T4 Faction Speedfarming Marksman (and His BoostSticks)
By Pazgabear.
This is a quick build that was put together for speedfarming lower end content while at endgame. The goal of this build was to have a main damage dealer supported by two characters that are essentially stat sticks for utility (luck, fortune, wealth, and fate).
Marksman
Passive Import:
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Skills:
- Phys barrage to share stats with Rains of Arrows and proc Fated Destruction.
- Rains of Arrows, armour shred comes from supports, ignite is too slow for what we want.
- Vanish, as we pick the defensive here for the offensive boost. Creeping Poison is single target only, Smokescreen crit buff is small but synergizes with Abyssal Hood. I prefer Vanish as it makes the marksman untargetable in case something goes wrong and +10% dmg mult.
- Bladestorm for the AoE damage, baseline 10% dmg mult from faction bonus and additional 10% ASM. Nature’s Bounty brings a 15.5% dmg mult (10% faction bonus + 5% passive), 5% ASM and +10% flask bonus from faction bonuses, so a case can be made for it too.
Passives:
- Defensive passives in the ranger and ascendancy trees are not really useful as most enemies die before they can get a cast off, in the off-chance they manage to, vanish will probably be enough to avoid the damage entirely anyway.
- I do not use the cooldown resets in the Marksman tree for the simple reason that to make them useful you need to forego renewed strength and renewed speed as they block renewed focus from triggering the stack loss. I value the 10% damage/attack speed multipliers more than a 2.5s reset. Rain of Arrows procs often enough as it is.
Gear:
- Abyssal Cuffs is a no-brainer as we want to cast Rain of Arrows as often as possible and buff it at the same time.
- Abyssal Hood + Blessed enchant is currently one if not the most impactful damage boost you can get right now (until it gets nerfed in 1.1), as long as you can hit 200+% crit chance.
- Choice of relic can be anything that increases direct damage as we want to blow up enemies before they get a chance to act, meaning you can use Marksman to prop up the focus damage boost from 25% to 50% at max stacks, or Juggernaut for a good boost of Adaptive Damage (the best offensive stat there is). Archmage/Vizier might work but I have not tested those and since they’re chance based I would avoid them anyway.
- Divine augments choice should be flexible. I use Orcish Warblade as the weapon augment as you get kills very fast, meaning it’s almost always on. Slayer’s Gauntlets are a good damage boost with an easy requirement. Band of Lapidary is the only one I would consider mandatory as it allows the gem setup used here.
- Fated Destruction is the fated augment tied to area damage which is what we’re using here. Its cooldown reset passive is also marginally better than Fated Aggression’s as it does not require a debuff to be active for it to proc.
Gems:
- Amethysts are a free 50 adaptive damage and +5 mastery levels to all skills (+10% to the damage boost on all skills and an additional 5% cooldown reduction on cooldown skills).
- Ambers gives an 8% attack speed multiplier after using an offensive cooldowns. With this build you have 100% uptime on it.
- Malachites synergizes with Abyssal Hood by allowing us to reach 200%+ crit chance at the start of a wave, further increasing your opening skills’ damage.
- Ferrous Cores is standard for physical damage, it also lets us use our dead defensive stats to spec into more damage.
- Mastery Focus should be Rain of Arrows, I used Barrage because I was lazy and did not want to look for a Rain of Arrows gem.
- Heart Of The Abyss can be a lot of things. I use Slaughter for that slight boost against boss and Thrash to stack it to 30%. However you can use a lot of other things, like Blessed which lets you change the amulet enchant to Divert if you have a support that can taunt, or if damage is not a concern, Avarice for more wealth and/or Covert for fortune.
- Rest is Damage/Physical Damage/Attack Speed, the left over stats can be whatever you want, be it defensive stats or more wealth/luck.
BoostSticks
They are the support characters that accompany the marksman in his errands. As their goal is primarily to bring a lot of utility stats and helpful buffs/debuffs for the marksman, they can be pretty much whatever you want. I use a Juggernaut for Sunder and Dragon’s Roar, and a Crusader for the blessings.
Skills:
- Whatever is relevant for your ascendancy choice. I use Sunder on my Juggernaut, which shreds armour, can be made to hit 3 targets and has a very low attack time. My Crusader uses Sweeping Judgement for similar reasons: it is AoE, low attack time and has a passive to shred armour and another one to apply shock. Dragon’s Roar is a staple as a supporting buff, and so is Sanctify.
- Faction cooldown will preferably be Nature’s Blessing for the +10% flask effect from faction bonuses.
Passives:
- Again, enemies shouldn’t be able to hit them anyway, but since they don’t really deal damage either, picking the defensive passives is not an hindrance.
- Passives related to your ascendancy choices are free.
Gear:
- Full on attack speed, cooldown reduction, and buff duration. Squeezing in utility stats wherever it’s possible. The goal here is to make sure buffs have 100% uptime for the marksman and that they can apply any useful debuffs before the marksman can use barrage.
- Divine augments follow the same philosophy: pick whatever you think can help. I use antiquity tunic for the ASM, savage flail for the armour shred and band of lapidary to let me use more meteorites for the green stats and still keep amethyst and amber sets.
- Fated augment can be whatever, they should have full uptime on their cooldowns so the cooldown reset from Aggression and Destruction will not be too useful. Fated Revenge can be an option to force a taunt proc without having to spec for it in the passives. I use restoration by default.
Gems:
- Amethysts and ambers are always useful for the CDR and ASM. Peridot boosts all farming utility stats except fortune, and the set bonus gives a chance to multiply gold drops by 5x (which is not that impactful when you can farm billions in endless but it is what it is).
- Mastery Focus can be skipped but is still an option if you need CDR on a specific skill.
- Heart Of The Abyss is a good (and the only) way to stack up covet to +10% and still get expedient.
- Random stats gems can be whatever you want, I use attack speed/wealth/luck/fate, meteorites are attack speed and whatever green stat I wanted at the time of the transmute.
Team Setup
Marksman is on the right-most slot for auto-cast shenanigans (making sure both supports’ cooldowns are active first).
Flask choice is up to your preference. For offensive flasks, Strength and Abrasion felt the best, Power can be a good alternative, Speed is heh. For utility flasks, as each character’s stats are counted, the actual value contributed is usually more than what is shown on the flask (e.g.: the Fortune flask is +8% to fortune times the number of characters alive on monster kills, so +24% on 3-man content).
Conclusion
This is far from being 100% optimized and it’s likely that there are more than a few upgrades possible, however it is a very strong team composition as it is for speedfarming anything up to T4 factions, and it’s able to clear T4 Elemental Domain in ~10.81s on average with 3 expedients (3782s divided by 350 runs):
This setup can also be easily adapted for Ancient Bastion by simply swapping Rain of Arrows to Pin Down and switching the mastery focus, though it should be better to use an explosive shot build for this, or better yet, use the solo templar build.