[WIP] Legion of the Beast [HC/Beyond] Minion-oriented Dominating Blow
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This is a work in progress. For now it's just an info-dump.
I am currently running this Dominating Blow build in Beyond. I start as a Duelist rather than a Marauder to focus less on tankiness and more on speed. However, when focusing on speed with Dominating Blow, it means you'll gain more momentum with your minion army, boosting both offense and defense to ridiculous heights. One important point to the build is that it doesn't focus on buffing our own damage at all, only our minions'. This is possible because Dominating Blow isn't required to be used for the killing blow to dominate an enemy. Instead, it applies a debuff on hit that lasts 0.5 seconds and if the enemy dies in that time period it is dominated. So with this build, you hit enemies rapidly while your minions do the killing.
Passive Skill Tree
Level 100 The reason I start as a Duelist is to pick up a few essential nodes for my take on Dominating Blow. Master of the Arena increases melee range, allowing the autotargeting of Multistrike to work better. Acceleration provides a large attack speed boost. Leather and Steel removes all movement penalty from gear, which is essentially 7%-14% increased movement speed. Iron Reflexes lets us use both armor and evasion gear to raise our physical defenses. Also, because we trek through so many Dexterity nodes, it covers the high attribute requirement for Haste. Other than that, all minion damage, speed, leech, and regeneration nodes are taken to drastically increase the potency of the legion. All skill duration nodes are taken to maximize the duration of our dominated minions. Resolute Technique is taken so every attack will hit, always applying the debuff. Just enough mana reservation nodes are taken so that you can reserve 99% of mana. If you want to go super tank max block (nearly max spell block) here's a tree. New gear requirements would be Ston of Lazwhar (with 4% chance to block) and perfect Rainbowstrides.
Gems
Dominating Blow
Dominating Blow + Increased Duration + Melee Splash + Multistrike/Faster Attacks + Minion Damage + Added Chaos Damage Increased Duration is very important because you'll want your dominated minions to last as long as possible. Melee Splash is used to hit as many targets as possible. Maxing its quality is very important so that you're hitting as many enemies as possible, spreading the debuff like wildfire. You have a choice between Multistrike and Faster Attacks. The former provides autotargeting to easily spread the debuff on enemies, and boosts melee minions' damage drastically. However, it also reduces the damage of ranged attack minions, so if you dislike that you can use Faster Attacks which will boost the damage of all attack minions. Because you will dominate every minion, you will want very generic damage supports so that they apply to anything. Minion Damage has been one of the best gems for minions ever since the amount of increased minion damage was reduced on the skill tree, and applies to all kinds of minions. Added Chaos Damage has the largest base damage of any support gem and applies to all minions.
Auras
Haste + Grace + Purity of Elements + Reduced Mana Haste is used to scale the damage per second and action timing of both the character and its minions. Grace is used to provide a substantial defense boost, as the provided evasion rating is converted to armor. It is used instead of Determination so that it can be swapped out for Hatred to further boost damage if wanted. Purity of Elements is used to raise the legion's elemental resistances, which would be sorely lacking if without. In Beyond you would never make it past an invading mob without it.
Utilities
Convocation + Flesh Offering + Bone Offering + Blood Magic It is important to note that these should not be used with Cast when Damage Taken because you want to time their uses appropriately. Convocation is used both to gather minions to you and to provide them with life regeneration. Gathering minions allows you to use them as meat shields, to bring your Undying Evangelists' proximity shields to you, and to better control where they are and what they attack. Flesh Offering is used as a substantial damage buff when you wish to kill things quickly. Bone Offering is used in dire situations so that the minions can tank as much as possible while dealing with a threat. For example, this is very useful for certain Beyond invaders. Desecrate + Temporal Chains/Enfeeble + Blood Magic Desecrate is used to provide corpses for either offering listed above. You have a choice between Temporal Chains and Enfeeble to curse troublesome enemies.
Spectres
Raise Spectre + Minion Life + Increased Area of Effect + Increased Duration This is the setup for tanky Undying Evangelists. Rather than focusing on their damage, I focus on their utility. Increased Area of Effect makes their proximity shields much larger and Increased Duration makes the proximity shields last longer.
Automated Immortal Call
Cast when Damage Taken (level 12) + Enduring Cry (level 12) + Immortal Call (level 12) This chain allows you a few seconds of immunity to physical damage if you start taking a lot of it quickly. The level is relatively high because you only want it to proc occasionally so that the cooldowns of the skills aren't constantly refreshed. I use level 12 because it processes at 1500 damage taken, which is around a 4th of my maximum life.
Equipment
These are the core items of this build. Soul Taker allows one to completely negate the ridiculous mana cost of Dominating Blow. However, because it still uses mana when using an attack skill mana will always be depleted. Because of this I reserve 99% of mana with auras and use the Blood Magic gem for everything but Dominating Blow and Leap Slam. Belly of the Beast allows you become a life tank and look awesome while doing it. It is essentially a more modern Kaom's Heart because not only does it scale your life insanely with the changes to base maximum life per level, but it also gives a significant boost to the newly buffed life flasks. Other than these two items, there are no gear requirements. Of course there are other helpful unique items such as Atziri's Step and Sidhebreath but they are not necessary to make the build work. More details for my own character can be found in the second post of this thread. 1.3 Marauder summoner version same name in-game Last edited by iao on Dec 21, 2014, 12:58:23 PM
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This post is for the progress of my own character.
Currently level 82 with this passive skill tree route. I'll upload screenshots and hopefully videos soon. same name in-game Last edited by iao on Sep 12, 2014, 1:57:23 PM
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Reserved
same name in-game
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What did you level with?
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