My DeathKnight is now level 98 in ultimate and I’m currently in Fort Ikon, getting closer to Logo every day. It is not easy, but it’s doable with enough patience.
At this point the build is complete. I already re-allocated devotion points to “match” what is described in the build guide. I also reviewed attributes and skill points according to the build guide. Unless I made a mistake, my build is really close to the one in the guide.
My main issue right now (I think) is my chaos resist that is way too low. How can I improve it without sacrificing too much ? I could add some resist on some armor or weapon, but it would remove augments that grant damage bonus. Without better resist I stand no chance against Logo or in any Ch’tonic rift.
At this point in the game, is it “normal” to have only 20K DPS ? I saw some video on youtube of characters around level 80 with over 30K DPS. I guess I’m missing something critical here. The build I follow seems to show about 70K DPS …
For the gear, I tried to get as many items from the build that I could. I have to deal with current gear until I get something better or that I can get the items listed in the build.
Seems like you’re quite limited by your gear. Gearing up your my first character(s) was quite a challenge in vanilla, and it must be way more painful now!
For the moment, I would focus on replacing items on suboptimal slots (e.g shield) prioritazing resistances, oa and da. Although your sheet dps might be somewhat lower, more tankiness means you’re not running around and dying, so you will be hitting stuff a higher proportion of your time. Faction vendors might provide nice replacements if you farmed enough rep (once you get to honored you can get a scroll that increases your rep gain by 50%), so it might be worth checking what options you’ve got there.
Also, your dps should be greatly improved with some attack speed (as). If I’m not wrong vicious jawbone provides bonus as and physical damage, so you might want to replace those roilling bloods on amulet and medal. Might also be worth getting jackal devotion on the meantime.
Once you get better gear, you could farm challenger crucible 150 to gear up before starting to farm for the krieg set.
you could change the amulet to something with resistance
The gloves you have are pretty sucky too, random green from vendor with “of alacrity” suffix and some resistances is better
get one point in Ravenous earth and bind Assassin mark to that
you can also start to overcap Cadance and daedly momentum a bit, if you get better resistances, reduce Decorated soldier
powershop Blood Grove vendor for an Amulet with chaos and extra resistance
Olerons blood gives some attack speed for the weapon too
Change Roiling blood to Corpse dust/Wardstone and Leather hide in helm you can change to Runestone or Sanctified bone for resistance (your stun resist is overcapped even without Overguard)
You can powershop Hyram in elite, location Steelclap district, for a good Colossal shield with loads of physical resists and +2 overguard.
I have about 135k DPS on my Death Knight, that was the first char I made. Took me like 150-200 hours to get there
Your offensive and defensive ability are rather low, and your rings are giving you literally no useful stat.
To hit two birds with one stone, dump those rings, go to Devil’s Crossing (as there are 2 regular vendors there) and check their shop (then restart session and recheck as many times as needed) for yellow (yes, yellow) rings with "“of Attack” or “of Readiness” suffix. For prefix you could settle for some of the various resist-giving ones, or “Agressive”/“Stalwart” for even more OA/DA.
Around lvl100 you want to have at least 3000 OA for a physical build to proc Assassin’s mark and Blind Fury consistently.
Also, the advice the others give you are great too.
I see you have items from Defenders of Malmouth, this means you’ve unlocked the Coven of Udenbog faction…and animals are damn everywhere. This means you should have unlocked Coven Storm Seal
Pop on back to Elite and get yourself a pair of these bad boys. Btw if you jump a waypoint away and come back the Storm Seal on offer will change, so you can easily guarantee you get 2 with really high stats if you look up the max stats on them using that link and the options menu to the side (show min/max stats its under the cog lookin thing at the top of the side bar) I personally wouldn’t accept anything short of 4% DA, 5% atk speed, better than average both resists and top 25% of the range for physical dmg… but that just me.
Two of those will help with a lil with your resists and some with your damage problem too…
Edit: that was bad advice on the amulet…not the worst advice but still not great, bad Silben. Get a Coven Blade Pendant (aren’t they so useful those witches?) MOAR DAMAGE! As before check the merchant multiple times to guarantee good rolls!
Also, double check your recipes to see if you have Juggernaut relic…its not that rare tbh.
To hit two birds with one stone, dump those rings, go to Devil’s Crossing (as there are 2 regular vendors there) and check their shop (then restart session and recheck as many times as needed) for yellow (yes, yellow) rings with "“of Attack” or “of Readiness” suffix. For prefix you could settle for some of the various resist-giving ones, or “Agressive”/“Stalwart” for even more OA/DA.
While this is indeed a possible option…I’ll further add that you don’t need to restart a session. Just portal between two locations with a small time delay.
Homestead <–> Devils is good back and forth as they both have vendors. The shops refresh inventory after a short time.
Oh, if you take my above advice and re-do your rings and amulet like that…I recommend a Soul Shard in both rings and a Black Tallow on the amulet (or vicious jaw / dread skull for MOAR DAMAGE and if you managed to get your chaos/vitality resistances sorted with other slots)
These drop/are easily craftable with recipes you should already have access.
Also, if you are sided with Order of Death’s Vigil running Kymon’s areas to get their badges may yield good returns. Finding one with ‘of attack’ and a semi-useful prefix shouldn’t be too hard in ultimate, it’d fix your chaos resistance in a single item, and just be an all around upgrade. Eventually you’ll prefer the craftable legendary shown, or a good Rylok Crest but those are harder to farm…and wouldn’t fix your chaos resistance problem.
I think the trigger is minimum distance (2 areas maybe?) and a minimum time.
Talking to another vendor or doing something else in the new area makes for less down time…but you could in fact portal and sit on the waypoint for a few mins and portal back
I had a first look at all the comments. I replaced some gear (rings, amulet, shield and gloves).
Rings: Coven Storm Seal
Amulet: Coven Blade Pendant
Relic: Juggernaut
Shield: Colossal shield from Malmouth
Chaos resist is now at 61% with the ‘right’ components and augments. OA and DA are now around 2500 instead 2300. DPS also increased: it is 28.6K when buff are actives. Nice improvements IMHO
What will be the benefits of Ravenous earth and binding it to Assassin mark ? The only thing I can think about is the reduction of physical resistance.
To be honest, I did not check vendors in details so far. I think GD is one of the first game where vendors can sell useful items. In most RPG I played the vendors are only there to sell my loot.
I will check again for the suggested augments and components. I don’t seem to have all of those you recommended. Anyway, I’ll have a look again.
Reduction of physical resist is huge effective damage output.
By binding devotions that triggers on crit to skills that deals damage very very often mean you have higher probability to cast, in this case assassins mark, early and thus get more benefit out of it.
Now you have it bound to a WPS skill, that activates 8% of all default attacks. Since you are doing cadance, the attack rotation will be:
default - default - CADANCE - default - default - CADENCE
only on those default hits you have 8% on each to cast Zolhans technique.
Let’s say your chance to crit is 10%
Chance to proc Assassins mark on each default hit between the Cadance hit is 0.8%
You can also get 1 point in Ill omen and bind Assassins mark to that, Ill omen is also a good Devotion “proccer”
Again, only ONE POINT is needed into one of those skills (Ravenous Earth, Ill omen) because they hit fast and many many time and each hit have chance to be a critical hit.
Ravenous earth spits out the listed number of projectiles every second for 4 seconds (4 waves total) and each projectile has a little AoE when it hits. This means Ravenous earth generates LOTS of hits, and those quite a few crits in a very small time frame whereas your 1 pt Zolhan’s technique only has a 8% chance to trigger on swings 1 and 2 of each 3 hit cadence cycle or a 5.28% chance to trigger per swing, and I’m guessing you are sporting around 10% or less (sometimes far less) crit on bosses, meaning you have around 0.528% chance to actually inflict Assassin’s Mark on a boss per swing!
Ravenous earth on the other hand would give you ~30% chance per cast - if only a single projectile hits. When placed right you can hit a boss with 2 or even 3 projectiles per wave and quickly debuff and thus kill the boss.
Btw in this setup you’ll only ever cast Ravenous earth against hero or higher enemies (and once your DPS is higher not even against heroes!)
I finally reached level 100. Things are going well in the areas after Fort Ikon. No problem clearing the Necropolis.
Things gets nasty inside “Tomb of the Watchers”. I tried few times to kill Bloodlord Thalonis, but I get killed too fast. Unless I run away after few hits, I don’t see how I can kill him. I can’t imagine how I could kill Loghorrean.
It’s frustrating to be “stuck” so close to the end of the story in ultimate.
Now I feel a little bit stupid. I checked my gear again. Guess what ? some of them did not have any augments applied. I applied the best components I could find because some are not available (missing blueprint ?)
I also checked my gear based on what is the guide I followed. Now my vitality res is up to 65% and chaos is now 80%. I’ll check if I can replace some chaos resist because it is 64% over the limit.
Good luck with the rest of the playtrough! Make sure to buy those Mandates and give to your future chars, it will speed up the process