I’ve leveled my second character to 35 now, figuring that’d be enough time to get the feel for how a character will go, but I’m just as confused now as when I started this character.
My goal was to run a 2h battlemage that leveraged %Elemental damage. I’ve got a weapon that seems perfect for this, for now - The Conduit
But after experimenting for a while, I’m having a really hard time figuring out whether any of what I’m doing is at all effective. Cadence has been slowgoing and boring in trash clearing, and I wonder if it’s the best approach. I’ve tried out bladearc as an LMB, I’ve tried Mistborn Talisman’s Troll Rage, and I’m interested in Beronath’s Fury, but don’t have it yet.
So I suppose I need some help here. Is The Conduit worthwhile to focus on? Does it in fact play well with Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange? How much benefit will Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange yield, and can it be leveraged as effectively as anything else? What auto-attack might be the way to go?
That last question is particularly confusing, because it can touch on questions about damage conversion, and Weapon Pool Skills. Both of which I’ve read up on repeatedly, but can’t seem to feel confident about.
I suppose what I was imagining early on was a build that leverages elemental damage heavily, and takes care of groups by quickly tagging lots of stuff with DoTs. Don’t know if that’s silly or what. Meanwhile I haven’t found a forum post that quite covers this.
So uh… Ideas? What might a lvl 50 Elemental 2h Battlemage look like in terms of offensive style, skills, and devotions?
I revisted this problem and still haven’t figured out where I’m going with the build.
For a while, I played a blade-arc build, backed up by an Arbiter relic and Blessed Steel, for their two skill activations. And actually, that worked pretty great. It seemed like a way forward.
But the more I considered, the less I knew where this was going. As mentioned, my initial idea was to tag things with elemental DoT’s from the IEE chain, and use devotions that further fed into this damage style.
But, obviously, the soldier mastery doesn’t offer anything to boost this damage style. Instead, everythings physical, trauma, and bleed with a side of piercing. There’s simply no synergy.
I started thinking up an alternative build - a Cold warrior, leveraging Star Pact, Olerons/Absolute Zero, and a craftable epic like the Leviathan.
But even then, the core problem remains - All the Soldiers’ damage contribution is un-related.
My final holdout idea is leveraging either the Mistborn Talisman’s troll rage, or the Shard of Beronath auto-attack replacement. But this seems slim.
Am I missing something, or is the IEE chain simply not useful with the Soldier mastery? Is an element-based Battlemage just too clunky? Are (mildly)synergistic battlemages restricted to leaning on Callidor’s?
Why not Shaman / Arcanist 2H? Or are you dead set on Battlemage?
Maybe something like this for Battlemage?
http://grimcalc.com/build/MrmSUH0
Focus on Cold Damage on gear and Elemental Damage. Most of the physical damage will be converted to Elemental (75%), and another 15% directly to cold.
No idea if this would work well, I have no experience trying something like this, but seems like it could be kinda neat to try.
Cadence builds are definitely more fun once you get 12 points in the second ability(fighting form) because your cadence swings hit 3 monsters instead of 1 or 2, which makes clear time significantly better.
Well, I already made the battlemage, so I was determined… to some extent… to make work this character & origin intention. The intention being focused on Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange, a 2 hander, %elemental gear, and viable for end-ultimate melee brawling.
But my determination is indeed approaching to that limit.
That grimcalc layout looks roughly what I was imagining for my Cold warrior, aiming for a Leviathan weapon build.
But I wonder about this direction: Is Cadence the right auto-attack, relative to for example Blade Arc, Force Wave, Troll Rage, or Beronath’s Fury? And is IEE even a worthwhile investment here, in terms of opportunity cost?
Bind aetherfire to cadence, arcane bomb to off. Proceed to finish rhowans crown bind elemental storm to cadence and swap aetherfire to warcry.
Cadence modifier converts 50% phys to elemental. IEE will be 30% at ultimate rank. On top of those there are gear options and augments, so they synergize quite well.
I leveled a ranged elemental battlemage, it now tanks fabius in about 1:20, but gets ate by mad queen so 2h should do just fine for most content.
Also, another thing I’m fuzzy about is the conversion orders. I’ve read through the guide like 3 times, along with some discussions, but still can’t seem to feel confident. If I’m attempting to maximally leverage %elemental (or single element) damage, is it useful to boost skills that boost physical damage? Will the skill then get converted later to Elemental, or cold, or whatever? This would make the Soldier seem somewhat more cooperative. It’s also the question that makes Troll Rage seem like potentially a good option.
Another question - After considering DoT’s, I’m beginning to think that this was a bad idea. By the time a character dings 85, how much benefit does a Soldier’s DoT’s convey, relative to other potential investments?
This is interesting. But The damage type is spread pretty broadly. You can gear for %elemental, but it looks like the base damage is higher for Aether & fire? From that standpoint, why have IEE at all?
Also, what allows this build to stay alive in sustained melee? I don’t disbelieve you regarding Fabius, but I also don’t see what makes that work.
You will gain benefit on flat damage as it can/will be converted. IE Deadly Momentum flat 12-25 physical damage @base lvl will be converted.
You won’t get any benefit from +% physical damage, or %physical on skills or gear as these will happen after conversions. IE Fighting Forms 21% Physical or Deadly Momentums 15% Physical values @ base lvl.
So Troll Rage’s relic flat damage, and its skills flat damage can be converted.
That is how I understand it anyways, I could be wrong.
Fire and Aether are higher because of Reckless Power. I use RP because of arcanist skill bonuses on gear and arcanum pistol bonus.You could always go 50 into soldier and use Olerons Rage instead for OA and movement speed. But then you probably want to just go 32 or so into arcanist.
IEE gives 30% physical to elemental conversion at max rank its kinda hard to pass up. Iskandras set is kinda the best way to get elemental damage, and its bonuses are mainly to IEE’s skill line. Iskandras will also come with bonuses to aether damage. Most if not all of elemental weapons and gear procs will cause a elemental dot, plus you have elemental storm devotion ability to further the desire for IEE and its line. You can’t really have equal elemental damage unless you want to gimp yourself greatly at some point thru gear, skills, devotions one or two will take over.
To stay alive i rotate potion, haunted steel ability, mirror. Then I have wayward soul, behemoth, turtle procs. I can upload a vid if you would like, it will take awhile tho. As to the 85 build i linked, idk haven’t tested 2h melee.You will have healing rain, turtle, and dryad procs, warcry debuff and i assume you would use haunted steel on weapon for adcth unless you needed resistance.
IEE gives you the conversion to elemental 30% is kinda hard to pass up.
I hope I’m not contributing to any confusion but it feels all muddled to me. How do you end up getting a decent total damage with some of the physical->elemental conversion? What are the sources of epic +damage% modifiers? And since not all damage is converted, is it going to kind of be a carefully-tuned ratio of +physical damage% and +elemental damage%?
Builds focused on damage conversion give me such a headache! I like the pure physical cadence build since it’s just like slap it a +1000% physical damage modifier with deadly momentum, done!
Cadence has been slowgoing and boring in trash clearing, and I wonder if it’s the best approach.
For me cadence is most fun when your attack speed is super fast, like 150% and over. Then it starts feeling like you’re cutting paths through mobs almost like a nightblade without even pausing to attack (the attacks occur so fast). Then throw something like Blind Fury on top of that and then it’s glorious.
Not sure how to find a similar equivalent for a cadence build focused on elemental damage with a two-hander. Some of the sexiness to me of cadence is that its physical damage is so high with deadly momentum that you don’t need a 2-hander, though it might be extra sexy with a 2-hander that does a huge amount of damage.
Kearuga’s choice of elemental storm makes total sense though. I immediately wanted that when thinking about this build.
About The Conduit, there is an Empowered version (collected two of the empowered ones already and several of the normal one) which is considerably more powerful and might be viable even towards endgame. I never considered it – it’s not a weapon I used much with heavy bonuses to elemental damage to get a good feel for how good/bad it is.
No need to post a video, that survivability explanation makes sense.
But this build seems like IEE is tacked on top, rather than working with it’s main strengths and focus. I do not doubt that it works, but I wonder about whether it’s the best path, given that the primary feature is full investment into RP and Aether devotions. Why not put those points instead into Callidors, and gear toward Aether/Fire? For a ranged build, certainly not - you can not properly leverage it, while IEE can be fully leveraged. But I’m going brawler.
This said, I do think such a build would complete Ultimate without problems. But for whatever reason, I’m in love with the idea of a big %elemental sledgehammer.
I’ve got a Conduit & an Empowered sitting in my stash. I ended up not using them because they appear to deal less final damage than a high-damage club, and has less available for IEE to utilize, as well as splitting off a large chunk into Piercing, which is counterproductive. So I imagine a Conduit is better suited to a Nightblade that gears for %elemental, perhaps. No IEE or conversions required.
Just guessing though, I have only one character besides this current project.
As for cadence… I just don’t like it. I think my conjurer spoiled me. I do 2 or 3 clicks, and a 2 screen radius dies while I go make a sandwich. Got me addicted to DoT’s(Curse of Frailty/Elemental Seekers + Storm Totem/Reckless Tempest + Wind Devil/Elemental Storm, ooohmyyyygoooodddd, it’s a Lightning-elemental hellscape.)
I’d wanted to do something like slower, bigger swings that whack many monsters at once, rather than quickly eating them one at a time. Again, it’s the visual of a wide-swinging, big damn elemental hammer. Cadence doesn’t really do that for me. Blade arc though… But Blade Arc(and all the rest) just isn’t seeming very synergistic.
But maybe it’s enough. Maybe I won’t feel weak by the time I’m whacking lvl 90 Aetherials in Plains of Strife. Don’t know.
*and I don’t like the 3rd hit mechanic on cadence. Would rather something more consistent. But that’s just picky.
Yeah, I don’t think blade arc is so viable as an endgame attack skill unless you focus on bleeding. The pure physical part is underwhelming compared to cadence when you take up deadly momentum.
One alternative I’d suggest just for leveling up from Kearuga if you just want to have a bit more fun on the way but still using cadence is maybe not focus too much on damage conversion just yet and take deadly momentum as soon as you can. It gives you ridiculous damage if you semi-rush to it and this way all trash will probably fall under a single swing of the sword and explode into bloody chunks once deadly momentum is active especially when you have Kraken. At least you won’t feel as miserable lacking AoE.
Leveling up with cadence is usually miserable though. I never found anything more boring in the early stages than cadence builds… but they come to fruition at some point when you start attacking fast and having AoE procs triggering left and right (blind fury in my case). Then things are just dying left and right around you without having to put your mouse cursor over them. Cadence builds are late bloomers as with the case with savagery.
*and I don’t like the 3rd hit mechanic on cadence. Would rather something more consistent. But that’s just picky.
Attack speed trivializes that. Even if you’re just focused on fun instead of effectiveness, cadence is a whole lot more fun with attack speed. If you’re doing three attacks in the blink of an eye then you no longer feel like, 1… 2… okay now I’m powerful. It’s happening in a flurry almost like a blademaster with high enough attack speed.
I assume you’re looking at the lvl 50 spec, in which case it would seem like that. I threw that together so you could rush Kraken and Elemental storm, the fire aether trees just help get their quicker while adding more damage and clear potential because cadence is boring while leveling and doesn’t have good aoe clear as elemental. Those devotions wil change at 85. You can always pick star callers over reckless. I dont because of the gear setup and having better access to fire/aether resistance shred.
In ultimate, with the 85 version you will be focusing at maxing IEE into its ultimate levels to buff cadence to do all your damage. Scholars light, Owl, Rhowans Crown are all elemental, Widow is the only one not and its the best option to help get to Kraken since you want the lightning resist shred in ultimate, the aether is just added benefit since reckless power adds flat aether if you take it.
Conduit isn’t great because it lacks attack speed. Having a higher damage, phyiscal no piercing weapon with attack speed would be much better since it would get converted or a prismatic eviscerator.
It works out fine so far(lvl 40), but my intention is to change my LMB to either Troll Rage, Beronath’s Fury, or Cadence once I need to focus single target damage. Alternately, that might never be necessary, if I have a few item skills to cycle through, like Sacred Strike, or Arbiter’s.
Blade Arc was particularly valuable, though, for the crit bonus, and the knockdown. A Melee character’s DoT becomes more meaningful when it’s paired with knockdown, in this regard. Heh, and it’s also very satisfying in look, and perfectly fits the original aesthetic impulse. One-hit kills and ragdolls everywhere.
As for other things - Olerons Rage, Deadly Momentum, Bleed, attack speed - These contribute to divergence from the theme and goal: Elemental damage. Would prefer to avoid, unless no other investment is better at contributing to the primary goal.
Haven’t had one drop yet though. But in truth, like the Conduit, that weapon tends to promote AVOIDING IEE, I think, and simply using gear and devotions instead of skills to attain greater elemental damage. Thereby freeing up points to spend elsewhere.
But I’d like to back up a bit to some lingering questions.
Say I level up Cadence opening skill. It gives flat damage. It also gives %weapon damage. Will the flat damage be converted by IEE? Or will the flat damage be converted only by gear? And will the %weapon damage multiply the post-IEE damage? I assume it cannot touch the post-gear conversion damage.
Troll Rage. I don’t understand how it works. The description shows 7 charge levels, which modulate… something. What exactly does it modulate? And how am I supposed to read the percentages? does charge 1(30%) mean (Weapon)+(.3Weapon) or does it simply mean (.3Weapon), representing a nasty opening malus? Is it strictly worse than Cadence, or is it better in some select circumstances?
I’ve read some threads that talk about it being great, but I don’t fully understand why.
Markovians Advantage, and Weapon Pool Skills. Don’t understand this very much, but I think MA is a WPS? When these fire off, will their flat damage bonus be subject to skill conversion? Gear conversion? And will the %Weapon damage be post-IEE? Post-Gear-Conversion?
Beronath’s Fury. Are Shards of Beronath still available? Is the recipe via drop-only? This appears to be the premier auto-attack for my desired direction. Are there caveats?
Bleeding I agree and Oleron’s rage makes no sense here versus Reckless Power, but deadly momentum is something useful even with the endgame high elemental conversion tossed in since its physical damage will still be converted to elemental (it simply won’t benefit from any +physical% modifiers but the elemental damage post-conversion will benefit from +elemental damage%).
You can see Kearuga maxed it at level 85 with his grimcalc suggestion. My only alternative suggestion was to max deadly momentum a bit sooner as a leveling suggestion and not wait until level 50+ if you want to see things die in one hit a lot sooner using a cadence build.
And attack speed is handy no matter what if you are swinging or firing weapons! I actually consider the attack speed boost from Kraken to be more useful than its damage modifiers endgame.
One thing I didn’t think about so much is that I thought Oleron at first would be irrelevant for your build. Some of the constellation is largely useless to you since it focuses on boosting physical and internal damage modifiers. But actually his chest, abdomen, and left hand (blind fury) might not be so bad if you have points to spare, meet the prerequisites already without setting it as a goal, and the first point is a healthy stat bonus. That makes only the second node kinda useless. I believe you can convert the weapon damage of that proc that saws through everything around you. Not sure it’s worth it though unless you just happened to meet the prerequisites already without aiming for Oleron which seems unlikely with an elemental focus.
But in truth, like the Conduit, that weapon tends to promote AVOIDING IEE, I think, and simply using gear and devotions instead of skills to attain greater elemental damage. Thereby freeing up points to spend elsewhere.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. My interpretation is kind of opposite though in that I feel like it promotes IEE (well, it kind of blatantly makes it so since it gives a +3 skill bonus to IEE). It does do a healthy dose of lightning, fire, and cold damage but you’ll be even better off with a heavy +elemental damage% focus if you’re converting some of the physical damage of that sword to elemental on top to benefit from your high +elemental damage% modifiers. To me the sword says, “I do lots of flat elemental damage for you already, but convert my physical damage as much as you can and boost up your elemental damage modifiers! I’ll boost IEE to help you out!”
Say I level up Cadence opening skill. It gives flat damage. It also gives %weapon damage. Will the flat damage be converted by IEE? Or will the flat damage be converted only by gear? And will the %weapon damage multiply the post-IEE damage? I assume it cannot touch the post-gear conversion damage.
Kearuga can probably better answer since he has more experience with elemental damage conversion but I’m fairly sure the flat physical damage from cadence and especially deadly momentum (which gives you flat physical damage for all your attacks, not just every third strike, making it very noteworthy to a cadence build) will also get converted by IEE and other physical->elemental sources.
Troll Rage. I don’t understand how it works. The description shows 7 charge levels, which modulate… something. What exactly does it modulate? And how am I supposed to read the percentages? does charge 1(30%) mean (Weapon)+(.3Weapon) or does it simply mean (.3Weapon), representing a nasty opening malus? Is it strictly worse than Cadence, or is it better in some select circumstances?
Troll rage is like savagery. As far as I understand its base values are 135% weapon damage and 28 physical damage, -35 offensive ability.
Let’s just focus on the 28 physical damage. With one charge it’s only 30% as effective, so it’s not 28 flat physical but 280.3=8.4 flat damage. With 7 charges it’s 110% as effective so it becomes 281.1=30.8 flat damage.
I’m not sure if the -35 OA penalty is consistent throughout or scales too with the charges. I should watch my character sheet’s OA the next time to see.
Markovians Advantage, and Weapon Pool Skills. Don’t understand this very much, but I think MA is a WPS? When these fire off, will their flat damage bonus be subject to skill conversion? Gear conversion? And will the %Weapon damage be post-IEE? Post-Gear-Conversion?
MA is WPS as with Zolhan’s. They only apply to your first and second strikes with a cadence build, not the third.
I believe the %weapon damage does convert but I need a verification from an authority. Otherwise any attack that does like 200% weapon damage would be kind of useless and too vague about what the heck it does with damage conversion in the mix. If an attack deals 200% weapon damage then the only sensible solution I can think up that doesn’t leave a giant gap as to what it does (0% conversion) post, say, 100% conversion is to convert all of it. Otherwise it would render a lot of skills almost useless with damage conversion in the mix since with many skills and procs, %weapon damage is the primary damage of note.
Beronath’s Fury. Are Shards of Beronath still available? Is the recipe via drop-only? This appears to be the premier auto-attack for my desired direction. Are there caveats?
I never found one drop but have the recipe and it’s not so annoying to craft (one of the few times I find aether shards to really come in handy). I can’t remember where I got the blueprint but got it quite early actually with one of my earliest characters. Either I was extremely lucky or the recipe is not so rare, I think. It’s considerably better than Troll Rage without any OA penalty and especially for you since you focus on elemental damage. Neither troll rage nor Beronath’s Fury can be used simultaneously with cadence though so I got a bit confused unless you’re considering them as alternatives to cadence, or you want to get really fancy and use cadence for a few hits then switch to Troll Rage/B.Fury when deadly momentum kicks in for several seconds then back to cadence, then back to Troll Rage/B.Fury, alternating between the relic/component skill, accumulating charges, and cadence/deadly momentum.
Well, it gives 5 bonus categories, 4 of which will be un-useful. Only flat damage would help me. But I could instead invest those same 12 points into something like Markovian’s Advantage - all of it’s stats are applicable(conversion orders permitting). Or defenses. It’s an ‘opportunity cost’ kind of situation.
Of note, everything dies in one hit at the moment, lvl 40. So I have enough points to develop whatever needs to be tried out, and I’m not running into problems of things dying slowly. It’s just a matter of build direction, and how it will continue in elite and on, when I need to develop synergy.
Diminishing returns. A chunk of physical damage is missing from the item, likely in order to accommodate the base elemental damage. I could see putting one point into IEE to take advantage of the bonus, but the amount of benefit gained per point is much smaller compared to IEE applied to a high phys, vanilla 2 hander.
The problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t match up to what I’m seeing in game. I took off all my gear and started hitting a training dummy and watched my stats. Troll Rage wasn’t moving the numbers in a way that seems to match up with your theory there. Which, by the way, does seem to make sense otherwise.
So yeah, I’m confused.
Either way, there’s some segment of players who’ve been using it to great effect, at least in some circumstance. Interested in hearing what that is.
Indeed, but Cadence isn’t involved here, as I’m not likely to begin taking Cadence. Beronath’s Fury is likely the best option. I’m interested in the conversion ordering for WPS… especially though, on which step the %weapon modifier comes into play.
I see, in that case deadly momentum kind of becomes moot. Its flat physical damage is not to be underestimated though – at just 12/12 (and we’ll likely get skill bonuses to it endgame to go beyond and it still scales well) it’s dealing 91-135 flat physical damage for all your attacks, which is like having the flat damage of our weapons doubled and then multiplied with all our damage modifiers (especially for us wielding sword and board, maybe not as much for a two-hander). It’s the only reason my cadence witchblade’s melee first and second strikes (not just cadence strikes) aren’t pathetic in spite of using a board. I actually do more damage than my warder wielding a massive axe with it and almost as much damage as my blademaster.
Diminishing returns. A chunk of physical damage is missing from the item, likely in order to accommodate the base elemental damage. I could see putting one point into IEE to take advantage of the bonus, but the amount of benefit gained per point is much smaller compared to IEE applied to a high phys, vanilla 2 hander.
That’s true, but if you do a heavy focus on elemental then maybe your damage modifiers endgame might be like +1000% or something like that. In that case even 50 flat physical damage converted over and amplified is already 550 damage extra per strike which is multiplied by attack speed and OA crits. From a conversion standpoint it’s fairly linear provided you don’t get diminishing returns in amping up conversion. I don’t know of so many physical->elemental converters though besides IEE, and it only gets us to 25% at 12/12.
The problem with this explanation is that it doesn’t match up to what I’m seeing in game. I took off all my gear and started hitting a training dummy and watched my stats. Troll Rage wasn’t moving the numbers in a way that seems to match up with your theory there. Which, by the way, does seem to make sense otherwise.
So yeah, I’m confused.
I just tried the same thing and now I’m so confused! I see the offensive ability immediate dip even after the first charge, so the penalty to OA seems consistent throughout whether you have 1 charge or 7… but the WTF thing – my DPS isn’t changing even if I have zero charges or 7 charges! It’s like all it’s showing is an OA loss. I’m hoping that’s a display update glitch more than anything else since if I go by the character sheet display as charges accumulate, Troll Rage is worse than pointless.
Okay, I tried going completely naked with just Mistborn to help me see more clearly what the heck is going on (though from my devotions I’m still dealing lots of bleeding and internal trauma even punching the stupid dummy).
I can definitely say Troll Rage is increasing damage. Ignoring crits, my first punches at zero charges were for ~50 damage average totally naked (excluding the bleeding/trauma DoT), my last ones with 7 charges were for ~480 damage with a steady linear kind of increase to go from ~50 damage to ~480 damage as you would expect from accumulating more charges.
I repeated this multiple times, same results, so building up charges with troll rage definitely boosts damage a great deal (especially when just punching with a fist since the fist barely does nothing on its own – the flat damage coming from Troll Rage is helping more than the main hand modifiers).
The funny thing is that my DPS doesn’t update as my charge levels change on my character sheet, only OA. My wild guess as to why this may be is that maybe the DPS calculation is trying to average what would happen with many troll rage hits (effectively kind of computing the damage after 7 charges). It’s not updating so dynamically as the charges accumulates, per se. In that case it wouldn’t respond to charges dynamically – it’d be trying to average the net result of hitting something many times using troll rage. That would kind of coincide perhaps with why DPS seems to update in a deferred fashion (and sometimes with multiple iterations before the numbers converge) – it might be computing the effect of using the LMB skill repeatedly and not just updating on the fly rapidly with instant state changes to the game.
As a side note to highlight the effectiveness of deadly momentum (which I think is too easily overlooked), I do over 4000 DPS completely naked and just punching a dummy once deadly momentum kicks in on my third punch. That’s without anything equipped, not even a weapon. With a crappy sword and the rest of my gear (which is far from BiS), I’m often looking at at least 20k DPS. That flat damage it gives for 4 seconds that refreshes on every third strike is really the primary appeal of cadence to me, not what it does on every third strike. I know you’re thinking of ditching cadence but deadly momentum is what really makes it sexy to me if you ever consider a cadence build (IMO builds using weaker but fast-hitting one-handed weapons benefit from it more than heavy-hitting 2-handers).