This is the first build I followed from a guide without just rolling my own, and it absolutely works as advertised. It’s also one of the most interesting builds to me since it’s such a pure concept focusing so heavily on retaliation/reflection mechanics which are easily overlooked and achieves the goal it set out to do. That’s a very impressive achievement to me.
One interesting thing to note about retaliation damage modifiers is that many of them often have healthy boosts to all types of retaliation damage. As a result my current build is dealing ~13k total retaliation damage but from a variety of sources (acid, piercing, lightning, etc). It’s not as big of a problem to deal such an eclectic variety of damage types when retaliation is concerned since many modifiers often boost them all (of course with some exceptions, but it’s easier to get away without focusing on just one or two damage types).
About playing this build though, it is freaking boring to me! It’s so, so, so boring! I thought pet builds were boring, this takes it to a whole new level. I’m wanting to scream at the screen, “just hit me already!” when a boss starts screwing around and using attacks that don’t count as melee while I’m standing next to them. If that’s not a problem for people then the game is really a stroll in the park with this build. I actually kind of get excited the few times my health is dropping because of a lot of ranged characters or getting swarmed by nemesis on crucible or something like that where I have to stop and actually pay attention since most of the time I can just idle away. I’m not sure it’s such a good build for farming for people who have no great collection of gear just yet since it’s so slow unless you’re willing to accept doing it at a fraction of the speed (though at a massive, massive reduction to risk).
Quite soon after taking this build quite far, I wanted to try one that focuses more on “on hit” procs instead of retaliation, since I think that would be a bit faster if we could pull it off (ex: plaguebearer prefix). This way only one enemy would have to land a hit for a proc to go off that does aoe to everything around us, e.g., instead of waiting for each and every enemy to land a hit or two.
The boredom happens only if you want to go pure retaliation just for the sake of the concept. But there are ways to make both retaliation/offensive builds. Sure they will be less tanky but they don’t need to be because you don’t need to just stand there and take hits. Another advantage is that ranged mobs or bosses are no longer a nuissance with this in mind.
Just a matter of changing perspective. If you put all your eggs in one basket you will get huge retaliation numbers but skip 1/3 of the games content or try to compensate with reflect damage which is not something to rely on but something to complement a build.