Small Talk Build Discussions

General
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I’ve been really active over the past couple days and have had fun chatting with everyone (even when arguing haha) so I figured I’d start a small talk thread about everyone’s favorite builds (current and historical). Try to sell the build and playstyle I guess? I already had a short discussion in another thread with F0lk and Ghoultek about our planned builds for after the reset.

Since it’s my thread I guess I’ll start.

My current favorite build is easily the Melee Falconer centered on Cinder Strike, Explosive Trap, and Acid Flask (fire convert). Cinder Strike applies Explosive Trap on melee hit and generates Oil Coating for more fire damage, health and mana, and creates Burning Daggers for more ignite stacks and fire damage. The explosive trap attaches on melee hits has a 100% chance to drop a new trap as long as there’s an enemy within 12 meters, shreds fire resistance and throws acid flasks on Detonation. I take the No Man’s Land node to throw my maximum number of traps and give it a Cooldown (to justify more Cinder Strikes). Acid Flask is procced by the traps and is converted to fire for ignite chance and fire resistance shredding causing my other abilities to do more damage. I bring Falconry and Specced it to, you guessed it, throw Acid Flasks! My little feathery B2 Bomber is great on bosses for that reason. It also buffs me and I mainly focused the rest of the spec into it’s active ability including kill threshold. Lastly is Smoke Bomb for defense. Leaving Acid Flasks off my bar for Shift.

If I could change anything about it, I’d give the Explosive Flask node in Cinder Strike the ability to scale with Acid Flasks tree and probably swap to melee Marksman (not Jelhkors, still with Cinder Strike) and replace Falconry with Detonating Arrow and proc that with Explosive Trap for more explosions and to detonate all my traps at once for even more flasks!

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I don’t have any current favourite as I am not playing right now, and probably won’t for along time.
But historically, I have a huge favourite, that I played in 0.8 in SSF, then re-created in 0.9 to reach lvl 100 HC: the (sadly a bit forgotten) Vinebear.
With some modifications, mostly due to systems/trees changes, it is based on Aschere’s amazing work:

Pretty much a one button build, so some people might not like that, but I love how all the skills are deeply inter-connected. Even the tiniest node is thought through, makes sense, and influences several skills at once.
You just jump around, Werebear form allows Maul to apply both Fury Leap, that in turn creates vines boosted by Spriggan Form tree, and Entangling Root, which helps a lot your vines and your Spriggan. Everything is weaved together.
Very resilient too, because, well, it’s a bear.

At this level of interaction between skills, theory-crafting is a form of art. I love this build, not just for the gameplay, but for the aesthetics of the concept.

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No. 1
Harvest Lich - Literally the build and theme that made me buy LE. When I saw that you can transform into a Reaper and Harvest your enemies with a Scythe that alone was enough for me to buy the game, no more questions asked. The build didn’t got any significant changes since I started playing in 0.7 (early access release). It has one of the earliest levels for having all mandatory skills. With level 7 you have both of your main skills already (Harvest + Bone Curse). It has one of the best gear progressions of any build I played, because even rare items can bring you into 200-300 corruption. With good exalted items you can scale it further.
It has a shitton of uniques that you can use, but none of them are mandatory. So the ceiling is very high. The sky is the limit kinda.
(Suloron’s Step, Boneclamour Barbute, Shattered Chains, Siphon of Anguish, Death’s Embrace, Omnis, Nihilis, Titan Heart).

I was made fun of a lot back in the day for loving this skill so much. Nobody really cared for the build.
When I created Death’s Embrace I was actually very surprised, that all of the sudden a few people showed interest in the build, which I find odd, because while the item does serve very high offensive power, it is not a pure BiS item that is mandatory to make the build work.

Nonthe less I was pretty happy that some other people showed interest.
It is not a crazy powerful build, but it is very fun to play, lots of active skills that you constantly use, decent dps and great burst (with Death Seal).
I play it with: Harvest, Bone Curse (self cast), Reaper Form (with Reap not sharing cooldown with Transplant), Transplant, Death Seal.

Using Transplant on cooldown for Frenzy and Haste uptime and Reap as movement skill. For regular echoing you can also use Transplant to jump into the midst of a mob pack.

Transplant + Reap as mobility makes this build feel super smooth and agile.

No. 2
Erasing Strike Void Knight

I played this in every iteration you can think of and all of them have their own little cool things. Melee with medium cooldown and a lot of filler spamming, Melee with super low cooldown without any other filler, Spellbased with 2H Staff or Shadow Beacon Unique and finally the latest version with the new 1.1 Uniques with Event Horizon and The Inevitble without cooldown.

No. 3
Lightning Lethal Mirage Flow Bladedancer with DW Fulgurite Shard.
4-5sec cooldown on Lethal Mirage with Shuriken spamming as filler.
One of the most rewarding and satisfying builds.

Using 5 skills in a row with the flow mechanic for a great payoff when Lethal Mirage quite literally deletes everything is very cool.
Killing bosses with a single combo sometimes.

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Skill points will be rough to include burning daggers since I assume you will be maxing the Oil coating stuff for acid flask.

Foot of the mountain is a great synergy since you will mostly be standing still for melee Cinderstrike and tons of dodge from Oil coat and smoke trap (Explo Trap).

I’m doing that as a Marksman with Dragonsong, although I dislike that Fire Detonating arrow is locked behind the No arming time node.

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I loved Vinebear! I made a cold variant back before they nerfed the rage gain by moving it to a unique amulet, I understand why they did it but it makes me sad that another Primalist build that I loved is effectively dead, though this one is still technically playable compared to my 0.8/0.9 Shaman

I really wanted to love this build when I tried Lich back in 0.8, I ended up basically playing it as a pseudo-Warlock with heavy emphasis on Spirit Plague though. Maybe I should try to revisit it after the refresh.

I have an Erasing Strike build in my build planners, haven’t tried it yet though. It seems like such a versatile skill and your many variants kind of prove it.

Flow is the one (technically more, lol) passive for Bladedancer that I just could not get comfortable with, I think it’s because I like to spam a single skill while weaving in other skills more than cycling through skills for a big payoff

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Not particularly! I mainly used Burning Daggers for ignite stacks so I didn’t bother trying to max it out and the Oil Coating I only went the bottom path for the Penetration and Health/Mana gain after 5 stacks. I wish I could have used the burning dagger points for the explosive flask nodes, but it’s just not worth it since it doesn’t scale/interact with Acid Flask

Yeah, I tried to see if I could plan out a melee Marksman for that synergy and it’s just rough lol. The passives are just too bow oriented and don’t leave enough meat for me to justify that one synergy. I’ll try looking at Bladedancer to see if I could make that work better, but I don’t think there’s any fire conversions off the top of my head

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Historically, I’ve always been more of a minion build fan. However, the two builds I had most fun with so far in LE weren’t minion based (or not really):

#1: channeled poison wandering spirits lich. It wasn’t especially powerful, I couldn’t make it work quite like I wanted to (life kept draining faster than I liked) but it was very fun running around with aura of decay and getting huge regen from spirits.

#2: retaliation forge guard: this was based on having a manifest armor and ring of shields retaliating damage. It was very slow (Lagon especially is awful for retaliation and would take me over 15 minutes to kill him), but it was almost immortal and could face tank everything due to 100% uptime of rebuke. Then 1.0 came along and rebuke was nerfed with a higher cooldown and the build died.

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I did a similar Lich build with Wandering Spirits, Spirit Plague, and Aura of Decay. The poison Stacking and plague spreading across the screen like wildfire were so satisfying to watch. Of course outside of Aura of Decay, that build works much better on Warlock now.

I hate when builds die because of nerfs or skill changes. I’m super salty about the Tempest Strike rework and Fire conversion on Tornado gutting my Shaman build. The only thing Tempest Strike needed was the ability to scale with attack speed! queue look at how they massacred my boy

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I don’t necessarily mind this, when it happens to OP builds. But FG was nowhere near OP and the build itself wasn’t either. Yes, it was mostly immortal, but it was so damn slow that it more than made up for it. I just like that playstyle, so I didn’t mind it. And yes, I was sad when it died.

But, for example, I didn’t mind much when VD/DD archmage build died around Heist with archmage changes. It was a really strong build and archmage was kinda out of control at the time.

So it really depends on the context of the nerf.

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Im still a rogue main, and i absolutely love bow classes in all rpg titles.
My current favorite build is still Hail of Arrows. That rotation based playstyle is just something else and very satisfying to play.
For Bladedancer i absolutely enjoyed Shadow Cascade with a simple Shift/Sync Strike combo.
I personally dont enjoy Falconer atm because its too busted and lacks build diversity imo. Whatever you try to build around, at the end the dmg always comes from the same sources. Tried Cinder Strike with falcon fists…only the bird is doing dmg.

People probably dont know that there was a time before rogue where i had to play different classes:)
So Holy Trail Paladin, Cold DoT Bear and Cold Skeli/Mage Necro were my favorite non rogue builds.

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That’s fair. I guess our two situations are in the “I don’t understand why you changed this” camp that makes it so heartbreaking. I wouldn’t mind if a build I threw together was op as hell and got nerfed because of it. I do mind when a build I made work despite everyone else hating the skill (tempest strike) gets gutted because the one aspect that people want changed (scale with attack speed) is ignored in favor of a complete rework with no replacement skill. Gathering Storm fills the “spammable melee”, but Tempest Strike was so unique and my elemental Aura Shaman is dead and gone and I need to accept that.

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My cold Marksman plans on using hail of Arrows but I’m not there yet, seems like I’ll enjoy it though!

I definitely don’t remember a time before Rogue personally, I think I started playing at the end of 0.7? I know I played 0.8

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With how I played it you still spamm one skill primarily and every 10 seconds you do a “full rotation”. So it’s a lot less stressful than it sounds at first.

Also Flow is really lenient, because using a duplicate skill or alternating between two skills does not cancel your flow counter, but you only have a 2 or 3 second windows before flow runs out. So what you could do is:
A B A B C A A A D A B E
As long as the time between each unique skill uses is not longer than the flow stack duration.

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Ohhhh! That does sound really lenient. I could probably make that work actually. Based on the wording I assumed repeat skills would reset the counter so I never bothered. Thanks for the information, I need to look into this.

Edit: question, does proccing a skill, like Shift using Shadow Cascade, add a stack of Flow for Shadow Cascade or only the one for Shift?

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Only directly used skills

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Torment Warlock is just so effortless to play. I am really enjoying it right now. Yes its overpowered but the minimal effort gameplay and profane veil for bosses just feels so good

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I love Zoo Necro in LE. I have played almost exclusively minion builds since Diablo 2. I played minions in D3, Grim Dawn, POE, D4. And LE necro has the best zoon minion experience I have had so far.

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I love my Warlock build. Just seeing dots spread across the screen is so beautiful

I’ve got to admit, I can’t stand pet builds in 99% of games and can only think of GW1 minion master as the exception. I’ve planned a Necromancer pet build but haven’t tried it yet. Could you try selling me on what you love about them. Maybe I just don’t get it lol

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Personally, I love the lazyness of it. Just let them go at the target while you only bother with evading attacks. And if you do a full zoo build in LE, you don’t even need to press any skills, or maybe just a movement skill, which you can use unspecced.

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The one I’ve planned uses Wraiths as an ability to spam (part of my “make a build for every Mastery using the Mastery Skill” efforts). Maybe I’ll do that for the refresh… So many options!

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