So great to see someone else struggling with an Ultos build lol. I’ve taken 8 builds to endgame now and my Ultos Warder is still the one I’ve struggled the most to get to perform as advertised in guides. Appreciate the in-depth info and build-craft!
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Same honestly, I’ve tried multiple things and still struggle to consistently clear sr 75-76. Maybe weaving savagery would help in my case (but I hate doing it so I won’t use it).
Just…squishy and I don’t know why. Specs are fine on paper (192 AS in game, 62 ish slow res), AOE is great but careless playing even with constant DR will get you overwhelmed in SR. And…Grava is such a bitch ass kunt I almost insta-restart when he spawns lol.
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Yeah I have the same problem. Just recently switched to Savagery only with Upheaval maxed and it feels a LOT better but still not great. Realizing I need to be better about overcapping and secondary cc resists in general too.
Yeah your Chaos res really leaves you open to his rr, he’ll slap you around hard when it’s up. I think you need to drop the medal component and use Black Tallow there. That’ll improve your DA, your Chaos res and give you % reduction against him. It was really a noticeable improvement for the fight when I switched to it.
Also glad to see your cc res is just as awful as mine (as in, what is cc res?). I really don’t see a way to fix it with what the Lightning devo path and Ultos gear offers.
I also think swapping the ring to a second Storm Seal might be needed to get that DA up. I’ve had some very sweaty fights against Fabius and that was even with him not being able to crit me. A physique dump could also help on that front. Even though both Cunning and Spirit give you great benefits for damage, if survivability is an issue, you get a lot out of every point in physique thanks to the % increase from Military Conditioning. You’ll still probably end up in squishlyville like me, particularly because you don’t get the benefits of the % phys res on Might of the Bear, but then again your AoE is better than mine so you might have an easier time with hordes at the cost of having a worse time with bosses.
Oh and I think just 1 point in Break Morale does the job well enough. Those could instead go to Oak Skin for the res and DA.
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I mucked around with augments, components and skill points following mad_lee’s advice:
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I’m not sure the shift from Storm Touched to the WPS is actually worth it. If I were to take either of the Soldier WPS I’d probably take Zolhan cause that one has AoE. But, taking either of them diminishes the proc rate of Upheaval, plus the dmg output of the build in general will go down because of the missing Storm Touched bonuses. Attack speed, flat electrocute, % lightning all down. As for the Arcane Spark, I think the fight against Grava will really get a lot worse without the dmg reduction against Chthonics, not to mention the Chaos res overcap is now too low to protect against his RR (you need 28 for that). I’d leave the Tallow there. I think the main improvement that can be made is swapping out the glove component for the Wrappings and reshuffling the augments to make up for the removed Ugden Leather. Probably something like this.
Fixing the missing Acid afterwards does make the Pierce res worse but I wouldn’t change the chest component cause that may fix the pierce res but then wrecks the armor absorb, so we’d be better off against enemies the debuff pierce resistance, sure, but we’d be worse off against almost literally everything cause phys damage is so prevalent.
However, I don’t think this slight reshuffle would noticably change the overall performance of the build. Cause the issue of awful CC resists remains and I don’t think it can be addressed without gutting a major portion of the setup. There is no trap res on the devo tree that we can reasonably get and the gear slots where we could get it (such as swapping the boots for Footpads of the Grey Magi) all put a wrecking ball to one of our damage resistances. Oleron on the chest nukes our resists and armor absorb and all we get out of it is a mere 24 % reduction anyway. We can replace the Corpse Dust on the ring with Frozen Heart to get a little bit of Petrify, but that’s a sufficiently rare cc that I don’t think it would really have a noticable impact.
In order for the build to decidedly improve without losing something important somewhere else, I think Ultos would just have to provide better resistances. Cause we’re building on such a shaky foundation we don’t have the freedom to fix everything we need to.
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So I just did some math (yuck) looking at the resistances provided by the 5pc sets. And wouldn’t you know it, Ultos is in the bottom two. Arguably, it’s the bottom one because it supercharges just one elemental resistance and thus wastes a good portion of the total res it provides.
Here are the numbers for the fun of it. Since elemental comes lumped together on everything except Ultos, I treated it as a single resistance rather than three for the totals. For Ultos I just averaged the ele res.
1 Markovian – 348 dmg res total of which 0 is phys, 30 slow (also provides by far the most health and most armor)
2-3 Ulzuin – 252 dmg res total of which 15 is phys, 0 cc res
2-3 Iskandra – 244 dmg res total of which 15 is phys, 50 slow
Ulzuin has more res but Iskandra has the slow as extra which might nudge it to no 2 depending on how much you value it
4 Deathmark – 219 dmg res total of which 16 is phys, 0 cc res
5 Runebinder – 209 dmg res total of which 3 is phys, 0 cc res
6 Virtue – 188 dmg res total of which 18 is phys, 0 cc res (second highest health)
7-8 Ultos – 183 dmg res total of which 16 is phys, 0 cc res
7-8 Dreeg – 171 dmg res total of which 12 is phys, 20 stun, 20 freeze
Ultos may have more raw res but the cc on Dreeg should push it to no. 7
9 Uroboruuk – 163 dmg res total of which 3 is phys, 0 cc res (third highest health)
However, if we don’t average the elemental resists for Ultos and just take fire/cold as the base (since we still need to fix those anyway and they will mostly come as all ele res, not fire/cold), Ultos has 140 total res, with no cc. Which makes it far and away the worst set in terms of raw resists provided.
Obviously it’s not that simple, the availability of res on the desired devo routes matters, the amount of res provided by ideal gear matters, res provided by masteries matters. You can end up with unnecessary overcaps just naturally and waste a good portion of what the sets provide, etc. And that’s not even talking about OA and DA (Ultos stands out in neither department though). But it’s no surprise Ultos is such a struggle on resists when it takes up 5 item slots and provides that little on the resist front. The rest of the build then has to pull double duty to get that shit sorted.
don’t necessarily have to take from storm touched, could just take from ex Torrent, given its special mechanic means it has limited dmg potential, (although that’s less pronounced on CD primal strike ofc)
meanwhile if Savagery is your main spam, wps is significantly going to affect dmg potential there
What special mechanic? I know it didn’t use to hit the main target but that’s no longer the case afaik.
Torrent on PS is a "secondary mechanic"effect, which means, A it doesn’t get PS modifiers applied, and B in this case has an internal cooldown/limit, “only 1 torrent can be active at a time” (iirc)
*the 1 limit is usually only a big deal factor for spam, but since mods also doesn’t apply, and the WD portion is useless for dot stacking because of dot rules, means Torrent does get some slight less value on CD primal strike too
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The internal cooldown I did not know about, though chain lightning type skills do tend to have some sort of a limit so that they don’t bounce over and over between the same two enemies. The rest was expected, since it’s a secondary ability like Brimstone and such.
I’m still not sure it’s worth sacrificing, given how big a portion of the build’s AoE (and sustain) Primal Strike is and how often I’m getting to use it with all the CDR I’ve got. I’m 1 point short of getting another target on it, sadly, but I’m only 1 level over the last breakpoint, so there’s not that many points I can free up at no loss. And every point in WPS comes at the cost of Upheaval proc chance. With Upheaval all it took was 1 point and I got a decent “WPS” out of it. I lack the skill point bonuses on the Soldier side so I’d have to get it all to a decent level manually. If I only free up 2 or 3 skill points, the WPS I get out of it isn’t all that great.
you aint proccing that many upheavals anyway 
reminds me, Ultos shoudl really be on devils, and you should have 1pt in maelstrom too
elemental storm you should be able to pretty safely have on primal strike
*crit calc is saying you currently have 15% crit chance against trash enemies with 2400DA, less against the boss room nemesis ofc
which means you’re getting 15% hits of 101%wd increase, meanwhile even moddest amount of points into wps would be more than 15% interval, making it probably much more worth, even if the effective wd is lower
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I think Ultos set is a relic from the past and needs some fresh re-work. Like Marcus mentioned, resists are terrible to juggle on this set; some chaos res would be nice. Also; phys res doesn’t exist on individual pcs nor is there a set bonus as is common with other 5 pice sets.
Secondly, if you’re not using savagery as a crutch for PS; your attack speed will not be capped. Best I seen was @Slev1n ’s old Thunderbolt Warder build. 193 AS with GD stashed gear. Legit players will struggle to have around 190 with similar set up on Warder. Non soldier builds will have even lower speed. I myself managed 192 but that’s after hours and hours farming best rolled Ultos stick; and rings and so on. Maybe set can get a %speed bonus or AS bonus.
Thirdly. Tone Grava’s fumble pools the fuck down please! Lightning aa builds like this have an unfair struggle against this guy. No other nemesis consistently manages to be such a problem for a single archetype as this fucker.
@madlee I’m tagging you because I’m curious to hear your opinions on current Ultos situation.
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Thanks man! Long day. 
Have I been summoned again to this thread? Ha.
Current Ultos situation is that it can be a decent middle of the road build, even able to farm most of the endgame and facetank Ravager. But its inherent flaws stand in the way of it being trully top-tier. We did test Ultos Archon for top20 min-maxed by @banana_peel himself and it was an all right build. But stuff like lack of good passive and active defenses, usually low DA, scuffed adtch because of -tdm% dipping, Grava and his pools make it forever flawed.
And I am talking about optimal Ultos setups that are PS spams (but everyone of course has a right to play how he wants it’s strictly nerd talk)
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But of course. The local mad lord himself, back in the flesh after his lengthy and untimely exile at the hands of the ruthless Zantai.
Kidding aside you’re one of the “OG’s” of this forum so yeah; that’s why I asked cause you’ll likely always know the state of any build in the current meta. Exceptionally well.
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Also can we get a rough sketch or an actual gt for that archon please?
Banana’s spec. Rings are a bit tough to get I think.
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Well, I’d use chaos resistance pots for facing Grava 
As it’s often difficult to get high chaos resistance. While Markovian Attack WPS skill reduces enemy’s DA that allows Upheaval to hit more often, as this build can’t get higher of OA.
But yeah, Ultos set needs some fixes to bring it up a bit. Not enough sleep on my end to give correct feedback ;-;
[edit] - I’m not editing the above, for it shows exactly why we all need sleeeeeeeeep. Or in my case, don’t read a book in bed for too long…
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