[2.2] Vigilant Strike Gladiator /Insane dmg/no budget/Immortal (Hc Viable)

So the first question is,why use vigilant strike in the first place,the skill has a cooldown of 4 seconds and to surpass that you need to consume an Endurance charge,so why go through all the trouble to use that skill?

Well let's have a look at vigilant strike

With the skill sitting at 203% base damage at lvl 20,it is second to none in terms of base damage percentage,also vigilant strike can't be evaded,which means you don't have to play Resolute Technique or focus on accuracy and you can easily play Crit for more damage

So that is all good,but again comes the question how do you sustain endurance charges enough to enable the Vigilant strike to be spammable like any other skill

1-Enduring Cry :Having to stop and cast it every while isn't efficient by any means


2-Warlord's Mark : Good,but it's still a chance so still not so reliable


3-Endurance Charge on Melee Stun : and that's the main source of generating the needed Endurance charges to sustain using Vigilant Strike


However it would be lame if you'd have to waste a link on using that gem instead of using sth that boosts your dps,and that's why i play 1h/shield,using reckoning/vengeance/riposte with Endurance Charge on melee stun,along with Warlord's mark+blasphemy ,now you have endurance charges 100% uptime for spamming vigilant strike.



Full Build


Core Build


Bandits



Current Gear,Not optimized by any means and i still faceroll any content


Flasks


Build Setup


Ups


Downs


Gear Choices


Jewels



Auras

Links





Maps Mods,what it can do and what it can't


Atziri


IGN :XdasVigilante,if you got any questions,feel free to ask,hope i covered everything

Can I use Varunastra with this build? I'm assuming I can just go with axe nodes and it'll count towards my blade, just wanted to be sure, and in terms of life and tanking how well off will I be?

Very interesting build, thanks for posting it

I've been trying to pursue a build/gem setup similar to this, but am just not getting it to work out against the hardest fights.

I have a character in Hardcore Parandus and began the game going with molten strike, then once I got to a 4-link, I was trying out Heavy Strike with melee splash. I really like the fact that so much of the damage is physical damage this way. With Molten strike's 60% conversion and hatred and the elemental damage on the weapon (and added fire damage or herald of ash if being used), so much is elemental and I feel like there are a lot of enemies with decent resistances, so the tooltip DPS of molten strike wasn't as good as heavy strike.

Starting around level 50 in Cruel, I would try to use vigilant strike, but I just couldn't keep up enough endurance charges. I got a 5-link and put endurance charge on stun in there with the vigilant strike to get more charges and that worked great. I could clear the trash monsters out super fast, with constant fortify, it was great. Until... I got to the Dominus fight at the end of Act 3. For the first part of the fight, I was stunning the monsters a bunch, but once it was just Dominus, he didn't spawn additional monsters enough and I wasn't stunning him, so I ran out of endurance charges quickly. I was able to flee through a portal and change up my gems and go back.

Same thing happened fighting Izarro in the Cruel Labyrinth, I was ok for a little bit, but he just didn't spawn his little minions enough to keep my endurance charges up. I tried to portal out since I was worried about dying, but for some reason the portal wouldn't let me flee that fight. So, I ran around for 4 seconds between each cooldown and eventually was able to kill him.

So, all in all, the hardest fights are the ones where the vigilant strike setup I feel like is not working for me. Maybe at higher levels/with better gear you can do ok in more fights, but I feel like the chances of "jamming up" are just too high to tolerate for HC play.

I'm going to keep at it, sort of deciding between molten strike, heavy strike with splash, or static strike.

(also, thinking about maybe going with a 4-link on molten strike or static strike to do trash/times I need AOE and then set up heavy strike with a 5-link and use it for single-target DPS on big bosses and stuff)

Made a fullblock aurora duelist, tried several melee skills including this one, based on your suggestions. Sustaining the charges is overall solid, if somewhat uncomfortable, so you can actually attack and wreck faces, which is good. The problem is that every time you attack you need to find a foe with your mouse, click him and then melee splash kills some minor area around him. At the same time you could've been using Earthquake, give no fucks about where to click or where enemies are, the entire screen will explode and you will leapslam into sunset because fuck all other melee skills, right GGG? Melee splash AoE needs to be at least twice as large as it is now to be even remotely competitive. Which is sad.