Note
This build wasn’t tested after the nerf to leech (that happened in The Luxuriant Update: Part I). It may need some adjustement.
Why play this build
Plus
- Good damage potential that ramps up higher than you’d ever need
- High Max life, not squishy
- Easy to build and gear for, good beginner build
- Extremely well-suited to the Great Forge mode
- Huntress gets to be happy
Neutral
- Probably the only reason to play Huntress instead of Mage
Minus
- Brain-dead 1-button gameplay
- A little slow to ramp up when initially placing Ballista (outside of great forge)
- Does mostly indirect damage; Life Leech/Mana Leech can be a little unstable as recovery.
Introduction
This concept of this build is based around swarming the field with Ballista while stacking as many different damage multipliers as possible. Crit damage multipliers, totem effect multipliers, Turret Syndrome perk multipliers, ‘damage to elite enemy’ multipliers…
At maximum power, a single Ballista does millions of damage per second, and we can have over 12 of them active at once. A single Ballista arrow is eventually capable of doing millions of damage, which is enough to one-shot kill any regular enemy at Wrath level 10 (except the wooden armor guys that can’t take any damage until the 4th hit).
Furthermore, the new Great Forge mode is a wave-defence type of mode that’s well suited to the turret playstyle, since it doesn’t require very fast movement and gives you plenty of setup time.
Recommended Reapers
Attributes
Your core attributes should look like this. Note that you can also reforge attribute bonuses onto your gear at Friedreich (up to 3 points per gear for an additional 33 points) resulting in having up to 73 attribute points to spend.
Top priority traits
- Savagery-45: Provides much of the base damage output in the build. Heavily incentives Life stacking, something the turret build is pretty good at since it gets increased Max Life% for every active turret. If you’re using the TMP version, this trait isn’t strictly necessary but there’s not much else you’d care about anyways.
Medium priority traits
- Determination 20,25: More Max Life, good for Savagery-45 as well as not dying.
- Determination 30: Has a funny interaction in the Great Forge mode; Allied obelisks are friendly elites so they each activate this trait, which can end up providing you over +100% damage to elites in that mode.
The extra points can be spent however you want, though I’d suggest putting 10 in Fury for the 10% critical chance, or putting more in the Savagery or Determination lines.
Ultimatums
Ultimatums are rewarded for every 10 floors reached on the Slorm Temple expedition.
Recommended Ultimatum
- Ultimatum of Profound Depth is by far the best end-game option. Cataclysms are all area damage and they hit very hard. This helps mitigate them a lot.
Other Ultimatums
- The ‘Critical Damage’ ultimatum is fine early on, but you will end up getting a higher amount of critical damage from your gear than you would from this ultimatum.
- The ‘Movement Speed’ Ultimatum is decent for walking around faster in battlefield/slorm Temple, since we don’t have much movement speed in this build.
- The ‘Mana Regeneration’ ultimatum is just for early game players who don’t feel like reforging mana regen on their equipment.
Runes
Runes are a new mechanic introduced in the Great Forge mode. You get 1 rune every time you defeat the Siege Lord boss (once per run).
| Activation rune | Adrianne |
| Effect rune | Shaman |
| Enhancement rune | Adrianne |
This rune setup lets us spawn Prime Totems when using our Ballistas. The prime totems fire Arrow Shots, which in our build doesn’t do much damage. However, Arrow Shot is a primary skill, it is direct damage, which means it can activate life leech and mana leech. This is quite nice for keeping our health up without having to cast primary skills ourselves.
Support skill: Turret syndrome
Despite being the ‘Support’ skill, this is skill going to be responsible for 95% of your damage output. The perk selection is pretty self explanatory; unfortunately nearly every build that wants to use ballistas as their main damage source has to use the exact same perk selection here, using anything else is just handicapping yourself. The first 6 perks are just generic buffs for Ballista damage, fire rate, etc.
Ballista are ‘Totems’ that inherit all of your ‘attack’ stats (listed in game in the character page). (Ballista can’t use the ancestral strike stat though but luckily we don’t care about that stat at all).
Of note is the tier 6 perk that reduces the cooldown of Turret Syndrome for every stack of Serenity you have (Serenity is increased whenever you cast the same primary, secondary, or support skill in a row, and decreased whenever you cast different skills in a row.). Because of this, we will try to keep Serenity as high as possible at all times, by trying to minimize our usage of primary/secondary skills. Also, skills from the Ancestral Legacy Tree do not influence Serenity, so those can be used freely.
The other noteworthy perk is the tier 8 perk that provides Life Leech, which is by far the best stat to restore health in the lategame. Unfortunately, Life Leech only works on direct damage, and our Ballista do indirect damage, so they cannot leech life or mana for you. It’s still a useful perk for your other skills though.
Primary Skill: Immortal Arrow
This skill will be used to increase our Serenity stacks. It will pretty much only be cast at the start of an expedition to max our Serenity, or after you cast Arrow Shot to Life Leech.
To use this skill the fastest, just hold the mouse button down and wave your cursor around the screen.
Secondary Skill: Arrow Shot
Arrow Shot doesn’t actually need to be equipped, but we don’t have any other skill we would use anyways. The perk setup is the best setup for the Arrow Shots fired by Prime totems, we aren’t going to be casting it ourselves. It’s almost entirely just for triggering Life Leech.
In an emergency you can manually cast arrow shot to trigger Life Leech and heal yourself, though it’ll reduce your Serenity stacks so remember to cast Immortal Arrow afterwards to recover them.
Ancestral Legacy Tree
Offensive Option
This setup gets us to Obscure Retribution, an aura with a completely useless effect. But the 25% lifelock cost is needed to reduce our life for the Savagery-45 trait. You can also cast the Burning Shadow skill for a small damage buff, but as a turret player that’s more effort than it’s worth.
Defensive Option:
This setup gets us Risk of Pain, an aura with an effect we don’t care about (but 15% lifelock we do care about). Since the lifelock is less, the damage output is less, but this build also has a spare point to take Air Conditioner, a useful defensive aura that helps quite a bit against nearby enemy spawns.
Gear Stat priorities
This covers which stats to prioritize when looting or reforging gear. First, some important things to note:
- Gear has 3 types of normal stat values, Primary (basic stats), Secondary (magic/rare stats), and Tertiary (epic stats).
- Primary stats have higher values than secondary stats. and secondary stats have higher values than tertiary stats. ex. if you can roll max Life on any of the 3 stats, as a primary stat it would give 700 HP, as a secondary stat it would give 500HP, and as a tertiary stat it would give 350HP. (Numbers aren’t exactly accurate but the concept stands).
- Gear can only roll a stat once, if you rolled max Life as a primary stat, it would no longer be available to roll as a secondary or tertiary stat. Because of this, try to roll your most important stats as primary stats and not secondary stats (if given the choice at least, often the categories are mutually exclusive). Make sure important stats you need aren’t rolled as tertiary stats if the equipment allows for it to be a primary or secondary stat instead.
- A ‘flat’ stat (+X) and a ‘percent’ stat (+X%) count as two different stats. Gear can roll one instance of each of them if possible.
- What primary and secondary stats can roll is limited depending on the type of equipment. Specific stats are locked to specific categories of equipment. Except tertiary stats are special in that they can roll ANY stat no matter what category of gear. Optimizing this is a gigantic pain, do not bother reforging tertiary stats unless you have an excess of materials and goldus to do so.
Stat priorities
One-off stats
- Attack Speed (roll as the main stat on shoulders, bracers, and gloves. Cape is optional)
- Movement Speed (roll as the main stat on boots)
- Mana Regeneration (roll as a main stat on helmet)
- Mana Leech (roll as a secondary stat on bracers)
Top priority stats
- Max Life (flat) and Max Life%. Max Life (flat) is more valuable than the % version. Determines our survivability and damage bonus from Savagery-45. Roll when possible.
- Totem Effect%: Damage and duration multiplier for your Ballista. Roll when possible, though don’t stack it entirely at the expense of Critical stats.
Secondary Offensive Stats
- Critical Chance% and Critical Damage%: Generally prioritise Critical Chance over Critical Damage, both are required though.
Luxury stats
- All Damage Reduction.
- Fire/Lightning/Shadow/Light/Ice Resistance.
- Stacking meaningful amounts of these stats is difficult, since they’re primarily on epic stats. Hitting 100% resistance gives you complete immunity to their respective Cataclysm, which is especially useful in the Great Forge where you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
Special Gear stats
- Reaper Stat: Astorias (buffs Big Fury and TMP Reapers)
- Mastery Stat: Turret Syndrome
- Attribute Stat: Savagery/Determination
These are special stats you likely have to manually reforge on your gear. (in order of priority Mastery > Reaper > Attribute).
Legendary Effects
Most Legendary effects don’t have any a major impact on the build, though there are still a few worth mentioning if you happen to have or find them.
Amulet
Nothing noteworthy.
Belt
‘Sahrusiel’s Pact’ can help mitigate big damage spikes.
Chest
Nothing noteworthy
Boots
Nothing noteworthy, but you can use ‘Sparkling Boots of Midos’ to increase goldus gain somewhat.
Bracers
Nothing noteworthy. Damasius Awareness would be great for us but it unfortunately does not work on Turret damage.
Cape
‘Repercussive Cloak’ is useful for the 5 seconds of damage immunity it provides (You don’t actually need to use soul bond for the defence from this to work).
Glove
‘Winds of Harmony’ can slightly reduce cooldown to let us spam more Ballista.
Helmet
‘Vitalizing Helm of Vitality’ is a great option to increase Max Life (which increases both damage and defense). ‘Young Phoenix Feather’ does not provide any damage but it provides valuable 1-shot protection on a 3 minute cooldown.
Shoulders
‘Heavens of Steel’ is ok as it provides some extra reaper damage.
Rings
‘Aestia’s Ring of Life’ (and ‘Aestia’s Ring of Mana’ if both are equipped) can be used to heal when no enemies are nearby to leech off of.
The End
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.
