The On-Hit Nomad

Interested in the Nomad but not sure how to play him with the long cooldowns and many build paths? Check out this guide that sets you up for success with the Nomad!

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my first guide!

This is a guide for people who already have a nomad partially levelled, and are looking for an effective build path.

Quickstart

If you're in a hurry or solely interested in my talent and stat distribution, here is a screenshot of my build on my level 105 Nomad.



The breakdown of all the involved skills and why I chose them will be explained below.

Stat Points

Moving on to stat points. In Hero Siege, you can distribute your points into the following:

• Strength
  
• Swiftness
  
• Armor
  
• Stamina

For this build, we will focus on Stamina for the mid level Nomads, and Armor for the higher ones, and Strength for both.

Swiftness, while nice to have, would cost more than it would gain offensively and defensively and therefore, I do not use it. If you feel it suits your playstyle better, substitute some STR points into the stat.

Strength
Typically, you level up your strength by putting one point into it and the other into your chosen defensive stat each time you level up.

Armor
Why do I suggest Armor for higher level players? This is because Armor and Stamina work inversely as you level up, as Armor becomes increasingly more effective the more points placed and Stamina becomes less effective than putting the same points into armor. Once you are placing between 130-150 and beyond points into a defensive stat, place them in armor.

Stamina
As described above, Stamina is very effective for lower to mid level players but its effectiveness slowly dies down as you level up further and further. If you like, place a couple points in armor to give yourself a threshold of damage reduction, but Stamina is the way to go until you get to that higher level.

Talent Points

Remember this picture? Let's look further into it.

Start by placing one point into all of your abilities unless you have an all talents bonus like I do. However, note that the Wind & Sand ability (Bottom left) will not proc unless an actual talent point is placed into it, so i recommend doing so.

Main Skills

The following are the skills you want to max for this build

Traveler
This is your core damage skill. You want to max this out as the first priority. As of Hero Siege 1.4, there will now be a difference in damage depending on how full the traveler meter is when you swing. Therefore, time your attacks wisely for some massive damage!

Dissipate
With the high proc chance of 30-40% depending on how many of your equips have all talent skills, this is the second important skill because it has a nice proc rate, good damage, and scales with your strength, which you need anyway for Traveler!

Eye of Ra
This is a flat damage bonus but with one catch! Your blade does not actually need to hit the enemy for the talent to activate! From my experiences, you only need the enemy to be visible on your screen for Ra to shine down his blinding light. Therefore, spam spam spam!

Wind & Sand
The best thing about the skill is that you only need to place one point into it for it to become effective and useful. This is because the strength scaling is INSANELY high, approximately 20x your strength. That means if you place 150 points into strength, your tiny tornadoes pack a whopping 3000 damage! The only "con" of the skill is that there is no real reward for levelling it, so don't.

Rupture
This is the last main skill in the On-Hit build. The reason I assign this the lowest priority is because it does not scale with any stat, provides a very tiny bleed bonus, and is more utility than anything else. All this does is have a low percent chance to cripple and slow the enemy as it bleeds out.

Secondary Skills

After you complete the build (somewhere around lvl 130 assuming you place one point into W&S) you can choose to max these in any order.

Flying Schmitars
This skill is very very strong early game, but falls off later because of the lack of scaling and higher enemy health bars.

Sandstorm
This creates a tiny AoE storm that damages all enemies nearby. Honestly, this is my go to talent for map clear because crates destroy instantly when they touch the storm.

Demolishing Tornadoes
For myself and many others, this was partially the reason I used to play Nomad :). Before recieving a heavy nerf, this skill basically obliterated anything on your screen in giant tornado columns, which merited it a long cool down. However, nowadays you only get four tornadoes that go around you five of six times, covering a fraction of the area the old skill used to, but with the same cool down! Fun skill, but not much use anymore.

Vanish
The last skill is the Nomad's invisibility ability. Useful for getting out sticky situations but note ranged enemies will still target you. Why? I'm the wrong person to ask xD.

Conclusion

So if you are looking to play Nomad, why this build? The Nomad has only one big tradeoff for the massive damage this class can have: Cooldowns!

Lets take the Vanish ability as an example. The skill starts at 5 seconds of invisibility, but with a ~40 second cooldown! Now, this wouldn't be a problem if it scaled up at higher levels, but each point only raises the invis time by about .2 seconds! I would suggest to either lower the cooldown, or scale it to increase as you increase the level of the talent as well. I do not have a problem with the time invisible, I find it is the perfect amount of time to get out of the worst of situations.

My concerns with the Demolishing Tornadoes are explained above, and as far as Schmitars and Sandstorm are concerned, they both provide excellent damage early game, but fall off hard as you advance.

But back to my build.

Here's the thing: My Nomad DOESN'T have cooldowns! The core skills of this build refresh everytime you swing your blade (see? On-Hit!!!). That is why you don't need to worry yourself about surviving until the next time you can pop your tornado, and you just walk up to the enemy and whack em right in the face! That is why for the current state the Nomad is in, I believe this is the best way to maximize the potential he has.

Thank you for reading my guide!
Questions?
Comments?
Concerns?
Leave them all in the comments below, I will do my best to address them all!

Wanna Play?

I'd love to play with all of you, with or without my Nomad!

You can find my Nomad, Trend.NA.us, lurking around online late on weekdays EST and weekends! However, I do not host servers, so feel free to add me and ask to play, I'll usually say yes if I am free!

Thanks for reading, Trendy OUT!

[Kiddo]

Is this build still relevant? I just started playing Nomad and have him at level 50 something. Looking for a good build if anyone can direct me to a good one, similar to the title of this.

[The Drink]

Bump for Update Please!!!

[Mikurae]

outdated

[Hugo]

This really needs an update, swiftness has been replaced with energy now that mana is a thing.
While the strategy may still be valid, it's pretty much back to the manual labor of examining how each skill scales up.

[StormSheep77]

is traveler still the number one skill now that it is changed?

[FANTAMAN OG]

how does this build works right now?

[SpaciousNewsdealer]

Good question, but you forgot one important part: Traveler! While it doesn't scale directly with STR, the formula used to calculate damage from the skill uses a damage component, which can only be created through adding strength points. Additionally as I mentioned before, it would require a lot of points into swiftness to make the build effective. Believe me, I've tried! In any case, many relics boost swiftness anyway, so keep an eye out for those and you'll be fine!

[Tarengar]

Why do you use to chose str as i noticed for this build str only scales with dissipate and windand sand and it does not scale well,wouldnt it be better to use full swiftness and vit because the more swiftness the more disspates you can get off faster and more eye of ra procs and more tonadoes = more dps? or go for str,swift and vit? what you think message back

[SpaciousNewsdealer]

I'd do something like 140 STR, 100 STA, 10 ARM. Thanks for the compliment :)

[Katzeo]

Weird question ==> If you have to distribute 250 stat point, how would you distribute them?

Awsome gudie by the way