I’ve been following this guide for some time now, having felt let down by an older character I was playing and wanting something more capable of surviving while dishing out pain against a vast majority of enemies.
I have three pieces of the Dawnbreaker’s set and the equipment I have right now, which really is useful for how I go about things, as well as a good damage reflect of 151%.
I have something of a variation, having opted to only have one point into Veterancy and Mogdrogen’s Pact and maxing out Tenacity of the Boar, a point into Counter Strike, Markovian’s Advantage and Zolhan’s Technique since it wouldn’t feel right to take advantage of those bonuses, and a point into Blitz, Forcewave with Rending Force and Internal Trauma, and a point into Blade Arc, with Clean Sweep and Laceration, for dealing with regenerating enemies that don’t melee and want to hasten the process of eliminating such.
If any friends of mine would ever like a build that can withstand a lot of punishment, while enemies break themselves upon their bodies, I’ll be certain to keep to lead them to this topic.
You really don’t sadly. Reflect damage is difficult to come by and often you’ll just need to skip ranged mobs unless you absolutely need to kill them. To be honest this is a pretty poor build in terms of actually experiencing the game.
Yeah, for anyone with little experience with the game I would not recommend this build, its pretty much walk around and get mad when you take 15 minutes to kill a boss.
It is a BAD idea, given that mage bosses spawn quite often.
You run past them.
Or, in the case of Thalonis, you stand there for 25 minutes.
Log was under a minute for me.
Thalonis was 20~25.
People like to tell me to farm Moose, to get things.
But fuck getting to Nemesis with Undead with this build… you need to run a completely different set of kit, stacking Reflect, and losing a lot of your Retaliation survivability in the process, and even then, it takes too damned long…
Yes. Skip Devouring Swarm and use Briarthorn 16/16 instead. It absolutely murders everything in the beginning of the game, and even fits the Retaliation theme.
You can even get Ground Slam 12/12 to make it devastate groups of enemies faster, and still be within your 25 Shaman Mastery limit. Then you can respec out of Briarthorn once you get some good retaliation items.
You shouldn’t need to. According to GrimCalc by the end of step 6 (complete Hound) you should have 8 Primordial and 6 Ascendant - Messenger requires 7 and 3. But Squib has missed out saying you do need to put the removed Crossroads Ascendant point into Crossroads Primordial to be able to do Hound.
Yeah, good suggestion re Briarthorn. May change that over to save constantly downing mana potions. Eats into the funds for buying the other stuff needed. Or more points into Mogdrogen’s Pact early as that provides some %energy regen.
Love this build!
Currently lvl 40 but im wondering something.
For higher lvl gear would belt of oleron (legendary) be good?
It does not have retaliation but it does have +1 to all soldier skills (also menhirs bulwark and more hp?)
and maybe peerles eye of beronaz (also + 1 to all skils) increasing retalition
So i’m new to the game and playing my first character. I liked the build idea alot and so i decided to do it. I didn’t bother reading comments or not because i liked the idea of the build. Knowing nothing about the mechanics of the game. Devouring swarm basically 1 shot everything with the exception of “elites/heroes” and bosses. (Everything except those died with just 1 cast of devouring swarm.) Up until about 30. Most still died with 1 cast but that was ok because i had windigo totem up and with its damage and devouring swarm together i was not slowed down at all progression/kill speed wise. I got to level 40 last night and respected as the guide said to. I got lucky in 3x and found a “Shield of Perdition” i also have a ring that gives 138 retaliation damage over 3s. Then i have a chest i bought from Kymon’s reputation merchant that has 63% piercing retaliation (and +13% all retaliation damage), boots have 73 piercing retaliation, shoulders have 68 piercing retaliation and +15% all retaliation damage. Then i have a few items that happen to have % chance of retaliation effects. After respecing like this build suggested at 40 my kill speed has went from what i would deem as incredibly fast to none existent. Any normal mob that melee’s me and actually hits takes around 2700 retaliation damage and immediately dies (it was somewhere between 2.7-2.8 dont really care enough to check it again.) The problem with this is from the best i could tell melee mobs are only managing to hit me on average 1/3 hits) Some more some less. I fought 1 melee elite who actually managed to hit me 1 time out of 11 swings. Ranged mobs i cant kill unless i want to take about a minute or so meleeing a normal mob to death same for magic mobs. Bosses etc are basically out of the question if they aren’t melee.
I went back to get a shrine i couldn’t find (The 1 between rocky coast and new harbor that seems to be in the water on the map u get when portaling) I looked at a guide and im pretty sure i have all the 1s it listed there but im not entirely certain that i got the 1 in cronley’s (seems to be the only option?). So i went back in there and ran into a ranged boss (area level has increased alot since i was last there at around 28 ish. (Mobs are now 36). It took me about 5 minutes to kill that boss via meleeing him.
As this is my first character i’m grasping at straws here thinking “this cant be true there is no way this character is this bad”. Now by “bad” i mean insanely slow at killing and in normal as useful as a wet paper bag thats had the bottum ripped off. I read that the % retaliation damage doesn’t work on the specific retaliation on items (like on the perdition shield my chest and boots and ring) Which doesn’t make sense to me seems to be working. However the fact that retaliation procs so incredibly rarely (even in large groups of melee maybe 1 time in 10 seconds?). It’s nowhere near what i would call viable by any means.
So im really curious am i missing some stat or item here that this build really hinges on? From what i can tell on the guide retaliation stat seems to be the main thing but i have that on 5 items. Unless the proc chance is changed then i cant see what im missing? Is it reflect? Is reflect truly the key to this build or is this really it?
I keep reading that this build is amazing in ultimate etc but im just not seeing it in norm. I played my first video game in 1998 at my cousin’s house. That video game was Diablo 1 for playstation and i was 10 years old. Since then most of the time i’ve spent gaming has been playing ARPG’s. I’ve played D1,D2,D3, (Doesn’t deserve to be considered part of the trilogy) PoE, Titan Quest and a few others. I don’t remember them all i have a few more on my steam games list but i dont feel like looking them up. I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours in ARPG’s since then and unless ultimate is so hard in this game that it 1 shots most characters i cannot fathom a reason this character would even be remotely usable. Unless of course im missing something here. So am i missing something or is it really that bad? Is anyone playing this build doomed to take ages to kill anything at all on any difficulty and forever skip magic/ranged mobs unless they stack loads of reflect? Seems like a hard stat to get from what i can tell so far.
Cool stroy, bro.
The OP post itself advices to take coffee breaks during fights against ranged bosses, which would give you a rough idea how efficiently it deals with them.
Not sure if just trying to be a troll or failing to understand the point of my post. Maybe i didn’t explain myself well enough or the point wasn’t made. Possibly you even skipped over the questions i dont know but let me try this again.
Am i truly missing something or is retaliation that useless against most mobs? It procs so rarely because mobs so rarely hit me and it only works on melee. So that being said is this build basically designed to just walk up to melee bosses stand there and do other stuff until it dies and only just able to kill melee stuff?
just this week, I have leveled such a char, so here’s my response:
I simply chose to ignore the majority of normal, and also good parts of monsters in Elite. Quests in Elite give the majority of EXP, and there are only a handful of ranged heroes you actually need to fight.
Having said that, I have a blessed steel in a high-damage weapon, and have that on my left mouse button. Blitz is on the right button. At level 54 (and about to do Steps of Torment), I have close to 800 dps, and the sacred strikes from the Steel go up to 3k or so. 28k kills in 18 hours, which is pretty solid clearing speed for mostly self-found. Retaliation damage is in the five digits, and that is with random equipment I found myself, only one perdition piece right now.
Spectral Shields (from those undead ghosts in the Spined Cove, Arkovian Undercity of Steps of Torment) come with a Retaliation Auto-Mod, go farm for those if you lack a good shield.
