[Neraphym]

A/D

Critical Strikes: 15 (11+1+3)
Scythe Mastery: 10
Earth Prayers: 10


Zealous Scythe of Enchanting (+15% Damage while Enchanted)
Radiant Insignia
Attunement Runes
Superior Rune of Critical Strikes (on headpiece of critical strikes)


1. VOW OF STRENGTH
2. AURA OF HOLY MIGHT
3. AURA OF THORNS
4. MYSTIC REGENERATION
5. CRITICAL DEFENSES
6. CRITICAL AGILITY
7. CRITICAL EYE
8. WAY OF THE MASTER


VOW OF STRENGTH
>Enchantment
E: 5
T: 1/4
R: 10
For 20 seconds, you cannot use attack Skills and your attacks deal 35% more damage.



AURA OF HOLY MIGHT
>Enchantment
E: 10
T: 3/4
R: 25
All nearby foes take 30...46...50 holy damage. For 20 seconds, you deal 20...30...32% more damage with your scythe. When this Enchantment ends, all nearby foes take 30...46...50 holy damage.



AURA OF THORNS
>Enchantment
E: 5
T: 3/4
R: 12
All nearby foes are Crippled for 8 seconds. For 30 seconds, this Enchantment does nothing. When this Enchantment ends, all nearby foes begin Bleeding for 12 seconds.



MYSTIC REGENERATION
>Enchantment
E: 10
T: 1/4
R: 5
For 20 seconds, you have +3 Health regeneration for each Enchantment on you.



CRITICAL DEFENSES
>Enchantment
E: 10
T: 1
R: 30
For 10 seconds, you have 75% chance to block. Critical Defenses refreshes every time you land a critical hit.



CRITICAL AGILITY
>Enchantment
E: 10
T: 1
R: 30
For 4 seconds and 1 second for each rank of Critical Strikes you attack 33% faster and gain 10...25 armor. This Skill reapplies itself every time you land a critical hit.



CRITICAL EYE
>Skill
E: 10
T: -
R: 30
For 35 seconds, you have an additional 15% chance to land a critical hit when attacking. You gain 1 Energy whenever you score a critical hit.



WAY OF THE MASTER
>Enchantment
E: 10
T: 1/4
R: 30
For 60 seconds, while holding a non-dagger weapon, you have an additional 33% chance to land a critical hit.



The object of this build is to output insane amounts of damage from a scythe by using critical hits, damage enhancement, and a high increase of attack speed. Vow of Strength and Aura of Holy Might add 35% and, depending on your rank, 20-32% increase in damage. Additionally, a critical hit adds another 40% to your damage. With a scythe that is customized for +20% and +15% damage while enchanted, the damage you'll put out from a basic attack will be insane. The downside is that scythes are slow, but with Critical agility, you have 33% increased attack speed, which mitigates this downfall.

Critical Agility gives you some extra armor depending on your rank. Critical defenses lets you dodge 75% of all attacks. These two skills should refresh often with every critical hit, which really helps your character survive. Way of the Master and Critical Eye last a long time, and add to your chances of getting a critical hit. Mystic Regen takes advantage of this enchantment-heavy build and gives you pretty much infinite health regen that caps of at 10. It'll take a lot of health degeneration to counter this. Lastly, Aura of Thorns is a good snare, and serves as a great cover enchant.

The downfalls to this build are obvious. Blocking or Blind renders this useless, and weakness hurts a lot.. Energy looks to be a potential problem, but critical hits should supply you with a nice, steady stream. Enchantment removal is only a problem if there is a lot of it; if they remove only a few, you will still be a viable threat. While Aura of Thorns gives you a nice snare, you might want to use something to increase your running speed so you can catch up to foes.


Critical Hit Chances:

Critical Strikes: 15
Critical Eye: 15
Way of the Master: 33
Scythe Mastery: 12
---------------------------
Total: 75


Damage Increase:

Vow of Strength: 35
Aura of Holy Might: 20 (Base), 32 (Max)
Enchanted: 15
Customized: 20
on Critical Hit: 40
---------------------------------------------------
Total: 130 142







>>>I'm going to test this when I get home.<<<

[Ratty]

Goaty made one of these a little while ago, seemed to work really well. xD I don't know anything about it, so he'll have to come and tell you what he did later.

[Neraphym]

I need to do some stuff in nightfall before I can become a paragon and cap VoS from Mhedi...

[Goto]

Hmmm... Pretty interesting take on an A/D build, I like it. You might find you want to allocate more points into Scythe Mastery, though. All your damage is based around hitting with a scythe, so that's probably just as important to raise as Critical Strikes. Keep in mind you'll also get a bit extra chance to critical hit from increasing Mastery stats, so that should help to mitigate the difference after changing a little bit. Vow of Strength and Aura of Thorns are a nice addition, although I personally haven't had much experience with enemies surviving long enough to kite away from me with my version. I could see Vow of Strength providing you with some ridiculously high damage, assuming it stacks properly with Holy Might (which seems likely). Mystic Regen should provide good healing, considering you're taking a crazy 7 enchants. Should have ~77% chance of critical hits, so that's plenty high for maintaining, although still a bit lower than my take on the build. Not sure if you're aware, but the text in Aura of Holy Might is actually misleading, it will increase your damage output by much more than it says. It affects the damage rating, rather than the end-result damage. As a very rough estimate, it'll increase damage by about twice as much as it says in the description, the specifics get bogged down in mathematics a bit. It'll also change your damage type to holy, which could well be quite useful against warriors.

It is lacking in the spike damage my build is capable of dealing out rapidly, although Vow of Strength would help to mitigate that a little given the IAS. I see this as being a somewhat more defensive variant, probably better suited to longer engagements. Energy during battle shouldn't be a problem, but I'm very concerned with your startup cost. There's about 65 energy worth of enchants/skills that you'd want to be casting towards the start of a fight, although you'll regain energy quite quickly it's going to be a bit problematic at the start. The fact that you're not using attack skills probably lessens the issue a little, but you'll still have to stagger your enchantments to get them out. The only enchants with an activation longer than 3/4 are Critical Agility and Defense, which you shouldn't really have to reapply, so your activation time shouldn't be too much of a problem in the middle of a fight, neither will interrupts. Casting Way of the Master and Critical Eye a bit before entering battle and letting your energy recover is probably wise, since they're the longest lasting and can both be kept up indefinitely (plus Critical Eye has no activation time, so it won't slow you down to reapply). I guess Critical Agility could be used before running in to aggro, for the extra armour and to offset that huge initial energy cost a bit further. You should be critting in the first hit or two, so I would expect you'd renew it in plenty of time given your high Critical Strikes attribute.


Anyway, overall I think it's a very good build. Some testing would be needed and possibly a little bit of tweaking is necessary to optimize it, but I think you've done a good job of a high-damage sustainable A/D. Regarding the last part of your first post though, I'm not sure there's any reason to assume that the damage increase is additive, that would seem counter-intuitive to me. If the damage-increasing skills come into play in a certain order, the result of one might well be used for the next. That would result in some truly startling damage. When I get a bit of a chance I'll try to do some testing.

[Neraphym]

Actually, I have no idea how the percents effect the damage, but I decided to add them all up to show everyone what it might look like. What you said about initial energy costs is actually my biggest concern. Critical Defense and Mystic Regen should probably be applied in battle as needed.

[Goto]

I took the liberty of running your build through a few basic tests, just taking it against the target dummies to see how it performed. First of all I should point out my equipment wasn't quite what you had in mind, I only had a 13 in Critical Strikes since I was using my regular armour (minor rune), so that might have played a fairly small part in results. Also my scythe has fort rather than enchanting.

Basically, the critical hit rate didn't seem to be coming out as high as it should. As far as I could tell, it was averaging about 50%, maybe 55% at most. That was done with a couple of hundred hits, perhaps as many as 500. Even with the lower critical strikes, I should have been getting about 69% critical hits and that's a significant drop considering the fairly large sample size. It did cause me to drop Critical Defense a couple of times when I was particularly unlucky, that wasn't usually too much of a problem. It did mean that quite often I was hitting for pitiful amounts of damage, though. Even with all the damage increases, if you're not hitting criticals then it can be working on base damage 9 and won't be all that impressive. Energy management still wasn't a problem mid-battle though, still seemed sufficient to keep things going. I found it was possible through careful choice of what skills to use earlier to stagger the enchants before entering battle so that you could get them all out, but I'm not sure how well it would work in a real combat situation. And any DP would make things much harder to handle, of course. I had a full set of radiant gear, but since my armour wasn't optimised for this build I could probably squeeze another +2 energy out through another attunement rune, if it was.

The other thing I found was that I didn't find it particularly fun to use, you spend your whole time watching enchantment durations and reapplying when necessary, and I don't find that very appealing. It could probably be made somewhat better if the skills were listed in a more logical order for the person using it, though.

I'm not in a position to make a judgement about which build works better, though. Mine was still kinda under construction when I posted it, and it's intended to be a framework upon which you can add what is needed for the situation. It's got a considerably higher critical hit rate leading to higher energy gains and more reliable damage, but it would also be more easily killed. I haven't done enough testing to work out whether Vow of Strength overcomes the difference of that lower crit rate, and target practice against a stationary dummy doesn't really do the aspects of your build which don't revolve around damage justice.

EDIT: Didn't notice Alpha's reply before I posted. Leaving Critical Defense and Mystic Regen until you needed them might help with the startup energy cost a fair bit, it wouldn't take long into a battle before you had the energy to cast again.

[Neraphym]

Actually, this build was primarily there to see how hard I can hit with a normal attack. I doubt this is an effective combat build, but a neat gimmicky build good for a run or two.

[Goto]

While it probably makes a better technical exercise than actual combat build, with a bit of work I could see it being feasible. Melee fighters with very high DPS can make a huge difference in battle, particularly if they can also tank a bit like it seemed your build could.

[Neraphym]

They just nerfed Mystic Regen.