Cursed Captain - Bane 'Crewmaster' Summon Build

Build guide for a summon based Cursed Captain using the Bane relic

Introduction

Class: Cursed Captain
Relic: Bane
Build: Summoner


The Cursed Captain is a fun class that lets you lead a ghostly crew of pirates to defeat your enemies. The class has two solid trees to work with and a couple of summon type skills to play with. The Bane relic is the obvious choice for the build as it provides terrific minion support. Compared to the Sharpshooter, another good summoner class with Bane, the Cursed Captain crewmaster does have a few flaws.

Firstly, unlike the Sharpshooter, Cursed Captain has no built in way to poison enemies to trigger Eight-legged Allies. This means you're dependent on getting a weapon that inflicts a poison DOT on your enemies if you want to use the skill.

Secondly, I feel it takes a lot longer for the Cursed Captain to really get going. Call the Crew needs serious investment to shine combined with further investments in other skills to support it. It also can be a bit difficult to resummon your crew early on. Fire! makes for a good workhorse for the Cursed Captain throughout the game but the Sharpshooter's Goblin Legion is accessible right away, new ones can be summoned very often thanks to Reload and the Ryeful of Leedarshap legendary rifle gives the Sharpshooter an additional three minions on summon. The Sharpshooter just needs to sit back behind the meatshields and spam ranged attacks.

Once heavily invested in your skills through the crewmaster is an efficient summoning machine being able to adequately keep their crew up while clearing through Fazeer's Dun'djinn on Ridiculous difficulty without too much hassle.

Skills (Part 1)

FIRE!


The Cursed Captain's default starting skill, FIRE! summons a stationary spectral cannon, manned by a spectral crewman that fires at targets automatically. FIRE! is the build's primary spammable DPS skill, after summoning your crew and First Mate you will spam this skill (technically the skill has a 1 second cooldown) with your excess doubloons when you are not using one of your utility skills.

Skill should be maxxed 10/10.


Call the Crew


Your primary mobile summon skill, Call the Crew will summon five ghostly crewmen to follow you and seek out nearby enemies to kill for you. The skill has one major drawback. Activating the skill while any crew are summoned instead commands the crew to Wraith Walk to a target location and deal damage and refresh their duration. At 6 doubloons cost, this is overall inferior to FIRE! with its 4 doubloon cost once upgraded and better DPS. Well I do still use it in between FIRE! when I have a lot of doubloons endgame, gives me another skill to hit in rotation.

The bigger issue through is that you can't resummon dead crewmates with the skill until ALL the crew have died. Using the skill before then will use the Wraith Walk ability and refresh the already summoned surviving crewmates. So if you have one or two of the five left alive, you basically need to wait until they despawn so you can resummon your full crew. This is a pain early-mid game but FYI, the skill Black Spot's Tier 3 really helps with this issue.

Tier 1 will give you an extra ranged rifleman crewmate and Tier 3 will give you a second crewman so this also helps by given you seven crewman on summon instead of five.

Skill should be maxxed 10/10.


Black Spot


Apply a curse to a single enemy. Cursed enemies take an extra 40% damage and summoned crewmates will prioritize cursed enemies over non-cursed enemies. When the enemy either dies or the curse expires after 10 seconds, Unholy Detonation is triggered, an AOE that hits the enemy and nearby allies.

Tier 1 summons 4 doubloons which helps with summoning additional FIRE! early on. Tier 3 is a huge buff as it causes Unholy Detonation to summon a crewmate with up to two extra being summoned. This really helps keep your crew going. Every 10 seconds you can curse an enemy and resummon a crewmate to assist.

Skill should be maxxed 10/10.


Wraith Walk


The Cursed Captain's movement skill and is absolutely mandatory for every build. Wraith Walk is one of the best of the class movement skills imo. The skill shifts you into a incorporeal form moving to a destination, fearing at skill activation and at the destination.

Wraith Walk pulls nearby Doubloons to you and any you collect refunds part of Wraith Walk's charge. It's great to use the skill in between using skills like FIRE! to quickly grab lots of doubloons at once so you can continue to spam skills quickly. Outside of maybe Sharpshooter with 3 charges + Reload, I don't feel like any of the other classes have such a reliably available movement skill.

Tier 1 gives the skill an additional charge. Extra charge is really easy to get and generally worth getting imo. Higher tiers aren't really required, you don't have the points to spare as there are much more important skills to max.

Recommend 3/10.


Miasma


Miasma drains your Relic energy when activated. While active it's a major source of buffs and a bit of damage to nearby enemies. You and nearby allies gain +25% damage and your defenses are increased by 50%. Early-mid game you'll want to build up your Relic energy to close to full before activating the skill as you'll likely lose Relic energy faster than you can rebuild it so you'll want to maximize the amount of time the skill is active. Late game I found myself gaining Relic energy during active combat even with the skill active so I pretty much just triggered it as soon as possible.

Tier 1 summons one spiderling summon a second while the skill is active. Up to six can be summoned at once. All the spiders should help fill the screen and distract enemies away from you while you Wraith Walk around, collect doubloons and use FIRE!.
Tier 2 reduces Miasma's Relic energy cost by 25%. This will help make it much easier to keep the skill active.
Tier 3 gives a huge 100% damage buff to all your minions. Absolutely insane buff for minion builds.

Skill should be maxxed 10/10.


Puppet Master


Passive skill that boosts all minion damage by 25%. Not as much as Miasma's insane buff but it's always active and a nice buff for your minions.

Skill should be maxxed 5/5.


Dread Banner


Drops a banner that gives you and your allies a number of nice buffs. Tier 1 bonus doubles the effectiveness of banner for your crewman making it a huge buff for them. Tier 2 provides a large damage buff for your pet; to clarify this does not affect your 'minions', only your loot carrying 'pet'.

Recommend at least 3/10 for the double buff. If you have additional points to spare you can put points here to decrease the skill's cooldown so you can summon it more as it's a terrific buff.


Energizer


Boosts Relic energy Charge Rate by 25%. Useful for boosting Relic energy so you can keep Miasma up. Personally I like the skill but it's not mandatory so you can swap points out of it if you want and put it into other skills.


Take a Swig


Excellent one point wonder skill, lets you heal up minor damage if you ever take scratch damage instead of using a potion. The Tier 3 skill is good but it takes a lot of points to get there.

Recommend 1+/10


Thieving Spirits


Another one point wonder skill, it's a very effective way to spawn doubloons so you can use your summons. With the Haunted Headcannon legendary affect and/or the Cursed Captain offhand, you can use those instead to grind doubloons easily. Which long term is a good idea as it frees up a spare skill slot which you'll need for another skill.

Recommend 1(or 3)/10 without another good way to get doubloons, not really needed if you do.


Eight-legged Allies


Gives you a chance to summon spider minion(s) when you hit a Poisoned enemy. Cursed Captain doesn't really have a good skill for poisoning enemies so you if you want to use this passive you want to use weapons that inflict the poison debuff on enemies. Weapons that do flat poison damage don't work, you need one that specifically says it has a % chance to Poison over X secs.

This is a bit of a pain as you can't just toss on the highest DPS weapon you find, you need to look for one with the Poison debuff. It's a useful passive when you have the weapon on hand, otherwise it's useless.

If you don't want to bother with it then you can skip the skill completely. Or you can just wait to late game to drop points here when you've got other skills you need. Either 0 points in skill or whatever you can free up if you do.

Skills (Part 2)

Spectral Spider


Serves as your early game Relic energy skill, summons a large spider minion. Recommend 3/10 before you can use Miasma effectively, then unspec as you need to free up the skill slot and use the Relic Energy for Miasam instead.


For your final skill slot (7), there are a couple of skills you can go for. You can go with another summon skill or add a damage skill for yourself.

First Mate


Summons your First Mate to assist you. Follows you and around and fires their cannon at your enemies. Activating First Mate when they are active will cause them to fire their blunderbuss. I find this a bit tricky to use properly. Activating Call the Crew causes the First Mate to Wraith Walk similar to your crew. With Tier 1 they will summon some powder kegs for you to blow up.

It's an okay summon skill. Not mandatory like FIRE! or Call the Crew but fits into the whole crewmaster theme best.


Arachnid Assault


Bane's ultimate skill, can be used you've collected 200 Relic energy, Arachnid Assault projects six spectral spiders surging out from you in all directions. At Tier 1 the skill also summons the massive Spider Queen minion so it provides a mix of DPS and pet. I used this on my Bane Sharpshooter, it's pretty cool. First Mate kind of fits the crewmaster theme through imo but you can try this out instead if you want.


Powder Keg


Spawns a barrel at location which explodes for very heavy damage after six seconds or can be instantly destroyed by your own skills. Good source of burst DPS if you want to add some to your repertoire.


Broadside


Solid option for a bit of additional DPS. Cooldown reduced whenever you use a Piracy skill and as you will be spamming FIRE! often that should help keep the skill available often.

Legendarium

Commodore's Cape and Jacket are both generally nice as they increase your Piracy and Cursed skills respectively by 1 or 2 if you have three Commodore's pieces equipped. Preferably you'd wear these instead of choosing them in the Legendarium. To get the full benefit you'd need three Commodore pieces equipped so it's best to have these two set pieces equipped along with a random third piece of the set to get +2 to skills. This also saves you the slots in the Legendarium for something else. I did find the Commodore set ridiculously rare through so you might have trouble actually finding them.


Nothing really mandatory for your picks so you can pick the options that appeal to you but here's a few good options to select from:

Haunted Headcannon - Fires thieving spirits on basic attack letting you get extra doubloons. Excellent pick if you're not using another method to generate them.

Crabcaller - Summons a giant crab minion when using Call the Crew. Gives you another body to DPS and protect you.

The Many Tentacled One - Updates FIRE! with two additional projectiles in a cone with 50% damage buff. You'll be spamming FIRE! at lot so should get good use out of this, unfortunately refused to drop for me.

My Lil' General - Nice damage and damage resistance buff to you when you reach max Relic energy. Late game you shouldn't have to much trouble hitting max energy so shouldn't be too difficult to trigger the buff.

Pearl of Plenty - Increases max doubloons by 3 letting you store up a bigger stash of doubloons.

Commodore's Boots - Extra evasion and movement speed on potion use and Wraith Walk is pretty useful.

Boneblocker - Extra bodies if you decide to use Arachnid Assault instead of First Mate.

Ancient Ember Boots - Grants you a skill to fully charge Relic energy and reset Relic skill cooldowns. Can be useful for keeping Miasma up early game. Late game I was able to regenerate Relic energy faster than Miasma drained it during combat so didn't find it very useful when the boots finally dropped for me. Also, you'd need to free up one available skill slot to use the granted skill.

The Wanderer's Hood - Extra charge and faster recharge on Wraith Walk useful early on for kiting/escaping when you haven't found any good legendaries.


If you're decided to use stuff like Powder Keg or Broadside you might want to look at The Showman or Big Fish as well.

Leveling

Generally you want to work towards unlocking skills and reaching the skill's Tier upgrades. Individual skill ups provide rather marginal gain outside of the Tier upgrades so I'd expect you to be aiming to have your skills at level 1 (just for unlock) or 3, 6 or 10 (for Tier upgrades).

During the game you can earn Respectacles from Contracts or purchase them for 2500 gold from vendor. They're fairly expensive to buy from the vendor so I'd expect most to store them up from Contracts. I have large stockpiles of these now. You can use them to respec out of skills you no longer require or if you want to move the points into a newly available skill instead. Otherwise if you don't want to use Respectacles to respec spent skill points you can instead save the skill ups until the later skill is available.

I don't exactly remember the order I unlocked skills. Early on I believe I maxxed Eight-legged Allies passive because I liked the idea of a bunch of spiders swarming the battlefield. I was able to swap poison DOT pistols (I like ranged attack option, you can also use rifles or Cursed Captain exclusive cannons if you want at the cost of your offhand slot) via the shared stash from my other characters (I was leveling one of each class in Ridiculous). I'll assume you won't have good access to poison DOT weapon upgrades so will leave it out on suggested leveling but you can tweak to include if you like the skill and have options available. I also waited on getting Miasma until I had the rest of the skills really built up and could generate Relic energy decently but if you have Ancient Ember Boots you can try leveling that early on. There's no one absolute leveling path.


One possible leveling path, feel free to try skills out in different order if some skills appeal to you more, long term you'll eventually max your main skills anways:
Level 2 - unlock Spectral Spider so you have something to use Relic energy on
3 - unlock Black Spot for its effect
4 - upgrade FIRE! to level 2
5 - unlock Wraith Walk to get your movement skill and upgrade FIRE! to level 3 for Tier 1 to reduce doubloon cost to 4
6 - unlock Thieving Spirits to help grind doubloons faster and easier
7-9- upgrade FIRE! to level 5
10 - upgrade FIRE! to level 6 for Tier 2 and unlock Call the Crew for your primary movable minions
11 - unlock Dread Banner for its buff
12 + 13 - upgrade Call the Crew to level 3 for Tier 1 for the extra crewman
14 - unlock Spectral Spider level 2
15 - unlock Spectral Spider level 3 for Tier 1 and unlock Take a Swig for free heal
16 to 19 - unlock Puppet Master and upgrade to level 4
20- upgrade Puppet Master to level 5 and unlock First Mate for an additional minion
21 to 22 - upgrade Dread Banner to level 3 for Tier 1 for double affect on crewman
23 to 28 - upgrade Call of the Crew to level 10 for Tier 3
29 to 34 + unspec 3 points from Spectral Spider - unlock and upgrade Miasma to level 10 for Tier 3 minion damage buff
35 - upgrade Wraith Walk to level 3 for Tier 1 extra charge
36 to 43 - upgrade Black Spot to level 10 for Tier 3 crewman summon on Unholy Detonation
44 to 46 - upgrade FIRE! to level 10
47 to 50 - unlock and upgrade Engergize to level 5
51+ - unlock/upgrade your choice of Dread Banner / First Mate / Eight-legged Allies / Take a Swig / Powder Keg / Broadside, etc.

Final Skills and Gear

These are my final skill trees and gear setup at the end of Fazeer's Dun'djinn:


FYI, FIRE! is actually at level 10 as I have +6 to the skill on a piece of gear as can be seen below. Poorly designed UI shows the points spent on skill and not actual total. Hovering over skill lists level you spend and the bonus levels from gear seperately.

For your pet, of the four auras I like the Defender aura the most but you can also go the Critical Strikes one if you like. For your pets non-aura skills, I'd say Battle Cry is a must, nice little boost to damage. Using Vampirism to help sustain pet's health. For my final slot I'm using Assemble! as I liked adding a few extra ghostly summons. You could swap this out for whatever skill you like, stuff like Defensive Posture, Dasher, Healing Friendship, Immoblizing Strike, etc.

For my pet, I choose the Pirate Fox for rather obvious reasons.



For gear, I generally like to get Defence on as many pieces of gear as possible, like to have more survivability. Need at least one piece with Electric, Fire and Poison resistance. End game you can use Enchant slots of add a missing resistance if required. Health is nice as well but usually put Defence first.

Other things to look out for endgame are buffs to skill levels so you can get free points to spend on other skills, buffs to skill damage, miasma duration, critical damage, evade, block, etc. Was looking for a new pistol with poison chance as I replaced my previous one with my current pistol but didn't find any at the time.


General gameplay loop goes as follows. First farm up some doubloons. Then activate Call the Crew with six doubloons followed by First Mate also for six doubloons. Use utility skills like Dread Banner and Take a Swig as needed. I can keep Miasma up 100% during combat so I just trigger that as soon as I can. With Call the Crew and First Mate both up, spam FIRE! and use Black Spot when its off cooldown. Wraith Walk when needing to reposition or grab doubloons. Pretty simple overall.