Varric’s Mod 13 CW Build (Omu-god wtf!)BACKGROUNDHi. My name is Varric. I’ve been playing neverwinter since Mod 2. I never wanted to make a guide to be honest, but with the changes that are coming to the CW in Mod 13, I figured I’d show you my MoF Support Build to maximize both debuff and dps. It’s not easy to find a happy balance but I think I’ve done fairly well. With this build, you will be able to handle solo content as well as find a place in parties. Will you do top DPS? No, but your DPS will be better than sufficient to handle most end game content. Right now we are at the bottom end of the DPS spectrum, so finding a good build to maximize DPS yet preserve the debuffs are top priority.

THIS IS MEHere is a picture of my toon. So dwarvy. Gives you an idea what I am using for gear, but I will tell you right now I focus on two things. Critical strike aaaaaannnnd…..Recovery. Yes! I do NOT use spell twisting, we need the damage more than the clunky system that spell twisting provides. We also need action point gain to fire those dailies off as fast as possible, because that’s going to be our primary source of damage, even more so than any at will. In an ACT run the dailies will be 2nd or 3rd spot, because Rimefire Smoulder usually is top and Disintigrate is 2nd or 3rd depending on your daily generation.

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Intelligence is obviously the most important aspect here as it is both damage bonus and recharge speed bonus. Wisdom also gives recharge speed bonus but I’ve put extra points into charisma to up my crit chance. The trade off is +5% crit chance vs +5% recharge speed, I believe the extra crit chance is worth more.

As you can see, these are my current un-buffed stats (without companion bonding) A good rule of thumb is to have critical strike at roughly half your power or better. You should be able to sit around 60% crit chance before your companion kicks in. The other 10-25% can come from the companion. Another thing is recovery. I have 10.5K here – this is enough for solo content. With the chultan shirt you get another 600 in a party plus whatever the tank offers (Aura of wisdom/Into the Fray). You can also get a cheap mount that offers a 2K recovery bonus. (At this time, it was the chultan leopard at 120K AD).

Just more stats – This shows my unbuffed critical chance.

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RACEHey Varric, why are you a dwarf? I am a dwarf because I like dwarves. This is mostly for aesthetic purposes. Really, you can be any race you wish, you will gain or lose values here or there, but for the most part play what you want to play. It will not affect the outcome of your character’s prowess by a ton. Play what you like.

FEATSOk, so feats. I will explain why I took what I took, but there are hundreds of feat definitions out there so I’m not going to define them all.

I put 0 points in controlling action because it’s too situational. There are better ways to get AP gain.

Weapon mastery 3/3 – Extra critical chance, always good.

Toughness 3/3 – Extra Hitpoints, great for the OP’s Aura of Courage and for survivability. It’s roughly a 10% boost in hitpoints.

Fight on – 4/5 – A lot of people think this is a trap feat. True, it is if you are using spell twisting. But if you are not, it’s a great way to shave time off the default encounter recharge speeds. Just a good tweak.

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Wizards wrath 2/3 – AOE damage boost. We do use a lot of AOE, but this is really a situational feat.

Blighting power – 3/3 Extra cold damage. Since we use chilling cloud as our main, and we will be doing a few more at wills than usual, this comes in handy. Plus we use a fair bit of cold based encounters, so it’s a plus.

Learned spellcaster – 5/5 Extra overall damage based on intelligence. The alternative to this is to put 2/5 here and 3 points in focused wizardry for extra single target damage. The difference between both configurations is close, and if you’re human and have the 3 extra points you can max both.

THAUMATURGE PARAGON

Tempest Magic- 5/5 - when your target is below 30% hit points you deal an additional 5% damage. This isn’t the best feat out there, but Snap Freeze and Drifting embers both suck. They’re way too situational to use, and drifting embers sounds good but doesn’t work very well at all. The mobs have to be close together and it doesn’t spread to more than 2 from the original target.

Malevolent Surge-5/5 - when you kill a foe you gain 5% more damage This lasts 15 seconds. This is a solid feat and although it doesn’t stack still better than some of the other feats.

Elemental Empowerment – 5/5 – This is one that people usually don’t take being a renegade. This is your bonus damage right here, and it’s easy to keep up a constant 10% on mobs and 15% on bosses.

RENEGADE PARAGON

Critical Power – 5/5 – This is a great AP gain feat right here. Works well.

Reaper’s Touch -5/5- This is also a great tool for us, as without spell twisting we’ll be able to get a few more at will rotations in.

The next two columns are useless feats, we only use scorching burst on bosses to proc smoulder. There are much easier ways of getting arcane mastery stacks. Also, the energy recovery feat is a joke. Even with a full rotation of chilling cloud, 5% extra temp hitpoints will be gone in a nanosecond, because we’re so squishy. If it was 50% it MIGHT be decent, 500% would be excellent. But I’m just rambling.

Uncertain Allegiance – 5/5 – this is a great feat as it gives everyone in the party including you an extra 5% critical chance. It’s always up and running as long as you’re attacking, so it’s decent.

I used to recommend Abyss of chaos, however with weapon enchant procs being nerfed, this doesn’t do more than 2-3% of your damage now. There are much better ways to boost damage.

Nightmare Wizardry – 5/5- This will activate the corresponding feat, and the synergy is excellent. This also adds a big bunch of dmg, and of course Charisma is boosting the damage this does.

Phantasmal Destruction -5/5- This is a very nice damage boost and procs with Nightmare Wizardry. Now here is where you have a choice. You can take this or take chilling advantage for a critical chance boost. But here is the kicker. If you have over 70% crit chance with companion bonding and Uncertain alliegence, it’s not worth getting the extra critical chance from chilling advantage. Chaotic Nexus procs often enough that it will average out to an extra 15% crit chance throughout a run, or better. (Chaotic Nexus grants +30% crit chance)

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CHAOS Magic capstone 1/1 – This is pretty self explanatory now that the devs actually had a brain fart and cleaned up the tool tip, nuff said.

NOW KEEP IN MIND: You want these things:

85% Armor Penetration/Resistance Ignored (Between you and companion)

65% Critical Chance (Same)

15%+ Life steal (Same)

10K+ Recovery

The below feats are what I took. I didn’t bother with Shadowtouched or Elven ferocity because they are flat damage, can’t crit, and cannot be buffed. They do about ~1% of your damage if you’re lucky. Toss them out and take the healing chances for greater survivability.

Some feats will give you a choice between Recovery vs Crit Sev vs Crit Strike vs Life steal. You can get 1300 Recovery from these boons but it will depend on how you build your toon. I took recovery each time.

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Moving on….

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Here you can put all into Dragon’s fury if your Lifesteal is good. Totally up to you. Continuing…

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I hated SKT with a passion. Never finished it, but I’d probably take Glacial Strength and Chill of Winter.

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There are 2 boons one here and one in IWD that offer Combat advantage bonus. It’s pretty much capped at 1200 so don’t bother adding to it if you have enough.

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The final boon of this sucks, I find vision of beyond to be the best of that trash.

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Soul syphon is definitely better than lingering curse, as my ACT has proved to me. As far as Tyrant’s terror, feel free to put all three points in there. I took one point in shamanic grace for the extra hitpoints (for some reason it has more than the rest)

ARTIFACTSReally any artifacts that have action point gain or combat advantage bonus are a plus, up to 1200 – but the Sigil of the DC is best for charging dailies. There are a few epic mounts out there that give AP gain, like the Coastal flail snail or Minotaur, but no biggie if you can’t get them. Do what you can with what you have. As far as other artifacts, power/crit/arpen are all good to grab. There are a ton of choices, choose what maximizes your stats best.

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COMPANIONSReally not going to say much here, take companions that have flat damage bonuses like archons over critical severity/combat advantage companions. However, I will say this. Find a striker companion that attacks fast to proc your bondings as fast as possible. Get it to legendary, for max stats. Too many people are ooohhing and ahhhing over a tiger with a stupidly slow attack speed. My two cents. Oh, and find a companion that fits the best gear YOU have, not the other way around. Getting an awesome companion with crap gear is not going to help you at all.

ENCHANTSI’ll be honest, if I could run all brutals and black ice enchants I probably would. But I’m cheap, and so I run mostly azure in offence slots with exception of a few silveries (RECOVERY, HELL YA!) and those are cheap. I’ve put a couple brutals in offence slots, but meh, do what you can. I also run darks in defence slots, because, cheap.

MOUNT SIGILS AND POWERSHey Varric, what is best here? Well, for sigils, you can get AGRESSION(ARP+CA), SKILL(CRIT+AP), MASTERY (RECOVERY+CB) and GOND(RECOVERY+HP)

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You can put in calvary’s warning over wanderer’s fortune if you are super rich and don’t need RP anymore. I like Artificer’s persuasion, it’s an awesome power for us non-spell-twisting CW’s. There are Artificer’s builds out there and if you want to go find one to keep that up 100% go ahead. I’m just too damn lazy to do that. Note that I have a ton of mastery/gond insignias. Very easy way to build up recovery.

WEAPON ENCHANTS ***Hey Varric, what do you use? Well, I’ve spent the last few weeks and hours of testing on the preview server. The weapon procs are disappointing. Also, theorycrafting is great and in a perfect world application would follow the theory perfectly, (yes, I see the pun, yes it’s terrible) but practical testing and empirical data are what I follow. I have comparisons up in the forums and quite a bit of ACT data there, but this is what I run: Vorpal. Why??? Well, because weapon enchantment procs suck a lot now. If I had to go with one of these type, I’d take Fey or Lightning, or Terror if I’m on the cheap. They aren’t going to be that great, but they’ll work. But Varric, Dread is better than Vorpal, right? Not for this build it isn’t. We are going to spam Dailies and use more at-wills than the average spell-twisty cw. The problem with dread is it doesn’t apply the crit severity to DAILIES or AT-WILLS. Encounters only. And the weapon proc of dread is as terrible in mod 13 as the rest of them. At 88.5% critical severity and 82% crit chance, I can outdps myself with a Vorpal vs Fey. In the end it is your choice, but the fact that vorpals apply crit severity to everything you do on a CW makes it a plus in Mod 13.

TYPICAL ENCOUNTER POWERS/CLASS POWERS/DAILIESThis is my standard setup for trash mobs, it’s mostly AOE based.

Conduit of ice on tab, disintegrate, steal time, icy terrain and oppressive force. Sigil of the DC, Pocket pet (you can use that or tymora’s coin but it won’t let you use both anymore) and llira’s bell. Thanks to elemental empowerment, we will get cold and arcane elemental power. Ding! 10% extra dmg boost. Note that I’m running combustive action (for the fast daily recharge) and chilling presence, it works to buff smoulder now.

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For Bosses, we go to a single dps loadout.

Now, Ray of enfeeblement is on tab, but in the new mod it’s only a 20% debuff vs the old 35%. So I may move that to a slot and put fanning the flame in its place. NOTE: Fanning the flame if not in mastery does NOT proc smoulder, and COI if not in mastery does NOT proc chill. This really makes no sense, since you’re either setting someone on fire or casting a cold storm around them, but I didn’t make the rules. I might as well walk into a hardware store and try to order pizza. Anywho, if you stay with the current setup above, you’d have to right click the scorching burst every so often to keep smoulder started/going. So I’d probably put it on tab and use ROE at the 10% debuff instead. Here we have all 3 elements, so cold/arcane/fire. Ding! 15% damage boost. I am using swath here for the consistant swath 20% debuff vs combustive action for the selective debuffs. My daily will charge slower, but the target stays debuffed longer because bosses take longer to kill than meatheads(mobs).

BUT….BUT…I WANT A DPS BUILD FOR CW!As it stands, spellstorm is not the way to go for mod 13, and I’m sorry it had to be that way. I will post a DPS MoF build, encounter setup/boons/feats are the same. You take what you want from it. I wish you luck my friends. I’m not going to explain it, as most of it is straightforward.

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Hope this gave you guys and gals some insight. Feel free to argue with me, I may or may not respond, but if you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

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