2h ground slammer (1 month HardCore race 4/4)

Well for single target i'd say heavy strike if you ask me .. but that's just me because i never liked molten strike ( i can't stand it actually ).

And yes, geofri's baptism is awesome and can indeed serve you very well for quite some time ( sadly i wasn't able to get one when i needed it ... things are expensive in the beginning :P )

Well if you are playing in SC you could try without acrobatics .. but it's just amazing ... it effectively doubles your survivability and traveling all the way to it is actually not a waste due to the awesome nodes in that part of the tree. Of course you are free to try without it but i can't guarantee that the end result will be good :)

Well that's the thing with 2-handed weapons and why most people deem them underpowered - they severely lack defensive mechanics. You can't get block ( aside from staves of course .. but even they have very low base block chance ) , and because you don't have a shield ( shield have huge armour + there are crazy shield defense nodes which multiply that amount greatly ) stacking armour is hard and ineffective.

So i was thinking .. what reliable defensive mechanic i could use with 2h maces ... and of course acrobatics and phase acrobatics is the obvious choice. Some might argue that it's not that reliable due to it's random nature ( 40% chance to take 0% damage from an attack and 60% chance to take 100% damage from the said attack ) but the thing is that acrobatics just like block ( and unlike the primary defenses - armour and evasion ) has always the same chance to prevent the incoming damage. It does not care about the hit chance of your enemies and it does not care how big is the hit .. it's 40% ... all day every day. On top of that with Resolute technique you can't evade your own reflected attacks but you can dodge them! And needless to say phase acrobatics is awesome .. and the only thing that do what it does is the spell block chance .. which of course is not an option when it comes to 2h maces.

So in the end acrobatics + phase acrobatics + some evasion ( mainly gained due to Grace ) + big enough life pool + life regeneration + life leech + endurance charges = a character with extremely high survivability

And this build gives you all of these things while the DPS is still acceptable and above level 80 you can focus entirely on offensive nodes to greatly improve your damage output.

With the new expansion i plan on remaking this build. The tree will still look pretty much the same + the jewel passives of course and probably some more endurance charge nodes... because i'm planing to use the new vigilante strike ( that was the name right ? i'm too lazy to go and check it out ) as the main ( and probably only ) attack ... sadly it will no longer be a ground slam build .. but it'll still be a 2h - mace marauder build with RT, acro and phase acro .. i suspect that the dps will be more, the aoe less but the suvrivability would be even greater ( due to the fortify buff ) :)


P.S. Hopefully i'll get into the closed beta to try this early on :P

I'm using CWDT + Enduring cry as well as endurance charge on stun + vengeance.

Buy a 5L chest ( white ones are pretty cheap )
also put quality on your mace ASAP :)
If possible get The magnate for nice dps boost