Regnar's dual wield sword ranger build, now with Blood Magic!

Hey first time posting in this thread, I came back to the game after taking 4 months off. I decided to build my ranger like yours and I am having a terrible time with survivabilty in merciless. I get ganged up by and I cannot kill the mobs fast enough and they overwhelm me. Now I don't think my weapons are terrible they do good DPS but, I'm at 540dps w/hatred. (Again this is my first character so I don't know what the standard is with DPS at this level)

It's very frustrating going through an area to die in the next and lose all the experience you got from the one before.

Here is my gear



and my tree so far is the same as yours w/o BM up to Lava Lash.

Thefifenation: I test the build and dont work well with bad gear. Mana problems and poor damage. U need get another tactic before u can get a good gear.

For xample fire trap help so much, frenzy for spam Flicker Strike. Viper strike isnt bad for single targets and well u can use Leap Slam instead of Whirling Blades.

BTW u need add support gems "in linked sockets" and remove cold and fire penetration in cleave.

Is it really worth to rush Iron Reflexes? I mean at level 23 when I got it, I switched from like 45% evasion to 46% physical damage reduction. That's actually worth less because evasion also applies to elemental attacks which you lose completely.

A lot of people think that armor is broken the way it is at the moment (because of scaling with damage). Wouldn't it be the safer way to just stay with an evasion build? Or does it scale much better in mid or late game?

Due to evasion scaling with levels, due to mob acc, it's better to actually consider IR along the terms of a CI decision. Armor comes into play largely when you have the links to afford life leech.

This build relys alot on Life Leech for its survivability. The lower your damage, the more leech you need.

@ Clark:

With hatred and a crit build like ceto's, you shatter the shield crabs and they occasionally (I feel its like 50% of the time) and they drop no loot at all.

Is this build viable for HC? If not, could anyone point me in the right direction for a solid ranger hc build? ;D

One thing i still didn't understand in this build, After looking at the revised video and tree - How do you keep up the cost of Blood Rage? The tree seems to give 3.3% life regen from what i saw, While BR costs more. What am i missing here?

Also, I noticed a few times its being referred as a crit build. You don't seem to have too much crit mods on your tree and gear (aside, of course, from Maligro's which might in itself make it an enabling item for a crit build, i guess) - Why not use the crit gem supports?

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ransagy wrote:

One thing i still didn't understand in this build, After looking at the revised video and tree - How do you keep up the cost of Blood Rage? The tree seems to give 3.3% life regen from what i saw, While BR costs more. What am i missing here?

Also, I noticed a few times its being referred as a crit build. You don't seem to have too much crit mods on your tree and gear (aside, of course, from Maligro's which might in itself make it an enabling item for a crit build, i guess) - Why not use the crit gem supports?

1. Between my life regen and life leech the cost of BR is a joke.

2. Where did I claim this was a crit build? I would LOVE to know! =P

Yeah, but even at the start of the map, your life bar isn't going down. Shouldn't it if youvhave less regen than BR's expenditure?

Might have confused someone else's claims on the crit.

I said it's a crit build, as high aspeed and the ranger area in general, propagate crit indirectly, as well as diamond flasks. Another thing to realize is I said this in reference to hatred aura and shattering crabs, and getting no loot from that situation.

You indeed have a really efficient DW build there Ceto, I think both you and Epsi are right in stating this is likely one of the most efficient DW builds you will get.

I made a HC Duelist DW build not too long ago and I have just killed merci vaal with 2k HP at level 58 which was not easy because I wanted to see how viable my build would be if used for open beta with no stash items.

So I have been using all self found gear and have not traded anything and it was extremely difficult but exciting, once i was in merciless, health spiking constantly down to 25%, 80% of the time, haha.

I would be interested to know how you geared your char ceto, meaning, I can probably assume if you did it during a 1 week race you likely traded regularly for certain pieces to help? I also noticed you did not have BM when I first saw this build but I chose it for mine, as I really could not be bothered with the mana issues.

I feel once you hit merciless, DW starts to feel really gimped unless you have very nice gear, it relies on good HP, Regen & life leech, and positional play, for hardcore at least. I am gonna continue to test maps now and see how it goes, but it is pretty fun playing a dual wield in HC because I found it more difficult than a lot of other builds.

One could also make a good argument which epsi pointed out that Ranger is more efficient than Duelist if building similarly.