Melee "Spearhead" Build

bioshrike

So I'm contemplating a heavy weapons/celestial/archery build, which is not quite a tank, but more of a "rallying point" for the team. The build below isn't set in stone, but I do want to stick to heavy weapon and archery for the damaging attacks, and I don't want attacks that are non-physical, (so none of the fire/sonic/electrical/toxic attacks). I was thinking about replacing Skullcrusher with Vala's light, (and using a self targeting bind to cast it on myself, so *I* become the beacon of healing). Bulwark is a key spec for this build - I'd be in support role most of the time, but could switch to hybrid to increase my own defenses and draw more aggro. Please let me know what you think and if you have any ideas/input.


PowerHouse (Link to this build)

Name:

Archetype: Freeform

Super Stats:
Level 6: Endurance (Primary)
Level 10: Constitution (Secondary)
Level 15: Presence (Secondary)

Talents:
Level 1: The Hero
Level 6: Shrug It Off
Level 9: Boundless Reserves
Level 12: Prodigy
Level 15: Physical Conditioning
Level 18: Impressive Physique
Level 21: Bodybuilder

Powers:
Level 1: Bludgeon
Level 1: Cleave (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 6: Decimate (Nailed to the Ground)
Level 8: Aura of Radiant Protection (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 11: Conviction (Rank 2, Reverence)
Level 14: Eruption (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 17: Skullcrusher (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 20: Snap Shot (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 23: Storm of Arrows (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 26: Ascension
Level 29: Enrage (Endorphin Rush)
Level 32: Redemption
Level 35: Rebirth
Level 38: Unleashed Rage

Travel Powers:
Level 6: Ninja Leaves (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 35: Athletics

Specializations:
Endurance: Readiness (3/3)
Endurance: Kickback (2/2)
Endurance: Power Overwhelming (3/3)
Endurance: Hardened (2/2)
Protector: Fortified Gear (1/3)
Protector: Unrelenting (2/2)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Exhausting Strikes (2/2)
Protector: Resolute (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Elusive (2/2)
Warden: Upper Hand (2/3)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
Mastery: Warden Mastery (1/1)

xeiros

Primary Endurance is garbage. Defend your choice or choose a better one like Intelligence or Strength.

Enrage with no Strength? What?

Are you going to have loads of bonus healing on gear? If not, don't bother trying play a support build. Understand that Presence is to healing as Ego and Strength are to ranged and melee damage. That is to say, they don't account for much on their own. No compassion or stacked bonus healing is a poor foundation.

Why Con? You took none of the powers or advantages it scales with outside of Enrage's duration which is irrelevant , but then you didn't even support that properly either.

No AD? In fact, you have so many attacks I can guarantee your one rank 2 heal and Ascension won't save you from anything threatening. Most of your attack choices are terrible; I'd love to see you try to defend them. It was in theme is a lazy excuse.

Rebirth? Do plan to die often? Wait don't answer that. It's quite clear you do.

Ah I see the purpose of enrage now! It was all so you could use Unleashed Rage ... at rank one .... brilliant... clearly you have surpassed us all.

In conclusion this a terrible build full of awful choices none of which you have shown you are able to defend. Look if all you want to be is " in theme" then that's it. You're already a winner. It doesn't matter how horrible that build itself is when that's all you're trying to accomplish.

bioshrike

END provides excellent energy management in the form of kickback, plus even more HP, ups my energy equilibrium, and provides more damage in the form of additional offense. CON is simply for added survivability, (partially to make up for AoRP not being as strong as full defensive passives). PRE affects *any* healing I do, including my own, as well as threat generation.

Between eruption and skull crusher, I won't have a problem building up stacks of enrage. Rebirth is there because, yes, sometimes *everyone* dies, and I like to be prepared. I've built other tanks that can get the job done w/o any active defense, and only relying on conviction, so I'm not worried there.

xeiros, I thank you for your input, but suggest you work on your delivery, as it doesn't lend itself toward heavy consideration.

bluhman

The Endurance superstat does not really belong on a build like that. None of your big attacks are especially energy-heavy, and at most, you'd probably only need some side Endurance/Recovery statting via talents to get all the energy sustainability you need. In lieu of this, I highly recommend replacing the Endurance primary with something like Strength or Dexterity. If you're feeling really good about getting top-line equipment for your character, you could superstat Presence, stat very high in it, and take Compassion to get a comparably high damage boost from that form, while also gaining massive heal boosts.

For what you're trying to do, I'd suggest looking into Sentry and Sentinel trees. Sentinel's big sell is that it automatically heals everyone around you if you get the aura, but of course it doesn't have much else going for it. Sentry, on the other hand, can help make your heals stronger as you land criticals, gives single-target attacks more power, and can also sometimes heal nearby allies when you take damage.

Related to that, as a beacon, you're likely going to be spending most of the fight standing right next to the boss - not moving around. I'd try getting a circle (primal dominion or radiant protection are my suggestions), and thus drop the Unrelenting specialty from Protector. The inclusion of some ranged arrow moves in there(???) would back this thought process up.

bioshrike

Thanks for the input, bluhman, that's some stuff to consider.

Frankly, a big part of my choosing END as the primary superstat is that I like its specs. I find many other stats' spec trees to be disappointing.

I realize that STR or CON as a primary are the defaults for tanking, but I already have builds like that, and I'm going for something a bit different. I don't want to just be the guy who takes the hits, (which is why I included some archery attacks). And while END is certainly not the best at everything, it does, as I pointed out, improve offense, defense (through more HP), and other aspects of your character...

stmoth

what about primary Dex? Getting some crit chances in for the Sentry tree's abilities can be nice, plus with the dodge and avoidance from Dex and really good dodge/avoidance gear, would be easy to get a fair amount of dodging to go along with AoRP.

bluhman

Problem with Endurance's offensive layout is that it's actually really weak. The two big contenders with Endurance's primary include Power Overwhelming, and Outburst.

• Power Overwhelming applies extra offense score based on your superstats. The problem here is that offense score, on its own, does very little. Offense of around 400 will grant you maybe like 20-80 extra base damage on a big single-target tap, like haymaker. To add insult to injury, you also have The Best Defense from the Warden Tree - that alone will give you all the offense you'll need to really get maximal benefit from said stat.
• The other candidate, Outburst (which isn't used here), is mostly useful for builds that charge themselves to full power to let loose a huge AoE nuke burst. The damage boost is guaranteed, but is only allowed practically for a single attack thanks to a coinciding energy cost increase. Of course, your build doesn't feature a huge nuke, which makes sense as to why you didn't take Outburst, but the problem is that it's probably the best offensive ability that the Endurance spec gets.

Compare Endurance's bonuses to what you can get from Dexterity - Raising critical chances, dodge chances, severity - standard stuff, but the thing is that all these bonuses will apply to every aspect of what you're trying to make the character do - be sturdy enough to stand in the thick of a battle (using dodges), provide strong enough protection for allies (critical heals), and do enough damage to be useful in combat aside (critical damage). The difference, of course, is that the difference offered by this is quite noticeable.

The one problem you'll run into most likely if choosing Dexterity over Endurance is that Dex has no specs that improve energy management. Of course, I also find it hard to believe a build that uses Cleave, Snap Shot, and Storm of Arrows as its primary attacks will have severe energy issues.

bioshrike

TBH, I've "done" crit builds time and again, (and frankly I'm kinda annoyed how much emphasis both the spec trees and mods place on crits and how they allow anybody to get a good amount of crit even w/o Dex).

Regardless, I certainly appreciate the input. I wasn't aware that things like the bonus offense from the end spec hardly amounted to anything.

Is the Withstand spec any good? Does it help noticeably?

bluhman

All Withstand (and any crowd control resistance at all, really) does is makes holds last a shorter period of time. It requires some serious PRE statting/dedication to get it to 100% - which cuts the length of a hold in half.

Basically, not that great.

jonesing4

bioshrike wrote: »

xeiros, I thank you for your input, but suggest you work on your delivery, as it doesn't lend itself toward heavy consideration.

I've noticed this every time xeiros posts about a build. It always seems like the very idea of your build is personally and unforgivably insulting to him. Kinda funny, but really obnoxious.

selphea

Outburst is practically worthless as well. The 15% is additive and so subject to DR. That works out to roughly an extra Form stack.

It's possible to maintain indefinitely, e.g. Flashfire + Thermal Reverb + Dragon's Claw with primary End and secondary Dex, but the difference you'll see is like 1-2%. Maybe a high 79xx crit moving to low 80xx.

The 15% to healing is more noticeable, but still doesn't bridge the gap between End heal/sec vs Dex heal/sec with crits. Nice for BCR and other uncrittable heals though.

wimpazoid

I personally would (and have) design a heavy weapon/beastial enrage build without strength just so to make better use of my SS and raise the dps through crit potential.

Not having str isn't that bad, but not having a bit of crits could make it tedious on a build with a defensive/support passive. I also never found melee powers other than a few that's very demanding on energy when geared properly to require rec/end as and SS. Hence int has far greater utility here when used with cooldown redux gear.

You can try str/int/pre. In this combi, I would drop ascension for MSA and have a 3s spammable Conviction rather than a slightly boosted one further apart. Str provides substantial benefits to offense/defense as well as energy (on top of having ss int here, which makes UR easily affordable with MSA by having a ready pool without having to build up energy for it.). Something I like to do is have different builds using +crit strke and another with +healing. In your case, a good example will be hybrid/AoRP + crit strike. With int, you can use conviction often enough, such that you get enough healing on top of disorient + cleave, which is a consistent form of dps and healing. With cleave + endorphin rush, I would recommend Arc of Ruin over skullcrusher for its disorient and advantage for a 10% physical dmg resistance debuff.

You could also try support/AoRP + healing + vala's light for your pbaoe heals

Specializations:
Strength: Swole (2/3)
Strength: Physical Peak (3/3)
Strength: Brutality (2/2)
Strength: Overpower (3/3)
Protector: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Exhausting Strikes (2/2)
Protector: Resolute (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Slaughter (3/3)
Warden: Ruthless (2/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (2/3)
Mastery: Warden Mastery (1/1)

On the other hand, con/int/pre is also viable. You get more defensive bonuses out of it, and you now heal when you crit while attacking which requires +crit strike gear. This can be effective when compounded with cleave+endorphin rush.

Specializations:
Constitution: Unyielding (1/2)
Constitution: Tough (3/3)
Constitution: Resilient (2/2)
Constitution: Adrenaline Rush (2/2)
Constitution: Armored (2/2)
Protector: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Exhausting Strikes (2/2)
Protector: Resolute (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Slaughter (3/3)
Warden: Ruthless (2/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (2/3)
Mastery: Warden Mastery (1/1)

Both options grant some knock resistance, that prevents the rallying point turning into a mobile rag doll.

bioshrike

After hearing all your input, I think I'm gonna try the below build:


PowerHouse (Link to this build)

Name:

Archetype: Freeform

Super Stats:
Level 6: Dexterity (Primary)
Level 10: Strength (Secondary)
Level 15: Constitution (Secondary)

Talents:
Level 1: The Master
Level 6: Martial Focus
Level 9: Physical Conditioning
Level 12: Acrobat
Level 15: Finesse
Level 18: Impressive Physique
Level 21: Shrug It Off

Powers:
Level 1: Bludgeon
Level 1: Cleave (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 6: Decimate (Nailed to the Ground)
Level 8: Aura of Radiant Protection (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 11: Conviction (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 14: Eruption (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 17: Enrage (Endorphin Rush)
Level 20: Snap Shot (Rank 2, Crippling Challenge)
Level 23: Skullcrusher (Rank 2, Rank 3, Put Them Down)
Level 26: Storm of Arrows (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 29: Intensity
Level 32: Redemption
Level 35: Rebirth
Level 38: Unleashed Rage

Travel Powers:
Level 6: Teleportation (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 35: Athletics

Specializations:
Dexterity: Combat Training (3/3)
Dexterity: Gear Utilization (3/3)
Dexterity: Deadly Aim (3/3)
Dexterity: Expose Weakness (1/2)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Ruthless (2/2)
Warden: Elusive (2/2)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
Protector: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Protector: Unrelenting (2/2)
Protector: Bulwark (2/2)
Protector: Resolute (3/3)
Mastery: Dexterity Mastery (1/1)

wimpazoid

Due to the SS, I'm assuming this is hybrid role. This build is very likely to have problem fueling snapshot, storm or arrows and UR, without the increased recovery of support role. If you're taking dex, drop str for an energy stat or an energy unlock. Otherwise you'll be better off taking defiance.

stergiosman

Would you consider Str primary with con and int as an option? If so then AoPM would really help you boost stats, defense and heals more than AoRP plus allowing you to deal more damage.
Energy won't be w problem if you get MSA and put 2 int mods in your primaries.
Rest mod slots should go to con and gear for str in secondaries.
Rest mod slots should be cooldown reduction with Cd reduction gear , a heroic/legion's bp of agility with 1 or 2 gambler's and either a crit chance with +heal strength mods or a heal strength with crit chance mods in your primary offense gear.This setup allows you to have good survival ane heavy crits.
Hope it helps!XD