Hey, this is my first character build that I have been interested in enough to share, primarily because I haven’t found anyone else post a serious attempt with this class (outside of panettis). Hit lvl 100 yesterday and thought it’s time to show it on here.
A few notes: My characters got wiped so I had to start from scratch with this one, so gear options are limited and it was a real slog to get to where I am. I have maxed out resists and about 13k sheet dps with albrechts. I also use Reckless Power instead of Aura of Censure because of all of the free bonuses in it.
So yes this is an albrechts build right now. It has served me well and provided me with probably the easiest ultimate clear I have ever had. I am really open to any thoughts at all on the potential of the mage hunter and my build specifically. I quickly regretted taking the Inquisitor over the Necro (especially given the drops I have found) but the aether debuff is nice. Should I switch skills, itemize differently, choose different devotions?
A few notes: My characters got wiped so I had to start from scratch with this one, so gear options are limited and it was a real slog to get to where I am.
AAR must be a terrible skill choice to start from scratch, it still suffers all the same drawbacks it had before. And new ways to use it in AoM require new gear first.
Why would you overcap some of your skills for very little gain? Isn’t it better to move these points to mental alacrity for more cast speed that you haven’t maxed, and better mana management? Are you sure you need that word of agony? Your elemental resists are overcapped to 70-80% without the seal, why not use something else instead of molten skins and rigid shells you have?
I found 4-5 mage hunter aether ray builds myself, but they were all theorycraft builds or lvl 50/60 builds. Didn’t find anything like this. Maybe I missed it? Very possible.
I’m not sure about difficulty - unless the expansion changed the game, I found almost all content a complete cakewalk with this build. I can say that out of my 4 max level chars, this one was probably the easiest come elite/ultimate, and that’s counting two copy-pasted builds.
Mana is perfectly fine actually. I always kept it balanced on a knife’s edge. As long as you view elixirs of spirit as just another skill and not a limited resource there’s never a problem with it. You DO have to sometimes take intentional damage in extended fights to proc the weapon, but other than that you can do just about anything you want and mana is not an issue (even with AAR at 26). You have to remember there is a lot of kiting involved, which means lots of down time for ray.
As far as other questions go - you are right about the poor optimization on some components (didn’t update to match change in resistances), word of agony was solely picked to increase the radius, whether or not those points make it worth it is tricky, your suggestion looks interesting, I will have to try it out though I remember without the radius buff, the skill was a pain in the ass to cast, but maybe that was just laziness on my part. Looking around I found a lot of hate towards the skill, and wanted to try it out to see how it did. If your goal is simply to clear all content, the skill seems perfectly balanced. You can melt almost all heroes (minus corrupted and a few outliers) in a single cycle without the need to kite, which I think is fairly decent for a random ass build. That said, I wonder how much better it could be with propers items and a more well-honed skill/devotion setup.
The biggest problem I see is your DPS is 13K. That should hit at least 100K, and I see it over 200K on some builds. Playing AAR at 13K DPS at level 100 has got to be painful. I have to assume your casting speed is very low, and AAR isn’t over cap by much at all.
LOL are you serious? That’s hilarious. I feel there is something amiss as I think my damage while definitely suboptimal isn’t THAT bad. Good to know though. I have a long way to go.
It does appear it’s at 16/16 AAR (my mistake, 26/16). My last AAR build had 20K at level 30, if I recall. I think it reached close to 40K at 40. Though that was surprising to me, as that was what my previous level 85 had a year or 2 before.
Are you sure you don’t have an auto attack button assigned to the LMB? Remove it, and put AAR in its place. If auto attack is on the LMB or RMB, that is what is shown for your DPS. I always change that to move to instead, so I don’t attack mobs, and move instead.
If you look on this page I did see another AAR mage hunter (lightning instead of fire though) that only has 20k dps on the AAR all decked out. Unless I am checking it somewhere else these seem to be fairly normal numbers.
That’s not remotely close to normal, but it is normal for the DPS listed on the character sheet to display someones auto attack numbers, and not their primary skill. A lot of people leave auto attack on the left mouse button, and no matter what your other skill is, it displays the DPS of auto attack. I’m betting the same is true for you.
Edit:
This might be the one you are mentioning, but his DPS shows 199k, not 20k. http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63306
You might also be looking at the damage per hit, rather than the DPS. On page 2, the numbers on the top is per hit.