Sean's DW Blood Tanky DPS

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Bradaw wrote:

Your build is bad kid. L2p. I would run circles around this build all day. Good luck trying to do anything with this clusterfuck of a set up. My Down Syndrome neighbor could make a better build than this by drooling on the keyboard. You're bad.

I am your neighbor.... ERRRRRHHHHHHHH!

Hey Sean! Been playing with your build and quite frankly I've had a blast.
Lvl 60 atm and its working really well in act 3 merci with Faster attacks+life gain+life leech gemmed to the main attacks :)

I just have a little question. Why did you decide on axes for the build?

Alight so I'm lvl 32 at the moment. Nothing fancy, but I've found one thing that destroys me at the moment and that's mobs that slow/freeze. If I get hit with a slow or a freeze and I'm in a pack of mobs I'm pretty much screwed unless I luck out and leap slam away.

one damn mob is killing me instantly. In act 3 the electrohead whatever special mob. 2 electro explosions and i'm dead. how much resists must i have?

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Moreris wrote:

one damn mob is killing me instantly. In act 3 the electrohead whatever special mob. 2 electro explosions and i'm dead. how much resists must i have?

Early on the build is really weak in elemental resist. What I did to counteract it was get two prismatic rings. Add some stats to them with a trasmutation and an augmentation and you'll be set. Surviving elemental attacks is much better in Act 3 than the extra damage or life your other rings might provide you. Also at the top of the Solaris temple you should be given an option to pick a yellow ring, one of those should be a prismatic.

Currently my problem is that anything that stops me from attacking means I'm probably going to die. I'm in the Fetid Pools right now where the skeletal rhoa are these guys destroy me and instantly kill my decoy totem. There's really nothing I can do against them and I'm forced to party with people to finish that area. This is upsetting because up until this point I've been able to do everything solo.

Heya, I've been playing with something similar to your build, in the OP you mentioned something about having 4% life regen to not lose hp during blood rage, one thing that you did not consider was that in merciless you get -60% chaos resistance, which makes this ability hurt you for about 6% health if you do not suddenly get a lot of chaos res in the later acts

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davidftw wrote:

Hey Sean! Been playing with your build and quite frankly I've had a blast.
Lvl 60 atm and its working really well in act 3 merci with Faster attacks+life gain+life leech gemmed to the main attacks :)

I just have a little question. Why did you decide on axes for the build?

I was wondering that aswell.

Just want to leave an update as I'm now nearing the end of Act 2 on cruel. So far I've followed your progression build to the letter, except I stopped and got Blood Drinker on my way up to get the Heart of the Gladiator and such.

So far I've only found a couple of larger weaknesses with leveling this build. The first is cold damage/slows. When hit with an effective cold damage that slows attack/movement speed the chances of death jump considerably. This build relies heavily on you attacking at all times, frenzy orbs help to counteract this, but there's still a big danger of dying while slowed or frozen. This isn't so big a problem in act 2 until you get into the dungeons and the pyramid. What I've done is gotten a Quicksilver flask that dispels freeze when activated, this has saved me a few times. The trouble is remembering it. Going along with this, there's the Fetid Pools during cruel. The skeletal rhoas are ridiculous. You can't really dodge their charges when there's a huge pack of them on top of you and you can't outheal them because of the stun that stutters your attacks. My suggestion is to party up for Fetid Pools in cruel or equip Lightning Strike and attack from a distance.

The next issue is elemental damage, specifically lightning. This weakness shows it's ugly head in Act 3 of normal once you start dealing with those casters. The only solution I've managed to come up with is to get two yellow prismatic rings and a flask that boosts elemental resit while active (I'd suggest something other than a life flask) and jumping on those caster mobs with leap slam instantly. In cruel, on the ledge, the only way I was able to kill the big false god totem was to equip two lightning resist rings and pop my resist flasks and kill it before it killed me with max frenzy and faster attacks and life leach and life on hit on my dual strike. Chances you're going to have a 4L item with 2 green and 2 red at this point are probably pretty low unless you're lucky. I suggest just running past it or partying with someone.

There are some minor other problems but I think that's more gear related than build related.

That said, I'm not trying to work on getting some decent gear, unfortunately I find myself outleveling my gear pretty considerably and spending the orbs to get something great just isn't worth my time. I also think that I will eventually be going for swords once I get some points into +dex, because I currently don't have the dex to support the +crit % swords, but I think I will eventually.

I'm on the fence about Lightning Strike vs. Cleave. I think they are both valid choices and I won't have a definitive answer until I reach merciless/end game and then I think it'll just come down to what maps I'm doing and that'll mean swapping them in and out.

Overall I'm really impressed with this build. It's effective and incredibly fun, which is something I didn't have on my other two characters. My Summoner Witch was really boring to play and my Staff Templar was poorly constructed and it showed very much in cruel, but wasn't so obvious until Merciless. This build isn't showing that level of weakness just yet.

Two gem suggestions.

The first is to add iron will as a support gem to Molten Shell. Since we have so many points in strength this will make Molten Shell explode for a TON more damage. Second, Clarity Aura. At level 2 it calls for 96 Mana (HP in our case) for a large 300+ evasion rate which is more than worth it. Once we have Iron Reflexes that's a ton of armor and won't prevent damage from proccing Molten Shell. Obviously, if you are using Molten Shell as a primary part of your build I'd skip this until Iron Reflexes/Unwavering Stance.

somehow managed to post the same post twice

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Noxit wrote:

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davidftw wrote:

Hey Sean! Been playing with your build and quite frankly I've had a blast.
Lvl 60 atm and its working really well in act 3 merci with Faster attacks+life gain+life leech gemmed to the main attacks :)

I just have a little question. Why did you decide on axes for the build?

I was wondering the that aswell.

I think a page or so back he explained that he opted for axes because he didn't think that the build had enough dex to support +crit swords, but he is reconsidering now that he's a higher level.