1.2.0 /// Bashar EK Tank : 28,000 dps : 6,500 life

The EK Shadow Tank

This is a rebuild of my old Ethereal Knives Shadow for 1.2.0. I've seen a lot of different Ek builds pop up during the last league, added chaos damage etc. I'm not really sold on scaling ek like that (no harm to Zigs and Zeno, love you guys), imo this is the way to scale a non crit ek build using added fire, hatred and cast speed. We will be speccing into a little bit of crit, just enough to bring it up from 1 in 20 hits to about 1 in 5, which will be very noticeable with high cast speed, but this is a flat scaled Ek build going for speed and base damage with strong defensive stats.


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Stats

Life // 6,535
Mana // 3,961
Mana Per Sec // 280
Armour // 8,592

Running lvl25 Arctic Armour

EK Dps // 28,129
Casts Per Sec // 4.6
Crit Chance // 18%
Crit Multi // 218%


My Gear & Gem Setup



My Tree at lvl92



Bandit Rewards

Normal // Oak (life)
Cruel // Oak (Phys Damage)
Merciless // Passive Point

Auras

Grace, Hatred and Clarity


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Leveling

You can level this build using any spells you want. Flameblast, Bond, Ek, Fire Trap, whatever floats your boat. I leveled using Poison Arrow, Fire Trap and Ek, fire the arrow into the pack, throw a trap down then 1 shot the half dead mobs with a blast of Ek. Having a +1 gems item will be godlike for this, I used a +1 gems vaaled Foxshade and a Silverbranch



Firetrap, Ek and Empower in the Foxshade, Poison Arrow and Empower in the Silverbranch, took me all the way to merciless when I could start to support Ek properly and use it on its own. Karui Ward is awesome for leveling Ek too.

When you level you are going to start with 4 Ek gems, mule them with Shadows from the early quest reward. Use 1 and level the other 3 in your weapon swap. When they all hit 20, use the GCP recipe to quality the 3 spares. When they hit 20, swap out your main Ek for a 20/20, GCP recipe that one and then Vaal Orb the other 2, you are hoping to get a 21/20 Ek here. Once you have a 20/20 corrupt, you are free to Vaal all your other 20/20 Ek gems. Keep doing it till you get that 21/20 candy.


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Building With A Low Budget

So you don't have GG gears or the orbs to buy them, you don't have lvl21 gems and a lvl4 Empower, you don't even have an Empower at all, how is this spec going to work out with just a 4 link and a crap wand? Will it still do damage?



Using lvl20 gems, 4 link Ethereal Knives, Echo, Faster Casting and Added Fire in a Geofris with this shabby little wand I am getting 18k dps with this spec. For a 4 link setup I think that's pretty decent, you can clear any map in the game with that deeps.

With a 5 link you would drop Faster Projectiles from the 6L setup. Projectile speed can be picked up on a wand, it wont be as good as the gem but it will be enough for a budget setup. I lose about 2k dps when I drop Faster Proj gem.


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Questions


How does this build deal with reflect?

Coming across a phys or ele reflect pack in a map is no bother, just slam into them and wipe them out. Cursing the pack with Warlords Mark and making sure you are at max Endurance Charges will help. Arctic Armour will mitigate a flat amount of Phys and Fire damage, which is ideal for this spec. Running Phys/Ele reflect maps can be done, I do it without hesitation. However, I swap to the Doryanis physical belt for these maps, if you don't have that be sure to curse everything with Warlords Mark for the leech.


What does BiS gear look like for this build? What gear should I be aiming for?

Evasion + Energy Shield hybrid body armour and shield will be best in slot for this build, with the rest of the gear being pure evasion. We do not have the capacity to run Discipline, so you will need enough raw Energy Shield on gear to give you mana through Eb in order to sustain higher level arctic armour, and you WILL want AA running as high as you can. I'm running it at lvl25 with my setup, if you don't have the means of boosting your AA above 20 then you wont need as much ES as I have. If you have trouble getting enough ES through hybrid gear then consider using 1 piece of pure ES gear, like a shield, with as much es as possible. Mana and Mana Regen on jewellery is highly advised.


Is this build Hardcore Viable?

Yes, absolutely. I have 1 death on this character, it happened in Normal difficulty. I ran into a corrupted side area and the first mob in the zone 1 shot me with a flicker discharge. Providing you are not stupid enough to be charging through corrupted zones in Hardcore at low levels you will be fine. My death was random, an elite with the wrong mods/auras in the wrong zone at the wrong time, if you can't get past Normal without dying you should probably stick to softcore leagues, lets be honest here.

This character has soloed every map in the game without dying with some truly ferocious mods, I've never come even remotely close to dying in maps, just don't play like an idiot and you will be fine.


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If theres anything I've missed, any further questions you have etc then post in the thread, I'll try and reply as soon as possible, if it's a very important question I may add it to the main post here.

Hope you are all well, hf and gl people :)

I wouldn't call a 6L 'budget'.

What's the DPS without 6L? budget?

What is the DPS without all the +20% quality gems? budget?

What's the DPS without empower? budget?

Now, is this still a budget build?

Crit build is way cheaper.

"I will be back to show how it scales with budget gears"

this is far from budget gears, thats 6 t1 stats 6 link chest with 6 +1 vaaled gems. As I said, I will be back to show how this tree scales with budget gears using a 4 link geofris, lvl20 gems and a shit wand, when I have the time.

Crit Ek, with great gear it can be great, most of the crit ek builds I have seen however are pretty dogshit, slow clearing, slow casting yawn builds that cant run double reflect maps with vulnerability and lack decent defense.

I like your take on EK, actually. Nice to see other options.

I like it too (that's an awful lot of life). How do you think players with significantly worse gear will fare without Life Leech in high level maps? Lots of flask popping?

can you kill atziri with this build?

In Rampage atm and can clear 78s just fine as a 91. Doing this a bit different with MoM and way more crit, currently
4200hp
1200 unreserveredmana, 250mps
29k dps without charges
lvl 19 arctic armor

My only problem lies in that i cannot do atziri :( even using purity and rise of the phoneis doesnt help. the first 2 bosses are a joke.

So question, any1 here killing atziri with EK? and how

Nice to see EK can be so tanky and do some damage too! Your equip are imba, however i' m pretty sure that the build can work even with low level tier items, good job.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

imo this is the way to scale a non crit ek build

This line is my only beef with what you have so far. Your build is most definitely a crit build. You may not use power charges, but to take Trickery, all the nodes around Assassination, and Doom Cast, then call it a non crit ek build... Does not compute :P

It's a very nicely balanced crit build, but you can't deny that it relies on crit for dps.

it doesnt rely on crit for dps, the crit chance is about 18%? ish. It 1 shots mobs with non crits, any crit build worth talking about should be aiming for minimum 45% crit chance with lots of multiplier, I intentionally avoid as much multi as I can so my dps is not weighted on the crits. The damage scaling revolves around boosting the flat damage of the gem, the increased phys/spell damage, the elemental damage scaling off the resulting phys and the cast speed scaling all of it together.

With 4.6 casts per sec sure it crits about once every 1.5 seconds, but thats just the icing on the cake. Trickery gives me 1% crit chance, the 20% elemental damage on that node gives me far more dps than the 1% crit chance given I have hardly any multiplier and 50% of my damage is elemental, that node is only taken to access the cast speed nodes. The multiplier is 218%, compare that to my crit dagger build posted in the witch forum with 95% crit chance and 400% multiplier, thats a crit build that relies on crit for its damage. This is a flat damage + cast speed scaled build that picks up a small amount of cc because its convenient and when you cast so many times per sec with such high flat damage a little bit of crit chance goes a long way.

So its crit lite yeah, theres some investment there but its far from relying on crit for the dps. The average damage of each hit x the casts per sec is 23k dps, so the crit portion is giving me 5k out of 28k, and a little over 1/4 of that is the natural base 5% crit, so the investment on the tree is worth maybe 3.5k of the final dps. I wouldnt call that a crit build, certainly not a build that relies on crit for its dps. Its just nice to have, hard physical + hatred crits sound lovely, its just such crunchy goodness, the freeze is nice defensively, but in terms of dps its doing very little in the bigger picture.

I'll respond to the other posts in a bit, sry dont mean to ignore people, bit sleepy this morning and Ive got some mapping to do with the bros, you know how it is :D

Crit lite's a good way to put it. I realize of course that most of the power comes from gems, but the tree damage would be lackluster without the crit... unless... Do you know how the dps compares if you drop the 5 crit nodes between Coldhearted Calculation and Quickness, drop the Doomcast circle, and head for the Witch damage nodes instead? Like this:



Ok, that's not a completely fair comparison since it takes two more points to get over there (unless you leave off the two 16% spell damage nodes), but it does remove the crit factor from your build. Not that you should remove the crit, I'm just curious about the potential damage with each of the trees.

What I love about your tree, aside from the high life, is that it could be absolutely nasty (dps-wise) at level 100, although reflect would be a problem: