I am wrecking my mind on how I would make a character ultimate and/or gladiator viable with Necromancer’s Deathgrips and the Revenant constellation. Considering that using both cannot be made viable with the current content we have, which one you would use and how would you make it work if the said character would also has to get into the thick of things and use melee attacks? Which items and masteries would you use with the said build?
A penny for your thoughts…
Nowadays (on current patch) this idea have not much sense, because now skeleton from revenant scales from player’s damage bonuses, and this spirit from gloves scales from pet’s damage bonuses.
I have some build there this two things work separately from each other, but none of them - there they work together.
That being the case, can you enlighten me and link a build that is truly viable for the Revenant constellation?
I apologize in advance, because all the videos are in russian and made for the russian community
Without thinking about it too hard, I assume a melee, attack-damage-converted-to-health (adcth) Conjurer would be somewhere in the ballpark for either of those. I’ll say now that I’m not one of those !!!hardcore!!! players who throws a character in the trash if they’re not able to solo facetank the Mad Queen or turn their nose at disgust if a build can’t beat their record time for pummelling Mogdrogen on Ultimate hardcore, so take anything I write with a grain of salt.
The big thing here would be to build as a vitality+melee class first, and consider the deathgrip ghosts/skeletons to be a bit of bonus fluff. As you mentioned, this build would need to be able to survive on its own without the pets anyways.
Of course there’s a bunch of different variations I can think of off the top of my head:
Firstly, you’d have to choose if you’re going to focus on the Shaman skills or occultist skills.
Shaman
If focusing on the Shaman, my first thought would be to boost up Mogdrogen’s Pact, and go for the Wildblood set since that set has a heavy lean towards vitality and supports the Shaman’s life-leeching abilities for melee, but I haven’t memorized the details of all the legendary sets so there might be something better - I’d go more into gear, but the base of the matter is that there are just so many powerful pieces of equipment geared towards vitality damage that the best option would be to mix and match to see what suits you best. While there are better alternatives, I seriously doubt the Necromancer Deathgrips would suddenly make-or-break an otherwise viable vitality melee build, as long as your other gear is solid.
Invest in Wendigo totem+blood pact, as it’ll heal your conga line of skeletons as well as yourself. In addition to Mogdrogen’s Pact and Wendigo, consider investing in blood pact and devouring swarm - they’re both skills that improve your vitality damage output and support life leeching.
I’d recommend testing Grasping Vines as well - immobilization doesn’t matter too much for a melee build, but it does slow enemy attacks, thereby decreasing the amount of incoming damage per second. Not sure if ‘slower enemy attack’ is one of those gimmicks that just sounds good on paper when in reality everyone and their mother are resistant to it (cough cough energy leech cough cough). So, I’d say test if the ‘slow enemy attacks’ effect actually works on anything before trusting me on that one.
There are equivalent skills in the occultist skill tree for mass debuffing+leeching, but I’ll get back to that idea later.
For extras, I’d recommend Tenacity of the Boar, if you’re planning on really getting into the thick of melee. Perhaps someone can confirm if this works for certain, but I’m pretty sure the health regen boost from Tenacity of the Boar will complement both Shaman’s Mogdrogen’s Pact and Occultist’s Blood of Dreeg, which overall will make you pretty tough against any situation that doesn’t include stunlocks or hilariously excessive damage bursts.
I haven’t tried Primal Bond, but I assume there’s an argument to be made in favour of using it. Grimcalc is slightly out of date about this stuff, but it’s telling me that Primal Bond gives slightly more damage absorption than the Occultist’s Possession skill, so there’s that. Also I’ve seen players who swear up and down that physical damage is the alpha-and-omega for anyone who’s serious about melee damage - haven’t investigated that too thoroughly either.
Lastly, if you’re choosing to pack a 2-handed melee weapon, invest at least one point in either Upheaval, or max out Feral Hunger. This is if you’re planning on using the Revenant skeletons, which I’ll elaborate on later.
Occultist
As for focusing more heavily on Occultist, I’d definitely recommend Curse of Frailty and Vulnerability. If you combine this with Bloody Pox, it essentially gives you similar effects to the Shaman’s Grasping Vines+Devouring Swarm combo, as mentioned earlier. Having used both of these combos in separate builds, I’d say it’s like the difference between Vanilla icecream and French Vanilla icecream. Mix and match as you wish - as long as you achieve the objective of reducing the enemy’s resistances and DoT damage for the Devotion skills.
In my first Witchblade Build, I liked the life leech from Sigil of Consumption though now I’m not so sure. Comparing it to the Wendigo Totem, Sigil of Consumption is potentially more reliable in terms of attack-damage-converted-to-health(ADCTH) but it relies purely on its own damage output for ADCTH, unlike the Wendigo Totem that springboards off the player’s attacks to provide ADCTH. I’m not a mathematician, so I can’t answer which one is a better investment for damage dealt+health gained. Perhaps one can use both?
As for other Occultist skills, Blood of Dreeg is a pretty reliable get-out-of-jail-free card, and it should mesh with the passive regen abilities from the Shaman tree. I’ve used Solael’s Witchfire extensively on a Witchblade, but I just can’t advocate for it fully - each point in Solael’s Witchfire and Second Rite adds to your active energy cost per second, which can be a real problem if you’re like me and spam skills like they’re going out of style.
Devotion setup:
As everything I’m spouting here, devotions will definitely depend on what balance of skills you take, plus what sort of gear you’re focusing on, but I can give a few conditional suggestions.
If you’re going for the Revenant, I’d say start with the ghoul or vulture - really, most of the ‘chaos’ alignment constellations are poor, so here we’re choosing between the vulture which provides very mediocre bonuses but gives a lot of chaos affinity, or the ghoul which is slightly less mediocre but gives less chaos affinity points.
After that, make a detour to the primordial constellations and unlock the Gallows - you could probably choose the Sailor’s Compass too, but ADCTH builds are mostly about keeping your vitality damage as high as possible so you can steal as much health as possible in return.
With that done, go for the piece de la resistance of most solid ADCTH builds: the Wendigo.
Remember all those cruddy DoT skills I was recommending like Devouring Swarm, Bloody Pox and Grasping Vines? The Wendigo is why you want them. The great thing about the Wendigo is that the Wendigo’s Mark proc has no cooldown. This means that if you assign the Wendigo’s Mark to a DoT effect, it’ll roll to activate on every enemy affected by the DoT, for each damage tick.
Now as great as that is, this puts us a few affinity points short of the revenant - if you picked the Vulture and you have that 1 extra Chaos affinity from the Crossroads, then you’ll be able to start investing in the Revenant. If you went for the ghoul, you’ll be 3 points short - 2 points if you still have chaos crossroads. I’d say go for the Bat constellation - I think of it as the Wendigo’s little brother in terms of what it offers, but for whatever reason everyone hates the Bat so I’ll respect if you want to pick something else like the Jackal.
As for where to assign the Revenant’s skeleton summon skill, I’d recommend assigning it to feral hunger or upheaval. It may be tempting to just slap it onto an attack replacer like savagery, but the problem with doing that is the Skeletons will be too busy being resummoned to actually help you with any attacks: it needs to be something that does enough burst damage to reliably get you at least one skeleton per use, and that recharges fast enough to let you reach your summon limit of 5 skeletons without being so spammy that you’re forcing the skeletons to be resummoned before they even enter combat.
That being done, now pick up the Lizard - a 3-star constellation that gives you even more regen to compliment Blood of Dreeg and/or Mogdrogen’s Pact, along with either the Sailor’s Guide or the Eel. Eel is cheap and useless, Sailor’s Guide requires one more devotion point and is hypothetically less useless.
Right now, the Dying God should be unlocked. The devotion skill is a bit risky, to be sure, but the amount of vitality damage the constellation offers is undeniable.
Now, we’re still a little flimsy for defence, but that’s alright - if you picked the Bat earlier like I suggested, you’ll be sitting at 3 eldritch affinity. Use the crossroads to get to four affinity, and the Behemoth constellation is now unlocked - good for staying alive. Alternatively, if you picked the Viper instead of the Bat, you can give Aeon’s Hour Glass a spin.
Picking the Behemoth does unlock access to the Kraken constellation if you’re running a 2-handed gear setup - I don’t hear this constellation talked about in other builds, but in my personal experience there are worse options than a constellation that potentially gives +60% to all damage, +80% to physical damage, and +20% attack speed. Otherwise, using your last 5 points to grab the Manticore Constellation for the Acid Spray proc could also work.
There’s definitely alternative builds for if you want to ignore the revenant as well - such as one that goes for Golgoran instead, but this post is getting long winded as it is so I’m going to wrap this up.
As I said, I haven’t actually tried this build out myself, so this entire post is nothing more than the blind leading the blind. However, these’re just my two cents on the matter - as someone who has both the deathgrips and has played around with revenant before, I’ll definitely set some time aside to actually try this out.