Templar Shield Block Build

Why do we stack Shield Block Chance and Wisdom/CDR

43% Base Block Chance +10% Shock Set Bonus = 53% Base Block Chance

53% Base Block Chance + 34% Counter Barrier = 87% Buffed Block Chance

53% Base Block Chance x Aegis Passive = +508.8 Base Defense

87% Buffed Block Chance x Aegis Passive = +835.2 Buffed Defense

55% SnS Cooldown Reduction + 20% Buff Duration means that we can keep Counter Barrier up for 7.2s/9.45s which is an insanely high uptime (76%).

Why Trait for Endurance instead of Evasion?

This is an excellent Question as Evasion completely avoids damage while Endurance reduces our chance to take Critical Hits and Increases our odds of taking minimum damage. The short answer is that we don't know what various bosses Hit Chance is.

When determining weather or not you will Evade an attack the game looks at your enemies Hit Chance Rating and Compares it to your Evasion Rating.

• If your evasion rating is HIGHER than your target's Hit Chance Rating then you have a % chance to Evade the incoming attack. At this point the more Evasion Rating you have the more likely you are to Evade an attack.
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• If your Evasion Rating is LOWER than your target's Hit Chance Rating then you will have a 0% chance to evade and all of those hard earned Evasion Rating Traits are rendered completely Useless.

Endurance on the other hand compares your targets critical strike chance and your Endurance rating.

• If your Endurance Rating is HIGHER than your target's Critical Strike Rating then it becomes impossible for your target to hit you with a Critical Strike.
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• If your Endurance Rating is LOWER than your target's Critical Strike Rating then you will still have a % chance to avoid taking a critical hit based on the difference amount Between you and your targets Critical Strike Chance vs your Endurance Rating.

In short this means that any amount of Evasion Rating below your target's Hit Chance is USELESS, Where as any Endurance Rating below your target's Critical Chance is STILL USEFULL. Therefore we can not consistently evade attacks without knowing the Boss's Hit Chance, But we can consistently avoid Critical Strikes which will ultimately improve our survivability and will smooth out our damage intake by making it less spikey and easier to predictably heal.

Witty Strike vs Annihilating Slash

Resilient Mind and Fountain of Life might not end up being good enough to upkeep mana, Even with our absurdly high Block Chance in this build. In this case, swap Annihilating Slash out for Witty Strike. If you do run Witty Strike , I recommend taking Consecutive Use on Witty Strike and using your remaining 5 Spec Points into whatever you want.

Why not Clay Salvation/Swift Heal?

Swift Healing does a lot of healing on a low cooldown but it's a multicast heal. The way this game work is when you cast an ability linked to a weapon type, you pull out that weapon. This unfortunately means than when you cast swift heal multiple times in a row you are completely removing your Ability to block and your defensive stats that come from your shield. The same thing but worse occurs with Clay's Salvation you instead have to use a cast bar and while you're casting you lose the ability to block or evade. Both of these scenarios often times lead to you going to heal yourself and you actually end up taking MORE damage than you otherwise would heal for. Thus it is recommended to take Fountain of Life because it has the least amount of time where you have your wand out and then it passively heals you while you've got your shield out. It's on a longer CD and doesn't heal as much, but you will, at the very least, gain a net positive with your heals.

Fountain of Life + Selfless Soul

Fountain of Life and Selfless Soul offer insane synergy in regards to mana return and healing. By default, Fountain of Life costs 600 mana to cast and ticks 12 times in total. (6s duration, Ticks every 0.5s). When adding the mana recovery spec it hits you for +40 mana for every tick bringing the baseline mana refund up to 480 mana. Fortunately we can spec into Effect Duration Up, This effectively adds 4 more ticks to Fountain of Life mean that now with 16 ticks multiplied by +40 mana per tick; We now not only have the cost of our heal refunded but actual GAIN 40 additional mana as it returns 640 mana total.

When we combine this with Selfless Soul, which gives us +38 mana regen per stack of Selfless Soul. Normally this wouldn't be very effective with Clay's Salvation or Swift Healing as, (at best), we would only receive 3 stacks of Selfless Soul , However because Fountain of Life tick SIXTEEN times, we get max stacks of Selfless Soul within 2.5s or within the first 5 stacks. This gives us +190 mana regen at 5 stacks and refreshes duration of Selfless Soul every single tick (After 5 stacks you have 11 ticks left, meaning 8s of +190 mana regen (0.5*10ticks + 3x1 for the last tick since Selfless Soul lasts for 3s). The way Mana regen works in this game is that your mana regen is the amount of mana regeneration per 10s. So bearing this in mind means that we gain an additional +152 mana when we take Selfless Soul (190 (mana regen) * 0.8 (10s Durations)). On top of being a fantastic heal that allows us to stay tanky by keeping our shield out; You and your party members now receive a grand total of +792 mana when we stand in Fountain of Life, Almost +200 mana profit when comparing that to the cost of using Fountain of Life. 

Now for the downside, Fountain of Life is on a 36s CD and lasts for 8s, this is a rather long CD. Until you factor in that this build runs +60% Wand/Tome CDR. With this our new Fountain of Life CD is 14.4s; Meaning 8s/14.4s is a 55% uptime of dishing out +792 mana to you and your party. As if that was not enough to sell you on this combo, Selfless Soul also boosts are healing by 41% at 5 stacks. All of these effects are boosted by Buff Duration (for Selfless Soul) and Mana Cost Efficiency (for Increasing total mana profit).

Multi Target Threat

Your Provoking Roar > Counter Barrier > Annihilating Slash (or Witty Strike ) , All Procs your Spectrum of Agony for a massive amount of AoE Threat. Weave in Touch of Despair , Piercing Strike , Stalwart Bastion and A Shot at Victory to boost this damage further and improve survivability.

Credit for this AoE Threat Strategy goes to Wilstorm Gaming (SEE CLIP DOWN BELOW) This clip enables us to effectively tank with one weapon giving us the flexibility to use ANY secondary weapon. 

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxPekY3q0ELQITitPopLWHMtx3QCA5L1Wz?si=hS_0zOHsv7Q-mBQK

Single Target Threat

While our AoE Threat is insane thanks to Wilstorm Gaming's AoE Strategy; Your going to notice your boss threat is lack luster, This is because your Spectrum of Agony does not have any other targets to proc off when you only have one target. For this reason, We opt to spec our Curses into their single target variants. While this removes their AoE Capabilities it Buffs then with Higher Damage, a lower cooldown, and a removed Cast Time to enable high single target threat that ramps up as the fight goes on. The AoE variant of our Curses make them extremely dangerous as we are completely unable to Block or Evade ANY attacks while we are casting. With that being said, Here is the general opener and single target rotation that we use on boss fights.

Counter Barrier on Pull > Provoking Roar the Boss > Touch of Despair(50% Chance to Apply 2xStacks)  > Decaying Touch > Curse Explosion > A Shot at Victory > Piercing Strike > Annihilating Slash.

1. Be sure to keep Counter Barrier & Fountain of Life on CD as much as possible as they will increase your survivability tremendously while they are up!
2. Stalwart Bastion Is the CD to pop when your PARTY is in Danger.
3. Immortal Pride Is the CD to pop when YOU are in Danger.
4. Maintain 3x Stacks of Touch of Despair on the Target at all times!
5. Try to make sure A Shot at Victory's Buff is up when you combo Piercing Strike into Annihilating Slash as it dramatically increases damage.

Curse Explosion Explained.

A lot of people don't understand how Curse Explosion works so let me explain it here. Curse Explosion counts the number of stacks of Touch of Despair on a target to get it's Modifier %. (5% per stack) So if you have 3 stacks of Touch of Despair on your target the Modifier % is 15%.

Curse Explosion then takes that Modifier % and boosts any DoT on the target by that percent. So if Decaying Touch, (which is the only other DoT we have access to), Ticks on the target for 100 damage it will be boosted by 15%, (at max Touch of Despair stacks), to make it 115 damage. When it boosts the DoT, Curse Explosion forces the DoT to tick twice instantly and consumes any remaining DoTs on the target as well as any remaining Touch of Despair stacks. With the Dark Explosion Spec it does not consume any of your DoTs or Touch of Despair Stacks.

Now that we understand fully how curse explosion works there are a few important things to remember

1. NEVER Use Curse Explosion without having Decaying Touch or Corrupted Magic Circle on the Mob, Without this DoT, the bonus damage from your stacks of Touch of Despair is 0. For optimal damage, (except on boss pull), try to only cast Curse Explosion when you have 3 Stacks of Touch of Despair on the Mob.

    

2. Touch of Despair's Damage is NOT boosted from Curse Explosion; It's only used to count stacks and determine Curse Explosion's Modifier %.

    

3. Curse Explosion will always do base damage of 420% Base Damage + 272. This damage is not modified by any curses. It is however the only portion of this ability that can crit.

    

4. We take the Dark Explosion spec for Curse Explosion so that we don't have to wait for 3 stacks curse of despair in order to use Curse Explosion . We can use this ability at the beginning of the fight, (after we cast our first Touch of Despair and Decaying Touch ), for a big burst of threat and then use it again once we have 3 stacks of Touch of Despair.

    

5. We take Damage Increased spec for Curse Explosion so that the Touch of Despair modifier goes from 5% per stack to 10% per stack, Effectively raising our DoT modifier cap to 30% instead of 15%.