What's your Polearm build?

Can someone share their successful Polearm build? I know, melee is not in favor of many these days, but maybe someone decided to stick to Polearms and still enjoying them no matter what. I can understand that without magic there is no way Jose today, but what magic school do you like?

I am still in my mid 60s with a few skills around 80, and I can solo 5 skull areas, but I am no AoE cannon, that's for sure. I still watch with envy videos of people, who run around places and AoE everything to the ground, while still staying alive, is everyone still mostly using Air because of stuns etc?

 

I don't roll around with polearms, but they are getting a polish pass. However blades is stronk!

 

I don't know about 'successful' but here's what I do currently (from around adv lvl 65-75) with a halberd. I'm able to solo all 5 skull stuff without much fear of death unless I get really swarmed and am not paying enough attention to complete a tactical retreat. My philosophy is to use the halberd as the baseline damage while stacking magic glyphs to use when appropriate.

I have my main, passive polearm skill GM'd, and have spinning attack (high damage, aoe) and skewer (high damage, stun) locked at 80. Those are the only two pole arm skills I put in my deck now. For the rest I use chain lightning (high damage, aoe, stun), immolation (aoe, fire resistance), searing ray (good for undead, pulling enemies at distance), and assorted death magic for leech (death shield and death field for aoe against non-undead). I throw a couple of other misc things in there like 'ignite weapon' and 'earthquake'. This serves as a sort of all purpose deck that doesn't require much thought. It has some weaknesses:
-If I heavily load death magic, the undead become more troublesome because of resistance.
-I wear mostly chain with cloth gloves and still have about 75% fizzle with chain lightning. Working on the skill to lower fizzle, but if fires regularly enough to work.
-Eventually, I'll probably make more specialized decks and learn to swap them out appropriately. There's too many glyphs in this one to be really efficient, but like I say doesn't require a lot of thought.
-I usually run with a pet, so focus management is always an issue.

So, this is the functional, average joe, non-theory crafter build .

 

Do you fizzle 75% of the time or did you mean 75% success (25% fizzle). The number that's listed on the hotbar is the success chance, not the fizzle chance. The fizzle chance is listed in the skills window when you mouse-over the spell.

 

Yes, it's 75% success (I thought most people spoke in terms of success for fizzle); though, apparently that's going to be 60% chance next release for chain lightning.

 

My Polearm build I have built around AOE damage. So I wear full chainmail, full pole arm skill tree (All skills Currently GM in main skill and working on puncture), Full Fire skill tree with high immolation, ringe of fire and fireball and damage passive, Earth skills/spells that add str, in ice just to the ice fist for combos, heavy armor skill all the damage increase ones,

I just recently started training shields to start playing 1h pole arm and shields.
I really enjoy my build when I saw in the telethon Chris state that pole arms was the weakest it was kind of a suprise to me as I felt I did pretty well out in the wild so the increase / love to pole arms is gonna be awesome for me since I already enjoyed playing that way.

 

My first melee build was polearms, then switched to ranged. Wow what a difference.

I then built a dual wield blades build which feels like 3 to 4 times more DPS than polearms even though I can only hit 2 targets at once (3 with 2H sword) compared to 4 targets that 2H polearms can hit. I don't want to sound mean, but I have first hand experience that polearm DPS really in a bad place right now as Chris stated.

I hope they improve polearms soon, I prefer the style/feel of a big ole 2H hally.

 

The only melee builds I have played were 1h bludgeon with shield(tanky type class) and then the pole arms 1h and 2h and I always felt my polearms were better DPS so I am super stoked about it getting a bump it will just make me feel stronger