Elemental cleave - a guide and my knowledge.

Hi all, the name is Mitchell and this will be details of my characters progression.

If you would like any help please IGN me on Rain_of_Deathss

I am by no means a professional gamer, though I have a few world firsts in WoW and collected all the stars in Super Mario 64.


Build concept:
The build I am currently playing works around the melee skill 'Cleave'. This skill performs an attack in an arc in front of the character with the equipped weapons (note, swords or axes only). It has a reduced physical damage effect if dual wielding but will average the attack speed of both weapons. As such it has no elemental damage reduction and thus performs better with elemental damage on weapons and armour and auras while using fast weapons and attack speed increase from passives and haste aura. The idea is to become strong enough to take hits and attack fast enough while dual wielding with enough elemental damage to slay monsters with relative ease.

Weapons:
Aim for axes and swords with an attack speed of 1.7 or greater. You want two, one hand weapons with ideally added fire lightning and cold damage. The three remaining stats are up to you to choose from if you deem them necessary. Resists are nice but hard to come by, attack speed is amazing and the only other benefit would be life on hit or kill for a slight gain in sustain. Accuracy and critical strike are useless due to 'Resolute Technique' passive.

Auras:
Aiming for 6 auras. They are: Anger, Wrath and Haste for damage. Purity, Grace an Determination for survivability. Anger, Wrath and Grace will be run off of Blood magic (from Covenant's body armour or Malakai's helmet) and Haste, Purity and Determination will be run off of mana whilst linked with reduced mana.

Damage abilities:
Cleave for more than a single monster in range. Supported by Faster Attacks, Weapon Elemental Damage, Life Leech and Blood magic for a 5link chest. The 6th link is able to be interchanged depending on your needs, Added lightning Damage will add more damage, similarly with Added Chaos Damage, Elemental Proliferation will assist in aoe clear speed and allow you to spread Shock Stacks to rares and bosses which you would be unable to otherwise. However with the new melee support gems being released, my though is that Multi Strike will far outweigh elemental proliferation and / or faster attacks. The splash damage seems redundant as cleave is already aoe and Power charge will be useless as we do not crit.

Gearing:
As a list of priorities you want:
Elemental damage on Weapons, Rings, Amulet. % Elemental weapon damage on Belt, rings and amulet. Attack speed on rings, amulet and weapons. Resistance and Health. Enough Dexterity and Intelligence to run your auras.

You need to max resistances.
Max resistance in Merciless = 5% Max from Elemental Adaptation, 5% Max from Purity with Aura Passives, 75% Standard Max, Merciless penalty of -60%.

75+5+5+60=145

Passives grants (without 15% at bottom of skill tree): 15% All + 10% All, 18% Fire, 18% Cold.

Purity grants: 37% All resist (Including Aura passive at level 20)

Total of 62% Lightning, 80% Fire and 80% Cold, meaning you need to get from gear another 65% Cold, 65% Fire and 83% Lightning.

As well as this you need to gain Chaos resist, a maximum of 135%. The more the better but going from -60% to a positive number would be a nice start.

Specific items that are extremely useful:

Passive Tree Spec:

This is the build I am following, if you manage to hit this level of gear, depending on your needs you can pick up life node, chaos resist (not really worth it if you can get it on gear), attack speed and resist all if you head south then west from your southernmost dexterity nodes. Up to you, and congratulations that you made it this far.

Please note, on all three difficulties I killed all of the bandits for the passive skill points, I felt that the 40 HP was not needed as a marauder and the skill point is more valuable than charges, attack speed or resist.

Here is my gear as it stands currently:

My stats are as follows:
5176 Cleave at 0.3 Attack Speed, 6498.6 Dual Strike at 0.33 Attack Speed.
2481/2815 Life.
82% Resist all, (over capped).
6107 Armour (50%).
30% Crit Damage reduction.

Nice guide, very under-appreciated xD