Unique and Detailed Character Builds (All Characters)

My friend and I came up with these builds while trying to see how far we could go through the red portal. Hope these help you out and enjoy!

Special Thanks

While I may have written the entire guide and collected all of the images, I wasn't alone in testing runs and builds! I want to give a special thanks to one of my best friends Cswitz as he assisted in testing builds, brainstorming, and finding fun ways to play the game while I was putting this guide together. Couldn't have done it without you!

Quick Notes

Just some quick points to make:

• These are just builds that took us far that we enjoyed
  
• We stopped at 170 with each character because we wanted to get the appearances
  
• We will try to add new characters when they are released
  
• These are just what we found during our testing.

TAKE THE "WEAPON EXPERT" RUNE ALWAYS

Banning Passives:

We found that most builds work best when based around an element. We did do some testing with Ammunition, Aptitude, Dazed, and Disoriented but didn't have much luck in getting quick kills or surviving a long time. While these attributes are fun and work in their own ways, they just didn't fit into many of these builds.

Weapon Choices:

We tested every weapon and tried to put together a "build" for each weapon for each character... key word "tried". We found that all weapons worked well, but in this guide we're pointing out the ones that we felt worked the best.

"Testing" Runs:

All of our runs were performed by using the red portal and seeing how far we could go. In most of these builds we could make it to red portal 5, some made it to red portal 6, and very few could make it to red portal 7. One build in this list almost made it to red portal 9...

Curse Intensity:

We ran all of our runs at curse intensity 51 because we wanted to push ourselves and these builds. This still allowed us to get the max bonuses with every run and we didn't have to deal with the Pillars of Protection (because they are annoying).

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Weapon Artifact Powers:

Since we initially built this guide, the release of artifact powers for weapons has been added to the game. We will add these to each character section as they are added to the game. Just a note that they likely were not taken into consideration at the time of making these builds.

The Barbarian

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The Barbarian can be an absolute tank while also dealing massive bleed damage. The weapon you will want to take is Bloodgod's Legacy for the two additional bleed skills. The Barbarian only has access to 5 skills which apply bleed by default, so for the 6th skill we will take "Bladestorm".

You can play with the runes a bit on the build but the main damage dealing skill is "Bladestorm". "Bladestorm" attacks every 0.1 second and each hit will apply bleed after you take passives. This means bleed is constantly stacked and hits everything on the screen, and even off the screen when it gets big enough.

Through all of the builds that we tested, this was one of the only builds we were able to make it through Red Portal 6 with. Constant healing and application of bleed damage makes it a slow, but satisfyingly fun build.

Make sure to ban any elemental passives that would apply Fire, Poison, and Doom as we want to focus on getting as many Bleed passives as possible.

Skills:

• Bladestorm
  
• Flurry
  
• Bloody Saw
  
• Heavy Strike
  
• On Guard
  
• Ground Slam

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Glass Cannon
  
• Decapitator
  
• Pulse of Agony

Example of a Run:

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Barbarian Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Pyromancer

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If you are looking for a build that lets you set the world on fire, The Pyromancer is the perfect character for you. We attempted running with the Damnatus, Spire of Shadows but felt like it wasn't consistent or direct with damage. Then we decided to switch to the Pyromancer's Firestarter and realized that doing a fire build would be perfect.

Make sure to ban any elemental passives that would apply bleed, poison, and doom as we want to focus on getting as many fire passives as possible.

Skills:

• Fire Slash
  
• Meteor Shower
  
• Conflagrate
  
• Flamethrower
  
• Combustion
  
• Fire Bolt

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• Elemental Flow
  
• Searing Intensity

Example of a Run:

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Pyromancer Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Hound Master

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The Hound Master is a bit of a sour spot for us because we had major hopes for an Aptitude build using the Dragonfire Scattergun, but we couldn't seem to get something good going. We ended up trying the Toxic Cannon and realized the insane power of the "Pestilence" skill and just what happens when you flood the screen with constant poison.

Suggestion: Try swapping out "Poison Cloud" for "Poison Bolt" as we realized from later testing that "Poison Bolt" may perform better.

Make sure to ban any elemental passives that would apply bleed, fire, and doom as we want to focus on getting as many poison passives as possible.

Skills:

• Pestilence
  
• AcidRain
  
• Pesticide Burst
  
• Poison Puddle
  
• Threshing Blast
  
• Poison Cloud

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Elemental Flow
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• Decapitator

Example of a Run:

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Hound Master Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Spellblade

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The Spellblade is the an what you would get if you combined The Barbarian and The Pyromancer into one character. Take the Scorching Edge as your starting weapon. You will be taking all fire skills with the exception of "Bladestorm" which will expand and apply stacks of burn to enemies off screen.

Ban the Poison, Bleed, and Doom passives the first time they come up. If you find the passive that applies Slow when you apply Burn you will want to take this. Taking this allows you to start getting "Apply Slow on hit" passives and I found these to be nice later in the room.

Skills:

• Bladestorm
  
• Fiery Blades
  
• Firestorm
  
• Flamethrower
  
• Fire Bolt
  
• Flame Wave

Runes:

• Searing Intensity
  
• Elemental Flow
  
• Executioner
  
• Misfortune's Embrace

Example of a Run:

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Spellblade Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Arcane Weaver

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The Arcane Weaver gave us the impression that right away that you could do a fire build... which you can, but he's called the ARCANE Weaver for a reason. This build uses the Arcane Staff and focuses on taking all arcane skills to build up Brittle and Radiance while applying Doom, Burn, Poison, and Bleed.

Unlike other builds, we want to take as many Doom, Bleed, Poison, and Burn skills as possible (in that order). While your skills apply Brittle, you will start to apply stacks of debuffs and the enemy will suddenly die from all of the stacks.

Skills:

• Arcane Orb
  
• Arcane Missiles
  
• Arcane Beam
  
• Arcane Sparks
  
• Arcane Disc
  
• Magic Missile

Runes:

• Searing Intensity
  
• Decapitator
  
• Executioner
  
• Misfortune's Embrace

Example of a Run:

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Arcane Weaver Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Sentinel

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We found the Sentinel to be fun character to run. Once we got the Noxious Longbow we focused on running all poison skills. Take the Noxious Longbow because you are going to be poisoning everything that spawns on the screen. Most of your damage will come from "Pestilence" as it does more damage based on the stacks of Poison each enemy has on them.

Make sure to ban any elemental passives that would apply bleed, fire, and doom as we want to focus on getting as many poison passives as possible.

Skills:

• Noxious Shot
  
• AcidRain
  
• Venomous Volley
  
• Pestilence
  
• Poison Cloud
  
• Poison Puddle

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• Synergetic
  
• Elemental Flow

Example of a Run:

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Sentinel Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Paladin

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The Paladin, or should I say The Barbarian 2.0, is one of the strongest characters we had the pleasure to play. The Paladin plays a lot like The Barbarian did except we have a couple of secret weapons this time. We will focus on using Bleed and the effects we are working with are as follows:

• Prowess - Damage Modifier
  
• Resilience - Reduces Damage Taken
  
• Fragility - Extra Damage
  
• Exposed - Extra Damage
  
• Brittle - Increase ALL Damage Taken

We will start by taking the Dawnbreaker's Mace weapon to gain the Prowess and Resilience effects from the starting skills. Three skills we take will each add the extra damage in the form of direct frontal damage. The last skill we take will be "Bladestorm" to apply bleed to every enemy from a distance. When we see a boss, we will aim our cursor at the boss and simply watch them melt to nothing.

Important Note: The Paladin really lacks in Critical Chance and Movement Speed. Make sure to prioritize getting these bonuses up sooner rather than later.

When taking Passive Skills you will want to banish Poison, Fire, and Doom so that you aren't wasting time by taking them. Our runes are picked to maximize the damage we get from Bleed and making every enemy weaker.

Skills:

• Fissure Strike
  
• Staggering Blow
  
• Magic Missiles
  
• Bladestorm
  
• Light Beam
  
• Arcane Beam

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Elemental Flow
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• Pulse of Agony

Example of a Run:

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Paladin Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Chaoswalker

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The Chaoswalker turned out to be one of the favorites we played because we could use a unique build we didn't see with other characters. This build focuses on the character skill "Manifestations of Chaos" because the skill deals damage based on stacks of Disarray. We then take skills that cause Disarray and Chaotic (Chaotic giving a chance to cast another skill).

Unlike other characters, we want to focus on grabbing as many elemental passive skills as possible. If you see a passive skill which reads "apply *element* when you apply *element*" you want to take it right away. The more debuffs, the better.

Something that needs to be explained about this build quick, the use of the Chaotic trait. Chaotic reads "Whenever this skill is used, you have a % chance of casting one of your other skills..." This means that whenever one of your Chaotic skills fires off, you have a chance of firing another skill and another.. and another... you see where this is going. While Chaotic cannot trigger Chaotic on another skill, our main focus is to apply as many stacks of Disarray as possible.

Take the Skull of Draxiz as your starting weapon because we will need the skills it provides to spread the most debuffs.

Testing Note: Be warned that by taking "Chaos Golem" you will be more likely to die as the enemies and bosses will start to huddle the "Chaos Golem" minions at later rounds.

Skills:

• Manifestations of Chaos
  
• Light Beam
  
• Chaos Totem
  
• Shadow Orb
  
• Unchained Chaos
  
• Bloodlust

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Executioner
  
• Misforune's Embrace
  
• Synergetic

Example of a Run:

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Chaoswalker Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Beastmaster

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The Beastmaster is our first character where we put focus into the summoned units mechanic of the game. We found running Widow's Embrace set a good foundation for doing a Bleed build. You should take the "Harmony" rune because this will increase our damage for every summoned unit you have. This also means we will want as many summoned units as possible.

The summoned units will take most of the attention from the enemies allowing you time to focus on dodging attacks. As you take bleed passives, all of your summoned units will apply bleed with their attacks. The skills "Bladestorm" and "Shrapnel Bomb" are going to deal the most damage. "Bladestorm" will hit everything on screen to apply Bleed with your summoned units and "Shrapnel Bomb" will deal major damage to bosses.

Just remember that any passive skills you take will also apply to your summoned units. When you take Bleed passives, such as "Dismemberment", all of your units will also benefit from it. Make sure to banish passives focused around Fire, Poison, and Doom.

Skills:

• Spider Cocoon
  
• Spider Queen
  
• War Tiger
  
• Bladestorm
  
• Shrapnel Bomb
  
• Battle Moose

Runes:

• Harmony
  
• Pulse of Agony
  
• Executioner
  
• Elemental Flow

Example of a Run:

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Beast Master Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Assassin

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The Assassin is a unique build because we get to utilize the Doom and Ambush mechanics. Ambush activates a unique ability per skill, because of this we will take the Edge of Doom weapon because the skill we care about is "Reap".

Every time you hit with "Reap" while meeting Ambush requirements, you will instantly apply all stacks of Doom. We also take the "Smoke Bomb" skill which causes all damage done within the "Smoke Bomb" to be considered an Ambush. These two skills together deal an incredible amount of damage and only get stronger when you partner them with other Doom applying skills.

Suggestion: While we took 6 Doom based skills for our runs, we believe swapping one of them for "Bladestorm" may not be a bad idea.

Skills:

• Shadow Stab
  
• Reap
  
• Shadow Orb
  
• Death Vortex
  
• Shadow Bolt
  
• Smoke Bomb

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Vulnerable Exploit
  
• Vulnerable Target
  
• Extended Reach

Example of a Run:

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Assassin Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Elementalist

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The Elementalist is unique from other characters because he has access to pick up elemental orbs regardless of what element you're running. This means that you will always find passives for Doom, Poison, Bleed, and Fire even when you don't have any skills of that type. The problem we ran into is that when trying to run an "all elements" or a Fire specific run... we didn't get great results.

The best option we found for The Elementalist is to run Scepter of Nature and focus on doing a Poison build. Unlike other Poison builds, Scepter of Nature gives us access to a skill called "Contaminated Cut" which causes all stacks of Poison to deal their damage instantly, while also allowing more Poison to be stacked.

The Scepter of Nature gives a negative bonus to critical hit chance, so you will want to focus on getting that up early on. The Elementalist also gets passives for all damage types, this means you will want to focus using your banishes to remove them from your passive skill pool.

Skills:

• Contaminated Cut
  
• Pestilence
  
• Acid Rain
  
• Outbreak
  
• Poison Bolt
  
• Poison Cloud

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Executioner
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• Decapitator

Example of a Run:

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Elementalist Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Legionnaire

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The Legionnaire build is almost identical to The Elementalist but it plays quite a bit differently. Take the Fang of Vipernus weapon to start your run as we will be using Poison as our main source of damage.

It's possible to run a Fire build with The Legionnaire as we tested, but we decided to put this one down on paper. There may be a really interesting Form build to do, but sadly we haven't had time to test this.

Remember to ban any passives based on Doom, Fire, and Bleed as we are focusing on Poison based Passives,

Skills:

• Purging Slam
  
• Pestilence
  
• Acid Rain
  
• Corrosive Spear
  
• Poison Bolt
  
• Poison Cloud

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Decapitator
  
• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos

Example of a Run:

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Legionnaire Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Necromancer

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Welcome to one of the strongest builds we found.

The Necromancer is a lot like The Chaoswalker except this time we have summoned units to help! This build is going to focus on a multi casting skills and dealing massive physical damage through traits that weaken enemies. Start by taking Grimtalon's Scourge as your weapon so you can get the "Murder of Crows" skill.

"Magic Missile" and "Arcane Beam" will apply the Fragility, Brittle, and Disarray while being cast multiple times and more often (thanks to Chaotic). This means we want to focus on taking physical damage passive skills for higher damage and better crit chance/damage. We are taking the "Extended Reach" rune to make these two attacks reach farther. We are also taking the "Overwhelming Chaos" and "Controlled Chaos" to get consistently higher damage rolls.

Something that needs to be explained about this build quick, the use of the Chaotic trait. Chaotic reads "Whenever this skill is used, you have a % chance of casting one of your other skills..." This means that whenever one of your Chaotic skills fires off, you have a chance of firing another skill. This is perfect because our goal will be to cast "Magic Missiles" and "Arcane Beam" as much as possible.

When taking passives be sure to get your Crit Chance % over 100% as well as getting Crit Damage and Physical Damage as high as possible as they will directly affect "Magic Missile" and "Arcane Beam"

We want to ban Poison, Bleed, Fire, and Doom passives as we are going for a physical damage based build.

Skills:

• Murder of Crows
  
• Frenzied Bunnies
  
• Chaos Golem
  
• Arcane Beam
  
• Magic Missiles
  
• Skeletal Archers

Runes:

• Harmony
  
• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Extended Reach

Example of a Run:

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Necromancer Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Death Knight

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The Death Knight has a skill set that could work for either a Doom or Poison build. For this build we've chosen Poison because Doom doesn't give us the ability to apply the Weakness trait. The Death Knight does not have the ability to use dashes, so put a big focus on getting movement speed passives.

For this build, start by taking the Greatsword of Corruption for access to the poison skills. Be sure to upgrade this weapon up as much as possible because we gain an increased movement speed modifier, this will be very helpful. We have chosen to not take "Pestilence" because we have access to a character unique skill called "Contagion" which works as a better "Pestilence" to output damage.

Banish any modifiers that would apply Bleed, Fire, or Doom as we are focused on Physical and Poison. Also don't forget to grab movement speed passives whenever you have a chance (we stopped around 250%).

Skills:

• Festering Strike
  
• Lethal Blade
  
• Path of Decay
  
• Contagion
  
• Acid Rain
  
• Poison Bolt

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Synchrony

Example of a Run:

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Death Knight Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Monkey King

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The Monkey King has a set of unique skills that no other character has, so for this build you can be we are going to use them. Start by taking the Trickster's Boomstick for as we will want the "Gunpowder Strike" skill to apply Weakness and Bleed.

We are going to take skills that will apply the debuffs: Exposed, Brittle, Shattered, and Weakness. This will help weaken all of the enemies and bosses so that "Shrapnel Bomb" can finish them off.

Suggestion: We didn't get much DPS out of "Trickster Decoy" so it might not be a bad idea to swap it out for "Armor Shatter".

Block any passives based around Poison, Fire, and Doom. Because we are using both Physical and Bleed you will want to focus on passives around both.

Skills:

• Gunpowder Strike
  
• Trickster Decoy
  
• Whirling Defense
  
• Shrapnel Bomb
  
• Earthquake
  
• Light Beam

Runes:

• Elemental Flow
  
• Executioner
  
• Pulse of Agony
  
• Decapitator

Example of a Run:

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Monkey King Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Engineer

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The Engineer is a fun character that we found fun to play using every weapon. Our favorite ended up being the Bomb Launcher. "Shrapnel Bomb" is your main source of damage as it deals more damage based on stacks of bleed. Overall it's really fun to be running around with a big gun and just be shooting everything.

We would keep the "QT Bombbuddy 1000" for a while, but would trade it out for something to inflict more bleed damage once we had 4 other skills. Focus on taking skills that inflict more bleed and you'll do fine.

Skills:

• Shrapnel Bomb
  
• Bomb Barrage
  
• Heavy Artillery
  
• Shrapnel Shot
  
• Explosive Trap
  
• QT Land Surprise

Runes:

• Executioner
  
• Pulse of Agony
  
• Misfortune's Embrace
  
• War Tank

Example of a Run:

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Engineer Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Image coming soon.

The Myrmidon

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The Myrmidon quickly joined The Necromancer as being insanely strong and fun to play. Right away we found our favorite weapon to be Song Of The Sirens because it gives us access to "Glacial Trident". Normally we wouldn't want to be taking passives that cause Slow, but because we can get the Hypothermia passive (Slow has a chance to cause Disarray). We will want to focus on our attacks applying Slow, because this will quickly build stacks of Disarray and will melt bosses.

We take "Light Beam", "Magic Missiles", and "Arcane Beam" to stack up the extra damage on top of the Disarray stacks. We tried taking "Earthquake" in place of "Arcane Sparks", it just felt like "Arcane Sparks" did a better job at cleaning up the small enemies. Lastly we take Might to get another big boost to our damage.

Trust me when I say this build gets crazy strong and is the farthest we have gone with any character. Even with The Myrmidon at level 0 with no weapon upgrades you can make it to Red Portal +6. The best run we have so far is 1 boss away from Red Portal +9.

Skills:

• Light Beam
  
• Magic Missiles
  
• Arcane Beam
  
• Glacial Trident
  
• Arcane Sparks
  
• Might

Runes:

• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Extended Reach
  
• Divine Legacy

Example of a Run:

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Myrmidon Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Demon Hunter

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If you like seeing your screen flooded with so many arrows that you can't tell what's going on, you are going to love The Demon Hunter! We start by taking the Bloodbane Crossbow as our weapon of choice because we want to utilize the Disarray and Chaotic traits. Bloodbane Crossbow gives us access to "Uncontrolled Arrows" and "Madness Shot" which will both be some of your top dealing damage skills.

The Demon Hunter is unique because we are going to utilize two of the three character skills in this build, something that we don't do for many other characters. The first skill is "Twin Impact" which will apply fragility and the second skill is "Demonic Breath" which will leave pools on the ground to apply Disarray. "Demonic Breath" is also our highest damaging skill we will run in this build so make sure to take it as soon as possible.

Testing Note: We did try running "Storm of Arrows" which didn't output as much DPS as we had hoped for, but if you really want to flood your screen with arrows, this is the skill to take. You'll have a great time.

Skills:

• Demonic Breath
  
• Twin Impact
  
• Uncontrolled Arrows
  
• Madness Shot
  
• Weakening Shot
  
• Explosive Shot

Runes:

• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Extended Reach
  
• Divine Legacy

Example of a Run:

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Demon Hunter Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Cursed Captain

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The first 9 runs I did with The Cursed Captain didn't sit right. It took a lot of time to find something that felt as good as some of the other builds in this guide. That brings us here...

We start by taking the Admiral's Might as our weapon of choice because we are going to be spawning more tentacles than an adult rated anime. Admiral's Might gives us access to "Cannon Barrage" and "Fleet Strike" to assist in applying bleed and spawning even more tentacles.

The Cursed Captain introduces us to the Cursed status which causes ghost tentacles to spawn. These assist in constant damage output and, from what I can tell, also apply bleed to the enemies. Put extra damage into "Shrapnel Bomb" whenever you can as it will be your biggest source of damage. Make sure it you find the passive Poisonous Blood, which causes your Bleed effects to cause Poison, that you BLOCK it. I found that taking the extra status of Poison with Bleed only hurt the build in the later parts of the run.

Skills:

• Cannon Barrage
  
• Fleet Strike
  
• Weakening Shot
  
• Eldritch Grasp
  
• Suction Bomb
  
• Shrapnel Bomb

Runes:

• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Curse of the Depths
  
• Elemental Flow

Example of a Run:

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Cursed Captain Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

The Shaman

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Leveling-Up Note: Poison is always a strong build, but I'm not going to make another Poison build. If you want to level up The Shaman quick, grab a Poison build from another character until you can try out the build below.

The Shaman, in most video games a shaman class uses totems and it's no different here! Most of your damage output for this build will come from the "Quicksand" totem because it explodes every 0.5 seconds dealing more damage based on the stacks of Brittle.

We start by taking the Tharuun's Lasher as our weapon of choice. IF you can get this weapon to +10, you will start your runs with 100% Critical Chance. This means you will never need to take Leathality as a passive, so you can ban it right away. Tharuun's Lasher gives us access to "Earthbreaker" and "Quicksand", I feel that "Earthbreaker" could be swapped for a different skill so there's some room for playing around with the build there.

Light Beam, Magic Missiles, and Arcane Sparks are taken to assist with applying debuffs to the enemies. Stone Spiral also benefits from the Colossal trait so the more health you have, the larger the damage multiplier it receives.

Skills:

• Quicksand
  
• Stone Spiral
  
• Light Beam
  
• Magic Missiles
  
• Arcane Sparks
  
• Earthbreaker

Runes:

• Overwhelming Chaos
  
• Controlled Chaos
  
• Elemental Flow
  
• Extended Reach

Example of a Run:

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The Shaman Weapons & Artifact Powers:

With the release of Artifact Powers, we decided it would be best to put a screenshot of them here for anyone who may not have them unlocked. This way you can have the knowledge of the power when formulating a build rather than spending the materials.

Q&A / Update Notes

Update Notes:

2024.09.28

• Correcting the formatting and layout of all character sections to be uniform.
  
• Corrected wording on The Chaoswalker build
  
• Added The Demon Hunter build section
  
• Added Q&A / Update Notes section
  
• Corrected formatting on all builds so skills are formatted as bold in quotation marks

2025.05.08

• Added The Shaman build section
  
• Added The Cursed Captain build section
  
• Corrected contributors of the guide
  
• Moved Special thanks to top of guide for better visibility
  
• Added Abilities to The Pyromancer and The Arcane Weaver

Q&A

Adding this section to answer questions/comments being left by the community.
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Q. Masterbpk4 - Barbarian thunder axes with the lightning buff and critical mastery does so much damage and it scales with enemy hp since more hp = more dazed stacks = more crit damage with critical mastery. Spend the rest of your skills to get finesse/bulwark builders for defense. I almost beat boss rush 9 with an un-optimized build.

A. Lancescape - I love the use of dazed stacks and critical mastery! We have been discussing for some time about going back and redoing the earlier character builds as we learned more about game mechanics the farther we got into testing. I'll have to find some time and give this run a try!
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Q. Graptharr - a shame theres no electricty based build in here

A. Lancescape - Couldn't agree more. If we could find a good way to utilize dazed stacks I'd love to do some electricity builds. To the question above from Masterbpk4, I think we'll go take a look at characters like The Barbarian and The Assassin to see what we can put together.
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Q. JohnHenry - for chaos walker, you say to take all elemantal tick dmg for stacks, do we also take the dmg incrase boon ?

A. Lancescape - Great question. I'd say yes? With the release of The Demon Hunter we've started talking about the Chaos Walker again. We're putting Chaos Walker an a redo list to give it another go, so we'll take this one into consideration!
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Q. Flamewheel - so i found a way to achieve near immortality through the use of the assassins second weapon(curved daggers), basically i made use of the fact that finesse can generate bulwark along with hast and a few others being able to generate finesse, as well as making use of synergistic to increase the chance of getting it and multi cast master for longer chains, after one clear and going into the second red i could get upwards of 800 bulwark so an 80% chance to block damage, and if you get the buff that increases crit damage you can melt the overloads just by walking past. The current damage block chance record is at 93.7%

A. Cswitz - This is the exact same theory and foundation I've used for a few of The Barabarian's test runs. I really love this idea and it sounds fun so I'll have to give this a try!
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Q. Eggmatickgry - also with barbarian def doesn't need executioner easily could be swapped out to critical mastery or synergetic and get all the buffs from it

A. Lancescape - Duly noted! I think you're right about swapping executioner and when we redo The Barbarian we'll make sure to remove this.
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Q. J4ve5 - Are there some general stat thresholds you would recommend for the characters? Overall very nice guide. Thank you

A. Lancescape - For all characters we will press escape to check out "Crit Chance" %. Once we get it to 100% we'll banish Lethality so we don't accidentally keep taking it. Also, depending on the character we may or may not banish Leviathan to prevent the loss of movement speed. Glad you like the guide!
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Q. Eppaツ - How do you ban elemental passives?

A. Lancescape - The first time a passive comes up as an option, such as "all attacks inflict bleed", if you banish that skill it will never come up again. Doing this with any of the elemental factors (poison, bleed, doom, fire, etc) will prevent them from coming up again.
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Q. Qonstrukt - I experimented with myrmidon and the holy weapons, and the most damaging were Sanctified Throw, Templar's Verdict, Living Weapons, Holy Frenzy, Holy Fire, and additionally Might.

A. Lancescape - Credit where credit is due, We used your comment to help create the build for The Myrmidon! The mention of Might made us say "That's what we're missing!!" and that helped pull the whole build together.

[Smurfdaddy]

Flame Spiral + Heat Explosion works wonders!
I usually play with devastating blows & use another primer (something that hits often) like whirling defenses. You can get a lot of skill chain upgrades & procs like this to make the 3rd skill go nuts & apply tons of fire procs. Still easily beats titan hunt +12

I was a bit sad that neither of these 2 skills got any love in the guide since they seem super powerfull. Scorching edge might still be better then heat explosion but it is nice to have a bit of variation when it comes to fire builts :)

[Xasthur]

Thank you for great work. Im waiting eagerly for update, especially Shaman build!

[Sacredng]

awesome guide cant wait for shaman test :D

[Acuru]

Very helpful guide, hoping for update :)

[Nasty.T]

Can we get an update?

[Daddy Death]

Well Done! Thanks

[stolve]

"Q. J4ve5 - Are there some general stat thresholds you would recommend for the characters? Overall very nice guide. Thank you

A. Lancescape - For all characters we will press escape to check out "Crit Chance" %. Once we get it to 100% we'll banish Lethality so we don't accidentally keep taking it. Also, depending on the character we may or may not banish Leviathan to prevent the loss of movement speed. Glad you like the guide!"

Why do you do this if multicrit is a thing?

[Qonstrukt]

Don't be so harsh. They admittedly didn't test everything, including new meta skills/runes. While there might be some or one build that is best, this gives a good general direction what affinities to build.

[Akrimus]

These builds are okay for a beginner, but overall they are complete garbage.

[Scipo0419]

It's a bit disappointing seeing how many builds you found worked best were just "use poison". Thankfully, this game is relatively well balanced from what I can tell and I've had success with basically every build I've tried (except a Prestige 1 Legionnaire build where I tried mixing Thrust and Chaos on a Danger 8 map, that was tough)