Opinions on WORST build in the game

Game Discussion
1

For a potential content idea I wanted to gather opinions from people about what they think is the worst possible ao build that you simply cannot work with even if you try really hard to make it good. Note that the builds have to be within a realm of reason, which is why I’m going to set a few guidelines below. It’s easy to intentionally come up with something terrible like 87/87/88/88 savant but this is more builds that you thought would conceptually be good or earnestly made an effort to try to make good but it just does not pan out right.

Guidelines:

  • Please specify what magic, fs, relics, and weapons the build uses when applicable. For weapons I’m more looking for weapon types, so if you say some nonsense like fossil spear I’m replacing it with skyhall spear or noble thunderspear depending on weapon invest of build since I’m just going to treat that as you saying polearm
  • If you are suggesting a savant or unawakened build, specify your stat distribution and try to reason through the concept and why it just didn’t work out. (It’s more because I kinda need it for those two builds since there’s so many ways to build them that if you just say “savant” you don’t narrow it down to anything but again I do not want to see 87/87/88/88 vant)
  • For any other build, due to the game being kinda doodoo and there only being one overwhelmingly more correct distribution for pretty much every class, I will likely not try out another stat distribution (again the goal is a build that doesn’t work even if you try to make it work in good faith), but still feel free to suggest a new stat distribution if you think there’s a real good theoretical concept behind it
  • (Edit) No specific gear loadouts. It’s way too easy to say something like “all in on drawback!” or worst case scenario “i5 build!” and the build is auto terrible. You can mention that certain fs or magics have worse arcanium/fight gear

If this post gets enough reception I’ll make a poll on which of the most popular bad builds according to this post is the worst. Make sure to :heart: any build you agree that is bad since I’ll be using that as a metric for which builds should make it to a final poll.

Also if you say some bull like sand conj or shadow metal mage I WILL be taking you out back

2

120 strength (strength weapon minimum + 20 for shot)
130 weapon (right when you get next tier of skills iirc)
100 magic (remainder but also gets you cannon and barrage)

ironleg (big damage and size go brrr)

all strength weapons (big damage and size go brrr)

metal or earth magic (big damage and size go brrr)

optionally 4 blood diseases and greases on every weapon

3

My immediate guess is a 3 way savant (strength,spirit, magic) with most of the focus on strength (probably have thermo since its thermo and a speed style) and the rest put into magic and just enough into spirit to qualify for savant (but not enough for the imbue)(going 4 way so you can waste stat points on weapons to get like 1 skill a weapon is a idea).

have sand as magic (Despite the 20% damage penalty not working solo, you still get haste arcaniums which arent exactly great (so its worse due to worse build potential)) . There is also the matter of sand and thermo suffering from soaked (both the rain and ocean apply it, making you do less damage in environments that have them).

(edited to fix the message containing a gear loadout and some other things)
(worse gear potential does not mean a gear loadout)

4

negative synergies don’t apply to oneself so the 20% penalty would not occur

and sand magic’s imbue is decent, 5% damage and roughly size at the cost of 2.5% speed

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rest is pretty bad though lol

5

On top of negative damage syns not being self inflictable as keiko mentioned I also won’t take gear stat loadouts since it is extremely easy to make a horrible gear loadout (you can just say i5 build and I die instantly lol)

The stat distribution, magic, and fs are still on the table though

Edited the post to mention no gear loadout

6

Awesome sauce, would prefer if you limited it down to one magic tho

If it helps, from what I heard from someone else, earth imbue on ileg is actually bugged and it doesn’t apply the bleed for some reason

7

earth has that status that increases FS damage though doesn’t it?

so metal would prob be better to further gut the attack speed

8

Earth doesn’t, earth applies bleed at 33% hp worth of damage (aka won’t trigger in a real fight)

9

oh i couldve sworn they gave it the bruised status effect, must of been decided against last second

10

I kind of skimmed through the message so sorry for that, edited the message to fix the issues

11

Spirit/Strength/Wep Savant; 155/80/115. The worst build I could concoct whilst technically being a build. At least before the new update, this gives you the least coherent arsenal:

  • High Spirit Investment is really not worth it right now, especially on Savant with its focus on imbuements, Spirit provides redundant skills that can’t be imbued.
    • This also forces your Relics to be Patrimoy, Staff-of-Night, and Tidestone; also locking you out of the mobility skills.
    • Also, I’m pretty sure your Spirit ends up being Blue/Purple. Which is boring and sad.
  • The 80 Strength invest gives you access to Crash, Smash, and Jab. You’re also locked into picked between Boxing, C-fist, and I-leg. I-leg is probably the best.
  • Then you have the 120 weapons. This gives a pretty pitful arsenal of skills, and a terrible series of weapon options.
    • You only have access to 30-cost skills on Level 50 weapons btw. Level 30 weapons are the only ones that give you access to 60 and 90 skills.
    • You might’ve realized you have access to Strength Weapons. Lions Halberd, Lions Lance, and Chief Axe & Maw. These also give you access to level 60 moves, but its still not a large arsenal.
  • This build also sucks because its 7 abilities you have to manage… 3 of which are going to have 1~3 skills, but still.
More Depth.

Ok, so this is just some extra notes and planning for strategy i guess.

  1. Your rite options are as follows—
    1. Base Rites on all Relics: anything thats 0~40. Those are all you get, all of your relics can use them; Spirit— Blast/Barrage/Burst/Hound/Rain/Shockwave/Wall/Rain
    2. Astrapikis from the patrimony, and Thalakyma on the Tidestone.
  2. As previously mention, strength options are—
    1. Crash, Jab, and Smash.
    2. Basic, Boxing, and I-leg.
  3. Your weapon options are the greatest, but still limited, best bet is strength weapons, but you have other, worse options.
    1. Level 10~60 weapons are usable.
    2. Level 80 strength weapons are also usable.

With all that said, my worst combo, taking in everything prior:

  • Fully Ardent Relics and Weapons; Boxing. If forced imbuements are true, imbue everything with the Staff of night, which will lower their damage and give them a bit of speed.
  • Put Spirit Blast/Hound/Burst/Barrage on the Staff of Night; Atrapikis and Spirit Wall on the Patrimony; Thalakyma and Spirit Rain on the Tidestone.
  • Kai’s Sabre, and the two Elius weapons; all greased with Blinding. You said to refrain from specifying weapons, so we’ll just say: Bows, Dual bladed, and long bladed,

I will say, next update, this becomes a lot harder. A lot of these builds should be hinging on the fact that Spirit just has nothing between 80 cost and 150 lol. With the Rite cost getting dropped to 120, its going to be a harder to do this.

Technically, 4-vant can be worse (140sp / 50 ma / 80 st / 80 wp is far worse than this one), but thats always just less funny than the theoretical least viable 3vant setup. I do believe this is the worst 3vant distrubution though. Even if you ignored the forced build, you really don’t get a lot of options on how to make this somewhat work.

Theres also the option of replacing Strength with magic, which cripples you options of weapons, as you’re now stuck without the warlord weapons, but you do get leap. The magic variant does repeat spells/rites more, but its projectiles, which suck less.

If i had to pick a magic for this, I’d pick Light, which goes against you staff of night, has not DoT, and continues to have no status that can synergize with the weapons.

12

why does savant get so much hate? I may be biased by playing purely True Savant, but I really do not get the hate

13

Notice how magic alone isn’t included in the worst build possible

14

This is nicely thought out, but the investment of 155 spirit and 115 weapons has absolutely zero justification over 150 spirit 120 weapons or 160 spirit 110 weapons. It’s debatable but at that point I would start considering this as entering the realm of just fucking up a build for the sake of fucking up a build, so I would like a stat change here if possible.

If you want a reference,

  • 150 spirit 120 weapons: Gains level 90 abilities on the faction weapons (probably most importantly sparrow thrust on skyhall rapier, though also things like fphoenix and sstep on faction swords). Gains level 60 abilities on 3rd and 4th slots on level 80 strength weapons.
  • 160 spirit 110 weapons: Gains spirit walk, spirit lift, spirit flight, along with corb and ember staff imbues.

Whichever one sounds worse to you can stick.

15

sand+wood mage

16

If you want to pretend to make a reasonable build— but still have it be the contestable worst— it’d be better to go Sp/Ma/Wp; then go into 160/70/120

Strength weapons are just too good to leave you with more than the bare minimum. My original one was mostly because having 0 mobility on a build with both weapons and strength sounded miserable, but if you don’t value you them that much, the magic is inarguably worse.

140 is the range where you can get Thalakyma, which makes it a reasonable end point, unlike 150, same for weapons getting some extra skills at 120.

It’s a really hard tie between 160 Sp or 140 Sp. Getting the Corb and Ember imbue + mobility really brings a person up a bit, but it prevents Magic from getting anything good; if you go for 140 Sp you get beam, and then technically have a usable arsenal.

I would say the for,er though, because you could just pick a magic that does horribly with the Relics, and then be left with decent mobility and nothing else.

Nah, the magic one is already tied as the contender for the worst build. The real kicker is that Weapons is somehow never slacking in either build.

17

that’s technically none of them since corb imbue is positive EP and gives good regen.

i could just pick a bottom tier magic but i think i wont say anything on that, i want to see whether you have a specific magic in mind nstead

18

People are mad that savant got to shine for 5 seconds during full release.

Actual story is that because of how savant worked, it was able to copy warlord which was effectively better warrior before the new strength split. As a result, everyone is scared that savant might steal even more gimmicks in the future.

19

Yeah… all of the Relics are pretty neutral when you have 160 stats; even if it has no synergies, most relics turn out to not change anything except giving you regen[1]. With the imbues on relics we have availble, there probably isn’t anything you can do to be actively bad

I don’t know much about the Magic’s stats themselves which is why I’m pretty lenient on suggesting them[2].

If I had to hazard a guess, it’d be between Snow, water, or Ice Sav. Two of these have only a synergy with Tidestone, but its like 3.5%; The other is water but which has a weak synergy with the patrimony, though it does give paralyzed. Thing is, I doubt either of these are that bad as solo magics— Ice/Snow have good base damage— snow in particular has really high stats, with ice’s speed being fixable if you decide to ignore the synergy and just use the Corb. Water also isn’t that far behind snow in base damage, with again, decent speed and good size.

I still haven’t considered greasing though, which could pull these builds up through the mud. It can use level 50 weapons— even if hardly— so Sunk-Sword gives you freeze anyways, Ice and Snow are probably even stronger than I’m suggesting with that in mid; Patrimony imbued Sunk-Sword + Water can’t be that much worse either.

My guess is still in on Water Sav with the 160/70/120 build. Its probably the worst you can get as a 3vant build.

PvP is pretty unstable, so anything that isn’t the best probably wouldn’t’ve felt that good anyways: nobody has fun against the 400 damage mage, and the 600 damage zerker. But in general use? This is way more than enough. Even in medium-end PvP you probably wouldn’t do that poorly with a decent build set-up. You could still take this to Elysium and win quite a few rounds.

And again, this is entirely hinging on Spirit having really high costs and 10 moves as of now. The next update makes this build like 10x more viable on the Spirit cost reduction, arcanium rework, new Relics, and Rites. Hell, if either of those Relics use wind then this build becomes viable with no alternative; Every magic would have a synergy with a Relic, or be a magic that wasn’t relying on synergies anyways.

3vant is basically impossible to build that badly. 4vant is definitely the king of being bad, as its a lot to manage, but I thought it’d be more boring for a mind exercise in bad builds. This is about finding the worst theoretical build in game, so the one that has technical justifiable stats for 4vant is:

4vant worst candidate A

140Sp/50Ma/80St/80Wp

  • Technically gives tidestone-band a usecase.
  • Magic requirement for explosion styles.
  • Just enough strength to use strength weapons.
  • Just few enough points to make any other weapon pathetic, whilst technically allowing strength weapons

Significantly worse than the 3vant btw. Patrimony+Tidestone; go for both the strength weapons; and then I’d go with Water-magic or Ash. Your build is essentially ruined from there.

4vant worst candidate B

140Sp/50Ma/60St/100Wp

  • Just enough to use Tidestone again.
  • Just enough to get styled explosions (which again, are already gotten by the relics)
  • Just enough strength to get smash and nothing else.
  • Gives you only 30 cost moves on the first slots with level 50 weapons. No strength weapons.

Same spiel, but not Ash— that’d give you scalded, and we don’t want to give you a DoT. Water Magic only. Your build is still miserable.

  1. Said Relic’s being really neutral is the reason we’re avoiding 90 Magic. It’d be FAR too easy to just imbue and use Bean+Blast+Explosion, with the occasional Spirit Rain and Spirit Barrage. Also aka, All Relics have close to 1x1x1x stats. ↩︎

  2. I’ve always struggled to play mage for some reason. I’ve played pre-FR Jugg & Knight and had less total wins with Mage than both of those. This extends to using magic with Paladin and Savant. My savant does better when I pretend to not have magic than me playing “optimally” and trying to use it. I’m horrible at magic, it has yet to improve. ↩︎

20

Well isn’t the point of Savant it gets a bit of everything? I don’t get how people got mad Savants got more stuff with a higher level cap, you give em more stat points, they get new things to play around with. But speaking as a Savant main, it’s also pretty easy to counter most Savants, you just close the gap and cause them to panic. Unless they’re terminally insane and have Sprit, Strength and Weapons, I have no clue if that kind of Savant exists, and I question their sanity. And honestly, giving Savants imbues is only logical, because before that they were a hybrid with a second magic or fighting style, while if i’m not mistaken the other hybrids had imbues.

I could be wrong. But idk. I feel like people just don’t want the weird stat build being decent.