User:Tchek
TheRabbit303 on the official forums
TheRabbit - 59 Elemental Bow Ranger
LaserBeamsPewPew - 68 Lightning Strike Witch
RabbitBAMF - 40 Flicker Strike Witch
RabbitTemplar - 44 Elemental Wand Templar
Introduction
Hi. This is mostly just me rambling about various builds I'm working on. Feel free to comment. TheRabbit
Lightning Strike Dagger Witch
The general concept of the build is to use the very fast high critical strike chance daggers with Lightning Strike linked to Mana Leech and Lesser Multiple Projectiles. Lightning Strike will be a low cost, high speed, spammable attack, as even at high levels, it has less than 13 mana base cost. Due to the high elemental damage bonus from the passive tree, the LS projectiles will have very high damage, and hitting even a single target should recoup the mana cost.
This build, if equipped with proper Energy Shield gear, should have no problem standing toe to toe with bands of mobs in Chaos. Yet, because of the way Lightning Strike works when combined with Multiple Projectiles, this build will also work as a ranged damage dealer. The downfall to this is that Lightning Strike has a pre-defined spread of projectiles, and thus, is not as aimable as other ranged projectile builds.
Gearing
Gear would generally consist of Energy Shield armour pieces and offhand shield, with gloves that provide increased attack speed and damage boosts, and jewelry that provides additional elemental damage with a primary focus on lightning damage. The main hand dagger should be a high speed dagger (to benefit the most from added elemental damage) with increased attack speed and lightning damage at a minimum. The majority of your damage will not be coming from a physical damage multiplier, so percentage increases to physical damage are not entirely useful (X% Increased Physical Damage). However, because Lightning Strike converts a portion of physical damage into lightning damage, base increases to physical damage will gain all of your elemental damage multipliers (although cut in half) (Adds X-X Physical Damage). Still, the most effective modifiers will be ones that add straight Lightning Damage, and % Increased Attack Speed.
Skills
The primary skill of this build is of course Lightning Strike. A 6-linked setup would include: Lightning Strike (red), Lesser Multiple Projectiles and/or Greater Multiple Projectiles (green), Mana Leech (green), Added Lightning Damage (blue), Increased Critical Strikes (blue), and Melee Damage on Full Life (red). However, this would require a 6 link chest piece that has 2 Green sockets, 2 Blue Sockets, and 2 Red Sockets, which would be incredibly unlikely. The core gems of the attack are LS, Multiple Projectiles, and Mana Leech, any other gems attached are purely for increased effectivity and DPS. Alternatives include: Faster Attacks, Added Cold Damage, Weapon Elemental Damage, Increased Critical Damage, Added Fire Damage or supports like Knockback and Pierce.
This build should consider using at least 2 Auras, Tempest Shield for better defenses, and as a thorn aura, and Wrath for the great increase in Lightning Damage. Additional skills to consider would be Whirling Blades to move quickly, or Phase Run for a similar effect, Molten Shell for additional defense and AoE damage, Blood Rage for the incredible bonus it applies to CI builds, Haste for additional attack speed, or the other 2 damage Auras (Anger, Hatred) for added elemental damage. Flicker Strike provides incredibly high single target damage, and is very useful for hitting targets that are behind objects or other enemies so that they can't be hit by the Lightning Strike projectiles.
Passive Skill Trees
The Passive Tree is built around picking up Elemental Damage boosts, Critical Strike Chance boosts, and Energy Shield boosts for defense.
LS Dagger Witch 59 point
LS Dagger Witch 70 point
At 70 points you need to decide if more defense is needed, lots of shield and energy shield nodes are nearby. If more offense is needed you can go towards Acceleration or Night Stalker or for more critical strike chance.
Note: One current game-related issue with this build is that a very high number of Lightning Strike projectiles on screen can cause the game to crash. It is highly recommended to not group two people together that are both using this style of build.
Elemental Damage Templar
Build in progress... Elemental Templar 70 points
Hardcore Flicker Witch
The general idea behind this character is having a very strong defensive base, and using some of the most overpowered passives and active skills in the game. So, I've made a character that picks up Catalyze, Chaos Inoculation, and uses Flicker Strike.
History
Because of the way that block chance stacks in the game, I decided to focus defensively on picking up as many Block Chance passives as possible, and the earliest version of this build started as a Ranger and a Dualist due to the concentration of block nodes near their starting areas. The problem I had with this was the lack of offense. It was very difficult to pick up a useful amount of offense while also stacking block chance, thus I decided to focus on Catalyze for my offense.
Block chance alone can only take you so far defensively, as just like evasion, you are eventually going to get hit, so I had 2 choices, stack health, or stack energy shield. Since I was already going to be in the area of the tree that Catalyze was in, picking up Chaos Inoculation seemed like a good idea. Thus, more passive points were dedicated towards increasing Energy Shield and increasing survivability.
Passive Skills
- 105% Increased Elemental Damage
- 36% Additional Block Chance
- 120% Increased Energy Shield From Equipped Shield (+20% Increased Defenses)
- 12% of Block Chance applied to Spells
- 143% Increased maximum Energy Shield
- 65% Increased Energy Shield Cooldown Recovery
- 50% More maximum Energy Shield
Active Skills
I wanted my primary attack to be Flicker Strike aided by the buff Blood Rage. An incredibly helpful aura is Tempest Shield which will increase block chance by an additional 4%, and the elemental damage auras (Anger, Hatred, Wrath) will help boost damage output, while the Discipline aura will further increase survivability.
Ideally, we would like to be able to run all 5 of those auras at once, however that is impossible due to the amount of mana reserved. Because our physical damage is not going to be a significant portion of our damage output, we can drop the Hatred aura, and we shouldn't have much trouble running the 4 remaining auras.
Flicker Strike will benefit the most from 2 support gems, Faster Attacks and Weapon Elemental Damage. In order to continually run Flicker Strike, we will attach a Mana Leech support gem to it as well. This 4 link combo should provide enough damage output to reliably carry us through the end game.
Because of the very personalized nature of 6 socket chest pieces, I'm not going to include any generalizations here. By the time you acquire a 6 linked socket chest piece you will already have the support gems planned out.
In addition to your primary Flicker Strike attack, it may serve you well to have an additional Flicker Strike leveled and attached to Item Rarity and Item Quantity support gems to provide you with additional drops from bosses.
There are 2 curses that synergize well with this build.
- Elemental Weakness provides a significant increase to your damage output by directly decreasing enemies resistances. Because resistance acts as a multiplier for final damage, reducing resistances adds a multiplier to your damage. Aka 30% decreased resistance = 30% more damage.
- Temporal Chains reduces the attack speed of enemies, which generally will allow you to kill them all before they have a chance to complete an attack animation.
Gearing
This build is heavily gear dependent. Subpar gear will result in this build dying a lot, something you can't afford to do in Hardcore, thus I strongly suggest that this not be your first attempt at making a character. You will want to have a substantial amount of currency and gear built up before attempting this. However, once you are appropriately geared, this build is unstoppable.
For armour pieces you will be best served by choosing high Energy Shield pieces of gear. You will want to have either your helmet, gloves, or boots an evasion piece of gear in order to obtain the G-G-G-R sockets required for Flicker Strike.
For your shield you will want to choose a high block chance energy shield style shield. These are the shields that offer no passive bonus to spell damage. They also have the highest base energy shield available.
For your weapon, you have 3 choices, because we aren't limited by passive choices, Daggers, Claws, or 1h Swords. You will be best served by a high attack speed weapon that has large amounts of elemental damage on it. The 1.6 attacks per second Ambusher and 1.65 attacks per second Corsair Sword are currently the 2 fastest weapons available. Both have their own perks, with the dagger increasing your critical strike chance, and the sword increasing your accuracy.
Your Gloves, Amulet, Rings and Belt should also be used to increase your elemental damage and attack speed.
Leveling
Your first priority should be in reaching Catalyze. That is your primary source of damage, and should be treated as such. As the early game is very forgiving, there should be no problems with rushing towards Catalyze. After reaching that group of elemental damage nodes, you should focus on the shield nodes nearby, as that will give you a large boost to defense, and grant you the innate chance to block spells. Early game you may need to pick up additional stat point nodes in order to equip gear and level your skills, this is perfectly normal.
Generally you will want to wait until you are in your 40s before picking up Chaos Inoculation, as that skill requires you to devote all of your gear to Energy Shield, you'll no longer be able to just equip any good piece of gear that comes along. You can also hold off on picking up Chaos Inoculation until you're in your 50's, as by that point your gear should be "end-game" and you won't be upgrading much.
Once you've reached your early 60's you'll have completed the main trek of the skill tree, and you now have several options. You can further increase your elemental damage, and pick up an additional frenzy charge for 6 points. You can pick up all the critical nodes in the shadow area for 100% increased critical chance for only 4 points. Or you can head towards Acceleration and pick up some additional physical damage for 5 points. You can also pick up the nearby Adder's Touch if you've cemented your decision to go with daggers. By this point your defenses should be very solid, and you need to decide how you want to evolve your offense.
Vanilla Builds
These are generic builds, the general idea being that they serve as a good base for someone new to the game that wants to play a specific roll. They are not perfect builds, many times I'll choose a generic passive over a better, but more specialized, passive. These will not all be 100% viable for the end game for every person, much of that depends on itemization, skill usage, and player skill.
1H + Shield (Tank) 76 point build
Elemental Damage (Archer) 71 point build
Cold Witch (Caster) 75 point build
Dual Wield (Rogue) 74 point build
2H Axe (Berserker) 75 point build