Berserker Meatball Sprinkler
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*** Edit 3/20/2017: Changed aura setup for Arctic Armour / Herald of Ash ***
This is a build guide for a Berserker character I've created for Legacy league. The intent was to build around the revised unique Brutus' Lead Sprinkler, the meatball sprinkler, and the new molten Strike threshold jewel Wildfire. Having played a blade flurry Hand of Wisdom and Action character to it's limits in Breach league, the appeal of creating a strength counterpart was immediately appealing. This build compares favorably against it's predecessor, greatly surpassing it in damage and life leech due to the Berserker's Cloaked in Savagery comboed with Vaal Pact. It should be mentioned that the build lacks a little behind in clearspeed. However, not as much as you'd expect from a molten strike build due to great attack speed from the Berserker ascendancy and projectile spread from the new jewels. Before going any further, I would like to point out that this build is not hardcore viable due to an aggressive, in-your face playstyle and having an effective ~6.8K health pool with the Berserker's Aspect of Carnage ascendancy. In this build, we stack high amounts of strength, damage multipliers, projectile explosion overlap along with leech. This character has cleared The Shaper and is most definitely capable of clearing all content in the game with the right amount of currency put into it. The character is fully decked out at something around 20 exalted orbs. However, it only requires about 10 chaos orbs worth of unique items along with rare gear with life and resists to get going. If you are a veteran player and feel like you understand the build's mechanics at a glance, you can gloss over my passive tree and gear and then skip to the videos at the end showcasing the build in action ( guardians, shaper, etc... ) The choices made in the passive tree are explained in the Molten Strike & Scaling section. Now, onwards! Current Gear
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Passive Tree Path of Building code
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http://pastebin.com/Ua33bf9k
Bandits
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Oak - Kraityn - Passive Point Leveling
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It's possible to level this build with molten strike from level 28 once you get your scepters and if you make use of leveling uniques with strength, such as Meginord's Girdle and Karui Ward. I have not tested this but I invite you to try it. Firestorm will also do just fine. When making the switch to molten strike, you should prioritize the Wildfire jewels and Point Blank. The opportune point to make the switch will probably be when you have the jewels, Cloaked in Savagery, Vaal Pact and Point Blank. The first thing you'll want to get on the passive tree is the Templar's Elemental Overload keystone, picking up damage and life as you go. Once you have it, bee-line it straight to vaal pact. After that, you should be able to make the switch to molten strike after you pick up Point Blank. At this point, you can fill in whatever parts of the tree you feel like you need. Prioritize life nodes that also get you strength, like Devotion and Purity of Flesh Pick your ascendancy in this order: Pain Reaver - Cloaked in Savagery - Crave the slaughter - Aspect of Carnage The bulk of the character's defense and offense comes from stacking strength. Currently, the character sits at an even 840 strength total. What this gives us is: 420 max life blaze it 168% melee physical damage 336 to 672 fire damage added to attacks The added fire damage is what's most important, because this damage will apply to every individual molten strike projectile, of which we have twelve. The following is an introduction to the mechanics of molten strike and how we scale the skill gem. If you are familiar with the skill gem, feel free to skip this part. Molten Strike & Scaling
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Molten strike consists of two parts. The first is a generic melee attack which scales with strength and any other modifiers to melee weapon attacks, like % increased physical damage with one handed weapons.
While the melee attack is beneficial for single target damage, we will focus on scaling the skill's second part for damage. The molten projectiles released from the attack have the tags attack, area of effect, projectile. Due to the attack tag, the added fire damage we receive from strength is applied to the projectiles. This also allows us to scale damage with % weapon elemental damage from gear & skill tree. Due to the area of effect tag, we can support our skill with concentrated effect for increased single target damage. Interestingly, this will also decrease the area in which the projectiles will spread, causing them to fall in a more dense pattern and creating more damage overlap. Due to the projectile tag, we can use the point blank keystone located on the bottom right side of the skill tree to give us a 50% universal damage multiplier with no drawbacks. This is because the distance the projectiles travel away from us is always at a short to medium range. We will not pick up the iron grip keystone. Iron grip increases projectile physical damage. The only physical damage our projectiles have is from the scepter base damage, which get half their value converted to fire damage. We will get more damage and life from picking a jewel node instead. Due to our base damage being nearly exclusively fire damage, we get a lot of damage from scaling fire penetration. We use a Flammability curse in a Blasphemy setup, along with a Fire Penetration support gem. The Lava Lash passive skill cluster also helps scale our penetration. Gearing
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As of the time this is being written, a near perfect Brutus' Lead Sprinkler goes for about 5 chaos orbs on Legacy Softcore. The Wildfire jewel also has a negligible price due to it's commonality and disuse. We require two of each item in order to have the base of the build working. For our equipment, we want a high strength roll on every piece of yellow gear, along with high life rolls and sufficient amounts of resists. For a budget version, it's possible to use uniques like Alberon's Warpath to fill in missing strength. And using Resolute Technique in place of Elemental Overload if we have absolutely no accuracy on gear when we enter maps. Having our body armor be an Astral Plate helps a lot with gearing because the strength requirement starves us of suffix slots on gear, which resistances need. We want our fire resist to be higher or equal to the other elements in order for The Wise Oak to benefit our fire damage. We benefit greatly from % increased weapon elemental damage on jewelry due to it scaling molten strikes' projectiles. Along with this, we need good accuracy rolls on 1 - 2 pieces of either rings, gloves or helmet. Aim for ~85% chance to hit. Collecting six of The Celestial Justicar divination card gives us a high ilvl 6-link astral plate relatively cheap. Chase items are important for any build. It gives the player a meaningful goal to strive for in the pursuit of power. For this build, Xoph's Blood and The Dying Sun are incredibly valuable chase items to obtain. Xoph's Blood benefits us with increased strength and fire penetration. Covering enemies in ash makes them take 20% increased fire damage and have 20% decreased movement speed. The avatar of fire also benefits us by converting the remaining physical damage done by the skill to fire damage, which our passive tree scales better. I have never seen a build get more value out of this amulet. The Dying Sun gives us two extra projectiles for increased single target damage, along with increased are of effect for projectile spread and Herald of Ash AoE. The maximum fire resist helps with reflect. And the added fire resist also helps us build around The Wise Oak. Getting a helmet with 3 additional molten strike projectiles boots our damage immensely, but it is not required. For boot enchants, % increased global critical strike chance of you haven't crit recently would help our Elemental Overload up-time a lot, and possibly remove the need for an Orb of Storms setup. However I have yet to test this. Corrupting physical to fire damage conversion to our weapons may give an increase in dps over the implicit 16% increased elemental damage. It's worth noting that because of the scepter base, we cannot corrupt culling strike or weapon range unto our weapons. A few players have mentioned that the character could use a pair of Alberon's Warpath boots instead of a rare pair of boots. The boots would give us about 70 extra strength and they have good movement speed, we will loose something around 150 maximum life for a 30k projectile dps increase on a fully geared character. I agree that they definitely have a place in the build early on when the character doesn't have the helmet enchant and Xoph's Blood. However, getting resistances on boots is important because requiring strength in every gear slot starves us of item suffixes, which resistances need. Another pair of unique boots that would benefit the character is Kaom's Roots. In fact, this is probably the pair that I would personally use if I had the resists to do so. The lack of movement speed hurts. But the quality of life gained by not having to worry about Temporal Chains or being frozen is near addictive. Having used the boots before, it hurts to not use them for the build. They also save us two passive points on the tree, not needing Unwavering Stance anymore, and they give us a big boost in survivability. Flasks
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Swap The Dying sun with a silver flask until you can attain it. Current flask setup Skill Links
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Leap Slam - Faster Attacks - Blood Magic - Fortify I recommend using leap slam on a four link with blood magic so that there is never a situation where we can't use the skill. Herald of Ash - Blasphemy - Flammability - Arctic Armour We can swap flammability with enfeeble for T16 maps with damage rolls, uber-lab and uber-atziri. Anger also gives a good damage boost if you'd like to swap it with AA/HoA, but more damage is definitely not needed for this build. Cast When Damage Taken (lvl 13) - Immortal Call (lvl 15) - Molten Shell (lvl 17) - Increased Duration Having taken a savage hit, the molten shell explosion heals us up to full HP Vaal Lightning Trap - Vaal Haste - Increased Duration We use vaal lightning trap for end-game bosses and vaal haste for more clear speed. Orb of Storm - Increased Critical Strike Chance - Increased Area of Effect We are not guaranteed a permanent elemental overload up-time. Getting a crit chance enchant on boots could however eliminate the need for an orb of storms. You can swap orb of storms with Lightning Golem - Enduring Cry - Portal These are the main skill links in order of importance: Molten Strike - Weapon Elemental Damage - Multistrike - Fire Penetration - Increased Area of Effect - Elemental Focus Swap inc. AoE with concentrated effect for tough boss-fights. Sixth link is elemental focus. Defenses hideout
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 Offenses
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Character sheet with auras in hideout
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 Molten strike's tooltip dps does not reflect anything close to it's effective dps. Let]s take into account penetration, point blank, concentrated effect, ash debuff and flasks and other regular buffs. This calculation is demonstrated in the Path of Building link above. Every molten strike projectile has around half a million DPS. With 12 projectiles, let's assume three quarters of them overlap on a target. Then the effective single target dps can be assumed to be 500,000 * 0,75 * 12 = 4.5 million DPS without shock 500,000 * 0,75 * 12 * 1.5 = 6.750 million DPS with shock Videos
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Near deathless Shaper kill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPjZGmf2kM&feature=youtu.be Phoenix clear using an old version of the build which used Anger instead of AA/HoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuC-KHDkcc4 The current version of the build clearing a strand map. Fuck you Chayuka https://youtu.be/6_C757U-Wws Further Discussion
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To crit or not to crit?
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For anyone having played a HOWA build, you may have an impression of how much going crit thins out the build. You loose out on precious intelligence in the process which subverts the entire point of the build. While Brutus' Lead Sprinkler has much better critical strike chance, attempts to create a skill tree for crit does not allow any critical strike multiplier besides the Templar's Galvanic Hammer cluster. This is due to us being very starved for passive points going with Vaal pact, Point Blank and high strength on tree. . What really disarms the idea of going crit is that we cannot scale molten strike's secondary effect along with the Disemboweling cluster due to the secondary effect not having a melee tag. By going non-crit, we enable ourselves to pick up the Elemental Overload keystone if we stack some accuracy on gear and avoid the Resolute Technique keystone. Additionally, we gain more passive points to spend on things such as strength and life. Why no Vinktar's?
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The added leech from Vinktar's is unneeded, the build already feels like it has permanent Vinktar's on after receiving damage. Furthermore, we would need to waste a precious flask slot for shock immunity. The increased damage enemies would take from shock is also unnecessary for pack clearing, and for big bosses like guardians, shaper, etc. We simply use Vaal Lightning Trap Resolute Technique
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The Resolute Technique keystone is actually decent on this character, even if it locks us out of Elemental Overload. A player pointed out to me his character which used the keystone and still reached very good dps. However using Elemental Overload will give us more damage once we get accuracy on gear. The beauty of going Resolute technique is that it makes the character easier to gear, freeing up 2-3 suffix slots on gear. Unethical theorycrafting
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While the damage of molten strike in this build is on the level of some of the hardest hitting builds out there. Further progress could possibly be made by using the Emberwake and The Taming unique rings. The extremely fast hitting nature of molten strike could afford us an incredible stack of ignites on enemies, and allowing us move the build into double dipping territory by scaling general damage, projectile damage, fire and elemental damage. This could be done by investing into critical strike chance, or as I see the build possibly doing, chance to ignite. This would however require near perfect resists on gear due to us losing both our rings slots for the combo. - Lemjir Last edited by stormcrawler on Mar 23, 2017, 2:21:12 AM Last bumped on Dec 7, 2017, 6:25:40 AM
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Hey, that build looks interessting. Thank you for sharing. I have two questions:
1. The passive tree in the guide and the one in you profile look different (- Vaal Pact, + Lava Lash). Why is that? 2. Did you went first towards Templar Area or towards Vaal Pact first? | |
" Hey thank you for posting. To answer your first question, this is an error. You probably caught the character between some testing. The passive tree linked in the guide is the correct one. I went for the Templar area first in order to use elemental overload while leveling. Vaal pact is not needed until you get the Cloaked in savagery ascendancy. I'll update the thread with a better description on how to progress the skill tree, thank you. |
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Hello! just wondering why you're not taking iron grip its only 2 points and its 5k dps
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" Iron grip actually only increases projectile physical damage. We have some projectile physical damage just from the base damage of the scepters, which get half their value converted to fire damage. You will in every case be better of picking a 2-damage affix jewel with some life, I'll put an explanation of this in the guide, thank you. If you have Path of building, you can see this for yourself by copying the code found here, http://pastebin.com/Ua33bf9k, importing it into a build and comparing dps. |
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" You're right i totally didnt think about that | |
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Hi, question. How many jewell Wildfire 2 ?
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" We use two. Using any more doesn't work because of the jewel's limitation. Good luck! |
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Have to ask, why not Ngamahu's flame for even MORE MEATBALLS??
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" Haha, go for it man. I'll stick with my current sprinkler system for now. |
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