Introduction
(this section will repeat between my build overviews; you can skip to Build Concept if you’ve read one of my overviews before and are familiar with my rating system and test criteria)
Patch 9.8 brought, among other things, major changes to the Shattered Realm. Given that SR is where I do my endgame build testing, with the release of the patch I decided to redo all the testing for all my builds. And since I’d be putting in the time and noting down all my results anyway, I thought I might as well post the builds and their scores publicly for others. Who knows, maybe you’ve been thinking of trying something similar and are curious if it even works. Or maybe you’re just morbidly curious and like that tickly feeling in your brainhole when you see someone play something utterly stupid.
Now, what exactly does this testing entail? Each character has to do 10 SR75-80 runs (I used to do 5 runs but I’m expanding it to 10 for this second wave). Every run completed within timer counts as a success. It takes 6 successes (over 50 % success rate) for me to consider a build complete. If a build keeps failing to meet that quota, I keep improving it till it works. Ergo, no build I post here will have a lower score than 6/10, because if it doesn’t have over 50 % success rate, I’m not done improving it and it doesn’t get posted.
Three rules were followed to make the results more representative:
- no consumables other than healing and energy elixirs can be used;
- no shrines can be taken; if a build has bad resists, it’ll have to make do with bad resists, Rattosh isn’t gonna be saving its ass;
- no mutator hunting; if I get shitty mutators, I’ll have to succeed with shitty mutators.
Other than that, it doesn’t matter in what manner the runs are completed. If a build takes twice as long to finish a run than others do, that’s perfectly fine as long as it successfully finishes. Doesn’t matter whether the build has to dodge Nemeses in shards like the plague or whether it hunts them for sport, doesn’t matter if it has to kite like crazy or stands its ground with ease, doesn’t matter if it completes the runs deathless or not. Only thing that affects the score is completion within timer. Generally, a weaker build that is slow, fragile, hard to play etc. will end up with a lower score regardless because its shortcomings will affect its reliability across the 10 runs.
Now, two final things before we get to the build itself:
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As mentioned in the title, this is a build overview, not a build guide. What’s the difference? Well, a build guide says “this is the way you should build this type of character”. What I’m saying is rather “this is what I did, here’s why I did it this way, here’s how it turned out”. It’s more of a documentary, a post-mortem, rather than an example to be followed. “Wait, that’s just a fancy way of saying you make shit builds,” you might say. No, not exactly. I try to make a strong character without deviating from the concept of the build. But the concept of the build might not necessarily be something one should even be doing in the first place
While my build concept and the in-game support will often align to create a reasonably predictable, almost cookie cutter build, just as often I’ll just be doing something abundantly demented for my own reasons. I’ll always endeavour to explain in the Build Concept section why I chose to do a thing a certain way, but I don’t want you to get the impression that what I’m presenting is a thing you should necessarily be doing. -
I’m also by no means hyperfocused on optimising the crap out of a build once it’s in a workable state. There will almost always be things to optimise on my characters, but frankly, I prefer spending an hour theorycrafting a new character rather than shuffling an existing character’s devo tree, gear, component and augment setup just to squeeze 5 % more damage out of it. I don’t care that much.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the build itself.
Build Concept
Right from the moment I created my very first character, a 2H Ranged Pyromancer (which was not very good due to lack of item support), I’ve had my eye on Blackwater Cocktail (BWC). I’ve always been a big fan of engineer and alchemist archetypes in video games, partly because they aren’t all that prevalent in RPGs and ARPGs compared to spellcasters. And BWC really scratched that alchemist itch.
While my first character did use BWC, it was solely for utility, not really damage, and it used the cooldown version as a result. This time around I wanted to make a build all about BWC. Now, as I’ve said, I’ve had my eye on the build since the moment I started playing the game, yet I’m covering it as one of the last characters I ever made. Why? Well, usually I just build on my own and only look up other builds if I feel like I might have overlooked some important pieces of gear and such, and don’t want to just scour all of GrimTools to check. I’m not sure what exactly motivated me to do so but for some reason I decided to look up what other people were doing with BWC long before I created the character, just kinda out of curiosity. And I saw a bunch of builds all touting themselves as BWC characters. And every single one of them was using the CD version of the skill. That can’t be right, I thought. How can you possibly be a BWC character when you only use your main skill once every 3.5 seconds or so, and all for just a 165 % total damage modifier. If you cast the spell several times a second you’d way surpass that sort of damage. And so I kept looking around for why people were building like that (that was years ago, a lot has changed about BWC and its transmuter since then). Pretty much the only information I was able to find at the time was: 1) BWC’s damage is poor, hence why people probably didn’t build around it, and 2) it slurps down Energy like crazy. I even saw specific mentions to the tune of “you need Sorcerer to properly sustain the skill as spam, otherwise don’t bother”. So when one of the last mastery combinations I had left to do was a Sorcerer, I immediately marked it as my dedicated BWC character.
Setup
Taking the Infernal Knight set was a no-brainer, of course, and given how many dedicated items BWC has for it, a good portion of the itemisation was on autopilot. On the weapon the only choices were Ugdenbog Flamestrife and Herald of the Blazing Ends, where Herald has always been miles ahead because of the duration, which massively increases damage per cast. The offhand was a similar story, except it used to be a bit more contested between Tome of Atonement and Zarthuzellan’s Codex, but the two items kept switching places in terms of priority. The Codex used to provide BWC duration early on, then it lost it and Tome was ahead because it provided flat damage to BWC while Codex didn’t. Then Codex got its flat damage added, and it was higher than the Tome’s, so Codex was better. And then the Tome got the duration modifier the Codex used to have, so now it’s all Tome of Atonement all the time. 10 bucks says those items will swap places again within a year. On the medal there was no replacement for Slathsarr’s Crest on Fire damage. And that was kinda it. The amulet was sadly left empty, as both potential options, Venomfire and Blightlord screw with the damage typing. The remaining task was trying to maximise the BWC nodes, which in the case of Demon Fire was pretty much impossible. Thankfully this is about to change in patch 1.2, where the IK set is about to get a whopping +5 to Demon Fire. So whatever the build’s performance winds up being now, in the future both the damage and the survivability are going to go up quite nicely.
Now, getting those modifiers on and getting the skill line up as much as possible is all nice and dandy, but that wasn’t even remotely the main thing the build needed to worry about. As I mentioned in Build Concept, before I started on the build I was already aware of two issues people reported: low damage, and difficulty in sustaining the Energy. The latter I was hoping Arcanist was solving for me, so I’d just have a slow-ish build but that would be the end of it. Actually, that wasn’t even the start of it. “It” being “the problems”. Because BWC has no % weapon damage on it, nor does it have any item modifiers that would allow leeching. So the build would need to figure out a way to replenish health without relying on its main damage skill. And Sorcerer ain’t exactly the class you’d look at when you need auxiliary healing. The only form of native health recovery on the whole class is the regen on Vindictive Flame and built-in leech on Ulzuin’s Wrath. The IK set also doesn’t do jack for regen or any of that stuff. So how exactly was this thing going to stay alive?
Now, I’ve had to solve this issue before on my Trozan Druid and was pleasantly surprised by the results of trying to sustain off of just heal procs. Difference is, Trozan runs around with like 40+% cooldown reduction and has Wendigo Totem. How exaclty was I supposed to get even remotely comparable results on Sorcerer with none of that? Another major difference between the two situations was that Trozan could inherently play as a kiting build, the vast majority of its damage all came from periodic casts of TSS, which the build could pull off just as comfortably stationary as when it was running. BWC had no such privilege. Akin to Seal of Consumption, BWC gets its damage up by stacking on and on on top of itself and ticking down the enemies standing within. It may look like a DoT skill but it’s not a DoT skill, its damage is all tied to an area. To make matters even worse, TSS is a cooldown skill so the Druid could slot in a leechable filler. If I was planning to spam BWC, there’s no filler for me. So having to essentially facetank with this, sustaining off of nothing but heal procs, with not even half of the CDR that Trozan had just didn’t seem like a feasible solution.
The path I chose to take when I started this character way back when was therefore the usual go-to for when you can’t sustain off of your main skill: I was gonna take Bat, and I was gonna convert as much of its damage to Fire as I could. There were three items that would help me do that: twin Blazeseer Signets and Darkblaze Source for the Vitality, and Gauntlets of Ignaffar for a bit of the Pierce. Sacrificing the gloves wasn’t particularly painful as there wasn’t a must have piece to take there for BWC. I could hardcap all the nodes except Demon Fire and hardcap Termite Mines with any gloves there. The other two items came at a cost. The inclusion of two Blazeseer Signets meant not only would I be sacrificing Demon Fire ranks from Entropic Coil, I’d also have to sac Combustion Band for RR. On the amulet, top priority was getting +1 to Demo skills, which Darkblaze Source did provide, but I would be missing out on % Fire damage on a build that was already supposed to have poor damage output.
That was the setup I ran on this build for a long, long time. I’ve tested the build with that setup in two separate patches, I believe, and it was by far the sweatiest 3/5 build I’ve ever played. Like, even my first character, the Pyromancer, which turned pretty damn meh because of essentially complete lack of item support, felt better than this even after its weapon got nerfed. Pretty much all the concerns I had about the build proved to be justified. The damage was ass and was not helped any by the fact that I was sacrificing % damage on amulet, RR on a ring, and skill ranks on another ring. Despite sporting Arcanist with a capped IEE and Mental Alacrity, I still had to take, I kid you not, Arcane Spark, Harvestman’s Scythe AND Scales. Yes, Scales, on a build with no real leech and with built-in flat RR on BWC. And even with that, the build’s Energy consistently kept going down, to the point that I’d have to chug Energy pots pretty much on cooldown without Scales. And the health sustain. Ehm, what sustain? Because of the way BWC keeps stacking up and ticking enemies down, Twin Fangs were triggering pretty damn consistently. And it was still, by all metrics, an absolutely miserable sustain source. It was particularly pronounced against the types of enemies where I was going to need the sustain the most: Grava, IM, Fabius, Kaisan. All of them capable of hitting fairly hard, all of them very Fire resistant and since Bat’s sustain scales based on how many enemies it was hitting, in 1v1 against these dangerous, resistant enemies, the sustain was at its worst when I needed it at its best. Despite the comfy Sorcerer rotation of “trigger Blast Shield, wait for it to run out, if health is still low, activate Mirror, by the time Mirror comes down Blast Shield is back up”, it just wasn’t a feasible way to sustain, even with fully converted Tip the Scales and with Giant and Turtle on top. I would take a massive Forcewave from IM, do the whole Blast Shield, Mirror, Blast Shield rotation, and my health will have barely moved back up. Despite the fact I was sacrificing four item slots just to get the Twin Fangs to do something, the just partial conversion wasn’t doing the trick. Another thing bringing the sustain down was the weapon, as it’s purely Physical, not Fire, meaning that the %WD component of Twin Fangs was pretty much doing nothing.
When I came back to this build to test it for this Overview in 9.8, things have changed a lot. To begin with, BWC’s tick rate was increased by about 20 % in 9.8, meaning the build just gained 20 % damage baseline without having to do anything extra for it. The mana cost increases on the various BWC nodes have also gone down dramatically, so that the build didn’t need to be anywhere near as invested into Energy regen devotions, passives and components as it used to be and its whole Energy game would be just fine. With that, I had high hopes for the build. Even if its sustain would still be bad, it just wouldn’t be nearly as painful to play, I could take some additional defensive measures with the freed up devo and skill points from Energy sustain, and I could maybe turn this into at least a passable build, a 7, maybe 8/10.
When I took it back out for a spin, it definitely was noticably better on the two aspects that were improved in 9.8, but the sustain still kept letting me down. I would have loved to go as defensive on the devos as possible, stack up all of the heals and try to imitate the whole Trozan setup, but one of the issues the build had was that there was a major shortage of good proccers. Offensively, the build wanted to take Meteor Shower, it needed Eldritch Fire on a good proccer like Mines, and the heal proc on BWC. There was no good place to slot in Dryad on top of Twin Fangs if I really wanted to go all out on the heals, and even though the build would very much enjoy the extra damage from Fissure, there was just no good place to put that one either. After doing some 2 or 3 runs with the Bat setup in 9.8, I just about had enough. I completed all of those runs successfully but it was just so uncomfortable. It felt like I was sacrificing four item slots for basically nothing. So I called it quits, cut out Bat, slotted in Dryad in its place, and with that, took the two rings I wanted, slotted in the best +skill and % damage amulet I could think of, since there were no good modifiers there, and finished the whole thing off with whatever Fire gloves I could take that would let me fill out the resist gaps I was left with (without Blazeseer Signets the Pierce and Chaos all went to shit and I neded to reshuffle a ton of stuff to fix that, which left other holes I needed the gloves to address). I also swapped boots from Wyrmscale Footguards to Earthshatter Treads for the same resistance reasons, which incidentally provided me with a better way to proc Meteor Shower (previously I had it on Flashbang, which, though it had an over 50 % proc chance, required some spamming to trigger in 1v1s). And it felt SO much better. With extra DR from Demon Fire and the more reliable sustain that was no longer dependent on the devo’s damage output, the build finally started to feel good enough on the sustain front, while its damage also went up in the meantime through Demon Fire, extra RR and more % damage. This is the final setup I settled on for this testing after the removal of Bat:
1.2 UPDATE: Has there ever been a playstyle that has had such a two-patch winning streak as Fire spam BWC? In 9.8 BWC’s tick rate was increased by 20 %, giving it just a straight up 20 % TDM. In 1.2 Infernal Knight received much needed Demon Fire points, meaning it can now cap the node. Several of the BWC item modifiers have also been increased. This has yielded another nearly 17 % sheet DPS increase to spam BWC. Actually probably more because the majority of the damage gained is flat, which stacks on repeat casts, while some of the on-sheet DPS is diluted by Burn. But that’s not all. With the additional Demon Fire points, the build also gained 3 % extra damage reduction. Still not done. Pretty much all the heal sources the build uses are better, even more so because the build’s health is more protected by the extra DR. Dryad heals for more, Behemoth heals for longer and gives more regen, Wayward Soul gives more armor, Ghoulish Hunger now increases cast speed as well (helps combat slows) and amplifies all healing, making it more valuable. And regen has gone up globally. The build regens about 400 more hp per second at rest and about a 1000 (double its original regen) at peak than it did before. And the build has gained about a 100 DA. Like holy shit.
This build is pretty much unrecognisable from what it was back in 9.7. The only downside to all of the above is that the Demon Fire points on IK came at the cost of Thermite Mine points, so while the sheet dps has gone up by 17 % there has been a loss of 5 % RR, making the damage gains slightly weaker. That would technically open up room to make up for that on some of the other gear, such as Wyrmbone Handguards or Wyrmscale Footguards, but the resist setup makes that a bit messy on the gloves, and replacing the existing boots robs the build of a reliable way to proc Meteor Shower. Regardless, even without any compensation for the lost Thermite Mine points the build breezes through 80-81 comfortably and I could definitely see it doing 85+ with all this newfound strength. The only change that needs to be made to the above-linked build is there is now a 1 point overcap on Demon Fire. That point can go pretty much anywhere between IEE, Overload, Nullification or Fabric of Reality.
Performance
(DPS for BWC with permabuffs up…not that the number tells you much of anything; keep in mind BWC and Flashbang massively debuff enemy OA/DA respectively, meaning both numbers are effectively at around the 3k mark.)
10/10
Sooo…an embarassing little story to open up with. In one of the prior patches, the Energy sustain situation was just so incredibly bad and the resist and OA situation was sufficiently iffy with the different devo and gear setup, that I was looking for any ways I could find to save some skill points and alleviate those problems. One of the things that caught my eye was Reckless Power. All I was getting out of it was the % damage. The flat damage didn’t matter, the conversion was useless, I was capped on cast speed already. And I was sacrificing 18 skill points on the Arcanist mastery just to climb to that. For 135 % Fire damage, when I had so many other issues to solve. And so, for one of the test runs in one of the past patches, I tried dropping Reckless Power for a bit to invest more points in Mental Alacrity, Overload, and put some spares into Temper for more DA. When I came back to test this build now, I returned the skill allocation to the way it was before, as that route didn’t seem any better. Except…um…I then didn’t put Reckless Power back on the second skill bar after I skilled it back up. And I didn’t realise it until I got dispelled by an Arcane, reapplied my auras and noticed that I don’t have Reckless Power up. So I tab over and…why is it not on the skill bar? That was the only reason I noticed the mistake. And…um…I was already on my 10th run. Awkward!!
So I had to scrap the footage I already had uploaded for the build, cancel the run I was on, put the Reckless Power back where it belongs, and had to redo the 10th run just so I have at least some footage and some feel for what the build should have played like the whole fucking time. Now, because my cast speed rolls on gear were very good, the build was already more than sorted on cast speed even without Reckless Power, so there was no loss of damage there unless slows were involved. The % damage definitely helps but it wouldn’t really revolutionise the build or anything, especially since % damage was no longer involved in the build’s sustain. No, what is involved in the build’s sustain is proc heals. And one of them, Wayward Soul, was bound to Reckless Power. So I’ve done 9 out of these 10 runs with one of the heal/defensive procs missing and with about 5 % less DPS. Ehm…oopsie!
Because of that, most of what I’ll be saying here has to be taken with a grain of salt, as instead of 10 runs of proper experience with the build, I only really have 1 accompanied by 9 runs with a handicap. But you know what, I’m gonna call that a plus. Because this build was a 9/10 and on its way to doing a 10/10, and I have to say, not an uncomfortable 10/10, and all that with a bunch of healing, DA and armor missing, and with no defensive stun retal or additional % damage. And it was already doing well. Now, surprise surprise, it’s doing even better.
The Energy sustain, which was the whole reason I even made this a Sorcerer, is now very comfortable. So comfortable, Arcanist just isn’t really bringing much to the table anymore. Because the build’s health sustain is now mostly % based (“mostly”, because all the various heals still have some flat health to them), it doesn’t really make much of a difference whether the build has middling health but lot of % absorb or just a massive health pool with no absorb. As long as the effective health pool is the same, it makes no difference for the sustain, which isn’t the case for leech-based builds. With that, taking Oathkeeper in place of Arcanist would be a better option, as that mastery also has RR and healing amplification, and is getting some points naturally from the belt, and more can be added via the amulet slot. Alternatively, you could use Occultist, Shaman, Inquisitor, or even Nightblade of all things, since there’s some support for that on the weapon. The only thing Arcanist is bringing to the table at this point is Nullification, more comfortable access to cast speed (though Vindictive Flame can serve that purpose just as well), and Mirror. The % damage on Arcanist is nice and all but that won’t rival having a second RR mastery, not by a long shot. The damage benefits would just be too great.
Speaking of damage, 9.8 was absolutely revolutionary for this build. It’s amazing what 20 % extra damage can do. This build used to be a slog to play. While it may not be one of those 7-8 minute SR75-76 runners, it now just feels very nice and snappy. Even more so when you actually got Reckless Power running…who knew. Even the resistant enemies don’t feel all that bad to fight, particularly since thanks to Dryad the build now heals the exact same way against resistant enemies or unleechable enemies as it does against everything else. It’s also worth pointing out that, given my past experience with the build, I chose to still spec it very defensively. There isn’t much that can be done about Fabius, IM or Kaisan, but you can speed up your fights against Grava, Ekket’Zul and SharZul with a Sanctified Bone to shore up some of that slowness against Fire-resistant bosses. I chose to take the more generalist route of slotting in a Prismatic Diamond, which defends and intermittently improves damage against everything. Plus the % health essentially amplifies the sustain.
Speaking of sustain, abandoning the Bat route feels like the right call. The item slots it opened up helped the build improve its damage even further, and in the end brought the build better sustain with less space investment, though I’m judging that just by feel. It is worth pointing out that in 1.2 the Bat route is going to get a little more comfortable to gear for, as the Vitality to Fire conversion that I was getting from the Darkblaze Source will be removed and placed instead on the weapon at a 45 % conversion rate. There will still, however, be a need to sac some slots to get the rest of the conversion going, and the weapon’s damage typing isn’t changing, so the %WD on Bat will still be essentially worthless. Even though the change to the conversion was made specifically for the benefit of the BWC+Bat combo, I’m not sure it’ll end up being worth it. Maybe if the weapon became a Fire scepter.
Regardless, with Dryad, Giant’s Blood, Turtle, Prismatic Rage and the defensive triple-tap of Blast Shield, Mirror, Blast Shield, the build sustains sufficiently well that it can fight almost anything barring maybe Korvaak, Theodin or Gargabol while fully facetanking, as it needs to to keep the enemy in the BWC pools. Add to that the Wayward Soul that I was missing for the majority of the runs and things get even more comfortable. Though I chose to include Ghoul on the build, I don’t think it was really all that worth it. Obviously, the leech aspect of Ghoul isn’t doing shit on a build with no %WD on anything, what I was looking for was just the extra phys res for when I take a massive beating, but it didn’t feel like I was getting all that much use out of that. Better to have it and not need it rather than need it and not have it, of course, but those points could probably go somewhere else, like, I dunno, Jackal or something, for just some generic phys res that isn’t contingent on procs. Like I mentioned, there is sadly a shortage of good offensive proccers, so even if you could reshuffle the points to drop Ghoul and open up space for some sort of offensive proc, there isn’t really anything to bind it to, so just generic stats will probably have to suffice. One of the important things for this % heal-based sustain system is getting a good health pool going. The versions I tested in prior patches sat at around 15-16k, but when I redid the itemisation and overhauled the whole devo path away from Scythe and Bat, I ended up getting the health pool to over 19k. On a Sorcerer, not exactly the healthiest of classes. A big part of that was the roll on the pants. If you end up getting something a little weaker, the Ghoul may become more relevant to keep the build alive.
Not all is perfect though. To begin with, the build’s health sustain is essentially flat. With leech-based sustain, something like Bat, the sustain changes based on how many targets the sustain source is hitting. With heal-based sustain, that’s not the case. Just because your healing is good enough to stay healthy against 4 heroes doesn’t mean it’ll be good enough against 6. It doesn’t scale up or down, the only way your healing “ramps up” is that if there are more things hitting you, they’ll be proccing Giant’s Blood and Wayward Soul more consistently than if you take 1 hit every second. Giant has some persistent healing to it but with Wayward Soul that’s a one and done deal, once it procs, enemies can just keep hammering you and no additional healing is coming. So it’s important to aggro enemies in manageable amounts, use your Mirror on time, or manoeuvre out of the thick of it when the numbers become overwhelming. You can’t just go ham and leech from an entire army as you might be used to, though with the improved damage a lot of that army will just be a molten puddle after a few seconds anyway.
This reliance on procs brings with it another “issue” which is that you need to keep a close eye on what is up, what is on cooldown, and decide how you need to react as a result. If you’re taking a lot of damage but Blast Shield is off cooldown, no need to panic, just wait for it to trigger and then you’re essentially untouchable for the next 4 seconds. If during that time Giant’s Blood procs, you’re once again safe for a while thanks to the slab of regen you just got for the next 10 s (another thing that’s about to get better for the build in 1.2, regen sustain). But once those are down, the only thing standing between your now reduced health pool and death is Prismatic Rage, which isn’t all that strong defensively, Ghoul, which may slow down the Physical damage but does nothing for the rest, Turtle, which will last for just a little bit, and then you got Mirror. So a lot of the time, in the middle of the fight you’re not even looking at the battle taking place cause you’ll be looking above your health bar like a hawk checking for that Blast Shield timer, looking for Giant’s Blood, for Turtle shield health remaining, checking the Dryad cooldown, seeing if you really need to pop that Mirror or if you should wait. You don’t, for example, want to waste Mirror while Blast Shield or Giant is up, and you don’t want to waste Mirror if your health is just about to jump back up thanks to Dryad or Wayward Soul coming off cooldown. That can mean you’ll miss some important stuff happening on the battlefield as you’re just staring at the bottom left. On the plus side…it’s not like you would have seen anything anyway.
Because probably the biggest problem this build has is visual clarity. If there was any visual clarity, you wouldn’t be able to see it. It’s hard to spot much of anything that’s happening when BWC is burning a hole into your retinas. If there’s an Arcane projectile sailing through the air towards your location, you ain’t gonna see it unless it enters from outside the blazing inferno you’ve created. It will be completely drowned out by the flames the moment it enters the AoE. If the Arcane is standing in your BWC pool, there’s a chance you won’t even notice it’s an Arcane, cause their model will be completely drowned out unless they’re one of the larger types like Bloodkeepers or Ryloks. And same goes for pretty much everything. You could be standing on Cairn’s deadliest stack of on-death acid pools and you wouldn’t know until your health starts disappearing. If there’s a Diseased enemy around, you have to notice them before you start casting, cause after that it’s just fire, fire as far as the “I can’t see!!”. The only way you’ll be able to tell that Fabius has popped his Blade Barrier is that his health stopped moving. Except you’re probably not even looking at his health cause you’re just eyeing the bottom left. You better hear Valdaran trigger his barrage aura cause you won’t see it, and you’ll often only see your health going down rather than see the projectiles themselves. Oh, yeah, for whatever reason, BWCs on the ground count as projectiles for Rashalga, Slathsarr and Valdaran. No clue why. In a way, it’s a good thing this build’s playstyle is so simple. Just lay down Mines, spam BWCs, and periodically apply Flashbang and Stomp to trigger Meteor Shower. Cause between being unable to see shit, and having to watch your proc timings, it’s not like you’d be able to make any complex sequencing decisions anyway. About the best that can be expected of you is occasionally looking to the bottom right too to see if you need to Nulli something off.
Despite some of the feel I have for the build being skewed by the fact I was running it with a handicap for 9 out of the 10 runs, I really have nothing bad to say about it outside of the visual clarity problems. It’s one of those “all AoE all the time” builds, so obviously its clear is going to be way better than its single target, but it’s good enough on both now after 9.8. It still means in chunks you’re better off avoiding the Fire resistant Nemeses, of which there are plenty, but at worst you can just drag the Nemesis with you through the chunk, take advantage of your defensive procs and Mirror, and just burn your way to chunk completion by exploiting larger hordes. Regardless of the good, reliable performance though (only 1 death in total across the 10 runs, possibly caused by the missing sustain source in that run), with the improvements to Energy sustain I can’t really recommend recreating this on Arcanist as there just isn’t really much of a point, not with the heal-based sustain. With Bat, Sphere might have some extra merit, making whatever health you do recover through leech more valuable, but with %-health healing in play, you can just as easily stack up a larger health pool on something like Oathkeeper or Shaman and get similar effective sustain while doing more damage thanks to the extra RR. On Shaman you might even just try to sustain off of regen and drop some of the heal procs. Whatever path you choose, spam BWC is definitely in a better spot than it has ever been, as all the core issues of old have been pretty much eliminated, leaving just one thing to think about: how to go about the health sustain. And to that, there might be even more good answers in 1.2 than there are now thanks to regen buffs, while the damage and DR will go up thanks to additional Demon Fire points. And Herald is getting an extra 10 flat damage to BWC to boot. Things are only looking up for us arsonists.
Here are the SR75-76 and SR80 parts of the one run I did where the build was actually using all the tools in its toolbox. Needless to say, if I had a good feeling about the build from the 9 handicap runs, this one just felt comfy. Something I thought I would never say about spam BWC based on my past experiences.
One more build left and all the mastery combinations are complete 