Dave/Kripp's 400 str Ethereal Knives Maraader

EK is more of a tri-stat gem (something like 50/70/60 or w/e) at level 16, so it's never really going to be an issue to hit the dex requirement. If they bump up bear trap much you might choose to use something else, but you really have a wealth of other choices out there for single target.

Ive played this build to 70

I respeced out of templar tree around level 65.
I had cast speed on rings and wands, i felt like getting projectile damage nodes near Duelist was better option.(I've tested Leather & Steel too in the same area).



Very tanky build with a lot of armor. But damage is on the low side. (Comparing it to wand templar clear speed/tankiness)
Reserving 25%+ of your health is really not fun. and EK needs 5-6L armor.
EK +Faster Projectile +Added Fire +Iron Will +fork +life leech
( i found fork to be really good with EK). IF u running hatred+added fire you need life leech for reflect mobs.

You gonna have issues with Int requirement for wands. Dext is not a problem for any gems/armor really.

I will be playing witch EK in OB, I want to have mana pool for auras and not use up a gem slot in EK for blood magic.

I was just checking out Nugi's stream and he was teaming up with this mara EK guy. It is very viable it seems. MaraEK is tankier, witch one deals more dmg. Also he was using wand+shield not 2 x wands.
Anyone using this build?

Played both builds in CB and ditched my summoner to roll the witch build again.

Very fun, very durable and hence very viable imho.

The marauder starts out a little easier (imo) thanks to better life regen and quite early access to BM, which lets you forget about the blue orb. Marauder has a little bit of an int shortage at first, what makes the choice of weapon a little annoying (I went with daggers in CB, works just as well).

The witch build catches up later in terms of toughness and life regen and adds more dps on top of that. It's a long way to IR and dex is a little annoying to get. (not even sure if you still need IR at all, given the new changes to possible armor affixes, seems like going full armor directly works, too).

I like the witch build better, but both are very viable and effective.

What do you think of this Shadow EK
http://tinyurl.com/azdte2l.
I was playing it in CB and it was very good.

Wait...do increased projectile speed/damage and whatnot affect EK? Thinking about it now seems so obvious, but I just assumed it meant bow projectiles since it was clustered with other bow stuff.

And here I was thinking I was making some unique build :D
Had an idea for this yeasterday as I was thinkering a new character to play with some of my irl buddies and came up with this:


After I settled for that I wanted to see if there was more people using it and possibly get some feedback and ideas for the build. Looks like it was not that original after all :D

Anyways, I choose to get the Reserved Mana passives, so I can run Hatred easier and went for the Inner Force to buff auras some more. I'll get some INT and Cast Speed from there as well.

I did some testing and rough calculations with existing highish lvl marauder and without any Spell Damage or Cast Speed from gear and without Auras I could reach 2k dps quite easily.
With all of those, high life, high armor and some evasion I'm confident that the build should work.

Any thoughts?