Build Guide
Dear Natalya,
If you are reading this, most probably I haven't made it from the 77th level of The Fortress by the end of fall..
I'm leaving you this letter, in hopes of passing the knowledge and experience I had during my recent expeditions.
I know nobody approved it, when I embraced the full power of shadows to gain the focused firepower required to kill the strongest of foes. For one has to give up on ranged weapon capabilities and hone skills in using the bladed weapons instead.
Although I have invented other means of spreading damage in crowds, I also learned that it is better to elude lesser minions at all costs. If you
spend too much time on small ones, you might be overrun. I made some necessary additions and small changes which made it possible to walk
ethereally among swarms and reach my main targets faster. After all what matters the most is downing the greater ones and summoning the
guardian..
This new "hit and run" strategy requires everything you can utilize to raise your survivability. Give into shadows to deliver unimaginably powerful blows to your enemies. You must never look back once you have started the path.
Always forward, always gaining something in return..
Karlei
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
-This is a Shadow's Mantle build variation optimized for solo tier 60-65 difficulty grifting based upon my own experience and knowledge accumulated since the start of 2.4 PTR.
-This difficulty range is great for gem upgrading, decent amount of paragon xp accumulation and loot within the capabilities. Putting a limit to difficulty range allows us to exaggerate toughness stats and features to be able to soak up a lot of damage instead of vaulting and dodging yet still we will be able to clear within a reasonable time bracket.
-The idea of the build is to focus efforts on killing elites/progress monsters, skipping worthless trash and less dense areas. For this purpose I made several shifts in skills, non-set/cube items, etc which can be summarized as follows:
-Nemesis Bracers is an obvious choice for the task. Since you will be scouting/skimming a wider area than you would normally do in a typical pushing run, you are more likely to find pylons-> elites-> progress globes..
-Endless Walk Set's toughness/damage trade off mechanism works great with huge damage tolerance of the Shadow set. Also, we can totally abandon generator due to absence of Wraps of Clarity, F+R, and presence of huge resource regen from KP dagger and perma-vengeance.
-The empty slot from generator is filled by MfD/grim reaper to drastically improve AoE. I find it critical to assign mfd/gr to left mb to make a better habbit of applying it before impales. Packs literally explode from the 6pc impale bonus+MfD overload once you get used to the rythm and master landing impales on your intended target. The virtual projectile beam of an impale shot is tiny. You need to improve your mouse skills, hence achieving a succesful hit rate will not be as tolerant and easy as it is with any other build. As you can see on the video, killing a specific target (champion) requires 3-4 succesful direct hits, while this may not be possible every time, because of swarming trash around and lack of an efficient AoE method. This is where Illusory Boots and all that extra toughness comes in handy. You walk through the main target soaking up attacks, blow it up with as few shots as possible, collect the progress globes and move out ignoring the rest. While a yellow champion (not the whole pack) spawns 4 globes, blue packs spawn 3 and you need to kill the whole pack.
-CoE is the second ring option which is one of the few and great damage multipliers you can add. You will want to equip this ring, since
it will have some guaranteed and better stats on it over the other option. Elusive Ring can't be utilized efficiently due to lack of related skills therefore it is excluded in this build.
-Zodiac Ring is required to increase uptime of FoK/BA and Wolf Companion and close the gap for having less than 36% cdr required for perma-vengeance due to shift in stats from CDR to vitality in offhand and gloves.
-FoK/BA is preferred over PPA rune because of;
- A more frequent Armor bonus+damage is more beneficial than a too long CD bigger blast. Which is justified further by the absence of FoK dagger.
- Shorter CD coupled with ZodiacRing and Gogok's Swiftness gem makes it possible to keep the shield up almost permanently. Don't fry your brain over CoE elemental shifts, just use it every CD and try to make sure you have smt to damage close by.
-Illusory Boots; This is one of the most controversial item shift I made in this build. The reasons;
As you might have noticed at first look this build does not utilize vault. In its stead you have the ability to pass through anything accept map obstacles.
This item is so underrated against vault belt or any other mobility item. I can't begin to tell how much fun and useful is being able to permanently run through stuff coming or thrown at you / covered areas with shit pools/fields/etc, swarms of white trash with no progress value at all. It could be coupled with TA and HP passives for T10 speed boost but in greater rifts you can't afford to drop any of the above 4 passives. Since there are enough survivability features, 50DR from Visage of Gunes is expendable for the target diffculty range.
-Yes there's no Vault, so we can equip more damage/toughness oriented TGV belt which can roll both AR+Liightning Resist and +15% lightning skill damage. String of Ears might be also fine but every aspect of TGV belt is a welcome addition for this build.
-Nothing much to say about Dawn in cube.. It is fixed, especially with no possibility to equip in main or off hand. Essential for perma-vengeance..
-I chose to use HPS as offhand over its 6 primary opponents (DML,Bombsac,Sinseeker) for a little bit of edge to damage, but since it is particularly hard to find a sensible HPS, the other options will be fine as well. If so, Gogok's existence becomes less necessary, since you can have some more cdr, in that case feel free to swap with BoTP/Taeguk/BoTS/etc...
Comments