[1.2.x] Oos' Crit Dagger Capped Block Ranger (Reave / Flicker / Double Strike) Acrobatics or IR

seems like 2h builds are finally on a par with 1h / shield builds lol. They managed to nerf melee even more with this tree. I guess we have to wait until the patch notes are out to see if there's gonna be changes to make it up for the block nerf. Tbh I don't think there is much hope. The 'meta' (as much as I hate this word) is more and more transitioning into path of casters. Marauder and Duelist trees look even worse than before, horrible pathing. There's so much less life in the marauder tree than before. I wonder if it's even worth picking up all this 3% nodes even more. lol

Well I think the build is not totally dead, you can still pick 18% additional block chances in the tree with the new ring below the duelist, but the question is : is Iron Reflexes + block better than full evasion Ondar's Guile WITHOUT acrobatics + block ? I don't know...

As I mentioned earlier, I played the IR-version of the in the SC 1-week race.
Since the 1-week race is almost over and not much more is going on there, I might as well resume what I ended up with.

Passive tree


There are some concessions to not having the points for everything and not having perfect gear, like speccing into the resist nodes and getting a little int here and there.
The gear did not change much since day 3, I only crafted phys dmg onto one Ring when elreon reached lvl 6 and exchanged a few gems. I also recently exchanged one dagger for another very similar one.

Gear


The Abyssus is obviously a concession to my inability to craft or find a good dagger, so I had to run some source of extra damage to compensate. Also, between the people of my map group, we found three of those helmets, so I was kinda forced into wearing one of them :)
Also, it was SC so it wasn't that big a threat.
The build still felt fairly tanky, but in 70+ maps big hits are certainly MUCH more noticable than you'd expect at over 13k armor. I didn't end up dying much in the endgame, and when I died it was mostly to other people spawning too many bosses and the framerate dropping to unplayable levels - good thing I played SC, I would've hated that stuff in HC.

Any way, dps is about 13k without auras and power charges and close to 25k with charges and hatred up - so definitely more than good enough.
Over4k HP, over 13k armor, 63% block, 47% spell block - not unhappy about that either.

I really enjoyed the build, pretty good defense, excellent offense, freezing everything in front of you and good movement pace thanks to whirling blades.
Only in parties with large ranged damage potential I felt a bit useless, that is until a beyond pack spawns and suddenly freezing stuff is actually very useful again.

I would play it again, if GGG wouldn't nerf the shit out of block (don't think crit daggers are nerfed too much). So I'm glad I got to enjoy it while it was at the full potential. :)

For the last day, I'd like to try Atziri and some more beyond bosses before the race ends, got a Poorjoys as well to bash my head against.

New 1.3 Tree for Oos fans. If you want to play this build as a Shadow you can also visit my guide in the Shadow class forum.

I think if you're going for acrobatics in the new tree, you should probably just dual wield daggers, as it's giving you a very substantial damage increase. The 30% less block penalty on acro is pretty crushing.

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hscorpio wrote:

I think if you're going for acrobatics in the new tree, you should probably just dual wield daggers, as it's giving you a very substantial damage increase. The 30% less block penalty on acro is pretty crushing.

I personally have never been a big fan of acro, but I know that Oos loves this keystone so I inculeded it this time. The idea is that you actually don't focus on block anymore and get a shield with high EV instead, to skyrocket your evasion rating with the ev nodes as well as ondar and use atziri boots for even more Doge%.

I've had another thought, maybe block is getting nerfed to balance the new 3 melee gems. Idk, just a thought.

I'm just going to do the build just as I did prepatch for the reaver. The block nerf was needed but I still feel it isn't enough even. The problem stems from all the different sources of avoidance we can stack (dodge/evade/block/spellblock/spelldodge). Only one source got nerfed which doesn't do a big dent in the overall avoidance at all. My current values is ~87 spell/hit avoidance. Post patch both will be around ~74 which is still silly high.
I'll do a comparison of prepatch/postpatch values once we get the final tree and the actual patch. One thing that can screw with us is some actual huge patch changes that we dont know about yet.

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candoerfer wrote:

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hscorpio wrote:

I think if you're going for acrobatics in the new tree, you should probably just dual wield daggers, as it's giving you a very substantial damage increase. The 30% less block penalty on acro is pretty crushing.

I personally have never been a big fan of acro, but I know that Oos loves this keystone so I inculeded it this time. The idea is that you actually don't focus on block anymore and get a shield with high EV instead, to skyrocket your evasion rating with the ev nodes as well as ondar and use atziri boots for even more Doge%.

Yeah it was a preference thing really. But at higher levels I'd say acro was stronger than IR/nothing because of a blocked hit reseting the evasion entropy. It was way too strong so the nerf was justified I guess.

Now the question is if you go Acro+no block, or block+IR or block+neither. Pretty hard to plan a build right now. Either way I haven't played this build for a year and wont be making it again. But I'll update the topic with the best tree when 1.3 hits. Hopefully the patch notes show us a new skill that buffs block or defenses in some way.

Lysithea's setup with spell block will probably be strongest in 1.3, no acro.

I played a hybrid ar/ev build, so I used neither Acro no IR. As a result I was able to get insane Evasion against ranged projectiles, while maintaining decent armor for a basic phys mitigation.