[1.3.1]A Comprehensive Guide to 2-Handed Sword Crit Cyclone "It'll Never Work..."

"Wait, wut?" You heard me. We're tanking off of as much lifeleech as we can get our hands on, and 10% with some all-res isn't something to be glossed over lightly. "But Carnage is BAD! 25% reduced max life! D:" As you will quickly come to learn, we don't care about that. And the omni-stats it gives are useful at least.
You could probably be able to get away with a godly phys-crit ammy, but you can only roll up to 6% LL on rare amulets, so it comes at a cost. Lifeleech is a priority for this build, because we will be taking Vaal Pact, and that cuts all our effective LL by 60%. It's a painful penalty to eat, but we don't have much choice in the matter, so eat it we must.

The exact amount of consideration each of these deserves is up for debate however, and you should never consider ALL of these, as you will be starved of resistances. But let's get started with the silliest one of all:

Abyssus
We have 450% inc physical damage. Why the **** wouldn't we? +50% phys damage taken would be a pretty good reason, but with a little adjusting you could grab at least a couple endurance charge nodes and some skill duration to make a perma-IC setup work quite effectively. I just don't have the skill or patience to run that.

Would be hilarious just thinking about it though...

Devoto's Devotion
In an armor, IR spec, these are worth considering. 10% reduced phys damage is a drop in the pond, and the 16% attack speed we exchange it for is not. Good chaos res, good stats - not a bad helmet overall.

Carcass Jack
Hardly best in slot as a rare, but the 2 unique modifiers on it (Inc aoe and inc aoe damage) are tasty. However, because the 12% damage is additive, it loses a LOT of allure. And it's evasion rating isn't amazing...

Belly of the Beast
This is a common go-to - and while we're lacking a LOT of %Life, making the bonus here even more attractive than normal, this would definitely be MUCH better in a meta where armor is more effective, and we were running Iron Reflexes. Right now, it isn't, and we aren't, so Belly is just a pile of health and resistances. Two things we hardly don't need, but it's not favoured in the meta right now...

Daresso's Defiance
Another for consideration if the meta shifts back in favour of armor again. Currently one of the only ways to get lifeleech on the chest, it has a boatload of defensive stats and gives free endurance charges for a limited period and some free dodge. Hard to argue. No resistances though - which does put more pressure on your other gear.

Death's Oath
Sounds cool in theory, but if you don't have capped chaos resistance, this armor might just kill you more than it saves you, as it has no life or resists. Worth a mention though...

Hyrri's Ire
Also worth a mention. It has a large amount of evasion rating on it, and comes with acrobatics. If you don't have the keystone yet on an evasion varient, this might be worth wearing until you pick it up. After that though, a good rare is better.

Lightning Coil It is so hard for this build to get resistances to cap, lopping another 60% off and losing a prime resist slot REALLY hurts. If you can run it however, that extra phys damage conversion will help a bit.

Queen of the Forest
Close to Best-in-Slot, no doubt. Life, resistances and a large pile of evasion rating. Really hard to pass that up. Getting good rolls however is tricky because almost everything is a variable there.

Ming's Heart
STRONGLY consider this, as a flat 20% more damage as chaos is really hard to pass up, and the downside isn't a downside to us. Losing more life...pfft. We're already wearing Carnage, why stop there? And all that chaos res is so tasty when we're running blood rage.
The problem is the ring slot is very high pressure in this build, so if we're running Mings, the other ring had better be SUPREME.

Death Rush

If you aren't running Mings, you can run this. Which precicely is better, it's hard to say. They're both great, and if you can get away with running both without sacrificing so much resistance, go for it. Full HAAM!

Meginord's Girdle
It's a less good abyssus in the belt slot. If the belt slot wasn't so important, this would be higher priority.

Darkray Vectors
We gain reliable frenzy charges, and wouldn't mind that free dodge chance.

Cyclone, Our main damage skill: Cyclone + Life Leech + Blood Magic + Melee Physical Damage.
(5link: +Faster attacks)
(6link: +Blind/Mana Leech/Inc Crit Strikes/Inc AOE/pCoC...You get the idea. It's personal preference)
This is our up and out right-click skill. A 5 link for the faster attacks does give us a nice bit of damage and survivability boost, but it is not necessary because we get a lot of attack speed from the tree. A 6 link is unnecessary, so you can slap whatever you want in that 6th slot.

Vaal Cyclone, yes we use a vaal skill: Vaal Cyclone + Life Leech + Increased Duration + Faster Attacks
(5link: +Melee Physical Damage)
(6link: +Mana Leech MUST BE QUALITIED FOR ANY NOTICEABLE EFFECT D:/Stun)
Vaal Cyclone is probably the best skill in the game, and yet we use it as a utility skill. It shines in wide open maps where you can suck in several packs at once and just mulch them all down, but you can't just run around Vaal cycloning whenever you feel like it. There is quite a bit of finesse involved in knowing when NOT to hit vaal cyclone, and it's not when there's a phys-reflect pack about. "Le Gaspe!" Yes indeed: with close to 30% lifeleech before VP, we actually aren't that bothered by phys reflect.
I'll address that Mana Leech when we hit the skill tree...

Leap Slam, Our Movement Skill: Leap Slam + Curse on Hit + Warlords Mark + Vengeance
*Slams on brakes* "WHAAAAAAT?"
You heard me.

Leap Slam + Vengeance, Our Autocurses I shouldn't need to explain why we're using Warlords Mark, but I will anyways. Life and Mana Leech. The reason we use 2 skills to apply it is because they both apply it at different times. Our movement speed is quite lackluster, and our attack speed is pretty silly for a 2 handed skill, so we can use leapslam to get around like a rabbit out of a Monty Python sketch. Sure, faster attacks is always nice when you're using it like this, but with this setup, when we leapslam into a pack of mobs and get a few warlords curses down, we can get straight into cycloning and will start regenerating the mana we used leapslamming everywhere. Also gives us a bit of bonus lifeleech when we start taking damage.

"Okay, so why is that vengeance in there?" Why not? Leapslam isnt going to hit more than 3 or 4 targets in any given pack, so when we get inevitably surrounded, having that big AOE go off and apply curses to everyone nearby - everyone who is going to be in cycloning range I might add - is an incredibly efficient way of automating the curse. The downside in this meta is we're going to be stacking evasion in order to avoid most of the damage, so vengeance will trigger less frequently, but this build does transition from Evasion/dodge into Iron Reflexes and Armor VERY effectively, at the cost of 1 skill point and 1% max life. Oh noes, may we not wet ourselves at the prospect... (if you're very high level end game, you could even gain skillpoints back in the transition if you invested into the whole acrobatics cluster. More on that later...

Blood Rage, Mo' Leech Blood Rage + ....? Blood Magic? I've just got this little guy sitting out on his own with no clue what to link him to. I know that if you have a quality blood magic linked to it that the Low Life bonuses gets applied globally, but frankly, we don't spend much time on low life for 1 reason or another. Either we leech our health back to full, or we die soon after.
The Frenzy Charges aren't terribly important to us, but they're nice to have.

That's it. You expecting a cwdt setup? Go right ahead - you've got 1 4-link setup sitting there empty. Go nuts. I don't run one. (mostly in preparation for the expected breaking of the cwdt/ec/ic with the change coming to enduring cry, but for now I guess there's no reason to not run it.)
No, we don't run Auras. We can't afford the skillpoint investment, nor the mana reservation. If you feel compelled to, run haste, but I warn you - it's not advised.

Normal: Oak/Alira
Yeeees, I know Alira's Bonus is bad... and I haven't allocated it, but I did seriously consider her. We'll cover that when we go over the skill tree, suffice to say flat mana is actually somewhat important to us. And 40 life from oak is almost always better than the skill point from Eramir. All-resist from Kraitin is a joke, sorry. :/ We already have 32% allres from the tree.
Cruel: Kraitin
No, we're not taking oak. We have almost 450% increased physical damage from the tree and only around 50% attack speed. The 18% phys from Oak is MUCH less impactful than the 8% from Kraitin. It's heresy I know, but I've done the math. Kraitin's bonus is better.
Merciless: Eramir
We gain both frenzy and endurance charges, but we don't build around either of them, and a skill point is more important for us by a significant margin.

This is a base hybrid defense character which can easily specc into armor or evasion as the meta shifts. This one is a predominantly evasion variant. To spec into armor, we drop Ondur's Guile, grab Iron reflexes and (it takes a little respeccing to do) unspecc the Bloodless ring and instead continue up into the maurader tree past Unwavering Stance (we do NOT take it) and move over into the outer ring through Juggernaut and continue as normal from there. A net loss of 1% max HP and 1 additional skillpoint (getting to Iron Reflexes).
As one can quickly see, we are quite light on defenses, only taking as much life and evasion as we need to not get blapped by every powerful crits rhoa and LMP Freezing Pulsar we find. With barely 50% max life and no sheild, we will be entering maps with maybe 1600 life and token energy sheild. Even as a full evasion spec, this is incredibly low, and lifeleech alone is not enough to mitigate the sort of spikey burst damage that evasion characters are so vulnerable to - and we get around this by taking Mind Over Matter.

This is the hidden secret to this build. This is why we have so much mana leech on a blood magic character. This is why we took that random-ass Battle Rouse wheel. This is why normal Alira isn't a (total) newb trap. This is the gimmick. With Evasion and eventually dodge mitigating most of the incoming damage, and armor dampening the small hits by a token amount, we still are only afraid of the big spikes of damage that sneak through and our mana pool eats that damage wholeheartedly. It's more effective than it might seem, that 30%. Between Battle Rouse, Mana Leech and 1 (and only 1) instant mana flask (preferably bubbling, seething is okay, NOT panicked), we can maintain our mana against just about any incoming damage that isn't normally rippy (ahem, kole...) and our lifeleech will take care of our lifepool. I still like to carry one lifeflask with bleed immunity on it for corrupting blood's sake, and one chaos res flask for blood rage (usually atziri's flask. because lolleech) and the other two flasks are personal preference. For only having 50% inc life, this build is deceptively tanky if you aren't frozen, but you do need to be VERY aware of your surroundings, as getting desynced on terrain basically guarantees your death. This is definitely a build that punishes inexperience and inattentiveness. It is NOT newbie friendly.
Don't get me wrong though - it's hella fun!



We Grab the Lust for Carnage ring for the leech. No surprises there.

But here's where this build goes a little off the rails.
We grab BOTH perimeter sword wheels. Not both sides, both of them. As in the one at Ranger and the one at Maurader. That 'both'. This is why we don't use staves. This is why we don't use axes. We have access to not one but two notable weapon wheels, and it just happens that we can reasonably go crit with them as well by picking up the crit chance (and avoiding the multiplier) from the Fatal Blade, Disemboweling and the Deadly Dilettante wheels for a grand total of just over 300% inc crit chance. Yes I know that looks low, but we have 93% accuracy behind that, so we crit a lot more often than one might think.

Beyond all that, we allocate points on utility and defense, picking up offense where we can and filling out the rest of our weapon wheels as we go, eventually working our way up to the acrobatics cluster.

Early game leveling is always quite slow, I used static strike as a 2 hander to level early because that skill is quite OP with a 2 handed weapon and you can truck your way all the way until you can run cyclone in a 3 link with blood magic and life leech. It's a very strong skill. We'll work our way down through the 2 handed ring and pick up that early evasion/armor/life nodes. These are basically as tanky as we'll get for now, and that'll get you through merveil without a hitch.

So as you plough through act 2 and 3, we should be branching out and looking to pick up defenses as we can and make our way towards the Mind over Matter node and towards the Scion Life Wheel. The Cloth and Chain wheel is extremely beneficial to us because of all the allres and evasion/armor nodes, but we aren't going to take MoM and Vaal Pact until we're ready to switch to running Cyclone off of blood magic. I switched far too early, and didn't have enough leech to sustain it. Only experience will tell, I'm afraid, and it does depend on your low level gear. Dominus should in theory be a cakewalk if you have a topaz flask. At this point, with sensible flasking, you should be able to just facetank him like a boss.

Cruel is more of the same all the way through. We'll grab some extra allres to help compensate for the penalty, and we make our way into the first of the major sword wheels, picking up what extra damage we can. Somewhere during cruel, you should be able to switch to cyclone/bloodmagic/lifeleech, even if you don't have the chaos res to safely run Blood Rage yet. Keep it on hand and leveling, even if you don't use it. Also try and automate warlords mark as fast as you can during this point if you haven't already. The extra leech for sustaining cyclone is quite important.
Up to this point, it is important to note that this build is still mostly ambiguous as to whether you are evasion/hybrid based or armor based. The differences as I noted before as quite small. I shall continue as if it was an evasion character.

This is the point, approximately, where you should have received all of your 'free skill points' from quests, for a grand total of 79 points to play with, and from hereon out it's solely your ability to level. I took the sword notables in a very specific order - Brutal Blade, then making my way over to the Maurader wheel for Blade Master and Razor's Edge. It's only NOW that I started to specialise into crit, picking up Fatal Blade. Pound out a few more levels, and so long as you have cyclone in a 4 link and enough chaos res to use Blood Rage, and capped resistances you're fit to start mapping. :D Take it slow though - in these baby steps, there are some deceptively nasty map mods that you want to avoid.

From Hereon, you want to flesh out whatever it is that you haven't grabbed. Fill in the weapon wheels and push on up to Disemboweling to round out your crits, and grab a few utility nodes here and there. At some point also we'll want to press on up and grab the Acrobatics cluster, and it may benefit us to actually use Hyrri's Ire until we can. After that, a rare chest would probably offer the most benefit - maybe a well rolled Belly of the Beast or Carcass Jack, but there are for the most part luxury items. At level 90, an evasion specced build will look something like this:
And a level 90 armor character (assuming GGG actually buffs armor's defensiveness with 1.4) might look something like this: Beyond here, there's not much left to do except fill out your life and mana pools, and grab what evasion/armor is left around to pick up.

With our tree in mind and our peculiar skillset established, gearing is somewhat typical for a melee evasion character, if the priorities are a bit wonky.
In some semblance of priority:
#1 Lifeleech: If we don't have as much as we can get, we're doing it wrong. This is our Blood and Butter, right here.
#2 Ele Resistances: Because we are still vulnerable to spell damage, which predominantly comes in the form of elements, if you aren't at least capped and hopefully overcapped, you're going to have a bad time in some map mods.
#3 Chaos Resistance: Yep, we're running Blood Rage. We need to keep that Chaos res up high much more than most other builds would - to the point where I considered shelling out for a Mings Heart, but the problem with that is if you don't have stats on one ring, like resistances and life (which mings does not have (No, we don't care about more reduced life)), the rest of your gear needs to pick up that slack. Being a 2 handed weapon user, we're already one gearslot down, and closing off one ring slot and one ammy slot (albeit with a good quality ammy), it can be quite costly to get good enough gear to pick up the pieces.
#4/5 Life: Yes, life is actually this far down, and only slightly more important than...
#5/4 Evasion: Regardless of whether you are a pure evasion or an Evasion-cum-Armor build, pure evasion gear, or at the very least evasion/armor gear is the most efficient after the Iron Reflexes conversions are applied. When running Iron Reflexes, we want to wear as much Evasion gear as we can, and get as much Armor nodes as we can, as both of these benefit each other the most efficiently. Life is just a buffer, and we don't have much from the tree and have quite a bit of reduced max life too, so it's not nearly as important as it would otherwise be - but we still do need some.
#6/7/8 Flat damage: With such incredibly high phys damage scaling, flat damage is super important, but when our defenses are cut so tight, we definitely cannot afford to rate this much higher.
#7/8/6 Flat Mana: This is the counterpart to Life. Our mana is also a buffer, and while it's not a stat that we actively seek out, it should be noticed and considered as much more valuable than it usually would be when found.
#8/6/7 Attack Speed: We are swinging what is usually already a slow base attack speed weapon, and while cyclone dodges most of the usual hidden penalties associated with a low attack speed, it's still a good way to escalate damage, and is not to be ignored.
#9 Crit chance: Crits are luxury. They're nice to have, but definitely come at the bottom of the priority list.

Things we do not need:
Mana leech: base leech rate is so low and our damage output is so high that warlords mark already caps us at max leech rate, we don't need any more from our gear. It's a wasted slot.
Mana Regen: Similar logic as above: mana pool is so small and base rate is so low that mana regen is basically worthless.
Added Elemental Damage: our attack speed isn't high enough to make noteworthy use of these.
Weapon Elemental Damage: We have 0 weapon elemental conversion. Would be nice if we could, but we can't. If a party member is running Hatred though, go hug them. Otherwise, this is a dead stat.
Energy sheild: Aahahahahahaaaa....ehh...
IIR: Wasted slot, more than anything. Meh.
Accuracy: We're using swords. Accuracy isn't BAD, but we're already pretty close to cap. Diminishing returns are definitely a thing...it's another meh.
Life regen: it's set to 0 by vaal pact. Wasted slot.
Stun recovery: We're immune to stun while cycloning and Vaal Cycloning. Basically a wasted slot.
Additional [attribute]: we have plenty of dex and strength and don't need much intelligence because the only blue we have is curse on hit. Colossal meh.
X gained on Y: Be it life or mana on hit or kill, it does not matter, they're all bad in this build. X on hit, our attack speed is too slow. X on kill, once shit is dead, we don't care about it anymore.
Stun Duration/Chance to stun/Stun Threshhold, etc: We're not a stun focused build, and while we can stun somewhat often, it's not worth the slot usually. A luxury stat.
Movespeed: We rarely walk anywhere, and modifying base movespeed to make us cyclone faster is...ehhh - it seems really inefficient. Worth considering as a luxury.
Phys damage reflect: Meeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh...
Flask charges gained/used/duration: hidden gems in the flasking world, but not so powerful as to warrent going hunting for. Luxury stats.
Flask Recovery Rate:...on the other hand is a wasted slot.

You want the highest pDPS 2 handed sword you can lay your hands on, with the biggest base crit chance as an aside luxury. It's that simple :3 A well-rolled Doomsower isn't a bad start for level 65+. They're cheap.

Anarchic: Rogue exiles are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are a cakewalk, some are notoriously difficult. This is definitely one of the few true melee builds that doesn't struggle too much with Igna Pheonix because of our insane lifeleech eliminating her righteous fire damage, and mind over matter soaking up much of her burst. Magnus, on the other hand, still just obliterates us mercilessly. (he single handedly made me pick up a ruby flask instead of my topaz, and I haven't seen him again yet to test...
Armored: irritating, but still doable. Our ridiculous damage output really isn't significantly dented by this map mod. It feels just like an "extra life" mod.
Demonic: this one is actually a 'tentatively avoid', because of voidbearers. This mod + extra damage, multiprojectile or any sort of accellerant is basically insta-rips waiting to happen. Keep a close eye on this one. It's bearable on its own, but it stacks REALLY BADLY with nastier things.
Extra X damage" You'll want to be careful here. Handle it just like you would normally, but remember those big spikey mobs are exponentially more dangerous in this mod than they would be in others. I'd even go as far as to say you should never use Vaal cyclone in here just to be on the safe side.
Fleet: or as many call it, "Crack Map". It's desync prone. Surprisingly nothing special here.
Hexproof: aggravating, but not impossible. Just be a bit more careful and know that you'll be missing some lifeleech and won't be as tanky.
Mirrored/Ele resist: 0 elemental damage, 0 problems. :D
Otherworldly: this one is a definitely "approach with care." If you understand and appreciate that every time you hit vaal cyclone you're spawning beyonders no matter what happens, and maybe even beyond bosses, you'll be okay. But there are some REALLY nasty surprises that can pop up from those beyond portals.
Overlords: can be nasty, depends on the boss. Definitely a case-by-case basis, but it can render some bosses completely undoable.
Punishing: this one is definitely quite punishing. You need an INSANE amount of leech to adequately deal with this map, or be extremely overleveled and overgeared. It's not impossible, but it's usually not worth the hassle, especially considering your mana pool will be permenantly empty from all the phys reflect damage it's absorbing. It's like Blood Magic maps, but worse. More on that later...
Unwavering: not much of a big deal, as we don't stun too often anyways - just avoid using vaal cyclone. It will get you killed quite frequently.
Of Balance: About that elemental damage...
Of Enfeeblement: this one doesn't hurt as hard as it does some builds, but it's definitely aggravating. Reduced accuracy doesn't hurt much, because we have so much from the tree it's a drop in the pond, and losing our crit chance makes us sad but nothing more, but the less damage stings our lifeleech quite hard. This is one to beware of when in tandum with other rippy mods.
Of Exposure: this one is even more dangerous to us than it would be a normal melee because of our careful balance of defense/offense. We can't really afford to lose 20% max res unless you luck out and get minor elemental mobs. This + voidbearers = OH HELL NO
Of Frature: Let the mulching begin...
Of X Grounds: All of these are trivial at best if we have carefully rolled flasks. Of Ice is probably the worst because it cuts our attack speed, which we so dearly need to maintain our leech. Watch your footing.
Of Hemomancy: this one is EXTREMELY dangerous to us because of how important our mana pool is. It's like running the build as normal without Mind over Matter. It can be done - but you are going to get bursted hard and often. Approach with caution.
Of Smothering: this one hurts more than you might think. We have 0 life regen, so that part doesn't care, and our mana regen sucks as is, but our mana leech is not applied instantly like our life leech (come on vaal pact, wtf is with that anyways?). Mana leech already applies half as effectively as lifeleech and halving that again slows our effective mana regen down to a crawl. You need to be DYNAMITE on your mana flask with this mapmod, because you won't be leeching very much at all, and if the map is already rippy, it's probably not worth trying.
Of Stasis: this on the other hand is a cakewalk. We already have 0 life regen, and our mana regen is so pitiful we don't care about losing it. Unlike the above mod, this does not impact our mana leech. It's a little inconvenient, that's it.
Of Vulnerability: this one is more dangerous than it would normally be, and can result in you getting bursted and oneshot a lot harder than you would expect. Do be careful, but it's not impossible. Beware of phys-reflect though.