I’ve been playing LE since 1.0 and VK has been my favorite mastery because it seems ideal for a typical Dark/Death Knight build. I wanted to:
use a 2H weapon
not rely on skills from other masteries
use Vitality & void damage to scale up damage over time and time rot
leverage VK’s echo mechanic as much as possible
rely on having high HP and leeching damage back to survive
Very quickly, and to my great disappointment, I realized that the echo mechanic and Time Rot provided very little return for skill/passive investments.
I ended up going into monos with a ravager build. It functioned well with some of the style/fantasy that I was looking for, if not a bit clunky, up until empowered monos where the damage and survival both took a nose dive. I’ve watched videos of other builds/classes that just melt bosses at much higher corruption while generating massive amounts of ward. And here I am fighting for my life for 5 minutes, at ~100 corruption.
Also running with a 2H feels like another disadvantage due to missing out on extra hits and stats/effects from a second slot. Might be dumb to restrict yourself but a lot of people want to have the Dark Knight fantasy that slaps mobs with a 2H axe/sword/mace. Hopefully the devs will send out some buffs in that department too.
I’m by no means an expert in this game, so maybe I’m just doing something very wrong…but I really wish they would buff the core mechanics. Let Vitality give more HP for VK. Echoes should be almost guaranteed and happen faster if I’m spending 16 passive points. Time Rot interactions are underwhelming and difficult to incorporate due to their positions in the tree. And please don’t force me to run around with a wand or staff, that’s not why I picked this class.
I feel like you are confused on what you want. You want a 2h so you can slap stuff but want to focus on damage over time and void spells. You can’t do both effectively. If you want to hit stuff hard with a 2h then forget timerot, you want erasing strike. And it feels great. If you want the void spells and dot then you probably want to go warpath and attack speed. There are lots of void dots including one that exists on a set of uniques so it’s definitely a build, but you want a fast weapon not necessarily a big one.
Lvl 77 with 900 HP? No Reduced Bonus damage taken from Critical strikes as a prefix on the weapon while wasting affixes in other places to couteract crit? Not using a Hollow Blade base? Bad bases with implicits that aaren’t doing anything for you? I don’t know but this looks all over the place and I would farm non emp monos to streamline my gear to have at least 1.5k hp (more better) cap my resists and work on the Reduced Bonus Damage Taken prefic on a Hollow Blade. Then go for big Bonk with crits or a fast attack ailment stacking build, both is not working out because beeing bad at 2 things is far worse then beeing good in one thing.
Spellmelee hybrid build seems pretty hard to pull off as a cycle starter, but the Unique Shadow Beacon Mace will enable it.
Im sure there also some ailment stacking build with multistrike, smite, healing hands tripleing your hits. Time Rot and Doom have limited stacks, but Future Strike doesnt.
Timerot exists to enable damage mechanics. yeah its a shame you cant use it as a damage source, but thats the nature of stack capped ailments unless they have really unique strong mechanics(curses, doom, plague etc)
As for echos tho, you are crazy.
There is tons of characters who dont scale void damage at all who go VK simply for the echos. Getting what is essentially 40% more attack/cast speed is a crazy good mechanic.
one thing to consider when it comes to echos most people dont speak about, its also a 40% chance to cast skills again which have cooldowns. You can echo voidcleave while its on cooldown, its a way to get more bang out of your cooldown skills as well. or to get that extra hit at no mana cost. Echos have tons of utility/damage.
I just want to use a 2H, doesn’t necessarily have to translate into big hits. Kind of like an Unholy Death Knight in WoW. Ideally, I’d use Void Cleave in my build for movement and Abyssal Echoes applicator, with AE/Ravager doing most of the damage but it doesn’t feel like it’s scaling.
Recently found out about items with Doom though, so if you have a cool build with that I’d love to see it.
Sorry build link was wrong, should be good now. With stacking as much Vit as I can though, I’m at only ~1700HP which still feels squishy even with crit immunity.
How is it doing on boss damage? Can you link?
Just found that mace, but can’t use it with Void Cleave due to its weapon restrictions. I also wanted to stay with the void abilities; I can change Smite into void but I don’t think that’s an option for HH.
I was under the impression that Future Strike isn’t very good so I haven’t tried it, have any build suggestions?
I’m okay with using it as a damage enabler, I just haven’t come across a very strong interaction that would justify the skill points, especially for the type of build I was going for. I’m all ears if you have suggestions.
Unfortunately echo doesn’t work for Void Cleave with Gravity’s Edge or Anomaly, so that’s already 2 of my 5 spells that don’t work with that mechanic. I’m not sure if echoes have any effect on Abyssal Echoes or Ravager that are cast via Void Cleave, can’t say that I’ve noticed any.
Also, 16 points in passives seems like a pretty steep cost for an extra 30% echo chance, especially when you consider some of the crazy stuff that other classes have in their trees.
Entropic blows in void cleave is 5% damage per stack of timerot per point up to 25%. at 12 stacks, thats a staggering 300% more damage if you have fully stacked timerot.
Warpath has a similar node, thats up to 15% per timerot.
or final hour in erasing strikes 100% more melee hit damage if they have 12 stacks of timerot.
thats nearly 2% more damage per point, its pretty decent. if we consider on average echos grant their chance in more damage(They pretty much do)
While not everything scale equally with echo chance. Echo chance is essentially a %more damage multiplier. Those 16 points have other useful stats as well.
Yeah I have no clue what a death knight is. All I’m saying is the purpose of 2handers is for big hits. Going for DoT build and wanting to use void cleave with a 2hander is not optimal and you will just be limiting yourself for no gains just so you can feel like some class in another game. There is a better way to use 2handers, and a better way to build for DoTs.
You would have to use Lunge and the Lunge helmet and get an additional free skill slot. Only using Void skills even as support skills is really limiting.
Future Strike has the highest base damage of all unlimited stacking ailments, but Void Abilities arent very multihit, youd have to branch out a lot.
