Tired of...
- Playing the turtle with the Legionnaire?
- Trying to get to your targets for it to die just before you reach it?
- Checking endgame medals and see you got 15 kills or less?
You'll also be able to rake kills like you never thought possible. Just to show you how good this build can be, a personal record of mine is 173 kills on Perilous. It was with a full team and they were not in the fade...
Note: This build works amazing on Perilous, it will also work for lower difficulties using lower quality items.
The raw build
http://da-skills.net...1,11100,011,1,0
Essential skills
- Payback Strike
- Lunge and Slash
- Shield Bash
- Turn the Bolt
- Unyielding
- Warrior's Resolve
- Flow of Battle
- Bear Mauls the Wolves (honorable mention, not essential)
- Turn the Blade (honorable mention, not essential)
- A good 1 handed weapon (preferably Longsword of the Dragon, Caliban or anything over 170 base damage)
- Superb Stamina Amulet (+50 Stamina)
- Lunge and Slash ring (+30% damage)
- 20% to 30% Heal on Kill (usually a combination of weapon upgrade and a 10% Superb Heal on Kill ring)
- Dwarven Proven shield (+5% damage/enemy in the area) (honorable mention, not essential)
- Level 1 -> 2: Turn the Bolt
- Level 2 -> 7: Bee line to Unyielding (gives you some leeway)
- Level 7 -> 9: Lunge and Slash + upgrade
- Level 9 -> 11: Warrior's Resolve
- Level 11 -> 13: Shield Bash + Upgrade
- Level 13 -> 16: Flow of Battle, Payback Strike upgrade, Bear Mauls the Wolves
- Level 16 -> 19: Anything you want, but I bee line to Turn the Blade
- Level 19 -> 20: I promote...
The philosophy of this build is to stun and knockback the enemies so they actually can't attack. That means that instead of going the usual defense route, I go batshit crazy on offense.
When you approach an enemy, you open with Lunge and Slash from as far as you can. There are 3 important reasons for that.
- You close the gap much faster between the enemy and you
- The extra damage from the distance your travelled will usually outright kill the enemy on Perilous or leave it almost dead
- Because of the long distance travelled, Lunge and Slash have no cooldown, this is very important!!!
By now, there's usually 1 enemy that escaped your first 2 skills and hit you. No problem, Payback Strike is now primed to do extra damage to everything around that enemy and knockback or stun anything still standing. Again, that locks the battlefield so you and your teammates aren't attacked.
If anything is still alive, just use basic attacks with Shield Wall cancelling. Shield Wall cancelling will increase your DPS while at the same time give you a chance to build Guard on a random block.
Usually, only a faction boss is still alive after a round of skills + auto-attack. The good new is, every skills is on a 8 seconds cooldown!!! That means you can rinse and repeat almost with no pause, simply use auto-attacks for the rare times you're out of Stamina.
Obviously that's the best scenario, sometimes it doesn't go as well as I described here. So here are other situations where you need to react a certain way to survive.
The first thing that comes to mind is that enemies can also be spread out, which limits the effectiveness of the trifecta offensive skills. Well, there are 2 things that save you here. Remember I said Lunge and Slash has no cooldown if launched from a good distance? Well, that's where it comes handy. You can theoretically just use Lunge and Slash to kill entire spread out groups by simply targeting an enemy that is "far enough" from you. No cooldown means you'll chain those over and over and over. When Lunge and Slash is on cooldown because you couldn't use it from far enough, you still have Shield Bash. The upgrade lets you close the gap from a lower distance than Lunge and Slash, but it still knockback the enemy and deal amazing damage. That means that you have 2 abilities that can close the gap between you and the enemy while potentially affecting more than 1 enemy, incapacitating or killing them, useable every 8 seconds, less with Flow of Battle. This will make your usual Legionnaire one of the character with the most mobility of the whole cast. It's all action, almost no downtime!
The second situation that isn't ideal is when there are multiple archers shooting at you from farter than Lunge and Slash can travel. That's where you use Shield Wall. It offers flawless protection from damage, but it is very costly in Stamina so don't use it too much otherwise you'll need to auto-attack to regenerate enough Stamina to get the trifecta offensive skills going on again.
The third situation is when the enemy archers do their back step of death... Shield Wall, that's the only skill that will keep you alive when that happens. Even with the best armor, full Guard and 1000 HP, you simply drop dead if you don't use Shield Wall. Obviously, this patch is supposed to fix that now, but it's still important to mention Shield Wall could fill that role. Unyielding is also a great help when you couldn't stop attacking fast enough to activate Shield Wall.
The last situation I can think of right now is simply when you couldn't kill anything to get back health with Heal on Kill. It happens, sometimes your allies kill "your" target and you're left in the open with not much health to fend for yourself. Unyielding is pretty much your lifeline here, it usually gives you enough time to kill 1 or 2 enemies so you can get back to about 40 to 70% health and keep going. Or were you thinking your health was always full the whole time I explain my strategy with this build? Of course you're constantly losing health and regaining it, you have no defense skill and no fast way to generate Guard so your health is all you have. This also makes this Legionnaire build like the Reaver, constantly struggling between low and high health.
What you need to remember
This build is not invincible, I die like everyone else even if it's not that often. You also need to constantly be on the offensive or you'll die quickly, in that sense it's a lot like the Arcane Warrior with Fade Shield but you're using your Health instead. You won't be able to solo with this either. It requires a pretty darn good awareness of what's going on to play it right. It also requires some specific skills, passives and equipment too. But despite all that, it still works wonderfully on Perilous.
Conclusion
Allright, I think I covered pretty much everything for that build so I'll finish this post by saying this...
If you see a crazy Dwarf charging enemies like a rhino (Lunge and Slash), thinking to himself "be the canon ball" (Shield Bash) or trying to mimic the Templar Commander "Spin to Win" but failing due to a lack of balance after 1 spin (Payback Strike), there are a lot of chances that's gonna be me and I'm gonna love every minute of it
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