Transcription
How's it everyone? This is Lockhole with my even tide shatter chain martial artist build.
This entire build revolves around the new even tide pedals amulet and the midnight zenith [music] skill that it grants. Understanding this as well as a function of ice crystals will inform the rest of the build how to build it and how to scale it.
This build has some of the most satisfying clear I've ever felt with shatter chains that echo throughout packs of monsters. It also has unbelievably good single target damage and it can be done on a fairly modest budget as well. But to understand the build, let's talk about Even Tide Pedals.
So, this amulet grants us a skill Midnight Zenith. This says, "While active, critical hits with other skills that kill targets or hit powerful targets cause you to gain Arctic Petals. Once you have enough Octicals, they'll be consumed to create ice crystals near the most recent target. So once we reach 10 Arctic pedals, we generate five ice crystals up to a maximum of 10. And these then can be detonated to deal damage to the enemy."
So the first part of this informs us we need to get crit on a lot of gear. If we're critting more often, then we are generating more petals, which generates more ice crystals, and then those explode, dealing more damage. However, there is another important line on ice crystals that makes this all work. Skills which consume freeze will instantly shatter ice crystals, causing them to deal more damage in a larger area. So, if we're able to consume freeze with other skills, we won't actually have to deal damage to them in order to make them break. This also makes space for more crystals to be created. So if we're rapidly creating ice crystals and then consuming the freeze which detonates them, we're able to create more which can be then consumed and detonated and this is what creates the chain.
But before we go into that, let's speak about how we scale crit because this is a very important aspect of the build. So firstly, we can get critical hit chance and bonus from the passive skill tree. Our quarter stop critical hit chance is very important. This applies to all of our other attack skills such as shattering palm and our tempest spell, making these crit more often. It's also recommended to use a sinister quarter staff because this has a 12% base crit. And then with the way of the stonefist ascendancy, the modifier percent increase critical damage bonus is converted into base crit. And then all of these base crit multipliers on our staff and from way of the stonefist. These are all then multiplied by any increases to critical strike chance we get on our gear and the passive tree.
Now one of the main skills we're using is shattering palm. This dashes to the enemy, strikes them, and then covers them in shards of ice. Dealing enough damage with these will shatter those shards, causing an icy explosion that deals attack damage. Shattering Palm's quality also grants more critical hit shots. [music] So, this is a great skill for dealing crits very consistently and also the ice shards that it grants generates explosions which can crit dealing more damage and also generating more petals to generate more ice crystals.
Another modifier that's great on gloves with way of the stonefist is plus level of all melee skills which gets converted into quality of all gems. And if you get plus two melee skills, it gives you plus one melee skills and quality of all gems, further improving the effectiveness of all our skills, but also importantly giving us more critical hit chance on our shattering palm.
Now, in order to deal crits more effectively with other skills such as Herold of Ice and Herold of Thunder, we can use Pinpoint Critical, which grants us 60% more critical hit chance at the expense of 30% less critical damage bonus. What's most important, though, is just getting these consistent crits with all of our skills to generate pedals, to generate ice crystals, which then can kill enemies.
Another piece of this though is that with the hollow focus ascendancy, while active, ethereal bells periodically spawn around us. And when hit, these generate a shock wave, and these hits are always countered as critical hits. Again, critical hits generates Arctic pedals, generates ice crystals. So, this fits in perfectly. Another thing, hollow resonance. This ascendancy point attached an ethereal bell to our back. Critical hits with other skills will cause this bell to ring out, dealing damage to nearby enemies. And again, we're critting all the time. This is ringing out all the time and critting. And all this all works together to generate these ice crystals.
But I mentioned consuming freeze in order to detonate these ice crystals consistently. How do we do this? So with the support biting Frost 2 linked on our Herald of Ice and Herald of Thunder, this makes it so these are able to consume freezes, shattering the crystals, but then also making space. Remember, we have a limit of 10 ice crystals. This makes space for more ice crystals to be created, and then they are shattered, and then the chain continues.
So that might all seem very complicated, but this little graph might help. When we see a pack of monsters, we open with a shattering palm. We dash toward them. This crits generating petals. This also covers enemies in ice shards. And if we deal enough damage, these ice shards can detonate and crit. When we crit, our hollow resonance on our back, this also rings out. And this can crit too, generating more petals. Our hollow focus any of these ethereal bells that spawn around us, these get hit. These count as crits and also generate more pedals which get converted into ice crystals.
Now, most of the monsters that we're going to be hitting because we deal a lot of cold damage are going to be shattered with our Herald of Ice. This then explodes and it also then consumes the freeze of the ice crystals which then detonate and those monsters are killed and they're chilled which causes our Herald of ice to proc which crits which generates pedals which generates ice crystals which explode which causes our Herald of ice to proc which crits which explodes. The loop should make sense now. And this is why you can punch one single pack of monsters with the shattering palm and then this entire cascade of events happens and you get that rippling effect throughout the pack of monsters. So this is why having crits is super important on this build. It is the most important aspect of it.
And when it comes to boss damage, we have a similar chain of events, but the setup is slightly different. So when we get to a boss, what we want to do is open with whirling assault to generate combo. Then we want to drop tempest bells. And when we attack the enemy or the bells with shattering palm, everything is critting, which generates ice crystals. The tempest bells ring out, shattering the ice crystals. Also, they crit, generating more ice crystals, which get exploded, which causes our bells to ring out, generating more ice crystals. You see how the loop works.
One important thing with our bells, though, is we want to try and have all three down as soon as possible. With ancestral call 2, this will ancestrally boost our tempest bell, making it strike additional nearby enemy targets. However, if there is only one boss, only one bell will drop. A clever way to get around this is to use delayed gratification on our Tempest spell, which increases the amount of combo required to use it by 1.5 times, but it lets us use it multiple times in succession. We open with whirling assault to quickly generate combo. Then we drop one temper spell and then we drop another two immediately after that. This gets us our three temper spells and then we can shattering palm which again that whole loop begins again.
If we want to further improve our damage, we can use hand of chaula to apply some curses to the enemy. Firstly, elemental weakness will lower the enemy's elemental resistances [music] and freezing mark will cause the enemy to become frozen more easily. If you want to further improve your damage, you can also consume a power charge and then use Rend to gain 50% of damage as extra lightning. Generating these power charges can be done by using killing palm on one of our hollow form ethereal bells and then just a quick rand for 50% of damages extra.
Now, one important difference with this setup on bossing is that we don't actually want to consume the freeze on bosses. We use the passive point heavy frost hits ignore non- negative elemental resistances of frozen enemies [music] and 20% increased freeze buildup. And of course, another thing is that frozen bosses can't move, which is a very, very powerful defensive aspect. Luckily, the biting frost, which we use to consume freeze on our ice crystals, this only procs when we kill enemies, therefore it won't proc when we're bossing. With this setup, we can freeze bosses consistently, but then while mapping, we have a clean, consistent consumption of those freezes [music] to make the explosion chains ring out throughout the packs.
But now, I just want to discuss the two different aspects of this build and its damage and how to scale it. So the one piece is we need to be able to hit enemies and crit them and kill them with other skills in order to generate the ice crystals. So modifiers on our quarter staff such as ads call damage, lightning damage, crit chance, crit bonus, these all matter a lot for making all of our other skills that aren't the ice crystals deal increased damage and then generating the charges to create the ice crystals. Modifiers like added damage to attacks on rings, these are going to be important. Same with our staff.
However, when it comes to ice crystal damage scaling, which we get from our amulets, the scaling here is quite different. These ice crystals are not going to benefit from the flat damage on our quarter stuff. So, anything like adds 10 to 20 cold damage to attacks isn't going to apply to these ice crystals. Also, points on the tree such as increased critical damage bonus for attacks. Not going to apply to them. Ice crystals are not going to benefit from the base crit on our quarter stuff or the crit bonus on our quarter stuff.
And another thing that a lot of people ask is do we want high ice crystal life or low ice crystal life? The bottom line on our even tie pedals amulet states ice crystals have minus3 to positive3 increased maximum life per five cold resistance you have. If you're not consuming ice crystals, then you probably want to go for lower life to make them shatter more easily. However, if you are using the V glass support, which we're not, then you probably want higher life. But because we are shattering our ice crystals by consuming freeze, this actually doesn't matter.
So, if we do want to scale our ice crystal damage, what are the modifiers that it benefits from? Firstly, generic percent increase call damage which can be found on rings or on quarter staves as a desecrated modifier. You can also find some points on the passive tree such as coming calamity which grants us 40% increased call damage when we are affected by herald of ice. Generic percent damage gained as extra such as from our rend. This will apply. Also, generic percent increase critical chance and critical bonus will apply. And then consuming freezes with our other skills. This grants more damage and more AOE. Another thing is also the level of your Midnight Zenith. This will increase the amount of damage that these ice crystals are doing. So, we want to be using the highest level of Midnight Zenith on our Even Tide amulet that we can.
Let's speak about some of the other gear slots which also matter for our helmets, body armor, and boots. We're looking mainly for energy shields and evasion racing. I'm currently not going chaos inoculation yet. I probably should, in which case we could go full energy shield or still energy shield evasion hybrid, but for now I'm just sticking with a life energy shield hybrid [music] setup on our helmet. Looking for energy shields, evasion rating, life, critical chance as a suffix. Can also get things like rarity and resistances. Body armor, aiming for very high evasion rate and energy shields, most important. Bit of spirit is also great to allow us to fit in additional permanent buffs. And then also looking for resistances on our boots, life, evasion rating, and energy shield, movement speed, good prefixes with suffixes. Looking for resistances.
Now, another really important suffix that I'm looking to add on my build is some deflection. This should be on my boots, body armor, and helmet. This will further improve our defenses, but this can put a strain on our resistances. Something that can be used to solve this is the new runic meridians ascendancy point on this class. This gives us five additional rune sockets which we can use to fill with things like storm runes or glacial runes to get additional resistances. However, there's also some very strong options here such as using Crayian's rune of warning to give us 50% reduced effect of curses on us. Combine that with the point on the tree, the hollow keeper, for another 50% reduced effect of curses. We now are effectively immune to curses. So no more temp chains or any of those horrible curses that you encounter in so many maps in your gloves.
Later on, you can also use emergent possibility. This is quite expensive, but it grants us gain 1% of damage as extra damage of a random element per rune socketed in equipped items. We have a lot of rune socket in our gear and with runic meridians this works perfectly. The other gear slots you can do with as you please, but this is a fantastic thing to use early on just to get your resistances solved more easily and have extra suffixes on your gear for things like deflection.
If you are able to solve all your gear problems, you could opt instead for something like marshall adept. With this, when you gain combo, gain additional combo and minus 0.2 seconds to current energy shield recharge delay per combo expended when using skills. So, this could help especially if we're going CI with starting our recharge on our energy shield. If we were to use mantra of destruction linked with delayed gratification, this would cause this to require 20 combo to use, which when used would effectively instantly restart our energy shield recharge. Combine that with Alith's chime support, then you can also use this to gain power charges, which then you can use with Rend to gain that damage boost. But for now, rooting Midians, fantastic point on our ascendency for quality of life.
As for our rings, looking for resistances, percent increase damage to improve our ice crystal damage, and flat damage to attacks to improve all of our other attacks. Also, life is going to be great, but generally solving your resistances and a bit of extra damage is what our rings are going to be for here. Our belt, Shabon satchel, life recovery from flasks also applies to energy shield for a bit of energy shield recovery. And then our amulet. We know all about this.
But now, another very important piece of gear are our gloves with way of the stone fist. There are endless options with these, but I'll go through some of the ones that I think are really good. For our prefixes, flat damage to attacks will be converted into gain damages extra for attacks. This is really useful for most of our skills. Not so much for our ice shards, though. I'm using mine more defensively, so modifiers like percent increase energy shield will be converted into global energy shield and evasion rating. Flat maximum energy shield will grant us flat energy shields and evasion rating per character level. And you can also even opt for some of the explode modifiers that I have a video on. These come from decay modifiers from the Catla's gloom. And modifiers such as magnitude of poison, ignite, [music] and bleed will convert into explode if you want to get even more explodes.
As for our suffixes, this is possibly more important, but modifiers such as plus two level of all melee skills. This will grant all our skills increased quality. This is important for dealing crits more consistently with our shattering palm, but all of our other skills benefit as well. Then the next really important one is going to be critical damage bonus, which gets converted into base crit. Again, that gets multiplied by all of the increases that we have on our other gear and our passive tree, making our crit chance way higher. Another modifier I'm using that I found quite useful is reduced attribute requirements which when equipped with weather the stonefist converts into all attributes. There are tons and tons and tons of these. Attack speed can give you onslaught for a more smooth play style. You can also get resistances which grant then max resistances. Intelligence grants us cool down recovery making our hollow focus and hollow resonance work more often. There are tons of options, but the good news is most of them are good. I would mainly focus on trying to get the crit chance and then also using your gloves to get more defenses with modifiers like energy shields and percent increased energy shield.
The points on our passive tree should all make sense in context. We're getting things like crit damage bonus, evasion rating and energy shield for defenses, skill speed for smoother gameplay style, more defensive stuff, and area of effect. There's a whole lot of crit on the tree as well, and some of the freeze that I discussed. One point we are not taking is whirling assault. The points after this are really nice, but the problem is Welling Assault has the line knocks back enemies if you get a critical hit with a quarter stuff. Now, we are critting all the time and the problem with this is on bosses, you are going to crit them and knock them back out of your bell combo with your ice crystals. So, you're going to actually lose a lot of damage if you take this. So, we don't need that. It can feel kind of cool. And for clear, it is a bit more defensive, but it will lower your boss damage.
Another thing you can get is a time loss sapphire. In this point, we're allocating a lot of things around the tree over here. Modifiers like increased critical damage bonus, cold damage, skill speed. These are all going to be really nice on a time loss jewel. But that should cover everything. I'm going to keep working on this build. This is about probably 80% of the way there, I would say. There's still a bit of refining and minmaxing that we can do with it, but I felt like this was in a good enough place to share and help people understand the build.
In terms of leveling, I went with a full unplanned ice strike leveling setup and just experimented and this was the point I came up with. So, I don't have a clean clear leveling guide. However, I can recommend leveling setups from FG Corbin and also Scorpius. They both have leveling setups for monk that should help you get to the point where you can equip the amulet and start this setup that I have here. So, this is more of an endgame build, not necessarily a full handhold from level one to maps. I'll see what I can do about adding that section in, but for now, I'm just focusing on the endame aspect of the build.
If you have any questions, don't forget to check the written guide linked in the description for mobile litics that has a lot of written information here. You can also join my live streams over on Twitch and YouTube. Join my Discord. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you're enjoying the video. If you're enjoying this build, if you have any cool ideas with it that you want to share, I'd love to hear them. So, join the streams, let me know. I'm always open to hearing out some cool ideas that [music] you might have.
That's going to be it. Have a wonderful day. Enjoy the build. Take care. Stay safe.