Just wanted to share the build I’ve been working on. Took some inspiration from Boardman21’s Bleeding Warpath Paladin. I created an alternative version which is focused on Ignite and Fire Damage instead of Bleed which also sacrifices mobility for tank. This build is made specifically for pushing Arena and is capable of going well beyond wave 500, which is pretty impressive for a mostly meele build.
You can find my build here:
Key component is Volcanus which offers a gigantic amount of leech. Wings of Argentus is also a nobrainer, however if you’re not that far into the game yet, a chest with high armor implicits, the same affixes as the helmet and both health suffixes would be a decent substitue.
You can juggle some passive points around a bit in order to cap your resistances. If you have good rolls on your amulet and boots, you should be resist capped with the passives I chose in the builder. If you need more points for resists, I suggest removing some points in Light of Rahyeh since movement speed is not as big of a priority in Arena.
Gameplay wise, well, spin to win! Also make sure to press Volatile Reversal every 4 seconds because this skill is BUSTED and offers an insane damage boost. Also make sure to maintain 4 stacks of Sigil of Hope, though most of that should come passively from kills, you don’t have to press the skill very often.
In general, Arena is very meele unfriendly so be ready to kite and dodge stuff at times, altough you have high endurance threshold and more than 8k armor buffed, after wave 300 or so the damage received becomes nasty.
Why Volcanus instead of Eye of Reen? You’d get more ignites but less leech & you certainly wouldn’t be able to leech off your ignites unless you used a Bleeding Heart.
Ignite deals Fire Damage, so the Volcanus leech applies. Your statement would only be true if Volcanus gave Leech on hit, but it does not, it is flat Fire leech. I tested it, it works. Bleeding Heart is horrible unless there is no other way to get leech on a build imo. because yellow Amulets are great for capping resists, give penetration (which is one of, if not the best dps stat in the game) and great implicits to chose from and Bleeding Heart only gives leech.
Volatile Reversal is busted because of the 2 debuff nodes, which effectively more than double the damage you deal to enemys hit. Also 20% AS which is a great stat for DoT on hit builds.
I know, which is why I said that swapping to Eye of Reen would give you more ignites but less leech & not being able to leech off ignites unless you used a Bleeding Heart.
My question was why Volcanus, I presume due to the fire leech.
Ah I see. Yeah, Eye of Reen in offhand + a well rolled yellow/exalted axe in the mainhand and using Bleeding Heart would work as well. Would also grant a lot more attack speed from Blademaster due to the axe equipped. Volcanus is pretty nice though, the 10% proc does good damage and, as far as I can tell, also applies stacks of ignite. Going with Bleeding Heart also requires to put more passive points into resists and giving up on the Penetration though, not sure if Eye of Reen would make up for that.
I was thinking of DW 2 Eye of Reens, though using a Raider Axe with a melee crit prefix would help with increasing your crit chance to get stacks of Reen’s Ire for the fire damage buff & you could get chill & ignite as suffixes on the axe.
Also, DW = 12% more damage taken which would make it much harder to push higher in arena. Very interesting build, was looking at possibly doing something like this myself. My only question is how are you sustaining mana? I see Warpath is 0 cost which is good but volatile reversal no longer restores mana so I would assume that your other skills would run you dry since there’s 0 mana recovery while warpathing, unless I’m missing something.
You only really need to spend mana on Sigils sometimes, though most of them are cast passively from killing enemies. Natural mana regeneration when kiting and not spinning is enough for me. I very rarely spend mana on Holy Aura, only to very quickly stack up a lot of ignite on a tough enemy and then run away while they tick, which is sometimes required on the later waves.
