[1.1]Reave Duelist - Cheap, Effective, End Game Farm

I was looking for a duelist Reave build, as Cleve seems way better than Reave.
This build looks good. Though i wanted a dual wield build.

I was thinking, if Reave alternates between weapons one could get elemental equilibrium and two instances of reave enchanted to different elements, also weapons with different elements corresponding to their Reave skill. So if you keep alternating between the two Reave skills you would always get the 50% resistance reduction on enemies. Would it work? Would Reave keep stacking if you alternate between two?
I just started the game and only have few low level characters and the Reaver one is on nemesis alone and has only one Reave so I can't test it (yet). :(

Edit: Tested it, alternating between two Reave resets them. :(

"

Azrafar wrote:

I was looking for a duelist Reave build, as Cleve seems way better than Reave.
This build looks good. Though i wanted a dual wield build.

I was thinking, if Reave alternates between weapons one could get elemental equilibrium and two instances of reave enchanted to different elements, also weapons with different elements corresponding to their Reave skill. So if you keep alternating between the two Reave skills you would always get the 50% resistance reduction on enemies. Would it work? Would Reave keep stacking if you alternate between two?
I just started the game and only have few low level characters and the Reaver one is on nemesis alone and has only one Reave so I can't test it (yet). :(

Edit: Tested it, alternating between two Reave resets them. :(

This build is far from optimized for duel wielding and I would only use it loosely for that. Currently, most people prefer to get their AoE with duel strike + melee splash as it has a much higher DPS then reave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REbocYdHwik
build made by me, reave duelist (its almost the same nodes)
:)

isnt this build better?
and cheaper?(or at least as cheap as yours)

"

xenochaos1 wrote:

Spoiler

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/690934

isnt this build better?
and cheaper?(or at least as cheap as yours)

'Better'.

No it is very different, it has considerably less damage and 0 block. It has more health, but that is due to it being planned out for 10 more levels then mine. It isn't cheaper in any meaningful way either.

Couple days ago I was feeling bored of my first new char since the end of closed beta when everything was wiped, and started looking around different builds to try and spark some ideas for a new character.

I happened across this thread, and saw it was based off a skill that I don't think was in the game since I last played and decided to have a look. I really liked how affordable it looked (especially since by coincidence I had 2/4 of the unique items drop on my marauder!) The playstyle portion sounded like an interesting change of pace as well, so I immediately sorted out what I already had, sought out the two missing uniques and started a duelist up. Grabbing the culling strike axe was actually the most expensive portion, and while optional, I feel it quickly recouped it's cost of purchase, and was well worth picking up.

I decided to level using reave mostly to try and get used to the skill and how it works. I feel this was very helpful at improving my play at end game where higher dps weapons make the skill a fair bit more forgiving. I found it was actually a pretty good leveling skill; no spectral throw / searing bond, of course, but pretty solid. There were occasional struggles with mana until I could get blood magic up and running (made worse by the fact that 2 of my blood magic gems were leveled to require level 60) but some sources of mana leech/regen by and large took care of that very well.

On the other hand, frenzy was a different story. It's high mana cost was very prohibitive while leveling to use it for much more than refreshing / start up frenzy stacks, so I mostly used double strike for single-target DPS for most of the progression through the game. It became a non-issue once I hit 60 and could blood magic it. The higher level also made the skill finally start to outstrip double strike in dps. In the earlier levels I also used fire trap for tougher blue groups / rares / bosses. It made for some nice supplemental dps to both reave and double strike. But mostly it helped fill the gap in levels where I was having trouble finding an upgrade to my weapon.

Keeping an up-to-date weapon is the key to keeping leveling with reave smooth (as with most melee skills).

Before having multi-strike, reave plays a lot like a trapper or poison arrow type character. It lends itself to circling packs of mobs to group them up nicely for reave and building up reave stacks as you group them. Then, once you hit 6-8 stacks, the group will be nicely bunched and ready for a quick death.

After getting multi-strike things change a fair bit. If you aren't on blood magic yet, it will risk making your reave unsupportable by mana. It also becomes a bit less about circle-kiting, and more about finding the ideal angle to plant yourself to start reaving--occassionally taking steps back from time to time to keep your effective arc of damage nice and wide.

Despite giving up so many slots to the key uniques, I didn't have a particularly hard time maxing my resists for each difficulty, and reaching decent life pools. As mentioned in the OP it's really only once you consider higher-end content that your stats start to look a little low (namely in life and armour/evasion) as it becomes prohibitively harder to go from 3k HP to 4k, and to do so at the same time as trying to get your armour/evasion up requires some really specific (and likely expensive) jewelry and chest piece. But as the OP mentioned the easiest solution is to have a set of gloves/helm to swap out for such things.

Another cheap unique (that I got from the race rewards) I ended up using was this:


I'm actually still using it as I've yet to find a belt good enough to be worth giving up a few extra levels of the IIR gem, extra IIQ flask bonuses and fire resist. The faster block recovery and minor damage reduction is just icing on the cake.

The downside here is I had to sacrifice a bit more dps as a result in order to get more resists via jewelry. That said, this character made enough currency while leveling to buy a nice high dps sword that more than makes up the defensive focus of most of the other gear.

For my flasks, I ended up using a granite with 99% increased armour for duration ( I think I would have preferred increased evasion, just to even out the defensive a bit more, but I couldn't say no to that great roll). I find this really helpful particularly at higher levels I've found it a struggle to keep armour/evasion up at a healthy amount. (Currently I have 900 armour, and 2100 evasion) Admittedly, a big part of this I opted to go for a high tri-resist armour that doesn't have the best evasion/armour amounts.

A quicksilver with adrenaline. An Amethyst flask with curse immunity (mostly for other areas/progression, as chaos can be a bit rough in some areas of merciless and low-level maps). My other two are health flasks: one that cures shock, and one that cures chilled. They all have some form of extra charges or charge recovery.

I actually found curing chilled/frozen quite useful on this character in merciless for the appropriate areas, as it's pretty key to keep your mobility and reave going. (Prior to merciless all the early health nodes made chill/frozen just not happen) Usually, in battle the granite basically acts like a health pot wherein you stop taking damage for a while.

Something I did a bit differently, is that I linked my cast on damage taken thus:

Enduring Cry > Enfeeble > Devouring Totem

The enfeeble doesn't often conflict with temp chains, as more often than not it simply gives me more up-time with having a curse on enemies at all. I really liked your corspe eating idea, and decided to go with devouring totem mostly for two reasons: while small, the little bit of health gained is helpful, and while leveling and using mana the mana gained was quite useful too. It does lose some efficiency at eating corpses once switching to blood magic, but I feel it makes up for it with point two: devouring totem is a great distraction, particularly for dangerous bosses like kole. The other thing I added was a decoy totem to the reduced mana links for the same reason. It helped a lot while progressing through dangerous areas as well. The biggest reason at this point though is it makes it trivial to kill Kole if I find him on the way down to piety. :)

All in all this build has been a lot of fun. I'm Lv69 at this point and have enjoyed every bit of the journey there. Thank you for sharing this build!

The highlight of the whole process has definitely been: Making Kole whimper like a child as a melee character.

Im curious why you didnt went for templar nodes instead or rangers?

I was looking at the tree and by no means am I an expert in tree building (far far far from it) but I'm trying to figure out when going from the duelist tree to the left to grab blood drinker you go down and around. So you grab the 3 strength nodes by the Endurance node. I don't understand why that would be preferable to going through Steel Skin.

Grabbing steel skin does require one more skill point.

So +30 strength, 1 Skill Point

vs

52% increased Armor, 6% increased Max Life, +10 int.

A lot of people seem to have issues with the survivability of this build, so wouldn't the increased armor help especially if you go and grab IR at some point as well.

"

beybus wrote:

Im curious why you didnt went for templar nodes instead or rangers?

Which Templar nodes specifically? Most likely due to low efficiency of getting nodes far away. Did you mean Marauder?

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DarkMage530 wrote:

I was looking at the tree and by no means am I an expert in tree building (far far far from it) but I'm trying to figure out when going from the duelist tree to the left to grab blood drinker you go down and around. So you grab the 3 strength nodes by the Endurance node. I don't understand why that would be preferable to going through Steel Skin.

Grabbing steel skin does require one more skill point.

So +30 strength, 1 Skill Point

vs

52% increased Armor, 6% increased Max Life, +10 int.

A lot of people seem to have issues with the survivability of this build, so wouldn't the increased armor help especially if you go and grab IR at some point as well.

Unless I counted wrong it is 5 points not 4, compared to 3. So a more apt comparison would be;

+30 STR +16% health

to

52% increased Armor, 6% health , +10 int, +10 STR.

Both are good. I prefer the health to armor. But I encourage to diverge as you want.