Battlemage build Poison oriented

Hello,

New to the game I have successfully finish the game in normal mode and now, I am starting a new mode in Elite with my level 57 battlemage. I am devoted to poison constellations and assign 50 points in Soldier stats & 20 points in Arcanist. From your experience, do you think it is ok or it is better to push the second class at its max ?


Now that the game is becoming more difficult, I am wondering if my choices were good. Following the advice I read on the forum I invested a lot of point in physics, so here are my base stats :

Should I keep investing in Physics or is it better to start investing in Cunning ? I notice that i tend to miss some hit on high level enemy.

A lot of skills of the Solider are bleeding and trauma based but for the constellation I have chosen poison (rat, abomination, scorpion + vulture) which gives me that (gear is include) :

Is it low or good ?

Given that it does not match the soldier basic damage I wonder if i should go for trauma & bleeding constellations. It seems logical to me but the game allows to chose whatever magical damage you want.

Could you please give me some guidance ?

Don’t invest in cunning only for OA, it gives almost nothing and is not worth it unless you pump your entire 85 attributes points in it. Usually items will give you enough OA and in large quantities.

I think it isn’t a good choice to go for poison damage with a battlemage. Soldier has naturally a lot of physical/bleeding/internal trauma damage sources, so you have no synergy with poison for now.

With a lot of physical to acid conversion you could try something, but I doubt you can reach 100%.

Honestly you are spreading yourself a bit there, try to focus on something! :stuck_out_tongue:

If you want OA, max out Oleron’s Rage and Inner Focus. You’ll get a total of 22% OA. Put some points into Fighting as well since it gives a good chunk of flat OA as well as % All damage.

For Arcanist tree, I’d just leave it at 20. Take a point in Nullification and get Maiven’s Sphere of protection for damage absorption.

Thanks for your advice, guess i’ll reset the constellations.

So, constellations are meant to apply to one class and you can’ really mix it ? Or is it only the soldier ?

Honestly, your build will probably fall flat on it’s face because you have absolutely no synergy with the devotions and classes.

If you want a similar class type, a Witchblade fits a LOT better than Battlemage for poison spec. Overall the best battlemage spec is Callidor’s Tempest abusing how powerful Avatrix’s Malice relic is, or whatever it’s name is, in combo with CT’s raw damage it provides. With how powerful Widow is right now, as well as HP/regen being one of the top defensive stats, it’s pretty easy to be insanely tanky even as a caster, so long as you don’t let your resistances lack.

Not exactly. But you need synergy, GD revolves around picking one thing, MAYBE two things, and amping it to 11, 12, or even 13 gasp. If you spread yourself out, all you will do is leave yourself lackluster at everything, as you can’t Jack of all Trades this game, due to how the stuff scales. If you do, it will leave you doing almost negative dps (If not literal negative dps, which is possible for enemies to outheal your damage if they resist it and you don’t do much in the first place) vs targets with regen effects, or other defensive modifiers.

For example, one of the strongest builds right now is Witch Hunter, abusing super-poison stacking to get 250k poison ticks (Hint, this is seriously overkill for most game content. My 20-25k sheet dps, roughly 40k actual dps as far as I can tell, Spellbreaker clears everything with ease except really tanky bosses in ulti, like some of the Nemesis bosses). It does this because it has two seperate -poison resistance debuffs, poison has a LOT of powerful support right now in devotions/augments/components, and it has access to 2 innate high poison damage skills + components that do good poison damage. I believe the max -poison resistance debuffing it can get is about… -130ish? If you got the right gear+devotions set up, anyway. Considering how very few things resist poison, its easy to see why its probably one of the dominant builds, in the top 3 at least at the moment, with another one being Pyromancer dual wield with an Exterminus+Plaugebearers or Of the Abyss secondary pistol, maxing Hellfire Mines with Eldrich Flame for massive -fire & chaos resistance shredding.

Effectively, to make a good character, you need about 5 things.

  1. Really solid damage of 1-2 types.
  2. Solid survivability/sustain either through devotions, masteries, equipments, or all of the above (Capped out resistances being a big part of this).
  3. The ability to shred the resistance of those primary 1-2 damage types.
  4. Either insanely high burst, or really high sustained DPS, and if not one of those, god level CC (As in being able to freeze-lock a boss who should be immune to Freeze, a la 85% CDR Spellbreaker).
  5. Solid fallback plans for enemies who either resist or counter your primary fighting style/damage types (Can be gotten around and isn’t 100% necessary, as some builds are pretty good about not having hard counters, but it helps a lot for those that do, like a Bleed build gets really countered by Undead enemies as well as Cthonic Shaleborn (Of which, the Cthonic Nemesis is a Shaleborn), for instance). As an example for my current ulti character, Freeze immune enemies are really problematic for me at times, by both resisting my OFF to CC them, as well as usually resisting cold damage, my primary damage type, doubly over making my OFF do nothing and reducing my main damage output from Shadow Strike and Leviathan. I have a fallback plan on spamming Blade Spirits who have the Crown devotion attached, with my Shadow Strikes also creating Elemental Seekers, both of which do elemental damage, giving me a solid way to clear enemies resisting my mostly cold damage (And speccing for elemental damage isn’t bad as a cold focused character, as it also increases cold damage/scales its own cold damage aspect with my cold amplifiers).

Don’t feel bad for screwing up your first few characters, its expected, and it doesn’t help how easy normal/veteran are, it makes some builds look a lot more viable than they actually are early on, while meanwhile some really powerful endgame builds have difficulty getting started up in normal/veteran, usually due to needing high end mastery skills that they don’t have access to right away.

I would like to make a honest clarification here that most WH players do not make and, as such, mislead new players - those 200k+ DoTs are ON HUMANS, not other entities.

Compare the following:

AND

  • Both are “casual” DoTs done with the same equipment and only Anatomy of Murder bonus and DM chest. Revna, however, is not a human and has >100% psn resistance. Salazar, has only possession activated. If I wanted to impress noobs I would take Nidalla’s Leggwraps, put a couple of points more in AoM and post pictures with 250k DoTs on humans. That doesn’t mean I can put 200k DoTs everywhere. Let’s be honest here.

In reality, the highest I’ve got on a poison resistant enemy (e.g. Mogara) was 129k even with -130% to psn, which is much lower than I get on guys like Fabius or Karroz, or Bolvar or Salazar or …etc.

Otherwise, all your points are 100% true and helpful for a new player ! Ohh…and nice SB build :wink:

:stuck_out_tongue: I don’t think you can do any good poison damage with Battle Mage - there is no synergy … you either go physical dmg or Elemental or Aether…your choice

Thanks to your advice, I re-assigned my devotion points & change some of my equipements to fit the expectations of a Battlemage

Compared to the previous set up, I have a gain in DPS and resistance. HP is also up while only Cunning and Spirit go down. I took one level which allowed me to wear a new armor.

However, I kept Mark of Dreeg on my two hand mace because I need the skill granted by this item for crowd control & flee when things turn bad. I went for Trauma constellation.

In addition, I withdraw all points in Discord to add more power to physcial/trauma damage or Callidor’s Tempest. For now, I don’t need Maiven’s Sphere caus my HP pool & HP reg rate is sufficient. I rely on Iskandra and Overload for Elemental damage which grants me bonus on every hit and not only one out of three.

Any suggestion ?