The armour shredder archer build

Acolyte
1

I was keen to see if armour shred can compete with DoT or crit. I’m only on low level monoliths so far, but it’s looking quite good at this stage.

Key item - Arek’s Bones weapon
Key interaction - The necromancer passive ‘aegisfall’ gives 200% armour shred on minion hit. The ideal Arek’s bones gives 200% increased armour shred effect and another 90% armour shred, so each minion hit shreds close to 600 armour. Then you can use bone curse for another 100% chance with 90% increased effect, so now we are close to 800 armour shredded with each minion hit.

Skills
Summon skeleton - take the archers and damage nodes
Summon wraith - I took the permanent wraiths for decent damage and a bit of AOE melee
Summon Golem - I used this as a primary defensive skill, with full taunt and health on hit, plus a bit of movespeed for minions.
Volatile Zombie - I’m not sure if the vomit counts as a hit, so I figured the maggots would give more armour shred than vomit
Bone curse - armour shred, slow, bone armour and explosion for a bit of AOE in dense packs

Passives
flat physical damage, physical penetration for skeletons and bow damage make your archers hit hard with physical damage. Lots of attack speed for minions makes the most use of the armour shred.

Defenses
Should scale well with armour and life regen.

Edit Testing
A single wraith without Arek’s bones equipped = 1.5K-2K per hit
With Arek’s bones equipped = 1.9-2.5K per hit
With Arek’s bones and bone curse = 2 - 2.8K per hit

It’s very difficult to see numbers when more minions are hitting the target dummy, but lots of minions does not increase damage exponentially. At level 63 archers appear to be hitting for 2-2.5K per shot, meaning 8 of them do about 20K DPS in total.
Hence, it appears to prove that armour shred is capped at 80% more damage.

It seems the main benefit of all this armour shred appears to be vs high armour targets (a few dozen hits changes them from 85% reduced to 80% more damage taken). It also ramps up much faster than DoT’s but has a lower maximum damage. The flat damage is easier to passive and gear for vs crit and DoT. It may yet have a role in multiplayer as a damage multiplier for crit builds…

3 Likes
2

There aren’t any “high armour” mobs and in order to get an 80% phys damage increase you need to stack (and maintain) -13k armour which with 800 per minion hit is 16.25 minion hits within a 4s duration. I’m not sure what the attack speed of skellie archers is but you’d have 9 of them so you’d “only” need them attacking 2x per second.

There is no “appears”, the devs have stated that the increased damage taken from negative armour is numerically identical to the reduced damage taken from positive armour which is capped at 85% phys/63.75% non-phys.

Also, that’s an awful lot of uniques on that build, some of which do nothing for it (Boulderfist, Isadora’s belt).

3

Just lazy use of the planner, not intended as an end game target. I was just interested in an easy to achieve armour value :speak_no_evil:

1 Like
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My math may be off but wouldnt it be 0.5 hits per second with 9 minions not 2 hits per second per minion

5

I don’t do mental arithmetic. I didn’t have excel open when I posted that.

6

So…

+5 boardman, shadow strikes again!

7

2 Likes
8

The irony being that I did the time dependent Schrodinger wave equation at uni many years ago… If you’d asked me ~20 years ago, I would have understood it. Though I’d have to google it now to explain it to you if you want.

9

Did the cat survive?

10

Yes.

And no.

1 Like
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