Frenzy Facebreaker | 40k-80k DPS | 1-100 viable | 1.0.5

Hello there. My name is farettig and I play a Marauder on Domination (soon to standard). I feel in love with the idea of punching things in mmo's a long time ago and every new game I play I strive to make punching things very successful. When I found out about Facebreaker gloves I fell in love instantly. Firstly, they are cheap to get. Secondly, they are insanely powerful. Below you will find my way of using them.

I've tried infernal blow and really enjoyed it, but it was lacking in raw punching power. I went as far as doing the BoR - Aegis - Rainbow Strides - Stone of Lazwar immortal build. Yes I couldn't die to Dominus' Touch of God, but it just didn't do enough damage in party play. A paltry 14-20k dps doesn't help your group out. So I sought to optimize facebreakers, bring them to the forefront of damage and this is what I've come up with. It's not 100% optimized, but it's close.



I should quickly mention that this can also be a Duelist build, I stuck with Marauder because I didn't want to be a redshirt.

Blood Magic?
The Blood Magic keystone is interesting. It's offensive benefit is amazing, not needing to worry about mana or the blood magic gem free up a lot of room for other gems/stats but on the other hand if you want to run any auras, you take a bunch of life. I only run Hatred linked to a level 20 reduced mana. It adds insane damage, but at the cost of 26% of my max hp which is a lot at times. The nice thing is that when you aren't feeling comfortable about having less life, just toggle it off. You don't need the extra damage solo when you kill everything in 3 hits or less. Like with most things in this build, blood magic is up to you. I like it, you may not.


Bandits
Life (oak) -> Melee Phys (oak) -> Frenzy Charge (kraityn)

The reasoning behind these choices are pretty obvious, the Life helps us survive, Melee Phys scales better considering our immense attack speed, and the frenzy charge gives insane damage with the frenzy skill. You could pick attack speed, all res, and endurance charges if you wanted, but I wouldn't suggest it.


Required Uniques
Facebreakers are the obvious necessity of the build. Without them this does not work. Get a good pair. With 999 Legacy Facebreakers this build does 70k dps with just hatred aura. Meginord's Girdle is insane for the buid. Flat phys, % life, strength, and flask life recovery are all very good and helpful.


Gems
Really you only need 6 gems for the build to function and an additional 4 to make life easy.


These are apart of your main skill linkage. The order they are aove is my recommended order of importance. If you decide not to go blood magic in your tree, you could replace faster attacks with blood magic gem but it would a large dps loss.


These next 4 gems are the helpful ones. The standard melee Cast When Damage Taken Chain. Endurance charges are obvious, molten shell is obvious, but warlords mark is user dependant. I like using enfeeble as a defensive aura, but it's int requirements are high and this is a softcore character.


Gearing
We've covered the required uniques and gems, so what about the other stuff? It's actually a really easy hierarchy system.

Resists (until capped)
Flat Phys
Life Leech
Life
Move Speed
Armor

If you look at my current gear, I haven't been able to even follow my own guide as it's quite expensive to get max phys rolls + life leech + resist and life on an amulet. Perfect pieces of gear exist, but the are expensive.

A 6-link chest is highly recommended. The damage increase over a BoR using level 20 gems with 20% quality on them makes a noticeable difference and the defensive bonus of having immense armor or evasion really really helps. You could get away with a 5-link, but I really suggest otherwise. Use a BoR until you get a 6-link but then switch immediatelym it's worth it.


Abyssus vs. Bringer of Rain
When I was using infernal blow, BoR was my go to. It is cheap (compared to a 6-link chest), it has great stats, and it looks really cool. But I wanted more power, more damage, and the only other helmet that gives that is Abyssus. With this build I knew melee damage would be hard to take when using Abyssus, but that's why we have 4 endurance charges and crazy armor with granite pots.

This build will still 100% function with a Bringer of Rain, though you will be doing approx. 32% less damage than you would be with Abyssus (53k vs 70k with 999 facebreakers or 42k vs 56k with 780 facebreakers).


Lioneye's Remorse vs Other Shields
When using Infernal Blow I've tried both Saffels and Aegis as shields and I loved them both. The thing I didn't like about them though is their passive requirements to get the most out of them. They were amazing offensive shields, but I wanted something more flexible while giving huge defensive capabilities. Enter Lioneye's Remorse. Huge Life, Huge Armor, Extra protection against Projectiles. What more could you want (all res, damage) well I guess more but beggars can't be choosers. You could easily use a non-unique shield if you so desired, there are those out there that blow Lioneye's away but they are expensive to the average player. Shield choice is really up to you!


Map Content
Maps are easy. You are bloodmagic keystone, you literally only care about phys reflect. That's the only mod you cannot do. If are worried about elemental reflect just toggle off hatred and enjoy the extra HP

While you are not creating something 100% new and spectacular (facebreakers pretty much seem to dictate the rest of the gear and passive tree), I like your Bloodmagic approach.

I haven't seen a viable build so far using both Auras and the Bloodmagic keystone. Was already wondering if this was doable at all or if the passive "reduced mana reserved" behind Blood Magic is just useless, there would be no point for it at all.

So: Thumbs up!

Thanks for the thumbs!

While I realize the build isn't unique, there hasn't been an updated Frenzy Facebreaker guide since last October which is quite a while.

Honestly I don't think you even need to run auras, I'm just doing so because I like seeing a higher dps #. Resists aren't hard to cap when you don't need unique boots, armor isn't hard to get when you use a lionseye remorse so you don't need grace+ir. I have something like 6.2% life regen so I don't need vitality. If you build right, blood magic is an easy inclusion and large dps increase!

what kind of maps are you doing with this? I have a frenzy doing only 20k and can do 77s no problem, so I'm curious why you chose to shoot for abyssus

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karitas wrote:

what kind of maps are you doing with this? I have a frenzy doing only 20k and can do 77s no problem, so I'm curious why you chose to shoot for abyssus

I like to keep up with my guild mates. When you have a LA/Frenzy Ranger doing 30k dps on his LA with chain+lmp you and two low-life crit-thrower's hitting 60k dps each you feel kind of inadequate only doing 22k. I wanted to see how far I could push the damage and this is nearing it's limit minis a lot of min-maxing.

As far as maps go I have done up to 76s solo with this with the only rerolls being no regen and phys reflect. I'd do higher but I just don't get the drops and the currency from selling them is usually more worth it to me.

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

"

Thanks for the thumbs!

While I realize the build isn't unique, there hasn't been an updated Frenzy Facebreaker guide since last October which is quite a while.

Honestly I don't think you even need to run auras, I'm just doing so because I like seeing a higher dps #. Resists aren't hard to cap when you don't need unique boots, armor isn't hard to get when you use a lionseye remorse so you don't need grace+ir. I have something like 6.2% life regen so I don't need vitality. If you build right, blood magic is an easy inclusion and large dps increase!

You must have overlooked my Dancing Frenzy Facebreaker build thread, if you think there have not been an updated Frenzy Facebreaker guide for awhile. :P



Your build is great since I had at one point had it like that, but that was a long time ago. Of course, I have improved it since there was a lot of flaws in it.


To be honest, going past 30k or even 50k DPS does not make much of a difference if you are soloing, so it is usually best to focus on defense to balance out. I know you want to make a difference in partying, but the essence of partying is to kill everything together, so unless there is a DPS meter competition, I find it pointless to increase your DPS to the point that you are actually hurting your defense.


Going BM pretty much handicap your build since placing auras reduces your HP, and not having auras up at all is sad.


Getting more armor + life regen + reducing DPS = much easier to mitigate physical reflect



Also, if you are going to call your build Frenzy Facebreaker, have the decency to get all the frenzy charges or at least attempt to get all from the tree. I apologize if I sounded harsh here. It is just this build reminded me too much of my failure back in early Open Beta. :(

Sorry that I didn't see your forum post!

As I said above, my friends and I kinda do have a dps contest going with me still trailing behind.
I really don't consider BM a negative here, sure it reserves some hp, but 95% of the time the difference between 3.6k~ and 4.5k~ would have been negligible and I would much rather not have to use the BM gem, if I need more survivability I could turn off my and still be doing crazy damage thanks to the extra socket.

While I understand what you mean here, but consider that the next frenzy charges are 7+ nodes away and that you've told me to focus on defenses and that everyone knows the marauder-duelist area is immense for offense and defense. Even going up to 6 frenzy charges only nets 'another' 6k dps. Like you said, why bother for more damage? I nearly forgot about the one in the duelist area in the first place. I could be running Darkray Vectors but why give up the defense of my current or any good boots? Again while I understand what you are trying to say, you sound very conflicted saying I should 'go for more damage' via frenzy charges but also scale back the damage in favor of defenses. In my own play experience I've found a nice balance.


To each their own though! Thanks for the comments.

Oh look, another facebreaker build

Abyssus + 25% hp reserve - ouch

no block nodes = more fail

Spectral throw + mpd = doesnt work, use ppd

Relying on warlords mark for life leech = waste currency to reroll curse immune maps

remake pls

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JohnNamikaze wrote:

these boots is amazing with Frenzy Facebreaker.

especially on half / no regen maps

Hate them stupid map mods with no challenge *sigh*

There should be 50% regen and 50% curse effect maps ... not no regen / stun or curse immune ... GGG take note!

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rhoasjustkilledmybaby wrote:

Spectral throw + mpd = doesnt work, use ppd

I'm just taking a wild guess here, but I would say:

He is using his facebreaker gemslots to level gems.
He's not spectralthrowing "ST+MPD+LMP+Grace" with no weapon at all.

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I really don't consider BM a negative here, sure it reserves some hp, but 95% of the time the difference between 3.6k~ and 4.5k~ would have been negligible and I would much rather not have to use the BM gem, if I need more survivability I could turn off my and still be doing crazy damage thanks to the extra socket.

Your screen says "DpS with Hatred" and you have 4500 HP there.
So is it 4500 or 3600 with Hatred?
3600 would really seem a bit low.