[3.11] Shaper = Stunned, Tidebreaker Heavy Strike Stunner Build

Bright,

Can you look at my build and tell me if there is any improvements I can make? Its about the same as your build but just with dual wield and a little different mechanic.

https://pastebin.com/ZA9364Yq

Thank You

Im following the guide since start of the league. Currently lvl 86 Slayer but sill using Sunder for both map and boss. I can't use Tidebreaker for now, because its not even 5L and to use Kaom i have to re-arrange my resist. Did uber lab in first try, full key run with 5.4K life. So far so good.

Current Gear



Waiting Room Gear :)



For last Ascendancy points i took Imapct, but i see not much use of it. Is it not better to use Overwhelm for more stun?

"

ZekeAsakura wrote:

Bright,

Can you look at my build and tell me if there is any improvements I can make? Its about the same as your build but just with dual wield and a little different mechanic.

https://pastebin.com/ZA9364Yq

Thank You

This reminds me of a theory-craft I did at the beginning of Harbinger League, with the same unique one-hand mace and Dual Strike; and that theory-craft ended with the realization that this game calculates stun chance separately for both weapons with Dual Strike. Now let's talk about your build.

The problem partially remains for your build. With Heavy Strike, you will alternate between each weapon, and the stun capacity with Frostbreath is just far worse than Callinellus Malleus. Also, although Frostbreath has this "double damage to chilled enemies", due to very low weapon damage, both weapons actually deal similar dps. So I suggest using 2 Callinellus Malleus.

There are several tweaks we can make to the tree, but mostly I want to point out that investing 4 points in the Vitality Void cluster seems very wasteful. Also, you can travel to Stun Mastery from Barbarism and pick up Juggernaut along the way, also the life nodes above Master of the Arena are better than the melee damage nodes.

Also something debatable would be that maybe you have invested too much into attack speed. For stunning purposes, attack damage > attack speed (not always but in most cases so), and maybe you can remove some attack speed nodes and look for more life nodes or attack damage nodes. You should be aware to take out Multistrike to stun in boss fights.

Besides that, I think this build will be doing fine, I am not very certain about the power level this build can achieve, but you should be able to do endgame content with refined gears. one last thing would be: why are you running a lvl 11 CWDT and lvl 18 Immortal Call when you don't even have endurance charges... Molten Shell is mediocre even at high levels, so I would just run a lvl 3 or 5 CWDT and a lvl 5 or 7 Immortal Call instead. Warchief and Blood Rage are some nice and handy skills, you should consider using these as well.

Bright,

Thank you for the follow up could you show me what the tweaked tree would look like (because without that cluster I only have 243 life leeched)? if you dont mind. I was not aware that CWDT had restrictions thanks for clearing that up :).

Thank You

"

HunterMoon wrote:

Im following the guide since start of the league. Currently lvl 86 Slayer but sill using Sunder for both map and boss. I can't use Tidebreaker for now, because its not even 5L and to use Kaom i have to re-arrange my resist. Did uber lab in first try, full key run with 5.4K life. So far so good.

Current Gear

Spoiler

Waiting Room Gear :)

Spoiler

For last Ascendancy points i took Imapct, but i see not much use of it. Is it not better to use Overwhelm for more stun?

I don't think you can stun-lock Uber Izaro with a 5-link Marohi using Sunder, so you just face-tanked Izaro with 5.4K life? That's far above my expectations; maybe the new Vaal Pact is indeed that good.

Impact is definitely pretty useless without Heavy Strike. You can grab Brutal Fervour instead, which grants you stun and bleed immunity. Overwhelm is not particularly useful right now, but if you like it, you can grab it instead.

In fact, if you mostly clear with Sunder, Impact is only useful for clearing some trash during boss fights and to proc Headsman with Writhing Jar. So if you're not even planning on using Writhing Jar, then you should definitely not pick Impact.

With that said, I still would recommend trying out the Heavy Strike + Ancestral Call combo with Impact splash. This actually feels just like a Sunder, shorter but wider. I have been having a lot of fun with my Heavy Strike pack clearing experience. (Also, with Ancestral Call, you can now aim at the ground while using Heavy Strike; just like how you use Sunder or Sweep.)

"

brightwaha wrote:

I don't think you can stun-lock Uber Izaro with a 5-link Marohi using Sunder, so you just face-tanked Izaro with 5.4K life? That's far above my expectations; maybe the new Vaal Pact is indeed that good.

About uber izaro, yes i can't face tank him because of no stun lock, but if you manage to get dark shrine it should be no problem, of course its a tough fight, have to dodge alot.

"

brightwaha wrote:

Impact is definitely pretty useless without Heavy Strike. You can grab Brutal Fervour instead, which grants you stun and bleed immunity. Overwhelm is not particularly useful right now, but if you like it, you can grab it instead.

About impact i keep it for now, until i can fight guardians / shaper and see how often my stun triggers on them. Maybe later i switch to Overwhelm for better stun threshold. ( Don't know why you are saying its not useful? You mean double stune and reduced stun threshold is not that much useful on shaper / guardians? )

"

brightwaha wrote:

With that said, I still would recommend trying out the Heavy Strike + Ancestral Call combo with Impact splash. This actually feels just like a Sunder, shorter but wider. I have been having a lot of fun with my Heavy Strike pack clearing experience. (Also, with Ancestral Call, you can now aim at the ground while using Heavy Strike; just like how you use Sunder or Sweep.)

BTW for map clearing, you recommend HS + Ancestral Call, and for other 3 gems it should be Multistrike + Melee phys dmg + Ruthless, right?

And last question, how can i check my effective stun chance (or whatever) in PoB?

"

ZekeAsakura wrote:

Bright,

Thank you for the follow up could you show me what the tweaked tree would look like (because without that cluster I only have 243 life leeched)? if you dont mind. I was not aware that CWDT had restrictions thanks for clearing that up :).

Thank You

With only around 0.6% damage leeched as life you will be able to easily achieve max leech rate, which is with Vaal Pact 40%. From ascendancy you may get 0.2%, and 0.4% can be obtained from jewelries or just 1 leech node in the cluster or from Bloody Bludgeon.

I have spent some time but couldn't figure out a satisfying tree, I am deciding on some large changes, including whether crit is a good idea and whether should we travel to the ranger area.

So far I think the ranger area is not going to be efficient. So if you just take my Slayer tree, remove all two-hand nodes(Butchery, Executioner, Wrecking Ball) and take nearby one-hand nodes instead(Strong Arm, Ambidexterity), you will get a good tree.

Or maybe you should travel from the right-hand of Constitution, like this:



To be honest, there is no way these trees are well refined. There are many other factors involved(say, are you planning to use Belly of the Beast? Are you going to be wealthy enough to afford high-end jewels?) So it's difficult to make some decisions.

But this tree can work, and if you travel to the ranger area, it can work too. But I suggest going directly from Art of the Gladiator to Finesse.

"

HunterMoon wrote:

About impact i keep it for now, until i can fight guardians / shaper and see how often my stun triggers on them. Maybe later i switch to Overwhelm for better stun threshold. ( Don't know why you are saying its not useful? You mean double stune and reduced stun threshold is not that much useful on shaper / guardians? )

BTW for map clearing, you recommend HS + Ancestral Call, and for other 3 gems it should be Multistrike + Melee phys dmg + Ruthless, right?

And last question, how can i check my effective stun chance (or whatever) in PoB?

Overwhelm just gives 5% stun threshold, which is really not very significant. 20% chance to double stun duration sounds very juicy, but what we care about is not high-rolls, we care about low-rolls. Giving boss 5 stacks of stuns while lucky doesn't do anything, but not landing any stun while unlucky is very problematic. So the idea of having only 20% chance to land a longer stun doesn't seem appealing to me at all. (In fact, if it's 80% chance for stun to have 25% more duration, then it will be appealing.)

And yes, ordered by priority, Heavy Strike, Ancestral Call, Melee Physical Damage, Multistrike, Ruthless, Damage on Full Life (or Maim, in special cases when you know you won't be at full life mostly).

PoB doesn't have any stun related tools, nobody besides us cares about stunning lol. So I have written a code to calculate the effective stun up-time on different endgame bosses. If you go to the Build Mechanics section you will see. Basically, if my code tells you that you have say 60% stun up-time on Shaper, then it means in ideal scenario, in a Shaper fight that last 20 seconds, for 12 seconds Shaper will be stunned. This is not realistic because Shaper would start a portal phase the second he's freed from stun-locking. This code does give a good estimate of our stun capacity and consistency. If you have over 95% stun up-time on a boss, you will most likely just stun him to death.

Edit: I implemented Overwhelm into the code, and it is actually not that bad. However, I do still feel that either Headsman or Impact are far more useful. Even so for Shaper fight, as we can use Impact splash to trigger on kill effects from Headsman with a Writhing Jar, the 20% damage boost is more effective than Overwhelm. (The 20% double stun duration of Overwhelm is equivalent to around 15% more damage, as I roughly estimated with the stun up-time data provided by my code.)

Been playing a berserker version of your build this league (HeavyZeekin character if you want to see)
And love the stun mechanic of it, obviously with only 4-5L I still have a long way to go and gear is nowhere near great yet (rares suck and need replacing).

Some general questions I had for you:

How important is reverse knockback do you think? I've been considering swapping to rare gloves and just dealing with the knockback - it seems like a lot of lost stats, maybe use some essence gloves with more attack speed and socket my leapslam in them for movement, then using kaom's roots for the stun/freeze/temp chains immunity?

Would you consider using kaom's roots? Why/why not?

On your berserker build, how do you handle twinned bosses? Or bosses that can't be stunned? I have found a few that posed a serious problem and ended up dieing a few times :(

Currently running perseverance for the fortify/onslaught effect and two extra endurance charges (5 total) - is good/bad? I can't decide if the endurance charges are worthwhile; obviously if I had GG jewels I'd opt for those instead, but until then.

Blight,

Thank you for all your feedback. I ended up making a build that has amazing stun and great dps. I still need the mana leech so I kept that bottom leech.
https://pastebin.com/748QEBEA

Thanks :).