Least angry fevered boss
Intro
Time to ring in the new year with a little anger management! I had an incomplete physical witchblade laying around with nothing to do so I started messing around with acid retal again. My initial setup had poor cast speed and not enough sustain. I wasn’t really sure the best way to fix it and I could only find a few old retal witchblades on the forum. So I took it to the discord channel and @mad_lee was nice enough to provide some suggestions. I implemented most of those and along with a revamped devotion map, I think it’s turned out well so I wanted to share.
The Build
In order to withstand the onslaught from fevered enemies, this needed more than just health regen alone. Life steal, regen and other defensive layers make this character a fairly tough cookie, despite not having a source of damage reduction (although that can be worked in).
The bad news is that if you hate pushing buttons, well… it’s a lot so fair warning. There’s a number of skills and cooldowns to manage but like anything else once you get used to the rotation, it’s not too bad.
Download Character:
_DreegFuryEye.zip (772.7 KB)
Stats with Blood of Dreeg and Shard up:
Gear
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The full Sentinel of the Three set along with Ronaprax amulet & Basilisk Fang medal comprise the heart of the build.
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Callagadra helm has the best combination of damage & defense but if you don’t currently have one, you can sub with Okaloth (can be target farmed) or Daega’s which drops often. Rotgheist helm also works ok with its crit bonus to DEE.
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Thornhide pants are a great all-arounder for the skill ranks and beastly damage proc.
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Crafted Emberguards with “Celerity,” “Rapid Reflexes,” or “Dark Intents” suffix is the best way to maximize cast speed. Can sub in Fewmet grips until you can craft the gloves.
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For the belt, initially I had Thorn Girdle but eventually switched to Sash of the Immortal Sage. Although it doesn’t have flat acid retal damage, the amount of raw resists it provides are too good to pass up and it frees up augment slots for more HP.
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I had double Gollus rings at first and then decided to split the difference with one Creeping ring (more on that in the farming section). The build will work with doubles of either but I think one of each is a good balance.
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I like Vilescorns over Venomspines but they can work here too.
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Dreeg’s Affliction relic is a no-brainer. Has everything the build needs. You don’t necessarily need to use the Afflicted Spines skill but it can shotgun against certain enemies.
*Note: For the crafted items you’ll want to do it with Egellon for slow resist (Scepter, Belt and gloves).
Farming & Crafting the Greens
- “Yeah so cool story and all but there’s 5 greens here. No way I can reliably recreate this.”
Worry not, friends. Two of the items (Creeping Rings & Basilisk Fang) can be vendor farmed at Vinelton in the Ancient Grove dungeon. If you’re unaware, vendor inventories can be reset without having to respawn the entire dungeon. In this case just walk to the next level (Tainted Wood), wait at least 6 seconds or so, then go back to Vinelton and his inventory will have refreshed.
Also, thanks to @modal and his MI drop spreadsheet, we have a good idea of how long it will take to get the proper affixes. If you want more info on how it works you can reference his thread on it here. For the purpose of this write up, I’m just posting the relevant data for this build.
We want casting speed on all items if possible, but realistically you won’t get it on the medal as they don’t have a good bias towards it. The two suffixes to shoot for are “Of Celerity” and “Of the Gildam Arcanum.” Note that Celerity can’t spawn on the medal.
These numbers are using the “Expected Value” from the spreadsheet.
Creeping Ring (vendor drop)
“Celerity” = 1 in 18
“Gildam Arcanum” = 1 in 389
Basilisk Fang (vendor drop)
“Gildam Arcanum” = 1 in 416
Gollus Ring (boss drop)
“Celerity” = 1 in 30
“Gildam Arcanum” = 1 in 110
Ronaprax Sting (boss drop)
“Celerity” = 1 in 43
“Gildam Arcanum” = 1 in 112
From my owning farming runs, these numbers are pretty accurate. I spent probably a total of a couple hours refreshing Vinelton and I saw multiple rings of celerity. For Ronaprax, I did about 70 runs and dropped 2 Gildams, one of which is here in the build. Gollus runs can be irritating since you have to hunt for the hive entrance but you should find a celerity ring before too long.
For the gloves, here are my craft results for reference. I crafted 50 Emberguards for this build. Out of those, 36 were magic and I got celerity 9 times. Out of the 14 rares, I got celerity twice and 1x Rapid Reflexes and 1x Dark Intents. So your results may vary of course but as you can see, you should get something usable without spending a ton.
So what about the prefixes? They can be much more flexible but generally you’ll want as much OA as possible, especially on the medal since it has such a poor chance to roll cast speed.
The dream offensive green setup would probably be something like:
- Aggressive Emberguard Gauntlets of Dark Intent
- Aggressive Ronaprix Sting of Gildam Arcanum
- Consecrated Gollus Ring of Celerity
- Maniacal Creeping Ring of Celerity
- Aggressive Fang of Gildam Arcanum
Gameplay
Regular campaign stuff or challenge dungeons don’t pose much threat to this build so I’m just going to mention some lessons I’ve learned related to SR farming.
If you watch some of the videos, I don’t use Bloodthirster & Overguard on every encounter but you’ll want to be careful on certain map tiles that have high density areas, such as Immolation. The pox spreads quick and before you know it, half the map is frenzied and you can get swarmed under with debuffs.
For boss rooms, the character can handle 4 fevered pulls but not in all scenarios. Just be aware of who’s there and hold off on casting pox if necessary. Physical hitters aren’t an issue but certain combos like Valdaran + Father Abaddoth can kill you in a flash while they are frenzied. Grava’thul is weak to acid but he also launches his null bombs extremely fast while fevered. Rashalga can also be a terror. Generally, just be careful around the bosses with big debuffs.
So if you want to be on the safer side a good strategy I’ve used is to pull two bosses and pop Bloodthirster then once they’re down, pull the other two and pop Overguard while the former is on cooldown.
The absolute most important tip though: keep attacking! A portion of your sustain is life steal so don’t just cast pox and run away.
Leveling
This is an endgame (level 94+) build so you have to level with something else. Physical Forcewave, Blade Arc or Blitz are the easiest options. You can refer to the forum Beginner's Compendium to look for a suitable guide to get you going.Retaliation is famously difficult to start with because there just isn’t enough gear for it. If you really want to play retal as soon as possible, you could reasonably make a switch once you get to Malmouth DLC content. At that point you’d have access to acquire the rings, amulet and medal. Combine those with some Perdition set pieces and you might have something going.
Videos
SR 30-31 more average run (4:42)
SR 30-31 with Okaloth helm (4:46)
*For the Ravager/Callagadra I swapped to Ectoplasm/Soul Shard on rings and popped energy oil. Ravager takes more patience and positioning to maneuver out of his degen pools. Cally was pretty easy in comparison. Dodge sunders, cast pox, rotate between Bloodthirster & Overguard.
FAQ
A few questions I anticipate might come up:
- “So why no damage reduction? War Cry is right there.”
A: I did play around with WC a bit but it’s another cooldown to manage. You could drop overguard and use WC but for one point, overguard provides a nice cheap buff. Another option is to swap the arcane spark for attuned lodestone but you’ll have to energy pot often. Lastly, you could swap Vilescorn for Stormtitans which have a DR proc.
- “Wouldn’t it be better to max cast speed through devotions and components?”
A: I’ve tried to balance everything without sacrificing too much damage and quality of life. You could swap out arcane spark for dread skull and chest for eldritch mirror, but then it affects OA and energy sustain so it cancels out to me. I also think the devo map is pretty locked in but you can always experiment.
- “What is the best DA number to shoot for?”
A: In general, the less DA the better to synergize with fevered rage. Enemies hit you faster/more often = they die faster. I’d say between 2400-2500 seems to be the sweet spot.
- “129% movement speed? Eww, gross.”
A: Unfortunately this is an annoyance since Vilescorns have low movement but if you watch any of SR vids the character speeds along just fine. Just craft some Elixirs of the Hunt for extended farming runs.
Final Thoughts
I think I covered everything important but as always, if you have any questions or suggestions just let me know. Thanks again to Lee and anyone else who gave tips in the discord!
If anybody wants to take it for a test drive, I included a copy of the character to download and there’s some spare gear in the stash if you want to try other variants.
Happy Raging and Happy New Year!
