Grimtools
In-game stats:
(Gameplay is at the bottom, if you’re looking to skip to that.)
Hey! I’m a relative nobody who’s been enjoying the added difficulty of FoA a lot. I’m posting this build because it’s worked out for me, and as a possible reference for this who share my minority taste of not caring that much about optimization of speed or damage.
I noticed that a lot of people were facing some rude surprises at how spiky damage in FoA could be once things were juiced up (Ascendant, 5x altar, etc), and was also inspired to post this because it was a commonly voiced experience that I didn’t actually share as I got into the expansion.
As you can probably tell by now, this is a very defensively oriented setup, so it’s really not fast. Compared to anything from the top builders in the community, this could maybe clear things half as fast on a good day, and even that much is a pretty optimistic stretch.
However, if you like being able to clear harder content fairly comfortably, avoiding random deaths, and not being punished for poor piloting and lapses in attention, this might be of some interest to you.
The Basic Premise
Forcewave has a giant weapon damage multiplier and long cooldown thanks to Grey Knight and Earthsplitter (which, thanks to TDM modifiers stacking separately, get you over triple damage on your forcewave). This gives it some pretty crazy weapon damage scaling. By getting a lot of flat Internal Trauma damage and duration, you can generate massive DoTs off this forcewave. Onslaught stacks from Beronath’s Howl help multiply these infrequent, DoT-applying attacks.
As we’re using Blitz for Blindside’s shred, and have weapon damage on War Cry, the rotation has to be in a more specific order of:
Blitz, Warcry, 3xAspect of Beronath, Forcewave
…with optional boosts like Overguard (thanks to Colossal Grasp). This can also get more long term benefit out of temporary buffs such as Fighting Spirit or Arcane Will. Still, you have to make sure you get your onslaught stacks after War Cry and Blitz to avoid wasting them.
Between cooldowns of this rotation, you can either kite, move on to extra mobs, or simply hold down Aspect of Beronath for a bit of extra damage between cooldowns.
As this has a lot of extra IT duration, a lucky crit will sit at the top of the DoT priority for a good long time. Even though this is a turtle of a build, in regular play it’s fairly frequent to see forcewave ticking upward of a million, and squishier nemeses like the Underking can often be left to die after a single setup.
Defensive Layering
This build takes a long time to die on Ascendant. If you go AFK or such, it’ll die eventually, but it’s pretty well-layered.
It’s resistant to one-shots with 26k health, 39% phys res, and 5.4k armor (with full absorption, of course). Resists are pretty mundane, with only 83% vitality and 87% pierce being over the usual max. However, it does make sure to overcap enough to avoid most standard resist reductions in the game.
A resting defensive ability of 3439 doesn’t reduce damage per hit much against more meaningful circumstances, but does enough to ensure you don’t get crit even when you take a few hundred DA shred in debuffs. This keeps damage a lot more static.
The 26k health is also effectively bumped up a fair bit by 24% damage absorption from Maven’s. This is near the end of the defense order, and I have minimal to no flat absorb, so for most purposes I just think of this like a health and healing multiplier (making the health pool akin to a solid 34k). There are minor distinctions (sitting in damaging ground areas without Primordis, for example) but they’re pretty insignificant for the most part.
War Cry has a staggering 17.6 meter radius and reduces incoming damage by 33%. It’s pretty easy to keep up most of the time, and you’re unlikely to get one-shot in the instant before you can put it up.
All this makes the build quite hard to one-shot, meaning that the next thing to address is dying to surprise shotguns – akin to one-shots, but mechanically distinct. For this, there’s a fair number of circuitbreakers in play.
The first is a layer in Crab, which will generally just go off whenever (2900 absorb). After that, Giant’s Blood is tied to Arcane Will, which goes off at 75%, and has a 30% proc chance. It’ll heal a base of 1200+20%, brought up by a 61% healing increase to 1932+32.2% to heal for around 8000. After that, Turtle procs 6100 absorb at 50%, and Menhir’s Will heals about half my health at 33%. Thanks to the pretty massive eHP pool above, there is very little in the game that ever skips these.
This works out because a “shotgun” one shot is many hits at once, which are still calculated out by the game engine, so you can end up proccing multiple of these layers in one, would-be-fatal instant containing many hits.
If you run with Elixir-Revurrum-Terrobellum, you’ll be at 6308 armor with 100% chance to block 5487 damage with a 0.64 block cooldown. I haven’t found this to be necessary or notable, but it does guard against one-shots even more if you want.
With all these layers, it typically takes 3-4 egregious mistakes in a row to really cause death. Being sundered while also standing in something like Raddoth meteors and then taking a big hit, sort of thing.
I’m sure if you go high enough into SR you will still begin to explode. I cleared 40 reasonably comfortably (before the nerfs to higher SR damage currently in PTR) but haven’t attempted anything past that.
If things are somehow still looking bad, you also have Mirror of Ereoctes as a panic button, and Nullification to do things like purging a Sunder off of yourself. Thanks to all the layers above, it’s extremely rare you won’t have the time to react, outside of mistakes on Uber Nerf.
Getting nullified is still scary (run away until it falls off) but is not instant death. Circuitbreakers will still activate without buffs up, and you maintain most of your health thanks to Military Conditioning not being an aura. In addition, you can just mirror through most of the duration of one nullify.
This still has its weaknesses; its sustain isn’t particularly great, so it’s not a good Facetank Simulator build – it’s just highly resistant to poor piloting and bad luck. If you stick around in high-grade bad floor effects for a long time, you’ll burn all your circuitbreakers and then die. However, given that you’re pretty much free to do anything between forcewaves, you can just stay moving most of the time.
It’s got one missing CC resist in Entrapment (only at 39%) so there are scenarios with something like Benn’Jahr + Dread that can get a bit thought-requiring. You can still nullify off being rooted, though.
None of this, beyond nullification and mirror, takes much thought to use at all. This is more to explain an in-depth layering of defenses designed to not explode even under a lot of pressure or more major mistakes, because people are rarely interested in building this way, so there’s a bit less reference material.
Possible Improvements
Obviously, if you want more damage out of this build and don’t feel the need for that much armor, DA, health, or any other defensive stat, you can trade out things for more damage. You can run TDM pots while they still exist, or just shuffle around devotions. As I’m not that interested in more damage than this, I haven’t looked into it. Consequently, suggestions I can give would probably be suboptimal.
I haven’t quite had the energy to go back and redo things to be more optimal after getting the Uber Nerf clear, so there are things that could definitely be better in a post-patch environment.
If you don’t mind disintegrating now and then, you can drop the titan platings. However, even at ~70% reflect resist with one plating, a single reflected forcewave would burn through all of my circuitbreakers and kill me in a few seconds if I didn’t notice and nullify it off.
Also, in general, I’m not that great at optimizing; I’m sure somebody could take the same premise/pieces as I have here and output somewhat better numbers.
Some more specific points of potential improvement…
Constellations
This is the big one. Block’s not really a big deal on this character. I largely ended up with Anvil and Shieldmaiden because they delivered flat IT with relative efficiency for their colors at the time I was first getting set up. Oleron was prioritized for similar flat IT motivations.
Patch 1.3 added a pretty solid chunk of flat IT to Decorated Soldier, so the efficiency of stats on these constellations has shifted, and they may be a lot worse than before. It’s possible that there’s an overhaul to the devotion tree that is just plain better than this one in all respects.
Once again, mathing out damage is kind of a headache for me, and this build has performed well enough already, so I haven’t exactly been motivated to redo it post-patch.
Helm
Another shift with the patch, Fleshwarped Casque has a lot of nice stats on it for a battlemage, but is no longer needed to keep War Cry at full uptime. As such, there may well be much more efficient options out there – maybe Scorv helm as a stat ball, maybe a Nyarlathon helm for more phys RR, maybe a chosen gaze for more crit damage on forcewave, since high roll DoTs are so valuable. You could also pick up a third Octavius piece for 12% phys res while possibly freeing up one of the titan platings to be something else. I dunno, I don’t want to calculate so much resist shuffling on a build that I’m already having fun playing.
Amulet
I don’t have an Ascendant’s Portent, still looking for one. I suspect the universal max res would just be worth it and let you trade off more defenses for overall better damage elsewhere. My current amulet is pretty good imo, so I’m not in a hurry to replace it.
Ring
Given battlemage’s lack of RR, it’s probably more optimal to get a second resist shred ring (Combustion or Bladetwister, maybe? Idk). However, the devourer ring gives a lot of stats I’m happily using, so I haven’t looked into what else I’d need to swap around and re-roll for it.
Belt, Boots
Probably some triple-rare combination with resist shuffling that could just get me better overall stats.
Relic
My howl’s low-rolled on damage (68%), inventor won’t let me reroll it. I absolutely can’t be bothered to get a better roll or completion bonus (8% to undead is fine anyway).
Ascended Modifiers
Soul fragments take a bit to farm, so I generally sat on the first passable bonus I got for each piece of gear. There are probably more optimal ascends in a perfect world.
Anyways, that’s about all I have here, so moving on…
Gameplay
Ready to see some poor piloting in action?
CR 181-200 EX in 10:30 (Buffless, First Attempt at Extra Spawns)
This was before patch 1.3, meaning that I was getting more damage off onslaught, but had less base IT thanks to the decorated soldier buff that would come in that patch. This means it’s also before any of the damage nerfs to CR180+ or specific nemeses. It even features the dreaded Underking boulder-to-wall shotgun! Could maybe be a little bit faster, given this was the first attempt at extra spawns and my piloting is… not good. I also don’t really know positioning for fast crucible times at all.
SR 36-37 in 8:38
As noted in the description, I go out of my way to tank a bit and multipull bosses, to show both the limits of the build’s survivability (if I just stood around facetanking all day, I’d die), but also the reliability of the circuitbreakers and defensive layers (lots of big health flickers, but I come out pretty unscathed). No idea how the RNG was time-wise.
Callagadra + some altar mods (Ascendant, 3x Ashes, 2x Keys):
Just tried on a whim when that was my current altar setup. Done before nerfs to altar mods on ascendant, but after some toned down damage to mobs in general. This build can pretty much just apply a DoT and kite all day, so celestials are a non-issue since the build isn’t prone to getting one-shot by any possible stray attack.
Uber N’erfatal… in 10:10??
With my preferred playstyle, there was never any hope of beating the enrage timer. Fortunately, as it turns out, this build doesn’t need to do so. I’d ponder if this makes it HC viable for a player many times more skilled than I, but there is a lot of stuff that can kill you and I do fail more than half my attempts. This is also why I haven’t put “all content safely” in the thread title, because this sure isn’t safe.
Still, it’s neat that I was able to make my own way through it; by and large it looked like the majority consensus was that the enrage was pretty much a game over. But, well, it seems like Zantai calling it a soft enrage was actually correct!
I don’t record much gameplay by default, so that’s all I have on-hand, but if there’s content people want to see, I can boot up OBS and record a run of something.