This is a showcase for my Mirror Bolt Runemaster that stacks both Strength and Intelligence to get incredibly tanky with decent offenses.
This build is a work in progress but is currently around 1100-1200 corruption so I thought its good enough to showcase it as is (Mainly missing red rings and still level 98).
This build is inspired from @Valinov’s Mirror bolt runemaster that won the Builds of Power contest. After my old Runemaster got nerfed, I was looking into other setups and after getting dissapointed by Plasma orb I went looking through the old build competition videos and settled on Mirror bolt.
Aergon’s Mirror Bolt is a Runic Invocation that scales off Strength with Fundamental Criterion (mandatory unique for scaling RI damage) but it also has a Ward generation component that scales off Intelligence as well as scaling % increased damage with Intelligence like all other Invocations meaning it gets a lot from stacking both the stats. Intelligence and Strength also boost Ward and Armor respectively which are two defenses that stack well together.
However, Mirror bolt has VERY significant weaknesses as well.
- The main one is its 11 target/hit limit which makes it pretty bad at clearing.
- Where normally autotargeting would be seen as a benefit since you don’t have to aim, it becomes another weakness for Mirror bolt due to the hit limit as you cannot focus your full damage on high target enemies such as the Diamond matron sitting in the middle of a mob of spiders.
- The final hidden weakness is its range, the skill has a hidden range requirement that isn’t clearly defined anywhere(that I could find) which can cause it to reduce the number of ricochets or completely miss against highly mobile enemies such as the Skinny Harbinger.
Current build: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/BG1E6VjA
Red rings would be a big boost to defense with 20% DR but replacing my current rings will go from 102 Str to 86 Str which loses a lot of damage. A legendary red ring with T7 Strength would make up the difference but I have already missed on 2 rings (hit mana regen and poison res).
Build Pros:
- Big lifepool from amazing ward generation
- Extremely tanky with capped armor as well as DR
- High mobility with a less than 2 seconds Flame rush cooldown
- Solid single target damage (particularly if you manage to get max Aspirant’s Arrival + Copied scrolls off)
Build cons:
- Mediocre clear
- Unable to target specific high-risk enemies
- RNG damage (due to copied scrolls)
- Rotation based gameplay (can cause difficulty in hectic boss fights) although this build minimizes the clunkiness with Immutable order
- Flame rush gets stuck on terrain a lot!
*Bugs! (EHG pls fix!)
Gameplay Showcase - Aberroth, Orobyss, Boss+Harbinger kills, Echo clear and T4 Julra:
This build uses Immutable Order to force Invocation to cast Mirror Bolt based on the order of skills on your toolbar (Cold Cold Fire). This means Flame Rush will be the main way to proc Mirror bolt so around 60%+ cooldown recovery is required to bring Flame Rush’s cooldown below 2 seconds for the build to feel smooth. The Runemaster passive Ancient Inscriptions adds a decent amount and the rest can be got from belt and boots as well as rings (though those would ideally be Red rings).
Abacus Rod adds a surprising synergy here, while the added flat damage and cast speed from Numeromancy is a decent buff (although still worse damage than a regular wand with crit multi). The element conversion is actually pretty useful with the Attuned Recovery node since I have specialized Flame rush into a cold skill and Frost wall into a fire skill (ironically the inverse of their base types) I can swap between Fire and Cold Runebolt which are the best for this build to proc Numeromancy. Since the cold Flame rush procs both Invocation and Static Orb, it consumes a large amount of mana but also sets Runebolt to cold which gives 18 mana on hit with Attuned Recovery helping to recover mana much quicker. Casting a flame wall after a few cold bolts changes it to Fire Runebolt which generates health on hit with Attuned recovery which helps counter the health loss from Uhkeiros. I call this combo interaction ‘Hot N Cold’ and it can probably be used on other Invocation builds as well.
Although sadly, Abacus Rod bricks many nodes in the Runebolt skill tree these are the ones I noted:
- Frost spikes: This node does not convert shock chance to chill chance if Abacus rod is equipped.
https://imgur.com/a/KUWuHmU
My build really wants a source of Chance to chill on hit to make use of the global more damage to Chilled enemies from the Chilled touch buff. My plan was to use the Shock chance blessing from the Lagon timeline which will get converted to Chill on Runebolt and stay as Shock for Mirror bolt and Static orb hits which will allow me to keep constant Chill (for the slow and more damage from chilled touch) as well as Shock (for the stun chance and more armor against shocked enemies from Runeword Inferno) on bosses. However, I can’t since the node is bugged. I’m sure this probably means the other shock/ignite/chill conversion nodes are also bugged. - Efficient Experiment: The wording of this node “Directly casting Runebolt now has a chance to double cast if the previous cast was a different type” implies that it should work with any method of changing Runebolt’s element type. Abacus rod overwrites the randomness type selection of Efficient Experiment, however changing element type using Abacus rod does not qualify for the Double cast. This would probably only be a minor boost with a 20% chance to double cast but still annoying that its bugged.
But the biggest bug affecting this build is that Fundamental Criterion cannot be made into a legendary with Strength or Attunement as an Affix. This means every Strength and Attunement scaling invocation is missing out on upto 72% MORE DAMAGE compared to Dexterity scaling invocations which seems like an oversight.
This is because the Eternity Forge does not allow to combine a Sentinel/Primalist armor (the only ones that can roll strength) with Fundamental Criterion even if they do not have any class specific affixes. Which means Strength and Attunement scaling Invocations are pretty much getting screwed over right now compared to Dexterity Invocations.
