Heavy Strike Gladiator Question

Plan on doing a Heavy Strike, max Block, high armor Glad. With Cyclone for clear and Reckoning for extra damage. Because I love pure melee! <3

Could you please check out my PoB and tell me if this even has the slightest chance to work out? Unique items are just in slot to get an overall idea.

Thaaank you! https://pastebin.com/hiYh9TtZ

My goal with this build is to block most of the incoming damage, and have the high armor deal with whats coming through.

Single target damage from Heavy Strike seems rather nice, boosted to 86 % to dael double damage with 3x Weight of the Empire and some crits. These heavy strikes will cause heavy bleeding too, right?
Last edited by monsieurdome#9725 on Dec 15, 2019, 2:21:15 PM
Last bumped on Dec 17, 2019, 4:41:27 AM
Hi, loving the build idea! been trying to make a shield block build that felt like it wasn't losing out to dual wielders, and this certainly looks fun with The Surrender added in.

I've made a huge set of changes looking over the build, and will try to explain most if not all of them here!

https://pastebin.com/2B4RchRx - preliminary pastebin (First changes so could be improved greatly still)

-Removed a Weight of the Empire (it has a limit of 2).
-Removed the high focus on bleeding as it didn't really do enough damage and actively worked against the other focus on Impale.
-Moved the tree around for substantially more crit and life, though life is still quite low it is probably made up for by various defensive measures.
-Removed Kaom's Roots, this is not a necessity but you can get much more out of the build with hose four extra sockets, as by reserving the helmet for cyclone and the shield for reckoning you're effectively deleting close to 11 sockets from the build.
-Changed the belt to a Cyclopean Coil; this change is only "necessary" if you remove Kaom's Roots, as it provides a source of extra life and freeze immunity.
-Changed main weapon to Scaeva (or any other applicable sword). Ahn's Might is quite good but somewhat limiting, as such I changed it to a more generic sword capable of upgrading into a metacrafted rare.
-New skill setups: Main skill changed a bit to add both Brutality in place of Chance to Bleed, and Fortify in place of Multistrike. Your tree takes Fortify related nodes, as well as also having Fortify in the config however you didn't actually have a method of obtaining the buff.
-Changed Auras, Pride is great but a little too expensive. Instead I've opted to change it to Dread Banner for extra Impale Effect, Herald of Purity, and added Maim to the Flesh and Stone aura for a little boost to dps.
-Flasks: Changed sulphur out for a non-unique, overflowing chalice has poor sustain. Added a diamond flask, you ticked that your crit chance is lucky in config but I don't believe you had a method of achieving this. Added a crit cinderswallow and removed Taste of Hate, though you can change these about to your liking as I presume Taste of Hate was a defensive choice. Also added a Blood of the Karui, as no matter how tanky you are its always nice to have a panic health potion.
-Utility Skills: Added a four link setup for if you choose to remove Kaom's Roots, which is a Cast When Damage Taken setup using Immortal Call and Ice Golem (This gives us more crit and fixes our accuracy a bit without Precision). Vaal Haste is also added to this setup in the extra socket. If you can't be bothered with Vaal Haste, adding an Increased Duration to make Immortal Call last longer is also a great choice. In addition to this I added a (disabled in PoB) more utility based setup to Reckoning which contains Leap Slam, Faster Attacks and Pulverize in order to preserve some of the existing damage potential while adding a movement option. You might prefer to just cyclone around, in which case definitely continue using the more damage oriented setup you originally chose. This setup has also had Reckoning removed in favour of socketing it in the shield, thus automatically having Reckoning use the supports (this change is just for PoB).
-Added Blood Rage for a source of Leech and Frenzy Charge generation, this can be a polarising skill (it literally drains your life), so if you prefer not to have it you should turn it off for sure.
-Changed Rares to be a little more defensive. Until this point you had about 30-40 in all Elemental Resistances including Endurance Charges. By changing a few rares about and adding rare boots, we can max these out. I also added an Accuracy roll to the helmet to push us up to 100% hit chance, though this accuracy can come from anywhere and isn't necessary to be on a helmet.
-Added "100% more melee damage" to Abyssus to emulate Impale. (remove this if using the fork of PoB where impale actually works). If you change anything about the Impale aspects of the build, generally speaking 100% Impale chance is equal to 50% more damage, with 100% Increased Impale Effect taking that to 100% more.

Hope these changes help! Of course they're just suggestions and not me saying "this is objectively better", so make sure to mess about with it and see what feels good in the actual game as PoB can be misleading at times. I hope I didn't destroy the integrity and uniqueness of the build too hard.

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