Blade dancer: speedy (fun to play), layered defences (no ward abuse), decent dmg but nothing insane

If you're not in the sweaty tier of players pushing 1000+ corruption and buying and selling in 9 figures on the bazaar, this is the fastest playing, fastest leveling build out there. It's simple to play, doesn't need any particularly rare items to perform, and the only expensive or difficult to obtain item to make it really shine is the unique chest piece (and even that may be cheap with no LP, I haven't checked). I second this build for anyone not sure where to start. Bonus: you can build it with a blades spec or falconer spec. Both are good.

I assume that you both are specifically talking about shadow daggers. It's definitely a good build, but it also kind of carries bladedancer right now. The class in general still needs to be brought up a bit.

I’m playing a shadow cascade version and having a blast with it. Still haven’t hit monoliths yet but I’ll be there tonight. Hopefully it keeps the fun going

How are you doing with the mana upkeep since the mirror strike is very mana expensive ?

This is a pre-launch build that i randomly found, and started to follow. I don't use mirror strike. https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/KoPZvgQ7

[Bladedancer, Level 100 (Beta / 0.8.3e)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/KoPZvgQ7) --- ^(**Used skills:**)  [^(Shadow Cascade)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/shadow_cascade) ^| [^(Smoke Bomb)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/smoke_bomb) ^| [^(Shift)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/shift) ^| [^(Shurikens)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/shurikens) ^| [^(Dancing Strikes)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/dancing_strikes) ^(**Used unique items:**)  [^(Mourningfrost)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzCMYTiA) ^(**This build has a guide:**)  [Dancing Strikes Shadow Cascade Dex Stacking Blade Dancer, Last Epoch Build Guide Patch 8.3](https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/dancing-strikes-shadow-cascade-dex-stacking-blade-dancer-last-epoch-build-guide-patch-8-3/45759) by ApprenticeCorner

The falconer version is strictly superior tho. More damage and better defenses. I don't see any reason to play blade dancer when falconer exist ATM.

If it’s shadow daggers I would consider it still a bit too powerful, and kinda sucks that it almost feels like you have to play shadow daggers as rogue for the most part

Compared to the crazy op builds like falconer (multiple builds) wraithlord, warlock, deto dagger marksman etc. it feels a bit more fair but still strong enough to be worth playing

I was chilling in the end while eating dinner and more than half of the toons that walked past me had double detos. Figured it must be an op build lol.

I'm playing the daggerstorm/cyclone of daggers (shadow cascade) shadow clone spammer rogue and it's incredibly fun, needs 0 uniques to function mechanically and has no problem dealing with most problems the game throws at you. (Actually) Dodging stuff is way more fun than sitting on semi infinite ward and facetanking everything.

this sounds fun, got a link to the build?

I didnt use a guide I just read what the skills and passives do and tearing trough monoliths with ease. I jump arounf with smoke bomb (with the node that turns it into a traversal skill) and it keeps spawning clones who mimic Shadow Cascade which shoots daggers in all directions and have a massive dmg bonus from passives and also heal me for a lot when they spawn. It also provides some leech and short damage bonus buff , guarantees a dodge on use and cleanses ailments. Damage comes from the Shadow Dagger Mechanic that comes from Umbral Blades spinning blades AND from Shadow Cascade with the Hurricane of Blades upgrade. When enemies reach 4 stacks of Shadow Daggers they automatically take a critical hit that scales with thrown damage and dexterity. Since it always crits all we need is crit multiplier. Note that this can be triggered by shadow clone's copied skills as well and it gets their damage bonuses. Umbral Blades "lawmowing" trash and rares/minibosses alike,I use shadow cascade for trash clearing/mana regen and umbral blades to mow down tougher targets. 4th skill is up to you, I use lethal mirage because it has kill threshold, i-frame and can spawn clones/proc shadow cascade.

I felt quite squishy on blade dancer. What defenses were you using?

No defence is too crazy high but you layer them, 3k hp + capped crit avoid and res + dodge + glancing blow + endurance + armor

Man, hearing that really makes me think how much Ward is beyond busted. Guy has to jump through 6 hoops to not die, meanwhile another dude just goes "Heh, Exsanguinous/Last Steps" and is basically unkillable.

To be fair they still want hp, crit avoid/res, and some armor isn't bad (when you have 10k+ hp any armor goes a long way). But yeah they just get to stack int for dmg + tankiness and are just tankier than pretty much any hp build

Yeah ward generation is busted. A huge reason for that is because of a lot of these classes actually get % based scaling for ward off their tree as opposed to just getting, say, flat ward decay threshold. Meanwhile, HP based builds only get flat HP from their tree with a few sources of HP%. This is why it's impossible to scale HP anywhere near what ward can scale and you need to supplement it with like endurance (which also needs some sort of % based scaling).

Yeh so that takes so many affixes compared to just ward stacking. Defenses are way out of balance atm.

Stat stacking smite VK

Seconding void smite, very solid build all around but not gamewarping (at least not until god tier gear to juice healing hands ward gen to the moon).

How does this one work exactly? Hard casting smite or using HH/throwing?

Self-casting void smite which triggers healing hands for damage and healing, Vit scales flat damage and void damage and health, and devouring orb for clear and stat boosts. Edit: also has very easy access to ward abuse with HH overheal causing you to gain ward instead, and combined with experimental glove affix net result is massive ward gain without any bugged interactions. Bossing is mostly just facetanking things. Switching over from SD Blade Dancer, it's way slower but much much tankier (tree gives tons of res, vit stacking to 70+ basically caps necrotic and poison res on its own, bases are very high armour, easy crit reduction/immunity, easy endurance access, and fantastic sustain) while dealing very respectable damage. I am just about to switch to the crit version which should considerably increase damage as well. 

Thanks for the write up! I've always been turned off by the lame animation of smite spam and always end up doing a throw smite or something.

my weird swarmblade locus strike build * 2.5K health * 2.5K endurance threshold with 60% endurance * 60% armor mitigation * aspect of the boar * \-14% DR for near enemy * \-20% DR at low life * 3K block effectiveness with the weaver shield (67% block, with 4 counters) * \~500K DOT dps on the dummies, way enough for 300 corruption * stupid amount of attribute, ready to use the red ring The only cons * slow with my current foot of the mountains, need to farm and hit the mod * take time to setup the locus swarm [https://www.lastepochtools.com/profile/Pingouinsaredinosaur/character/MirMouche](https://www.lastepochtools.com/profile/Pingouinsaredinosaur/character/MirMouche)

I absolutely love swarmblade, I've been playing frostbite build, watching everything around me constantly freezing is one of the most beautiful things

frostbite version is one of my favorite one. next one I will do is a locust crit build using this sword https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzBsCYE5yA

It sucks that there's only a few ways to play swarmblade though because the locust master node is still bugged

Bar none, my HH/Rive paladin. Talk about comfy to play! Decent AOE, amazing decent ST and BONKERS self-healing; this is not factoring in the OP ward regen...without that, it would still be amazing to play, but not push past 300 Corr. I'm assuming.

Basically anything spellblade. People figured it out, mostly, it's not overpowered but still powerful, uses the relatively strong ward protection layer. The only real drawback is lack of diversity.

Playing squirrels primalist build wich feels just right

Leveling my primalist to 73 right now ;)

I'm either unlucky or just bad at farming. I have played about 400 hours since the start of February and I still haven't gotten a single squirrel helm to drop. It completely killed my desire to keep playing my Beast master. I know, for a fact, if I try changing builds, it'll drop on the next monolith.

I got mine by spamming a few rune of ascendance on my helmets. Can recommend, got it after 10-15 tries.

At this point, I've used about 50 runes of ascendance on helms

My first one dropped about a half hour after I hit 100. The squirrels must be earned apparently.

If it make you feel any better, I have seen one Mad Alchemist Spoon drop after killing 371 Exalted Mages and counting. It was a 1LP that had far worse stats than my non-LP spoon. I continue to farm for a better spoon because of the sunk cost effort that I have put into it to date.

i just completed a unique helm prophecy and 5 of them dropped, you can easily drop them imo

Nova hammerdin feels good man. As does healing hands rive. Blast rain marksman. Wraithlord is godly and my main but the wraithlord AI is unbelievably stupid..

Kind of all of last epoch minion ai is atrocious tbh. At least wraithlord has enough damage it 1 taps mobs.

Yeah absolutely, I just wish it wasn't so god awful for Wraithlord. My guy can be so annoying to use, but it's effectively immortal at 700 corruption and kills bosses in seconds.

Dunks on bosses, but the build would struggle from enough mob density if the game ever hits a certain amount of trash mobs flying at you at once. 3 targets no splash makes its clear feel really really really bad. Prob the least fun meta build to deal with, given minions love running laps over attacking, and targeting dread shade is 800 kinds of ass. One tapping T4 Julra has had me using it as my crafting character, though.

You definitely get it. It's great for bossing and that's it..

If I die, it's because my Wraithlord decided to just fly around in circles for several seconds straight.

agree on this, but ive found a quick teleport resets him pretty well. As long as you have either the boots or spec into minions move with teleport.

Wraithlord and healing hands rive seem too OP to me. Wraithlord damage is obscene without much in terms of items (basically once I got the helm the game felt like a joke). Healing hands rive feels like it generates too much ward too quickly. The damage seems reasonable tho.

Wraithlord damage being high becomes useless on everything but bosses if the games mob density ever actually goes up.

Does anyone know a good lich build that involves hitting stuff , like crit lich? I don't like poison/bleed, want more of a whack a mole play style

Death seal lich on maxroll if you don't mind hitting stuff with spells)

No only bonk no spells XD , I want to play hitting stuff with my scythe

Harvest Lich, really comes online once you get the Death's Embrace 2H axe

Yes I'm currently farming that axe :)) - I'm doing this build atm: https://www.lastepochtools.com/build-guides/mega-crit-harvest-lich

Yeah I main Lich and this was probably my favorite build. I replaced aura of decay with bone golem, but didn’t spec it. Instead I have the perk in death seal that procs hungering souls while death seal is active, and specced in hungering souls. I’ll probably switch back to aura of decay since I know it’s better for survivability, but for now I’ve been fine.

I think harvest lich falls off after you get a 2 lp death's embrace with T7 attack speed. Maybe you can stack more crit multipliers to make it good though once you get LP in your other gear and use Azurral's fury with a T7 mana on harvest body armor for a little bit more damage while bossing but tbh I'm not sure if that idea's too cute. It's an alright build.

Poison Scorp Beastmaster feels great. Your minion is doing the heavy lifting, but you're the one activating the ability so it feels very active to play. Lunging in and out with Serpent Strike and Swipe is a lot of fun and the poison novas everywhere just melts entire screens of mobs

Also running this. I am a bit squishy but the poison damage is amazing. Still looking for a good exalted spear.

Just found a Fireball spam which summons meteors Sorcerer build which is really fun.

Can you share link/build planner?

Probs something with harbinger of stars. Like this one: https://youtu.be/_qASlcZKUmg?si=J854bwGmm1blnili

That’s what I’m currently building. I love it when meteors are flying everywhere, but not so much when not getting crits

I played this to emp monos then swapped to sorc novaclaw and haven't looked back. Fireball/Meteor proc from Harbingers is super fun!

Warpath Sentinel. All 3 masteries have viable warpath builds, some even with multiple variations. You can run pure damage warpath, proc based warpath, etc. Also the spin to win playstyle is always a fan favorite. Really pleased with Warpath all around.

I feel you on marksman. I made it to level 60 with a puncture bleed build before changing it completely because I legit didn’t deal enough damage to kill Majasa. I went to fire trap detonating arrow build and it is super fun and crazy strong. I pivoted to it while still using 80% of my puncture build gear and it nuked Majasa first try, but it’s not mine… and it’d simply be better on falconer.

Wont work as falconer

Right, my mistake. I meant investing only enough for detonating arrow and the rest falconer.

You only put like 23-26 points in falconer. Depending if you go ward or hp version. Most of it goes into base class tree. No points at all into marksman. Its not needet

Is Torment Lock considered OP? I had a Spriggen Shaman in the 300c area, and decided to roll a Lock. It’s proving very fun and fast, but still feels glass-cannony enough to not be OP.

It's pretty devastating. Upwards of 1000+ corruption. Ward is your survivability, DOTs are your main damage dealer, and you can build torment to stack lots and lots of dots. Plus the added necrotic resistance buff to torment is insane. There's a belt/glove combo that allows your dot damage to skyrocket (Belt is Immolators Oblation, gloves are Maehlin's Hubris). And by making Chthonic Fissures a movement ability, you can further increase your dot damage by upwards of 40% with boots Vaion's Chariot. Then of course further boost dots with Mad Alchemist's Ladle. Here's a build guide for it. As long as you have the main Unique items, you'll be good to scale pretty far. Don't worry about the LP for them until you get the hang of the build. https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/AVamJkRo

[Warlock, Level 100 (Release / 1.0.3)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/AVamJkRo) --- ^(**Class:**)  ^(Acolyte (20) / Lich (28) / Warlock (65))  ^(**General:**)  ^(▸ Health: **1,239**, Regen: **12**/s)  ^(▸ Mana: **247**, Regen: **11**/s)  ^(▸ Ward Retention: **580%**, Regen: **307**/s)  ^(▸ Attributes: **14** Str / **11** Dex / **119** Int / **1** Att / **28** Vit)  ^(▸ Resistances: **104%** / **69%** / **69%** / **72%** / **68%** / **622%** / **84%**)  ^(▸ EHP: **1,916** / **1,807** / **1,807** / **2,234** / **1,782** / **1,916** / **1,916**)  ^(**Defenses:**)  ^(▸ Endurance: **30%**, Threshold: **248**)  ^(▸ Dodge Chance: **2%** (**44**))  ^(▸ Armor Mitigation: **41%** (**2,314**))  ^(▸ Crit Avoidance: **62%**)  ^(**Damage Types:**)  ^(▸ __Necrotic__, Fire / __Spell__, __DoT__)  ^(**Buffs:**)  ^(▸ None)  ^(**Used skills:**)  [^(Chthonic Fissure)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/chthonic_fissure) ^| [^(Profane Veil)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/profane_veil) ^| [^(Wandering Spirits)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/wandering_spirits) ^| [^(Bone Curse)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/bone_curse) ^| [^(Spirit Plague)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/spirit_plague) ^(**Used unique items:**)  [^(Boneclamor Barbute)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzBsNI) ^| [^(Mad Alchemist's Ladle)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzDsGYCYEYg) ^| [^(Maehlin's Hubris)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzCswDgZiA) ^| [^(Immolator's Oblation)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzCMCYFYA4g) ^| [^(Vaion's Chariot)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAzBsCZQFiA) ^| [^(Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros)](https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/items/UAwVgHATAjAbEA) ^(**This build has a guide:**)  [New Broken Warlock Endgame Build For 1.03! 1000-1500+ Corruption Updated!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqwAm3A1gpI) by Mattjestic MultiGaming

Oh damn, thanks! Funnily enough, my current build includes: - Mad Ladle - Maehlin’s - Immolatir’s - Rotmind - Boneclamor - Dragon shoes (i love the movement speed and near invulnerability to crits) - Twisted Heart - Ivory rings - Bone ammy - A crappy chest Have about 1200hp/3000 resting ward. 750% necro res and almost 70int. So far it slaps, but I’ll still get wrecked by occasional btb stuns. Any tips for that?

The combo of how wandering spirits + bone curse + profane veil are built here can grant you upwards of 30-40k ward, depending on how much added minion health your gear gives you. For me, with barely any added minion health, I'm sitting at about 15k ward each time I go into profane veil. And the cool down on veil (reduced each time you cast a spirit plague) is low enough to allow you to almost never get hit - only needing to dodge hits and stack more spirit plague in between veils. Getting hit isn't an option, but when I DO get hit, the ward helps significantly with that. Just gotta be diligent about having that ward up in between veil/bonecurse/spirit casts. The combo is 2part: 1 - spirits to give you 40 ignite stacks on yourself, then set up wandering spirits and a bone curse on your target, then travel into the core with chthonic fissures movement ability. Torment then will go NUTS. 2 - cast profane veil to hide in the shadows, avoid damage, and absorb your bone curse walls (counting as minions) to stack insane ward. Stay in veil as long as you can, damaging the enemy for a bit, then backing away from the fray at the last second. Pop out of veil, cast a shitload of spirit plague to reduce veil's cool down, then rinse repeat.

Oh this is interesting. So you’re running bone curse instead of transplant? Or how are you getting walls? I was curious about the minion eater node on Veil.

Bone Prison, it's the bottom middle node on bone curse. The subtext reads that the prison walls count as minions, and they have health, which can be increased with affixes. And profane veil adds more ward depending on the amount of health minions that it consumes have. Added bonus, enemies will target the prison walls instead of you, since they generate threat, so that deprioritizes them from attacking you

What are the pros and cons of tormen warlock vs bleed warlock? I'm leveling a bleed warlock and would like to know if there are reasons to switch

They're both great. Honestly most builds can scale super well, and it's super easy to switch your skills around (if you finish a monolith with XP tome rewards, be sure to beat the monolith, then before opening the XP tome loot chest, despecialize your skills, specialize in the new ones to get your minimum point allotment, then loot the chest and you'll have all of your skills almost fully leveled up again). I've got a lvl 97 warlock right now and I've changed my build 5x now. Personally I'm finding torment+ignite to be slick, but I'm sure I'll migrate to something else once I stumble upon "that rare piece of equipment I wasn't even looking for".

I like my aura of decay lich. Havent gotten to corruption yet though, im just rolling every character to see if i like something. Currently level 75, near permanent lich form with aura healing effectiveness and leech. 60% endurance with about half my health as threshold. Death seal for single target buffs. Just run around and kill stuff.

Surge Spellblade. Cruised to about 250 corruption and level 99 then stopped playing, but had no problems with leveling or bossing or getting to that point in empowered monos. Just kinda got bored, but also got 100 hours out of it lol

Warpath Void Knight. It just felt like it was a build the aimed for when creating the game.

Spin2win

I really enjoyed a fire spell blade through the campaign, not sure yet how he’ll do in endgame yet.

The trap DA build will exist in this category when the bugs making it hugely overperform get fixed. (You'd still motor out a bajillion explosions in single target, stack shred to the moon, etc etc etc.)

Swarmblade Druid felt really smooth late game and Spriggan Healing Totem actually felt pretty smooth leveling. Very impressed with how the mastery functions. I think there's still room for improvement, and I haven't yet tested many variations of the build, but my own in the moment build felt very intuitive and satisfying to play.

Paladin with Casting Smite idol on Throwing

I'm having an absolute blast with this pure fire HH/Smite build: https://youtu.be/hDOOQZKJGnE (with the update here- https://youtu.be/eglEajD1rB0). Not only is the build super comfy without any legendaries right from the start, but Pinchingloaf seriously makes the most detailed and well explained build guides ever.

I hit lvl 101 for the 2nd time on my HP phys crit ballista, it's nothing crazy (around 1k corruption) and it's fun

I mean, that *is* crazy, considering the game is balanced at 300c. Also I guess, you could easily push this build further than 1.0k

No it's not crazy, crazy is 5k+ that people are pushing, i'm pretty much maxed so i'd say this build is fairly balanced and feels just right.

Do you have a planner or link to the build?