your skills don’t have a lot of damage bonuses. All things considered, Silverbolt doesn’t bust things open nearly as much as I originally anticipated.

I see your point. There usually is another 2H ranged that does a better job.

Rotgheist Primal might work with it or some builds with 100% physical conversions to RF.

I played around with an Acid Silverbolt RF Paladin just using the RF transmuter and Gulgazor’s MI for the conversion. It didn’t look overly impressive…but in spite of not having that extra 25% RR of the full Radaggan, the extra skill to the wps might somewhat compensate - except it would be obviously slower vs very high acid-resist mobs.

It’s definitely an interesting play on the order of conversion, though.

[thepowerofmediocrity]

All this time, I completely forgot that Discord, and therefore Elemental Cadence, existed. Shameful display!

1.1.9.4 Discord Elemental Cadence Ranged Tactician

With the Head + Shoulders of the Luminari Set and the Shoulder piece, you can get around 95% Pierce to Elemental conversion. That’s excellent as it leaves little residual unconverted damage left over. The bad news is that I must now consider RR from multiple sources as compared to the Cold Tactician that could simply factor for Cold damage and RR only.

Cadence Comparison Numbers

Elemental Damage Cadence

Cold Damage Cadence

As the 2 images illustrate, the Elemental Cadence is hitting for roughly 132K DPS while the Cold Cadence hits for 140k DPS; that includes the Frostburn for the cold damage, so the direct damage somewhat evens out.

The Elemental Cadence build has to reach for Solael’s Witchfire in the devotions and thus has to give up Ghoul. The Life Steal is sufficient for most difficult battles, but I clearly miss having Ghoul. Outside of that, both builds can run SR80; the Elemental one has a little more trouble than the Cold one, but outside of that, there’s no major difference.

Going Elemental Cadence is a perfectly fine option in the event that you can’t get the Alkamos Rings to get the Cold version. Still, I wish that there were more Elemental Cadence options available for the ring, amulet, or belt slots; If I could get up to 26/16 instead of 23/16, I bet the damage difference would be a lot smaller for the Elemental version.

[thepowerofmediocrity]

One last build for the Silverbolt Discord Cadence. This time it’s a Warder!

1.1.9.4 Discord Elemental Cadence Warder Grimtools

Cadence Damage

As you can see, 128K does fall well behind the 140K from the Cold Tactician, but the Warder does bring something unique: Wind Devils with 22/12 Maelstrom. The Arcane Seals fit this build beautifully, patching up needed resists and helping with the Attack Speed, and with 20/12 Raging Tempest, the RR for all three types gets a respectable 70%. Since half of my damage comes from Lightning, I take the Lightning RR route while going for Ultos and the required Ranged Devotions.

For this build, knowing when Ghoulish Hunger is up is critical to the build’s success, allowing you to take that one last bit of health while you’re going crazy with leech. Wind Devils go a good job with AoE clear, something that a Cold Tactician doesn’t really have outside of devotion procs.

I’ve mulled over whether I wanted to include this one because I always seem to find a way to die in SR75-76, whether it’s from Fabius or Kuba or Moose or plain stupidity running into a pack of Hero mobs with my relatively low CC resistances. Ultimately, since I’ve shown I can kill these creatures even with the Elemental Resist mutator, I decided to include it as it does stand out from the Tactician. Thankfully, for a majority-Lightning damage build, Grava is actually one of the easier Nemeses to fight in SR75-76, as long as you constantly zoom yourself to avoid getting hit by too many Void pools and avoid his dangerous nullification balls. Thanks to Silverbolt’s hefty damage to Ch’thonic bonus.