'Happy Turret' Huntress Build (W10) [Newbie Friendly]

Why To Play This Build

+Overwhelming damage potential that ramps up higher than you'd ever need

+Solid defensive ability: Good max Life, good movement speed, good defensive auras, has a stun, and can play safe around cover if needed

+Easy to build: No required legendaries or primordial reaper makes this great as a first build

+Does not reduce your frame rate to single digits like some other builds do

+Huntress gets to be happy

-A little slow to ramp up when initially placing Ballista (helped when you get higher +ATK speed)

-Does mostly indirect damage; Life Leech/Mana Leech and effects that trigger on direct damage are much less effective, has more trouble healing because of this.

Introduction

This concept of this build is based around swarming the field with Ballista while stacking as many different damage multipliers as possible. We use a reaper with excellent base damage, and then run that number through Reaper damage multipliers, crit damage multipliers, totem effect multipliers, Turret Syndrome perk multipliers, 'damage to elite enemy' multipliers...

At maximum power, a single Ballista does millions of damage per second, and we can have over 12 of them active at once. A single Ballista arrow is eventually capable of doing over 2 million damage, which is enough to one-shot kill any regular enemy at Wrath level 10 (except the wooden armor guys that can't take any damage until the 4th hit).

We get bonus loot stats from our attribute selection from our high investment in the Bravery Line. Additionally, the Reaper we use is generically useful and good in a multitude of builds. These factors make it a great choice for a starting Huntress build, before you want to experiment.

Reaper (The Most Powerful Bow)

The Reaper we are going to use is 'The Most Powerful' Reaper, also known as TMP. TMP is a very versatile reaper; it normally doesn't even have an ability, the entire purpose of it is to provide as much base damage as possible without requiring any synergies or investment in specific stats. It's great in pretty much any non-elemental build so it'll probably be useful in whatever build you decide to try afterwards.

The primoridial version is unlocked by getting around 42,000 kills with the base version. It's basically the same thing, except it also has a ridiculous damage multiplier that ends up making it more than twice as strong. The malediction doesn't even negatively impact 90% of the the builds that want to use this weapon, so it's basically a non-factor. If you get the primordial version, there's pretty much no reason to not use it.

Also note that the damage increase per level increases the higher the level gets, ending up in the 20K damage range at level 155 (the maximum).

Attributes

Your attributes should look something like this. Normally you have 40 attribute points to spend (at lv40), but you can also reforge attribute bonuses onto your gear at Friedreich (up to 3 points per gear for an additional 33 points) resulting in having up to 73 attribute points to spend. Conveniently, the most important traits of this build can be hit with only 40 points, so there's no rush to forge attribute bonuses onto your gear.

Top priority traits:

Bravery-30: By far the most important trait, the entire build was started because of this. Every yard walked gives a Strider stack that gives +1% critical chance, and stacks up to 100 times. Your critical chance stat is inherited by Ballista, so at 100 stacks your Ballista will always crit. Normally, all stacks are removed whenever you deal critical damage, limiting the usefulness of this trait. However since Ballista damage is indirect, it doesn't count as 'you' dealing critical damage; As long as you don't hit anything with your primary or secondary skills, you can maintain permanent the 100 stack bonus permanently, making your Ballistas always crit. When you have to use your other skills to Life Leech or Stun enemies you lose all Strider stacks though, but you get the stacks back fairly quickly just by walking around.

Savagery-5,10: Very self-explanatory Reaper damage multipliers. Almost all our base damage in this build is from our Reaper, so this is basically +25% damage multiplier for only 10 points. Technically, since it's a +10% and a +15% multiplier, it actually results in a +27.5% damage boost.

Medium priority traits:

Dexterity-15: Gets you +1% Totem Effect% every second while in combat, up to +200%. Totem Effect% is one of our primary damage boosting stats, so this trait is perfect for us. the only problem is that as soon as you're out of combat you immediately lose all stacks of this, so you need to keep a kill chain going to maintain it. Still overall a solid bonus though, the +Atk speed from Dexterity is also nice.

Low priority traits:

With the remaining points you can do whatever you want really. I put the rest in Bravery because Bravery-45 is surprisingly decent healing since this build restricts your healing ability (and elites often die instantly to Ballista). The additional loot stats are nice, and the bonus movement speed lets you build Strider stacks back faster when you lose them.

Support Skill: Turret Syndrome

Despite being the 'Support' skill, this is skill going to be responsible for 95% of your damage output. The perk selection is pretty self explanatory; unfortunately nearly every build that wants to use ballistas as their main damage source has to use the exact same perk selection here, using anything else is just handicapping yourself. The first 6 perks are just generic buffs for Ballista damage, fire rate, etc.

Ballista are 'Totems' that inherit all of your 'attack' stats (listed in game in the character page). (Ballista can't use the ancestral strike stat though but luckily we don't care about that stat at all).

Of note is the tier 6 perk that reduces the cooldown of Turret Syndrome for every stack of Serenity you have (Serenity is increased whenever you cast the same primary, secondary, or support skill in a row, and decreased whenever you cast different skills in a row.). Because of this, we will try to keep Serenity as high as possible at all times, by trying to minimize our usage of primary/secondary skills. Also, skills from the Ancestral Legacy Tree do not influence Serenity, so those can be used freely.

The other noteworthy perk is the tier 8 perk that provides Life Leech, which is by far the best stat to restore health in the lategame. Unfortunately, Life Leech only works on direct damage, and our Ballista do indirect damage, so they cannot leech life or mana for you. It's still a useful perk for your other skills though.

Primary Skill (Serenity Generator)

The skill in this slot will be used to increase our Serenity stacks. This skill will be used at the start of an expedition, and to recover Serenity fast when we lose stacks of it (when we have to cast something other than Turret Syndrome). We can also use this skill as an emergency heal through Life Leech. There are two viable skills for this role, so you can pick whichever you prefer.

Option A: Void Arrow

The standard Serenity generator. None of these perk choices have any alternatives, you pretty much have to stick with this selection. Void Arrow slows you down a lot when charging, and even with the -75% charge time perk, it still has a notable delay to charge fully.

The biggest problem though is that you can't use this skill properly for this role before Mastery lv9, so you're gonna have to work to raise the level of this skill if you haven't already.

Option B: Immortal Arrow

Immortal arrow is a pretty solid choice as well. It has some advantages: It requires a much lower Mastery level in order to function, and it doesn't restrict your movement as much as Void Arrow does when you're using it. However, if you use it as your Serenity generator, you can't use it for it's Stun utility, which is probably a better use for it.

(The tier 4 ability doesn't really matter, just pick whichever one you want).

Secondary Skill (Utility Skill)

Your secondary skill aims to provide some useful function, aside from just being able to do damage. It's also important as an emergency source of healing through Life Leech. Ideally you want to use this skill as little as possible since it will reduce your Serenity and Strider stacks, but don't stop that from letting you use it when you need to. You have 2 options for this skill slot.

Option A: Immortal Arrow

This time, Immortal Arrow is taken entirely for its ability to stun enemies with its tier 3 perk. This ability can stunlock an enemy indefinitely, and can save your life when elite enemies trap you in small areas. If you had Ballista set up beforehand, they'll finish off the enemy while you keep them stunned and harmless.

We don't take any tier 1 perk this time, since we want Immortal Arrow to return and start its cooldown as soon as possible, so no additional instructions perk is taken. Wandering Arrow perk is cute but sadly the damage on it is pathetic, and all it really ends up doing is removing your safe zone at the start of floors by immediately damaging enemies.

The tier 4 perk is up to your choice but doesn't matter much. Also remember you cannot use Immortal Arrow for this function if you are using it to generate Serenity.

Option B: Arrow Shot

Arrow Shot is an alternative option entirely because of its tier 3 perk that gives you an evasion bonus when Delighted (at 12 stacks of Serenity), and we are Delighted almost all the time. Evasion is nice to potentially negate some incoming damage, and we have to option to stack a good amount of evasion in our build, so a % bonus to it is helpful. Arrow shot being very quick to cast also makes it a nice option if you need to quickly trigger Life Leech.

For the tier 1, 2, and 5 perks, you can also take the Fork related perks instead of the Pierce and Rebound ones, but that tends to be less reliable and I would recommend just sticking with this selection.

Ancestral Legacy Tree

Standard option:

Taking both Ice Auras provide an incredible amount of defence against melee enemies. This lets you deal with annoying enemies like Executioners and Suffering Souls so much more easily, and those enemies are otherwise extremely dangerous at high Wrath levels. Keep in mind the second aura consumes a lot of mana, if you haven't reforged mana regeneration onto your equipment slots, you may want to keep it at a lower level or disable it if you have to.

Alternative option:

If for whatever reason you need more critical damage, or you don't have enough mana regen to support the second ice aura, you can also skip the second ice aura in favor of this build. This skill provides a sizeable crit damage damage buff, but only lasts 7 seconds so it has to be recasted a lot. Personally, I think it's more trouble than it's worth and isn't as worthwhile as the double aura setup. Also, the skill has a small 5% HP cost to use it, which isn't much but you do need some life regeneration on your gear first.

Gear Stat Priorities

This covers which stats to prioritize when looting or reforging gear. First, some important things to note:

-Gear has 3 types of normal stat values, Primary (basic stats), Secondary (magic/rare stats), and Tertiary (epic stats).

-Primary stats have higher values than secondary stats. and secondary stats have higher values than tertiary stats. ex. if you can roll max Life on any of the 3 stats, as a primary stat it would give 700 HP, as a secondary stat it would give 500HP, and as a tertiary stat it would give 350HP. (Numbers aren't exactly accurate but the concept stands).

-Gear can only roll a stat once, if you rolled max Life as a primary stat, it would no longer be available to roll as a secondary or tertiary stat. Because of this, try to roll your most important stats as primary stats and not secondary stats (if given the choice at least, often the categories are mutually exclusive). Make sure important stats you need aren't rolled as tertiary stats if the equipment allows for it to be a primary or secondary stat instead.

-A 'flat' stat (+X) and a 'percent' stat (+X%) count as two different stats. Gear can roll one instance of each of them if possible.

-What primary and secondary stats can roll is limited depending on the type of equipment. Specific stats are locked to specific categories of equipment. Except tertiary stats are special in that they can roll ANY stat no matter what category of gear. Optimizing this is a gigantic pain, do not bother reforging tertiary stats as the cost just isn't worth it at the moment.

Stat priorities:

Top priority Offensive stats:

-Totem Increased Effect% (secondary: amulet, cape, belt, rings)

-Critical Damage% (primary: belt, gloves. secondary: bracers, boots, rings)

Both of these stats are vital as they are our two primary damage multipliers. Our Ballista usually have 100% crit chance thanks to Bravery-30 so we don't care about crit chance % on gear, only damage. Totem Effect also increases the duration of Ballista, which is great considering every active Ballista grants use +3% max life because of a perk.

Top priority Auxillary stats

-Life Regeneration (flat) (Primary: cape. Secondary: chest, boots, helmet)

-Max Life (flat) (Primary: helmet, chest, cape , boots. Secondary: amulet, shoulders, rings )

-Mana regeneration (flat) (Primary: helmet, amulet, rings. Secondary: chest, boots )

Strike-through text means that that equipment slot is already filled with a higher priority stat, so we can't use it.

Max Life is the most important defensive attribute for higher Wrath levels to prevent getting 1-shot killed. We also get a Max Life % bonus for every active turret we control so the flat bonus from gear is extra useful.

Life and Mana regeneration are not amazing stats, but our incredible lack of direct damage means we need to rely on them more than we'd like, since we can't use life/mana leech very well.

Secondary Offensive Stats

-Atk Speed%

-Damage to Elites%

Roll these if they are available on gear slots that aren't taken by any of the top priority stats.

Atk Speed% is a nice stat that lowers skill cooldowns, allowing us to place more turrets faster to ramp up our damage.

Damage to Elites% is yet another damage multiplier. At this point the multipliers start to get into overkill territory so it's not really as important as the other ones (and only works on elites). Still, bigger numbers are funner numbers.

Secondary Auxillary stats

-Evasion (flat)

-All damage reduction%

-Projectile damage reduction%

Roll these if they are available on gear slots that aren't taken by any of the other stats.

Evasion is a nice stat to use when you have a solid amount of Max Life already as a buffer. Huntress has some base Evasion as well as additional Evasion bonuses, so this stat is more useful for us than Armor or Elemental res. We don't have enough points left to significantly invest in those anyways.

Damage reduction does not really shine until very late game with higher equipment reinforcement, character levels, and optimized tertiary stats. The advantage of it over armor/ele resistance is that it is not affected by the defence penalty at higher wrath levels. It's still a bit too early for it to be very impactful yet though. Projectiles are the most likely thing to hit you in this build which is why it projectile damage reduction% gets special mention.

Special Gear stats

-Reaper Stat: Astorias (buffs TMP Reaper)

-Mastery Stat: Turret Syndrome

-Attribute Stat: Bravery (a couple in Savagery and Dexterity also work but most should be in Bravery).

These are special stats you likely have to manually reforge on your gear. the Reaper stat in particular makes an absolutely massive difference if you get +5 of it on all your gear. (in order of priority Reaper > Mastery >>> Attribute). We get all our core attribute bonuses with just the 40 points from levels, so attribute bonuses are the least important to this build.

Legendary Effects

Most Legendary effects don't have any a major impact on the build, though there are still a few worth mentioning if you happen to have or find them.

Amulet:

Nothing noteworthy.

Belt:

Nothing noteworthy.

Chest:

'Heart of Darkness' provides an evasion multiplier, quite useful to further boost evasion, our primary mitigation stat.

Boots:

Nothing noteworthy, but you can use 'Sparkling Boots of Midos' to increase goldus gain somewhat.

Bracers:

Special mention to 'Echoes of Vilinis' for both requiring nearly 100% critical chance to be useful and only providing what is effectively a 20% damage bonus after a 2 second delay. It's not exactly good but we can actually make it sort of work in this build. Use it if you have it cause you're probably never gonna use it otherwise.

Cape:

'Repercussive Cloak' is useful for the 5 seconds of damage immunity it provides (You don't actually need to use soul bond for the defence from this to work).

Glove:

'Winds of Harmony' can slightly reduce cooldown to let us spam more Ballista.

Helmet:

'Vitalizing Helm of Vitality' is a great option to increase Max Life and reduce the likelihood of one-shot deaths. 'Young Phoenix Feather' can also provide a similar function by preventing death once on a 3 minute cooldown.

Shoulders:

'Heavens of Steel' is easily the best choice if you have it, providing a Max Reaper Damage multiplier. Any TMP build loves Reaper damage multipliers.

Rings:

'Aestia's Ring of Life' (and 'Aestia's Ring of Mana' if both are equipped) can be used to heal without losing Serenity or Strider stacks. The 60s cooldown is quite long however.

Tips Section

-Remember at the start of the expedition, to cast both your auras and use your Serenity generating skill before leaving the safety zone.

-While this build can clear Wrath 10 pretty smoothly, W10 is not really intended to be cleared at this point in time, and it shows because it's hard for most builds to get enough defensive stats to comfortably survive in there. If your build isn't totally developed yet, or you don't have any defensive legendary effects (specifically the chest and/or helmet effects), you'll probably find it a lot more comfortable to run W9 where the incoming damage is much less extreme.

-Projectile based enemies are the most likely to hit you because they are out of range of your Ice aura, and spiders can get you stuck letting every other enemy hit you easily. Play more carefully in floors with ranged enemy formations; you may want to place a Ballista or two in a room before going in, and kiting around the edge of the room is usually safer than running into the center to prevent being shot from multiple angles.

-You can place Ballista anywhere on the screen as long as your character has a direct line of sight to the location. Popping in front of room entrances to place a Ballista then popping back out for safety can be a good strategy.

-No need to rush triggering breaches in rooms, since any Ballista you set up clearing enemies beforehand will immediately destroy any new enemy spawned by the breach.

Video Demo

Here is a small video if you want to see the build in action:

(Stats/Gear shown at the end of the video. Gear used was reinforced to +6, the primordial reaper and 1 useful legendary was used (and 1 not so useful legendary)).

https://youtu.be/bHVJax0ARhM

The End

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2622359103					

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