Looking for some build advice/feedback

Sentinel
1

Hello esteemed theorycrafters and min-maxers!

I’m playing around with a smite spam dark cleric (VK), and am looking for ways to optimize my build. Currently my clear speed is decent, and just beat void Harkon relatively easily. I’m kind of at a point now where I need to start building out my gear properly for “end-game”, though, since I’m now reaching the lvl 85 content.

My build planner (Dammit, you’re a hero!) is below:

There you can see all my gear and skill points spent up until now. This is what I’m wearing at the moment.

A few things:

  1. I’m playing SSF, so there are some items I’m hunting for specifically, that being the Forgotten Knight’s sword/amulet. Haven’t found either yet :frowning:

  2. Abyssal echoes keeps my void resist at 75% overcapped, so even though the planner shows 8%, I’m well over.

  3. I am ACTIVELY avoiding Sigils. I’ve played 3 sentinel characters in the last 2 months, all of which used it, and I just can’t do it anymore. I’m using Void Orb with the 60% global damage increase as a lazy man’s sigils (plus some other bonuses).

What I’m really looking to build up is my single target dps. AoE is taken care of… abyssal echoes is far more powerful than I’ve given it credit for. It wipes out any and all trash mobs with ease. Smite does fairly well against most trash “elite” mobs, but is fairly slow going against bosses (compared to, for example, the SS rogue I had last patch, or the shatterstrike mage and Rive VK I played before that). I know I won’t reach those kinds of numbers, but I’m looking for the optimal mix of stats to make the most of the single target damage from Smite. My actual stats are as follows:

Cast Speed: 130%
Spell Crit: 32%
Crit Multi: 273%
Increased DoT: 213%
Increased Spell Damage: 198%
Increased Void Damage: 675%
Block chance: 49%
Block Effectiveness: 35%
Armor 24%
Only resist not capped is physical (43%) and poison (8%)… working on it.
Endurance: 46%
Endurance Thresh: 202
Crit Avoidance: 114%
HP: 1290
HP Regen: 148
Movement: 68%
Mana: 115
Str: 12
Att: 12
Vit: 25

Those are pretty much the most salient stats I can think of. My questions are:

  1. It seems like my increased % damage is VERY high (I know optimally it’s around 400-500%, beyond that it hits diminishing returns). What would be the optimal way for me to spread that out? Shift to more crit or crit multi? More cast speed?

  2. I’m currently using the Void Damage/Void spell flat damage affix primarily. What would the optimal second affix be on chest, for example? Skill echo damage? I have 30% echo chance, I think. Not sure how the skill echo damage interacts. Does the 100% increase double the attack’s damage it’s based on, or does it just increase the damage pulling from my stats? So for example, say Smite hits for 5000. Would the echo be 10,000, or would it just change my increased damage from 675% to 775%? I’d appreciate some info on this.

  3. What would an optimal shift to defenses be? Where can I get the most bang for my buck, based on what I have right now?

  4. Are the “Increased damage of Smite” idols worth it? Or would I be better off getting something else for more damage/survivability? Right now I have 32%, 47%, 39%, so a total of 118% increased Smite damage. Is this calculated along with my 675% void damage (so it would be 793%) or is it multiplicative of that?

  5. Are there ways that I can tweak my skills around for better performance? For example, would it be better to switch out for Mana Efficiency with Void Skills idols, and spec for additional echoes in Abyssal Echo? Has anyone played around with this?

  6. Is it worth it to also use the Shadow Helm/Shadow Plate base items? It’s another (up to) 140% increased Void Damage, but my void damage is already pretty overkill. Would it be better to use the Solarum items for the Crit Avoidance, and then take it off of two of my other items for other defensive suffixes, like armor or Endurance? I’m leaning this way.

  7. Any other things you can see that I can tweak to improve performance?

Again, playing this SSF, so my gear is not exactly optimal, it’s just what I’ve found/gambled/crafted so far by lvl 81. I’ve had a bit of a bad luck streak too, especially trying to get the Forgotten Knight pieces.

Thank you in advance!!

2

That’s what I did the new echo bosses with. While the staff is nice, it does less damage than a well rolled rare staff due to the lower adaptive spell damage. You can swap out the Sigils of Hope for whatever else you want.

They fixed Smite’s Unbalanced Scale so that it doesn’t shotgun anymore, so you might want to possibly move out of that since your DO will be doing all the clear you need.

IMO, not taking the Dark Moon node (& all the ones behind it) in Smite allows you to take all of the cooldown reduction nodes so you have a DO cast every 1.2s & you can take all of the Abyssal Orb frequency nodes for maximum purple balls spammage. This helps with clear, single target damage & leech.

You’d have to do the maths yourself as to whether swapping some increased damage to cast speed would be better. My increased damage gets up to 762%.

I think it would be the latter. I’d probably go with Attunement (increased damage for your spells) or Strength (increased armour) as the second prefix.

The increased Smite damage idols are currently bugged & don’t work. :slight_smile: Personally I went for damage on DO cast, but damage is rarely an issue so you could go for something that improves your tankiness.

I’d certainly go for more echoes in the passive tree, but if you’re spamming Smite you shouldn’t have any mana issues, especially with a mana on smite affix on your gear.

I’d certainly use the Solarum chest & Winged helm as they will allow you to only need 1 crit avoidance affix to be capped. If you’re going for Endurance, I’d probably go all in & drop all your hp & put endurance on any slot you can.

If you can get the frailty on hit blessing from the Spirits of Fire monoltih that would free up another affix slot & ideally you’d get the endurance threshold blessing from Age of Winter & the void shred from Black Sun.

This would give you virtually capped resists but 720 endurance threshold (with the blessing):

If you don’t have the unique staff (& it is very rare), go for a caster weapon with cast speed, spell crit, chance to chill & chance to slow, either a staff or sceptre/shield.

3

The node on the voidknight tree confuses me:

Does it convert EVERYthing of Smite to Void?
The bolts, the fissure, all that procced stuff too?

I guess so because you all take the lightning conversion?

4

I’m not sure about whether the lightning is converted, but the initial hit & fissure are converted (the fissure I’m assuming since it’s graphic changes).

Conversion on gear/passives is applied after conversion in the skill.

5

If the bolts from unbalanced scale are lightning and not void the damage would be underwhelming i guess thats why i asked. I love the graphical style of that “batman” but my voidknight is only lvl 18 :smiley:

6

Apparently fissure does not convert at this time

You may want to double check for yourself under discord “ask the devs no ping” channel, as of this post the dev responded to player yesterday at 9:09PM EST confirming such.

7

Graphically you do a void hit with lightning conversion but I’m not sure if it’s actually void (now with tool tips we could probably find out). My guess it’s a void hit and it overrides lightning. But if you get it to lightning arch they are still lightning damage from what I gather.

8

The void conversion overrides the lightning conversion for the Smite but the Fissure would be fire & Lightning Bolts would be lightning. Though at least the lightning bolts would proc Future Strikes.

9

So isnt this bad, all you scale is% void?

Getting the huge base crit, crit multi and more base damage multi was my idea on paper for smite. Single target nuke …

10

The point in Fissure is probably better spent elsewhere, yes (though it is also 1 point). The Lightning Bolts are less clear, not only do they help with clear (which isn’t entirely needed to be fair), they do also proc Future Strikes, but you’re spending 4 points for that which you could otherwise spend lowering the health cost & getting more damage or more base crit.

11

The reason I don’t have fissure is actually more mana related, less damage. It costs an extra 10 mana, and with the insane cast speed (130%) it chews through mana like crazy since I’m not using shield throw to proc it. The lightning doesn’t convert to the best of my knowledge, but the hits will all hit the same target when I cast it on a single target, so even with just 200% spell damage increase, it’s not insubstantial and does add quite a bit to the single target dps.

12

Fissure has a 0.5s cooldown, so the the higher your cast speed the more non-Fissure-procing Smites you can get off thereby giving you back mana (from the prefix as well as the Time & Faith node). I’ve never had a mana problem with Fissure procs, even with Devouring Orb cast on cooldown & keeping 5 Sigils of Hope up, though I do also have an additional 8-10 mana on Smite prefix which does help. Dropping Fissure would be a good way to reduce your mana usage.

That was changed in 0.8.1.

1 Like
13

I am using the mana back on smite prefix on the helm (only a T3… helm fractured… sad), but abyssal echoes is actually quite mana hungry. I can stay mana neutral with it on auto-cast, but if I start throwing orb in there, I’ve actually had a few cases where I run dry on mana, which gets a bit awkward.

Which part was changed… the single target hits or the spell conversion?

14

The shotgunning, sorry for not being clear.

1 Like
15

Thank! Ok, I might look at pulling that out of there, then, and messing around with either upping crit or hit damage for more single target. Maybe some base damage.

Any thought on stat redistribution? As I said in my post, I feel like my increased void damage is a bit too high and will be hitting reduced returns at this point.

16

That would probably be in the build planners.

17

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.