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

As a slayer, do you think that it is viable to lose Devotion, and the life node after Heart of the Warrior to gain either the Red Storm for reliable bleed for bloodlust support and 30% damage, or Hematophagy for the extra leech and 20% damage. I just feel like this would make it easier to stun guardians without top end gear. (I managed to divine 30 rEST onto my Tidebreaker, but the damage did go down a bit. I think a net gain in stun ability though.) I had another question, but I forget what it was.

Edit: Oh yeah, the question. Do you prefer playing the pure physical build or the mixed damage build?

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As a slayer, do you think that it is viable to lose Devotion, and the life node after Heart of the Warrior to gain either the Red Storm for reliable bleed for bloodlust support and 30% damage, or Hematophagy for the extra leech and 20% damage. I just feel like this would make it easier to stun guardians without top end gear. (I managed to divine 30 rEST onto my Tidebreaker, but the damage did go down a bit. I think a net gain in stun ability though.) I had another question, but I forget what it was.

I don't think it's a good idea to lose Devoto's Devotion. The dexterity, movement speed and attack speed are all very crucial in my opinion. Also it's very difficult to find the correct enchant on a rare helmet.

Red Storm offers additional 25% bleed chance and 30% increased damage at a cost of 3 passive points. We already have 25% bleed chance from the Bloody Bludgeon wheel, and from my experience, the 25% bleed chance is already enough. That being said, rising the bleed chance to 50% definitely helps, and cost is reasonable. You can pick Red Storm if you want, it's an okay choice.

*During a boss fight, if you use Frenzy 4 times before using Heavy Strike, when the first Heavy Strike hits, you have already done 4 hits with Frenzy and about 4 hits with Warchief totem. The chance to inflict bleed from those 8 hits with 25% bleed chance is around 90%.

Hematophagy offers 6% max leech rate and 20% increased damage at a cost of 3 passive points as well. I don't usually recommend this wheel because the 6% max leech rate doesn't help too much. Slayer already leeches very fast. Still, I think it's just an okay choice.

Now let's go back to your original wish to "make it easier to stun guardians without top end gear". Neither of those 2 passive wheels helps with that. Picking up damage from these passive wheels is very inefficient and it's only around 10% increased damage per passive point. We will get around 650% total increased damage with a finished build, and adding 10% on that means 1.3% more damage. Honestly, 1.3% more damage per passive point is very low.

The best way to boost our stun capability is to pick up every single node in the Stun Mastery passive wheel.

Also, no top end gear is needed to stun Guardians. You won't need anything like corrupted Empire's grasp or corrupted Redblade Tramplers. Besides maybe several exalts for a 6-link Tidebreaker and Kaoms, no other gear slot will require more than 1 exalt investment(maybe around 20 chaos on average will be enough).

The problem with your current setup is that your gem levels/quantities are too low. You cannot really expect to have great endgame performance with just lvl 16 and 0% quality gems on your 6-link main skill.

As for pure physical version and the mixed damage version, I think you should just read the Pure Physical Version sub-section in the thread; I currently cannot think of more to say. It's just a matter of gem swap after all, and you can experiment with either versions by yourself.

Hey I'm having issues with harder bosses on t10+ maps. How are we supposed to leech from bosses we cannot stun?

I can't tell if I don't have enough damage or not enough reduced stun threshold

https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/razzle/characters?characterName=RazzDoesASmesh

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razzle wrote:

Hey I'm having issues with harder bosses on t10+ maps. How are we supposed to leech from bosses we cannot stun?

I can't tell if I don't have enough damage or not enough reduced stun threshold

https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/razzle/characters?characterName=RazzDoesASmesh

The major problem here should be that the you're using the AoE setup on a 5-link to fight high tier bosses. Heavy Strike + Melee Physical Damage + Ruthless + Multistrike + Ancestral Call are what you're using. Among these, Ancestral Call does almost nothing against bosses, and Multistrike reduces our damage per hit, which actually hurts our stun capability. So this 5-link is actually as effective as a 3 and a half link(against bosses).

The best way to fix this, considering you probably don't have much currency to spare, is to place another single-target Heavy Strike setup on your chest armour. When you get more currency you can get another Tidebreaker, then you will only need to press weapon swap key to swap between the AoE and the single-target setups.

There is another problem here and that's you are not running Frenzy. One consequence here is that in some fights you won't be able to generate Frenzy charges; another problem is that you will have to Leap Slam(which is not as easy) to proc Fortify buff. Slayer leeches insanely fast with Vaal Pact and with Fortify you should be able to face-tank bosses that you fail to stun.

Thanks, totally missed the part about frenzy. I'll give it a go with the proposed fixes!

Hello there

I'm getting close to finish the league and complete my goals which are 40/40 like previous leagues I played.
I haven't played since Prophecy league, (tried Essence a bit but not long enough) so I had to learn a ton of new stuff like atlas, new acts, new melee support gems etc

I always liked melee builds, and always thought they need a lot of help from GGG. I think they re in a decent spot now.

This build has been a blast for me. I am using the pure physical version with brutality. I'm using Heavy strike for clearing maps, but not Ancestrall call, I just added some attack speed in the tree and with multistrike my clear speed is pretty good.
I am stunning and easily killing up to t15 bosses. Bosses below t15 are a joke. I couldnt perma-stun Shaper guardians, but managed to kill many of them deathless. Same with red tier Elder guardians which are even easier than Shaper's, except Eradicator who I think is a bit overtuned, and I had to use topaz flask for him. I didnt bother much with Shaper, just once for the callenge.

Since I don't need Hatred aura, I use Determination, and it helps a lot. I have 70% phys dmg redution with endurance charges, and 81% with granite flask. I am face tanking Minotaur and Uber Izaro slams. Mobs in t15 maps, cant damage me at all. Same with Uber Argus.

Thank you for this awsome build. Melee never felt so good.

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LiberAlley wrote:

Hello there

I'm getting close to finish the league and complete my goals which are 40/40 like previous leagues I played.
I haven't played since Prophecy league, (tried Essence a bit but not long enough) so I had to learn a ton of new stuff like atlas, new acts, new melee support gems etc

I always liked melee builds, and always thought they need a lot of help from GGG. I think they re in a decent spot now.

This build has been a blast for me. I am using the pure physical version with brutality. I'm using Heavy strike for clearing maps, but not Ancestrall call, I just added some attack speed in the tree and with multistrike my clear speed is pretty good.
I am stunning and easily killing up to t15 bosses. Bosses below t15 are a joke. I couldnt perma-stun Shaper guardians, but managed to kill many of them deathless. Same with red tier Elder guardians which are even easier than Shaper's, except Eradicator who I think is a bit overtuned, and I had to use topaz flask for him. I didnt bother much with Shaper, just once for the callenge.

Since I don't need Hatred aura, I use Determination, and it helps a lot. I have 70% phys dmg redution with endurance charges, and 81% with granite flask. I am face tanking Minotaur and Uber Izaro slams. Mobs in t15 maps, cant damage me at all. Same with Uber Argus.

Thank you for this awsome build. Melee never felt so good.

It's great to hear and also a lot of respect to you for (almost) 40/40 challenges.

I don't really believe Determination works well considering that we don't have too much armour to begin with. It's going to be effective against small hits, for sure; but I am not sure how well it actually performs against big hits.

But since you are having some great experiences running Determination, I will later do more analysis or experimentation with it. Hopefully I can reach some interesting conclusions.

you think this build will work in 3.2 ? i would love to do something like that next league :)

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Beardyboy wrote:

you think this build will work in 3.2 ? i would love to do something like that next league :)

I suppose the answer is yes. This build makes use of the fundamental game mechanics and non-league specific uniques, so unless they decide to nerf some non-meta uniques or change up the stun mechanics(both are very unlikely to happen) this build will always work.

That being said, we still need to wait for the patchnotes to see if big changes will happen to this build.

I legit hope for a Tidebreaker buff or it becoming a fated to have a even more powerful mace. That would be fun