[2.3] "Vulcan's Exemplar" Crit Dual Strike Slayer with Bino/Catalyst by fiqst

There is alternate tree that a player named Junaum created for 1.3:

106 points

It follows a similar path to yours and skips the whole Marauder area.

We debated the advantages of the 2 trees for quite a while in the past, Junaum's tree has more life and overall more survivability, whereas my tree has the most damage.

The reason for going to Marauder is the Disembowelling cluster and the life regen (Warrior's Blood + Combat Stamina). My critical chance is much higher as a result and it outputs more damage and inflicts more ailments. Also, the life regen is boosted to 4.8%, which makes playing with Blood Rage comfortable even without Chaos resistance. Junaum has 2%, which makes makes it more unnerving at low life.

But in 2.0 however, BR has changed and 2% life regen is perfectly fine, so the tree will most likely change and i'll probably drop the Marauder area.

I would appreciate any help in theorycrafting a new tree and i will post your version, and anyone else's, in the OP if its feasible.

Finally able to buy necessary uniques. Thanks for the build.
What equipment upgrade should I focus next?

"

voncess wrote:

Finally able to buy necessary uniques. Thanks for the build.
What equipment upgrade should I focus next?

Spoiler

Your gear is beautiful, i can't think of a single significant upgrade. Well done

I would quality a few of those lvl 20 gems though, blood rage quality gives more life leech, added fire gives 15% fire damage and so does HoA.

"

fiqst wrote:

"

voncess wrote:

Finally able to buy necessary uniques. Thanks for the build.
What equipment upgrade should I focus next?

Spoiler

Your gear is beautiful, i can't think of a single significant upgrade. Well done

I would quality a few of those lvl 20 gems though, blood rage quality gives more life leech, added fire gives 15% fire damage and so does HoA.

Thanks. I'll do that. Great work.

Some beta news:

The leech changes can be summarised as this:

Where you had 1% leech in 1.3, it is now 0.2%. (So 2% = 0.4%, etc)

This change with affect every item in the game. If you had a 6% life leech amulet in 1.3, in 2.0 it will become 1.2%.

So leeching is now 20% as effective as before.

But the leeching mechanic has also changed. In 1.3, the game leeches the largest hit and doesn't stack with multiple hits. In 2.0, every hit gives a leech.

So with 20% leech effectiveness, you will have score 5 hits to get the same effective rate as 1.3.

This means, if you smash into a group of mobs larger than 5, you will be getting a better leech effect than before. The flipside is when facing one mob (bosses, etc), you'll leech a smaller amount and it will force you to play it more carefully.

This pretty much kills the idea of using a single target skill and relying on burn prolif to clear the screen, the leeching is not enough.

I am now leaning towards a more traditional way of playing, with less focus on HoA prolif and more on the AoE of melee skills.

To further add to the leeching info,

the base leech rate without modification is 2% of max life/mana per second

If max life is 5k, max leech rate will be 100 life/sec.

So even if you do 500k dps and have 10% life leech, all that leeching doesn't matter since you're only going to be leeching 100 hp/sec.



If you take away the Bino's effect and look at life leech only, it's probably a necessity that we take some leech nodes around the Duelist area.



This single node has the following effect to the leech rate (disregarding all others):

Taking the 5k life example.

2% of 5k = 100 life/sec base

+30% increased leech rate = 130 life/sec

+4% of max life/sec to max leech rate = 330 life/sec

So the absolute best i can hope for is 15 secs from zero to full. Of course, you'd be collecting leech and rate bonuses from a few other places so it won't be this bad. But overall, a nerf.

It basically forces you to take VP, i think.




Yeah, i think i'll stick with Bino for now, but i get the feeling a change in that mechanic will happen very soon.

If this happens and if i'm forced to rely only on life leeching then VP will be a definite

Holy fuck, after seeing what your char can do, it makes me wanna delete mine hahah

I never dreamed it was possible to achieve such high DPS in this game, i thought the celling would be around 150k or so, but 700k DPS? wtf is this? diablo 3? lol

How the hell did you achieved such high crit chance?

congratz for comming up with such intriguing build

I was wrong about the leech details.

Here is post by mark_GGG on a reddit thread:



> Using your numbers, you have five leech effects, each of which is *simultaneously* giving leeching at your leech rate of 100 life/second (2% of max life per second), meaning in total you're gaining 500 life/second.
If you hit the same five enemies again before those leech effects are finished, then you'd have a total of 10 leech effects, each of which is leeching at 100 life/second, and thus totalling 1000 life/second. At this point you're leeching at 20% of maximum life per second, and thus have reached the cap, so additional leech effects on top of those will have no effect, unless you add to your 20% maximum leech rate

Updated details for 2.0:

In 2.0, I'm trialling Ice Crash as the main skill, but dual strike will still work.

The reason for ice crash is the unparalleled AoE damage and the fact it uses only the main hand, it opens up more possibilities for off hand utility.

For instance, instead of Bino and Snakebite, we could equip maligaro and ungil's gauche for maximising the catalyst crit chance.

But for now i'm sticking with the powerful regen from Bino.



Chest: RRRBBG

ice crash
MPD
WED
conc eff
hypothermia
crit strikes

the 39% MORE damage against chilled enemies from hypothermia is too good, but the tooltip won't indicate the power


Boots:RRRG

cwdt
IC
inc duration
blood rage


Snakebite:GGGB

flicker
coc
am
phase run (see below)


Catalyst: GRB

HoA
Hatred
enlighten lvl 3



Bino: GGR

whirling blades
ice golem
fortify



======================

This is the tree i'm considering:

114 points

There are 2 jewel slots plus 1 within 2 nodes.
2.8% life regen to counteract BR.
3x +30 attribute slots to take if lacking in equipment

Fiqst I like to know what you think of the new Wild Strike gem.

It looks interesting to play with but I still think that Vigilant Strike and ice crash do the most dps.

Also Phase Run with it's 40% more melee damage is so good. (even without movement speed)