Been stalking the forums for the last two month since I picked up the game. Had a lot of success with the 2-H FW build by Cthon. Farmed enough to do 100-150 aspirants consistently (don’t know about gladiator because my energy & OA are pretty crappy still).
I’ve really liked DEE and poison so I rolled a WH and sort of messed around since there’s not really a guide I can follow that seems recent. I picked up some pretty nifty MI’s and the Dreeg’s hood but I’ve been struggling a ton with this build. The campaign wasn’t too tough because I could DEE & kite a bit but crucible was absolute disaster. I run out of time or just flat out die constantly at the 100+ challenger waves. I think it’s a mixture of play, gear, build but I really want to make the poison WH work so advice would be appreciate.
link to build here: (replace dash with .)
www-grimtools-com/calc/YVW97AdN
My opinion:
Phantasmal armor need only 1 point, Nightblade mastery enough 32 points, remove Ring of steal. Max Veil of shadow (because -25% total speed), max Shadow dance (20% chance to avoid hit). Put more points in Curse of frailty. Devotion bind Manticore to DEE, Tainted eruption to Shadow strike.
With this changes you can use more effective Hit-and-run tactic.
In my opinion maxing nightblade mastery is the right thing to do - you get health, physique and cunning.
What I would do is take points from Merciless Repertoire (you already have +2100% to poison and acid damage, +146 doesn’t matter that much in my opinion), Ring of Steel and maybe Vile Eruption and max Shadow Dance and Veil of Shadows, like Akruks said.
Phantasmal armor is fine, you need the armor and resists if you feel squishy.
That’s my take on your build, it would be nice if you told us if and how you manage to make your WH work.
You shouldn’t have Manticore bound to biting blades. In fact I’d argue you shouldn’t be casting biting blades (ever) Poison is a hit and run playstyle, not stand and spam (biting blades with that 0.5 sec cooldown is just terribad)
You should aim to replace, in order:
-Weapon. The weapon is acid-melee centric, zero skillpoints you can use and neither affix is helpful = terrible weapon for the build! Any old common poison base w/ a poison suffix would be better - talking single affix magic item here! Or there are several epic items too.
-Gloves. More resistances! Lots more. They don’t even need to have poison damage. Some DA and/or health would also be nice
-Chest. Again, more resists, you can do much better than a non-MI ordered/kings. Again look for DA and/or health
-Shoulders. Again, you can do better, more resists, points to blood of dreeg is nice and all but you’d be better off with a more common base w/ better affixes
-Relic. Malediction is for poison melee, as you aren’t sporting an offhand weapon you have the wrong relic - Dreeg’s Affliction ftw
I’d also be on the lookout for potentially better rings - especially in place of that Vine ring. But unless you find a Judicator’s set I wouldn’t necessarily expect that search to go well.
You really should aim for around 2000 more health (minimum) and 150 more DA, also you’ll want most/all resists 30 overcap if you want to fare well consistently in Crucible. You have lots of % poison damage and need to keep in mind that it doesn’t actually scale great at the highest end. You could lose 250-300% poison and barely even feel it. Not to mention if you do get a better weapon you could gain enough to offset losing your poison damage on 2-3 armor pieces. The amount of ‘real damage’ you gain by not being forced to constantly retreat isn’t to be underestimated.
Btw your best (non-legendary) bet for weapon will come from this recipe if you’ve been lucky enough to find it.
wow thank you all for the replies! This was very enlightening. I hadn’t realized the MH was so inefficient. I had been using an assassin’s calling then wendigo’s claw (faction item) till I found the slicer. I think my concept of how I was playing it was pretty poor, mixing SS + NJE with DEE to do this weird melee + DEE build. It was ok for Ultimate but Crucible was pretty tough and even AoM Ultimate got tricky towards the end. The rimefrost wand is a recipe I’m lucky enough to have, I have to check stash for any legendaries that might be better (I don’t think I found anything on that end).
Any reason why DEE should be bound to manticore? I thought I’d want to proc tainted explosion more so I had it bound to DEE instead.
I’m mostly using the shoulders because the stats on it seem so good. Some damage boosts, the OA/DA, health and resists. My shoulder stash is general are kind of crummy sadly.