Overview
Build guide for a spammy thorns-based berserker. Proven past Mythic 15 in version 1.0.
Intro
This build is about constantly exploding, slowly melting your enemies and healing yourself as you do. Plus it is fun to conquer Mythic 15 and beyond without using a single attack skill!
While somewhat convoluted in parts, the elegant part of this whole arrangement is that both offense and defense scale with your maximum health, which you can dump mastery points into as you climb the endless tiers.
Rule#1: build as much maximum rage as possible. Rage will trickle down to a dozen important stats: thorns, damage reduction, health and mana regeneration, move speed, attack speed, health, damage, fire damage, and plenty more. SO ANGRY!!!!
We use two sets.
- Two pieces of Furious Retaliation will convert 30% of health to thorns. Rest of that set is irrelevant to us.
- Volcanic Garb makes your thorns proc in an AoE (via molten veins), makes rage add to damage reduction and thorns, and makes lava blood stack infinitely! Whew. Every time you explode, you add more damage over time to affected foes.
Gear & Runes
On the Retaliator’s Striders, I use a Critical Thorns rune. Just pumpin’ up thorns damage, nothin’ special.
Alternatively you can put a lesser rune of Ancestral Rage on your boots, which is very competitive for the slot. Essentially, Ancestral Rage will get you a little bit more health and attack speed while coming close to the same amount of thorns damage. Critical Thorns will edge it out in the thorns department. It is likely that you’ll want Ancestral Rage in order to climb endless tiers, just because the HP and attack speed will improve staying power. Either one works.
(Bear in mind that Ancestral Rage will make your passives act as if you had more rage than you do, but this does not work for the Damage Reduction on your armor).
On the Retaliator’s Bond, use the lesser rune from a Dragon Ring. This makes burn damage you take trigger thorns, and also increases your outgoing molten veins/thorns damage based on health lost to the triggering effect. This effect based on % health lost, which is fine because while you continue to increase your health pool size you can push for higher tiers where the monsters hit harder to compensate.
Volcanic claw rune is Dodgeclaw. Heal 12% of max health and mana when you use a utility skill. Great stuff.
Accessory will be Mantle of Dragon Kin with Heartstone greater rune. Mantle increases max rage and the effect of rage-based passives. You’ve got several of those, so this works great. Heartstone gives tons of raw health which we care about for both Retaliator set and Dodgeclaw.
(While you are still farming for the mantle and Heartstone, you can use a Retaliator’s Cloak or Paingrinder in the meantime.)
Necklace will be a Talisman of Spines (increases thorns 150% per heritage skill, ultimate, or utility, and all 6 of our skills fall into one of these categories). Neck rune: Molten Medallion, which increases lava blood damage based on mana regen. Weird idea, but ultimately pretty straightforward–mana regen becomes an offense stat. Lava Blood is our main damage, stacking it up until things die. We don’t actually care about mana regen for mana recovery, Dodgeclaw will take care of that.
(Death Choker kind of works instead of Spines if you don’t have Spines yet. You could also use just a plain Molten Medallion while starting out).
Volcanic Armor with Elementium greater rune for pumping resists. Resists turn into health via Heartstone, that turns into thorns via Retaliator’s and healing via Dodgeclaw.
(If you wanna have fun while farming, use a Flamebound rune instead. Flamebound auto-casts embershield with all fire skills. The auto-casted embershield will still trigger your Dodgeclaw heal. So, swap your main LMB skill to Flameroll to zoom around really fast. I mean reaaaaalllly fast.)
Volcanic Visage, with the dropped lesser rune of Embershield. This makes Embershield greatly increase your mana regen (which becomes damage via the Molten Medallion rune). It also means Embershield can trigger on-hit effects, which appears to include critical hits; so without this the Critical Thorns rune would do absolutely nothing.
More importantly, perhaps, it means you can generate rage by standing on the testing dummies with Embershield on, which is important for getting your rage up, and thus your damage reduction, before stepping through the anomaly portal.
Volcanic Fists rune is Dragon Flame. This removes the cooldown from Embershield entirely, which lets you abuse the absolute hell out of Dodgeclaw!
With this rune you can use Embershield as fast as your attack speed stat allows, at the cost of a stacking burn on yourself. But the offensive upside is huge, because every cast also triggers a Molten Veins explosion, stacking Lava Blood on your enemies.
You’ll always have ten stacks of the burn, draining 10% of your max health per second, which is instantly recovered by Dodgeclaw. The burn actually ticks faster than once per second, and each tick triggers a Molten Veins explosion as well.
Item Enchants & Gems
I won’t walk you through this exactly, but you can look at my pictures if you want. I won’t promise they are perfect.
First thing to do is add effect duration and cooldown reduction until your Sky Lord heritage skill uptime is nearly 100%. This is actually pretty hard, but “close enough” is close enough.
Next, maximum rage, mana regeneration, and thorns wherever you can. Maximum health is good, but at some point Resist All will actually provide more net health through the Heartstone.
On your weapons, a little bit of reach is nice, as it does increase the size of your molten veins AoE. A tiny bit of critical chance is also needed to trigger the critical thorns rune, if you run with that. Of course, attack speed never hurts either.
For Gems I just threw in a bunch of +Thorns and +Max Rage. You could do +Health instead of +Thorns and you’d get some more survivability while still getting a 30% Thorns refund out of Retaliators. You definitely want the increase gem effects enchant where you can get it.
What don’t you need:
You don’t need overpower. Firstly, because thorns ignore resistances by default, and this applies to molten veins as well. But secondly because Brute Force on tier one of the Guardian skill tree adds overpower based on rage, and we will have so much rage that this will bring us to 100% all on its own! Whew.
You don’t need damage stagger; in fact, taking damage in chunks makes the molten veins damage better via the Dragon Ring rune. You could take damage stagger I guess, but I didn’t and it works fine. (For the same reason, you definitely don’t need evasion).
You don’t need move speed; you will be unbelievably fast regardless.
Skills
Honestly, you have lots of spare skill points, so don’t panic about getting this exact.
The key is you want to get all four heritage skills.
For Dragon Kin (fire) you definitely want to fill out the top part of the Dragon Kin tree, where Embershield, Molten Veins and Lava Blood live. The heritage skill here will give you health and mana regen based on rage. Grab the Dragon Rage ultimate here as well, for even more rage.
The Guardian tree has some rage passives, but mainly we just want the heritage skill that increases your max health with rage.
And the winter tree, again grab the starting passives to get access to the heritage skill that gives you a flat bonus to all resists (aka health) and a panic button to freeze foes.
Last, and far from least is the Sky Lord tree, where you’ll get get a ton of movement and attack speed, from the two passives before the heritage skill, as well as the heritage skill itself. Also grab Dragon Spirit for a somewhat unreliable but substantial mana regen boost.
Embershield, Dragon Rage (ult), and Dragon Flight (sky lord heritage) should all be bound to LMB. Then stick your other heritage skills on the rest of the bar.
Note: why Dragon Rage instead of Drakeform? Well, they’re really similar, but 50 rage from Dragon Rage is more broadly useful since we have so many rage passives. You actually end up with more thorns damage from Dragon Rage than you do from Drake Form. On the other hand, Drakeform gives you huge heritage skill cooldown acceleration, making it a LOT easier to keep up Dragon Flight, and the 40% added health might give you a bit more health than the 50 rage does (not a ton). But while you are still gearing up, you probably also need that 50 rage for the 16% damage reduction it provides via the Volcanic Garb. Try them both out.
Last, if you can enchant a Spell Codex with Lightning Wyrms, that’s a good idea.
Masteries
Masteries are complicated. Here’s a picture of mine.
For your berserker masteries, there aren’t any super critical options that wildly improve your effectiveness. Set the World on Fire from the dragonkin column 7 might be the biggest. Bonuses to heritage skill effects are important as well. And you’ll want to take the ultimate skill cooldown perk, especially early on when you’re struggling to get max uptime on that.
The final class mastery choice is irrelevant; you can boost brawl, dragon, shout skills, or all three. But we use none of those! We don’t use any attacks at all in this build! So, don’t rush to that, and when you get there just pick the one with the best name.
Strategy
I won’t call it brain-dead…but the brain had a long shift at work today and it just wants a nap. But please heed this warning:
ALWAYS MAKE SURE TO GET UP TO MAX RAGE BY HITTING DUMMIES BEFORE YOU GO THROUGH THE ANOMALY PORTAL.
You are nothing without rage, you will die instantly.
As mentioned before, bind your ultimate, your sky lord heritage skill, and embershield all to LMB, so that you continually cast them on cooldown to ensure you have that +50 max rage and extra attack speed.
Thus, you just walk into groups of enemies hold down LMB until everything around you is dead.
Each cast of embershield heals you and triggers molten veins; you’ll also burn for 10% of your health per second and each tick of that burn will also trigger molten veins. With all your attack speed, you’ll be casting several times per second. Meanwhile, you’ll get attacked by enemies, further triggering molten veins. Pop Lightning Wyrms from a skill codex to bring more enemies close—the closer the better so they all get counted by your Mantle of Dragon Kin.
Each molten veins hit will add a stack of “lava blood” DoT based on the damage dealt to everyone it hits, stacking infinitely. Lava Blood only ticks once each second, so you’ll be prone to overkilling—for maximum efficiency, note that the back half of every group’s health bar is going to burn down much faster than the front half; you can move on to the next group and let monsters finish dying behind you, that takes a bit of intuition to judge.
If you are in trouble, pop your Frostskin heritage skill to freeze the group around you so you can recover and reposition if you need to. You can also use your Protector heritage skill to heal 30% max health in a pinch, which is worth doing. Your last fallback is to use your insane move speed to angrily run away.
You never need to press the fire heritage skill button. Forget about it.
And that’s it. Hope you enjoyed the guide.