[1.2.2] The Dark Knight - Ki's Crit Staff Duelist | 200k+ DPS, 8k Life | Best Melee Clear

Wow, I never realized the instant leech applies to mana as well, but it makes sense now looking at the wording.

It's going to be a while until I can test all this out but i'll post back here with some results hopefully :)

A few questions:

1) How do you deal with Elemental damage?

From what I see you have 37% chance to block, which means that even with Lazhwar+Ranbowstrides you will get 25-27% Spell block. The other way is getting 16% from Atziri's step which on its own is pretty much nothing.

Also apart from the +1% max fire res node, you got no other +max resists, which means elemental will hit hard.

2) How do you deal with Chaos damage?

-10% Chaos ressits even with uber gear. Seems like instant RIP to me if hit by any major chaos source.

3) 155% Max life? A bit too low? That is guaranteed less than 4k life in any hardcore league where you can't accumulate so much life from rares (too expensive and not so many best rolls due to limited time)

4) 6 Link seems like a must? Even without only Power Charge on Critical the crit chance will be too low (together with the not so great attack speed)


From what I see it seems like a cool build, but not Hardcore/Beyond viable. Or am I missing something?

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lolerman wrote:

A few questions:

1) How do you deal with Elemental damage?

From what I see you have 37% chance to block, which means that even with Lazhwar+Ranbowstrides you will get 25-27% Spell block. The other way is getting 16% from Atziri's step which on its own is pretty much nothing.

Also apart from the +1% max fire res node, you got no other +max resists, which means elemental will hit hard.

With Rumi's, you can cap your block and get an additional ~20% spell block on top of that. I do a Lazhwar swap for things like piety. In addition spell dodge or extra conversion from rainbows, massive life pool with a legacy kaoms, instant leech from acuity's, I have absolutely 0 problem. Even without the last two things, your defense against spell damage is pretty good if you're smart with flasks and swaps.

"

2) How do you deal with Chaos damage?

-10% Chaos ressits even with uber gear. Seems like instant RIP to me if hit by any major chaos source.

8k life + instant leech from acuity's is more than sufficient to keep me alive from any major chaos damage. I also roll with an atziri flask, so I'm at +20 chaos resist any time I really need to be. I've never had any problem with chaos damage, and I know Hege's HC variant has even worse chaos defense than mine.

"

3) 155% Max life? A bit too low? That is guaranteed less than 4k life in any hardcore league where you can't accumulate so much life from rares (too expensive and not so many best rolls due to limited time)

My build with and without legacy kaoms are very different. I am approaching 8k-8.5k with main build. I would suggest looking at the budget version for what you would do without a legacy kaoms. The life nodes on there would get you 5k life with a carcass, and approximately 5.8-6k with a belly of the beast.

"

4) 6 Link seems like a must? Even without only Power Charge on Critical the crit chance will be too low (together with the not so great attack speed)

Not really. Hegemony's staff 5L works fine, because it has an intrinsic power charge generating feature. Other staves 5L work fine if you find a way to incorporate assassin's mark to generate power charge, so you can toss PCoC from your links. Or you can just toss melee physical, deal with doing less damage, and keep PCoC.

"

From what I see it seems like a cool build, but not Hardcore/Beyond viable. Or am I missing something?

With the gear I have, you can probably do this on hardcore perm league. Otherwise there's no way you should be running this on hc/beyond. I barely if ever die with my main build, but on the budget it seems pretty inevitable. You would have to make some changes, namely more life nodes, either belly or lightning coil, no abyssus, probably going vaal pact and stacking a ton of life leech, et cetera. Here's Hege's guide to a similar build that is more HC viable

I have been investigating an interesting alternative setup for those that want to incorporate Increased AOE Gem into their 6L without sacrificing so much DPS from losing melee physical (--> 80% crit, 131k DPS) or PCoC (--> 57% crit, 152k DPS).

The alternative involves replacing:

my tri-res mana leech ring with Romira's Banquet (which also has mana leech) and also replacing my atziri boots with a rare tri-res pair to make up for the resists.

With my gear/tree, Romira's will on average give me the equivalent of 1 constant power charge (I've omitted the complicated math, but you can find equations/concepts I used here), which is to say that on average it gives me ~5% greater critical strike chance (the equivalent of a 50% crit chance node). Given that my base critical strike chance without any power charges is 57%, I'm left with choosing between two very different builds...

1. My Original Build -- Has 200k DPS, 80% critical strike chance (with 5 PC), and 16% more spell dodge (Atziri Step)

2. Build with Romira's + Rare Boots -- Has 168k DPS, 62% critical strike chance (on average), 20% more crit multi, 333 more accuracy (89% --> 91%), 2 more passive points (one from tree power charge and the other from bandit), and an extra gem slot to use Inc. AOE since I no longer have use of PCoC

Main Cost-Benefit Analysis:
So in the end, this alternative build sacrifices 32k DPS, 16% spell dodge, and will also be instant-leeching 22% less of the time than before....
....And gains the ability to link ground slam to Increased AOE gem (~45% increase in radius of attack) and also 2 extra passive points (depending on what you use these for, you can bridge the DPS difference to ~25k).

How Important is Crit-Capping and What Does Romira's Do Exactly? (AKA Longer Analysis)
Common sense will tell you that any staff build will scale much better with %phys and %ias nodes than a 1-H weapon build by virtue of its ~1.5x greater base DPS. This is part of the reason I am so reluctant to give up the Melee Physical Damage gem from my 6L Ground Slam setup to make room for the Increased Area of Effect gem – it’s a roughly 70k DPS loss (200k --> 130k)

What may not be common sense is the mediocre importance of critical strike chance to staff builds and in particular my build. The popularized LL dagger/wanderer builds quite literally NEED to have capped critical strike chance, not because of how well it scales, but because it’s the only way they can survive hard reflect maps. Daggers/wands do a lot of small hits with less base damage, meaning as long as any single reflected hit doesn’t 1 shot them, instant leech on crit via Atziri’s Acuity allows them to leech back this reflected damage. Having as high a critical strike chance as possible allows them to do this with maximum consistency and reliability, which is a must at high levels, because even infrequent failure and subsequent death will make the L90-100 grind impossible.

A top-end crit staff build will never be able to run reflect maps abusing this mechanic. We hit so much more slowly with so much more damage packed into each hit, that any single reflected hit will 1 shot us (even my goddamn 2L leap slam has 1 shot me before), meaning we can't abuse the instant leech on crit mechanic like fast attacking, low damage per hit dagger/wand builds do. Instead, we deal with physical reflect with a near-permanent physical immunity via a 20+ second Immortal Call, and have no issue with elemental reflect to begin with, because the build has insignificant elemental damage (just Hatred and Herald of Fire).

So we’re left with the conclusions that %phys and IAS both scale ridiculously well with staves (as well if not better than crit) and that we don’t need (nor could we ever rely on) crit to survive reflect. In mapping, since we basically have permanent physical immunity, we only really rely on crit/instant leech on crit to survive spell damage. So the main concern in deciding if we want to use the Romira’s setup or not becomes, do we still have enough crit to reliably survive spell damage? I think the answer is yes, and in answering the question I have to precisely explain what Romira’s does exactly.



I made this chart based on my specific character’s stats: 532% increased critical chance and 9.01% base weapon critical strike chance.


Although the chart is tailored to my specific character, and so the critical strike chance differences are effected both by the Romira’s Banquet mechanic as well as the different chance to hit I have with each build, the individual impact of the quirky Romira’s mechanic is pretty clear. By giving you a power charge every time you fail to crit, it increases the chance you will crit on the next hit (until you reach your maximum power charges), significantly mitigating the possibility that you will get an unlucky, long string of non-critical strikes. On average, this mechanic gives me the equivalent of about ~1 constant power charge.

Given that I have a base 7.1 attacks per second with a 91% hit rate, I will have 6.46 actual hits per second, which is equivalent to 1 hit every 0.155 seconds. Given that my damage per hit and life-leech are high enough to instantly leech full life in one critical strike, with Romira’s and 3 maximum power charges, I will have a 95.9% chance to instant-leech full life within 3/5th of a second and a 99.39% chance to instant-leech full life within 1 second.

This data combined with my personal experience testing the Romira’s build lead me to conclude that I still have enough crit to reliably survive the hardest of maps. And with the Romira's build, I also now have a ridiculously larger AOE Radius.

Without Romira's:


With Romira's:



And what’s the DPS loss? Only 25k.

Without Romira's:


With Romira's:


Conclusion:
Data shows (and personal experience confirms) that the new Romira's build does not noticeably impair survivability. Additionally, it not only helps me clear maps a lot faster, but also keeps me relevant when I map in parties with strong projectile-based characters. Barring any defensive set-backs, I plan to continue using this alternative set-up.

Updated Normal Build's Screenshots. Updated post above with some intense theory-crafting :)

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lolerman wrote:

From what I see you have 37% chance to block, which means that even with Lazhwar+Ranbowstrides you will get 25-27% Spell block. The other way is getting 16% from Atziri's step which on its own is pretty much nothing.

Also apart from the +1% max fire res node, you got no other +max resists, which means elemental will hit hard.

2) How do you deal with Chaos damage?

-10% Chaos ressits even with uber gear. Seems like instant RIP to me if hit by any major chaos source.

I've played many characters with 75% all res and -30% more less chaos res with 5k life in all levels of maps and not died with them. -10% chaos res is more than enough, esp with a kaoms on. Major chaos source? I don't think there's any chaos mobs in the game that can instarip kaoms heart character even at -60%. Most builds have very little max res atm and a lot of them do just fine.

Hello KiPad. So I just starting leveling my character, loosely following this guide and it has been great so far! What would you say is the minimum pDPS staff one could use to make this build viable in late game? Also minimum values for local crit chance and attack speed. Just looking for some rough values here.

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Shmez wrote:

Hello KiPad. So I just starting leveling my character, loosely following this guide and it has been great so far! What would you say is the minimum pDPS staff one could use to make this build viable in late game? Also minimum values for local crit chance and attack speed. Just looking for some rough values here.

Hey bro, I'd say two tier 1-3 stats via alt-regaling and then the rest of the mods via bench-crafting stats would be give you a good enough staff for end-game. You can check out weapon bench-craft rolls here

Finished writing up and updating the guide. Going to be my last update in a while, as I'm gearing up to quit in about 6 months time.

Did a Double Reflect, Shocked Ground Shipyard run in 4 minutes earlier today. This just in - Romira's on this build is OP as fuck. Barely any difference in DPS/survivability and Inc. AOE has shaved minutes off my already fast clear speed.



Unbuffed, no haste/atziri flask.

>Crit
>Manly
You lost me there buddy.