Because it’s not a 13 second fabius kill hold left mouse button build. I’m OK with it there are room for all kinds. Some people are going to find the build fun and active and some will not like the gameplay. Can’t please everyone
I’ve been leveling a pure arcanist and I’m almost level 35 now.
I am really wondering, why did you go with nightblade and not shaman? You give up the 32% health heal and 18% dodge and that 3 second immunity, but you gain 1000 hp/s from the totem and 40% more health from Heart of the Wild.
Is the -45% cold resist much better than 35 reduced elemental resistance?
The grim calc links dont seem to be working
GrimCalc is having some issues. Just retry in a bit and they should work.
OK Grimcalc is back up and the links are working again.
@ksajal I talked about the decision of druid versus spellbreaker in the initial build guide but let’s talk about it in a bit more detail. The decision to go druid really involves looking at three skills:
-mogdrogen’s pact line, even with all the skills maxed which I probably would not do, gives you 40% HP, 37 flat HP regen per second, 36% Pierce resistance, 100 armor and 25% HP regen increase.
-wendigo totem. This skill is very powerful I will say that. However it is very awkward in its mechanics and only half you if you AND the enemies are in the radius of the totem. This build moves very quickly and having to drop a totem for every group would be terrible and unnecessary.
-the only other skill I would even think of taking from shaman would be storm callers pact for the crit damage. This would be awesome as we have lots of crit damage on tss but it would require so many points invested and the loss of star pact which would be an unacceptable loss of CDR.
Basically I would only take shaman for the mogdrogen’s pact line and it’s bonuses.
Now let’s look at nightblade:
-veil of Shadow slows enemies by 25% total speed and lowers their oa by 135. Those are huge defensive bonuses that contribute to our overall survivability in a big way. Nights chill lowers enemy cold res by 47% which by itself is worth it as it increases our damage exponentially. The real benefit to nights chill, however, is the cold damage that pulses every second at the radius of VoS. This damage procs all of our item procs and I can literally just walk around and monsters will die around me.
-pb provides a 24% heal every ten seconds which is awesome in and of itself. It also provides 33 HP regen per second, 12% to total speed (cast and movement), 85 DA and 20% to avoid melee and projectiles. The effects last twice as long as the cool down so you can keep up the effects constantly while saving the heal for when you need it.
-blade barrier is an immobile 3 second immunity which does stop us but it provides a huge health regen while also reflecting all damage while our stars continue to fall around us.
-1 point in phantasmal armor is worth it for the energy leech since this build is so energy intensive.
-1 point in anatomy is 10% damage to humans and 5% cunning which is decent.
-1 point in ring of steel and the transmuter provides yet another cc that keeps us alive on a short cool down and actually does decent damage with our huge bonus to cold damage.
I think that this comparison speaks for itself. With the huge regen we have from devotion and skills we don’t really need the extra HP from shaman. It would be nice to have the Pierce resistance but I wouldn’t consider that a major resistance to focus on unless you are farming specific mobs ie fabius. Even then I have respectable Pierce res already. You could totally build this as a druid it just wouldn’t be nearly as productive or as active. You would just have more health
That made sense, thank you for the explanation.
Quick question, what skills did you tie to what devotion trees?
Awesome build by the way, really fun!
If it’s not too much trouble asking, what augments did you use for your gear?
Awesome build by the way, super fun and quite pretty. (:
Evange I threw some points into CT, the transmuter and the modifier just to test and the results are…mixed. The knockdown works wonders against random elites and packs of whites. The damage is much higher than RoS and the radius increase is wonderful. Throwing out a OFF followed by a CT with stars falling everywhere works pretty well. Unfortunately the knockdown does not work against heroes or bosses but it is a definitive improvement over RoS. I will update my original build guide to reflect this and I will incorporate it into my character. Thanks so much for the idea!
Remember that augments are chosen to bump up lacking resistances and, as such, my augment choices will likely be quite different from yours. That being said, I am using:
Head and shoulders - 7% aether and & 7% chaos res (black legion)
amulet - 7% all damage, 10 OA and 5 DA (devil’s crossing)
rings - 180 hp, 10% regen and 15% elem resist (rovers)
weapons - 12% aether and chaos res, 8 DA (outcast)
legs, gloves, boots and belt - 15% poison and acid res (rovers)
chest - 7% vitality and chaos res (black legion)
Thanks for testing out my theory! Btw looks like the upcoming devotion changes may make your build even stronger! Can’t wait to see the patch notes!
Really the only change would be binding a devotion skill to OFF. I might have to rework devotion a bit to get another offensive devotion because as it sits the only one we have is arcane bomb… Hmmm
Just started playing and i have 2 questions
First can i just pump points into PRM out of some other arcanist skill and level like that
and second i don’t get devotions you first get the blue primordial for 1 affinity and then put points into lizard? but then how do you get different colored affinity for say viper which needs red
and i don’t see anything about celestial powers like which skill gets what
i must be missing something but i don’t get it
You can level however you want off, tss, prm, weapon components skills like fireblast.
Devotions should be straight forward. Widow/arcane bomb is our only offensive skill and a debuff so it should be bound to PRM, bind Ulo to w/e probably nullification if you to control when it’s used. The other two abilities are passives to bind to buffs
Devotions are self sustaining. You put one point into red to access Viper, when you complete it you get 2 more red so you can take the point in the middleo ut
in the grim calc tho there is a point in blue so is that the only one that stay and respec the rest?
and thank you for the response it makes sense now
Yup, that one needs to stay cause tree of life the top devotion needs 20 blue and he has exactly that
What tomodak said 
unfortunately this devotion setup is very tight and doesn’t allow much wiggle room. I’ve been looking at incorporating another offensive devotion with the upcoming changes but haven’t been able to figure anything out without losing lots of survivability.
How about using Eel instead of Lizard and using the spare point to get the 8% health node from Tree of Life? Or the third node from Menhir (5% DA, +25 DA)?
For this build I think lizard is a much better choice. A lot of our survivability comes from health regen and that is a very good constellation for that. Eel gives 30 DA and 10% pierce res. We already have 2150 DA which in my opinion is pretty good for a caster and, while it would be nice to cap pierce res, 70% is already pretty good. You can switch and try it out; the node I would get after removing the crossroads blue is the third point in menhir’s obelisk. That 150 armor is delicious…
Nice build, looks really fun - will try it as my next character
One issue I have noticed is the boss clearing speed is rather slow - I watched your Log (ultimate) video and that kill time is too long for me…
Also what is your clear time for BOC and do you find it hard to kill nemesis?