Overview
A quick and dirty guide to an effective Berserker build.
The Guide
A Berserker’s Guide
Introduction
Seeing as this forum isn’t getting much attention at the moment, I thought I’d kick things off with a simple guide that’s allowed me to climb the ladder rather effectively. I’m still new to the game and I’ve dabbled with the Witch and the Crusader, but I’ve fallen in love with the raw power and speed of the Berserker.
Why play a Berserker? Well – I think you’ll find this build to be rather fast in terms of game length. I enjoyed playing my Crusader, but found that games took 10+ minutes to finish. 10 minutes isn’t really long in the grand scheme of things, but when you’re climbing the ladder, it’s more efficient to win in less time, right? I can win 3 matches with my Berserker in the same amount of time it takes to win one match with my Crusader – and here’s the rub, I can win more consistently with my Berserker as well. Also, who doesn’t enjoy doing more than 100 damage in a single turn? It happens more often than not with this build.
The Build
Okay, okay, enough pretense – what’s the build? Well, I’ll start off saying it’s new player friendly in terms of gold spent. It’s not extremely expensive to buy the equipment needed. Having said that, I started this build with rank 2 Cruelty (+7% crit) and this is by and large a crit build. I think it’s still effective without rank 2 Cruelty, but I haven’t tested it yet using a different perk. As I said, this is all about the criticals!
Main-Hand Weapon: Ymir’s Hand
This weapon gives you the critical hits – all the critical hits! At 1400 gold, it’s not crazy expensive either. You’ll start the match with 200 life and around 20-30% critical hit rate. By the time you’re enraged, you’ll usually have close to 100% critical hit rate. We want to take damage. Damage is our friend, as long as it’s not lethal. The more damage we take, the more likely we are to crit!
Off-Hand Weapon: Quick Adamantium Hacker
1050 gold for this VERY underrated weapon! Buy it cheap while you can, folks – 1050 is a bargain for this bad boy! Now you might say, “but Crusaber, this is a 2 AP weapon that does 5 damage – it’s really not that impressive.” The damage is rarely 5, but we’ll get to that later. The important part of this weapon is that it allows you to attack again on a critical hit. Remember above how I said that as the game progresses and you lose life, your critical hit rate will climb to near 100%? Imagine, turn 10, having 10 AP available. Having this weapon and close to 100% crit rate means you can usually swing 5 times that turn. Sure, it doesn’t seem like tons of damage. You get 5 damage + the 2 damage the axe gives itself when it criticals. 5 attacks means a potential of 50 damage in one turn (axes get +3 damage on a crit as well). Not bad, right? It gets better…
Trinket: Brute Armband
Here’s where things get juicy. Every time you crit, your off-hand weapon gets a permanent +1 damage. Now imagine we’re attacking late game again, with 10 AP available. Instead of dealing 5-7 damage a swing with your 5 attacks, you’re dealing anywhere between 10-20 damage with each swing of that off hand weapon! It adds up fast! And we really don’t care too much if the damage bonus gets dispelled because its easy to build up again, especially when you’re able to swing multiple times per round!
Trinket: Optional
This slot you can play around with a bit. When I first started using this build, I used Vicious Shard, which gives +5% crit rate for each active buff. Not only do Berserkers have a decent amount of buff tokens, but the permanent damage bonus from Brute Armband translates into a permanent +5% crit rate. Additionally, the +2 damage buff on the Quick Adamantium Hacker whenever you critical hit is another +5% crit rate and by late game, it’s close to being always active. That’s a nearly always active +10% crit rate, on top of the +1 damage for both your off-hand and main-hand weapons that this trinket provides. A very sweet deal indeed!
This build put me at the top of the ladder fairly quickly, however, as you approach the top of the ladder, it becomes apparent that it has trouble with Nuti, the devil-spawn of a sadistic AI programmer. If you haven’t come across her, I won’t spoil what she does or why this build has trouble with her, but I will say this: don’t use the Vicious Shard when you get within Nuti range. Switch this out for a different trinket. There is one trinket that gives you a nearly 100% win rate against Nuti while still letting the core of this build function, but I don’t want to spoil everyone’s fun. Trust me, you’ll be so much happier when you figure it out on your own. Having said that, if you’re really sick of Nuti and don’t have the gold to experiment with other trinkets, shoot me a PM and I’ll let you know which trinket I’m referring to.
Epilogue
Well – that’s my Berserker build. I haven’t had a chance to test it against real players because I don’t run into many at my current ranking, unfortunately. I have tested it against all the top bots (with the exception of the new 2000 ranked bot that was released today) and it’s capable of taking them all down with relative ease. I encourage everyone to try out the build, it’s fun and very visceral in its appeal. It’s also relatively cheap to build and only gets more effective with higher levels of the Cruelty perk. Few things in this game are more satisfying then attacking 9 times for more than 100 damage in a single turn (when all the stars align).
Good luck on the ladder everyone and may the odds be ever in your favor!
Crusaber