[1.2.2] Two-Handed Mace, Dominating Blow build

This is just something I've made a long while ago because I'm a fan of unconventional skills like Dominating Blow. The build was never intended to rely for damage on minions, but to use them as meat shield for maps while you wear down the remaining monsters or bosses. Getting fracturing on a map, sea witches or similiar will be basically your occasional ice cream because those are maps are impossible to die on even at the boss and are a lot of fun if your PC doesn't crash at 300 minions (Luckily the game starts not rendering most of them if you got that many). You can use the build on Templar, Maurader, Duelist, Scion. They're all equal and it's up to you which you want to use. I choose a Scion.

Dominating Blow is a pure physical damage skill and that's not the only downside. It unfortunately requires a lot of mana, even if you have a very slow weapon. Which is why I settled for two-handed maces, blood mage and a lot of HP/Regeneration on top of that. Slow hitting builds aren't for everyone I understand. Another problem is that it can be painful to play as Melee, often you will not be hitting mobs for 2-3 seconds for whatever reason and then suddenly the pack is dead after that time. This can and will kill you, don't play in hardcore. I had times where I wasn't hitting anything for 5 seconds and then just die.

A two-handed mace with high damage is absolutely required to have fun.
You can use any for this, but I specifically did the guide with the Marohi Erqi in mind, which a lot of people most likely hate, but I personally grew emotionally attached to mine and it's another reason to go for Resolute Technique. But you can use any other for this build.

Breakdown of the skills and links

Dominating Blow -> Meele Splash -> Multistrike -> Faster Attacks -> Life Leech.
A 5L is absolutely sufficient, even 4 works, but I can only dream of having a 6L Marohi Erqi.

Note: Minions you convert to allies with Dominating Blow get access to your linked support gems, this means all of your minions now have lifeleech + splash damage + multistrike and attack hilariously fast. Certain converted mobs can clear whole maps for you because of this.
You can also convert rare mobs, all of their auras will apply to you and your minions. With 1.2.1 you can't convert totems anymore, which is sad because they made totem maps a joke.
My Dominating Blow DPS is 10k, with 231 mana consumption and 0.39 attackspeed.

Cast on Damage Taken -> Your usual stuff. Enduring Cry. Immortal Call. Molten Shell. Temporal Chains or any other curse you like.

For Auras I usually just run Hatred because it converts 36% of your physical damage, as well as Herald of Ash with an additional 15% physical conversion. Herald of Ash is a great aura for just 8% reservation of your HP, but you don't want to use it outside of maps as it kills your own minions to the burn damage. Ugh. I hope they eventually fix this but since Dominating Blow is pretty much a forgotten skill by GGG I wouldn't get my hopes up. You conviniently don't have to fear nerfs or changes because of that. That's somehow a good thing.

That's pretty much the only skills you really need to use, you can extend it with another Aura and still have a lot of HP left.

At this point you're using 2-3 pieces of gear for skills while the other 2-3 are empty. This is all you really need but I'm also running:

Convocation. Recalls all of your minions to you, which is great if you have converted really slow mobs or if you fear tanking too much damage trying to get into the next pack.

Also add Vaal skills (Vaal Cold Snap is a good one for the CC), you will be killing a lot and you have a lot of free sockets.

Gear


I got the 5L one for 4 ex. I'm poor as fuck but I had enough after selling my Diviniation Flask from the earlier races. You can easily substitute it with Geoffri's until way later or any other two handed mace.




I don't use anything fancy or good, those are all 1c-10c items, so it's a relative cheap build.


Skill Tree



How to kill stuff
If map is below level 74 -> Just spam dominating blow while you move from pack to pack, it can't get any more mindless than this.
maps above 74 -> granite+jade flasks become important. You need to pop these when you enter a new map until you kill a pack for minions that reliably tank the distributed damage for you. If all of them die or you get focused, you need to use them.

You can kill all regular map bosses with ease as long as they have summons. If its a high level map or a +%damage brutus/kole you need to wear them down by just keep killing mobs around the boss, so those mobs will butter up everything else. Technically you can facetank brutus most of the time if you disable your third optional aura, the summons he adds to the fight are killed if you do that because dominating blow can affect the whole screen at times.


Video of map+zana+haku 2 bosses



I think this wraps it up.
This was my first build that I crafted for myself after being tired of cookie cutter builds so please don't be too harsh on me. I didn't look at other builds, so I don't know what I have been doing right and what is wrong, but I'd love to hear improvements, especially because I can be very narrow minded and having more opinions for a choice is always better.

TL;DR 10k dps, 4k life (which probably adds up to 9-11k with kaoms), max resist, 540 life reg

Do you have any videos of this build in action?

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trustworthy_polarbear wrote:

Do you have any videos of this build in action?

Got any requests? Otherwise here's a random map with a zana map/quest and a haku quest. Makes the weaknesses very apparent too, since it's a very slow build with a lot of issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqMN2hZqUgQ

Bumping in case someone can improve it