With patch changes situation regarding the Oathkeeper mastery had changed since it’s first appearance, so am interested in finding how strong are different Oathkeeper combos. This is subject to personal opinion. But still will set some criteria to the ranking. One thing is sure, OK don’t have really weak link with no synergy, which should be kept from the outside world.
Performance of the strongest end game build
Number of viable options end game
Number of play styles it covers
How easy is to level it and how it would perform without specific gear
Ease of gearing
Toughness and defensive capabilities
How easy is to pilot
So my personal opinion is:
Warlord. WL is class which is very strong defensively. Easy to build and is has value from the beginning to the end. It doesn’t have the fastest Crucible tines, but is good both there, in SR and campaign. Retaliation, Tank, 2h, DW all are possible. Lack of versatility when it comes to damage types.
Shieldbreaker. Natural synergy with fire. Blast shield and Ascension provides defense. Demo casters are excellent currently and OK can support it good. As we saw even DW melee is quite good here. Again other than fire and lightning through Cyclone, no other damages.
Dervish. It’s tough to decide it between SB and Dervish for second place. Natural synergy to acid damage. It have two top tier builds, Venomblade and Demonslayer. Also cold is possibility.
Paladin. Again fire damage, but this time help from Inquisitor seal, heal and Censure. Very sturdy class combo, maybe second best in that regard behind Warlord. Ranged, Hybrid, caster are all options.
Archon. Cyclone EoR, but not only. Both classes have fire and vitality RR. Also Shaman have the rare bleeding RR, so Archon is one of the top bleed classes. Unexplored potential probably in vitality /bleed hybrid.
Opressor. Physical damage or retaliation, vitality build, hybrids. It’s a class with few problems, despite the excellent RR for physical and vitality. Class have high health pool and is ok defensively.
Sentinel. Vitality, Acid, Physical, Fire, Bleeding. Sentinel have staggering 5 damage types with dual RR sources. Occultist also provides physical resistance and healing skill which OK lacks. Yet Sentinel is often outclassed by another classes.
Templar. The changes to Arcanist probably boos this class, but I don’t think is very good. Pyram or Vanquisher push it to decent level, but class is gear dependent, no sources of DA and hard to pilot also.
Warlord doesn’t lack versality when it comes to damage types - physical (Markovian, Warborn, Targo, Bloodrager), fire (Judgement set), acid (Sentinel of the Three set, although it’s considered weak), maybe bleed. It’s a very flexible class with a few very well performing builds, that’s why it’s top tier even in global class competition despite being pretty low-key nowadays due to not performing all that good in cruci speedrunning. It’s also had been stable recently, unlike Dervish or Shieldbreaker.
No idea why you said “maybe” lightning, Cyclone is mostly a lightning set after all. Plenty of strong options even with recent nerfs.
Honestly Dervish was shaken plenty - there was a time I counted it among top tier classes (in one line with beasts like Warlord, Shieldbreaker, Vindicator and Infiltrator), but nowadays I’m not sure. Venomblade went from top tier to meh to pretty good. Demonslayer idk, but should be okay. Cold I consider a meme to be honest. Yeah, it’s a thing but can’t call it as part of dervish repertoire. Dunefiend is considered to be meh somewhat.
Omnitrio is a big fan of this class and made all sorts of builds with it, most of then ranked SR+. I suspect that Paladin is also secretly a very strong class, but because it doesn’t show good performance in cruci speedrunning it’s under radar for now. In my global class ranking I put it into second tier.
Archon is a class that has a lot of options on paper, but there’s VERY little interest in this class. Main cause is because melee vitality (be it Savagery or PS) actually don’t work all that well, for reasons beyond my understanding. Fire is something I see as possible on paper due to Blazerush, but who knows if this concept could actually generate a strong build. So if anyone asks me about strong Archon builds I’d link them John’s PhysRager and that would be it. I don’t regard this class very high despite all the potential, third tier in my list.
Opressor is also a third tier in my list. Retal DE is throughfully dead, according to people who were insterested in it. That leaves BH Blood Knight (which is very good I heard), Blightlord and a few exotics.
Sentinel shares it’s problem with Archon - a lot of RR potential, but I haven’t seen an abundance of strong Sentinels. Third tier in my list. It’s signature set (Sentinel of the Three) is considered to be a meme tier set…
Templar is fourth tier in my list (and it’s the bottommost tier). It basically only has Vanquisher, which is pretty good. Pyran Templar was something I really wanted to be good, but all these points in guardians are a wasted potential since guardians got pretty bad scaling compared to blade spirits. It was meh compared to godly Sorc and even more godly Shieldbreaker even when guardians had some crazy RR, now it’s probably even worse.
Good analysis, @Stupid_Dragon . I wouldn’t call it nitpick. Cold Dervish can work with RF conduit and DM set. But DM was nerfed over and over and even Infiltrator are not top tier class, let alone Dervish. Mad Lee Dervish with Demonslyer is very good, Venomblade was improved in the patch fix.
Paladin is very strong defensively, I have posted DW melee and Judgment build, so I know. Also played Helborn build and have potential. But yes not having many fast clearing except EoR makes it fly under the radar.
Archon vitality PS sucks. Set have none support to other PS nodes, no WD I think and no support to the skill outside of set. Savagery don’t even have conversion for 2h. So Archon is weird. Rhyltar build looks decent.
Templar, try it as Pyram Devastation, posses damage, but hard to apprehend what to do. But I still think is weakest combo.
Okay? The build is not dead per se, but nowhere near fucking viable, A lot of hits towards retal nerfs that patch and first and foremost, the amulet nerfs, fucking destroyed it.
And that was the build with 4-5 greens.
I absolutely disagree. Call me a drama queen, if you want. I dare you.
Not only it was hit severy with amulet nerfs, but also a number of shit that time. Overguard trasmute nerf - severe blow of retal builds, to the point NONE takes it now, even good tanks.
Messenger rework. General lowering of retal values across the entire board, along with a good hit in RTA section.
ALL OF THIS combined severy hit the build. It was already having problems in shards and Cruc with tough single targets. It’s nowhere near viability of what it was. I absolutely think that it was overblown with nerfs and some of them, particular amulet nerfs, can be weakened.
You could still use it with the Overguard, though, it helped the tankiness.
Besides, not only the amulet was nerfed, the shield was too, I think - two buildmaking items, one of which is green with quite rare affixes.
The build itself used like 4-5 of these, to maximize the retal potential.
The build was strong in Crucible due to big RTA and retal mechanics along with old balance of mobs and gerenally weaker mobs there. Massive AoE was excellent for destroying packs of monsters and the sustain due to leech was great.
However. In shards, problems began to surface. Against strong, full-powered boss rooms single targets the damage was noticeably low. The sustain was still good, but some hefty blows were able to dent the build, if you were not careful.
RTA nerfs, retal nerfs after, this build showed clinically less damage than before - IMO, the ammy and the shield were nerfed too much. And after mob buffs, the sustain is nowhere near where it was before.
Now before it showed 6 minutes in Crucible. That’s totally fine, isn’t it? After all the nerfs It would perform marginally worse than that.
And you still have to compensate for lower than previous retal damage numbers with more green gear, since you also lack itemization per se.
My strong suggestion - return a bit of RTA values on ammy and make the shield more viable.
Retal DE is just as dead as warlord. It doesn’t have the best cruci times but it’s still unkillable. Warlord’s ranked one on this list - far from dead and so is retal DE. BTW, retal DE still does cruci (1.1.3.0, dunno about the most recent cruci buffs) in 7 mins consistently, you can even get 6 if lucky. And @Autentist my thread title did show 6 mins but that was before I learned that conversion affected retal. With beronath it magically just transformed to a 5 min build…
Onto the list:
Warlord: agree with dragon, it’s the most versatile oathkeeper in terms of damage type simply because soldier works as a support class for every damage type there is. That’s what truly makes it number 1.
Shieldbreaker - recent buffs and nerfs to dervish make this solid #2. I’m interested in shielded physical tho. It’s effectively got the same amount of RR as warlord, but the problem is that stoneguard is the only phys item that supports RF and i don’t wanna go retal.
Dervish - nerfs man. I don’t consider demonslayer to be a dervish build tho. It’s a nightblade build that works with every class combo that’s got vit RR.
Paladin - should be better in cruci but we’ve been hit by the anti-paladin crusade (thankfully) and now only omnitrio who doesn’t play cruci plays the class still we know by the amount of sr builds he posts that paladin is real good. Breaker just overtook it with the thermite buffs.
Archon - would rank this higher than paladin if only it had better synergy outside cyclone. It’s got more than just cyclone but I’m bummed that fire archon with double RR isn’t as strong.
Oppressor - this will always be number 1 in my heart.
Templar - this will always be number 2 in my heart. Buff pyran templar btw, move the skill bonuses from guardians to judgment. Won’t hurt shielbreaker (probably even a buff) but will surely turn out good for templar
Cold Dervish can work with RF conduit and DM set. But DM was nerfed over and over and even Infiltrator are not top tier class, let alone Dervish. Mad Lee Dervish with Demonslyer is very good, Venomblade was improved in the patch fix.
Build was nerfed yes, but even so there are different builds like thejabrixone retal hybrid Opressor.
still we know by the amount of sr builds he posts that paladin is real good. Breaker just overtook it with the thermite buffs.