my duelist build guide, for starters, hope this helps

How do you run the auras efficiently/at all without intellect?

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GirlJader wrote:

How do you run the auras efficiently/at all without intellect?

Elementary my dear Wattson...if you take a good look at my gear set, you will notice that alot of my peices give me intellect. I try to itemize for some int where i can. At the moment i have almost 130 int, which allows me to use lvl 14 or 15 wrath and conductivity.

im sorry but theres some misinformation here that I feel that needs to be corrected especially if this is for new players.

Dex does not give you evasion, it gives a multiplier. every 1 point of dex you get 0.2% evasion, or every 5 points of dex you get 1% evasion.

since your gear has little to no evasion, and for whatever reason you have a ton of miss match pieces, getting iron reflexs wont do much good.

instead i would always stick with 1 gear type, and get it's respective booster. in this case I would have sticked with pure armor and avoid getting leather and steel nodes.

Are you sure the passive node that increases 10% of your elemental damage doesn't help much?

There's 6 of the nodes within reach. 60% in total which is equals to a "Weapon Elemental Damage" support gem, and that gem is known to help heaps.

Is it because that 6 points is considered to much to spend for you? I don't see anywhere better to spend it though, although the physical damage nodes might just help as much as the WED nodes since LS (lightning strike) converts 50% of your physical damage into lightning damage.

Anyone tested if the physical damage nodes increases as much damage as the WED nodes?

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DarkenDragon wrote:

im sorry but theres some misinformation here that I feel that needs to be corrected especially if this is for new players.

Dex does not give you evasion, it gives a multiplier. every 1 point of dex you get 0.2% evasion, or every 5 points of dex you get 1% evasion.

since your gear has little to no evasion, and for whatever reason you have a ton of miss match pieces, getting iron reflexs wont do much good.

instead i would always stick with 1 gear type, and get it's respective booster. in this case I would have sticked with pure armor and avoid getting leather and steel nodes.

So with dex giving evasion, i believe what happens here is that every 5 points of dex, your evasion rating (the flat number) increases by 1%. The proof of this is that without iron reflexes, my armor is barley above 3000. Once i put that point into iron reflexes, my armor shoots up to over 7000, and then grace puts it to 11000. Everytime you get anything that raises your evasion by a %, it directly influences your evasion rating stat on your character sheet. Be it from passives, or from dexterity.

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Are you sure the passive node that increases 10% of your elemental damage doesn't help much?

There's 6 of the nodes within reach. 60% in total which is equals to a "Weapon Elemental Damage" support gem, and that gem is known to help heaps.

Is it because that 6 points is considered to much to spend for you? I don't see anywhere better to spend it though, although the physical damage nodes might just help as much as the WED nodes since LS (lightning strike) converts 50% of your physical damage into lightning damage.

Anyone tested if the physical damage nodes increases as much damage as the WED nodes?

I have taken weapon elemental damage nodes like i said, each one increased my DPS by about 40 points. When i take something like cruel blade for instance, my DPS shoots up by over 150 points. I prefer taking the DPS passives because they are usually coupled with atk speed or accuracy, and the other thing is that getting a big DPS node, is about 18% increase, whereas elemental nodes are only a 10% increase. To each his own i suppose. I've tested both ways, and this way seems better to me.

so your telling me with base evasion + evasion bonuses + your dex will give you 4000 evasion

that sounds really fishy. lets look at some facts

at level 100 your base evasion rating is 353, 53 is what you start off with, you gain 3 per level. and you had the hood which was 348 so in total you'd have lets say 700 just to make it easy.

so in order for that amount to become 4000, you need a modifer of about 571%. your dex alone only provides 48, your passives are only giving you 40, and assuming that the armor bonuses applies, thats only another 40, so where are you getting your other 400% from?

plus this calculation is based off level 100.

also grace only gives 1500 evasion roughly, why not go for determination which gives 50% armor, if your armor was at 3000 then you'd get just the same as grace would plus if you further upgraded your armor, you'd get even more armor than grace would give.

but im sorry this just doesnt add up.

Sorry accidently double posted, stupid duplication token

I'm just strting to play duelist. Should I rush as fast as possible to Blood Magic?

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DarkenDragon wrote:

im sorry but theres some misinformation here that I feel that needs to be corrected especially if this is for new players.

Dex does not give you evasion, it gives a multiplier. every 1 point of dex you get 0.2% evasion, or every 5 points of dex you get 1% evasion.

since your gear has little to no evasion, and for whatever reason you have a ton of miss match pieces, getting iron reflexs wont do much good.

instead i would always stick with 1 gear type, and get it's respective booster. in this case I would have sticked with pure armor and avoid getting leather and steel nodes.

I have a character preview spreadsheet and have an accurate IR + Grace preview.

Leather and Steel is not bad at all. He simply gets 40% bonus to the evasion part of his armour (including the hybrid armour), and 40% bonus to the armour part. People diss L&S usually because it's 40% for 3 nodes instead of 50%.

If he had only taken on Steel Skin set, then the difference of armor rating between taking another Steel Skin set or L&S (50+52% vs 50 + 40%LS) would be quite small, on my spreadsheet in fact LS wins because he has some evasion on his gear plus the DEX bonus, but by a small margin (up to 1% no more).


Other facts from calculations:

1)

Ideally with IR you'd go for pure evasion chest and piece as this gives a slightly higher IR. I'm not very good at maths I just know my formula accurately reflects my character in game. I think the main reason is that the evasion part of your armor will get the additonal DEX evasion bonus in the formula before being converted to armor, and the "armor" part of your gear won't. That difference however is not huge. For example moving a 1000 armour chest to a 1000 evasion chest gains 1% reduction. So this is not something you have to worry about when choosing gear, better focus on the stats.

2)

Shield defences sucks. 20% incraesed defences, even with a 1500 armor shield gives a pityful increase. In my simulation with IR, level 18 Grace and 1500 armor shield, I start with 11629 armor rating (55% reduction). My % may be off since CB since the monster defense will be different, and it changes every level, but we're just looking at the effect here: WITHOUT 20% shield defences, I'm at 11328, WITH it I'm at 11629 ! (EDITED to reflect closer to his actual gear). Damage reduction changed by one percent or less. So the 4% blocking node, defences is really only good for the blocking. This was further commented on by Kripp a week ago when he was making a spreadsheet and found the shield defence bonus is at the end of the formula: it was pretty worthless with Determination.

3)

Though it's idealy better to use pure evasion with IR (assuming you have like 150+ DEX), in practice heavy armor will be easier to use on this build because it will have more red sockets; YOu could waste a lot of chroms on a pure evasion armor to get multiple red sockets..

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since your gear has little to no evasion, and for whatever reason you have a ton of miss match pieces, getting iron reflexs wont do much good.

You're correct that he doens't have 4000 evasion. And he wouldn't see it since he took Iron Reflexes.

However you are incorrect saying he doesn't benefit from IR. With say, 236 DEX he gets 47% evasion bonus, this is added up to LS, so he gets 87% of evasion multiplier for the evasion part on his armour, PLUS 1244 evasion from Grace. That's like putting an extra 1244 evasion pants that get converted to armor rating. Therefore he ends up at 11500 armor rating or more (he could get 13000+ with a good chest with 1000 armour for an additional 3% DR). (EDIT: Kripp got up to 25000+ with some auras, but can't use Blood Magic).

Putting his numbers in my calc, I have 618+1505 armor total, 348 evasion total, which is then multipled by 87% evasion bonus, and 142% armor bonus. His armor rating would be at ~11629 with level 18 Grace. Without Grace he would be sitting at 7537 and roughly -10% damage reduction. Without IR he would be sitting at 5438 armour and 1199 evasion.

IR is basically always helpful for a melee Duelist/Ranger even if you go heavily armour. Without Grace you still get a significant increase (from 5400+ to 7500+ is 36% to 44% reduction with monster damage of 800). And if you take Grace then obviously it's even better since the evasion bonus from Grace is significant. Then he can go easily from 7500 to 11000 armor rating, gaining another 10% reduction.

Hope this helps =)

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twigglypuff wrote:

Stun threshold is a biggie. Okay so. If you take unwavering stance/Iron reflexs, you dont need to worry about anything stun related, because you cannot be stunned.

I was referring to 15% Reduced Enemy Stun Threshold. That increases your ability to stun enemies right? I'm not 100% sure how it works, I was wondering if you do notice you stun enemies with the belt?

Otherwise I concur. In closed beta I found it very frustrating to play my melee Ranger endgame without Unwavering Stance. I'd do the Caves and run into a pack of archers and feel like I was unable to do anything. It felt really sluggish and it's very frustrating because you see the character animation going on but you can't seem to do any damage. I'm guessing I was being stunned a lot. It's extremely dangerous to be under fire like that. Now according to the mechanics I think if I had more health like 3K+ possibly I would have been stunned less? But even so, just because it makes the gameplay much smoother and fun, I'd take that passive.

With Unwavering Stance basically, especially in Default League it's a ton of fun, you can jump "man mode" into a pack of archers, even Chaos ones, to spam Lightning Strike in their faces, and know that your life leech wiill keep you alive. If you get stunned however, you will die.