The Brutal Bloodbinder [Ancient Beasts DLC]

What can a previously okay-ish build do with the help of the Ancient Beasts DLC? The answer: A lot...

1. Introduction

Bloodbinder's Raiment is one of two summon-based Warlock sets (or three, if you count the companion mechanic on Burning Hells' Regalia). It revolves around the passive skill Living Blood, which can summon slime-like creatures whenever an enemy is hit by a poison skill. This can be exploited by using the Quadruplets item, which summons four companions that will trigger the player's on-hit effects - including Living Blood. In doing so, any companion damage stats and effects will double dip, which gives the Bloodbinder a very high ceiling compared to many other companion builds. That being said, the build has always had some problems which put a damper on its playability. Not only was the Bloodbinder notorious for being short on rune slots, but it constantly struggled to find the right balance between damage output and survivability.

Enter, Ancient Beasts DLC.

The DLC did a lot to alleviate these issues. The introduction of mythic weapons provided another much-needed rune slot, and the new passive skill tree helped make the build a lot more sturdy. On top of that, the newly released artifacts provided some really good options for further enhancing the build's already decent damage output. In short, the DLC has turned this once okay-ish mid tier option into an absolute powerhouse. And this guide will show you how.

Note that this is an endgame build for the Ancient Beasts DLC. You will need multiple true legendary items, anomalous runes and a fairly high mastery level to play this build, on top of having purchased the DLC (trust me: it's worth it!). If you are new to the game or the DLC, I highly recommend checking out Rahlence's guides below.

Leveling and Early Progression Guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2598037376 Ancient Beasts DLC Guide:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2763919484

2. Set Mechanics

Like any other set, Bloodbinder's Raiment grants bonuses based on the number of set pieces currently equipped. With 2 pieces, Living Bloods will fuse into a clot (provided that there are no clots already). With 3 pieces, that clot also gains the ability to absorb nearby Living Bloods. This will not refresh its duration, but it will further boost its damage and allow you to indirectly go past the skill's summon limit. On top of that, Living Bloods and clots will also apply an infinitely stacking DoT effect, where each stack represents an amount of damage equal to the damage dealt by your companions. With 4 pieces, you temporarily take less damage whenever a Living Blood or clot is formed.

I will go over the specifics in later sections of the guide, but for now, just know that the build will do just fine without the extra damage reduction. However, the 2-piece and 3-piece set bonuses are huge boosts to the build's damage output and therefore very important to obtain.

With all of that in mind, let's look at some of the stats that are worth talking about.

3. Important Stats

Companion Damage

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This one is a given. Not only do both our main skill and Quadruplets benefit from it, but because of the interaction between those two, the Bloodbinder also double dips on this stat. This build doesn't need to roll resistances on minor slots, so companion damage will be our go-to enchantment, if available.

What is double dipping?

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Double dipping is the term for something reaping benefits from the same stat twice. As an example, let's assume that we managed to double our companion damage; this would double the Quadruplets' damage, which would then double the base damage of Living Blood. Any companion stat bonuses will then be applied to Living Blood's base stats, so the already doubled base damage would get twice as much of a bonus as before. In this case, two times the companion damage increased our skill damage fourfold - or, more generally speaking, a ×N bonus to companion damage represents a ×N² bonus to Living Blood. There are other instances of double dipping in this build, so keep this interaction in mind.

Movement Speed

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This is important because of an item that boosts companion damage based on our movement speed. If there's any enchantment or gem slots where I picked movement speed, it is because of that interaction.

Mana

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As mentioned earlier, the build used to struggle a lot with finding the right balance between tankiness and damage output. The DLC brought about some changes that made finding this balance a lot easier. For now, in order to bolster both our offense and our defense, the good ol' mana stacking approach is the way to go. You will see why in later sections of the guide.

Attack Speed

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On this list of important stats, attack speed is the odd one out. However, I figured it's important to talk about why it's not necessary (in fact, it's detrimental) for this build. While this stat does affect companions, there is a rune which benefits from having your attack speed be as low as possible. Having tested both a build that uses high attack speed and a build that uses aforementioned rune, I can confidently say that the benefits of the latter far outweigh the benefits of the former.

Cooldown Reduction

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This may very well be the least obvious stat on this list, as it has nothing to do with item or skill interactions. Companion attacks work similarly to skillls and have cooldowns. With regards to your companions' attack speed, it is therefore important to take both attack speed and cooldown reduction into consideration.

Why is cooldown reduction important despite our low attack speed?

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Good question. The answer is that companions do not necessarily share the player's base attack speed. In fact, Quadruplets is one such example: at 100% attack speed, the character will attack once every 30 frames, whereas the skulls attack once every 60 frames (or twice and once per second, respectively). Even without any changes to the actual stat, we could double the attack speed of Quadruplets by simply getting to 50% cooldown reduction, as this would cut its cooldown in half, from 60 down to 30 frames.

What does this mean for this build specifically? Well, let's look at our stats. It may seem weird to talk about this before having explained the equipment, but it's important to plan things like this in advance. Otherwise, you run into the risk of making a dysfunctional build.

Our attack speed will be 75%, but there is an item that grants companions an additional 30% bonus. Therefore, their attack speed becomes 75% × 1,3 = 97,5%, which translates to 31 frames. Since Quadruplets has a 60-frame cooldown, we need to get to (1 - (31 ÷ 60)) × 100% = 49% cooldown reduction to maximise its attack speed.

Critical Hit Chance & Critical Hit Damage

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As is the case with companion damage, the Bloodbinder double dips on critical hits. For good offense, it is important to get both of these stats as high up as possible.

Overpower

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Even though they rarely trigger on-hit effects, companions still deal direct damage and are affected by enemy resistances. As such, it is important to invest in the overpower stat, which allows you to bypass enemy resistances.

Resistances

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This one should be a given as well. Resistances are the most accessible source of damage reduction, so we should always max them out. Therefore, we will be aiming to get all resistances to at least 130%, which is the threshold for maintaining the 80% cap even with the resistance penalties that come with playing high tier anomalies.

4. Equipment

Trigger warning: To be perfectly honest, I did not put much effort into min-maxing this build. I made sure to spec into all the important stats, but didn't pay any mind to whether there would've been a more optimal way of going about it. Feel free to make some adjustments.

Now that we have a good idea of what to do regarding stats, let's finally look at the equipment. This is the setup that I am currently using:

Weyrick's Crown is an incredibly useful item. It increases gem strength, an important stat boost which most other helmets don't give us access to. It also increases mana and damage, both of which are important for this build.

Crown of Innate Probability is useful for raising our chance to proc skills like Living Blood or Outbreak by 100%. In those cases, it means always triggering the skills as opposed to sometimes triggering them, which then translates to more damage and faster clearing speeds.

Cosmic Cape is our main source of base damage. There's 2 alternatives in Lucilla's Vision and Jotunhelm, both of which benefit from health stacking, and both of which are inferior. For one, we would have to make space by getting rid of either Weyrick's Crown or Innate Probability, but also, this build just doesn't mix with health stacking. There's no convenient way of creating a barrier based on your maximum HP, and trying to outheal enemy damage with 75% attack speed is out of the question. So, mana stacking it is.

By now, you are probably tired of hearing about Quadruplets, so I'll keep this short. This will trigger Living Blood and also benefits from our companion stat bonuses, which makes it an excellent source of damage.

Unwavering Loyalty is part of the Master's Command set, which is easily the best set for any companion-based build.

Infected Wounds is a nice fit for the build, as it double dips and synergises well with the Bloodscent rune on our weapon, which requires us to use bleed anyways. It is worth mentioning that Infected Wounds makes this a glass-cannon build to some extent. As you can see in the gameplay video, I almost died at one point because I carelessly stood in some ground effect, surrounded by a pack of enemies. If you would like some more sturdiness, feel free to use Star of the Pure instead to strengthen your barrier.

Bloodbinder's Tome is necessary for obtaining the set bonuses of Bloodbinder's Raiment. It is worth mentioning that the effect duration enchant is merely on there because there was nothing else to pick. Feel free to use a different enchantment in its place.

Cursed Blood triples the damage of Living Blood. It locks us into using Blood Curse, but that is a small price to pay.

Bloodbinder's Robes is another set piece needed for the bonuses. We will use an artifact to boost our minor stats - which includes most elemental resistances - but unfortunately, physical resistance is a major stat, so we need to roll this one enchant to make sure that our physical resistance is maxed out as well.

Since we are stacking mana anway, Vestige of Lost Souls is our best defensive option. For this build, no other rune comes close.

Bloodbinder's Staff is the final item needed to obtain all the set bonuses that we want.

Bloodscent is a ×4 multiplier to companion damage. It double dips, so Living Blood's damage is instead multiplied by 16. This is simply too good of a rune to pass up on any summon build.

I've briefly touched on this in a previous section: Brutal Attacks provides a damage boost in correlation to your attack speed. The lower your attack speed stat, the bigger the benefit from Brutal Attacks. At 75%, this rune translates to 800% more damage, which is much better for this build than investing in attack speed.

Hydrascale Boots provide some damage reduction, which other boots don't. The one exception is Battle Boots, which gives even more damage reduction after a mobility skill is cast (Soul Warp, in case of the Warlock). However, this build combines slow attacking and fast movement, which makes Soul Warp scroll spam feel extremely clunky. If you don't mind that, feel free to use Battle Boots instead. One important note: the Kill Haste enchantment has always been a solid choice for companion builds when speed-farming anomalies. However, one of the newly introduced artifacts gives us a chance at triggering on-kill effects on hit. This makes Kill Haste an important tool for companion builds period, even when pushing tiers.

As mentioned in a previous section, Advancing Army uses your movement speed stat to increase companion damage. This is easily the best rune for this slot.

Unbreakable Bond is the other set piece of Master's Command and required for a huge boost to companion stats. Similarly to Kill Haste, Kill Damage has become a very good option with the release of a certain artifact.

This build already uses 3 greater runes and can't fit Rune of Greatness, so using Jeopardy is out of the question. We would need to replace either one of the Innate Probability, Quadruplets or Vestige runes to make space, all of which are far more beneficial to our build than Jeopardy. However, looking at our current gem setup, Kingsrock can improve things like movement speed, our mana pool and poison damage greatly - especially since gem strength as a minor stat gets a multiplier from one of our artifacts. This makes Kingsrock a very solid replacement.

5. Skill & Mastery Point Allocations

Seeing how Quadruplets and Living Blood do all the heavy lifting, this build doesn't need to use a lot of skill points. Previously, you would just dump your excess points into QoL skills, which weren't really necessary, but which might've made your life a bit easier. That being said, one of the new artifacts rewards using your skill points sparingly, and this build will try to make the most of that. With that in mind, here's what the skill trees look like:

• Blood Curse is important for the Cursed Blood rune.
• Plague and Bane of the Dead are bane spells, which means equipping them to our skill slots lets us get a decent amount of damage reduction from Ritual of Banes.
• Outbreak helps clear out packs faster, especially with a 100% chance to trigger. Since we need to "waste" 24 points to get to Living Blood, this is one of the best passives to dump points into.
• Living Blood needs no further explanation. This is where all of the build's damage stems from.

• The Darkside is useful for capping Overpower.
• Ritual of Banes provides damage reduction based on the amount of currently equipped bane skills. This skill got a huge boost with the Ancient Beasts DLC and is the sole reason this build can get away with having to run this few defensive skills and items.
• Much like Plague and Bane of the Dead, Screaming Skull and Life Reap are bane skills with the purpose of getting the most out of Ritual of Banes.
• Two points in Shadow Armor are needed to cap resistances.

Putting skill points into anything else is unnecessary. This leaves us with 52 unspent skill points, which will be important later on. For now, let's continue by looking at the mastery tree:

• Our companions don't benefit from Corruptor Focus, as neither Quadruplets nor Living Blood are active corruptor skills. Therefore, I opted to go with Wide Synergy instead.
• Not running the Challenger perk for bonus damage to crowned enemies might seem perplexing, but companions unfortunately do not benefit from this stat. Instead, I went with Mana Leech, which isn't exactly useful, but the same goes for everything else.
• Demon Vigor from the demonologist mastery is also not necessary since we are running a barrier build, but I often take it as a just-in-case. You never know, the barrier might break sometimes, and even a slight bonus to your health pool could make a difference then. If you deem it unnecessary, feel free to skip it and drop the extra 7 points into the Mana perk.
• Speaking of which, all excess mastery points go towards Mana. More mana means more damage and more defense, so this is the best stat to improve upon.
• Death Come Near Me is very useful for boosting both our health pool and our damage output, and I use it on almost all of my Warlock builds. Seeing how we are so deep into this tree and considering that we want Ritual of Banes to reduce our damage intake as much as possible, it only makes sense to pick the Ritual Affinity perk on the last node of the reaper mastery tree.

Everything else should be obvious. Let's take a quick look at the skillbar and then move on to the next section:

Blood Curse is used as the main attack skill because of the Cursed Blood rune. Ritual of Banes in combination with our 4 bane skills is used for damage reduction. RMB is for Soul Warp, SPC is for Lightning Wyrms. Other than that, there's not much to talk about.

6. Artifacts

With all that out of the way, let's take a look at the artifacts that this build uses:

Some nice QoL improvement. Nothing else to it.

There's no other triangle artifact that directly enhances the gameplay; among all the options, I liked the prospects of some more experience the most.

Another instance of double dipping. While the invisibility gets temporarily undone after an attack, whenever this artifact goes off, it is a ×9 multiplier to Living Blood's damage. This makes it an excellent pick for this build.

Battle Haze has some incredible synergies with this build. It doubles Brutal Attacks' efficiency, provides some more companion damage by adding to our movement speed, and slightly increases survivability with some evasion. Definitely a great choice for this build.

Rahlence's Resurrection enables the Warlock to proc the previously mentioned Kill Haste and Kill Damage enchants on hit. Not having to rely on kills makes this artifact very beneficial if you are trying to push a build to the depths of the endgame.

Among others, minor stats include gem strength, companion damage, cooldown reduction and elemental resistances. Megan's Spark improves all of those based on how many skill points are left unspent (this bonus is multiplicative with boosts from enchantments and skills). This artifact has been a game changer for the Bloodbinder, and is easily the best option out of all the star artifacts.

7. Personal Endgame Experiences and Recommendations

This section will address some of the questions you might have regarding mastery requirements or endgame viability.

For starters, I tested the build at different mastery levels and concluded that the build is best played at M2000 and above. Below that, you either have to accept that your tankiness takes a big hit from the lack of mana, or you will have to adjust your mana conversion rate on Cosmic Cape. While this can make up for the survivability issues, it will also be a huge blow to your damage output. The build can still clear comparatively high tiers, but don't expect to handle T600 the way I did in the video showcase when you're at only half the mastery level. If you run into trouble getting to this point, I once again recommend looking up Rahlence's progression guide which I linked in the first section, and come back to this build once you've hit a high enough mastery level.

Moving on to endgame viability: As you can see, T600 poses no problem for the build. Putting aside the trash mobs, even bosses die quickly. If you want to speedfarm anomalies for grinding experience or materials, then around T600 you will feel right at home. At T700, the build is not capable of instantly killing enemies anymore, but the clearing speed is still fairly decent. And finally, regarding T800, the highest tier of endless dungeon I have completed on this build: simply put, it was a grindfest. Not to the point where it was unbearable for me to play through it, but to the point where I found myself unwilling to push any further. Though it hurts me to say it after going through the effort of making a guide: If you want to go beyond that, you're better off using other builds.

Finally, I would like to address the issue of item replacements. One of the most commonly asked questions on any build guide is related to whether item X can be replaced with item Y, or whether setup 1 would be better than setup 2. To which my reply is: Try it! A guide is just that, a tool to guide you towards a certain build. Nothing is set in stone; just like I came up with my setup that I'm comfortable with, you may find another setup that works better for you.

8. Conclusion

Given a decent mastery level, Bloodbinder's Raiment is a great set for speedfarming in the T600 range. It's high movement speed and baseline damage stats give it an edge over pretty much every other build in this difficulty range - not only among Warlock builds, but across all classes. However, its slow scaling makes it difficult to progress past a certain point, and at T800 and above, it gets significantly outscaled by a select few builds. That being said, it is very easy to play and one of the best companion builds in the game, if not the best right now. If that's what you are looking for, then I hope that following this guide will help you have a great time with your endgame journey. Don't be scared of testing other setups, but remember the important stats when doing so. Or follow the guide to a T, and don't worry about anything else ;-)

Have fun!

[SagaciousRationality]

To anyone that happens to read this before starting the build, I'd recommend swapping placement of the Brutal Attacks rune on the weapon with the Cursed Blood rune on the off-hand. This will save you a ton of resources since mythic weapons don't use Memory Essence for upgrades.

[Volkai]

Hello! Was wondering if you happened to have updated links for the Early Progression/what to level up in order? The links appear to be dead and non-functional? Thanks!

[cookybsu]

This build is truly amazing!
Every single choice of equipment, skill, and enchantment is completely lean and everything meshes well together.
It's a great build that has it all: strength, fun, and feeling good.
I don't speak English, but I wanted to say thanks to you, even if I had to use a translation site.
Thanks for a great build!

[Dave]

@TMas94 thankyou will try it thanks, your the man

[TMaz94]

@Dave

1.) Use Iaeptus to increase the chance to trigger Celerity.
2.) Use Rune of Blocking with +Block Rate and +Block Damage gems for more tankiness.
3.) Move the Bloodscent rune from the offhand to the weapon, then use the Valkyrie shield with Tome of Vengeance as a rune, and replace the Valkyrie armor with something more useful, like Spectral Armor or Elementium (because of shield + weapon, you'll get the 2p set bonus without the armor).

[Dave]

ive been trying to follow this build any tips to push it further? i just got a mythic weapon and i cant decide what to slot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdlruSmJvZ8

[cjdzl]

@TMaz94
awwwwww problem solved!!!! thx a lot!

[TMaz94]

@cjdzl Thank you! :-)

My base gem strength is 300%, you are most likely missing the "Hidden Gems" node from the expedition tree.

[cjdzl]

very good build!
i was following your instructions but my gem strength is still at 433% (without the artifact 285%)
and can't match up with your item gem's mana or poison damages

[TMaz94]

@Bear thanks, hope you're having fun with it!