Gimme your best repeater build

[droid327]

My main has always been an artI and I love the mechanics of repeaters - I know they fall off dps wise in endgame because of the silly double shot penalty (mathematically, you could remove it at and it would give the same dps bonus to rxb as it does to gxb, at this point on-hit mechanics are deprecated at endgame and shuriken still get more hits, but ANYWAY...) but for TR or ETR cycling they're still killer effective.

Right now I'm running a 12 art 6 rgr 2 rogue WF. Pretty by the book...T5 BE, Harper, DWS for sniper, built fully for repeater. I'm considering TRing into a 9 rgr/6 fig/5 arti - maybe PDK for the IPL. Trades some arti spells and RA damage for crit mult in kens and extra extra fusillades.

I wanted to bounce that past the forums to see if there's anything major I'm forgetting there, and also just to see what other repeater builds people have enjoyed that I haven't considered, besides the ones built around vorpal, which doesn't really sound like as much fun.

[Cantor]

On epics vs heroics:
T5 BE is not amazing, you can put just enough there for fusilade and T5 something else like kensei or mech. Running heroics that doesn't matter much since the AP is tight, but when you run an iconic/epic most of your time is going to be spent with all your AP.
Also you'll have IPS for more of your run time and you're really going to hate being on a tall race.

I know you said repeater but:
T5 rog using a gxbow with fusilade is crazy good, you can run repeater when not boosting. Anything with 5+rog 4+arti and 6+ftr works. 6rog gets you int to damage without paying for it in harper.

On ranger levels:
Sniper shot is great, but there are better splits than taking rng.

[MistaMagic]

If I did that then everyone would be running it, sorry

[droid327]

On epics vs heroics:
T5 BE is not amazing, you can put just enough there for fusilade and T5 something else like kensei or mech. Running heroics that doesn't matter much since the AP is tight, but when you run an iconic/epic most of your time is going to be spent with all your AP.
Also you'll have IPS for more of your run time and you're really going to hate being on a tall race.

I know you said repeater but:
T5 rog using a gxbow with fusilade is crazy good, you can run repeater when not boosting. Anything with 5+rog 4+arti and 6+ftr works. 6rog gets you int to damage without paying for it in harper.

On ranger levels:
Sniper shot is great, but there are better splits than taking rng.

Yeah I know GXB is pretty good too, but once you go down that road a lot of other dominos start to fall, like you said, and its a completely different build and playstyle. And once you start down that path, you end up at shuriken throwers because they're even better That's why I'm looking for repeater discussion.

24 in BE is mandatory, 11 in Kensei, 12 in Harper, 11 in DWS. That leaves 22 points left to play with - that'll get me to 33 Kensei - which I guess is exactly what I need for crit, ranged power, and AGD in T5. Guess I'd have to weigh whether BE or Kens gives me better buffs in T1-4, since the T5 is basically just choosing between AGD or 10% runspeed. Runspeed is a really nice QOL boost though...

Does AGD give you triple bonus damage on RXBs? 3 x 500 x 400% Ranged Power at 20% health would be an instakill up through like 30,000 HP mobs

[Emerge2012]

Yeah I know GXB is pretty good too, but once you go down that road a lot of other dominos start to fall, like you said, and its a completely different build and playstyle. And once you start down that path, you end up at shuriken throwers because they're even better That's why I'm looking for repeater discussion.

Throwers aren't better than fusillade gxbow builds, not leveling or at cap. But they're both better than repeaters.

As far as sticking to repeaters your plan looks solid. But I wouldn't be afraid to 'go down that road' as it's a logical destination when you grow out of something.

[slarden]

also just to see what other repeater builds people have enjoyed that I haven't considered, besides the ones built around vorpal, which doesn't really sound like as much fun.

I don't think anyone builds around vorpal, it's just the single most effective attribute on a repeater through heroics except for a few of the new chains where enemy hp seem out of alignment.

I tried many different splits and haven't found much differentiation in dps at heroic levels, although people have strong feelings about the "best" split. So I finally concluded the best thing to do is overweight survivability and defenses to maximize skull level if playing a repeater build.

Great Crossbow is so much better dps at epic levels I think you should take a look at it. Throwers have a higher ceiling in the right hands, but are alot harder to pull off than a great crossbow build.

[9rileystep]

I am having a lot of fun running on Machinegunz. I created him just to see how holy sword works with repeater builds

Bladeforged 14 Paladin / 6 Artificer

I had zero tomes so I sacrificed having disable device as a usable skill but I took Adamantine body, and invested in the Sacred Defender tree enough to pull out some armor class and 20% hit point bonus. At level 30 I have a standing 136 PRR (59 MRR) which gives my toon a "tanky" quality. I T5'd BE then invested enough in harper to get int to hit and damage.

My damage isn't too phenomenal around 200 base damage per bolt with crits hitting generally for 600 to 1100 using my morninglord with a single filigree. But again this is a first life toon with virtually no gear, and only the free +2 Dex tome you get as a favor reward. I think there is potential here for a lot more then what I have to work with.

[Wh070aa]

For mostly solo play 12 fighter, 2 rogue, 2 artificer. 4 free levels of your choice, I generally do 6 rogue, but it depends if you go mehanic, or Battle Engineer for secondary tree. Kensei as primary tree, INT based with Harper. Endless Fusilade or Fletching both work well. Greater Weapon Focus works really well as combination. This is my preferred build.

For party play with people good at the game- 18 Rogue, 2 artificer. Sneak attack + rune arm is great. Sadly you have to get the sneak attack and soloing makes it way harder and time consuming to pull it off, so it tends to not be worth it. Also if you do Great X-bow 20 rogue is better, but rune arm scales way better with repeater.

Healer build- 12 Ranger, 6 fighter, 2 artificer. Sniper shot messes with aggro mechanics so you gotta know how to use it properly. Really not that good, but, as long as people have healing amp, it's great to keep people topped off in reaper. Not that good with damage spikes, so not like "real" healer, but counteracts all the damage auras and stuff, well enough. Useful to farm past lifes, as this works way better with most epic destinies, in comparison to other builds on my list. With the new Wis to hit/damage, might be way better than the Int build I did before, but I haven't tried it out yet. Might replace fighter with cleric or FVS on Wis based build. Also Aimed Shot is amazing. You get instant 9 stacks of archers focus. That is 27 Ranged power. Up to 45 (or 75 with tier 5 but not worth).

14 paladin 6 rogue, or artificer is for people that don't feel like kiting. It's pretty good if you are planning to get hit a lot, and the heals are really nice.

Also Cleric/FVS with Wis to damage might work out really well ,but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Inflame gets your party +4 damage, each, and you can do full DC casting/healing, and buffs. While the base damage might suffer, but Holy Smite (good damage+blindness) is insane together with sneak attack, and full DC blade barrier and other stuns can't be underestimated. Also Divine Healing (RS 2) is like really good. Like for reals. Not quite sure if pure, or with something splashed on is better (2 arti, or some fighter levels for extra feats could be good, but it's damage vs spell casting balance, so it depends.)

I also experimented with 8 barb 6rogue 6 artificer for really nice movement speed. Int based barbarian with ranged attacks is surprisingly good, but my build needed more work. Really great if you have all the gear and damage and are running on lower difficulty, as the speed you can get is real. Sadly I dunno what to do past level 20 with it.

I am still in process of optimizing a build that fits my specific play style, so most of them are not like super optimal for all people. Scrolls, clickies and hirelings can pick up a lot of the weak points (get eternal potion of FoM, deathward clickies, level 11 resist energy wand, Scrolls of sleet storm , web and gliterdust traps, Petrify Runestone, and full set of Healing/rise dead/remove neg level scrolls. Also Greater heroism,blurr, invisibility, Shadow walk and True seeing, if needed). Level 11 fighter hireling has dimension door. Level 21 wizard hierling has trap the soul. Also Spell Absorption item lets you drop your tankyness a lot. Same for evasion and ghostly. If you have 4 rogue levels, pop your Uncanny Dodge when enemy gets near you.If you have blurr, Ghostly and dodge and evasion up, and you are kiting properly , breaking line of sight for things that cast disintegrate and stuff, while having regeneration effect going on to counter DoT's you should be good as long as you have like 300 HP. IMO trying to get 25%+ armor class to work in reaper is just not worth the investment, past level 10 or so. At least that's my opinion. You just do your best to kite instead of getting hit, and ignore armor class.

Only real downside is that Repeater scales well with all sorts of procs or additional damage things, but they do not scale with leveling up. Like 1d6 extra damage is nice at level 4, but when you are still doing 1d6, despite having 140 rangered power and 100 spell power? Its disappointing. Especially when they can't crit and mob HP multiplies each CR they go up. Same problem as casters after they nerfed spell damage. It just does not scale with enemy level properly.

[janave]

using a masterwork repeater

[banjo174]

using a masterwork repeater

Thats a nice example of what using the ability *A Good Death* looks like :P which can't be usable on enemies above 30% health. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone would want to use repeaters. Great crossbows, Shuriken, and now inquisitive all blow repeater outta the water.

[droid327]

I was gonna post a snarky reply about how the best Repeater build right now is Inquisitive with DXBs...then I realized it was my own thread necroed from a couple months ago >< lol

Thats a nice example of what using the ability *A Good Death* looks like :P which can't be usable on enemies above 30% health. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone would want to use repeaters. Great crossbows, Shuriken, and now inquisitive all blow repeater outta the water.

Yeah RXBs are at the perigee of the power-creep oscillation right now. Well maybe still better than Bows, to be fair. But you're probably right...at the moment there's very little reason to use them for anything except low-level grinding. Like you say, GXB dominates in terms of raw DPS (and utility, with KD-on-vorp), and DXB dominates in both DPS and ROF once you've got a moderate amount of Doubleshot...

To be thorough, and to facilitate further discussion, these are the issues I see with RXB:

- Arbitrary doubleshot penalty. I dont see what this is meant to protect against anymore. RXB were never overpowered with full Doubleshot to begin with, and now DXB can get similar ROF at the upper end anyway. Since DS is a major scalar for ranged builds, getting that 66% penalty puts RXB at a huge systemic disadvantage.

- Animations and Alacrity. Speed boosts only help the firing animation, not the reload animation. For bows and GXBs, most of the animation is firing, so they get most of the benefit of Alacrity. For RXBs, Alacrity only gives a fractional benefit. And, like above, Alacrity is a major scalar for ranged DPS too.

- Lack of a kick-ass RXB. A big piece of what makes GXB so powerful right now is that Volley is a thing...

- Reticence to go balls-out with on-hit procs. Few on-hit damage procs scale sufficiently, or at all, to leverage the ROF, which should be what RXBs are built around. Likewise, the trend to guard stacking on-hit effects with 1-sec ICDs negates the point of using them with RXBs.

- Reticence to put in awesome clicky attacks. The crowning glory of RXBs should be their ability to triple (or more) each special attack, trading reaction time (each attack takes 1.2 secs) for higher uptime (a 6-sec CD ability would comprise 20% of your attacks). There are few attacks that can really leverage this ability well, though. Sniper Shot in DWS is the big one, but other active attacks that might be much more powerful when tripled are either locked behind ICDs (ie Amel Strike), behind HP or other gating mechanics that prevent them from being regular rotation attacks (ie Good Death), are based on DCs that tend to devolve into "100% or 5%" situations anyway, or have such long CDs that you feel pushed to "save" them for tougher enemies. And the overall trend in design philosophy lately seems to be towards adding passive benefits like Ranged Power or crit profile, while active attacks are becoming more situational than rotational - there's a lack of "medium tier" active attacks that are more powerful than "spam tier" attacks but lower cooldown than "nuke tier" attacks.

- Attack cycles lost to server timing. Maybe its just me but, especially if I'm holding down attack, sometimes I'll see a desync between my firing animations and shots actually hitting (especially when mobs are jumping around to the sides), which results in "lost" attack cycles. And the attack cycle is ~1.2 seconds, so that's a noticeable loss when it happens several times in a fight. Doubly so if you lose a cycle on your special attacks. Corollary issue - losing special attacks because you dont have proper LOS, and if you fire a "test shot" to confirm LOS, you lose the alpha strike and might lose LOS before your next attack cycle anyway when they start moving.

- Fusillade has that extremely long animation, making it difficult to use it reactively in a fight like NHB can be.

- Lack of innate stat-to-dmg, limiting build options to Arti 6, Rogue 6, or INT/WIS based with Universal trees.

I think RXB could survive any one or even a few of these shortcomings, but combined it adds up to an overall inferior build option. RXBs just dont have a unique, well-defined role in the game right now.

[banjo174]

Something else to note, would be that SSG thought it was a good idea, to give inquisitive dual wielding the ability to benefit from double shot on both hands equally. Which is absurd really... They are letting inquisitive essentially hit 4 times in 1 attack, with the potential to eventually hit 5 times in 1 attack if they exceed 100% double shot, which I am sure is possible eventually.

yet repeaters still suffer a penalty.

[Tilomere]

[banjo174]

What exactly is this trying to demonstrate? You are level 15 artificer not using deadly weapons... You are attacking training dummy with helpless damage... You have 3 random cleric levels... Low stats... You aren't blitzing... So I can only assume that this is your attempt at a fury shot?

[Xgya]

What exactly is this trying to demonstrate? You are level 15 artificer not using deadly weapons... You are attacking training dummy with helpless damage... You have 3 random cleric levels... Low stats... You aren't blitzing... So I can only assume that this is your attempt at a fury shot?

You obviously don't know who Tilomere is if you need to ask why there's 3 Cleric (or, sometimes, 4 FvS) levels seemingly randomly placed here :P
Here's a hint. He highlights Soundburst to showcase the spell's DC in this screenshot. He's hitting that dummy for helpless damage because he hits basically EVERYTHING with helpless damage.

Also, that's not a furyshot, or blitz, since he's level 19 - no epic abilities here.

As for the lack of Deadly Weapons... Tilo, please explain this aberration!

[banjo174]

My bad, I didn't even notice he was level 19. Although I am still really curious why one wouldn't use deadly weapons.