Tips and guidance on a build

Hi,

I am looking to make a bludgeon/tank type of build mostly for pve.

Do you guys have any tips or advice on what skills to level up, when to lock them. What build I should use.

Best regards

Uldrich

 

Personally, I like crushing blow, knockdown, ground pound and break armor for active skills to use. Berserk can be used if you know you can handle the damage. How tanky are we talking here? As much tank as possible would be meteoric plate with meteoric heavy round shield. Take a bit of hit to tankyness with using a 2 hander but increase in damage. Even more increase in damage and less tanky with bronze plate.

Defensive stance will be a must, douse as well for those pesky fire mages. I don't know what the fizzle will be like for shield of ice in plate, but if you could use that as well you can start stacking up avoidance. Glancing blow and fortify defenses to really jack that avoidance up. If using a shield angles and redirection are very good boosts to defenses, maybe even deflect if you can fit it in. Life magic for some heavy healing and water for the soothing rain heals. If you go with the life magic gem your gear with diamonds.

Lets see what we can fit into one deck. Locked skills - Defensive stance, glancing blow, fortify defenses, if you can shield of ice, douse if you fighting many mages, healing grace, soothing rain, healing touch and bodyslam for a fast engage and cc. If your doing fine on heals with soothing rain and healing grace, and using a shield maybe deflect in place of healing touch. Or if all enemies are melee and you dont need bodyslam switch it for deflect if you using a shield. If your not using a shield you can also swap those skills for inner str. Unlocked skills - 5 ground pound, 3 knockdown, 3 crushing blow and 3 break armor. Stack all those on the one key you find most comfortable to use. Till you have ground pound to 80, you might have to use other skills to make sure you have no slugs. This is a 9 locked skills deck, so you need at least a 14 glyph minimum to not have any slugs.

Oh other passive skills, umm, when I log on later ill look and find out what will be helpful for that, just cant think of them all off the top of my head.

 

I want to sustain good amount of damage while being able to provide some moderate dps. I want to be able to enter a mine and not worry about dying all the time type of tank. And on what basis should I level the skills? All at once? Or one at a time?

 

The way I do leveling of skills is everything is on till 40, and once something hits 40, I turn it off till everything I want is 40. Then I go for 60, then 80, ect. When going beyond 40, you probably won't be able to have everything turned on at once, and even fewer at a time going beyond 60, and even fewer still going beyond 80. For the key skills that you will want 5 cards of like ground pound, even though it will hit 60 probably before other skills, I will leave it going to get that 5th card. To get a skill to 40 is only 4000-6000 exp approx, 60 is about 50-70k, and 80 is about 150-300k. Some skills like the train dex,str and int are really expensive. Just keep an eye on your pooled exp and try and keep it either going up a tiny bit or level, unless you have a surplus.

Now passive skills you will want for tank build. If you want to use a shield, angles and redirection are key, shield preservation will help your gear not need repair so often as well. Deflection and endurance will be key passives from the heavy armor tree. The base bludgeon combat skill is cheap, and will add to your damage at no increase in focus cost so its a must. the crusher and breaker passives from bludgeon will also increase your damage so those are good as well. The stunner is kinda meh, it can be one of the later skills to raise once you get it to 40 to open up crusher and breaker. Train str and dex will be key for you, but are expensive. Healthy and hightened awareness can be later skills to go past 40, your adventure level will get you more hp and focus, as well as str for hp and int for focus. Armor and weapons preservation will be helpful for needing less repair. Heavy lifter, well that is up to you if you want to do it. it is nice being able to carry more so you can stay out mining longer, but not a key ability for defense. Armor weak points is nice to add more dps without costing more focus. Inner calm from the focus tree can help with focus issues, but if you use 2 good foods, and get a good focus blessing for 1.5 combat focus regen, you probably wont have focus issues. I like to use dragon stew and either bear or venison surprise foods together when doing melee. Follow through can help if you have fizzle issues, and tranquility if you find you get interrupted often trying to cast. The skill level of the spell also helps fizzle some as well. Sympathy of stone and bulwark of earth from the earth tree are good passives for defense.

Now, if you going to use life magic, its important to know how attunement works. Attunement is the total amount of skill points you have in the tree divided by the number of skills the tree has. So if you have 550 points in the life tree, your life attunement before any gemmed gear will be 50 because life has 11 skills. You will need to open up all the skills and level them all, even though you might only use a few, just to make it so when you do use those few, they are more effective. Not all skills become more effective with attunement, like ice shield, but most do.

I hope this helps, if you have any questions, you can whisper Mac in game or PM me on the forums here. Play and have fun.

 

follow Mac's instructions then:

The best thing I can do is show you my many many long streaming videos. I am a tanky bludge/earth/life mage (this is the combo you want if you want bludge).

https://www.twitch.tv/2112starman/videos/all

 

Thank you very much guys, this is very helpfull!! I will be looking forward to applying these to my gameplay!! Answers a lot of my questions and clears my mind with the levelling and magic attunement! Thanks again guys.

Best Regards

Uldrich

 

No problem, and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.