Molten Strike of the Zenith Energy Blade Trickster is ONE SHOTTING EVERYTHING. This ability has the potential for the largest damage output in the game, with the fifth attack dealing 800% more damage. The multistrike mechanics make it hit an astounding 66 projectile hits, making it efficient for boss farming. However, the build is not ideal for random map clearing due to its slow movement speed. Overall, it's a unique and interesting twist on a melee build. 🔥😎
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Something that I've been meaning to do for some time has been to figure out a two-handed energy blade build. However, realistically, in order to use a two-handed energy blade, you need some kind of justification. That justification has shown itself with the new gem strike of Zenith. This ability potentially has one of the largest impacts ever in this game, with every fifth projectile dealing 800% more damage.
With boosting some quality, we can get a total of 280% more hits and ailments on top of molten strike of the Zenith's three projectiles, as well as the fifth attack firing an additional five projectiles. We get one projectile from the tree as well as two projectiles from a flask, meaning that we have 11 additional projectiles that deal 128% more damage. But that's not all. Molten strike of the Zenith has one other interesting aspect, in that it works with multistrike.
On the fifth attack, every single multistrike hit procs the additional damage, meaning that on that fifth attack, we're not getting 11, but we are getting 33 hits. And then, on top of that, molten strike projectiles return. So, when we add Nemesis to the equation, we're up to 66 projectile hits. With normal multistrike now there's a downside, as there always is with these kinds of things. Unfortunately, it does require us to get to that fifth attack to be able to get our real damage output. The normal damage is okay, but nothing even close to what that fifth attack brings out.
It is hitting Zenith and given you some examples here is Uber xar with normal multi-strike Uber xar and here's awaken with as many defensive mods as I could possibly manage to get the invitation. So, as you can see, we're kind of tickling him at first, but that fifth attack truly does some serious damage. I'm still in the initial stages of this build and while I've crafted most of the gear, it isn't finalized as is, but a video with my full thoughts will be coming in a few. However, in the meantime, I wanted to give you a little peak into what I've been working on.
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Name of the game: energy blade. It's a very strange ability that requires a two-handed weapon and deals the vast majority of its damage on the fifth attack. I've kind of explained how this works with multistrike and all those kinds of good things, so you should mostly already know how multistrike of the Zenith works.
However, there's one other thing that we need to talk about, and that's going to be blade energy. Energy blade is a source of power for this build. It's our weapon, right? The idea behind energy blade is that it sacrifices a portion of our energy and gives us a very Elemental damage weapon when we activate the ability. We end up with a two-handed energy blade that is pretty fast, has pretty good crit strike, and has an absolutely massive amount of Elemental damage. All of this comes from our energy shield. We have sacrificed this, and because lightning damage, it just so happens that the Volatility support is absolutely excellent for this build.
Beyond that, we're using some of the normal suspects: awakening lightning damage, awakening Elemental damage with attacks, energy leech, and trickster. So we get both effects of these all the time. And then, of course, we have strike or normal multistrike. Now, I was able to do most of the Ubers and everything that I did like to mess around with, at least in the initial point, with normal multistrike. I wanted to grab awakening strike since this just seems to be the currency at this point. It just doesn't, you just get an infinite amount of it, and it's kind of silly. We went with awakening multistrike.
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As you can see, we've got 28% quality from Global modifiers that's coming from the ashes. That gives us an extra infinite amount of damage on top of the quality for blade. It reduces losses in energy shield due to the nerf that you're getting, essentially, to your character, to the point where it goes from 50 all the way down to 6. Pretty good. We, of course, also have it linked with enhance. Obviously, I could buy level four, level five enhance, or whatever. I just have this sitting around. I haven't really pushed all of the currency into the build yet, although I have spent quite a bit.
The most part is a pretty straightforward int stack, energy shield stack trickster. There's not really a lot different going on here besides one mechanic that's happening with the new league. Now, somehow I have managed to just not play basically any build with the charms yet. Even though they're very strong, I've just been using Warden of the over and over again. So, what we're doing this time is we are oath of the Magi where it says defenses from equipped body armor are doubled if it has no socketed gems. So, the idea is that since we are a trickster, and we have a node that makes us that we get plus one maximum energy shield per evasion rating body. This node, with a really giant evasion energy chest piece, ends up being a bit of evasion and shield.
With all of that combined, we have relatively tanky and relatively high damage. Beyond that, I'm using the new adorned Jewel. This is a pretty powerful Jewel just in general. I've got these corrupted intelligence shield, Gastly eye Jewels. They are just the easiest ones to roll, although I have been getting unbelievably unlucky with my corrupts on this. I actually have had to buy quite a few of them because every one that I made was just failing every single time, which is very sad, but it is what it is.
Besides that, relatively insta... obviously it's going to be a little bit different because I'm using a sword. I'm going to like sword nodes and some projectile crit nodes and a little bit of weird. We're pathing down to point blank because it ends up being relatively good for molten strike.
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As you can see, I managed to get about 52,000 juice, which isn't really like a well-rolled map or something, so I can't like super juice anything up. Of course, but I had some footage earlier of me doing wave 30 simulacrums, one-shotting and going to phobia and such. It's that the build does okay in clear damage and all; it doesn't really matter. But the idea is that movement speed is probably the one big downside of the build, which means that Ubers are fine. You can farm Ubers relatively easily.
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One thing that a lot of people know about Exarch is that if you just chill for a second or two, they have this really large damage prevention, right? So if you just chill for a little bit before going and doing your damage, you'll notice like pfft, and they just instantly die. That's the Zenith getting hit. That's the ideology behind this, is that you chill for a little bit and they die.
You might be wondering about general clear. In general, I think the build really isn't super well-suited to just random clearing. I've been farming simulacrums and that's been going relatively well, but for just, say if we can make this a little bit more dangerous for random clearing...
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