[2.2 - HC] Duelist Phsyical Sword Crit Cleave Gladiator - Cheap and Scalable

Heya! Let's keep this short and sweet.

PROS - High damage. High survivability. High mobility. High resistances (easy to get 125%+). High Leech. High HP regen. Easy to gear and very budget friendly, but scales very well if you feel like getting rich. Blood explosions. Blood slows. Blood damage buffs.

CONS - Not the best AoE, but very good AoE. Melee in a ranged meta.

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The basic idea behind this build is high melee damage, life regen, and leech, while relying on the Gladiator Ascendancy's Gratuitous Violence for bleed explosions (which do 10% of monster HP as an explosion when a bleeding monster dies). We'll also use Blood in the Eyes for damage mitigation, extra damage, and a slow (useful for monsters that run, such as Loot Ghosts). Since we are dual wielding, I also recommend Outmatch and Outclass for free Endurance and Frenzy charges (not required).

Gameplay tips:

Jump into the fray and tank everything with your face while hacking it to bits and exploding in a glorious, bloody tornado of death. If you want to play like an idiot and feel rewarded for doing so, this is the build you want.

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*** PASSIVE TREE ***

My current passive tree at level 88.

106 point goal tree

Bandits: Oak (40 HP) // Kill All (1 Passive Point) // Kill All (1 Passive Point)

If you want, you can chose to instead grab the 16% Physical Damage from Cruel and an extra Charge from Merciless.

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*** LEVELING ***

Here's the Leveling tree. Yes, I'm serious. It's very easy to get over-leveled items for like 1 Alch and destroy monsters without needing damage nodes. Might as well grab your life early to make sure you're around to get all of the cool points later :) All of the free Elemental Resists also help greatly with gearing (and later, with having 125% all res for dealing with Elemental Weakness curse).

When leveling, you can use Lakishu's Blade at Level 28 and offhand Relentless Fury at 29. They will carry you through Cruel easily and are really cheap.

There's no reason to grab the Sword Crit talents until post-merciless, that way you can just use the best one handed weapons you find while leveling. You also don't really need to think much about Crit or Crit damage while leveling.

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*** STAT PRIORITIES ***

LIFE (we're hardcore, after all)
Resistances
Accuracy Rating, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, Attack Speed
Armour and Evasion
Dexterity and Intellect (to avoid needing jewels or passive points)

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*** GEAR ***

There's no required gear for this build, just recommended gear.

Recommended Helmet is Abyssus, as it gives insane damage and the +40% increased damage taken is additive, which is no big deal at all. I killed Merciless Izaro with Abysuss on BEFORE I got my Lightning Coil, so again the extra damage taken is no big deal at all. You can just use a rare if you want, but Abysuss is really good and you are likely scared of it without reason to be :)

Recommended Body Armour is, of course, Lightning Coil. Assuming you can't or don't want to use that, no big deal at all. Rare chests with life, resistances, and armour/evasion are great. Daresso's Defiance is REALLY good and REALLY inexpensive if you can get your resistances elsewhere (you can, easily).

For your weapons, I recommend a rare Corsair Sword or Eternal Sword in your mainhand and a Vaal Rapier in your offhand.

The Corsair or Eternal is useful for the Accuracy implicit and the attack speed (which makes your Whirling Blades go fast and turns you into a mobility monster). Try to get one with a high attack speed roll to make your mobility even better. Your mobility will be so good that you won't need a Quicksilver at all.

The Vaal Rapier is the highest damage range and it has an extremely high base crit chance as well as implicit crit damage. Your mainhand speed merges with our offhand speed when you Cleave (since they attack simultaneously), so the slowness of the Vaal Rapier is no big deal. You want a Vaal Rapier with increased Crit Chance for even higher base crit.

On Dexterity: I will note that you need "Fluid Motion" in the jewel slot unless you plan on grabbing extra Dexterity on your gear for the 212 requirement of Rapier Swords. Not a big deal, but something to note. Personally, I have a Vaal Rapier with "reduced attribute requirements," which is nice because I only need 144 Dex instead of 212.

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*** MY GEAR ***



*** EPEEN DAMAGE ***

Hideout damage





In-combat with 3 Frenzy Charges, Fort, and Sulphur Flask (bottom)



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*** POTIONS ***

You won't need a Quicksilver due to Whirling Blades being ridiculous.

All of your potions should have "20% Chance to gain a flask charge when you deal a Critical Strike" -- you're going to be critting often, so this is very very good.

I recommend one INSTANT health potion (Divine is best for this). Your other HP potion should be an Eternal for the larger heal over time.

Personally, I really love the new SULPHUR FLASK and STIBNITE FLASK. They have pretty much literal 100% uptime with the crit recharging, and they can each be used 3 times before needing to be recharged.

Sulphur in particular is VERY good, as it gives us lots of HP regen (which we already have a lot of) and it increases our damage by 40%. I am constantly at 400+ HP regenerated per second due to my innate regen and the Sulphur potion always being up.

Stibnite is really nice as well because it blinds the monsters AND increases our evasion rating. So jumping into the fray is no big deal since the monsters will often miss us (in addition to our weapon block, armour, evasion, and large HP pool).

I also use a Granite Flask as an insurance policy against crazy high physical damage monsters. You can use a third HP potion here if you are spiking more often or don't have the gear yet to keep the charges on your two HP pots.

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*** GEMS ***

Cleave [faster attacks, multi strike, melee physical]

Cleave 6L options: concentrated effect, added fire, power charge on critical, increased critical strikes. You can swap Concentrated Effect for Increased Area of Effect for faster clear speeds on content that you don't need the extra DPS for.

Leap Slam [faster attacks, fortify]

Whirling Blades [faster attacks, fortify, blood magic]

Cast When Damage Taken [immortal call, increased duration, flame golem]

Herald of Ash - no brainer for damage

Hatred - no brainer for damage

Abyssal Cry - for more explosions on large packs, works really well but you can use something else if you want

Vengeance and Riposte with two support gems - could sub these out for a curse if you want, I like the simplicity and free damage. Plus it incentivizes me to play like an idiot and take damage in melee, which is really fun in Hardcore (assuming you are built properly to not die when doing so!) ^_^

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This was a quick and dirty writeup of a simple and very effective build. Let me know if I left anything out and I will add things / update the post :)

What level of cwdt setup are you using?

What is your crit chance and life pool?

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patriklol wrote:

What level of cwdt setup are you using?

Level 7 (requires lvl 50)

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D_nasty wrote:

What is your crit chance and life pool?

28.26% mainhand and 36.13% offhand with 473% multiplier. Lifepool is 4954. Recently hit 7.99 attacks per second with quality Faster Attacks so it's quite a bit more critting than you might expect :)

Did you level with Cleave?
Enjoying the build so far :)

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drastikdreamz wrote:

Did you level with Cleave?
Enjoying the build so far :)

I actually leveled as Dual Wield Melee Splash, but realized Cleave worked even better at end game. Leveling with Cleave would probably better for the same reasons, haha :)

Glad you're enjoying the build!!!

Hey Metal! I LOVE your build! This is my first ever character and its fun being an idiot while staying alive so easily! I have issues with Izaro on Cruelty even though I'm in Act 2 Merciless. Do you have any tips for dealing with bosses in general?

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Worsma wrote:

Hey Metal! I LOVE your build! This is my first ever character and its fun being an idiot while staying alive so easily! I have issues with Izaro on Cruelty even though I'm in Act 2 Merciless. Do you have any tips for dealing with bosses in general?

I'm not him, but it might be worth making sure you have enough life and defenses. I like bringing mainly life flasks to Izaro since it can be rough to refill them. Perhaps something like swapping Herald of Ash for Arctic Armour would help for tough fights, since you stand still to cleave. And are your resists near maxed?

Hey.
Nice bild, I try it.

If change 2 swords on two-handed sword, how changes this bild ?

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apushkinz wrote:

Hey.
Nice bild, I try it.

If change 2 swords on two-handed sword, how changes this bild ?

I fiddled around and came up with THIS tree.

I chose Slayer ascendancy class. Taking Headsman and Brutal Fervour ascendacies (haven't played in a while so I hope you can take both). If you go Slayer taking the 2 Handed notable Executioner makes it counter intuitive so I went for teh sword nodes on the left at Marauder.

If you take Gladiator Ascendancy class you take Outmached & Outlast and Blood in the Eyes. You don't get the benefits that only work for 1h weapons but you do have massive bleeds and 30% more damage from frenzy charges. THIS is a Gladiator version.

If you take Champion just drop Bloodletting like THIS. For ascendancies you'd take Unstoppable Hero, First to Strike & Last to Fall, Inspirational, Conqueror.

Champion to me looks the worst, it has good raw stats but no extra mechanics. Gladiator is RNG damage oriented (frenzy charges, bleed). Slayer looks the best even though it gets the least amount of raw damage compared to the other two but it does have 50% reduced reflect damage and 20% increased radius among others.