Cetus - 18 Fighter / 1 Monk / 1 Favored Soul: The Ultimate Offensive Fighter

[Gilga1]

First of all, very nicely done.
It's rare to see good players sharing good builds on this forum

I think the build Cetus posted is a great answer to the cliché that thf can't do solid single target damage.
Is it the best dps build for boss beatdown in raids? I don't think so, but for sure it's perfectly viable.

And I truly love that gear, it's so great! Almost perfect. I'm using a very similar setup on my actual toon... and I'm so jealous because the celestial outfit is better compared to the heavy armor that lacks quality deadly. Lucky monks

2. The barb build is quite worse offensively, especially if you're foregoing storms eye to grab divine trance (we can breakdown the differences if you want, but it's pretty decisive). You also need endless supplies of toven cookies to ignore the tensers difference. Lastly, a fighter based build can pretty easily slip into precision if you need to run some R10's, barb cannot due to rage restriction.

Barb vs fighter? It's not that easy to decide a winner.
I can share some thoughts about R10 quests, because after the last changes I played a pure THF barb and a THF fighter18/barb1/fvs1. Both in Fury. Both truly shine.
Never running out of adrenalines is huge.

As pointed out, VKF capstone for 5% speed and 20 mp is a true beast. BUT going for VKF capstone means you need support. I pug very often, and usually, I want to be self-sufficient. So I need falcon, because playing in Fury without being able to bypass fortification sucks.
Looking at stats, on my fighter18/barb1/fvs1 I had some goals: 100% standing doublestrike (done), 200% strikethrough (3 granted targets), 100% helpless damage (that's not a must have, but in quest it's still relevant imho).
Ofc I also took different feats, because for quests I want speed above all. More speed = fastest completions. I took spring attack, I have sprint boost, and barb 10% movement speed. Cleaves are real good now, so I took the feats. Sadly, Whirlwind it's still useless due to the terribad animation you can't interrupt
Fighter is great, you have sky-high tactics, you are tough, you have raw damage, melee power, and strong active attacks. Half-Orc for Fighter it's almost mandatory imho.
Barb is good for splash: +10 STR (4+3 raging strength +3 power rage), 4 points in FB (1000 temp hp x7) and 4 points in Ravager. The number of Rages and Power surges is enough for quests. FVS is for trance obviously (you want to hit). And yes, I have almost endless supplies of Toven cookies

So, how is the fighter split compared to a pure barb? Btw I fully agree with Cetus, for THF Barb the way to go is pure: FB+falcon+VKF 11.
Barb has better sustained basic dps (Tail crit profile is unrivaled), 6 cleaves (as I wrote, cleaves are real good now), and better survivability (improved uncanny dodge is huge).
The Fighter 'delete' button is a lot better. A Fighter can be Half-Orc (pure barb Half-Orc is complicated because you badly want 100% doublestrike and dropping VKF for haste boosts and 5% doublestrike really hurts. Pure barb means Aasimar or wood elf, imho), and benefit from 2 auto crit attacks. Good death is good too. Also, Fighter is the only viable option if you want to use Magmatic Cleaver. And Magmatic Cleaver is a great weapon... it's a great axe in fact XD

Imho, the Barb is easier to play but it can still be fun and it's super strong right now.
Fighter has more stuff to handle, and it's super strong too.
For questing, nowadays I don't see better options than Fury barb of Fury fighter18/1/1.
For raids... well... it's an entirely different world. But if you want to raid with a THF build, Cetus did a great job.

[Cetus]

First of all, very nicely done.
It's rare to see good players sharing good builds on this forum

I think the build Cetus posted is a great answer to the cliché that thf can't do solid single target damage.
Is it the best dps build for boss beatdown in raids? I don't think so, but for sure it's perfectly viable.

Thanks Tronko! THF for life =D

I'll say this, I think the single target DPS achieved with this build challenges the idea that THF is suboptimal boss DPS, at least as far as R10 Dryad is concerned, since that's been the focus for me recently. Other raids may be different. But at least for Dryad, the reasons are:

1. Greataxe dice capitalize on the insane burst DPS of unbridled, and this build also has auto-crit attacks mixed in. So, for something like guardian beatdowns in between unbridled cooldowns - it worked extremely well. All of these crit chance bypassing attacks really makes this thing crit a lot. And, hitting a nearly 100k adrenaline on R10 is crazy lol
2. Using THF, you reach the hitbox a little further away. It helps continuing DPSing the fomorian during his stone attack on the right leg. TWF and SWF mostly have to jump out in my experience.
3. Using THF, DPSing scath is safer in my opinion, his attacks/charges are somewhat unpredictable and require fast reaction times. Again, the reach of the weapon helps you keep DPSing him.
4. During dancing, you can swing by and crack any enemy for a heavy adrenaline hit - which helps shave down a few hundred thousand hitpoints while SWF and TWF variants would do a fraction of that if they do the same thing.
5. I measured a lot of guardian beatdown times as Guardian HP divided by beatdown time during the high burst phases, and compared it to LD's D&D advertised raid pushes. Our melees were heavier on THF. The beatdown times were impressive considering the alleged THF disadvantage on single targets. I can pull up some numbers from the prior R8 runs and R10 runs later today to show this.

And I truly love that gear, it's so great! Almost perfect. I'm using a very similar setup on my actual toon... and I'm so jealous because the celestial outfit is better compared to the heavy armor that lacks quality deadly. Lucky monks

Yea! That armor fit in like a glove. I just need to convince the crew to farm me out a reaper melee power version =D

Barb vs fighter? It's not that easy to decide a winner.
I can share some thoughts about R10 quests, because after the last changes I played a pure THF barb and a THF fighter18/barb1/fvs1. Both in Fury. Both truly shine.
Never running out of adrenalines is huge.

Well, I think for R10 questing most builds will work well. It doesn't really matter at that point. Barbs hit more things, move faster and are more survivable, fighter passes more fort and has better tactics. It doesn't really matter. For R10, I just go out of VKF and grab falconry with this same build, pump up helpless damage and grab the horc strikethrough and just go zerg. R10's are so laughably easy the melee power difference isn't even noticeable.

As pointed out, VKF capstone for 5% speed and 20 mp is a true beast. BUT going for VKF capstone means you need support. I pug very often, and usually, I want to be self-sufficient. So I need falcon, because playing in Fury without being able to bypass fortification sucks.
Looking at stats, on my fighter18/barb1/fvs1 I had some goals: 100% standing doublestrike (done), 200% strikethrough (3 granted targets), 100% helpless damage (that's not a must have, but in quest it's still relevant imho).

Ofc I also took different feats, because for quests I want speed above all. More speed = fastest completions. I took spring attack, I have sprint boost, and barb 10% movement speed. Cleaves are real good now, so I took the feats. Sadly, Whirlwind it's still useless due to the terribad animation you can't interrupt
Fighter is great, you have sky-high tactics, you are tough, you have raw damage, melee power, and strong active attacks. Half-Orc for Fighter it's almost mandatory imho.
Barb is good for splash: +10 STR (4+3 raging strength +3 power rage), 4 points in FB (1000 temp hp x7) and 4 points in Ravager. The number of Rages and Power surges is enough for quests. FVS is for trance obviously (you want to hit). And yes, I have almost endless supplies of Toven cookies

I'm not too crazy about spring attack, people seem to really like doing gymnastics lmao. But if it's fun, I guess why not lol
I agree about the helpless damage, it's very useful despite what people have said in the past. It moves things along.
But I'm sitting at 132 reaper points, got everything needed from the trees. Not much motivation to really run R10's to farm points anymore.

But long story short, barbarian is very strong - either pure or 18/1/1. As far as to-hit goes, you can make a case that frenzy has a lot of AC reducing attacks - and you can slot insightful accuracy. There are options there.

For fighter, pure fighter was very strong too. In fact, that might be the way to go for something like an LOB push just because you might need the massive amount of boosts to carry you further into the raid with kensei capstone. Alternatively, if you want a higher burst DPS version that still maintains defenses, the 18/1/1 barb variant will accomplish that. But the monk split will give the highest damage out of them all. Also, don't forget vistani fortue - 50% of the time you're getting a DPS boost - either through 2 strength or 15 additional melee power.

[Khurse]

Stupid question... But how are you getting enough madstone rages to keep yourself at 25%?
Isn't it just from the boots?

[Tsutti]

Love seeing the Leg. Tempest's Spine armor, shoutout devs for not forcing armor into feywild sets so this is possible!

[Tsutti]

Stupid question... But how are you getting enough madstone rages to keep yourself at 25%?
Isn't it just from the boots?

My best guess is he doesn't have 100% uptime on it or if he does, it's because he keeps his inventory full of the things lol. Don't think they're exclusive (according to wiki, haven't checked them in game :P), and they last 2 minutes which is a decent time.

[Kebtid]

My best guess is he doesn't have 100% uptime on it or if he does, it's because he keeps his inventory full of the things lol. Don't think they're exclusive (according to wiki, haven't checked them in game :P), and they last 2 minutes which is a decent time.

Correct not exclusive. I have 10 pairs myself.
3-4 is a good starting point.


@cetus the 30 sec was reply where some people suggested you drop 1 point from warpriest, i am 100% sure noone wants to play with a 30 sec trance, 60 sec works fine for fighter, 30 is cancer.

[Catabree]

So we now have 2h melee destroying r10s at border line pre-nerf alchemist levels.
Everyone's running barbs, pally or fighter splits, and ranged are still totally nerfed and that slow that nobody has any interest in playing them. Nukers are long gone, current options are dc caster, swf or twf.
Well played ssg! Classes are more unbalanced then they have ever been. What's next, 2h nerf?

[Tsutti]

Well played ssg! Classes are more balanced then they have ever been.

Fixed. Being serious. Well idk whether they're more balanced than a few months ago or not but in general, everything is a lot more balanced lately. I see ranged. I see melee. I see tanks. I see healers. I see dc casters. I see dps casters. The fact that I see all these things, and not just from a few dedicated people or anything, says something about the game being more balanced than it often has been.

Healers a while back? Lol wasted party slot, just play something useful and pick up rejuv twist. Ranged a while back? Lol no dmg why u playing ranged lolol. Nukers a while back? Lol no dmg why u playing sorc lolol. Tanks a while back? Lol content so ez why u playing tank? So you can intim and afk? Play dps please, you can still tank fine but actually do useful things like dps too lol. Melees in the reign of inq? Lol why u playing something with the same dps as a ranged but ranged is much easier to build said dps on and also is super safe and has op cc with shiradi and one shots things bc hunt's end lolol play inq not a trash melee. Oh you're a dc caster? Lol everything's gonna die in 2 seconds, just play dps lolol and in the meantime maybe swap to exalted and twist renew so you can heal us. Okay maybe I overdid the moron language lol.

Now? Oh you're melee? Good, we needed some frontline in the group. Oh you're ranged? Good we needed some backup dps in case something goes wrong and the melees die horribly. Oh you're a healer? Sweet, I'm not that tanky but I should be fine with proper heals, easy win now. Oh you're a tank? Sweet, can't complete this without that level of hp to tank the raid boss. Oh you're a nuker? Cool no need to worry about trash, just need boss dps now. Oh you're a dc caster? Nice, things should go smoother now and we can take that shortcut with a room full of 30 enemies. Also we have options for melee, not just rogue or nothing or w/e. And especially the option to play an eldritch knight!! Your dps isn't as good as a dedicated dps class but you have casting at your disposal too. We not only have options on what style to play, but at least within melee and tank, an option for which class to play!

[Tsutti]

So we now have 2h melee destroying r10s at border line pre-nerf alchemist levels.
Everyone's running barbs, pally or fighter splits, and ranged are still totally nerfed and that slow that nobody has any interest in playing them.

Notice that Cetus has only 170% strikethrough, the build is perfectly fine in r10 questing but he seems to have built more for single target dps than r10 massacring. Also can't say I've seen a lot of pallies after the bugfix to confront any foe, the bugfix to their capstone, and the bugfix to holy ret (all of which happened to also be MEGA nerfs). They're less interesting to play than barb or fighter and now they're generally not as good either. Ranged are nearly in a reasonable spot I think, sadly only bows are especially common or competent dps but they're there. Just some more diversity of options would be nice. It doesn't seem to be the case that nobody has any interest in playing them, at least for now, because everyone's hyped about the bow changes and there are tons of bow users out there right now.

[Hawkwier]

This has been a brilliant thread, the best for some time imo, with some very informative contributions.

Everyone is free, of course, to post whatever we like on any thread (moderator approved, ofc), but I'd just respectfully ask if we could maybe try to avoid turning this one into yet another caster/range/melee balance gripe-fest? There are plenty of those already to have at it from all sides, and imo this thread deserves its focus to stay on top-end melee and what can be achieved by the likes of Cetus, Gilga, et. al. and some of the pearls of wisdom that may be divined...

[Cetus]

So we now have 2h melee destroying r10s at border line pre-nerf alchemist levels.
Everyone's running barbs, pally or fighter splits, and ranged are still totally nerfed and that slow that nobody has any interest in playing them. Nukers are long gone, current options are dc caster, swf or twf.
Well played ssg! Classes are more unbalanced then they have ever been. What's next, 2h nerf?

Complaining about the differences in performance of various classes is beyond the scope of this thread.

[Ganak]

Cetus thanks for posting. Pretty astounding build.

[Cetus]

Cetus thanks for posting. Pretty astounding build.

Thanks!

[mikarddo]

For a 20 Barb version - how would gear differ? Armor would be medium I assume, weapon would be Tail, but anything else to change?

[Cetus]

For a 20 Barb version - how would gear differ? Armor would be medium I assume, weapon would be Tail, but anything else to change?

Barb gearing can be quite different. If you are talking glass cannon, you can go with the same armor - but I'm not sure that I would recommend that.

Barbarians also benefit from items like the Legendary Thorn Boots, which provide damage bonuses based on wilderness lore feats.

[Bloodskittle]

I was amused that I put together basically the same summer set including armor while not looking at the forum only to see you'd posted this gear-set weeks prior.

I know you're keen on the G-axe option but allow me to strongly recommend SWF Daxe, 85% attack rate with full benefits from Fury is a good time.
Also if you don't have too many buttons to press, 1 more AP in Henshin for 10% fire vulnerability is pretty sweet.

[Cetus]

I was amused that I put together basically the same summer set including armor while not looking at the forum only to see you'd posted this gear-set weeks prior.

Thanks!

If we arrived at the same conclusion, then it's probably the right way to go lol

I know you're keen on the G-axe option but allow me to strongly recommend SWF Daxe, 85% attack rate with full benefits from Fury is a good time.
Also if you don't have too many buttons to press, 1 more AP in Henshin for 10% fire vulnerability is pretty sweet.

Definitely a viable option and very nice DPS. I have a few reasons for sticking to GA however:

1. Further range
2. Maximizes adrenaline damage
3. Saves 1 feat (2mp) and 2 action points in kensei by not needing exotic proficiency
4. Baz is also very strong for fire immune enemies
5. I think GA looks cooler

Definitely too high maintenance to try and maintain fire vuln.

[dwp101]

How did you manage convert puke to words? Bravo sir, Bravo

[Bloodskittle]

Definitely too high maintenance to try and maintain fire vuln.

So I had a play with the fire vuln on the ship cannon, it adds a little over 120 fire damage per swing once you're stacked up.
I think with your build I wouldn't bother for general use but with SWF attack rate it seems very good.
Though I have to drop deadly strike to fit it so it'll take a reasonable amount of maths to work out which is better.

Edit: It does tangle your finishing moves for your earth crit multi

[lillentle]

First Harmonic Chord or Running with the Wind (in the case when you are not wearing Bloodrage Chrism, see below)

Could you elaborate here? Is it because with bloodrage and running with the wind I'll hit the doublestrike cap?

Oh, because of the item nerf with u50..

So running with the wind for more doublestrike is now more worth it