Arcane Knight

Youtube Video

Youtube Video here

Build explanation

Core mechanic

We are gonna build around one major legendary, Arcanic Pledge and one particular Slorm Reaper, Kah-Veer. This is an Elemental build obviously, who rely on non-direct damage, making on hit effect and leech ineffective (see Life sustain and Survivability).

Arcanic Pledge, Legendary gloves

We are basing this build on this legendary effect. So we are forced to take Mighty Swing, and build around critical chances in order to proc the beam as much as possible.

I think it’s important to note that we can achieve a proc ratio of 100% when the item is at +13 (90-102%). Since most of the damage will come out of this, you want to prioritize the leveling of the gloves at first.

Arcane Beam

The beam description is actually not disponible on Mighty Swing. We need to know that ww (Whirlwind) has one.

With this we see that the beam has a base damage of 200% (65% + 15% per rank) elemental damage. If we can reach 100% crit chance (something we’re gonna aim for), we have 200% elemental damage per hit.

The beam pierce all enemies, and does have quite a good range (the beam goes further than the end of the screen).

Kah-veer, The Crackling Thunder-Primordial Sword

Since we are making an elemental crit-proc build, Kah-Veer is the best reaper we can use. The % elemental damage bonus as well as the movement speed comes in handy when we need them.

We can also see that when maxed, this reaper does have big reaper damage. We’re gonna convert those damage to elemental, to benefit the beam as well as thunderstruck. Reach out to Legendary required * for more explanations.

Only big downside of using the primordial version is the malediction, see Ultimatums for what to choose.

The cooldown reduction when you move is also great, even more when you consider the high movement speed the build has, since Kah-Veer boosts movement speed by 77.5% at level max (100+55). A good example is deflect has a cooldown of 2.71s (in my case), and is reduced to just under 2s, if you are moving constantly (something you should do anyway).

Thunderstruck

Since Thunderstruck is automatically equipped and at max rank, you do not need to invest in the ancestral legacy (but you can when you have fully upgraded the rest).

Thunderstruck is now proc when we deal a critical, meaning we are dealing the 200% elemental damage from the beam, as well as an average 300% (average damage) from thunderstruck (assuming both skill touch).

Note that Thunderstruck strikes a random enemy near you, so it will never proc on the enemy in the back.

Attributes

Here are the attributes the build is using.

Savagery

We’re only using the first 10 pts in savagery, just to benefit from the 25% reaper damage multiplier (well, 10% and 15% don’t really add-up to 25%, since they are multipliers). Since we’re scaling Kah-Veer damage and converting it to elemental damage, this is a good investment.

Fury

Fury is the main attribute we’re focusing on. The crit chance which is primordial for this build, as well as the melee recast chance, some nice and needed evasion and a small bonus to attack speed is the reason why we take fury. See Alternative version for variation.

The critical damage is useless, as well as the reaper damage multiplier after a movement skill, since we are not using a movement skill.

The bonus attack speed is also near permanent, since the build is aiming for near 100% crit chance. Be sure to put Mighty Swing on your primary slot.

Bravery

This attribute basically gives us a “free” 15% critical strike chance. Since fragments picked up counts towards Greed stack, and we are using a filter for at least the white item, the 15% bonus is near-permanent.

Ancestral Legacy

Elemental Swap

This aura gives us a 60% elemental damage bonus. The build is gonna stack “increased aura effect”, to boost this effect to 120%+.

In this case, we can see the build has 173% increased aura effect:

Only downside is that our mana cost is doubled, but we are gonna compensate for this by having a good mana regeneration, see Mana sustain.

Taking this, you also benefit some magic find stat (item quantity, item quality, fragments find, goldus find)

Options for third ancestral stone

Air conditioner

Having a good amount of increased aura effect, taking air conditioner can help against melee ranged enemies. The aura is capped at -90% attack speed, up to +100% increased aura effect. Combined with Grappling Hook, this aura can be very effective to avoid multiple attacks.

The Slormitologist

If you don’t see the need for air conditioner, you can swap for The slormitologist, who gives a nice bonus to item quantity and slormandrites find.

Regenerative Strikes

This ancestral gift can help a bit if you are really struggling with mana regeneration. Keep it mind it will only be effective if you manage to hit multiple target each time, so use the hook!

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Perks and Passives

Mighty Swing

We are using Mighty Swing of course for the beam proc. If you’re missing some critical strike chance because you are not geared enough at this time, you can go something like. You get 10% from the first perk, as well as up to 18.5% (for a 15 mastery Mighty Swing + 22 from gear).

Second row isn’t that important. If you’re struggling with mana regeneration, you can take the first two of the second row, it won’t change the mana cost.

If you are good with mana, you can take either inner fire or overdrive proc, it will help a bit with some proc from Kah-Veer. (Since IF/OD crit can proc Thunderstruck)

IV mastery is up to your current situation. If you are not capped for melee recast chances, you can take some. If you think you are a bit slow, take the attack speed stack, 45% is always huge.

The last one is a no-brainer, take the first (double recast on recast). Since we don’t care about Mighty Swing damage, the last one is useless. Since recast can also crit and therefore proc an arcane beam, you want to achieve 100% melee recast, to have an effective 3 beam proc on hit.

Once you are crit-capped for Mighty Swing (see Reaching crit cap), you can swap the first row to take the Dazed effect, which reduces the enemies attack speed for 45%. The skewer one isn’t that good, since it’s only 15% chance to apply on hit.

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Grappling Hook

I recommend you play with the Grappling Hook, since it’s way easier to kill and hit multiple enemies with Mighty Swing if they are all packed.

It’s a pretty basic setup here, nothing too fancy.

Taking both Long Chain and Captain Hook lets you grab the entire screen. This is also great for Gather Intel since you will get a bunch of stacks for melee, area and projectile damage reduction.

For the IV mastery, since at the moment the enemies don’t really have elemental resistance, you can just take Mighty Vitality, which basically lets you have a +50% max life bonus nearly all the time. If in the future enemies will have elemental resistance, we could swap to apply elemental broken on enemies (it’s assuming the build will still work or not get nerfed).

Deflect

We are using deflect, because it’s just a good way to increase the survivability of the build.

The build is using some kind of block, not really relevant, but still a nice little boost to defense. Basically we are always having at least 15 blocks stacks, which is a 13.5% damage reduction on average (more if you nullify often with deflect).

You want to take the 20% life, since we are scaling a bit of life as our primary source of defense (after deflect).

For the last two you want the immunity to area damage while deflect, and the 100% tenacity. I really like not being slowed down when I play, and don’t particularly need more stat. Other perks don’t really matter.

Elder Armor

You can always swap the 100% tenacity for this, if you are struggling to survive. This can boost your hp pool or evasion pool, as well as some elemental damage.

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Ultimatums

Flawless powder, Critical strike damage

When using primordial Kah-Veer, there is one ultimatum which stands out, the critical damage one. Since at the moment Kah-Veer malediction doesn’t have the correct implementation in game, what it’s doing is basically just having a -100% critical damage multiplier, the critical damage ultimatum is the best you can use while using Kah-Veer.

Using this ultimatum completely removes the malediction, as well as having an additional 130% damage.

Gear

Mod pool

In this priority order, you want the first available stat in the pool. Skip to the next if not available on this particular item:

1. Critical strike chance (until you hit the crit cap)
2. Melee recast chance (until you hit the 100% cap, this stat is effectively double with the last Mighty Swing perk)
3. Elemental damage (pure stat farmable here)
4. % Elemental damage
5. Attack speed
6. Aura increased effect
7. Evasion
8. Movement speed (boots)
9. Life (pure stat farmable here)
10. Mana regeneration (or mana leech, but leech cannot be find on magic/rare stat (except bracer)
11. Damage to elites

Legendary required *

Gloves: Arcanic Pledge

Since this is the core of the build, nothing really needed to say here. This has to be the number 1 item to reinforce. You have to aim for +13 to reach 100% chance for the arcane beam. Note that recast also proc the beam if they crit.

Amulet of Transference

Since Kah-Veer has a high reaper damage, converting it to elemental (our damage) is a no-brainer. It’s important to point out that converted reaper damage to elemental is not affected by % elemental damage. Here’s the damage calculation for skill damage without reaper conversion:

+

We see that the reaper damage is added to skill damage, without having the % raw damage affecting the reaper damage. It’s the same when converted to elemental damage:

So taking Elemental Swap (1 & 2) does not affect the reaper damage after conversion, it’s only to boost your flat elemental damage gained from gear.

Taking the amulet is still an increase of 1200 elemental damage at level 100, and 3500 at level 100+55. This is even better with the legendary Shoulders: Heavens of Steel.

Shoulders: Heavens of Steel

This legendary effect basically gives us a huge boost to reaper damage (it’s a reaper damage multiplier). Since we’re converting reaper damage to elemental damage (with Amulet of Transference), having this shoulder is a must. It’s giving us a +90% max reaper damage multiplier with a +15 item (+50% at +5).

Since it’s about max reaper damage and not “a simple” reaper damage multiplier, the effectiveness is half. If you have a 100+55 reaper, with Savagery 10 and the reaper +15 (+90% max reaper damage), you end up having 480-16320 elemental damage.

Legendary, nice to have

Bracers: Damasius Awareness

This legendary can help scaling crit for enemy full life. Unnecessary if you are already at crit cap.

Ring of Life & Mana

Those two rings will be your primary source of regeneration if you are not using leech. With enough elemental damage and attack speed, this source of regeneration is quite effective.

Just pressing the skill will put you nearly full life, and the regen will help also after.

Same goes for ring of mana, since there is no real ring usable right now in the game, those two rings are kinda the BiS without any downside.

Heart of Darkness

If you can scale some other defense other than life, evasion is a great addition to the build.

You can reach 5k evasion with this.

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Common problems

Life sustain

Since the build doesn’t do enough direct damage, we can’t really rely on leech to survive. It’s where the ring of life can help, see Ring of Life & Mana.

Mana sustain

Like Life sustain, since we don’t do a lot of direct damage (only base hit from Mighty Swing), taking only one node of mana leech isn’t enough. It’s important to note that it’s probably enough if you are not using the Amulet of Transference, since you will deal a lot more direct damage, therefore leeching more. But I do not recommend taking off the amulet to solve this problem. Either spam gear with mana leech, or mana regen.

Survivability

If you are struggling to survive, most of the time you just need more Life sustain. If this isn’t enough, here’s a couple of questions / options.

• Upgrade your life pool, by putting more max life and % max life on gear. You can swap deflect last mastery to take the double chest stat Elder Armor.
• Boost your evasion. 3000 evasion is already 27% evade chance. This can be achieved by having 50+ points in Fury, Elder Armor with 500+ evasion on chest, cape and helmet.
• Time correctly Deflect on combat. You want to use deflect before using the hook, to prevent any fast attackers from attacking you while you attack them.
• Be mobile. Since the build has a huge amount of movement speed, thanks to the Slorm Reaper, be sure to always keep moving!

Damage

If you are missing some damage, be sure to have the following:

• Reinforce as high as you can the Gloves: Arcanic Pledge.
• The Amulet of Transference is a huge boost to your damage.
• Boost your crit chance up to Reaching crit cap.
• Level up the Kah-Veer, since reaper damage means more elemental damage with the conversion amulet.
• Farm the primordial Kah-Veer, since it will greatly boost your damage with a 300% average elemental damage on crit.
• If you are still struggling, contact me or ask freely in the appropriate Discord channel.

Reaching crit cap

In order to achieve the most damage possible, you need to proc as much as possible the arcane beam, as well as thunderstruck from Kah-Veer. Since Mighty Swing third row perk are useless except for the crit one, we can reach the crit cap (100%) by just having  crit chance. (15 being the max level of the skill, and 22 the maximum added mastery from gear.

Since we are also using Bravery 15 and Fury 10, we have an additional critical chance of 20% (assuming Greed stack from bravery are up all the time, which is basically the case), you “only” need to have a 62.5% crit chance, a 57.5% bonus. This can be reduced to 52.5% (47.5% bonus) if the first Mighty Swing crit passive is also taken.

By having critical strike chance on any piece of gear where it’s possible (no pure stat), at the highest roll possible, you can achieve 81.5% with +10 gear. With a +11 bracers and +11 cape, you achieve the required 82.5%. This setup needs 6 epic stats with critical strike chance on it.

So by the time you get there, I recommend you take the first 10% crit from Mighty Swing (as well as the second of course), in order to boost your proc chance.

The low-cap at 52.5% (47.5% bonus) can be achieved with gear between +5 and +6.

The crit cap only affects Mighty Swing, since it’s your primary source of trigger. So if you’re running a Innerfire / Overdrive triggered version of the build, keep in mind that the crit cap for Mighty Swing is not 100% crit chance.

Reaching Melee recast cap

In order to maximize the number of proc of arcane beam as well as thunderstruck, you want to achieve 100% melee recast chance.

If you are missing some recast chance, you can always put recast chance on body armor and take Elder Armor to double this chance. Note that it’s even better with a pure stat on it.

Complete Gear Setup

Good Gear (+5 magic/rare)

Here is the setup used for the image (Wrath 7).

This setup sits at 78.5% crit chance, which is a dps-loss (compared to a crit capped) of at least 22.5%, since all of our damage is elemental.

This setup does not use epic stat at all. The image is at Wrath 7.

End-game Gear (+10 epic)

Very late-game Gear (+15 legendary)

Youtube video here.

Alternative version

Innerfire / Overdrive triggered version

Since inner fire and overdrive can proc Kah-Veer thunderstruck, the idea here is basically just trigger the most crit as possible. We can achieve this by having 100% chance for inner fire and overdrive on Mighty Swing.

In my opinion, this is not necessary, since we can already clear W10 quite comfortably, playing this version will just introduce more lag (due to multiple overdrive proc, and inner fire).

You could potentially mix this version while leveling, in order to achieve more proc per second.

Armor based version

Alternate defense version. Not really tested, only theorycrafted (and not much). It’s probably worse than a evasion version.

Ancestral crit cap version

This version needs a huge amount of grinding. Since the goal is to achieve 100% ancestral crit chance, we need some high pure stat in order to achieve this.

This version is of course un-tested, but the idea is to remove aura increased effect, since we swap Elemental Swap for either Fireball, or Ice-cone (triggered on ancestral crit).