Matriarch LotsaBlades, 100% CB Bladesin
Level: 87
St – 156 (230)
Dx – 40 (81)
Vt – 309 (367)
En – 25 (46)
HP 1456
Mana 247
Damage and AR (after BA)
Blade Fury: 1930 – 3990 @ 5,616AR
Blade Sentinel: 1655 – 3725 @ 3,325AR
Resists (After Fade):
Fire: 85
Cold: 75
Ltning: 80
Poison: 75
Skills:
Blade Sentinel: 20/31
Blade Fury: 20/31
Blade Shield: 20/31
Fade: 20/34 on switch
Shadow Warrier: 11/25 on switch
Cloak of Shadows: 1/10
1 in Prerequisites
Equipment:
Weapon 1:
“Death” Eth Berserker Axe
“Phoenix” Monarch
Weapon 2:
Mang Song’s Lesson
Guillaume’s Face
“CoH” Dusk Shroud
Steelrend
Gore Rider
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord
Mara’s Kaleidoscope
BKWB & Raven Frost
Bone Break & AsTorch
Merc (Act 2 – BA)
Vampire Gaze
“Treachery” Dusk Shroud
“Shael” Eth The Reaper’s Toll
Random musings:
Six months or so back, I saw that @snickersnack completed a bladesin and I thought I hadn’t made one of those for a while, so I put it on my “to-do” list. Her time has come. Even before I started her, I was tossing up what to do with the remaining dozen or so skill points, venom or shadow warrior. I think I chose the wrong option in the end. With 50% crushing blow on Death and 15% on Gore Rider, I thought that 65% would be good enough but then what the hell, I sacrificed a Harly for Guillaume’s Face to get to 100% CB. After much head-scratching, I decided to go for Steelrend as my gloves for the added percent damage and that gave me another 10% CB, so it ended up being 110% CB.
At some point early in Act 2 Normal, I put Cleglaw’s and the Cow King’s sets on and, other than upping the Long Sword to a Rune Sword at clvl 30 (interestingly GoMule shows the required level as clvl 48), I used the same items until my end game gear became available in the mid-60s. I could have dropped the CK set any time from mid-normal but once I get a thought in my head, I tend to see it through no matter the cost. Even with only the weapon upgraded, Cleglaw’s, with its level increase in both damage and AR, just kept chugging along nicely.
Blade Sentinel is a funny skill; easy to use and hard to master (for me at least). I found that I had difficulty placing the endpoint of the sentinel’s run. Sometimes, especially against stationary targets, I would accidentally click before the target and the sentinel wouldn’t reach it before turning around and coming back. Other times map artifacts would divert it or stop it altogether. Casting it too far beyond the target meant that the sentinel took too long to get back to the target to do more damage. There really was a relatively small sweet spot to getting the best out of the sentinel and that seemed to be both distance and movement dependent. I never really got it quite right. Talking of distance from the target, the slow-ish speed of the sentinel meant that anything over about mid-distance from me was killed by Blade Fury before the sentinel even got there. At times the sentinel would start heading off in a completely different direction from where I clicked before coming back to me and then going where I wanted it to go; strange! It did have some excellent uses though. I could quickly set up a killing field in front of me, and that worked fantastically for slow-moving enemies (like cows) or when they appeared in a given space (like Diablo or Baal’s minions).
In the end, I think that going for the Warrior might have been a mistake. I set Fury as my left mouse button and Sentinel as my right, thinking that the warrior would play a similar style to my character, i.e. attacking long distance. I never once saw the warrior use Fury and the use of Sentinel was sporadic at best and when it was used, they often overrode my carefully placed killing field or up against a barrier so that the sentinels sat there spinning uselessly. She was another target and damage sponge; I suppose there was that. The extra damage of venom probably would have been of more use in the end.
As usual I played /players8 through to Hell difficulty, then /p5 for a while before constant merc deaths made me drop it further to /p3. The gameplay was pretty simple; either CoS or Sentinel monsters at first sight then bombard them with Fury. Bosses never really stood a chance and only the sundered physical immune monsters slowed down my progress. But given the raw damage each blade was doing and the fact that I had 100% CB, I had expected a little better performance from this build especially with Decrepify procing as regularly as it did. A Ber dropped from a random monster in Travincal, so that was good, but the hell forge was crap as usual.
Level: 87
St – 156 (230)
Dx – 40 (81)
Vt – 309 (367)
En – 25 (46)
HP 1456
Mana 247
Damage and AR (after BA)
Blade Fury: 1930 – 3990 @ 5,616AR
Blade Sentinel: 1655 – 3725 @ 3,325AR
Resists (After Fade):
Fire: 85
Cold: 75
Ltning: 80
Poison: 75
Skills:
Blade Sentinel: 20/31
Blade Fury: 20/31
Blade Shield: 20/31
Fade: 20/34 on switch
Shadow Warrier: 11/25 on switch
Cloak of Shadows: 1/10
1 in Prerequisites
Equipment:
Weapon 1:
“Death” Eth Berserker Axe
“Phoenix” Monarch
Weapon 2:
Mang Song’s Lesson
Guillaume’s Face
“CoH” Dusk Shroud
Steelrend
Gore Rider
Verdungo’s Hearty Cord
Mara’s Kaleidoscope
BKWB & Raven Frost
Bone Break & AsTorch
Merc (Act 2 – BA)
Vampire Gaze
“Treachery” Dusk Shroud
“Shael” Eth The Reaper’s Toll
Random musings:
Six months or so back, I saw that @snickersnack completed a bladesin and I thought I hadn’t made one of those for a while, so I put it on my “to-do” list. Her time has come. Even before I started her, I was tossing up what to do with the remaining dozen or so skill points, venom or shadow warrior. I think I chose the wrong option in the end. With 50% crushing blow on Death and 15% on Gore Rider, I thought that 65% would be good enough but then what the hell, I sacrificed a Harly for Guillaume’s Face to get to 100% CB. After much head-scratching, I decided to go for Steelrend as my gloves for the added percent damage and that gave me another 10% CB, so it ended up being 110% CB.
At some point early in Act 2 Normal, I put Cleglaw’s and the Cow King’s sets on and, other than upping the Long Sword to a Rune Sword at clvl 30 (interestingly GoMule shows the required level as clvl 48), I used the same items until my end game gear became available in the mid-60s. I could have dropped the CK set any time from mid-normal but once I get a thought in my head, I tend to see it through no matter the cost. Even with only the weapon upgraded, Cleglaw’s, with its level increase in both damage and AR, just kept chugging along nicely.
Blade Sentinel is a funny skill; easy to use and hard to master (for me at least). I found that I had difficulty placing the endpoint of the sentinel’s run. Sometimes, especially against stationary targets, I would accidentally click before the target and the sentinel wouldn’t reach it before turning around and coming back. Other times map artifacts would divert it or stop it altogether. Casting it too far beyond the target meant that the sentinel took too long to get back to the target to do more damage. There really was a relatively small sweet spot to getting the best out of the sentinel and that seemed to be both distance and movement dependent. I never really got it quite right. Talking of distance from the target, the slow-ish speed of the sentinel meant that anything over about mid-distance from me was killed by Blade Fury before the sentinel even got there. At times the sentinel would start heading off in a completely different direction from where I clicked before coming back to me and then going where I wanted it to go; strange! It did have some excellent uses though. I could quickly set up a killing field in front of me, and that worked fantastically for slow-moving enemies (like cows) or when they appeared in a given space (like Diablo or Baal’s minions).
In the end, I think that going for the Warrior might have been a mistake. I set Fury as my left mouse button and Sentinel as my right, thinking that the warrior would play a similar style to my character, i.e. attacking long distance. I never once saw the warrior use Fury and the use of Sentinel was sporadic at best and when it was used, they often overrode my carefully placed killing field or up against a barrier so that the sentinels sat there spinning uselessly. She was another target and damage sponge; I suppose there was that. The extra damage of venom probably would have been of more use in the end.
As usual I played /players8 through to Hell difficulty, then /p5 for a while before constant merc deaths made me drop it further to /p3. The gameplay was pretty simple; either CoS or Sentinel monsters at first sight then bombard them with Fury. Bosses never really stood a chance and only the sundered physical immune monsters slowed down my progress. But given the raw damage each blade was doing and the fact that I had 100% CB, I had expected a little better performance from this build especially with Decrepify procing as regularly as it did. A Ber dropped from a random monster in Travincal, so that was good, but the hell forge was crap as usual.
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