[0.10.1g] The Groundshocker: Dual-Wield Elemental Ground Slam Marauder

The driving force behind the power of the elemental bow marauder is its ability to rapidly distribute elemental damage. That is to say, at its heart, its goal is to deliver elemental damage as rapidly as possible, to as many targets as possible. Elemental sources of damage are applied on every hit; thus, the more often you hit, the more damage you deal. This differs distinctly from the base physical damage of the weapon itself, wherein the weapon's speed factor is typically inversely proportional to its per-hit physical damage.

This is why the elemental bow marauder wants as fast a base speed on his weapon as possible. He's not at all concerned with the amount of physical damage the bow delivers per hit. Indeed, a properly built elemental bow marauder can dish out more damage per second with a very fast, low-end-damage bow than a slower, high-end-damage bow, so long as it's providing a comparable amount of elemental damage bonuses. Compounding this damage is then relatively straightforward, by selecting elemental damage passives and using elemental damage equipment and auras.

With a few tweaks, this basic concept can be adapted for use with Ground Slam. Rather than the typical ground slamming weapon -- a huge, lumbering two-handed hammer -- the elemental slammer instead seeks as fast a weapon as possible, in order to best deliver his elemental damage package. Then, just like the elemental bow marauder, this character will look for elemental damage increases from passives, equipment and auras.

Increasing the range of Ground Slam via passives *dramatically* increases the number of opponents being struck by its wake. As a result, it's commonplace to simply walk or leap up to a crowd of enemies, begin pounding, and hold the entire room in stunlock until they die. White, blues, even the occasional yellows will all be subjected to rapid-fire, stun-causing, shock-inducing, multi-elemental goodness.

Circle math:
Increasing the range of our ground slam also allows us to begin chain-stunning many dangerous ranged enemies. For example, enhanced-area Ground Slam out-ranges archers of all sorts. They have to step into our radius, and get snagged and chain-stunned before they can fire off a shot.

Exploring the upper regions of the passives tree in search of increased area also lets us pick up the crowning touch, Static Blows. This notable transforms Ground Slam into "Shock Slam", allowing us to distribute shock to entire rooms of foes, instantly and repeatedly.

Elemental Weakness further compounds the overall efficacy of the build, increasing damage, increasing shock duration, increasing our capacity to achieve and maintain stunlock. All of these concepts play into one another, allowing us to cut down huge swaths of opponents at a time, in seconds or less.

Plus, it's hysterical watching the guy rapid-fire pounding the ground all day long like Bamm-Bamm from the Flintstones.

On the defensive side, as an otherwise typical marauder, we'll never miss, we'll never be stunned, and we'll have lots of life, resistances and armor. This, coupled with the staggering amounts of life regained from Life on Hit, should keep us healthy and safe.

Stage 1, Resolute Technique:
Stage 2, Blood Magic:
Stage 3, Amplify:
Stage 4, Fleshing out:
Stage 5, Finishing touches:

First, a quick note on Ground Slam itself. As Ground Slam levels up, its base cost goes from 10 to 16, which is a 60% increase. That's a pretty hefty increase in base casting cost. And what do we get in return? An increase in *physical* damage dealt. Blech! Physical damage means almost nothing to this build. Therefore, I recommend not leveling Ground Slam past level 3. (It still costs 10 at level 3.)

For support skills, I suggest:
- Weapon Elemental Damage
- Faster Attacks
- Life on Hit

Faster Attacks is a dex gem, and we'll be pretty starved for dex early on. So you may want to substitute in Added Lightning Damage for some of the early levels.

Life on Hit is vastly superior to Life Leech for this build, I feel, mainly for the fact that the restoration is instantaneous. Thus, we can be merrily slamming a crowd, striking 5-10 targets each three or so times per second, each time gaining 30 or more life *per* target *per* swing. That's a pretty hefty life restoration rate! This, compounded by the marauder's natural health, resistances and armor, makes for quite the survivalist.

Should you one day find yourself in possession of a 5L chest piece, I would suggest adding on either Added Lightning Damage or Increased Area of Effect.

Having a 6L opens an entirely new universe, as you could then pop in both Increased Area of Effect *and* Concentrated Effect. The area decrease of Concentrated Effect is additive (and thus mitigated by the Increased gem), but the damage increase is *multiplicative*! I'm hoping one day to give this setup a whirl...

For auras, since we're Blood Magic bound, there's really only two useful skills: Anger, and Wrath. Hatred is based off of our physical damage (blech), and costs a percentage of health to maintain in any event, as do most of the other nifty auras.

For a curse, Elemental Weakness is the clear winner, I would purport. If you don't have one; or if you happen to find yourself extremely focused on a particular element; or you really want to buff your shock chance, for example; then you could use one of the element-specific debuffs. But Elemental Weakness is the most efficient choice once you're rolling.

I've also made it a point to have a Leap Slam gem equipped, for faster traveling and maneuvering. You may also want a Detonate Dead handy, perhaps "on a stick" (i.e., Spell Totem); but with the range I have with Ground Slam, it's never really been an issue getting to the necromancer in the back.

Right off the bat, the ground slammer is limited in his weapon selection to maces and staffs. All staffs are two-handed and are thus pretty slow, so we'll scratch those. Similarly, two-handed maces are also very slow, as we all well know. Instead, we're going with a one-hander. If you'll browse the wiki, you'll notice that firstly, there are in fact two different classes of one-handed maces: hammer-types (clubs, hammers, etc), and scepters.

For us, scepters have an edge over hammers in two significant ways. Firstly, the top-end attack speeds for scepters are significantly faster than hammers. Hammers top out at 1.3 attacks per second; the fastest scepter sports an impressive 1.45 attacks per second. Secondly, while hammers do grant stun duration as an implicit modifier, scepters give us one of the features we're going to want the most -- weapon elemental damage! The 1.45 speed scepters all have +10% WED, which isn't too shabby.

Thus, for our mainhand weapon we're going to look for a very fast base speed scepter. This scepter should have +% attack speed, and added elemental damage: fire, lightning, and/or cold damage. Any other attributes are just gravy; but you might occasionally find on scepters modifiers such as: +% damage on a particular element; +% weapon elemental damage; and so forth.

For our offhand, we have a much more interesting puzzle. First off, we should decide whether we're going with a shield or an offhand weapon. While shields are snazzy, we're already pretty tough, since we're marauders; there's plenty of ways to find more resistances and such on various other equipment pieces. Also, whenever a character dual-wields weapons, he gets a +10% *multiplicative* attack speed bonus. As the main item of importance in our character build is attack speed, this doesn't seem worth sacrificing.

Now then, which weapon to wield? It should also be noted that for purposes of the use of ground slam, the weapon type in the offhand is irrelevant, as only the mainhand weapon is ever swung. It should *also* be noted that because of this fact, many features of the offhand weapon will be *wholly ignored* (yes, really, ignored; see the section on idiosyncracies for further details) when using ground slam. This includes:

- The base weapon speed of the offhand weapon
- Any +% attack speed bonuses of the offhand weapon
- Any +# integer elemental damage bonuses of the offhand weapon

Yep, totally ignored! Got a super-fast, one-handed weapon with +% attack speed and +fire and +lightning damage? Worthless in the offhand! Ground slam will ignore it utterly. It will provide *absolutely no bonus* to your ground slam damage other than the simple fact that you've wielded an offhand weapon and thus benefit from the dual-wield bonus. You may as well hold a rusty spatula in your offhand.

So if that's the case, what *should* we wield? Well, we're going to want a weapon that will increase our damage. Integer elemental damage won't work for that; those are only applied when the weapon itself is swung. But *global* modifiers will work. Such as:

- +% weapon elemental damage
- +% damage on a particular element
- +N to gem levels

So *global* modifiers like "10% increased weapon elemental damage", "12% increased lightning damage", etc, will work. And what's the one weapon type that's absolutely guaranteed to give us a bonus to weapon elemental damage? Again, it's our friend the scepter!

So here, we'll want to look for a scepter that gives the most implicit +WED (it can go as high as +20%), with perhaps some more elemental damage, and/or bonuses to gem levels to boost Anger or Wrath. Its other characteristics -- base weapon speed, integer elemental damage, etc -- are not important.

The rest of our gear is pretty straightforward. Strength-based armor, with lots of life, some resistances. Gloves can and should have increased attack speed; elemental damage is a nice bonus. Boots should have some movement speed, though not strictly necessary since we use Leap Slam to cover large distances.

Rings and necklace should provide the remaining lacking resistances, some health, and elemental damage boosts, in whichever combination your jewelry affords you. Try to include some +dexterity in there somewhere, as this build is dex-starved, and the attack speed gem is dex-based. (My amulet is jade.)

After grueling experimentation, I can state with relative confidence that the seconds-per-attack displayed by the client when highlighting the skill shortcut for Ground Slam does correctly reflect the character's actual attack rate. However, the character sheet depiction of the character's attacks-per-second for Ground Slam -- and, thus, the dps listed -- is quite wonky. Apparently, the character sheet erroneously averages the attack speeds of your two weapons when dual-wielding, even though we all know full well that the offhand weapon is never used. It even displays damage statistics for the offhand weapon. Bizarre.

Suffice it to say that the following information *is* correct on the character sheet for Ground Slam:

- The total damage of the mainhand weapon
- The breakdown of damage delivered by the mainhand weapon (physical, fire, etc)
- The total attack speed bonus % of the mainhand weapon

Using this information, along with the base (not the displayed; the BASE -- i.e., 1.45 for a Karui Scepter) weapon speed of your mainhand weapon, you can accurately calculate, by hand, your actual dps.

Those of you furiously using your calculators to verify these numbers, as I have, will also note a very, very curious fact about this skill. Ground Slam lists its damage effectiveness as 70%. This factor does indeed apply to the physical damage delivered by the skill. However, *it does not apply* to the elemental damage delivered by the skill. That's right, folks -- elemental damage is non-normalized on this attack. Bug? Feature? You be the judge.

As of this writing (2/27/13), my elemental shock slammer has an actual calculated dps of around 3000. He also, coincidentally, has about 3000 health, maxed elemental resistances, and about 30% damage reduction from armor. He has a swing speed of 0.33 seconds.

With these statistics, farming Docks and other regular places is a cakewalk, taking minutes to clear. I've only begun fiddling around on maps, but the same principles seem to apply, maintaining wide-area chain stun and shock with little danger.

Ouch! Watch out for these turkeys. Just as we share strengths with the elemental bow marauder, so too do we share his one vulnerability. Even moreso, since we can hit even more targets, and our damage is delivered instantly. I really have walked into a room, pressed Ground Slam, and immediately dropped dead. Granted, that was a long time ago, and I'd been pretty much ignoring my resistances; but it's still something to watch out for, at least until you've gotten your resistances up to 80%.