Been playing for about a week or two now and have noticed a few things that I haven’t seen much information about, and which could be useful to others. Disclaimer: I’m on 0.7.6c because linux.
Anyway the biggest takeaway is that the ‘forging’ prefix on ornate idols (% manifest weapon chance on melee hit) can proc itself, as it is a melee hit (see gif below). Having multiple of these makes for a fun time. See my darling below (according to lastepochtools 16% became the highest roll in 0.7.7, so I suppose this one will be a bit worse when linux gets the patch)
Other random bits:
- Divine bolt doesn’t shotgun, so to maximise DPS I’d not bother with the ‘extra projectiles’ nodes
- Divine bolt scales with spell/fire damage. I don’t know if it scales with any attributes
- The manifest weapon proc can trigger divine bolt, and counts as a hit for the fire aura big boom node
- Manifest weapon and divine bolt have no cooldown
- Retribution (or whatever the 0.2s cooldown ‘when you get attacked’ passive in the base sentinel tree is called) can proc these things too.
Taking all of the above into account, I’ve managed to make quite a half-decent paladin (level ~75, eyes-closed arena 110 before i crash to ice elementals or carving through spiders) which uses warpath as a vehicle for proccing manifest weapon, and both of these proc divine bolt+fire aura explosion. This scales as much attack speed, ‘while channeling’, and fire damage as possible (a sick 2h staff is nice here). I was using volcanus beforehand but this just scales your fps loss while not doing that much more damage on single targets (which is the more relevant situation), so switched to a good 2h staff. I haven’t really min-maxed the build - it could probably be even better with future strike, but that crashes me even quicker when warpathing through crunchy spiders.
Core skills - a mess:
- Warpath: ‘while not holding a shield’ and reduced mana cost nodes
- Aura: The fire eruption node, attack speed, plus whatever else you want
- Sigils I guess? Seems like a din default
- Ring of shields on instant cast I guess? Again, a din default it seems
- Smite or whatever you fancy, its nice for the attack speed buff but i rarely find myself using it because spinning gives you so much prot
Passives - even more of a mess:
Sentinel
- Didn’t spec into the retaliate thing on this char because of crashes, but it’s a nice node (forget the crit and stuff, just the base one is good)
VK
- Nothing here, but future strike could be quite sick.
Forge
- Strength and attunement is a bit of a waste (unless attunement scales divine bolt and the fire blowup thing; haven’t checked). Could grab something else instead
Paladin
- Even though shred is known to be crap, since intuitively penetration isn’t a debuff but a per-hit thing, I figured it could be quite decent? Anyway, the main thing is that magic single point in divine bolt. The rest is either just for survivability, scaling fire, or laziness
Gear:
Most critical is to get as many of those ‘forging’ ornate idols as possible. Obviously the higher the roll the better. Otherwise, gear priorities are the usual boring warpath stuff (set GB, set CA, armour+prot while channeling, damage while channeling), and look for a big implicit spell damage staff with damage while channeling, fire damage, mana regen, and armour+prot while channeling. Fire could probably be replaced with spell. Chest is pretty flexible. Attack speed on amulet base (jade) and gloves. Maybe the helmet too if you’re feeling spicy.
Other thoughts:
The ‘Forging’ idols which give you manifest weapon are the real heroes here, as the proc functions as a ‘more’ multiplier on your attack speed, while not suffering from the same penalties as warpath. You could probably get quite far with a DoT build using these idols, but basic experiments with that crash me as well (how fun). It’d be interesting to see how far someone with nicer gear and who doesn’t constantly crash can take this. It’d be even more interesting to see how nicely this performs once manifest weapon gets a tree.
Also my passive tree and skills are quite messy because I keep trying to experiment, so there’s plenty of room for optimisation. Also the class choice isn’t set in stone. I made a paladin as my first char so used that for testing stuff out. Maybe there’s some bonkers VK compatibility with echos.
A bit rambling but I hope this info can be of use to others.
Edit 1: Added screenies, a bit of structuring.