Lightning Werebear is fairly strong right now with guides from LizardIRL on Maxroll and Volca on Youtube, naturally I had to be hipster and try out phys version. This was also a good respec from a failed crit Swarmblade build and is kinda reminiscent of old school dual axe werebears.
Phys version has 2 main advantages over the lightning version
- Aspect of Panther is a global buff allowing Maul to deal decent damage
- % increased dmg from maelstorms actually doing work
There’s tons of variations possible for crit melee werebear some what I tried were:
Full Swipe focus(like most of the above builds)
Swipe+Maul hybrid (what I’m using)
Upheaval instead of Fury leap maul(
Even more crit multi focus (Suloron’s)
And multiple weapon choices such as Undisputed+Exalted crit chance Eagle wing axe, Katana + Eagle Wing axe for easier crit, etc.
Current build: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/DQ9XqPEA
In the end I settled for Katana + Doom star, Katana’s high attack speed offsets the slow mace which has higher flat damage and crit multi.
Siphon of Anguish is a perfect fit with its increased damage from Doom and the leech rate boosting the build’s already strong leech.
To get the most out of Maul, I grabbed all the more damage on its tree and the Werebear tree and also added Vaion’s Chariot, these boots are pretty solid and easily farmable.
I decided against the Pummel and Bash nodes as the tree is pretty streched and Stun is pretty unreliable IMO (I definitely feel all sources of more damage to stunned /frozen /immobilized /feared enemies should be reworked)
Warrior’s Entrance is currently bugged so I thought no point using it now. Might change this.
Exalted base crit on Katana is not needed and just allows me a bit of flex with gear, 10% base crit total from both weapons and crit chance from rings+gloves should be enough to hit +90% crit chance and amulet/idol/relic can also help hit 100%.
Plenty of upgrades pending such as
- better roll on crit avoid blessing to replace the idol
- crit multi + useful suffix on idols
- better helm with crit multi
- legendaries for the 2 unique slots(pretty common)
- empowered blessings for first two timelines
T4 Julra kill:
T4 Arena kills: TBA
Melee Werebear is fun, hopefully Swarmblade can be too someday. More sources of rage generation would be great for DoT transform builds or builds that don’t constantly crit (Relying on one amulet to solve rage gen is bad design IMO and limits builds)
