The purpose of this guide is to present my Pyromancer build, which aims on DPS for boss killing/horde clear/elite killing/ special killing as fast as possible. This guide is recommended for players who are playing from recruit to legend. For a cataclysm guide, please look at other guides which focus on cataclysm as the game becomes very different due to the high scale of difficulty.
Contents
Complete Pyromancer Build Overview
All credit goes to Greyknight654!
Introduction
The purpose of this guide, as mentioned before is a build recommendation for Pyromancer for recruit to legend. It is not recommended for Cataclysm, but you may try it if you want to. The build focuses strongly on crit chance, crit power, and heatsink. These are the most important properties and traits respectively.
Playstyle
This section will explain how to use this build effectively.
About talents, traits, and properties, please continue reading below.
The build is very spammable for fireball staff. So most of the time, you will spam fireballs into your enemies using (Hold right click and spam left click) charged attack. If you see an enemy far away such as a special, use left click with the fireball staff. Also, in my opinion you get more DPS from simply spamming fireballs (Hold right click and spam left click) because there is no need to fully charge your fireball staff. It may increase damage, but in terms of DPS spamming left click charged attack is better.
Hordes
Really easy to deal with, just spam charged attack into a crowd, if an enemy gets into melee ranged of you switch to crowbill and block. It is advisable to stay behind your teammates as you can use them to tank the frontline while your spamming fireballs. On champion and legend difficulty, you should be careful about friendly fire though as you may hurt or kill your teammates.
Note: If the horde is engaging you and the enemies are very close to each other, or aligned in front of you then you should fire your fireballs through them in a way that all horde targets are hit. However, if the horde is spread around the area then you should fire fireballs at their feet on the ground so they take splash damage. Direct hits on hordes are about twice as much damage than splash damage when aiming about their feet on the ground.
Specials
If they are close ranged, use fireball charged attacks. If they are far away use left click. Also, it is usually important to kill specials, so also consider using your F ability.
Elites
All armored elites can be melted with fireball staff charged attack. Except chaos warriors, you would have to try headshots (which I don’t recommend) so instead, switch to crowbill and use that to kill chaos warriors. Otherwise, everything is killable with spam fireball staff.
Monsters
Spam fireball staff, again, charged attack. It is important to keep your distance from the monsters so let your teammates take the aggro from monsters while you deal the DPS. If a monster aggros you, then switch to crowbill and block. Because of up to 60% Block cost reduction (BCR), it will be easy to block monster attacks except grabs such as chaos spawn. So make sure your dodging accordingly. If you lose aggro, cocntinue spamming with fireball charged attack.
Lords
For armored lords you need a strength potion to spam with fireball. If you dont have a strength potion, use crowbill and F ability. If the lord is not armored (most of them arn’t anyway) just spam fireballs until they die.
Talents
Here are the talents I use:
- Lvl 5: Use spirit-Binding because it is mandatory to be able to keep your health above 80% for the lvl 10 talent which I will get into in the next point. It also helps you avoid dying in the game, by focusing on elites using melee when on moderate or low health.
- Lvl 10: Spirit-Casting, with the help of Spirit-Binding and Bonded Flame will allow you to maintain your health at over 80% during gameplay. This includes Temporary health as well. so try to keep your total health above 80% for the 10% inceased crit-chance.
- Lvl 15: Smiter is actually good, but we use enchanced power because it will maximize our DPS with Pyromancer. If you find yourself struggling when playing, use smiter as it helps killing elites which will help you maintain your health over 80% as well.
- Lvl 20: Use Deathly Dissipation. It stops your spells from generating overcharge every time you kill a special for 10 seconds. This helps this build as it makes firerball staff more spammable.
- Lvl 25: Personally I prefer The Volans Doctrine, because it ends the aqshy slowdown on high overcharge. Which you will reach while spamming fireball staff. If you are confident in your skill though, you may want to try fleetflame, as it allows you to spam fireballs while moving away from enemies.
- Lvl 30: Bonded Flame. This option is very effective because you get 35 health every time you ult. With your necklace boon of shallya you get 30% more healing from it which allows you to get 45 temp health every time you ult. Making it really easy to stay over 80% health.
Weapons
This section discusses the weapons to be used. It is strongly recommended to use crowbill, and mandatory to use fireball staff.
Melee
Personally, I recommend using attack speed and block cost reduction (BCR). BCR has proven itself to be much more effective than stamina, and crit chance on melee does not apply to ranged. So these are the best options for this build. You can really commit yourself to ranged attacks by using stamina instead of attack speed. However, I wouldn’t recommend any other property other than attack speed for this build. I use resourceful combatant, because then it becomes easily to have the F ability available for health.
Ranged
For this build to work, heat-sink is mandatory. Crit chance and crit power gives a nice damage bonus. heat-sink allows a player to spam fireball staff without having to worry about overcharge. Because this build uses such high crit chance (30-50% crit chance based on maximum overcharge and properties from equipment) Heat sink will allow a player to spam fireballs with no limit, other than overcharging of-course. With more overcharge, pyromancer gains increased crit chance, and thererfore it takes about 20-30 fireballs before a player reaches overcharge and dies.
Neclace, Charm, Trinket
Necklace
Having high health on low level characters is mandatory. Which is why I recommend using 20% health. BCR makes your survivability much better. with the BCR from crowbill, your survivabiility is also much more improved, and therefore you can use melee mainly for blocking, and killing armored elites. (Although fireball kills armored elites pretty easily too). Also use boon of shallya, it will greatly improve your survivability as it works with Spirit-Binding, and Bonded Flame. (Please read at the talent section for more info)
Charm
The charm is very important to enhance DPS. As it may provide up to 20% crit-power. Attack speed is good too, but its not mandatory. Decanter is amazing with this build. It allows you to spam fireballs using strength or speed potion, and spam your F ability for health with concentration potion. Therefore all potions can be used for this build.
Trinket
Finally, the trinket. Focusing on the trait first, Shrapnel is a great way to deal heavy damage with fireball spam. If you have a strength potion, you can drink the strength potion first, then bomb the enemy with shrapnel, and then spam fireballs. It will deal some insane DPS damage which is very useful for deleting bosses quickly. Note: I recommend crit chance for sure. However, curse resistance is useful if you play recruit to legend for full book runs. Therefore, it is not recommended for cataclysm.
How to Build: Legend to Recruit
For Legend players: they probably have enough reds to finish this build really quickly. You don’t have to have all red (veteran items) for the build to work. Just make all oranges (exotic items) if you don’t have enough reds, and eventually replace oranges with reds as soon as you have them. What is important for this build to work is Heat-Sink trait on fireball staff. You get enough crit chance from your passive talent (critical mass) as you gain crit chance for every overcharge stack.
For Champion and Veteran players: Again, most important trait is Heat-Sink so build that first. It requires only 50 scrap to craft an orange (more if your using a green or white item). Everything other than heat-sink is a bonus. So you should still be able to spam up to 10-15 fireballs before overcharging.
Recruit players: Recruit will have the hardest time following this build compared to other players because they don’t have a lot of scrap, materials. I would strongly recommend using the regular sword (not the firesword) for hordes, and then a long ranged weapon for sniping specials and elite killing such as beamstaff, fireball staff, or bolt staff. It should be easy to obtain those, but getting heat-sink during the recruit stage is not easy. So try the sword if you don’t have a crowbill, and try beam/fireball/boltstaff as ranged.
For all player difficulties: It is advised to build Heat-sink as soon as possible, I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Then build crit-chance and crit-power. After that go for the traits. You build Talents as you level up, so build talents as soon as you level a multiple of 5. Finally, You get temp health from melee kills using this build, so by the time you reach lvl 10 you should be able to have enough survivability. It would be good if you reached lvl 30 for Bonded Flame. As the 45 temp health is great for survivability. However, at low difficulties it is not mandatory. See it more as a bonus instead.
Notes
Why are you using crit-power instead of power vs _?
Crit-power applies to all enemies, and with this build your are critting all the time. So there is no need to focus on specific enemies, just spam fireball, block, and dodge.
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