Wuju Style - The Art of 2handed BF Sword Duelist

So yeah.
I loved Flicker Strike in the closed beta and always wanted to do a "Master Yi" (league of Legends) like character here. So here goes:

I figured out how to play a Duelist with a big f***ing Sword that utilizes mainly 3 damage skills with Blood Rage + Blood Magic, tons of Lifeleech, Life on Hit and pure physical dps.

my 4 main skills are:
Cyclone + Meelee Physical Damage + life Gain on Hit (+attack speed) - for AOE and rapid healing
Doublestrike + Multistrike + Attack speed + Life Leech (+melee physical damage) - for insane single target dps
Flicker Strike (+ melee physical damage) - for movement reasons and nearly unlimited blinking while in Frenzy
Blood Rage - perfect after we use Blood Magic for several reasons:
- Life leech
- Frenzy stacks on kill (Flicker Strike can surpass cooldown by using 1 frenzy stack, nice!)
- even MOAR Attack Speed on low health. And we will have that sometimes.

Heres a little video I recorded in merciless a2 just to show how the build works out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwPN9h5QW2w

I am currently at Level 58 and just die sometimes fighting Exiles or that nasty Piety.
Stats are:
level 58.
1558 hp
2812 Armour
Resistances Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos: 60% / 30% / 11% / -60%
Doublestrike 3421 dps + 7% lifeleech
cyclone 985 dps + 36 life per hit per enemy
flicker strike: 2201 dps


For my equipment I use atm:


Passives:
20 Points:

Firstly, we need to achieve a pool of life and as many 2handed meelee Damage we can get, so we can choose whatever 2handed weapon we like. I used mostly axes.
__________________________________________________________________
40 Points:

We get tankier and work our way to Iron Reflexes and Unwavering Stance (no stun means lifeleech!)
__________________________________________________________________
Level 58 (around 70 Points, now we begin to strengthen our Sword!):

Blood Magic and Lifeleech is what makes this build work!
__________________________________________________________________
The Goal:

Elemental Resistances, Melee Damage and Life. I am still thinking about Vaal Pact, since we need the flasks mainly for lifeleech affixes and that would be around 350-600 health restored per second (at lvl 58). should be enough I guess.
__________________________________________________________________


Pros:
- no Stun! Whirling all over the place as long there is no freeze aaround.
- extremely funny to watch becuause of the INSANE speed of multi-doublestrike
- cheap
- if played safely, hardly killable due to health regeneration
- fast paced gameplay due to flicker strike
- tanky for his high single target damage output.

Cons:
- not the best damage dealer early on
- depends on a sword later on
- depends on hitting all the time. freezing Exiles are your death sentence.
__________________________________________________________________

This is my first Guide and the first Character I played in open beta, hope you like it! Feedback appreciated!

Why don't you get a few frenzy charges among the way? since you are running Blood rage, that should drastically improve your damage output.
I'd recommend putting more points more into HP, and getting the blood dance boots. I'd say you'll be at 2K life when you hit mapping, and I can tell you, that is not enough(My 3.5K HP, max res, 40% eva, 60% block chance duelist feels squishy while doing 70+ maps). And no, Health Regen won't be enough when mobs start to hit 2K dps :>

Bro tip: Link Multistrike to Flicker Strike for a full Alpha Strike experience :D

Hey, thanks for your feedback.
I already treid Multi-flickerstrike and decided to not have seizures while playing. xD
The boots are nice, but I hope reduced Attack speed actually means reduced attack time, otherwise that would slow me down.

So it would be recommended to help kraityn on merciles as well. unfortunately i already killed him :/

I dont quite know where to get more life, I already searched for all life nodes I can get.
The final build should be about 199% increased maximum life, isn't that enough?

Do you have any experience with Vaal pact? I think its a great choice for me, but i dont know how hard the maps are, because I never played one...

You took all the resists nodes near the diamond skin, really bruh? Seems like a super waste. I hope those are only temporary nodes until you get gear with resistances.

The blood dance might reduce your attack speed, but it will give you 1% per frenzy charge. With 7 charges, that is 7%(!), that is more then the epic life regen from springleaf!
I am saying this, since I noticed you don't have a lot of chaos res. The chaos over time from blood rage is really rapidly taking your health.

Check out these vids to show what I mean.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mT-ruivaq8 (without blood dance)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTTg2UYKTTo (with blood dance)

See the difference in HP drops? You might deal less damage, but it is so worth it.

If you really care a lot about attack speed, you should head over to the shadower side, and get the life nodes near the ranger while doing so. Ever since the rangerbuff, these life nodes are insanely good.

Vaal pact is nice btw. If you are near it, I would recommend it. It saves you a lot of problems fighting against reflect mobs :)

HOLY CRAP, How awesome is that? :D But I guess I already screwed up my frenzy charges, because I killed Kraytin. I jsut see one Frenzy near my at the duelist side. I already got some life nodes between duelist and ranger, so it would be possible to go up to ranger I guess.

I see a the difference in life drop, but when I dont go on frenzy charges the boots might cost me too much...

I edited the final passive allocation 2 get +2 frenzy charges while traveling to the ranger life area. that would now be max 5 frenzy charges...

Im currently lv16, rushing blood magic because it's my favorite node in the game, im having a blast so far. flicker strike+sweep with a 2H and ezomyte+meginord's is OP as shit. can't wait to get cyclone :D

One major drawback.
Blood Dance/ Rage and Vaal pacts synergy is miserable. Vaal pact does NOT only disable life recovery from flasks but ANY life recovery over time (so % of life recovered per second as well... so goodbye blood rage...)

Ah right. Haven't tried Vaal pact on a non CI char really. Didn't think about that.

Well, imo the life regen >> Vaal pact, but that is just my personal opinion :>

i don't really like vaal pact either, never tried it before, i just really like instant recovery flasks in a pinch XD

by the way, i've been doing some testing with cyclone/multistrike, ive found some really interesting mechanics/possible glitches, have you noticed them? (could be that im just desyncing, but i feel like the mobs are losing health and im not rubberbanding, so it feels normal and it's just the skills behaving in a rather interesting manner)

Cyclone+Multistrike=your cyclone will bounce around like a pinball in a machine, you will not be able to select a new path until the maximum number of hits has been reached. not really sure what that # is, things die really fast lol. it's awesome in normal where you can just clip something with cyclone once then watch your guy bounce all over the mob and kill everything while you have a sip of water lol. in higher difficulties i wouldnt link these though, loss of precision=death

also sometimes when cycloning, if a mob is right above your character (like, in between your character in the center, and the top middle of your screen) sometimes you can actually just hold down your cyclone hotkey, and you will actually zigzag back and forth over the enemy without any new inputs. ive only been able to replicate this a few times, for some reason it seems to work only against undead-class mobs?

the last one is double strike+multistrike, though this may be 'working as intended'. if you doublestrike a mob and it dies, and theres another one next to it, you actually expend the remaining strikes onto the next mob. kind of interesting how it gets an 'aoe' type effect even when you don't have any aoe gems linked. >.>


sorry for wall of text, this duelist is the most fun ive ever had playing the game so im excited to talk to someone about it :D