This is an end game build for the Crusader. I’ve designed it to withstand the punishment of season 7 ground effects with minimal effort, while still dishing out a respectable amount of damage. I designed this build to farm lv125+ herald missions, but it does a good job of smashing through 118 maledicted missions.
The general strategy for using this build is to jump in to a mob, drop as much AoE as possible and jump to the next mob. A fast kill speed isn’t required to make it work, but it is designed to clear a purge map quickly.
Table of Contents
General Build Objectives and Design Philosphy
Build objectives:
- Minimise damage taken
- Find a mechanic that I don’t have to actively maintain in order to stay alive
- Decent clear speed against mobs and boss monsters
Low effort way to minimise the damage taken
I took a lot of inspiration from my lazy psyker build here, but I wanted a way to make the Crusader immune to as much damage as possible without having to actively maintain it. That way I can just dive into a mob and the protective enchantments mange themselves.
I achieved this by going for a combo of Blessing of Saint Victorious, a 30% hp loss invulnerability enchant, 5% Rosarius force field on hit taken for the armour slot and maxing out deflect.
Clear speed
Having a fast clear speed was important, I didn’t want to be spending ages hacking my way through every mob. The obvious solution here was to find a way of dealing lots of AoE damage as a crusader. Combined with the need for high deflect, the obvious choice here was a suppression shield. Assault armour was the next obvious choice, as not only is it AoE damage, it’s also a good way to get around a map quickly.
Equipment – Weapons
It’s important to find an archeotech version of this hammer, as the increased damage/cooldown time is a big boon to your DPS. The reason I went for a hammer is because it has a good AoE skill and an armour piercing single target skill.
The main enchant for this weapon is one of the primary damage dealing mechanisms for the build. It activates on melee damage – which means it will activate almost every time you use the suppression shield discharge skill, as it appears to calculate hits per individual monster. This gives you AoE on top of your melee attacks, and a very powerful one. It also has the added bonus of shocking enemies when it activates.
Main objectives here are to increase critical hit chance, damage and maximise vulnerability effectiveness. I haven’t found a 6 enchant version of one of these hammers yet, but if I did, I’d put a +20% damage against slowed, shocked and stunned secondary on it as well.
Psalm-doctrine choice is the heat aura, as the extra hit/crit triggers help with cooldown reduction and generally keeping enraged tokens up.
I went for a suppression shield because it has a pretty good AoE skill that activates the primary enchant of the hammer. It’s (again) important to find the archeotech version of this, as the cooldown and damage of the discharge skill are much, much better. I’ve further improved it with the secondary skills, discharge is the primary mob smashing skill in this build.
The main enchant on this one helps keep your suppression up, but also does AoE suppression damage. Coupled with the choice of purity seal enchant, it seems to do a good job of draining suppression bars very quickly, which then helps layer on the shocked status for the damage stack.
Primary enchants are pretty much a “do whatever you like”, I went for suppression on hit, chance to knockdown on crit (reduces mobs ability to fight back and is another source of shock with the passives I’ve selected) and more AoE damage.
The other reason for going suppression shield is a) situational invincibility using the slot 1 skill and b) for the massive increase in deflect value. Deflect is important to this build for reasons I’ll articulate later.
Equipment – Invulnerability
It’s extremely important to get a 30% or 29% value on the main enchant here, as blessing of Saint Victorious will cap incoming damage at 30%. This is your primary defensive mechanism.
+4 Warfare is important for boosting base damage, the 15% chance for champion enemies to drop a supply charge enchant is also very important for stocking up on teleport charges and the %chance to use the inoculator for free enchant is extremely important. Maintaining the inoculator throughout a mission helps immensely with damage boosting and crit triggers, so between this and the belt slot, you’ll want to get as close to 50% chance as possible.
Inoculator slot choices: two murderlust, a blood balm and holdfast. You can run this build with 3 murderlust in slot, I just like having a bit of HP regen going on. Socket slot choices are damage maxing, make sure you have an uncreator psalm in here at the very least. The other two are optional if you want to play around with the build.
I went for assault armour as it’s more AoE and it lets you move around the map quickly, which is good for clearing missions fast. It’s also physical damage as well, which helps when making the most use of a damage stack. The assault attack also causes knockdown, which is another source of AoE shock thanks to my passive tree.
The main enchant is important for maximising the defensive aspect of this build. You’ll get hit a lot (even with 60% deflect) and having a Rosarius kicking in regularly helps fill the gap in big mobs or against ground effects. This element also scales with mob size, so the bigger the mob, the more likely you are to become invulnerable for 5 seconds. Some mobs do a lot of hits at less than 30% of your hp, so this enchant plugs the gap and prevents you from dying from taking a bunch of 20% per hit damage rapid fire.
The only important enchants on this item are the two bottom ones, as having supreme crit and more damage against slowed/stunned/shocked enemies really helps the damage stack. Primaries are optional. The psalm doctrine is the best in slot for this build, so go for the 200% damage against.
Equipment – Enraged Stack
This is a difficult item to get hold of, but you should be able to find one doing 90-100lv boss farming missions, given enough time. The main enchant is the enraged token generator and the rest of the enchants that come with this are pretty well specified for dealing more damage. Important ones to go for are crit chance and damage. The second most important aspect of this is the +duration to execution effect, as this will extend the invulnerability from the inoculator enchant.
An easy one to acquire, this is fully rollable. Between this and the inoculator set up, you’ll have a baseline crit strength of 120, which is more than enough as a damage multiplier to cause havoc.
Important enchants on this one are the execution effect duration and the reset inoculator on kill. Having that as close to 10% as you can get is about right for maintaining a permanent inoculator in a normal mission.
This slot is fairly flexible, it made sense to me to add damage on the main enchant. +4 warfare is important for more base damage and the +20% damage against multiplier/+% supreme crit chance help a lot with damage as well. You can experiment with different things in this slot, I just haven’t found anything better than this configuration.
Socket slot choice: I went for the 3 socket shock explosion, it helps with mob clearing speed and I’m doing a lot of AoE shock anyway. A bonus explosion very much helps with clearing mobs in one big smash.
Equipment – Belt, Purity Seal and Signum
I went for a personal teleporter for two reasons:
- It’s an excellent mobility skill for fast clearing
- You get surprised state for a short duration, which increases damage and provides supreme deflect. Great for teleporting into a mob and doing a lot of damage in one hit
The main enchant on this one is extremely important – the fear aura will drop a fear about 20 times a second. Fear is good for reducing suppression, it also affects monsters with green suppression bars. This is useful for applying conditional effects such as the one I’ve chosen for the purity seal. The main advantage of the fear aura is that it also activates the general vulnerability signum almost immediately, as AoE. This helps immensely with damage.
The important enchants here are the +% chance to use inoculator for free and the increase in vulnerability effectiveness. You can experiment with the other slots. The socket items are also important – uncreator because you’r using a lot of vulnerabilities and this helps do a lot of damage, the neuralis psalm because it takes out armour very rapidly. All with the aim of speeding up a mission clear time.
This is an important part of the build, which may seem like an odd choice. The main damage stack of this build only really kicks in when shock is applied. Doesn’t make a difference for normal mobs, but I was noticing elites etc. taking a bit too long to kill. This main enchant does an excellent job of draining suppression bars fast and allowing the main damage stack to kick in. You can experiment with different items in the purity seal slot, but in testing, this option just seems to work extremely well.
The only important enchantment on this slot is the cool down reduction one, max it out as high as you can be bothered. CDR is a big factor in the DPS of this build, so take it where you can get it.
The two main enchants are important here. The general vulnerability enchant drops a stack of 10 general vulnerabilities on any enemy pretty much immediately and the +% critical hit chance helps bring your baseline crit figure up to the 50% soft cap. This is important, as it allows the other secondary +5% supreme crit and the inoculator supreme crit chance to stack above the soft cap, so you’ll be running around with ~70% critical hit chance most of the time. This is important for triggering cerebral feedback and any “on critical hit” effects.
Enchant choices are similar for both – it’s important to maximise vulnerability effectiveness and critical damage, as well as crit chance. Another big feature is the cool down reduction. You don’t get many slots for CDR, so max it out on the signums for better DPS. ToA is optional, but I like to keep it at a 12% chance on hit, as that seems to be the sweet spot and it does a fair amount of damage.
Skill Points, Passives and Perks
Skill Points
Perks
Ad-hoc subjugation is the primary source of loading up damage specific vulnerabilities. You can fill this with an archeotech enchant, but the perk slot is better value as it allows more flexibility with items.
Cull the weak is an excellent damage multiplier. You’ll be dropping a lot of debuffs so having another 50% damage against really helps kick up the damage.
BoSV allows you to eliminate any defensive enchants or passives when used in combination with the invulnerability enchant. You have to make sure you get an enchant with 29% or 30% for this to work though.
Passives
Max out your AoE tree. The centre skill provides a massive boost to DPS, but you’ll be doing a lot of AoE damage and the whole tree helps a lot.
Crit tree – you’ll be relying on a lot of critical hits. At the very least, you want all of the main skills and the 50% suppression damage on crit.
The melee tree is a good damage boost, but it’s also a good way of layering up extra physical vulnerabilities.
The physical tree is only useful up to the vulnerability skill. This is largely optional.
The debuff tree is useful for extending the duration of slow/shock, but the important skill here is disorient, as it applies shock to knockdown attacks (of which you’ll be doing many).
There are two important skills on this tree – cerebral feedback and overreaction. I’ve put more points into this as I’ve been testing things out, but they aren’t necessary. I’d recommend getting as many of the cool down reduction passives as you can though.
I’ve highlighted the only important skill in this tree. The objective is to hit the maximum 60% soft cap for deflect, as this will reduce incoming damage by a lot. It also allows you to trigger overreaction from the movement tree as often as possible.
Build Mechanics and Synergies
Crit, deflect and CDR
The majority of the DPS from this build comes from a combination of critical hits, cerebral feedback and the deflect/overreaction combo. You’ll be able to spam a lot of AoE physical/melee damage entirely due to this mechanic, which is where the mob smashing element comes from.
This does make the build weak against maps with the “no critical hits” modifier, but the CDR on deflect skill goes some way to mitigating that (or you could just skip those missions).
Hammer enchant, AoE melee and the shock damage stack
Another big part of the damage stack on this build is the combination of the hammer main enchant, which hits 6 additional targets for 350% base damage and the fact that the suppression shield discharge skill is AoE melee.
The hammer enchant triggers almost every time you lay down a discharge attack in a mob of 5 or more, it will even trigger multiple times on occasion. The damage this puts out in combination with the 3 socket shock psalm doctrine turns that into an even bigger grenade – essentially allowing you to one shot most mobs if you get it right.
In combination with the suppression damage bonuses, it’s a system that very quickly allows you to layer on the % damage against slowed, shocked or stunned enemies stack.
BoSV and invulnerability
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but the single most important combination of elements in this build is the mix of Blessing of Saint Victorious and an invulnerability archeotech item with either 29% or 30% activation hp loss.
BoSV prevents you from getting one shot, then the enchant gives you invulnerability for a decent period after that. This is augmented by the two +seconds duration to execution effect, as when invulnerability triggers it’s now more like 8 seconds.
Be the first to comment