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Path of Exile Charge Duelist Build

Path of Exile Charge Duelist Build by ImVeryKind

Hello everyone,

im ImVeryKind and today i want to present you the Charge Duelist. In my opinion the Duelist is one of the most understimated Classes. His unique position in the passive Skilltree, between Maurauder and Ranger, allows him to deal high damage, while being tanky and agile together. In this Guide we try to benefit from both neighbouring Classes to build a Character that will even survive in HC. Here is the Link to the passive Skilltree: Link.

1) Why Charges?

Spoiler

A lot of player tend use more attack skills for special situations. But we need to keep in mind, that we can only use 1 Skill at a given time. That makes multiple attack skills (talking for this kind of Guide) redundant. We need an concise Skillset with 1 Single Target and 1 Multiple Target (AoE) Skill. Charge generating Skills supports Offense/Defense without the need to constantly spam them. The only tradeoff is to make sure that the Charges doesnt expire. But measured on the benefit its worth the additional effort. In PoE there exist 3 Charge types. We will use 2 of them: Frenzy- and Endurance Charges.

Frenzy Charge:
5% Attack/Spell Speed per Charge

The base duration of this Charge is 10s. With 2 x "Frenzy charge duration" we extend its duration to 13,6s. The node "Evasion per Frenzy" will give us 4% Evasion per Charge. The base amount of charges is 3. With 2x "+1 maximum Frenzy Charge" we will extend it to 5. The total benefits are:

- 25% increased Attack speed
- +20% Evasion (with Iron Grip +20% Armour)

As you can see 25% IAS will gives us more Hits per Second and with Life Leech and Life on Hit modifiers we will regenerate more HP. As a downside it should be mentioned that the Manacosts will increase aswell, but Blood Magic (spend Life instead of Mana) should help us. Frenzy charge will generate if you hit the enemy with the Gem "Frenzy" or kill an enemy while under the effect of the "Blood Rage" gem.

Endurance Charge:
- +5% Physical Damage reduction per Charge
- +5% additional Elemental Resistances per Charge

The base duration of this Charge is 10s. With 2 x "Endrurance charge duration" we extend its duration to 13,6s. The node "Life Regeneration per Endurance Charge" will give us 0.2% Liferegeneration per Charge. The base amount of charges is 3. With 2x "+1 maximum Frenzy Charge" we will extend it to 5. The total benefits are:

- 25% Physical Damage reduction
- 25% Elemental Resistance
- 1% Liferegeneration

As you can see this Charge gives us more tenacity. Its quite easy to generate them. The gem "Warloads Mark" will curse the enemy, which will gives us a chance of 20%-29% to create a Endurance Charge. The Gem "Enduring Cry" will taunt enemys in a certain Radius and gives us Charges depent on the number of taunted enemys, but atleast 1 for a single enemy.

How to keep the Charges up?

Its easy to keep the charges up if you know how. I personally use "Frenzy" to keep up the frenzy charges. Its too risky to use "Blood Rage" because it gives 4% of your Life as chaos Damage per second is while its up. I dont think that the Life leech and IAS on low life is worth the risk. First i dont want to be on low life and second if you fight with single targets you Charge with expire, since there is no enemy to kill. But with "Frenzy" you only need to hit the enemy once to reset the duration and add +1 Charge if you not on Maximum. It should be possible in a timespan of 10-13s to hit the enemy once with frenzy. Sometimes you dont have the chance to get near to an Enemy (i.e. Brutus) because you are on low life or there is too much enemy to go near to them. Keep in mind that you can swap your weapons with X. As a second Weaponset i put Bow and Quiver with Frenzy, that helps me to keep the stack up while im on distance to the enemy. Swap to Bow/Quiver, shoot one arrow and press X again to go on melee.

For Endurance its alot of easier. I dont prefer "Warlords Mark" because its only provide us a chance to create one. Its too risky to lose all of your stacks and you waste your only Curse slot on enemys. "Enduring Cry" is easier. You need at least one enemy in your Radius to taunt them for a +1 Endurance Charge. More enemy means more Charges. Keep in mind that Enduring Cry has a 4s cooldown. On the other hand its too risky to taunt a bunch of enemys for charges you think. But i will explain to you later how to handle these situation.


2. Offence
Spoiler

Which Weapon? Dual, 1H or 2H?
The weapon of choose is the Sword, because it fits with the skill i want to use. Other weapons has nice skills too but are overall clumsier. The diffrence in Damage is not that much, but swords allows me to use 2 skills that are important: Viper Strike and Whirling Blade (see Gem section). A lot of Gems for the other Types use Elemental Damage, which is contra-productive (see Defence: Life Leech and Life on Hit) for us.

The next question one handed Sword with Shield or dual wield, or two handed Swords? This is a question of taste. Dual Wield will provide us with an implicit bonus of 15% Block Chance and 10% IAS and an explicit bonus of a second sword with offensive pre-and suffix. The skill of choose would be dual strike for higher Damage output and therefore higher Lifeleech. On the other hand a shield will gives us a higher Defensive Bonus (see Defence), better defencive pre- and suffix aswell as a higher block chance. Double Strike would be beneficial, since it hits twice with one attack and therefore proccs more (i.e. double Life Gain on Hit). Two handed Sword gives a higher Damage for a slower attack. You should choose Heavy Strike for single target damage. Whirling Strike would be replaced with Leap Slam.

- Dual Wield: 10% IAS, 15% Block Chance, high Damage, high attack speed
(Good for SC and need expierienced playstle in HC)

- Shield and Sword: Higher Block Chance, higher Defensive Bonus, more procc's.
(Good for SC/HC: Trade portion of Damage for security. Dont forget to change the "Ambidexterity" node in the Skilltree)

- Two Handed: Higher Damage, slower attack speed, Leap Slam as Escape skill.
(Higher Damage, lower mobility. Posted as an option, but its suboptimal. Dont forget to change all One-Handed Nodes to Two-Handed. Change "Ambidexterity" node)

The Swords came with 2 diffrent bonus. First with higher Accuracy (local bonus: only for attacks with this sword) or with global Critical Strike Multipler.

Source of Damage

Our Character deals pure physical damage. Every point +10 Points in Strenght increases our physical Damage for 2%. Thats really a good way to increase it, since every +10 Points Strength gives us 5 HP. So i invested more in Strength instead of %Physical Damage nodes. With %Physical Damage we need to take more little points before we reach a Node that gives us a bigger %Physical damage and we cant spread since we are narrowd down. With Strength we can dive more in the Maurauder Tree for a little damage increase + base HP and take all good Nodes, thats near our path. We obtain 68% physical increase only with Strength and 56% with explicite Nodes. That makes a total of 124% increased damage. We have 27% IAS that increases our Damage per Second and later 25% from Frenzy. Additional Damage/IAS Bonuses gained from Armour.

Critical Strike Chance

Our chance to crit is really low.

Damage over Time

Viper Strike is a good way to increase your overall damage. Chaos damage penetrates Energy Shield. You can stack the DoT up to 3 times. Like Charges you should reset its duration if its expire. Most of the time you dont need it. But on special Monster, that has increased regenerated Life, strong Energy Shield, too much damage to stand near to him, or larger HP pool, im greatful to have this. Another variant that i prefer to use is to swap to my second Weaponset (Bow/Quiver) and use Poison Arrow. With Greater Multiple Projectiles, Pierce and Fork i fill the whole Map with Poison. Its good when you cant go melee or a big chunck of enemy waits for you. GMP, Pierce and fork will greatly reduce its initial damage, that means the Damage that the Arrows deals, but the Poisoncloud is not affected (the part that deals the much greater damage). Poison Arrow is like Viper Strike a DoT and from Chaos Type that can only be reduced by Chaos resist.

Accuracy

All damage is useless when you cant hit. Unlike the Maurauder we dont depend on %Accuracy Nodes. Since we have 232 DEX nodes, we have an implicite 92% accuracy. Thats very high compared to most of the Classes. We gain addtional local 18% Accuracy increase with swords. Its easily to gain some more on armour but it should be enough.


3. Defence

Spoiler

Health and more

With Strength we gain 127HP. +60 HP from other Nodes. That is 187HP flat HP increase. We have 184% increased maximum Life. We have 5% life Regeneration per second (+1% with Endurance) and 2% Life Leech.
Due the fact that we spread we didnt need to take the 8% maxiumum Life increase. Instead we could take the higher Nodes. They are spread wide so you could easily chose one if you need life.

Life Leech and Life on Hit
Life on Hit is simple to understand. You gain instantly! Life for each hit. Life leech in Path of Exile is a little bit diffrent. You can only leech 20% of your maximum HP per second. If you exceed this limit the Life Leeach turns into a Health over Time (HoT). The amount of Life you will get is based on the physical attack you will deal to an enemy, elemental/chaos damage is obviously excluded. This is the reason why we choose a physical build in the first place. With the amount you recover with each strike your healthpool could theoretically increase 20% of your current health each second. Thats called virtual health pool.
You should know that Life Leech (Gem) can exceed the 20% limit. Also it will absorb a percantage of the damage dealth with the linked item, whether its physical or not. To know how much life you leech and how much life per hit you can get is important since you will spend all of your Manarequiment from your Health pool, thanks to Blood Magic.

Armour and Evasion
Before we start calculating lets see how much increase we have. "40% Evasion and 40% Armor" from "Leather and Steel"(L&S) nodes, 102% for Armour(Ar) and 52% Evasion(BE) from DEX. Before Iron Grip we have 102% Evasion and 142% Armour. After Iron Grip the calculation changes to:

Total Armor = Base Armor * ( 1 + L&S + Ar) + Base Evasion (1 + L&S + Ar + BE)
Link: Zoid

As you can see ( 1 + L&S + Ar) < (1 + L&S + Ar + BE), so we decide to go full Evasion Armour when we take Iron Grip. We have now a total Armor increase of 294% armour.
I should mention here, that you will get 30% critdamage reduction from enemy hits.

Elemental Resist

We have 60% Elemental Resist and Endurance Charges provides us with 5x5% ER. So fully charged we will have 85% Elemental resist. The cap in merciless is at 75% + 60% (penalty from merciless). So we need only 40-50% Elemental Resist on our Armor (if you choose 8% ER from Bandit quest). Thats easy to obtain.


Gems
Spoiler

Offensive Gems

-Dual Strike: Take this if you Dual Wield. It attacks with both swords and deals a lot of physical Damage on a single target. In comparison with Double Strike, it has more Life leech but lower life on hit because it counts as 1 attack.

- Double Strike: take this if you use Shield and Sword. It attack 2 times for 1 skill usage, so it proccs twice (LoH, Stun etc.)

-Cleave: You main AoE Skill. Attacks all enemys infront of you. Deals physical damage. Proccs will calculated for each enemy that get hit.

-Viper Strike/Poison Arrow: Deals chaos Damage. As i descibed under Offence it will help you on hard monster. Keep in mind that you have a second Weaponset.

- Frenzy: Will give you frenzy charges for each hit.

- Detonate Dead: For very special situations, where you need to get rid of bodies. Doesnt scale with your damage.

Defensive Gem

- Enduring Cry: Will provide you with Endurance charges, gives you elemental resist and physical damage reduction. Note that it doesnt give you armor. It truly reduce the amount of Damage before Armour will calculated.

- Whirling Blades: This skill is one of the reason, that we have 2 Savant (+30Int) points in our build. It whirles forward to your mouse location, hitting everything on road. After arrival it has a short delay before you can move. The animation and the delay scales with attack speed, that means we will have shorter delay and faster movement. With this you can whirl out of fights or close gaps between enemys. With life on hit and life leech you will easily heal your HP if you whirl out of big enemy groups.

- Immortal Call: Will consume all of your Endurance Charges but gives you 0,6 (0,84 at max) invulnerability. It will not prevent Chaos/Elemental Damage but as far as i know, the biggest damage are physical. Its worth a consideration.

- Decoy totem: Early game its really good to confuse the targets but later on it dies too fast.

- Rejuvenation Totem: Early game its really good but later it will destroyed too fast. You need good placement and you bond near to the totem for the benefits.

Aura

All Auras that reserve %Life are risky so i avoid them. Since we dont have any increased Elemental damage on the passive Skilltree the damage will really low. Only Grace gives some additional armor through IR. You should consider if its worth.

Curses
- Warlords Mark: Gives 4% Life/Mana leech and a chance to create an Endurance charge. Will grant more flask charges.

- Vulnerability: Curses all targets in an area, making them take increased damage from physical attacks and degeneration, and easier to stun. The target's energy shield will regenerate more slowly.

Support Gem

- Life Leech/Life gain on Hit: Your bread and butter skill if you want to survive with Blood magic.

- Melee Physical Damage: Increase your %physical Damage for 40% increased Manause.

- Stun: It seems that this Gem dont have a multiplier. With your high physical Damage and this gem you should stun the enemy really hard.

- Blind: Dont use it. Doesnt work with Unveawering Stance.

- Blood Magic: Using Life instead of Mana. It has a 2,45 multiplier on a skill.


Final Build
Spoiler

I think the biggest downsize of this build is Blood magic. It prevents that we can use most of the Auras. To get rid of them i tried several skillcombination that based on the blood magic skill. I will take the max cost that a linked item could have.

4 Slot:
Dual Strike: 9 Mana
Life on Hit: 40 Life, 1.5 Multiplier
Life Leech: 1.3 Multiplier
Blood Magic: 2.0 Multiplier

40 - 9*1.5*1.3*2= 4.9 HP per Hit

As you can see its beneficial to use Blood Magic gem instead of the passive. Life on Hit works here like the reduced Mana gem, only better

6 Slot

Cleave: 9 Mana
Life on Hit: 40 Life, 1.5 Multiplier
Life Leech: 1.3 Multiplier
Blood Magic: 2.0 Multiplier
Stun: 1.0 Multiplier
Melee physical Damage: 1.4 Multiplier

40*x - 9*1.5*1.3*2.0*1.0*1.4 = 40*x - 49,14 HP per Hit
X is the enemys which you hit. With x = 1 you would loose -9.14 life. But since Cleave is an AoE Attack you will hit at least 2 enemys which is positive. You could replace Stun with reduced Mana and would have 34,88.

3 Slot

Grace: 213 Mana
Blood Magic: 2.0 Multiplier
reduce Mana: 0.71 Multiplier

213*2*0.71 = 302,46 HP

As you can see its beneficial to get rid of blood magic. Since most of the Auras are %-based you could use these following Auras:

- Vitality: Casts an aura that grants health regeneration to you and your allies. 40% Manareservation (recommended)

- Purity: Casts an aura that grants elemental resistances to you and your allies. 40% Manareservation

- Haste: Casts an aura that increases the attack speed and cast speed of you and your allies. 40% Manareservation

- Determination: Casts an aura that grants armour to you and your allies. 40% Manareservation

Now lets see how much we can actually use. Reduced Mana will multiply with 0.71.

100/(3*40) = 0.83 (3 Auras are possible)
100/(4*40) = 0.62 (not possible)

And as a final result we would have an additional Skillpoint left

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