Level 98 Crit Static Strike Scavenger^{3.28.alternate}

Notes

- LEVELING NOTES - 

BIG NOTE, USE STAFF FOR EARLY MAPS. If you drop a nutso mace (like 800 physical DPS) use it, but you might feel a bit squishtastic without block/recover on block from the staff mastery. Also crit is better.

IF YOU'RE NEW JUST FOLLOW THE QUESTS AND KILL THINGS. There are some non-essential quests, but truthfully if you just do them all you get very powerful
and it makes the campaign feel better. Kill basically any enemy that walks near you while progressing through a zone. Racers don't do this, but racers are also
very carefully managing XP and have lots of practice. 

While leveling you can use whatever weapon works with Sunder (Axe, Mace, Sceptre, Stave) but eventually during maps you swap to Staves. Keep that in mind and be on the lookout for something around a8-a10.

- Act 1 -
Big note is to check for a Jade Amulet at vendors early. This will give you enough acc to run Precision and avoid early accuracy issues. Otherwise, use a sword up until you can Sunder Swap and grab the dex node to the left of Martial Experience.
You can also path down and grab Eagle Eye earlier as well to help with some of the accuracy concerns.

Use a Ranger as a Mule to get Momentum + Wisdom Scrolls. Check Vendors for 2h sword or axe + Links. Links are listed in gems tab.
Put any gear and wisdom scrolls you want to keep in your stash and pick them up on the Scion.
(Start of Act you want G-R or G-G-R. By end of act need at least G-R and R-R-R)

When you kill Dweller be sure to keep the essence you get. You'll use this on a level 12-13 weapon base (Mallet, Woodsplitter, Iron Staff if you have the int requirement)

Good points to gamble for weapons is level 8-9 and later 12-13. That's when you get access to base upgrades for your weapon choices. 

At Merveil's Caverns switch to Sunder. You need a R-R minimum but ideally you want R-R-R. You want to prioritize Chance to Bleed.

- Act 2 -
Progress in whatever order is comfortable. If you're a new player just folow the quests, it'll be much more enjoyable and you'll end up more powerful by the end of the act.

If you don't have a 3 link or level 12-13 weapon base (Mallet, Woodsplitter, Iron Staff if you have the int requirement), entering act 2 is prime gambling time.

Make sure to be checking vendor for a Turquoise Amulet. We need both Int and Dex early, and we don't get super early access on tree. 

After Chamber of Sins make sure to pick up Herald of Ash from Greust. You can then buy Blood Rage from Yeena, which will help you generate Frenzy Charges. 

Also be sure to pick up a Melee Physical Damage from Silk after Weaver.

We pick Alira as our bandit for resistances. 

Notably if you're super socket pressured, dropping Frostblink and Blood Rage is fine. If your gear just doesn't have the spare blue or green that's ok, just work towards getting them eventually.
It's more important to keep moving in campaign than it is to optimize for QoL gems.

Good gamble levels are 17-22.

- Act 3 -
First lab doesn't matter, truthfully you could skip it and wait until second to be more efficient, but you do lose out on some rewards/character power.

For Curse we grab Vulnerability after clearing The Crematorium. Hard cast this on rares and Bosses. 

We also want to get Autoexertion for our Intimidating Cry and Seismic Cry. Make sure to keep your mana flask upgraded.

Good points to gamble for 4 links and weapons is level 28 and 33. You get weapon base upgrades at both those points, and they're reasonably fast.

- Act 4 - 
After killing Malachai grab Fist of War and Overexertion. You will need an Orb of Alchemy for this.

- Act 5 -
No gem pickups. A good point to weapon gamble is level 45.

- Act 6 - 
Upon completing Lily's quest to clear the Twilight Strand, grab a Static Strike and Shockwave to put in your offhand. Also grab a Determination while you're here. 

Now be on the lookout for Staff bases, as we are gearing up for a Static Strike swap by the end of campaign.

Good level to Gamble for weapons is level 49.

- Act 7 -
No gem pickups, just be sure to upgrade weapon as you go.

- Act 8 -
Upon completing lab you get your first real point, there are two solid points to plop it. Either Blunderbore or Cloak of Flame will give you decent tank. Blunderbore is slightly more damage, 
Cloak of Flame solves your Physical Mitigation.

- Act 9 - 
Unless your weapon really sucks I wouldn't gamble until later in a10, ideally we save as much gold as we can for our gem swap.

- Act 10 -
Once we complete lab we get access to the ascendancy notable Tawhoa's Felling. This allows us to create copies of ourselves.  Due to how Static Strike works it allows us to have multiple copies out at once.  
This gives us a huge single target bump before we swap to life stacking. Now's the time we need either a Staff or a Mace. I slightly prefer staff for the early defenses. 
Pick whichever weapon is higher DPS for you. This will depend on what you drop. 

- EARLY MAPPING - 
Prioritize getting a 5/6 link. Your clear is solid enough to run early Breach. You should run that and use the wombgifts to craft gear. Honestly just throw in your highest tier map and blast. Should do 2 stone just fine.
4 stone will depend largely on your weapon, but there are lots of solid options.

To craft a servicable weapon, grab an ilvl 75+ weapon base (Ezomyte Staff or Imperial Maul are best) and use Orbs of Alteration on it until you roll a t4+ flat physical damage. Then sell it to a vendor with a Granite Flask and Orb of Augmentation.
Doing this will upgrade the tier and clear the suffix. You want to use an aug to roll a suffix, ideally hitting attack speed of any tier. If you don't hit it it's not the end of the world, just repeat the process until you have either any attack speed or t2 phys
After this, use a Regal Orb and craft % Physical damage on it. This should give you a 500dps mace or so w/o attack speed, and a decent bit more with. Attack speed doesn't matter a super ton for this build as we aren't persistently attacking, but it's 
still very nice to have. 

For other gear, just gamble from Faustus, do Breach Tree, or follow the brief guide I put out. The tl;dr is Essence spam on Armour bases until you get 60% total res and life. Chest you want to target around 1500-2000 Armour with a res or two.

If you're getting to maps later than the first few days, The Yielding Mortality can be a great budget pickup. Same with Tidebreaker.

- MIDGAME - 
As for Midgame setup, just focus on getting good crafted pieces. Build up Suppress as you can get it. With Cloak of Flame (ascendancy notable, not the unique) you don't need near as much armour so you can get away with Armour/Evasion. And since you swap to Staves (whenever you
craft a good one) you also have block. This makes for what feels like a fairly thick character. From here just save up for lifestack swap.

For a midgame staff, buying one from the market is totally fine. Somewhere around 5 div should get you 800dps or so. Attack Speed doesn't matter a ton, as your dps doesn't go up so much with attack speed, and that makes the base less
attractive to other builds (and thus cheaper) but no worse for us. Crafting it is mostly alt spamming bases until you can recomb. Will be putting out a crafting guide to help ease some of the confusion with getting staff.

You technically could run Marohi Erqi, but your Leap Slam attack speed will suffer. If you can solve for movement speed I think it's a great option though (so long as you can tolerate the attack wind-up 0.o)

Attributes are VERY important on gear for this tree. Specifically Dexterity is a bit rough to get due to Armour/Evasion gear. If you need to stick pure Armour that's fine, just build more into life to compensate for lack of supp/evasion. If you can solve them
on amulet/ring/jewels that's also totally fine. Losing a bit of crit multi isn't gonna be the end of the world.

Prioritize a 6 link and good staff, everything else is very flexible.

AS FOR TATTOOS:

Get what you can afford. Life is big for living, phys damage is nice, you have basically 100 strength to do whatever you want with, and this works out to 10 tattoos or so. I'll have a day 2/3 update out going over what I pick up for tattoos. 

- LIFESTACK SWAP - 
Ultimately if you're getting this far I'm gonna assume you're fairly experienced with the game, if you have any specific questions you can pop into my stream on Youtube or ping me on discord @arminyou. 

Bare minimum pieces include Crown of Eyes, Rathpith Globe and The Grey WInd. You don't necessarily need an Apostate, as Kaom's Heart and some good crafted rare gear can get you into a bridge setup until you can afford it. Though you
really should save up for all 4 pieces. Just run a rare crafted belt with high life until you can afford Mageblood. Running Quicksilver, Silver, Ruby and Bismuth Flasks will get you enough speed to bridge into a Mageblood while you farm for it.

Untouched Soul is very cheap. If you can afford it, grabbing a reflected fire res ammy is BIS though. Ideally with either min frenzy or crit multi (if you're running diamond shrine belt setup).

For early jewels, just 2/3 stat Life and Fire Res jewels will do. On the trade website search for 20% fire res and whatever % life and buy whatever cheap option pops up. Eventually you will swap to Adorned. 72% is the life breakpoint. There's
more math you can do to figure out what the fire res breakpoint is, but truthfully it won't make an exceptional difference, and getting fire res jewels at breakpoint is inefficient. At that point you're just counting pennies. 
You can also solve some attribute requirements here, Brute Force Solution is an option that is more of a placeholder than anything. 

When it comes to early speed without Mageblood, making sure you get 30% movespeed boots alongside good flask uptime will help, but grinding out for a Mageblood is the play outside of going for a simulacrum farmer/ultimatum style build, which you would do
a shrine belt setup for. Diamond is BIS (if you can solve acc) but accel/echoing are also good alternatives to mageblood if you can't tolerate the reduced flask effect map mod.

When you're looking for corruptions DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT GET A LIFE CORRUPT ON YOUR APOSTATE. It bricks your life mastery (15% increased life with no life mods on chest). This was a nice 40 divine lesson for me last league. 

TATTOOS PAST THIS SECTION

There are TONS of options for Tattoos with the legacy system. Armour tattoos are typically cheap, and as such we can make liberal use on the tree. Others to look out for are Tattoo of the Oak (life) and Honored Tattoo of the Berserker (Onslaught
on kill). Honored Tatoo of the Pa (Melee Hits Fortify) is also a good option of the Overlord cluster is expensive. 

- CHANGELOG 6/23/26 -

Fiddled with midgame tree grabbing Blunt Trauma to crit cap w/o Diamond Flask. I cut off Destroyer and assoc to the right of mana mastery at duelist start. Makes attributes a little more annoying, shifting them more towards dex rather than int.
though that should be totally fine, may change helmet/gear to reflect increased requirements. Also grabbed Soul of Steel alongside adding in some minor tattoos, % armour shouldn't bee *too* expensive. Dropped 
Intimidating Cry in favor of a CwDT setup. Also, notably swapped out Herald of Ash for Flesh and Stone in the midgame setup.

Updated notes to reflect highest phys hit bases for weapons.

Adjusted initial lifestck tree to get more block/life, cutting off an inefficient set of nodes. It was converted from a glad tree, and didn't quite get the attention it needed before video release so I'm cleaning it up now. Dropped Golem's Blood and grabbed
As the Mountain while filling out constitution wheel. Also adjusted items to reflect non-corrupted bases to more accurately reflect a transitionary setup. 

Fixed Alt Early Maps tree having MACE NODES (forgot to cull them when making it, though level was awful high.)

Added in a Watcher's Eye to the midgame tree. Determ Armour is pretty big, and gets us a bit thicker to phys hits. Precision damage is nice, but not necessary.

Adjusted the tattoos of Endgame tree. With an Unnatural Instinct we got a bit of skill duration alongside AOE and Regen. Using Supreme Ostentation jewel we get guaranteed Frenzy charge generation alongside the ability to tattoo our entire tree.
Impossible Escape adds in a critical extra str node for us to grab another Journey Tattoo of the Body. This also gets us some extra penetration (giggity) and a solid life node. Capped Chaos Resistance with Watcher's Eye. Unsure what the Tabula
Rasa node will be, but we'll for sure be tattooing something on it. Duelist has a lot of value add, jackpot is Gladiator's More than Skill is huge. Marauder also has some very high rolls with minimal bricks.

Added mana leech to a jewel on Midgame Tree (forgot to do this after unallocating the mana reservation).

Added in an Ancestral Vision after seeing Mirage league price. Need to figure out an additional 40% or so ailment avoid to be fully ele immune. 

Added in crafted % avoid ailments boots and retooled dexterity on the build to feel less pressuring while also making crafting make a bit more sense.

- CHANGELOG 6/25/26 - 

Swapped Mace/Staff trees in position. Mace tree still exists, but is profoundly worse for early DPS. The AOE is very nice for clear, but the clear is fine:tm: without, and I prefer people feeling much tankier. 

Updated the notes section to reflect changes and added in some basic crafting instructions and direction to my yapfest crafting guide.

Added some more color codes on words to increase emphasis and clarity of reading.