test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Forums > Home› Class Forums›
My GWF CB4 Weekend
argantis
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
Long live the fighters!
OK now that I have my Dune reference out of the way let me start by saying that my entire BW3 and 4 playtime was spent on the Great Weapon Fighter. My first one made it to level 47 and this latest one made it to 50. The first thing that I had noticed it the graphic updates. I seemed to be wearing heavier and shiner stuff and that was definitely appreciated. The next thing I noticed is that 8K and some change of AD bought me 20 lower level ID scrolls and 146 higher level ID scrolls. I literally ID'ed every item I picked up, and I rolled greed on out of class stuff in dungeons so I got a lot of them. I had 76 left when the closed beta weekend ended. The next thing that I noticed is that non identified items are worth 1/10th of the identified value with all decimal values dropped off after rounding. All of those extra identified items netted me about 2 of the 25 gold I had earned at level 50. So for people that want to identify every item to gain in game gold, yeah don't bother. It is absolutely not worth the AD loss in scrolls. The last thing that I noticed is that I did not need to buy a single health potion.
In beta weekend three I had focused completely on offense. My ability points went into Strength and Dexterity, my feats were all offensive in nature, and my power selection was totally different as well. This time around I went a different route. The first mistake I made was not taking a Half-Orc for a maximum AoE damage build. For personal reasons my character has to be a human. Since Humans work well with a balanced or defensive build I decided to go that route instead. On character creation I took a 16 Strength, 16 Constitution, 12 Dexterity, 10 Wisdom, 10 Intelligence, and 10 Charisma. I put the +2 to any ability score bonus into Strength ti give me an 18, 16, 12, 10, 10, 10 array to start off with. At level 60 it will translate to a base 24, 22, 14, 12, 12, 12.
Since humans get a 3% defense bonus I decided to build my character around that as a base stat. There are a few things that work well with that in the feat selection.
Armor Specialization: Increases the effect of your armor class and defense by 5/10/15%. This is just amazing. Too good to pass up for me.
Steely Defense: Grants you Power equal to 4/8/12/16/20% of your Defense. This allows me to get some offense from stacking defense.
I also took a few feats centering around Constitution, Hit Points, and Survival.
Toughness: Increase your maximum hit points by 3/6/9%. This really is one that I can sacrifice in my next iteration of the build. I had a little over 20.4K of hit points at level 50 in some pretty unremarkable gear. That gave me a bonus of around 1.8K in hit points from this feat. I suspect that this feat pretty much works like the toughness feat in all other versions of DnD that I have played, both paper and computer. It basically allows you to take one extra, hard but not top boss damage, hit. I will likely put these three points towards Unstoppable Action the next time around.
Constitution Focus: Increases the effect of Constitution by 5/10/15%. I am not quite sure of the impact of this on my overall hit point total, but I will continue to take it because it effects Resistance Ignored, Hit Points, and Damage Resistance. It helps to buff a feature of my build that effects offense, survival, and defense.
Grit: Gain 1/2/3% in Temporary Hit Points when you are Healed buy a player power. (40 second cool down) I used this to buff my self heals from the Restoring Strike Encounter Power. This is another feat that I will likely ditch in live. It helped, but the bonus healing amounted to 600 or so temporary hit points every 40 seconds. At level 50 it was not even saving me an 8K health potion in fights. Considering that it only happens one to three times on an elite pack pull, it may actually come close to saving you one potion on a boss fight. Not really worth it for me. These points will fill out Unstoppable Action in live and give me one extra to put into Ubiquitous Shield or Devastating Critical.
My remaining feat selection was completely in offense.
Disciple of Strength: Increases the damage bonus strength gives you by 2/4/6%. This took a huge hit from beta three when it was 5/10/15%. Why they did that is beyond me. If it is not changed back or made better for live I will likely pass on this selection. The three points will likely go into Devastating Critical or Weapon Mastery.
Endless Assault: Your encounters deal 2/4/6% more damage. Since I use Not So Fast, Roar, and Restoring Strike this has a lot of appeal to me. I will likely use Daring Shout in live to mitigate damage instead of the lame heals of Restoring Strike that require feats to still be unimpressive.
That was it for Heroic Feats, however my entire paragon path focused on offense. Everything that I took the the Destroyer tree was about buffing Weapon Master's Strike, Reaping Strike, damage in general.
Great Weapon Focus: Increase the damage of your At-Will Powers 2/4/6/8/10%. This was a must have for me.
Staying Power: Weapon Master's Strike also reduces your target Mitigation to your Encounter Powers 2/4/6/8/10%. Another must have for me.
Executioner's Style: Increase the damage of Reaping Strike when hitting a single target by 5/10/15/20/25%. This made my Reaping Strike a real beast on those bosses that like to splat red around them in solo play. In group play it made it nasty from combat advantage. I would not use Reaping Strike when a lot of movement was required. I needed to refresh the debuff from Weapon Master's Strike too in order for this to do bonus damage. This really turned Reaping Strike into my default AWP. In solo play I would sometimes debuff the mobs then either sprint back and charge up Reaping Strike or use WMS, Roar, Reaping Strike as a combo. This allowed me to charge up the Reaping Strike as the mobs walked back into me. Obviously that only works for melee but there are enough Ogres and Trolls around among other things to make this a good tactic. On the bosses with the red splats, I would run out of the red, turn and begin to charge up my Reaping Strike. The key is to not over run the red too much. I would inch back up as they release their AoE damage and then hit them just afterwards. Some charger mobs can be a pain and this will not work unless you get the timing perfect.
Focused Destroyer: Destroyer now has a 5/10/15/20/25% chance to grant a stack when hitting any number of targets. This allowed my damage to scale up on fights with less than three targets to hit.
Destroyer's Purpose: You now gain determination by dealing damage, and Unstoppable also increases your encounter power damage by 10%. This is the big finale in the paragon feat tree that makes it all worth it. The synergy it adds to give you even more damage is just filthy good.
I already mentioned my encounter powers above. They focus on AoE damage, determination gain, mitigation, and an interrupt / push back.
My two At-Will choices can be guessed as well. Weapon Master's Strike, which is not so good unless you used the paragon feats to compliment it, and Reaping Strike, which once again gets better with Weapon Master's Strike and a paragon feat as well. I may or may not use Sure Strike as a starter only power. This build obsoleted Wicked Strike which will be the main damage power of many other builds.
My Daily Powers pretty much are Slam, Slam, and some more Slam. I will take Crescendo in live for some massive single target damage and stun options, but Slam is just amazing. It can help build determination very fast once you fill out your destroyer paragon tree. Prior to getting that I would use it simultaneously with a full determination bar to get a big damage boost. Later on thought I found myself cycling it and Unstoppable to feed off of each other, which really works nice if you take Unstoppable Action in the first heroic feat tier. Which is why that will be a feature of my build in live over some of my beta choices.
I also took every passive power that I could which gave me the following:
Detroyer: A buff to AoE damage that stacks 2% to damage when you hit three targets with a single attack. Stacks up to 10% with rank three. Also there is that paragon feat up above that I took that allows it to stack on a single target.
Bravery: Increased me deflect and run speed. A must have for me. Combat in this game is all about movement plus I just love thing that add to multiple facets of a character. This allowed me to focus on deflection as a secondary defender type of stat. I should note though that I did place Power in front of it and defense in order to help out my damage. My stat priority was Power > Defense > Deflection. I still have to sort out Armor Penetration and Critical but they definitely will be an afterthought in my build.
Steadfast Determination - PAS: Allows you to gain determination while in combat. I took this because more determination is always good! However I question if the amount you gain is really worth it. In the end I felt that our tab mechanic is so powerful that even a little goes a long way.
Weapon Master: 7.5% Critical chance is nothing to shrug at, even in offensive builds. However I use it to offset some of the loss in stat priority and build choice.
Steel Blitz: This is part of our Paragon Path from Swordmaster. An extra hit can proc off of AoE attacks. Whats not to love about that? Well for PvE AoE damage anyways. This may be one I sacrifice down the road but it is not likely since I cannot see anything better to take. Much like Steadfast Determination, I felt like a little of something is better than an unused power.
Steel Defense: Become immune to damage for 5 seconds after activating a Daily Power. Amazing synergy with Slam, enough said.
Steel Grace: Control effect reduction. This is nice but I am not sure that I will take it. Normally I am of a mind to max out all passive abilities but this one just might get a pass by me for now. If I do go into PvP this will be a must have at max rank though and I think I will find room for it in my live build.
Well there you have it, the meat of my build. There is plenty of power points to play around with encounters and such. I might do some PvP load outs that focus on single target damage like Lunge or a knockdown effect like Takedown. I may also go with movement, damage and control powers like Savage Advance, Avalanche of Steel or Mighty Leap. The build at its base is very dependent on using Weapon Master's Strike to debuff along with fast encounter power burst AoE and determination gain. Reaping Strike really is a main feature of the build and does pretty much unmatched damage. Only the most powerful daily powers will beat it out and perhaps the Lunge encounter power on a single target. But the damage and utility of AoE or single target really make the movement trade off worth while. One thing that I wish they would change is that if you have it fully charged and use an encounter or daily power it would go off prior to the encounter or daily. Instead it overwrites your Reaping Strike so it takes some discipline to not face roll the keyboard.
Well I hope this helps people out, in at least providing some examples of a synergy in the build between paragon path, powers, and feat selection. A lot of the same principles could be applied to a pure offensive build. Ultimately I feel like the class offers a lot to those who choose to utilize it to it's fullest potential. IMO going all offense ignores some serious synergies and people would do better to wait for a Barbarian Primal Striker if they are looking for that kind of thing. I really do not think that anyone will surpass them in damage, including rogues. Their ability to do single target and AoE damage is amazing. Though they are a lot more squishy than a Great Weapon Fighter. I just throw this out there as a caution, I am not telling anyone what or how to play. I am just concerned about the misunderstanding of the class. In 4e every fighter is a defender, and there are better options for a plate damage class. Even the Avenging Paladin will make many offensive only builds green with envy should they enter the game down the road. I am just saying that if you are in the GWF for massive damage only then down the road you need to be ready to change classes.
OK now that I have my Dune reference out of the way let me start by saying that my entire BW3 and 4 playtime was spent on the Great Weapon Fighter. My first one made it to level 47 and this latest one made it to 50. The first thing that I had noticed it the graphic updates. I seemed to be wearing heavier and shiner stuff and that was definitely appreciated. The next thing I noticed is that 8K and some change of AD bought me 20 lower level ID scrolls and 146 higher level ID scrolls. I literally ID'ed every item I picked up, and I rolled greed on out of class stuff in dungeons so I got a lot of them. I had 76 left when the closed beta weekend ended. The next thing that I noticed is that non identified items are worth 1/10th of the identified value with all decimal values dropped off after rounding. All of those extra identified items netted me about 2 of the 25 gold I had earned at level 50. So for people that want to identify every item to gain in game gold, yeah don't bother. It is absolutely not worth the AD loss in scrolls. The last thing that I noticed is that I did not need to buy a single health potion.
In beta weekend three I had focused completely on offense. My ability points went into Strength and Dexterity, my feats were all offensive in nature, and my power selection was totally different as well. This time around I went a different route. The first mistake I made was not taking a Half-Orc for a maximum AoE damage build. For personal reasons my character has to be a human. Since Humans work well with a balanced or defensive build I decided to go that route instead. On character creation I took a 16 Strength, 16 Constitution, 12 Dexterity, 10 Wisdom, 10 Intelligence, and 10 Charisma. I put the +2 to any ability score bonus into Strength ti give me an 18, 16, 12, 10, 10, 10 array to start off with. At level 60 it will translate to a base 24, 22, 14, 12, 12, 12.
Since humans get a 3% defense bonus I decided to build my character around that as a base stat. There are a few things that work well with that in the feat selection.
Armor Specialization: Increases the effect of your armor class and defense by 5/10/15%. This is just amazing. Too good to pass up for me.
Steely Defense: Grants you Power equal to 4/8/12/16/20% of your Defense. This allows me to get some offense from stacking defense.
I also took a few feats centering around Constitution, Hit Points, and Survival.
Toughness: Increase your maximum hit points by 3/6/9%. This really is one that I can sacrifice in my next iteration of the build. I had a little over 20.4K of hit points at level 50 in some pretty unremarkable gear. That gave me a bonus of around 1.8K in hit points from this feat. I suspect that this feat pretty much works like the toughness feat in all other versions of DnD that I have played, both paper and computer. It basically allows you to take one extra, hard but not top boss damage, hit. I will likely put these three points towards Unstoppable Action the next time around.
Constitution Focus: Increases the effect of Constitution by 5/10/15%. I am not quite sure of the impact of this on my overall hit point total, but I will continue to take it because it effects Resistance Ignored, Hit Points, and Damage Resistance. It helps to buff a feature of my build that effects offense, survival, and defense.
Grit: Gain 1/2/3% in Temporary Hit Points when you are Healed buy a player power. (40 second cool down) I used this to buff my self heals from the Restoring Strike Encounter Power. This is another feat that I will likely ditch in live. It helped, but the bonus healing amounted to 600 or so temporary hit points every 40 seconds. At level 50 it was not even saving me an 8K health potion in fights. Considering that it only happens one to three times on an elite pack pull, it may actually come close to saving you one potion on a boss fight. Not really worth it for me. These points will fill out Unstoppable Action in live and give me one extra to put into Ubiquitous Shield or Devastating Critical.
My remaining feat selection was completely in offense.
Disciple of Strength: Increases the damage bonus strength gives you by 2/4/6%. This took a huge hit from beta three when it was 5/10/15%. Why they did that is beyond me. If it is not changed back or made better for live I will likely pass on this selection. The three points will likely go into Devastating Critical or Weapon Mastery.
Endless Assault: Your encounters deal 2/4/6% more damage. Since I use Not So Fast, Roar, and Restoring Strike this has a lot of appeal to me. I will likely use Daring Shout in live to mitigate damage instead of the lame heals of Restoring Strike that require feats to still be unimpressive.
That was it for Heroic Feats, however my entire paragon path focused on offense. Everything that I took the the Destroyer tree was about buffing Weapon Master's Strike, Reaping Strike, damage in general.
Great Weapon Focus: Increase the damage of your At-Will Powers 2/4/6/8/10%. This was a must have for me.
Staying Power: Weapon Master's Strike also reduces your target Mitigation to your Encounter Powers 2/4/6/8/10%. Another must have for me.
Executioner's Style: Increase the damage of Reaping Strike when hitting a single target by 5/10/15/20/25%. This made my Reaping Strike a real beast on those bosses that like to splat red around them in solo play. In group play it made it nasty from combat advantage. I would not use Reaping Strike when a lot of movement was required. I needed to refresh the debuff from Weapon Master's Strike too in order for this to do bonus damage. This really turned Reaping Strike into my default AWP. In solo play I would sometimes debuff the mobs then either sprint back and charge up Reaping Strike or use WMS, Roar, Reaping Strike as a combo. This allowed me to charge up the Reaping Strike as the mobs walked back into me. Obviously that only works for melee but there are enough Ogres and Trolls around among other things to make this a good tactic. On the bosses with the red splats, I would run out of the red, turn and begin to charge up my Reaping Strike. The key is to not over run the red too much. I would inch back up as they release their AoE damage and then hit them just afterwards. Some charger mobs can be a pain and this will not work unless you get the timing perfect.
Focused Destroyer: Destroyer now has a 5/10/15/20/25% chance to grant a stack when hitting any number of targets. This allowed my damage to scale up on fights with less than three targets to hit.
Destroyer's Purpose: You now gain determination by dealing damage, and Unstoppable also increases your encounter power damage by 10%. This is the big finale in the paragon feat tree that makes it all worth it. The synergy it adds to give you even more damage is just filthy good.
I already mentioned my encounter powers above. They focus on AoE damage, determination gain, mitigation, and an interrupt / push back.
My two At-Will choices can be guessed as well. Weapon Master's Strike, which is not so good unless you used the paragon feats to compliment it, and Reaping Strike, which once again gets better with Weapon Master's Strike and a paragon feat as well. I may or may not use Sure Strike as a starter only power. This build obsoleted Wicked Strike which will be the main damage power of many other builds.
My Daily Powers pretty much are Slam, Slam, and some more Slam. I will take Crescendo in live for some massive single target damage and stun options, but Slam is just amazing. It can help build determination very fast once you fill out your destroyer paragon tree. Prior to getting that I would use it simultaneously with a full determination bar to get a big damage boost. Later on thought I found myself cycling it and Unstoppable to feed off of each other, which really works nice if you take Unstoppable Action in the first heroic feat tier. Which is why that will be a feature of my build in live over some of my beta choices.
I also took every passive power that I could which gave me the following:
Detroyer: A buff to AoE damage that stacks 2% to damage when you hit three targets with a single attack. Stacks up to 10% with rank three. Also there is that paragon feat up above that I took that allows it to stack on a single target.
Bravery: Increased me deflect and run speed. A must have for me. Combat in this game is all about movement plus I just love thing that add to multiple facets of a character. This allowed me to focus on deflection as a secondary defender type of stat. I should note though that I did place Power in front of it and defense in order to help out my damage. My stat priority was Power > Defense > Deflection. I still have to sort out Armor Penetration and Critical but they definitely will be an afterthought in my build.
Steadfast Determination - PAS: Allows you to gain determination while in combat. I took this because more determination is always good! However I question if the amount you gain is really worth it. In the end I felt that our tab mechanic is so powerful that even a little goes a long way.
Weapon Master: 7.5% Critical chance is nothing to shrug at, even in offensive builds. However I use it to offset some of the loss in stat priority and build choice.
Steel Blitz: This is part of our Paragon Path from Swordmaster. An extra hit can proc off of AoE attacks. Whats not to love about that? Well for PvE AoE damage anyways. This may be one I sacrifice down the road but it is not likely since I cannot see anything better to take. Much like Steadfast Determination, I felt like a little of something is better than an unused power.
Steel Defense: Become immune to damage for 5 seconds after activating a Daily Power. Amazing synergy with Slam, enough said.
Steel Grace: Control effect reduction. This is nice but I am not sure that I will take it. Normally I am of a mind to max out all passive abilities but this one just might get a pass by me for now. If I do go into PvP this will be a must have at max rank though and I think I will find room for it in my live build.
Well there you have it, the meat of my build. There is plenty of power points to play around with encounters and such. I might do some PvP load outs that focus on single target damage like Lunge or a knockdown effect like Takedown. I may also go with movement, damage and control powers like Savage Advance, Avalanche of Steel or Mighty Leap. The build at its base is very dependent on using Weapon Master's Strike to debuff along with fast encounter power burst AoE and determination gain. Reaping Strike really is a main feature of the build and does pretty much unmatched damage. Only the most powerful daily powers will beat it out and perhaps the Lunge encounter power on a single target. But the damage and utility of AoE or single target really make the movement trade off worth while. One thing that I wish they would change is that if you have it fully charged and use an encounter or daily power it would go off prior to the encounter or daily. Instead it overwrites your Reaping Strike so it takes some discipline to not face roll the keyboard.
Well I hope this helps people out, in at least providing some examples of a synergy in the build between paragon path, powers, and feat selection. A lot of the same principles could be applied to a pure offensive build. Ultimately I feel like the class offers a lot to those who choose to utilize it to it's fullest potential. IMO going all offense ignores some serious synergies and people would do better to wait for a Barbarian Primal Striker if they are looking for that kind of thing. I really do not think that anyone will surpass them in damage, including rogues. Their ability to do single target and AoE damage is amazing. Though they are a lot more squishy than a Great Weapon Fighter. I just throw this out there as a caution, I am not telling anyone what or how to play. I am just concerned about the misunderstanding of the class. In 4e every fighter is a defender, and there are better options for a plate damage class. Even the Avenging Paladin will make many offensive only builds green with envy should they enter the game down the road. I am just saying that if you are in the GWF for massive damage only then down the road you need to be ready to change classes.
Post edited by argantis on
0
Comments
The Instigator paragon is very PvP/DPS oriented and is a bit of a balanced build for that. It also features spinning strike and wicked strike. It has no real threat mechanics though. So I may adjust out of that build for live but I think the synergy I used in paragon with just some more offense focus in the race, ability, and heroic feat choices would do quite well for an all offense build.
Yeah, they need to get the other paragons in so WMS is the best At-Will for a Destroyer, Wicked Strike for an Instigator, and Sure Strike for a Sentinel and we all have Reaping Strike as our second At-Will.