...::: [1.1.0] TK's ST CoC Shadow aka THE WELDER :::...

Barabazz
I'll post devourerz as soon as I encounter them.
Maybe your graphic settings are too high; this build puts great strain to your rig.

Faster att speed is always good; you can test it easily (well; if you have tabula that is :) by putting IAS gem; I find damage output less erratic and better especially vs single targets but third spell again seems better.

Your second daggers (dagger) has much better spell damage btw.

Araycan
1) well, yes, you can look it that way - or - purity will allow you to go either more offensively or more MF on your gear. For example because of purity I can use tabula and attack with 3 spells instead of two. What other aura can boost my damage that much?

2) I am using tabula because you lose much on defense but gain even more on offense. Plus flexible spell choice and testing. It's a tradeoff; you must decide what you prefer and what you need the most. Yes I would love to have nasty 6L armor with +100 to health and resistances and 1000+ armor eva but alas, I cannot afford one :)

3) I wouldn't write off eva so easily. There is long debate of armor vs eve and benefits of both but I will just say that I have 30% chance to evade and 30% chance to block; it guarantees you won't get stunlock; armor is better for melee characters then arches (which we effectively are) and remember; big hits (that really hurt) pass thru armor like thru butter. This build is about mobility and damage, not enduring in being hit.

Not being hit often is the key here. If you take lot of small hits often armor is better, but it's not universally better as most of forum likes to repeat as parrots.

5) devourers do spell damage. Flasks will fortify armor no matter did you took IR or not;



I pop it whenever mobs are near or I want to tank and it is always full (but again most of times they will miss or be blocked) and remember, more armor you have, less effective it becomes.

6)It's not bad plan if you want to be more tanky /especially if you use EK; in that case you really should take IR and not use tabula. It's all up to do you want to play more defensively or offensively. Personally I don't find lack of armor or eva on this build so terrible. Mobs cannot reach me in melee or outgun me as archers. Most difficult opponents are nasty spellcasters or your own damage.

PcOC - I guess it's an option. ChC for attack you hardly lack (it's close to 90%) and chc for spells it's good but I don't think it would outdamage chd gem. I personally prefer third FP spell, more aoe, more freezeing more leeching and more damage.

BTW, about devourers - I played with ST before, just pure physical ST - I had less than 4k life, no block, no evasion, just armour.
I died to them about 2-3 times maybe, out of 250 or so maps, maps up to lvl 75. So I guess its more about actually manually dodging their projectiles.

The spellblock amulet with those rare knives just takes so much useful stats away that it is not worth it, unless you decide to kill some dangerous boss with spells like Piety.

Thing I don't like about evasion, as I said before, is spiked damage - most of the times you are alright, and then suddenly you are down to 20% health. With armour the health loss is gradual, so you can apply flasks without dropping to low health.

Also, armour does allow you to take on phys bosses (as long as you drink flasks), which will oneshot you with evasion.

PCoC might also be useful for permafreezing enemies in a full party, when combined with Cold Snap.

Hi Araycan,

I know you're talking to TK but just wanted to add perspective from a similar build...

"

For defense - its quite simple:
1) You don't need Purity, if you use it it just means your gear is terrible or you have too much offensive mods on it instead of resists. Run Grace instead.

Or run Grace AND Purity and stack way more stuff on your gear without having to worry about it.

"

2) Don't use Tabula, which removes almost half of your defense.

See #1. :)

"

3) Take IR. Evasion is terrible as a stand-alone mechanic, in order for it to shine you need some sort of damage mitigation like MoM, Lightning Coil or 6-7 endurance charges. And of course Ondar's Guile, which we can't take because it takes too much nodes to reach.
Otherwise you are just playing russian roulette until you get 1-2 shotted, taking full damage each hit.

If you have a good life or ES pool and good resists, Evasion is more than sufficient because you shouldn't get hit by melee damage that often and can manually dodge spells.

"

4) Use CWDT-EC-Increased Duration-IC if you don't use it yet for some odd reason. This is the best defensive setup you can possibly make with 4L.

Physical damage isn't usually an issue. It's the mad amounts of elemental damage that is usually a problem. This set-up will be great with the new Corrupted Immortal Call gem though. :)

"

5) If you took IR, you can use Granite Flasks of Iron Skin, which will boost your armour massively, allowing to face devourers and hard-hitting phys bosses without dying.

Granite Flasks work even without IR and are less effective the more armor you have.

"

6) You can run both Grace and Determination if you drop Haste, combined with flasks, this can get you over 20k armour.

I like Hatred. Don't need 20K Armour when things get stuck and die before they hit you.

"

Also, thought of this variation for offense:
- take 1 power charge from tree, take another from Alira, this will get us 6 in total = +300% global chance to crit
- use Tabula with 2 spells + PCoC
Result - much higher crit for spells, and 100% crit for daggers without the need for so much crit on gear

I've been playing around with Power Charges. I can get to the 95% cap with 4 right now, so I'm going to experiment with dropping some crit from my tree when we get the skill reset. The other thought is to just run without Power Charges and add in a another support spell. I have a bow build, so LMP + Chain is crazy fun.

Few words of gearing choices;

This is my old gear and some of my newly acquired (and finally chromed) pieces as maligaro's;



Now I usually use tabula and golem paws; My health lingers to slightly low but tolerable 3900 - 200 (clarity) HP.

If I take maligaros; difference is pretty big; 5% to both chc and roughly 20% to damage output but my health goes by 400+ down which is waaay too much.

If I didn't use tabula I could afford that powerful offensive gloves but if I swap it for 5 Link chest that I have; I really didn't get anything; same helath and resi; slightly more armor; more damage but 1 attack spell /flexibility less.

Thing is that I hate losing most; for example I can put faster projectiles as third support and attack mobs waaay offscreen.

Also very good armor chest is not that better then fairly common belly chest. 2-3% damage reduction more but lose eva and even some HP.

I will try using grace for day or two; my last few deaths were to lightning/chaos bosses and thorns - grace cannot help me there but just to confirm. Haste does not help MUCH but it still does.

EDIT
I've also grabbed this belt;

Now that I'm back at golem paws, it added 150-200 hp more. Basically health is our best defense, no surprise there :)

Since we are now in standard, I've been playing a bit around with these:



Since I haven't build around it, I can only have 3 Enduring and Power charges, but it's still quite powerful. I could make even more use out of it by dropping some nodes, as I already have 95% crit chance.

Not sure if they could be incorporated into your version.

Well, accidentally;



I still have my old gear from my discharger.

It actually can be better introduced in danmaku, because of the overriding of cold snap cooldown. I saw people doing this before.

You could go with Cyclone-CoC-Cold snap-EK. That's four. You should probably not need life leech cause you could mobs would be frozen anyway and you would leech nicely with berek's grasp. Now if you could regenerate enough mana in some way that would be awesome (perhaps 3+3 nodes and ring and eldrich battery? You could use ES helm or boots perhaps) Then you could take one more attack AoE spell for freeze such as FP.

It would be pretty badass.


As for ST variant, I'm not sure that 5L would be much better then common defensive 5L gear. Again you would trade defense for offense, in very similar way you're doing with tabula. And again, end. charges you're gaining for defense wouldn't help you against things that bother you mostly, non physical damage.

With 6L, sure why the hell not - anything is better then tabula :)

How do you counter Lightning Thorns with this build?

I'm stuck trying to bypass the arcmages in the barracks, because every time I attack them (or the mob around them) I die... even with max resist and a topaz pot.

I'm pretty sure it's the hits/sec I'm dishing out that is the problem (that and my <2k health).

Do I need to change up my gems? I've tried with FB/IS and FP/IS (I'm limited to 5L at the moment) with the same results.

Carefully.
Not sure about barracks but in maps black mages cast thorns quite rarely, still you need to be careful - that is precisely the point.

Note that thorns last only 2-3 seconds. Wait it out. Aggro and divide group by decoy totem, retreat a bit and spread them, killing off one by one.

Or whirl inside group and take out mage first.

Swapping out the LMP for an Added Cold gem seems to have solved my problem... though it really slows things down... and I still have to be careful of the rare arcmages.

Oh ofc, LMP out much less hits.
I prefer not to swap my gems mid game because I'm lazy but it's viable.
Grab any spell instead that has single missile (not EK) if you have tabula.
If not - added cold can work but faster attacks would probably be better.