First off I just want to say that I am new to the game. I am trying to plan a build ahead of time, and I was wanting to know if someone would look this over and give me some advice based on my choices.
Am I making any obvious poor choices? Is there something you would do differently?
My choices are based completely off the descriptions of the skills, and I know some things look better on paper than in practice. Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.
I’m new to this game, but I think Field Command is more of a one-point-wonder. You want its synergy, but you have 11 points there that could be put to better use.
Hi, I made my first and only char as a Warder and it has been a good char to the end of ultimate.
Don’t invest more than one point in Blitz, it is more than a movement skill than anything. Also 1 rank will give you 100% weapon damage, if you use 2h weapon (as I suppose) it will be more than enough.
You are planning on using Savagery, so you need Feral Hunger, Zolhan Tecnique and Storm Touched. Max the Savagery tree, it is your main and only skill for damage.
About Oleron Rage, the movement speed buff it is nice, but consider taking Primal Bond instead in the Shaman tree. It gives damage absorption (which is really really good at high levels) +bleed and +phys, which directly affects your damage output. Internal Trauma is nice but it is affected more than Cadence, so you don’t need that. You will not use Pierce damage, it is more for a Blademaster.
In Ultimate you will need lot of survivability. So Scars of Battle and Decorated Soldier are very nice skill (Soldier tree) which will help you a lot.
Surprisingly, 1 point for each skill in Mogdrogen’s Pact is more than enough.
Finally, take Wendigo Totem. It is AWESOME, especially if you reach high levels of HP. At 12 rank it heals 5%+500 (if I remember well) of your Hp every 0.5 seconds.
I advice to try something like this:
http://grimcalc.com/build/h7gsEY
There are some points left, yes. When you reach Ultimate, you will find lot of good items that synergize well with your soldier tree, so maxing many of the skills will be an easy task. Depending on what you have, you can max many of the skills and have also lot of them.
This is my current build at level 85 with +skills from items.
http://grimcalc.com/build/5bE9v2
+4 to soldier
+1 to shaman
+1 to all skills
I use Meinhir’s Will as my “Oh s**t!” button.
These are my advices on my build, I hope they will be useful!
Been thinking about picking up Warder again myself. This is what I’m going with skill-wise:
http://grimcalc.com/build/ATVZI3
That leaves 7 points to spend, which I’ll probably use to max Decorated Soldier. ‘Slow’ is a real killer, and both +% Physical Damage and +% Elemental Resistance are too good for this build. Just don’t look at the Devotions, as I’m still tweaking them. The only one(s) that is/are definitive is/are Kraken (and perhaps Tempest).
FAQ:
Why am I maxing out Soldier mastery?
Because of the quite solid stat bonusses, but mainly because I’ve got a completionist attitude towards masteries.
Why Stormcaller’s Pact instead of Oleron’s Rage?
Because we’re not going for Piercing Damage, and Storm Pact grants +50% Critical Damage.
Why am I not maxing out WPS passives?
I am actually maxing out their proc percentage. The rest can come from +skills.
Check out General Cash’s thread for a good setup, devotion setup is poifect imo.
You really need more points in shaman. Wendigo totem is your main method of staying alive and stormcallers pact >>> oleron’s rage and you’ll want stormtouched if you have the points.
I always only go up to 40 in soldier, don’t need olerons and I think the 10 points are better spent on a skill then 10 more mastery points. You definitely want field command maxed and scars of battle maxed. This will give you a solid oa/da bonus, huge % armor, and 100% armor absorption when combined with scaled hide.
1 point wonder blitz, all those points in it are a big waste. Definitely don’t 1 point wonder field command it is awesome. I don’t use warcry at all on my warder and am just fine without it. It’s a huge point investment for it to be big. Kymon’s Will ring augment isn’t exactly a free ‘war cry’ as some people call it, but it is pretty solid
I will reapeat TomoDak’s advice. You will die early and often without Wendigo Totem. You also need all the OA/DA from Field Command in the later/harder parts of Ultimate.
You are going 2H? The skills matter less than the devotion setup.
A 2H Warder plays best as a Shaman with Soldier for support. A 1H+Shield Warder is better as a Soldier with Shaman as support.
I’ve taken a look at General Cash’s build and subsequently been tweaking my Devotions a bit, to come up with this:
https://grimcalc.com/build/w1QqxL
Just forget about Wendigo Totem etc. for now, it’s just about the Devotions.
It’ll take a lot of buying back points, but in return, you’ll get a huge amount of stacking health regen, especially in combination with Modrogen’s Pact, while simultaneously picking up a fair bit of lightning damage.
If you’re set on taking tree of life I would dump turtle for sure. It’s an okayish devotion, but the shield itself is pretty worthless we’re taking 2 maybe 3 hits from some random monster on ultimate as the damage absorb is pre resists. It is almost never the deciding factor in a life or death situation. Take lizard + the 2x 5% HP nodes in the middle instead. This builds upon our regen with additional flat hp regen and % bonus as well giving us more HP making all of our % hp healing a little more effective.
There’s two problems here though. The 1st is that tree of life is over the top and unnecessary. Wendigo, menhirs, field command/scar for big armor/absorb values, feral hunger, and behemoth+lizard give you tons of survivability. If you die it is 100% because you fucked up big time
The 2nd problem lies in damage. Shaman’s love to crit because of stormcallers big bonus to crit damage. Going from 1 point in field command to 12 + adding spear/dying god we get ~200 flat OA 8% OA, and a nice 10% crit damage on top! Spear gives us an okay boost to lightning damage as well and the proc just got a big buff, it now does 50% weapon damage. The other big problem here is resist reduction. No widow/bomb, no devil+tempest, no viper. This is going to be a problem in ultimate
You could try something like these devotions. Seems to be working for my Primal strike Warder at the moment:
sigh
Again, it comes down to GrimCalc not getting updated recently. I totally missed why everyone always seems so attached to Viper, but GrimCalc just doesn’t show the resist reduction it provides. I guess I should be building Devotions ingame, but it’s just not very convenient planning them out like that.
I can get where you’re coming from though, taking into consideration that Viper (n possibly other Constellations I overlooked) do give such massive bonusses. What are ‘devil’ and ‘widow’ by the way?
The devotion Widow which grants Arcane Bomb (-lightning resists) and Wind Devil in Shaman, the second skill in the line reduces Elemental Resistances.