Dragon's Immortal Tank (Updated for 1.2)

Dragon, you write about the mana leech gem linked with Infernal Blow and Splash, yet in your gem guide you mention IB + splash + multistrike + blood magic, without mana leech. Do you mean than mana leech is essential for leveling, while you switch to BM in the endgame?

I'm playing Anarchy and haven't found mana leech yet, so I'm using Infernal blow with splash and BM and I'm doing great so far (but I'm on Cruel A3 so far only). Being able to facetank Oak and Perpetus is a nice change after dying to them countless times with my 1st char.

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Jadran wrote:

Dragon, you write about the mana leech gem linked with Infernal Blow and Splash, yet in your gem guide you mention IB + splash + multistrike + blood magic, without mana leech. Do you mean than mana leech is essential for leveling, while you switch to BM in the endgame?

I'm playing Anarchy and haven't found mana leech yet, so I'm using Infernal blow with splash and BM and I'm doing great so far (but I'm on Cruel A3 so far only). Being able to facetank Oak and Perpetus is a nice change after dying to them countless times with my 1st char.

Yes, I meant linking mana leech for leveling only. If you can get your hands on a BM gem and can survive the harsh hp cost then go for it. For onslaught tho, I think it would be better to use a mana leech gem.

How important is the physical damage on the weapon?

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Shot wrote:

How important is the physical damage on the weapon?

The most important thing.

Dragon, is there any reason you are not using RainbowStride in your build? Also, what do you think about keeping blind linked to tempest shield?

Hi,

I see many of you switched to The Bringer Of Rain, good to hear.
BUT i also see that none of you did refund Unwavering Stance..

I just want to add something about this since i did some research about this build and Bringer Of Rain.. You CAN'T use US with BoR in order to benefit from blind. This is how Blind works, you need the 5% evade chance you still get even with Iron Reflexes. With US you are at 0% evade chance and blind won't work.

From the wiki :

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An attacker's chance to hit is the direct opposite of the defender's chance to evade. Since characters with Unwavering Stance cannot evade, attacks made against them always hit. As a result, even blinded enemies will always have 100% chance to hit a character with Unwavering Stance, since the Unwavering Stance character always has 0% chance to evade.

So if you switch to BoR, drop US and get more life if you want to benefit from Blind.

I hope you guys enjoy your play, and thanks again OP for this build ;)

EDIT: (this is pure theory, i'm not at this point so i can't test with/without US to bring you real things sorry)

EDIT2: and please... take the one or two endurance charges on the path, it is just 2 skills pts for 2 charges (mara start + duelist start), and will helps a lot with Bringer of Rain's endurance charges gain.

EDIT3: just saw pangolin1247's post page 28 about BoR and this build, he was right about US and Blind, and thank you for the review about survivability without US in maps.

If anyone that feel that they have this build pretty much under control and maybe want to help answering some questions i have during my lvling. Then this newbie would gain +100 happiness :)

My name is Storbubben so feel free to add me. I dont bite, much.

Cheers

There is no point keeping blind linked to tempest shield once you take unwavering stance. If you read Tekry's post above mine you will see why. Speaking of his post, I would NOT drop US to take advantage of the blind.

The main reason why I wanted to create a cyclone build around bringer of rain was because of the blind. You can skip US with cyclone because you are immune to stun why spinning. Also, more endurance charges would be great. But this is a completely different build idea.

I still think that my build works best with a good 6L chest, but bringer of rain is cheaper and an easier way to enjoy the build. But please understand that my build is not optimized for bringer of rain. It is optimized for a 6L chest.


Check out the new FAQ section under the guide for those that have questions. Thanks!




-Dragon

I just wanted to say, this build is absolutely amazing. I'm using a slightly modified version of the skilltree to account for using a 1H axe (and the really nice axe passives)
Here is my tree so far (lvl 80):

(I took +40 maximum life, skillpoint, endurance charge for bandit rewards)

I was originally going for US at the bottom, but will now be refunding that one point I've placed on the way because I want to take advantage of the blind effect from BoR. (Thank you Tekry)

Here is my current gear:


It's definitely more of farming type gear than anything else. At the moment I'm around 3k life with almost 600 ES and around 13k armour (with auras on). The rainbowstrides serve the dual purpose of providing spell block chance and extra ES (I might be taking body and soul nodes near the templar starting area to get even more ES since it's very effective). I could get much more life and higher DPS with better gloves, but this is perfectly fine so far. The highest maps I've run so far are 73, which I can do easily even with things like temp chains and vuln (although vulnerability is rather dangerous in some instances). With max block chance (75) and super high spell block chance (65), it's incredibly hard for things to get through my ES. I frequently test my survivability by just standing in the middle of huge mob packs and watching my ES bounce around. It is extremely hard for me to die, and the only time I've died in the past 5 levels was due to an elemental reflect map (which was stupid on my part because infernal blow against a pack of 30 creatures deals incredible reflect damage when they all explode).

I've taken two reduced mana reserved nodes to allow me to run 6 auras (4 on my mana pool). I run wrath, grace, determination, vitality, purity and hatred. I'm debating whether or not I should run a 7th aura on my health pool (anger most likely), but I would have to give up one of my support skills that are all very useful.

I haven't even leveled up infernal blow or any of my gems that much and I still have 6k dps currently. For single targets (bosses) i switch out melee splash for weapon elemental dmg that boosts my dps up to over 10k. Obviously, with better gear (aka not farming gear) and better skill gem levels my dps will be very nice. The killspeed currently is fine, and I don't mind being a tiny bit slower if I have insane survivability.

Sorry for this being so long, but I am absolutely in love with how invincible this build is so far. It's so fun! Thank you so much Dragon for inspiring this and sparking this interest in this sort of build. It's amazing.

Happy that your happy :D I always love hearing success stories. I would, if I were you, drop wrath for anger. Since you took lava lash, anger will add more dps that wrath. Ofc, using both would be ideal, but if you must choose only 1, anger is the better one.

On a slightly less happy note, I am currently trying pretty hard to get to piety merciless in Onslaught so I can make some vids showing off the build in OS. Up until just a few days ago, I had never attempted HC or OS. I had a lot of learning to do, but so far I am going strong in a1 cruel and have solo'd up to that point.

Wish me luck!