[1.00.6] Stormcaller Thunder Shot Warden – T500+

Overview

Warden based around using the Stormcaller set and Thunder Shot to build up huge bursts of Static damage.Easy to play, can map all skills to a single button, fast movement speed, nearly invincible through endless tier 300, great aoe and single target damage.

Overview

Warden based around using the Stormcaller set and Thunder Shot to build up huge bursts of Static damage.

Easy to play – only 2 active skills required, and both can be mapped to the same button

Fast movement speed – 162% base movement, with Kill Haste enchantment on boots you can reliably maintain 287% while clearing anomalies (can use Soul Warp codex/scrolls instead if preferred)

Extremely tanky – stand in the middle of multiple packs of T100 elites doing nothing and never die!

Great AoE and single target damage – equally effective clearing anomalies and bosses

Capable of clearing T600 (in under 15 minutes)

How to Play

Your only (required) active skills are Thunder Shot and your ultimate Thunder Sibyl. Just map them both to the same key and hold it down while you run through the map blowing everything up.

Soul Warp codex can be used for movement, but your movement speed should already be pretty high if you aren’t doing a tier thats too high for your damage output. Healing Touch can be used if you don’t want to use Soul Warp, but you get enough healing from other sources that its rarely needed.

For higher tiers you will want a Lightning Wyrms codex to group large numbers of enemies up and wear them all down at the same time.

Key Skills

Active Skills

A few important points for the skill bar. First, make sure that the skill in the left most slot is a Lightning skill, as the element of that skill determines how one of your set bonuses applies its extra damage. Second, make sure that Thunder Sibyl is on the far right, just to ensure its always active since it gives you a lot of bonuses.

Thunder Shot is your primary damage skill. We stack a TON of cooldown reduction in this build all for the purpose of casting this one skill faster. The actual damage from the skill is not what does the majority of our total damage, but more damage here contributes to higher damage from our Static bursts (which is where our damage actually comes from).

This is our ultimate skill. Provides good boosts to damage, crit chance and overpower, all of which are very useful. You will want this up at all times, which is pretty easy given how much cooldown reduction we have.

Companions interact with our build in a number of ways. We have an effect on our bow that boosts damage by 20% for every companion we have (27 total). There’s also a rune we put on one of our items that boosts our Static damage significantly for each active Sparkies. The active skills for the companions aren’t super useful, but they all provide other additional benefits.

Sparkies – have an aura that boosts our damage and health by 39%

Spiderlings – with the help of a passive from the poison mastery tree, these guys heal us for 1% of their damage – this may not sound like a lot but it is one of the most powerful heals in the game and the only significant source of healing in this build (barring Healing Touch codex if you run that), and is enough to permanently keep you alive while being pounded on by multiple groups of T100 elites

Treant Guard – a passive from the physical mastery tree will distribute 15% of all damage you take to the Treant instead; the active skill is a taunt which seems nice on paper, but in practice is not very effective as its difficult to target properly and doesn’t have a lot of range

Wolfpack – have an aura that grants us 20% crit chance, and a passive in the cold mastery tree that you can choose to either give them taunts (that they will cast on their own), or take a lethal hit for you once every 3 minutes, both have their uses its up to you which you find more helpful; their active skill can give you a 50% damage boost for a few seconds on use, but it stacks additively with all of your other damage boosts so in practice its a fairly mild effect once you have the build fully put together

Passive Skills

This is our final companion skill. Doesn’t need to be put in a skill slot to be active. Doesn’t provide any other bonuses besides simply being extra companions for damage boost.

Static and Lightning Rod are the critical skills of this build and where all the damage really comes from. I’ve linked a part of the Stormcaller set here as well as its necessary to fully explain how these skills interact with each other.

So what happens is every time an enemy is hit with a lightning skill (e.g. Thunder Shot), they are afflicted with Static. While they are afflicted with Static, every time they are hit with a lightning skill there is a 70% chance they will be hit a second time by Lightning Rod for 158% of the original skills damage. Then 2-piece Stormcaller set bonus kicks in to apply a burn DoT for the amount of damage that was done by the Lightning Rod strike, and this DoT effect stacks infinitely.

Normally every time Static gains a charge, it stores the damage dealt by the skill that triggered it (e.g. Thunder Shot), and at 4 charges it sets off a chain lightning effect hitting 15 enemies for the total damage stored in those 4 charges. But with the effect from the 3-piece Stormcaller set bonus, each Static charge now includes all of the damage from the infinitely stacking burns applied by Lightning Rod.

So basically every hit has a 70% chance to add an infinitely stacking burn DoT for 158% of the original skills damage to every enemy hit, and every hit adds not only its own base damage but all of the damage from the infinitely stacking DoT, and after 4 hits all of that stored damage is added together and explodes as chain lightning hitting 15 enemies (including the enemy it triggered from). Huge damage, it stacks forever doing more and more damage over time, more effective in larger groups, but still does very good damage on single targets.

The most useful part of having the Treant companion. As far as I know this acts separately from all other forms of mitigation, e.g. its not subject to the decreasing effectiveness of damage reduction.

Possibly the single most critical part of this build outside the damage skills. Makes you nearly invulnerable until the later endless tiers.

Equipment

First piece of the Stormcaller set. Weyricks Crown greater rune is from a true legendary. We have a lot of effects that give a % increase on our damage and health stats, so the base damage and health here are very valuable.

Second piece of the Stormcaller set. The Elven Ranger is a Warden only legendary armor piece. The cooldown reduction on this acts separately from the normal stat, very important for lowering the cooldown on Thunder Shot to under 1 second. A little extra damage never hurts either.

Staggering boots are great in combination with our accessory (Balgars). Companion Mobility is a drop only shared rune. Frankly it’s not that useful, but it can help your spiders keep in range of an enemy which may save your life once in a while. You can play around with what rune you want in this slot but frankly none of them are all that useful. If you decide to use Soul Warp then there is a decent option that boosts your damage reduction for a few seconds after each cast.

Some point after T400 you will get to a point where you cant reliably maintain the move speed boost from kill haste, you can swap it to something else.

Balgars is one of the most powerful items in the game. We mostly use it for the survivability it offers, but the damage can be helpful too. Call of the Wild is a Warden only legendary, it gives us 12 extra companions which synergizes well with our healing spiders, the Gaia effect on our bow, and the Sparking Static rune on our amulet.

First part of the All for One set. This set bonus gives us a massive boost to our lightning damage % (I go from 2000% to 500% by taking this piece off). Sparking Static is a Warden drop only rune. Gives a huge boost to our Static damage for each Sparkies we have (6 of them with Call of the Wild).

Second part of the All for One set. Terra’s binding helps max out our resistances and synergizes well with All for One.

Final piece of the Stormcaller set. Thunderpoint lesser rune is from a Warden only legendary. By default Static only jumps to 3 targets when it goes off. This rune increases that to 13 (and you can get 2 more from a mastery tree passive), which helps a ton with clearing large groups of enemies.

Gaia is our force multiplier in this build, with 27 companions we get a 540% boost to our base damage. Bombardier is a shared drop only rune which directly boosts the damage of Thunder Shot by 300%. Since Thunder Shot doesn’t have any duration, we don’t suffer any negatives either.

Enchantments and Gems

Most of the enchantments and gems are necessary to the build. When we have all buffs up this setup will give you 100% crit chance, 365% crit damage, 2050% lightning damage, and 91% overpower.

The ring/amulet/accessory gems you can do whatever you want with, there is nothing critical to the build in those slots. I have some lightning damage and pickup radius in there now, but you could remove all of those and your damage won’t suffer a ton. A few options are bonus experience or magic find.

Skill Trees

Grab the Treant companion here and a few useful passives.

Spiderlings here and a few more useful passives. I don’t know whether spores spawned from spiderlings trigger their heal ability. I suspect they don’t, but you need the points in Spores to unlock the spiders anyways, so its only a 1 point investment.

This is our main tree. Paralyze is a great skill for the later endless tiers to keep enemies from moving around and hitting you. The mana on hit you get here is all you will need to keep your mana topped up. A few companion skills and our major abilities are here as well (Static, Lightning Rod, Thunder Shot, Thunder Sibyl).

Wolves here and yet more nice passives. Hail doesn’t actually add any noticeable damage to our build, its just to get to the final passive on the wolves which gives us 20% crit chance.

Most of the critical passives from the mastery trees were explained earlier in the guide. The rest I’ve already picked the most useful, or the only useful, options for each slot. If you have all of the items and runes and enchants you shouldn’t be hurting for damage until T300+ so invest your extra mastery points in life until you get up to 150k+ hp, from there you can play it by ear.

Stats

Stats for reference, taken while all buffs are up, at mastery level ~2300.