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
Continuing my coverage of all the mastery combinations, the last thing left to finish off Shaman was Trickster. I wanted to go for something that would represent both masteries very well, would be sufficiently different from things I’ve done before, and would, hopefully, explore some skills and options I had yet to touch. And pretty much all of that was encapsulated in the weapon Rancor.
Now, normally when it comes to Nightblade stabby stabby bleedies, I wouldn’t go for a 2hander flavour-wise. Assassination shenanigans don’t exactly gel well with dragging a giantass sword around. But it just seemed too perfect, not just because of the things it would let me cover but also because, back in my brief PoE days, when it came time to build a Trickster there I was pretty stumped. Until I found a bigass two-handed sword to do tricky stuff with (I built Flicker Strike with Terminus Est and it was hilarous). So to pay homage to that character with GD’s Trickster seemed like a nice touch, though of course I wouldn’t be flickering anywhere.
As for the unexplored things the sword would let me cover, there were many. To begin with, across the 30+ characters I’ve made by that point, I only had one that focused on Bleeding at all. It was my least explored damage alongside Chaos. So making another Bleed build and exploring options I have not used before was very appealing. Bleed was a very nice point of overlap between the two masteries, so I’d have a lot of options to choose from. In addition, Rancor’s focus on Phantasmal Blades was very attractive. At this point the only time I’ve used PBlades was on my two Bloodsworn Witch Hunter variants, and those were spam. Using them as spam with Frenetic Throw kinda takes the bite out of the skill. -60% TDM will do that. I wanted to give PBlades their opportunity to shine, not as a weakling skill that takes 10 casts to do anything, but as a real powerhouse of a nuke, kinda akin to Titan Quest’s Throwing Knives or…well…other media…
And where previously I have done Bleed on a caster (Conjurer to be exact), I would once again be exploring something new here in trying to do it with mostly melee through Savagery and Ring of Steel. Though doing a DoT build in melee range seemed like a really stupid idea (why be in melee when you’re just wating for DoT ticks) it also seemed like there’d be a lot of interesting stuff to figure out. And with the Pierce support offered by Rancor, it would also likely be possible to get a decent enough flat damage aspect on the build, which alleviated my worries.
Setup
Issues started appearing before I even put the build together for gameplay, though. Right from theorycrafting I could see that things might not turn out as well as I imagined. To begin with, with the weapon slot occupied there wasn’t much support for Pierce+Bleed PBlades. There was pretty much just Packla’s Visage and Mark of Consumption, both of which were just Bleed, not Piercing. My thought was: well, I already have a 50 % TDM for PBlades, maybe I don’t need more than that. Occupying the helmet slot with Packla just for a bit of Bleed seemed like a waste and I wanted the build to be about more than just PBlades, especially since Bleed specifically demands the use of more than just one skill to stack up. I wanted to make use of Savagery, Feral Hunger, possibly Upheaval, as they all carry Bleed, and on Nightblade there was Ring of Steel with both a heap of Bleed and some defensive utility (Stun, Fumble) which a DoT-focused build might sorely need. And as it so happened, there was a close to ideal set supporting just that. I say close to ideal because of one sliiiiight problem: Bloodrager may be a Trickster set, it may be supporting RoS, but it lacks Pierce support. Given that that was supposed to be the part that would be sustaining the build, and the part that was supposed to justify the fact the build would be attacking in melee rather than kiting and letting things tick down, that was going to be a problem. Add to that the fact the weapon lacks attack speed and I was starting to get real worried about the viability of this concept. I would still be hard pressed to find better Bleed Savagery and RoS support, though, so I decided to commit to Bloodrager and hope it turns out well.
1.2 UPDATE: Build gained just the tiniest bit of flat damage from somewhere, not sure where. The regen buffs have not left a particular mark on the build (+300 health per second), while the leech nerf hasn’t impacted the build either. Plenty of health coming in before, plenty coming in now (helped also by more heal amp from Mogdrogen the Wolf). The build also gained 30% disrupt res. Given that it’s a more static autoattacker, that comes in handy. Butchers its way through SR80-81 pretty easily. Could see it pushing 85+. The dodge + fumble playstyle of Nightblade is also forgiving of occasional failure to dodge Sunder.
With the weapon and Bloodrager slots occupied there wasn’t that much left to work with. On the boots my choice was pretty clear from the start, as there isn’t much better Pierce/Bleed support to be found, and same with rings, with brought both the right % damage, some extra Pierce flat, valuable skill points, good proc and Lightning to Pierce conversion which was supposed to help with the Savagery and Upheaval damage. On the gloves I would be forced to give up on getting both Pierce and Bleed damage, as there were too many good options on Bleed (Unchained Might, Sandreavers, Crimson Claws). I chose to go for the latter cause not only was that bringing good Bleed damage (because of the Feral Hunger mod) it was also going to help solve the sustain problem. If my % damage on the leechable flat was going to be low, let’s say like half of what I would have wanted, I was going to have to make up for that by getting double the leech % to survive.
On the pants and belt there were some tough choices to be made. Normally on an attacking Bleed build I would just take Barbaros and call it a day, but the high Physique demands interfered with my intention to go for high Cunning (because of the efficiency thanks to Anatomy of Murder), so I would need to opt for some of those 662 Physique pants instead. Among these, the ones that caught my eye were Flesheater Legwraps because of the added leech, the Anatomy points, and the damage to Humans. On the belt, I wanted to take Guthook because, well, what’s not to like? Flat Bleed damage, speed, support for both damage types, for once, and plenty of valuable skill points. As you can see above, that’s not what I ended up doing, but I’ll explain more about that in the Performance section.
On the skills there were yet more issues and more uncomfortable decisions I would be forced to make. I just didn’t have enough points to go around. Originally I thought I might splash in some Blade Spirits but it became obvious those would be out of reach. Hell, even parts of the core skills seemed to be out of reach. I had a good number of buffs or passives to skill up, two RR skills to work with, and I was trying to get in full Savagery, RoS and PBlades lines. That was just too much but I couldn’t see a way to resonably shave off some points on buffs and passives to get the damage lines sorted. So I made the unsavoury decision to…not get them sorted. I tanked them. Even though the original idea was to use PBlades as a massive nuke thanks to Rancor, I didn’t end up maxing out Nether Edge. Given my Pierce % was going to be low, and Nether Edge was only partly efficient because Rancor provided conversion for just the Chaos damage but not the Cold, I decided to accept the fact the nuke isn’t going to be all that nuky. Same thing with RoS. I couldn’t commit to the Pierce aspect of it so I just went all out on the Bleed and hoped it would be enough. Needless to say I was not optimistic about the build at this point.
Figuring out the devo path was not difficult. I took RRs for both damage types, and headed for the two main Bleed T3s as best I could. That did, unfortunately, eat up a lot of points. Though all of them were well spent, with nary a wasted devo in sight, it did leave a lot to be desired in terms of defenses. Given that the build wouldn’t be sporting native DR and at most I would be relying on Attuned Lodestones (this was before the swap from Guthook) and I was going to be sporting some really mediocre flat damage numbers with possibly very low attack speeds, I would have liked to stack those defenses sky high. That would mean Ghoul and Turtle, possibly even Bat, and I could take neither.
So, what I was looking at, when it was all put together, was a build with next to no defense, horrifyingly low % bonus on the flat damage to sustain from, low attack speed without procs, and a melee playstyle. This is the stuff disaster builds are made of. A foregone conclusion, this one, and a sad note for Shaman to go out on.
Performance
(DPS for Savagery with permabuffs, Pneumatic Burst, Savagery stacks and set proc active)
10/10
I want to have this build’s babies.
Right when I started doing some endgame testing on it it was proving me wrong. Now, it was glassy, as I expected (again, reminder, that was with Fleasheater Legwraps and Guthook Belt) but where early on I felt like the big 2h melee fighting style just wasn’t very tricksy, this build felt like a proper Trickster. It would dip into combat just long enough to apply its various bleeds and then it would zip out and duck and dive and bob and weave just out of the enemy’s range till they bled out. It was always dancing just on the precipice of committing a little too much and dying, and any large amoutns of damage it took threatened to be its last because of the poor defenses. And it was FAST. It might be just the fact that my previous build (Korvan Wyrm Vindictator) was rather slow, but this thing felt blisteringly fast. It was particularly amusing to fight Humans. Between Guthook Belt, Flesheater Legwraps and Anatomy of Murder the build was fucking butchering people. You could almost see the digital sweat forming on Fabius’ forehead as you landed a few bleeds on him and the zeroes and ones in him started going “oh my fucking god what’s happening to my healthbar??”. It just went zzzzzzip and it was gone.
Unfortunately, as outstanding as the build felt damage wise, I don’t test for speed. I test for reliability. And with the survivability issues the build had, it was just far too likely that its score would end up suffering. The second run I did with that setup proved that very nicely, as I got shotgunned by a Groble Shaman hero with one of those splitting Acid projectiles in one hit from full at SR76, and later died and failed the run at SR77 to a one-shot from Theodin with no enemy damage bonuses or player defense maluses in sight. So I decided to take a step back and see if I can do something about the defenses.
I tried a few things, including slotting in Turtle at the horrible, horrible cost of Assassin’s Blade and Falcon. It was a solution that worked, no doubt about it, but it felt like perhaps I was going a bit overboard. And while the build was still solid, it did slow down enough that it stopped feeling as exciting and exceptional as it did before, which would be a sad state to leave it in. The devo points I needed to sacrifice to get that Turtle setup going, though, did end up having a different benefit. Because I wasn’t slotting in Crane on the Turtle setup, I needed to find a way to solve the resistances, as even with Crane the overcaps were iffy and without Crane they were not feasible. That gave me the idea to check my stash if I have some solutions there, which is where I found the nutty resist pants linked in the build above. I’ve found those like a year ago and stashed them away for when I have a build that just really, really desperately needs the resists. Then I promptly forgot about them. They would probably rot in my stash until Fangs of Asterkarn if I wasn’t so determined to get this build to excel. With these crazyass pants, the overcaps and cc res improved to very comfortable levels, especially once I returned back to the original devo path without Turtle and with Crane. The reason I felt comfortable taking Turtle off wasn’t the pants though, it was the belt. Originally I was solving my DR through Attuned Lodestone as there just wasn’t any on-tree DR to be had on Trickster. Then I incidentally found Lacerator Girdle in one of my test runs with the Turtle setup. And I went “oh wait a minute, didn’t I want to test these on the build back in 9.7?” Yes, yes I did want to. But I never did. If I didn’t find the Girdle when I did it’s quite likely I would have not realised that mistake and I would be presenting this as maybe a 7/10 or 8/10 build because of the poor survivability. Well, not anymore. While I did lose some nice skill bonuses from Guthook, with the % DR from Lacerator I could free up a component slot. And with the resists the way they were thanks to the pants, I could also make some more defensive choices on other components and augments so that I now felt comfortable enough to drop Turtle and return to the original, more offensive devo setup. The unfortunate side effect of these changes is that without the Flesheater pants and Guthook, the build’s presence no longer automatically melts any humans in the same time zone. The only anti-human bonus left is Anatomy. 15 % anti-Human damage vs 42 % anti-Human damage…not quite comparable. le sigh
On the plus side, though we may not be as anti-social as we were before, it doesn’t really matter cause we just murder everything. The build did lose a small part of that tricky aspect, as it’s no longer forced to duck and weave through fights and can mostly just stand there and butcher everything. But who cares about the niche flavour aspects when the build just bloody works? It is still a bit volatile, and that health can bounce around a lot so some defensive play against larger, dangerous groups of enemies (like Gargoyle hero groups) is advised. But for the most part, this is now just a pure Jack the Ripper of a build. In the SR80 run below the build was done with the whole ordeal in just a hair under 6 minutes even though it was stuck fighting Seeker of the Damned with Timewarped mutator. Not exactly a “short room”.
The build just ended up solving all of its problems. My initial worry was the low % Pierce damage because of Bloodrager, but thanks to Bloodrager and the other pieces of gear, the Bleed damage is high enough that things still die fast, just not to the Pierce aspect of the build. Similarly, the sacrifices I was forced to make on the nuke aspects of PBlades and RoS didn’t seem to hurt the build any. Another thing I was worried about was the low attack speed as it’s missing from the weapon. But between Bloodrager, Howl of Mogdrogen, Prismatic Diamond and the boot proc the build can intermittently soar right up to 200 % attack speed at times. On the sustain front the build ended up getting exactly what it needed: it may have about half of the flat % damage to leech from but it has double the leech a build would normally require, plus some additional jumps from Feral Hunger, the Upheaval mod on the medal, PBlades (despite the lengthy cooldown), the Bloodrager procs and Wendigo Totem, so the health can go from close to zero to full extremely rapidly. Which was the main point of the Pierce aspect of the build anyway. By taking Lacerator and sacrificing some of the flat damage on RoS and PBlades in favour of some of the useful passives, the build also managed to eventually get enough of a health pool and reliable DR that it doesn’t get one-shot anymore (also helped by the great DA despite the tanked Physique), which means it has the time it requires to leech right back up to full.
It’s just…it’s good. It’s fast. It’s exciting. It isn’t quite autowin because the health can still be quite volatile, but that just means you get to stay engaged instead of just sailing your way to victory. I thought I was setting myself up for disaster but I fucking love this thing. And, it’s worth mentioning, if all you’re interested in is quickly and efficiently farming SR75-76, you don’t have to go through all that hassle of figuring out some way to solve the resists with miracle green pants like I have, you don’t have to mess around with Lacerator Girdle. You can keep the Flesheater + Guthook setup, eviscerate all Human enemies by just looking at them, and you’ll still cruise your way through SR75-76 very comfortably and quite quickly. It’s only really at the higher shards or with more difficult mutators that the defenses really started being problematic. So you can live out that fantasy of being that evasive, slippery Trickster that just blitzes in for some wanton slaughter and zips right back out and it’ll be a workable build.
Here are the usual SR75-76 and SR80 parts of one of my runs.
With this, I now get to conclude the collection of builds for each class combo on a high note. There’s only 2 builds from that project left to go, and both of them are in my favourite mastery, the Demolitionist 
Not to worry though, I’m not quite done with overviews, after those 2 are done, I got another 4 builds left that I ended up making for different reasons.
I model if your build otherwise has enough -RR% or flat RR for PR you might get better returns on investment damage wise taking Maul. Of course, the devotion points AM gives does make it very easy to take for devotion paths for physical builds. As yellow and purple (sorry, lethologica ate the correct terms) points are oft required for higher tier devotions in that area.