[2.0 - Now with more DPS!] 2H RT Sword Static Strike

---Introduction---

Hello and welcome to my build.

Key elements here are:
-High Aoe (and single target) damage of greatly scalable Static Strike
-Extremely powerful and cheap Doomsower unique sword
-Tankiness through endurance charges generated automatically by Leap Slaming into mobs


So enter a build that will:
-Cost less than 3ex with rare gear
-Do more than 60k aoe dps
-But also work on a 4L (50k+ dps, <1ex)
-Use Static Strike from lvl12
-Be easy to level
-Be quite tanky
-Be capable of defeating Atziri (if that matters :p)


---Quick info---

But first a quick info on the state of my current character:

- lvl 88
- ~8ex overall cost
- SS Dps: 73k
- 4.9k Life, 3.8k Armour, 3k Evasion, 47% phys mitigation with Endurance charges

Not using any jewels at the moment.


---Video--- (1.3 videos with about 58k dps)

Quick and easy introduction: Gorge semi-speed clear
Harder stuff: Courtyard Clear - Phys reflect, Vulnerability, Boss dmg

---Tree---

Tree

3 jewel slots.

The tree is at lvl93 with two bandit passives taken. At lvl88 I am missing a jewel slot and the three Elementalist nodes. While I would advise to definitely take the jewel slot if you have a nice jewel ready, taking Elementalist might not be worth it enymore - since because of the increased damage, there won't be enough time to possibly shock the target before it's dead.

---Gear--- (gem links are from 1.3, look at "Gem Setups" for updated information)



---Gem Setups---

Doomsower 5L:Static Strike+Multistrike+Melee Physical Damage+Weapon Elemental Damage+Faster Attacks; 6L: Added Fire Damage
5L:Leap Slam+Fortify+Blood Magic+Endurance charge on melee stun+Faster Attacks
4L:Cast when Damage Taken+Immortal Call+Increased Duration; 1S: Blood Rage
4L:Hatred+Herald of Ash; 1S: Vaal Haste; 1S: Fire Golem
4L:Cast when Damage Taken lvl1+Ice Nova lvl1+Curse on Hit+Warlord's Mark (Least important, can be switched depending on playing style)


---Stats---






---Bandits---

Normal: Oak/Passive
Cruel: Kraitlyn
Merciless: Oak/Passive

I, personally, took two passives, but helping Oak two times is good as well, especially if you plan to be more tanky and not take some of the damage nodes as a trade off.


---Leveling--

Is very straightforward. In terms of tree progression, you take all the nodes in the Duelist area first, then travel into the Marauder area and take Resolute Technique and finally travel into the Templar area for more life and area nodes. At the beginning, depending on your gear, you might want to take some extra dex nodes.

In terms of your actual progress in the game, you pick up Cleave at lvl1 and use it until you can start using Static Strike at lvl12. Works great against groups and single targets alike. Continuously pick up higher lvl 2H swords as you progress and use the Rustic Sash recipe on them. Otherwise you can just pick up whatever you want for armor.

At the start (if you don't have access to Elreon jewellery) you will have to use mana pots to sustain your attacks and it is advisable to get Mana Flows on the tree as early as you can. When that starts not being enough against single targets (probably when you got a 5L), pick up Revelry.


---4L--- (damage numbers not updated for 2.0 - but expect at least 10k more)

In case you are very new to the game, you will be glad to hear you can do this build on a 4L as well. You can chose whether to drop Faster Attacks from your setup - which would leave you with 42k dps -, or whether to drop Weapon Elemental Damage - which would leave you with 35k dps but without being locked down in one place too long because of Multistrike. Alternatively, if you really dislike the Multistrike lockdown, you can remove the gem as well, leaving you again with about 35k dps. 5-linking your Doomsower is highly recommended, though. Not only you get a very nice dps boost, but re-sell value on linked uniques is very good in case you ended up not liking the build.


---Actually playing---

Apart from the obvious hack-o-slash-o there are some things you should be aware of to be successful with this build:

1. You generate Endurance charges automatically by Leap Slaming into enemies. Most of the time that's what you would do anyway, so that's nice, but for some situations you might want to make sure you are jumping on some monster extra - to be at full charges before opening a box, - when your charges are about to run out, - when you are about to face a boss, etc.

2. Although I have Cwdt gem (and all the other gems in the group) at lvl11, you should probably lvl them even higher to only get the endurance charges consumed when you REALLY need it. You should be running around with 5-6 endurance charges majority of the time. It helps with survivability quite a bit.

3. Roll a Perpetual Granite of Iron Skin. It should be up for basically every pack. Use it. It is your best friend.

4. You take no damage from Phys reflect (and can even do Phys reflect maps without any problems whatsoever), but Ele reflects somewhat hurts you. Because of the 0.75s delay on the Static Strike explosion you should have enough time to react to it, though, and use a Topaz flask. Still, even without a Topaz flask activated most of the time Ele reflect isn't something that should outright kill you. The increased life leech rate from our chest helps as well.

5. As always with any physical attack build, you need 1-2% mana leech (now 0.2-0.4) on gear somewhere.

6. You only get 20 dex from the tree, but you need AT LEAST 122 dex to equip Doomsower. That means you will need a lot of dex on at least one of your jewellery pieces. Probably your amulet.


---Gear discussion - Handy uniques---

None of them are required and you can do almost as well with rares, but do have their advantages.

Doomsower

An absolutely amazing sword that puts basically any non-mirrored rare one to the trash. Goes up to 488dps, which is roughly an equivalent of a 540dps rare sword. Decently rolled 430dps Doomsowers can be had for as little as 1c. What really sells it for this build is the 15% AoE, of course.

Although Doomsower isn't technically required and this build can be done just as well with a rare sword (and perhaps starting with 20% quality Static Strike), I am not sure why anyone would.


Ming's Heart

As most of your damage ends up being elemental, it gives you more of a 10% damage boost, instead of expected 20%, but even so, together with the chaos resist it is a net gain in the end. Btw, the 15% reduced life is substracted from your life percentage increase, not your life total. In effect, it makes our 167% increased life build a 152% one.


Cherrubim's Maleficence

A really solid chest if you don't need any resists. Up to 100 life. Very good defence stats. The chaos damage increase is absolutely minimal and can pretty much be ingored even when using Ming's and Atziri's flask, but... looks good in your mind, I guess. But of course, the real reason to get this chest is to get your hands on the life leech rate increase mod. Which is great and you do notice it.


Other Gear

Pretty much whatever. Most of my rare gear is self-found actually. Except for the amulet and gloves. Could get some more damage with a Rustic Sash. Could get more life on boots.


---Gem discussion---

If you can, get Static Strike with 20% quality. 20% quality on Blood Rage is nice. Also quality on Faster Attacks will give you the biggest dps boost out of any quality on other support gems.


---Closing thoughts---

There is nothing else! (yeah, fuck you too, Maramoa)

Thanks mate, this was exactly what i was looking for, gonna try this as i get home ;) just lvled a marauder and a templar around lvl 15 but didnt fit my playstyle. Anyway i liked that statik strike gem from the start so, this is perfect. Thank you

Edit: the only problem is that the link for passive traits is not working (well only show the "map" with no point spent) hope you fix it soon lol

"

giovait wrote:

Thanks mate, this was exactly what i was looking for, gonna try this as i get home ;) just lvled a marauder and a templar around lvl 15 but didnt fit my playstyle. Anyway i liked that statik strike gem from the start so, this is perfect. Thank you

Edit: the only problem is that the link for passive traits is not working (well only show the "map" with no point spent) hope you fix it soon lol

Oh shiiiit. Fixed, thanks. Hope you enjoy it.

Very convincing build. Was looking for a straightforward budget build to play on the 1 month leagues but couldn't find any. Glad I stumbled upon this, gonna try it now. Thanks for the build!

Giving this a shot on my deprecated 76 duelist as soon as I get a Doomsower. Will let you know how it turns out.

After getting to A3 Merciless with the "Pleb" version of the build, I had problems with survivability due to the lack of proper life leech. The life leech I got from a ring and my gloves weren't enough. I found that the work around to this is to just use the free 4S from a piece of gear to use another CWDT setup with Warlord's Mark + Molten Shell to get life leech and bonus armour. Made me tankier and survivability improved quite a lot.

"

After getting to A3 Merciless with the "Pleb" version of the build, I had problems with survivability due to the lack of proper life leech. The life leech I got from a ring and my gloves weren't enough. I found that the work around to this is to just use the free 4S from a piece of gear to use another CWDT setup with Warlord's Mark + Molten Shell to get life leech and bonus armour. Made me tankier and survivability improved quite a lot.

I played the Pleb version until lvl84 I think and never had a problem with my 6% life leech amy. But then again, maybe not everyone can get 6%LL on a budget. So good job adapting :-). I might try it out myself and if it works well, add it to the guide.

EDIT: Tried it. I guess it works when you are not doing a lot of damage yet, but at my level I usually stun+kill the mobs before they can do any sort of damage (at least in average maps) so the Molten Shell takes some time to activate and also sometimes dissipates without exploding and applying Warlord's Mark. Unless I leave it at really low lvls, of course, but then the armour bonus becomes fairly marginal.

But, simply to get Warlord's Mark applied, you can use all the other spells as well. Tried a few and - as you always jump straight into the middle of the pack - Ice Nova was by far the best. Won't work in curse immune maps, of course, but still should help anyone with Life Leech problems.

"

Cabesi wrote:

I played the Pleb version until lvl84 I think and never had a problem with my 6% life leech amy. But then again, maybe not everyone can get 6%LL on a budget. So good job adapting :-). I might try it out myself and if it works well, add it to the guide.

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to acquire gear like that with the current state of the 1MSC league, most people who would have had something like that have probably completed the challenges already and stopped. I also started with nothing but 3 Scrolls of Wisdoms in this league :P

"

Cabesi wrote:

EDIT: Tried it. I guess it works when you are not doing a lot of damage yet, but at my level I usually stun+kill the mobs before they can do any sort of damage (at least in average maps) so the Molten Shell takes some time to activate and also sometimes dissipates without exploding and applying Warlord's Mark. Unless I leave it at really low lvls, of course, but then the armour bonus becomes fairly marginal.

You were absolutely right about not having enough damage yet. I guess the setup was more of a temporary "fix" before getting more DPS. I tried tanking the same pack of mobs I normally died to without the setup when I still had 10K DPS and now with 20K DPS the 4%LL I have on my gear is enough to keep me alive and stay at full health.

Overall, I think it's a pretty solid build even though I haven't really gotten the full taste of it yet (still LVL 65). I was pretty surprised that I already have 20K DPS at this level with crap gear that I bought for under 15c compared to the old build I played that costed me over 10ex and only had 20k DPS at level 85+. I also haven't taken the damage nodes inside the Marauder area due to gem stat requirement issues, I went up the Templar area to get both the +10 to STR & INT so this is something I'm really looking forward to.

So far, out of all the budget builds I tried. I think this build is the best because 20K dps with 15c gear at a fairly low level is freakin awesome. To add to that, there is an option to transition to a stronger version of the build. So yeah, neat build man. Now time to complete the challenges!

"

You were absolutely right about not having enough damage yet. I guess the setup was more of a temporary "fix" before getting more DPS. I tried tanking the same pack of mobs I normally died to without the setup when I still had 10K DPS and now with 20K DPS the 4%LL I have on my gear is enough to keep me alive and stay at full health.

Overall, I think it's a pretty solid build even though I haven't really gotten the full taste of it yet (still LVL 65). I was pretty surprised that I already have 20K DPS at this level with crap gear that I bought for under 15c compared to the old build I played that costed me over 10ex and only had 20k DPS at level 85+. I also haven't taken the damage nodes inside the Marauder area due to gem stat requirement issues, I went up the Templar area to get both the +10 to STR & INT so this is something I'm really looking forward to.

So far, out of all the budget builds I tried. I think this build is the best because 20K dps with 15c gear at a fairly low level is freakin awesome. To add to that, there is an option to transition to a stronger version of the build. So yeah, neat build man. Now time to complete the challenges!

Glad you like it. And good luck with the challenges!

Updated for 2.0.