[CLASS BUILD] The Boar (Priest/Monk)

[Braven]

I haven't had time to test this, but thought I would share this idea anyway in case someone else wants to give it a go and/or wants to prove that priest is actually good still.

 

The idea is to collect massive amounts of health and healing modifiers and combine that with the most powerful healing spell in the game, priest's Triumph of the Crusaders. Then... just watch everything die to Rooting Pain. If possible, also try to lower enemy fortitude to make sure the Rooting Pain actually hits most of the time. This is a lot like my immortal paladin/monk, except this one is not "technically" immortal... but pretty much should be. Since it takes 8 HP to generate Rooting Pain... and that is also about how much Rooting Pain does in damage... in theory, you just need more HP than the weakest enemy you are facing. They can probably actually have quite a bit more health than that because you will have other passive healing over time and weapon damage.

 

Class: Helwalker Monk / Priest of Magran

Race: Does not matter much. Maybe nature/moon/fire godlike. If Fire-godlike was ever good, I guess this would be it and it fits the theme.

 

Starting Stats

Might: 16

Con: 18

Dex: 4

Per: 19

Int: 18

Res: 3

 

Key Abilities: Rooting Pain, Triumph of the Crusaders, Duality of Mortal Presense, Flame Shield

 

Weapon: Morning Star to lower fortitude or flails to lower reflex

 

I picked Helwalker because the downside doesn't matter... if you take more damage, you generate more wounds to fuel Rooting Pain. The extra Might from Helwalker will help buff up our healing powers more and all Rooting Pain and flame shield damage, so it is quite nice. Make sure you kill off any wizards first as you don't want them messing up your spells. They also probably have the lowest health pool and fortitude/reflex defenses.

 

At level 10, when you have your core abilities, the fun begins. Now all you have to do is get as close to as many enemies as possible and watch them die to rooting pain as Triumph of the Crusaders heals you. Also, use healing spells on levels 1-3 to further extend your health pool.

 

At tier 5, add flame shield to the mix for more retailation damage.

 

I recommend not resting and gathering all the bonuses you can that helps healing or health pool. Hylea's Bounty (+25% health pool) and the Blessing from the Priests in the starting town (+50% healing multiplier) are particularly helpful. I recommend focusing on Athletics with your skill points and getting the item that allows a second use of second wind... again to extend your health pool further. I think I found a cat or dog in the capital city that also grants a nice healing buff.

 

Anyone else have suggestions on how to add additional synergy to this? I haven't really thought much about healing/health items, so there are probably some I am not aware of. Fire PL items could be good with flame shield.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven

[Dorftek]

Shame there aren't any combusting wounds ring in this game, would have worked splendidly with this build.

 

If your are stacking +% healing done u might also consider high Alchemy skill with white leaf drug for a nice constant regeneration. There's a belt with +1 alch and +10% healing mod incase u go the Alchemy route with a lower athletics.

[Braven]

How do drugs work? Does the crash go away if you take another dose? The advantages of never resting is so great that I guess you need to be an addict. Might run out of drugs and get stuck with the crash for a long time.

 

I wonder if wizard could work with flame shield. That is also level 4 spell. The utility of mage spells could be nice, like using spell reflection to block arcane dampener. You lose the stat boosts, but the base damage of fire shield is higher and there are still a number of items that boost fire PL. reflex I think tends to be lower than fortitude as well.

 

Guess the problem is that it doesn’t trigger multiple times from a big hit. A heavy armor strategy would be needed for wizard to work to lower damage. Also only works with melee attacks. Meh. Monk is still best.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven

[Braven]

Update: Priest of Magran gets Flame shield at level 5... so you can have more retailation damage. Will update the build to go with that subclass.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven

[Dorftek]

Yeah I believe ud have to eat drugs on every dungeon or random fight to get rid of the crash. A bit inconvenient I suppose

[Boeroer]

Ha - I like it!

 

With Berath's Blessing you can unlock a merchant in the first town that sells a belt that will fill your quickslots with 4 random potions. Potions scale (like crazy) with Alchemy and the odds are good that you will get a healing potion (among other really useful potions) every now and then.

 

Maybe also a Lifegiver/Helwalker would fulfil this concept. He'd have no Flame Shield, but Moon's Lightl with +9 (+8 version 1.1) Power Level (+2 class + 5 shifting + 2 Wellspring) heals ~30 points every 3 secs with decent MIG for a long, long time. Moonwell is even better. If you combine it with the Dawnstars' Blessing and so on this is - in my opinion - more reliable than Triumph otC and you can add nice stuff like Nature's Terror (instead of Flame Shield). Ok, then you wouldn't prove anything for the priest class, hehe. What Do you think?

Edited June 5, 2018 by Boeroer

[Ascaloth]

There's the Healing Hands gloves which I think you can get from Berath's vendor, which gives you a Lesser Lay on Hands. There's also a Physicker's Belt which should be quite common, and gives +15% healing. Last but not least, you can get the Bone Setter's Torc amulet from Pahowane Underground after the second animancy teleportation quest, which is another +15% healing.

 

You're welcome. I know this because I'm researching a healer build, myself. 

 

EDIT: Before I forget; the Lethandria's Devotions medium shield for additional HoT. Maybe the Shining Bulwark large shield for burst healing, provided you pumped Diplomacy.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Ascaloth

[Dorftek]

Ha - I like it!

 

With Berath's Blessing you can unlock a merchant in the first town that sells a belt that will fill your quickslots with 4 random potions. Potions scale (like crazy) with Alchemy and the odds are good that you will get a healing potion (among other really useful potions) every now and then.

 

Maybe also a Lifegiver/Helwalker would fulfil this concept. He'd have no Flame Shield, but Moon's Lightl with +9 (+8 version 1.1) Power Level (+2 class + 5 shifting + 2 Wellspring) heals ~30 points every 3 secs with decent MIG for a long, long time. Moonwell is even better. If you combine it with the Dawnstars' Blessing and so on this is - in my opinion - more reliable than Triumph otC and you can add nice stuff like Nature's Terror (instead of Flame Shield). Ok, then you wouldn't prove anything for the priest class, hehe. What Do you think?

According to the tooltip of that belt with the new patch it now only gives you a single random potion each encounter.

Pre patch it filled all slots, played around with it on an alchemy rogue with deep pockets before, it was awesome :D

[Lokithecat]

The unkillable cloak would be great as an 'oe noe' countermeasure... (Nemnok's Cloak)  but its per rest abilities.

[Braven]

Ha - I like it!

 

With Berath's Blessing you can unlock a merchant in the first town that sells a belt that will fill your quickslots with 4 random potions. Potions scale (like crazy) with Alchemy and the odds are good that you will get a healing potion (among other really useful potions) every now and then.

 

Maybe also a Lifegiver/Helwalker would fulfil this concept. He'd have no Flame Shield, but Moon's Lightl with +9 (+8 version 1.1) Power Level (+2 class + 5 shifting + 2 Wellspring) heals ~30 points every 3 secs with decent MIG for a long, long time. Moonwell is even better. If you combine it with the Dawnstars' Blessing and so on this is - in my opinion - more reliable than Triumph otC and you can add nice stuff like Nature's Terror (instead of Flame Shield). Ok, then you wouldn't prove anything for the priest class, hehe. What Do you think?

I checked the belt and it only provides one random potion now. My past experience with it is that it tends to provide useless potions a lot, like ones that just increase a couple skills by +2, which are useless in combat. Alchemy is still a good option though, of course, and monk gets bonus skills for it too.

 

Yeah, It did occur to me after writing this that Triumph is not really the best for slow, AOE damage. But in my experience it is actually extremely fast AOE damage; each hit triggers several rooting pains all at once with a single hit (like 5+) and multiple enemies are hitting you at once if soloing. I consoled a character up to test it and it was quite devastating to the pack of enemies I used it against. I had to just spam the thunderous blows instant cast to keep my wounds down so I could create more rooting pains (doesn’t work if you have max wounds). Luckily, thunderous blows was nerfed and requires 3 wounds now making it easier. I guess you could say it is a buff. Helwalker and lesser wounds makes you take wounds so fast that HOTs will never keep up, no matter how much healing per tick you manage to push out.  My 3 resolve certainly didn't help.

 

I didn’t take the “reflect melee” ability when I tested, but I wish I did. I think that would actually be extremely powerful since it slows down the wounds and also contributes a ton of damage to help proc Triumph. It makes flame shield useless, but you can always take other spells like barring deaths that works will with Crusaders at that level. If you go druid instead, the melee block will slow down damage allowing your HOTs to be much more effective.

 

If soloing with priest, you can use the level 2 withdraw spell. That heals for a lot since it is a HOT, scales nicely with power levels/might/int, and more importantly, you are safe while it heals so you don’t have the issue of keeping up with the damage. With your huge health pool, you can afford to wait until low to cast it to get the full benefits. Barring deaths door with a HOT is also super powerful and you will full heal before it expires since something is bound to die.

 

The crusaders healing is insane. It can be like thousands from one spell cast. Sadly, most of it is wasted since there is no place to store it.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven

[Braven]

There's the Healing Hands gloves which I think you can get from Berath's vendor, which gives you a Lesser Lay on Hands. There's also a Physicker's Belt which should be quite common, and gives +15% healing. Last but not least, you can get the Bone Setter's Torc amulet from Pahowane Underground after the second animancy teleportation quest, which is another +15% healing.

 

You're welcome. I know this because I'm researching a healer build, myself.

 

EDIT: Before I forget; the Lethandria's Devotions medium shield for additional HoT. Maybe the Shining Bulwark large shield for burst healing, provided you pumped Diplomacy.

The lesser healing hands, unfortunately, does a comedically low amount of healing so it is not worth the recovery time to use or glove spot.

 

I am not sure if the physicks belt is better, or just one that provides +2 Con. When I tested this as a level 13 character, I healed for way more than my total health pool with Crusaders so I think just having a larger health pool is better than healing multipliers, if you need to pick between the two. I would not be afriad of the 35 Might/CON limit being exceed since you never really want full wounds since you need your wounds empty in order to trigger rooting pain. So basically, the passive bonuses from wounds doesn’t matter much.

 

If you steal a certain companion’s lantern, you can bump up your priest power levels by 2. In my experience you have no time to attack so might as well hold a “shield”.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven

[Braven]

The biggest fear I have with this build concept of using Monk's Rooting Pain is running into enemies with high fortitude or high armor that rooting pain can't penetrate. As far as I could tell, rooting pain is stuck at 8.5 penetration and does not increase with power levels. If it can't penetrate enemy armor, it will do pathetic damage, and with the built in accuracy penalty, it will not be able to hit some enemies very well at all. Not sure if priest/paladin/druid has any tools to help compensate for this downside. Druid has some really powerful DOT damage spells that do raw damage which could be used instead of or along side rooting pain. I wonder if alchemy still scales poison PL at a 1-to-1 ratio in patch 1.1? I will test later, or if anyone knows: Chime in. With that insane PL buff, all you need is druid for damage and then use priest for immortality tricks, since they didn't bother to nerf that.

 

You could do priest/druid and just rely on the druid DOTs to kill things and do tricks like hide in the "withdraw" spell while the damage ticks away and barring deaths door along with salvation of time. That is 80 base seconds of complete immunity by using priest spells. Add in 25 INT (with smart buff), and it is 140 seconds of immunity. I am pretty sure there are items to increase that further yet. That is plenty of time for everything to die to returning storm, wicked biars, plague of insects, etc. Since those all use different defense types and damage types, you can make it work with any collection of enemies. Some, like plague of insects have a huge AOE area.

 

You could even cast that Beetle Shell level 3 druid spell on yourself, though enemies will probably chew through that 200 damage shield pretty quickly later on since it can't be buffed further with PL, Might, or Healing modifiers. At least I think so... never cast it before. Still a decent emergency further delay when needed. With a medium or large shield modal, you can slow down the damage.

 

The nice things about priest/druid is that it gets going as soon as tier 2, attainable before you even leave the first town. 2 withdraws is already 70 seconds of immunity. With the level 2 insect swarm or autumn decay, you will deal out over 300 damage, AOE, in that time frame. That should easily kill off anything early game. Plus, you get around 300 HP of healing from the withdraws, in case you need it. Priest of Wael provides arcane veil at level 1 and is a good way to block damage while you cast your initial DOT spells. After that, withdraw, arcane veil again, reapply dots (maybe against another enemy clump), withdraw, things die, win.

 

Paladin/Priest could slowly kill everything with sworn enemy’s “branded” upgrade. Does base 4 damage with unlimited duration and no accuracy roll. 240 damage over immunity duration. Not so good against fire immune though.

Edited June 5, 2018 by Braven