[1.2][Beyond] Two Hand Heavy Strike (RT and Crit version)

You won't have a lot of armour, and you won't have a lot of evasion. All your physical mitigation comes from a buffed Immortal Call. You will have to make an effort to keep up Endurance Charges and pop Immortal Call when you anticipate a good chunk of physical damage coming in.
I wouldn't say this build is necesseraly hard, but you should be aware of your cooldowns and rotations, otherwise you will probably die frequently.

Heavy Strike is pure physical damage, so you will get the best out of your leech and damage. Molten Strike, Glacial Hammer and Infernal Blow have half of their damage converted to elemental, so your leech is effectively halved and you will suffer against resistant mobs.

UPDATE: Played around with Glacial Hammer. You need at least 2% manaleech (or run Clarity), but the freeze is almost as safe as the stun from Heavy Strike. Gonna try it out more and update later on.

Ground Slam and Sweep are good options, however you will need an extra single target setup.

Axes probably are the worst out of the three, simply because we don't navigate around the best nodes for them.
Maces have good damage and you'll do fine with them for a long time but...
Staves have two things going for them: Block and good Crit. Now, for a long time we will be running Resolute Technique, but at around level 90, the transition to Crit becomes really strong. And do I really have to talk about the benefits of block? :)

Now, all this is far from perfect, but I'm saving up for a crit staff so no major upgrades soon. You'll want Mana Leech and Life Leech on at least one piece of gear. You'll also need Dexterity and Intelligence for your supports, Curses and the Staff.


I've lowered my standards for the crit staff, so I bought one for pretty cheap. Ideally you'd want to have Critmulti on your amulet, however this would increase the price by a lot. My flasks aren't perfect yet either. At the moment I'm trying to get bloodrage going, I still need some levels and better chaos resist on gear, so it will take a while.

Bandits: Oak, Krait, Oak

Let me make one thing clear: you don't need any Uniques for this spec. Some will make life easier, and others are just simply BiS but also kind of expensive.

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Ahh, the 1.2.0 unique staff, Hegemony's Era. It's pretty much the dream unique for this build. Before 1.2.0, you had a really hard time to find a solid staff that also had critchance, and you'd have to stick with RT for a long time, if not all through the league. It will still come at a price, so if you want to spec into crit, make sure to get some trading done!

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The Bringer of Rain is a good "gateway" unique from a 5L to a 6L. It gives you good damage and good defense with 15% block and the lvl 6 blind gem. BoR is kind of pricy right now in Beyond though, so it might even be cheaper to go straight to a 6L body armour (I can only speak about Beyond at the moment, haven't had a chance to play Rampage. A quick cross search on xyz tells me that a BoR is not all that much cheaper though).

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Well, if you can get your hands on them, they are 100% BiS. You probably won't get them though. Good alternatives are Maligaro's or Shadows and Dust (those are Rampage only, sadly). Shadows and Dust > Maligaro's.

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When your staff is 5/6L, Kaom's Heart becomes a really nice chest. You can only really use it with Heavy Strike though, since Ground Slam and Sweep need a single target setup.