Questions on Hammers! 2H

Been an air mage since forever. I love the air tree especially now that I have abandoned any notion PvP is for me (I love PvP but air mages cannot use Chaotic Feedback and air shield is useless against Torpid even with .1 transfer rate which seems silly to me but alas I am biased).

Anyhow it seems appropriate Robert wield a hammer so I am pouring xp into bludgeon.

Question: how best to do bludgeon well? I use light armor but can use heavy and still cast air spells with a 2h Hammer as my weapon. I love air shield for PvE so I use that so I need not heal. Bard spells keep my focus up for me. How can I improve my strength? I cannot use strength of earth, I need air emb for my air shield. I have good strength armor (Elrond is amazing) but what necklaces or belts are good for bludgeon? I am getting my stun passive up as well as my damage passive too.

Any help/bludgeon insights most appreciated. I really like playing with the hammer (though I miss the raw power from my air build, but I refuse to respec my air tree because it took me years to get it) but lack the insights to do it well. From Spellbinder stance, standing still and rapid firing lightning to moving, charged attacks and defense with the hammer is a big change. I would love any help to better understand physical damage play and bludgeon more specially. Thanks, stay safe and enjoy SOTA!

 

Hey Robert, glad I can answer your questions this time, I had a bit of experience in fighting high level mobs with hammers (A maul to be precise), so I can answer here!

First of all, the one thing you will notice on 2H bludgeon is the Strength Modifier, which is the highest of any weapons (I think Axes are High, while Mauls are Very High). This means that the higher your Strength, the better you will do. This means you need to push for as much of it as possible.

Bludgeon doesn't have an amazing crit modifier or crit chance, so most notions of dex should generally be ignored, but since you are using Air Shield, you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot a little, but this simply means no min-maxing for you. Because of this, I will shoot you the equivalent of a No Magic based build. (One little thing to note here, if you would be willing to sacrifice a little and go for spears/Halberds instead of hammers, you might actually have a very strong build with Air, so if that is something you can try, let me know, if not, keep on reading!)

So for Magicless Hammers :

Heavy Armor is a must, speced if you can, otherwise ignore Body Slam. Glancing Blow, BODY SLAM (The Longest stun in the game, but a bit gimped by your hammers, more details below), Inner Strength and Knights Grace (this one is to remove CC at a reduced focus cost than jumping).

Next you got Bludgeon. For this one, Since most skills generate some sort of crowd control, you could end up losing a lot of Crowd Control duration (But you know this, because of Air!) My suggestion in terms of skills are the following :
Break Armor & Break Weapon, these don't cause CC, will make you hit harder, and get hit for less.
Knockback, this one doesn't generate CC either, so it can be very strong
Berserk, at lvl 120 or 140 this can give you 40% extra weapon damage, this is nuts, at the cost of defense, but if you manage your CC's correctly you will never get hit.

The other ones I would suggest to play around and try to see what works, but like I said, since they generate CC, they will cancel your Body Slam. Obviously if you go for Bludgeon Spec or another spec than Heavy, Go for Crushing Blow and Ground Pound as well.

Bring your earth innates up as well if they aren't already, they are always useful

For the rest, Berserker's stance for even more strength, Parry (a must), Fortify Defenses to get even more avoidance, and as much strength as you can from gear, be it rings, belt, necklace, anything you don't already use, get strength on it. once again, bludgeons are only as strong as your strength is, nothing else plays a role in your hammer's power, or at least not to the extent of spears or bows.


Now, in terms of playstyle, here is what I generally do :

Aim for a long stun (For me, its body slam). I 6 stack that to keep the monsters down for 20+ seconds which gives tons of time for the cooldown to go down as well as make sure I can hit as much as possible. During the stun duration, I will set myself behind the enemy, and make sure my auto-attacks are whacking at it for free DPS, while I stack/charge my other damaging glyphs. While doing this, I also make sure to dynamically stack Savage Sonata, which will be cast at 5 stacks if I can reach it, or 4 stacks if it's about to drop. Another dynamic slot for my defensive buffs I mentioned (as well as off-hand attack while using dual wield), and then just push out as much damage as possible before I have to refresh my stun. Against Groups, I would go for defensive stance + Ground Pound instead, defensive stance assuring that I don't die from all the chip damage the hoard is doing, but against any single target, the above is what works best in my experience.

If you want, I could create a deck and get you a screenshot of how I would use them, so let me know for this as well.

And if you have any questions, go ahead, it might be confusing as I added things along the way as I thought about them, so I might have made a mess of this post, so if so, sorry about that!

 

There's quite a few different viable variations of bludgeon for PvE imo, but if you already have a ton of air skills and want to keep them, you might be able to get the most out of them with a pretty weird build. I think you can still double up on brittle rings, which gives a ton of +strength. If you're using air shield, the -hp is irrelevant. You could use some fustian pieces for +focus and what you lose in +weapon damage and str masterworks on armor you can largely compensate for with the rings. It'd be annoying to actually cast air shield, but if you're still air specced, it will last a really long time anyway. Not sure how well this would actually work in practice, but it might be fun to try.

 

This is a really smart idea, especially if he gets the Brittle Brawn Epic. By pushing Strength and Focus to their limits, allowing for a big air shield but a great amount of strength, hey could actually be a very strong Air Shield Bludgeonner! 400+ Strength would be great, although 500+ was insanely strong

 

Also important to note that spec makes a much bigger difference for bludgeon than the other 2 melee schools. Bludgeon with spec is pretty good, but bludgeon without spec is kind of weak relative to blades or pole arm without spec. +Stun length spec bonus on crushing blow in particular makes a huge difference, and the added effects on ground pound to also. You can still use it without spec, but it changes things a lot and makes you more dependent on other non-bludgeon skills for survival.

 

I don't use it much, but are you sure about this? I just tried it and it gives a double CC resistance

 

Unless it has a knockdown effect, but my knockback from push does not give any cc resistance, so it might be bugged on my end or yours?

 

Bludgeon knockback has cc because it also has a short stun. It's still pretty good though, at least for some things. It has the low focus cost of knockdown, but also surpasses crushing blow in damage at high level spec.

The knockback effect used to actually fire on trolls (without cc iirc) even though they were stun immune, but not anymore. Maybe it used to not be classified as a stun or something, but I'm not sure. In any case, against mobs that are stun immune, knockback becomes way better than crushing blow since it's so much cheaper. It can be pretty annoying against standard mobs though since you usually don't want to knock stuff out of your melee range. It makes more sense with pole arm since you have more range.