I have been playing for a while in the alpha and beta, but I recently started playing serious now. I have rolled a shaman with ocultist as second class. I am level 36 now, and I play on veteran. So far, everything goes well. Some bosses are challenges, and I die from regular mobs if I don’t pay attention. I use an epic Rifle as my weapon. This is what I have so far:
I had some issues with the boss of the steps of torment (the priest, I haven’t opened the door yet) and Cronley was really a pain (died there 5 times), but the rest is going ok. The game doesn’t feel easy, but it is also not too hard.
I have been reading many topics about builds and I was wondering, is it easy to mess up a build and have a weak character? I like the way I play now, but will it be viable in harder difficulties?
Some info on my gear: I usually go for gear with cunning and offensive ability, because I never have mana problems. I used fire resistance gear when I was fighting with Cronley’s gang. Is there a way to show my gear?
I always open up with curse of frialty, and immediately throw a devouring swarm and wind devil after it. My basic attack (right click) is savagery, and I sometimes throw in a primal strike if enemies get close. I also use Wendigo totem if enemies are close to me, but almost dead. I really enjoy this way of play. Any tips to improve? Cheers!
Everything is respeccable, so it’s hard to screw up.
Only way that can happen is that you use up all your attribute points on something you don’t need that much and find that you cannot wear your endgame gear.
Visualize what your endgame gear will be, and then get your character to have baseline stats that are somewhat close to the requirements (keep in mind the -% requirements affix that are found on some gear and devotions as well). Then you are free to spend it all on whichever stat you like.
For example, Ultos set has low physique and spirit requirements. You’re usually covered on the spirit side just from masteries for a conjurer but your physique will tend to be low, so pumping quite a generous amount of points in physique is something you often need to be wear nice armor.
That’s something that immediately stuck out to me with your build is that you have zero physique invested and lots of cunning and a little bit of spirit. Anything with zero physique is featherweight to me and something experts can sometimes pull off, but it’s far easier to me with most builds to err on the side of a very generous amount of physique. If I were you I’d put a great number of the remaining points as you start leveling up into it to make sure you can wear endgame gear and also to boost your DA/health pool.
Another thing with shaman is that having a bigger health pool makes your wendigo more powerful, for example, since it heals a percentage of your health every interval. More maximum health means your wendigo is healing more health points every second, so for shamans I tend to become a health hoarder – trying to really boost maximum HP as much as I can
To me shaman is so much easier if you invest in wendigo and start getting used to putting it down in front of mobs. I always found that a hassle with shaman but I’d like to see anyone without godly gear try to play shaman-based builds in ultimate without relying on wendigo at all. It is so, so, so helpful to me.
I just noticed this part which explains the cunning investment – not so used to seeing shaman builds focused on ranged attacks. I think the general advice given before to look through some endgame legendary-type gear and aim for the requirements is very good.
After looking at your devotions I’m not sure what you are trying to achieve so much – like there’s poisonish-stuff developing there with some nodes, otherwise pet-focusing type of devotions – and you got a lot in briarthorn but not heavy enough of a pet focus IMO to really make it like a very effective pet build.
It might help to kind of explain what you are going towards exactly.
Well, he doesn’t have the basis of experience to know what to go toward. He wouldn’t know what that looks like. I’d argue that trying to dictate fine direction on your first character is somewhat of a waste of time, since so much of the first character is about learning the ins and outs.
So personally, I’d say skip the Item browsing, trying to figure what gear you’ll have at the end. Not yet, anyways. Keep free-wheeling. Particularly since you can’t really dictate what items you will get.
Rather, do what’s fun, and don’t do what’s tedious. At some point the crunchy stuff will be fun, and make more immediate sense - Do it then.
In the immediate future, if your goal is survivability, then that’s a more manageable task to guide towards.
I’m playing a conjurer right now also, just started on ultimate. Though my build is much different - 2h lightning axe swinger. Here’s some of what I’ve found.
Resistances will go a long ways, as will armor. Resistances are less important now, but will increase in importance later. HP regen acts as a great synergy with armor and resistances. Meaning the whole is greater than the sum of it’s individual parts. So in that regard, Blood of Dreeg is quite powerful, and worth considering. It provides you an on-demand heal, a huge HP regen boost, and some nice Offensive Ability.
Blood of Dreeg, and some other healing-related abilities operate on a %HP basis, meaning that they in turn synergize with your total HP pool. The higher your pool, the bigger the heal. Meanwhile you’ve got Mogdrogen’s Pact available, to further boost this angle of defense. These are strengths built into the Shaman and Occultist kit. Lacking specific items and theorycraft to build an exotic concept around, you’d be best off focusing on what your kit makes most available. Which pretty much is regen, and crowd control, when it comes to defense.
The problem you may run into with survivability, however, is that you’re stacking cunning. This goes to your question about whether you can ‘mess up’ a character.
Your Physique/Cunning/Spirit is, along with ranks put into a Mastery, the only thing you cannot un-do. So based on that, you’re not going to be able to leverage the health pool/regen/armor angle to it’s absolute fullest. But on the bright side, medium armor isn’t particularly demanding, so it’s not too late to start putting points into physique in order to make sure you can always wear the best medium armor you can find. You may find, as time goes on, that simply avoiding getting hit will get harder, and perhaps impossible.
Another thing to keep in mind: since you’ve already invested heavily into Cunning, that means you’ve invested decently into physical damage and piercing damage. Those stats get boosted from cunning, in addition to Offensive Ability. You could lean into that, and make sure your items all focus on boosting physical/piercing. But the Conjurer kit doesn’t really have anything that boosts this. It’s a bit of a dead end, without items to do the work. Cunning will not provide synergy with any of your bag of tricks, aside from the Offensive Ability that it provides. Yet, offensive ability can be obtained outside of cunning, so I would suspect it does not redeem the cunning investment.
This does not mean your character is ruined - merely that it’s not an optimal marriage of kit & stats. You could change direction now, for example, and not really feel too much pain from the shift. Alternatively, perhaps I’m wrong, and cunning will work great somehow - I’ve only done 2 characters, neither using cunning or ranged.
In the end, here’s some things to consider -
A) How, mechanically, do you do damage? Physical, piercing? Or is it lightning, or chaos, or vitality? Pick one, maybe two, not more than 3, and focus on those. Shun the rest. Dispersed damage bonuses are typically less strong than focused bonuses.
B) Will you invest heavily into pets? If so, then you might want to gear for pet bonuses(generally at the expense of personal damage). The Conjurer is potentially the most pet-heavy class, so you’d have plenty of synergy, if you chose to build that way.
C) When a boss mob teleports on top of you and lands their Falcon Punch, how will you survive? Plan ahead for the worst.
D) It’s extremely likely you will level one of your masteries to completion. Maybe both, maybe not, but which one for sure? Look at the last set of abilities available. They tend to be very powerful. They’re worth setting aside heavy investment. And they’re worth anchoring your build on, guiding your build.
Thought I had an E, but forgot. Dang.
For one potential build direction, you could do sort of what I’m doing - I know it works for sure in Ultimate. Earlier today, I realized I could switch out my 2h axe for a crossbow, and it’d work just fine.
You could bonus for lightning damage only, use lightning totems to spread damage around while you shoot. Tie the Reckless Tempest devotion to the totems - It will clear the room in an amazing and hilarious display, if you’ve got the Offensive Ability to get the crits(which you will). For crowd control, curse of frailty helps, and it’s Vulnerability expansion is superb. You could try out grasping vines, although that’s splitting damage types, but not so badly since it’s physical, and you’re already partly invested in physical. Blood of Dreeg will keep you alive in emergency moments. And you could pour points into physique to boost your hp regen, help you avoid getting critted via it’s innate Defensive Ability, and increases your overall health pool. Boosting physique would then make the Mark of Mogdrogen tree look more attractive, at least in parts.
This might be viable through ultimate.
But you’ve also got viable directions by focusing on Vitality, or Chaos, or perhaps poison. Vitality might be redundant though - Insect swarm is a ranged attack, and therefore fulfills nearly the same purpose as your auto-attack with a ranged weapon.
Thanks, great post, and I understand haha. My first serious character, it was fun, but I rerolled a witchblade now, a build that Dikkiedik made, and I am already facerolling everything in Act 1 except for 1 boss (I am level 20, boss is 26, but I killed it after a long struggle)
If you’re using a cadence witchblade just wait until you get deadly momentum and menhir’s bulwark if you use a board. It’s like say hello to 25k+ DPS even with meh yellow one-handed weapon of alacricity (even pistol) in ultimate while facetanking left and right. It was the first build with which I completed ultimate and I’m an ADHD type – I tend to try new build ideas the moment one faces any kind of struggle and I tend to abandon characters the moment their character sheet shows more than zero deaths even though I’m not playing hardcore. The only thing close to effortless even with so-so self-found gear (some legendaries but not ones that align so beautifully and no legendary popular set) was my cadence witchblade, and that was like the 23rd character I tried to make.
