General Strategy for Min/Maxing

[sovietxrobot]

I am interested to hear how people are min-maxing there builds. I made it to level 8 on hard, with great difficulty, but I've hit a wall here.

[Keenfire]

Personally I think its all about mobility. All of my characters but the druid can either jump, leap, or teleport. I too play it on hard and I found the game to be hard at first until I got the hang of it and geared my characters out a bit, but now I might as well be playing on easy.

-Kane (full on tank + party heals) -- Also his stone wall can make or break your fights, there is
nothing better than blocking off half the map to watch the enemies sit there while you beat their
friends up.

-Maeve (full speed autoattacking goddess) With autoattack build you can use the fire arrow +
earth blessing from the druid and you got yourself a nasty combo.

-Aeric (heals and summon ent to use as an off tank)

-Whisper (massive dps glass cannon, mastery maxed out with over 200% skill power meteor can
pretty much 1 shot bosses. All of my gear on her has skill power increase and I maxed out mastery. Only issue with her is that a lot of high end gear for mages take away from health regeneration. So make sure you mix some health regen stats in there to keep her alive.

Those are my favorite to use personally. Of course I'll switch characters out as the need arises, but for the most part there is no need to switch any of these guys out because they synergize so well together. I'm sure this is more than you asked for..hope this helps.

[sovietxrobot]

Thanks for the reply. Thats pretty similar to what I have been doing, except Boron instead of Whisper. I stacked armor penetration and as much DPS as I could muster. But I'm not getting anything close to the DPS other people are mentioning, so I must be doing something wrong.

[Keenfire]

Originally posted by sovietxrobot:

Thanks for the reply. Thats pretty similar to what I have been doing, except Boron instead of Whisper. I stacked armor penetration and as much DPS as I could muster. But I'm not getting anything close to the DPS other people are mentioning, so I must be doing something wrong.

Its probably just a gear issue. Also, what floor are you on now? As you go deeper the stats you find on gear exponentially go up. Same thing for gold.

Dont save any of your currency like the crystals or w/e they are I forgot atm. Use them as you need them. Basically you should be replacing gear with each floor. If you noticed yourself going through lets say, floors 1-4 without upgrading all of your gear you will be at a disadvantage.

[sovietxrobot]

I'm on floor 8. My main team are all at level 12, theres probably enough gold left in challenges to bring any other character up to 12. I don't have access to Tier IV crafting yet, but I have a nice stockpile of gems and gear. I'll try crafting some relic gear and stacking enchantments and see if that works.

[Keenfire]

Originally posted by sovietxrobot:

I'm on floor 8. My main team are all at level 12, theres probably enough gold left in challenges to bring any other character up to 12. I don't have access to Tier IV crafting yet, but I have a nice stockpile of gems and gear. I'll try crafting some relic gear and stacking enchantments and see if that works.

Theres your issue. DONT stockpile anything. Use them from floor to floor. You will always have more than enough to get what you need as you progress.

[sovietxrobot]

Thanks!

[Keenfire]

Originally posted by sovietxrobot:

Thanks!

np!!

[sovietxrobot]

I found this very helpful: https://steamcommunity.com/app/617480/discussions/0/3211505894137106184/

it seems the key is to focus on magic penetration/damage, particularly earth.

[Father Spookus]

I'm actually using a nearly identical party composition to Velathore as well.

Kane is built mastery tank with a slight bias towards armor and health regen and then is using the Thorns leg enchant and the ring you get that has thorns on it as well. Damage based on armor doesn't sound that amazing but it really adds up since it ticks per sec (so it ticks like 3 times faster than your average weapon does). The game doesn't seem to play out in real time so that tickrate is quite a bit faster than your attack rate. It also really helps him maintain aggro with a no damage build and it really adds up, especially on something like a portal encounter with a ton of adds. I run his dash, party armor buff, party heal, and I can't even remember what else. Mastery feels really good on him because your party buff gives really solid armor + resists to shore up the fact that everyone else is glass cannon, and his party heal basically 100%s everyone to full.

Maeve is mostly built around Earth autos + her buff's AOE evolution (which makes your attacks do full AOE damage). Stacking Speed/Might. I also use her Mark ability because it's pretty solid for bosses, but usually not needed. Her other two abilities are basically whatever floats your boat, I use bear trap just because being able to delay an oncoming wave from an inconvenient spawn location is handy sometimes.

Aeric with his Enchant + Healing Totem + Earth Ele + Earth Curse and stacking Mastery. Enchant just adds a lot of DPS to whole team, especially to Maeve. Healing Totem with either evolution. I use the resist one. It + Kane's resist buff means that anyone standing around the totem has capped resists regardless of other gear. Earth Ele either evolution. I use the damage one. I don't know how long he'll continue to scale but his DPS is insane for most of the game. He easily matches or exceeds the damage of my other members while he's up, plus he's another body to distract stuff from my squishies. Only downside to him is his AI. He tends to wander off. Earth Curse because it provides a big DPS boost to Maeve, synergizes with your earth damage buff, and works good for anyone else running Earth damage / weapons as well.

Whisper building skill power/mastery + mana regen so I can spam abilities. Meteor + Elemental Barrage + Whatever makes you happy. Meteor for big burst damage on bosses / high priority targets / big groups. Elemental Barrage with extra bolts puts out REALLY high DPS (especially if it randoms into Earth) with the downside of unreliable targeting and damage type. You do need quite a bit of mana to cast it on cooldown though since it comes back up about as fast as you can make it cast. The only unfortunate thing about whisper is that she takes quite a bit of micro since there's no AI / autocast function. I kind of worked around that by making an autohotkey script (yeah, I know, I'm lazy) that cycles through my team and tries to cast their buff on a hotkey. I just got so tired of tabbing through them all to see when it needed to be recast :P

An interesting interaction with Maeve and her AOE auto buff is that it appears to apply her weapon enchants to everything she hits (I haven't tested it extensively but she gets multiple applications of elemental weakness from a single shot quite a bit). This is super useful since my party is largely elemental damage anyway. MgPen+Shred seems to be quite a bit better than physical damage with ArPen. Not sure why the two resistance types were designed so differently but it really makes elemental damage stand well above physical DPS options.

Other useful things is that it's really easy to forge green wands for Aeric with fatty stun/daze chances. Since his autos aren't really that great anyway it can be really useful for him to interrupt drains / casters. Unfortunately, procCC doesn't seem to work on bosses at all so it's kind of useless for a boss fight and low DPS for a portal battle.

[sovietxrobot]

Switching from physical to elemental damage seems to have been the issue, the difference in damage output is dramatic. I was able to beat the fight with minimal effort after I respected to elemental damage.