Lately, I’ve found myself spending a ton of time theorycrafting in Grimtools. Inspired by the recent Top 20 Softcore Builds rating, I decided to share my ultimate chase build.
The Concept
This is a full Monster Infrequent (MI) and crafted setup. Because of that, it will be incredibly difficult to assemble naturally in-game (at least until the FoA expansion drops).
The core idea is simple: what happens if we dump almost all of our attribute points and gear affixes into Cunning?
Well, you get this monster. This build features the highest tooltip weapon damage I have ever seen. Thanks to the massive Cunning dump, we hit around 4550% Pierce damage scaling (1800 from cunning and 2750 from pierce dmg modifiers). We also have incredibly high OA and a decent +20% Critical Damage.
Offense & Defense
Offense: Single-target damage on this build should be insane. We naturally have a lot of flat damage from deadly momentum, dual blades and our equip, + 4 attacks per second with 200% AS. Also Cadence and single target wps will hit like a truck. Our area damage is a bit limited, we rely on Whirling Death, War Cry (50% Weapon dmg), but due to high damage overall, it will be enough. We also have a decent 82% Pierce RR coming from constellation proc, Night’s Chill, and the War Cry transmuter.
Defense: Despite the heavy offensive focus, the build is surprisingly tanky. It features 27.3k Health, 3.6k Armor, a bit of leech, hp regen and several defensive procs that trigger at low HP.
Customization & Alternatives
I theorycrafted this build to match my personal playstyle, leaning heavily into damage. However, if you want to sacrifice a bit of offense for more safety, you can easily push the build closer to 30k HP and 3000 DA (for example, swap out jewelry augments from flat + % pierce dmg for % pierce + hp)
If you don’t want to play a pure melee build, you can also easily transition this into a Phantasmal Blades caster using the Spite two-handed sword (keeping most of the gear the same, while swapping out a few components, augments, shoulders, and gloves to prioritize casting Speed).
Hopefully, this theorycraft gives you some inspiration! Let me know what you think or how you would tweak it.
You could take “Hawk” instead of dumping the last three points into “Vulture”
Would give you 28 crit% (+8),
eventually small adjustments needed… (spirit-req, affix-rolls, etc…)
you are missing CC resists that may not be needed for bossing but for other content especially for shattered realm are mandatory for melee char.Also you could try to put more crit damage since you got massive OA you will be hitting critical very often.
Thanks for suggestion. I was also thinking about this, we have some cc resist now, if it doesn’t feel like enough in practice, i would take some points off prismatic burst and put them into the scars of battlle.
+% Crit damage is kinda hard to come by without sacrificing our cunning affixes. I was thinking about may be putting tainted hearts in amul and medal (that would be +10% crit), and also putting constellation points to Hawk (+8% crit) as Nola suggest above. But that would require a bit of tweaking to keep required stats and 200% attack speed.
Terrify is just bad on melee , it’s bad in general but on melee makes the trash mobs run away from you which lead to slow clear speed quite annoying as well . Cunning affixes will suffer nerf in 1.3 , as a league player who is familiar with the reroll system I can tell this build may take couple of months grinding especially if essences are hard to come by , simply because reroll system don’t have bias ,it rerolls towards the entire pool sometimes I need 300 essences + back at the league just to hit a single affix on a ring , everything is rainbow and roses when you play grim tools but when you play the game is different story. Nadaan Blades are not very good anymore , Ulzaad aplies flats to both weapons , which leads to insane damaging windows when the proc is up. Sacrificing helm slot to cast half baked RR instead of rework the Devotion tree is huge shoot in the leg , not gonna mention Fleshwarped Casque is controversial to your idea because is heavy base item with high Physique requirements
Cadence is not that strong of an attack replacer. In your calc it lacks extra targets and arc
Heavy helmet just for a half-assed WC seems suboptimal to me
5% adtch (not 10% that GT show) is extremely low for any auto-attacker, and just won’t work with Cadence. I would recommend at least 15% adtch on a setup like that if you have some healing effects, ideally 20%+ with some additional crutches
Night’s Chill should be maxed out, it will scale your damage more than %damage itself at this point
I picked the Fleshwarped Casque because our Kuba pants already require 1,000 Physique, and Kuba pants give us huge damage due to the bonus to Deadly Momentum. The Casque also gives us weapon damage on War Cry, which will provide some leech when using it. Alternatively, I was considering the Ravager helmet, but again, we still will need good Physique for the Kuba pants.
I agree that Terrify may not be so good for melee, so we can drop it.
Regarding the rarity, I agree that this build will be hard to get, but a man can dream still.
It is actually fairly easy to pick Ulzaad in the devotion tree; I just don’t like its cooldown, plus Nadaan Blades give us attack speed.
Thanks for the criticism! Do you have any other suggestions?
Omg! it’s mad_lee himself. Thanks for critisism! i will think more about this. I will try to think of a way to fit more leech and crit in this build. I agree that i should max out night’s chill. Also maybe i will put more points in fighting form for better clear.
You need 100% weapon damage to apply the full value of your 10% life steal , being cut in half is 5% on a skill that hit like wet noodle is basically placebo effect. This helm provides zero value , when there are clearly better options but your build = your rules
