I play a lot of 2-player coop, and so far we have always created our builds individually, with little consideration for how well they supplement each other. For a change, we are thinking about creating two characters that are specifically designed to work in combination, where solo-play performance doesn’t matter at all.
My understanding of the underlying game mechanics is rather rudimentary, so I can’t really tell what the best approach would be. General ideas I came up with are:
Two chars who use the same damage type, with different auras that boost that damage type and different RRs (problem: afaik most of those don’t stack)
Two chars with different auras and radius skills that boost surviveability
Two pet builds with different auras that boost pet stats
Which approach would work best? Are there existing builds specifically for coop synergy? Would it actually work, or would the difference be negligible?
Iirc there was a group of 4 players who specifically built their builds around conquering deep SR and they managed to actually beat all existing shards (210 before the SR crunch, now it would be 84)
Wow, that’s pretty amazing, I watched some parts of the video!
It seems to be a bit different from what I had in mind, though - as I understand, they had one player, the Deceiver Lynh, who focused pretty much entirely on support skills, boosting the other three players (like a healer/tank combination in MMORPGs). I’m not sure this would work well with just one other player.
This can definitely work. As long as the RR is -%RR it stacks. So for example for cold -%RR you can combine any of the following: nightblade’s night’s chill, oathkeper’s celestial presence, occultist’s vulnerability, inquisitor’s aura of cencure, necromancer’s spectral wrath, demolitionist’s thermite mine.
What doesn’t stack is multiple of the same skill (or devotion), or anything that doesn’t say %, like the rr on elemental storm from rowhan’s crown and the rr on distortion from arcanist’s prm (second node).
You can also combine damage boosting aura’s or skills, or for health/energy regen, attack speed, etc. Just keep in mind two of the same skill will only apply the highest. So two arcanist IEE doesn’t help.
For coop group builds, look no further than checking out @WyreZ’s threads. They were made for 4 player groups at high level SR, but I’m sure you can adapt to get them to work with fewer players. Here is just one of the threads:
I had a similar idea after looking at that thread Volek posted - instead of having a soldier/oathkeeper tank with a occultist/inquisitor as a mere supporter, have two build who include a tanky melee class and a supporter class.
A Witchblade (soldier/occultist) could provide Field Command (OA/DA/attack speed/damage), Blood od Dreeg (healing and phys. res.), War Cry (enemy -damage and -phys. res.) and Curse of Frailty (enemy -phys. res. and DA).
A Paladin (oathkeeper/inquisitor) could provide Presence of Virtue (OA, health, phys. damage), Aura of Conviction (OA, phys. damage, phys. res.), Word of Renewal (healing, health, DA, phys. damage) and Inquisitor seal (damage absorption and damage).
After looking at WyreZ’s builds I wonder if soldier/inquisitor and oathkeeper/occultist might be better combinations, though. At the very least, it might be a bit easier to play if the same player doesn’t have to cast Curse of Frailty and War Cry.
Welcome to my wonderful world of multiplayer building. It is a joyous time, and you can achieve great heights by going down this path. Also see this comment, where we teamed up to try and see how high we could super-boost a pet’s damage.
You’re absolutely right in thinking that you can create synergy between multiple players, between shared defensive buffs, and synergistic debuffs on enemies, like stacking RR.
Your instincts to combine Oath/Inquis/Soldier/Occultist for phys damage and survivability are good.
It all depends on what sorts of playstyle you want with them, though. Do you want melee? If so - dual wield, sword ‘n’ board, 2 handed? What about ranged builds? Or one of each? Pets, casters? What about retaliation synergies? What do you and your teammates enjoy playing? The possibilities are virtually endless.
It also sort of depends on your goal - Do you want to be able to clear things quickly, or survive things well? Do you care about being able to kill Callagadra or Crate? Do you want to be doing SR 150+ ? Or do you want to be able to do SR 75 very quickly? Or do you just want to play builds that ‘feel’ fun, and are not too concerned with certain in-game milestones?
All of these considerations can guide your efforts.
Alternatively, make no consideration, and just start trying stuff out to work out what you like organically.
I’ll go with melee for now, sword 'n board since that fits soldier and oathkeeper well, and see if I can come up with builds we want to give a try.
Plan B is a pet-based approach.
I’ve been looking for items and devotions that grant bonuses that apply to your ally as well.
Items:
I haven’t had much success searching the database, since there are no filters for this kind of need, and search terms like “granted by item”, “nearby allies” or “meter radius” haven’t worked that well (for example, “meter radius” doesn’t show me Menhir’s Bastion for some reason). What I have so far, I took from the builds linked above: Battlecry (various items) and Menhir’s Bastion from the relic of the same name.
Devotions:
Inspiration from Bard’s Harp applies to allies as well. Does Stone Form from Obelisk of Menhir apply to allies? It has a radius. Assassin’s Mark reduces physical resistance.
It DOES take a while to work out what all of the team-based options are in terms of gear/devotions/skills, there are inconsistencies in naming. But you’re on the right track.
Meter Radius should show Menhir’s Bastion - at least it did when I tried it just now. Do you have other filters (ie greens only or a level item cap) that might prevent it from showing up?
If ever you want to calculate the team buffs that your build gives to another, I built a website to help out - you copy/paste your grimtools link into it and it’ll show you the buffs provided for an individual build, and for a team of up to 4 builds taking into consideration duplicate skills/devotions etc between chars.
It’s not perfect, and it’s been a while since I updated it. But it should be like 99% accurate, probably.
So far, the builds only include those skills, items and devotions that are relevant for supporting each other (and devotions necessary to get points). I’ll probably switch out Fateweaver’s Raiment, since armor is way too low for melee, and I’ll get rid of Manticore, since War Cry already grants a flat RR, and they don’t stack.
According to the tool, the relevant group bonuses are:
OA, DA and Crit Damage
+392 +8% DA
+666 +8% OA
+15% Crit Damage
Damage
+369% All Damage
+116.5 +185% Physical Damage
+185% Internal Trauma Damage
+356% All Retaliation Damage
+997 Physical Retaliation Damage
Healing and Health
+23% Healing Increase
+1000 +35% Health
+753 +170% Health Regen
+2935 +93% Health Restored
We’ve started a playthrough with a Tactician and a Sentinel about two weeks ago, doing the usual speed leveling routine. Currently, the chars are at level 100 and in the middle of Ashes of Malmouth. So far, they work very well. We encountered the first nemesis bosses, Valderan, Kubacabra, Ben’jar and Grave’thul, and they went down easily.
We are still making changes to the builds, but those are rather recent versions: Tactician Sentinel
The Tactician now uses the Mythical Warborn Gavel, and Word of Pain in addition to Storm Box.
Any ideas are welcome, the builds are still very much work-in-progress! The goal is to max out the damage dealt by both chars combined. The chars are intended for ccop play only, each build doesn’t have to work on its own.
Yes but even combined, they still deal much less dps than a good similar solo build.
Here is an alteration of the tactician with gear I think you both have (why did your relic menhirs bastion don’t have a completion bonus, and your inquisitor amulet no suffix for resistances? Use grim tools to upload char files)
Thanks a lot!
I like how you moved the ADctH to Seal of Blades so he can wear the Menhirian ring. How about Bladetwister Signet for another -10% phys. res. reduction? I’m a bit reluctant to lose the crit damage from Tainted Heart, but I can see that attack speed and DA shred from Seal of Annihilation will probably give better overall results. I’m not ready to give up group bonuses (Divine Guard) yet.
Two questions:
How much can we rely on resists from Blood of Dreeg and Word of Renewal? They can easily have 100% uptime, since cooldown is much shorter than duration, but afaik there are enemies that can disable your buffs for a couple of seconds.
I was surprised that you took Death Sentence for Word of Pain. Wouldn’t Lightning Tether for Storm Box be better, for slow target? That also affects attack speed, doesn’t it?
Those are recent uploads: Tactician Sentinel
We moved the Beholder-hat to the Sentinel, trading the bonuses to Blood of Dreeg for 100% War Cry-uptime, and we have reached 55 devotion points. Completion bonuses etc. are what we got on our first try, since items might still change, and we don’t want to waste ingreadients (that runic whispers amulett already took a load of ugdenblooms).
The Sentinel was quite difficult to make, since I couldn’t find a lot of builds for physical damage Sentinels to use as reference. I focused on melee damage and survivability, but noticed that he nevertheless accumulated quite a bit of retaliation damage (after conversion, he has about 25k physical retaliation, plus some trauma), so I tried to make use of that, especially by selecting devotion skills with high retaliation damage added to attack.
The arcane mobs are few and are easily recognizable+ you have loxmere and grava
Even HC players rely on having those buffs up all the time, and so should you.
What is ironic is that you spend quite some effort in the sentinel to make BoD as strong as possible… e.g. the shield.
Death sentance and word of agony is just for longer duration and area. All CC effects basically only affects trash mobs that are not dangerous in the first place. Dangeous mobs have very high slow res so they are not affected by such things.
We’ve done dungeons up to Ancient Grove and all Nemesis bosses except Fabius, and we defeated the Avater of Mogdrogen on our second attempt with the modified gear. In SR, however, we’ve hit a bit of a wall at shard 37. We can clear shard 36 rather reliably, but we’ve tried 37 two or three times, and on each attempt, one hero ended up getting one-shotted in the boss fight, and we ended up losing the timer. I’m not really sure why.
This is the current setup. We reluctantly gave up the Beholder hat’s big OA group bonus in exchange for improvements to some other stats and +1 Oathkeeper skills for the Sentinel. Tactician Sentinel
I jotted down some basic stats in the game, with group bonuses and BoD+WoR active:
Health: Tactician 27k, Sentinel 24k
OA: Tactician 3.1k, Sentinel 3k
DA: Tactician 3k, Sentinel 3k
DPS: Tactician 84k, Sentinel 34k
LMB-Skill: Tactician 68k-92k, Sentinel 9k-14k
Phys. Res.: Tactician 68%, Sentinel 69%
Armor: Tactician 4.1k, Sentinel 4.1k
[edit] I noticed that “inspect player” somehow displays different values than the other player’s own character screen, especially for damage, so better ignore those values for the Sentinel.
The Sentinel will get Seal of Annihilation, too, and Steelbloom Powder in the amulet. We also forgot to re-assign attribute points, we can move some spirit into physique and cunning. The Sentinel is lacking attack speed, so I think we’ll try exchanging the Apothecary’s gloves. Since we either don’t take much damage at all or die instantly, the group heal hasn’t been that useful lately. The Crimson Claws look good, since they also have a health bonus, and since they have lifesteal, we could maybe exchange the Unholy Inscription for Consecrated Wrappings.
Both characters have very low attack speed, and I don’t see what the sentinel has for sustain. The life steal seems low and the health regen doesn’t seem particularly great. I also don’t understand much of the equipment on the Sentinel. Hardly any of it has a bonus to any skills used. (Only the pants and rings.) Funnily enough the Tactician does have a shield and medal that would be useful for the Sentinel So I’d bump the life steal on the sentinel and figure out what skill you want to use there and actually get equipment to support that.
We’ve successfully reached SR 38. The Sentinel died once during the boss fight, but we still barely managed to finish it before the timer ran out. We also defeated Fabius, Morgoneth and the Clone of Jon Bourbon.
We made the adjustments to the Sentinel I mentioned before (Seal of Annihilation, Crimson Claws, Consecrated Wrappings), and additionally, we switched the medal to the Mythical Mark of the Dreadblade. I had dismissed that one before because of the flat Aether damage instead of Physical, but I realized the Sentinel has 50% Aether to Physical conversion thanks to the Seals of Might. We also gave the Tactician an Eldritch Mirror. The Tactician now has 167% attack speed, and the Sentinel 159%. The Sentinel has an additional +6% to Righteous Fervor from the Dreadblade medal, and +13% from Consecration, plus the occasional +12% from the Windshear greaves, and both heroes frequently get +10% from Battle Cry. DPS is now at 86k for the Tactician and 110k for the Sentinel.
The point about health regen is true, the Sentinel has less than 700, while the Tactician has almost 1200. This is probably due to the Tactician bringing most of the support devotions. I’ll try to figure something out - any ideas are, as always, welcome!
The lack of skill bonuses on the Sentinel gear is due to the fact that item support for Physical damage Sentinels is not that great. For example, there are no boots that grant +Physical damage and also have a skill bonus for any of the Sentinel’s skills, which leaves me with the Windshear greaves. Still, there is probably good gear that I overlooked, so suggestions are always welcome. The relevant skills are all that have more than one point invested in them. Most important are those that grant a bonus to the Tactician as well or that debuff enemies.
Please note I’ll be busy for the next week, so it might be a while until I answer new posts.
