Description

Use Dominating Blow and become a one-man army.

Suggested Leagues: Default, Hardcore, Anarchy, Onslaught

Passive Skills

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• First things first, a beeline for Resolute Technique (postpone resolute technique if you're not leveling with a melee skill)
• Moving onto Blood Magic passive (postpone this if your life pool isn't that great, and maybe pick up some life in templar area)
• Picking up some life in the Templar area (This and the step below are interchangable. Just do both of these before you move on)
• Getting Master of the Arena and more life. (This and the step above are interchangable. Just do both of these before you move on)
• Rounding out your life, picking up Iron Reflexes + Elemental Adaptation, and leaving Blood Magic behind
• The finishing touches (Berserking, Amplify, Leather and Steel, weapon specific damage nodes, and Endurance Charges)

Gems

4L Auras

Vitality
Hatred
Reduced Mana

4L Auras

Reduced Mana
Blood Magic
Anger
Grace

2L Aura/2L Enduring Cry (you'll want two 2Ls, not one 4L in this piece)

Reduced Mana
Determination
Blood Magic
Enduring Cry

6L Dominating Blow (Drop Faster Attacks if you only have a 5L.)

Dominating Blow
Melee Physical Damage
Melee Splash
Multistrike
Blood Magic
Faster Attacks

3L Utility Skills

Enduring Cry
Vulnerability
Blood Magic

Flasks

Flask Set 1

Life Flask
Life Flask
Life Flask
Granite Flask
Quicksilver Flask

Bandits

Help Oak in Normal Difficulty - Rewards +40 to Maximum Life
Help Kraityn in Cruel Difficulty - Rewards +6% to Attack Speed
Help Oak in Merciless Difficulty - Rewards +1 to Maximum Endurance Charge

Gear

Gear

Weapon - Look for a solid 2-handed mace with very high physical. A good attack speed is nice. Look for one with at least 1.10 attacks per second, but above that, a bigger hit from a slightly slower attack will simply be better than faster, but lighter hits. Armor reduces physical damage proportional to the size of the hit, so with the same dps on paper, the slower/stronger hit will provide more real ingame dps than faster/weaker hits. For this reason, I prefer maces over axes and swords, but ultimately, the choice is yours. In my guiding skill trees above, I have picked up mace nodes.

Gloves-This is one of the few pieces of gear you can get attack speed on, so pick it up here if you can afford it. More importantly however, is life and resists. You want to cap your resists (reach 81% for everything). If you can do it without having to spend points on Diamond Skin and Diamond Flesh passives, that's free skill points for you.

Boots-Life, resists, movespeed and strength are the best stats to get on this slot.

Chest-Life, resists, strength, typical chest stuff. Astral Plate is great for the built in resists. You'll be picking up Leather and Steel as well, so the main benefit of Glorious Plate over Astral Plate (no movement speed penalty, more armor) is overcome by the resists that astral plate gives. If you're rich, Kaoms will be great in this slot, but you'll miss out on some great utility gems.

Helm-This is the one non ring/amulet place where you can get int despite not using an int piece. If you're lacking the 150 or so int you need for your gems, this is a great place to pick some up. If you use hybrid armor/evasion, you can use this to shore up both your int and dex, since it can roll as high as 50 for each. Other than that, just get high life and resists as usual.

Belt-Rustic sashes are probably the best choice as they give a good amount of physical, but leather or even heavy belts will serve you just fine. Life and resists are important as usual, but you can pick up some strength and/or armor rolls on top of that.

Rings-A trick I like to do is get dual res on all the rest of my gear, and then have a single ring cover the third resist. If you're missing say cold resist, you can get a 30% sapphire ring, with a 40% cold res roll, and a 12% all res roll. That covers a massive portion of your cold resists right there. Of course, this ring won't be able to cover it all if you don't have any of it anywhere else, but if you play it right, this is a great 'trick' to avoid having to shell out for expensive tri-res gear. Other than that, life is great as usual, and physical damage and strength are great to have too. Life leech is a luxury, but since the only life leech you get is the 2% from Blood Drinker on the tree, you might want to invest in it here. It's not a necessity though. 2% from the tree will serve you fine. Attack speed is also a nice luxury here.

Amulet-You'll almost certainly want an Onyx to shore up your dex and int, but if you're all set on one, you can get a Lapis or Jade, or even an Amber if you're set on both. When Anarchy/Onslaught ends, one of the int/dex amulets might be fine too. You'll want life, resists, strength and physical damage on this slot.

All in all, you want to stack as much strength as you can. It does everything this build needs. You'll also want to cap all of your elemental resists, and pick up enough chaos resists to be at least 0%. If you can muster 25%+, you'll pretty much have nothing to fear from them. Remember, while you can pick up 2 12% all res nodes from the tree, those are 2 points you could have spent elsewhere if you pay a little extra for more resists on gear. It's well worth it if you can afford it.



Flasks
Seething Hallowed Life of Grounding - Instant flasks are of course extremely powerful. Combined with dispelling shock stacks, which will otherwise drop you very fast, this flask is pretty much nonnegotiable.

Seething Hallowed Life of Heat/Dousing/Staunching - I personally use Staunching, since puncture from elites hurt like hell, and the Canyon/Arachnid Nest boss has claimed me more than once on my other unprepared characters. Dispelling freeze/ignite is fine too, though the situations where it comes up are rare. A second Grounding is just fine too.

Bubbling/Sapping Hallowed Life of Warding - It's very important to keep curses off of you, or you will just die. Note that you can't get Warding on a Seething flask, as its a duration-based mod and Seething has no duration, so don't waste your alterations trying. Bubbling or Sapping are both fine. I like bubbling for the minor instant heal, but I can see wanting a stronger healing over time as well.

Ample/Perpetual Granite of Iron Skin - Classic Granite flask rolls.

Ample/Perpetual Quicksilver of Warding/Gluttony - The suffix here can be a lot of things. You could get a dispel status ailment flask, a dispel curse or a life leech flask. Quicksilver differs from Life flasks in that it will go for the full duration every time. Life flasks 'turn off' if you reach full health. Sometimes this can be a problem against a pack of enemies that curse very often. You dispel, hit full hp, get cursed again and repeat 2 more times, but they're still not dead. Now you have no warding flask, get cursed and risk dying. For this reason, I prefer to run a second warding flask here, but really, this comes down to preference.

Guide

Pros of the build
-Loads of fun. There's just something awesome about watching a boss get blitzed by 20 of his minions you dominated.
-High survivability. You should reach 81% resists, 10k+ armor, 4000+ life without kaoms, and rock 6 or 7 endurance charges. Plus, you usually have 15-30 minions soaking up damage at all times.
-Good clear speed. Once you get your army up and running, you kinda just snowball over everything. Only the most dangerous bosses like Piety will be able to burst down your minions. Most packs will not be able to kill your minions with you backing them up.
-Easy to change up the main skill. The skill tree works very well with several other melee builds. You can swap to ground slam, cyclone, even flicker strike just by changing up the gems and the supports a bit. Of course, it won't be optimal, and you'll probably have to chrome your gear each time, but sometimes it can be interesting to change things up.

Cons of the build
-Somewhat gear dependant. You'll need a 5L at least, and getting an Alpha's Howl will save you 3 skill points, so its highly recommended, but not cheap.
-This build is melee. All the usual problems of melee like desync and targetting come with this build.
-Effectiveness decreased by some of the popular builds. Party members with cold crit and Infernal Blow builds destroy the bodies of mobs with their skills, preventing you from converting them.
-Effectiveness reduced in group play. It's hard to build up an army with 4 or 5 other party members scattering them. Running with one or two buddies is fine, but you can probably forget playing with a group of 6. That said, this is mitigated in part by the fact that you can change up the main skill as mentioned above. Switch to ground slam or cyclone and you've got a working, if not exciting, party build.





Normal-This part is a cakewalk. You have some great leveling methods and you'll have enough early life to survive pretty much everything.

Starting out - There are two powerful leveling builds. One way is to go cleave. You can go double redbeak, run anger/wrath, and wear thousand ribbons for the first 10 or 20 levels. Ondar's Clasp is pretty nice too until you get Resolute Technique. The other one is searing touch, fire trap, which you can move into starting level 13 (You'll want to level up fire trap gems earlier). The +2 levels make that skill a killing machine and should carry you well into your 20s or 30s. It requires nothing from the tree, so you don't have to change up your build at all. If you go this route, you can postpone getting Resolute Technique until you move away from Fire Trap. Other leveling uniques you want from level 1 are Wanderlust and Goldrim. The mana regen from Wanderlust is really nice until you get blood magic. The resists from Goldrim are even better. Expect to use that battered cap until Merciless or whenever you can start running Purity.

Normal Bandit - Help Oak. Mana is useless to you, and 8% resists simply isn't as good since you'll likely be able to cap resists without them. If they ever put respeccing bandits into the game, 8% resists might be worth picking up for a little bit, but for now, +40 life is far and away the best choice.

Damage nodes -Most of these can wait until you're level 60+. 2-handers have great damage on their own, and all the strength you're picking up goes a long way. That said, if you feel like your damage is a bit lacking, the Slaughter node in the templar area is a pretty good pickup even early on. The two physical damage nodes at the top of the Duelist starting area I might pick up for leveling, but spec out of around level 40 or 50 to get to more important nodes like Iron Reflexes a bit sooner. You may also want to go through the Catalyse nodes to get to the juicy templar life nodes instead of going through the three strength nodes underneath, since you don't need to take the nearby endurance charge anytime soon. You will have to spec out of those when you start taking the Endurance charge nodes however. I would not get any weapon specific nodes until the endgame when I have settled on one.

Switching to Dominating Blow and speccing into Blood Magic - Sometime around Act 3 Normal/Act 1 Cruel, you'll want to start running Dominating Blow. To make the switch, you'll need a Geofri's Baptism, a RRRR 4L piece of gear, 1000+ life, and the Blood Magic keystone. Link it up Dominating Blow-Multistrike-Melee Physical-Melee Splash. Make sure you do NOT level up Dominating Blow at this point. The mana/life cost is already extremely high at level 1, especially with those supports, and you will not be able to sustain it if you level it up. Levels on Dominating Blow just increase minion duration by 1 second per level and give a bit of physical damage, so you're not losing too much.




Cruel-This is where Dominating blow starts to shine, and running around with your army, you'll be nigh unkillable.

Progressing through Cruel-Keep up your resists, and look to buy a Rigvald's Charge when you get close to level 44. This is the next step up from Geofri's Baptism, and is a big dps increase. If you feel like your clear speed is too low, pick up a couple physical damage nodes on the tree. Level grind if necessary. Ledge, fellshrine and docks are the prime leveling spots.

Cruel Bandit-The attack speed from Kraityn and the physical damage from Oak are the two choices here. They're both really good for the build, but don't slave over the decision too much. The difference between the two isn't very big. A skill point is also a decent third choice if you want the versatility, but it's unlikely you'll get as much value from a skill point as from choosing a proper reward.

Skill tree- This is the time where the tree is most flexible. You've spread out and laid down roots in both the templar and the duelist area, and its up to you how to expand. You can get some more life nodes further north of the templar area if you're lacking in survivability, you can pick up extra physical damage and attack speed nodes in the duelist area if you're comfortably tanking all the enemies. You may also find that you need to pick up some +30 int/dex nodes to use all your gems, or pick up some resist nodes to be fully capped. This is fine; You have respec points for a reason. However, you should always be aiming to get your gear to the point where you don't need them.

Speccing out of blood magic- This is the big event to look forward to around Act 3 Cruel/Act 1 Merciless. You gain 3 very important auras when you spec out (and later a fourth when you get a level 20 reduced mana gem), but this is not a change that's easily made. You'll need a 5L (add blood magic gem to your 4L), and you'll want a hefty life pool (2500+) before you make the switch. Adding vitality, purity and determination to your aura lineup will vastly improve your survivability, provided you have the life pool to sustain a now 5L dominating blow. Act 3 of Cruel is probably the earliest you should make the switch. Heading into Merciless before you do so is just fine as well, since its there that you'll really be hurting for the resists from purity.





Merciless-The fun continues in merciless, as you become stronger with each level.

The home stretch-Capping your resists is more important than ever, and if you've got enough life, you might even be able to start leveling up your Dominating Blow gem a few levels. The mobs are stronger than ever, but that just means your army is stronger than ever. Look for gear with as much life as possible, spec out of blood magic keystone to start running some of the more powerful auras and you'll be tearing through merciless like its effortless.

Merciless bandit- A 7th endurance charge is amazing for survivability (although you probably won't finish picking up endurance charges in the tree until the late 80s). I highly recommend getting it. If you decide that 6 is enough however, a skill point will do fine here.

Moving into the final stage of the game Kaom's Primacy comes after Rigvald's Charge and is your last stop before you go out into the real world and buy a big boy weapon. By now you absolutely want to have specced out of Blood Magic keystone, and gotten your 5L online. There's not much to say here. Grind Ledge/Fellshrine/Docks as necessary, and start looking for your endgame gear.




Endgame-This is what we've been working towards, and here is where the build is the strongest.

Mapping-You'll want a good weapon when you start moving into maps, but topping Kaom's Primacy by a meaningful amount means spending a pretty penny, so save up early. You can start leveling up Dominating Blow as well now, but still, I wouldn't recommend going past level 12 or so unless you have 4500+ life. As for mapping, you can handle pretty much anything that gets thrown at you. The only mods I would avoid like the plague are Blood Magic maps (they take away 4 of your most powerful auras), maps that have BOTH -max resists/elemental weakness and added fire/cold/lightning (if its just one or the other, its dangerous but with careful playing you'll make it), and half/no regen maps that have some dangerous mods like -max, added cold/fire/lightning, and vulnerability. That last category is still doable if you're careful. Other than that, you can pretty much handle anything. Even physical reflect does hardly anything with your high armor and endurance charges up. This build is very powerful, and can easily handle high level maps. Remember, the stronger the mobs are, the stronger your minions are; You just need to survive first contact with a pack, so you have to avoid the mods that get you bursted down in a split second.

Getting a 6L-There are two good choices for the sixth link if you manage to get one. Life leech and Faster Attacks. The 2% life leech from the tree goes a long way, but you might just find yourself falling short. If not, Faster Attacks boosts your dps quite a lot. Remember all supports on Dominating Blow can apply to your minions as well, and faster attacks is the better choice by far for helping out your minions. Increased Duration is tempting, but not a good choice. While your minions do last longer, the increased dps for both you and your minions from Faster Attacks improves your clear speed far more than having 5 or 10 more minions with you at any given time does.

Utility Gems-Luckily, we are still able to run Kaom's Heart with this build, but unlike before the aura fix, you will have to give up your curse and leap slam to do it. If you choose not to run Kaoms/can't afford it, you'll want to run Blood Magic-Leap Slam-Vulnerability in your weapon/chest. You may want to try Warlord's mark in place of Vulnerability for some extra life leech. Flame totem-Blind-Blood Magic is also a powerful combination that makes some of the bosses with hard hitting physical attacks into pushovers, but will require an additional 3L, or a 5L with leap slam and vulnerabiliity. Molten Shell is a nice boost to armor, and fits in a 4L with the 3 required gems. There are several other options that I have not played around with, but would probably be pretty good, including Decoy Totem and Immortal Call.

Aftermath of the Aura Fix- You will still be able to run 4 %-based auras off of mana, but this will require 3 extra skill points now. This is still a worthwhile endeavor. Wrath and Anger are still good enough that you will probably want to run one or other, but it is almost certainly not worth it to run both, as you will be reserving over 750 life with Wrath/Anger/Grace. Anger will probably be easier to run since it has a lower int requirement. If you are unable to hit the 151 int to run level 20 vulnerability and wrath, use anger isntead and a lower level vulnerability. The decreased effectiveness of Vulnerability is minimal (1% more physical damage every 2 levels). Similarly, don't be afraid to run a lower level Grace if you don't have the dex to support a level 20. Work towards maxing these auras out, but it's fine to run lower levels.

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