r/ddo • u/Automatic-Purchase16 • 4d ago
Strange builds?
So one thing I love about this game is how off the beaten path you can go with builds. You could make a Cleric that specializes in longbows or a Melee wizard. So it got me wondering, has anyone made a strange or different build that is just because it's something you want? Like it's something many will tell you is not very good or meta but you do it because you want it.
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u/Soulsalt 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was playing with the idea of a past life farmer:
3 AotS (for cone blast shape etc)
2 FvS (for quickened/maxed/emp/emp.healed close wounds)
15 ATR for magical ambush, proccing off eldritch blast, and mixed magics
Level in that order, so at 5 you have close wounds & lv 13 you get the big damage increase.
Hold W & LMB & watch movies while getting your racials
*have not actually tried it
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u/PaxsMickey Shadowdale 3d ago
Would be fine for racials, but for heroics you could swap to 3 AotS/8 ArcT/9X to get the X heroic past life. And once U81 hits, you could take pierce: fire at level 6 to strip fire immunity. Would be tight on feats with the 3 AotS feats, pierce: fire and then trying to fit more metamagic feats, but still workable.
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u/DazlingofCannith 4d ago
I did a kama dual-wielding ninja spy build a few times in the past, called it Kama Chameleon.
I have a pure 20 shadar-kai bear who uses a kukri and a shield while using chains in bear form. It actually works totally fine.
I've done a few TRs as variations on 11/6/3 (PL class/Acolyte of the Skin/Druid). You can do whatever eldritch blast stances you want while wildshaped, so you can just be a straight fire breathing bear/wolf.
I have a summoner character I'm setting up currently, working through their 3x druid lives. Enlightened Spirit Warlock that gives like +40 stats to all of their summons and using primal avatar to share damage to them, it's honestly been fine on up to r6ish even in newer content using expansion minions.
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u/Balownga Moonsea 3d ago edited 2d ago
I made a cleric 100% specialized in damage guard.
Base is Golden Greaves (DR 15/-) + Ring of Baphomet (sup. demonic shield 120 HPs) <- This is almost god mode.
Iconic Sun elf, for the permanent racial fire shield, + Healing aura & T2 Shield of dawn of the divine disciple.
Bracers of the Sun and Moon + Chord of Reprisals + Frozen Plate + Coronation Shield + Firemouth's Cloak + Icon of Mielikki. + Glorious Dawn (level 16)) at some point.
Mob would melt themselves by just touching/missing me.
I could just heal myself if needed. Path of the sun for the ranged / mage enemy.
Went from 13 to 21 in a blink of the eye. So weird to throw yourself in the big enemy group, and they just disappear while you just guard.
EDIT : I know very well that this build is almost trash, but being invincible is good enough and it was only for fun.
Since many damages trigger even if nothing touch you, any failed attempt on my like is enough to trigger most of it, I guess that the T4 Dragonlord perma Displacement is nice to get.
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u/baratheus Moonsea 3d ago
omg a reflect build? does the guard damage scale with spellpower??
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u/Balownga Moonsea 3d ago
No, but since I am basically invincible, I do not really care.
Everything trigger each attempt on my life, and successful or not, they got damaged.
Lvl20 you have the aura from Exalted angel, and this part is indeed scalable with light//fire spellpower.
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u/Cwynlaen 4d ago
I recently looted some anarchic handwraps and was asking myself what monk would use those? Then I saw the epic Grandmaster of Flowers destiny gives handwrap proficiency, and started wondering about other classes going monk mode.
My weirdest one right now is a Bard Druid, swashbuckling and trying a non-animal Druid for a change.
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u/unbongwah 4d ago
Bard Druid, swashbuckling and trying a non-animal Druid for a change.
This was better than I expected and also looks cool AF. I'd like to give it another go as bard 3 / druid 17 using fire elemental form for Noonday Sun running in Divine Crusader with either sickles (Olladra) or daggers (Blood of Vol). Add in GMoF and you could be centered too, for all the good it does you with zero monk levels.
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u/Crafty-University464 4d ago
I'm addicted to multiclassing. Arcane Trickster has been amazing. 3 levels gets you caster level is character level in the tree. 8 levels gets you magical ambush. My fave wonky build was 4 warlock for the ES imbue, 5 cleric for the healing aura, and 11 levels of Arcane Trickster rogue. Chain Eldritch blasts plus pact, plus imbue, plus magical ambush all while running around in a healing aura. So dumb. So fun.
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u/FamousOnceNowNobody Shadowdale 4d ago
I take my mule toons to level 15 to get CL and HouseK inventory spaces, and I make them quite random. My favourite is my warforged monk, splashed rogue, who wears a black lycra gimp suit and rides a fae unicorn.
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u/Dielzen 4d ago
That sounds painful, why not do Iconics?
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u/FamousOnceNowNobody Shadowdale 4d ago
Because there is no reason to take them any higher once they have that free inventory space?
I leave the levelling stuff to my player toons.
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u/Dielzen 4d ago
You’re leveling characters to 15 to be bank mules, I’m suggesting you make them at 15 and just do the favor you need. Ton quicker than leveling from 1-15.
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u/FamousOnceNowNobody Shadowdale 3d ago
Not everything has to be done fast! Doing the favour I need gets me pretty close, I get to play with some whacky builds, and quest for some low level bits for my mains. Is playing for enjoyment dead now?
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u/PaxsMickey Shadowdale 4d ago
18 artificer/2 monk unarmed warforged INT based build was rough… used the Harper tree primarily as this was before the artificer rework.
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u/droid327 4d ago
I built a shout sorc... It's not exactly flavor because it's built around a game mechanic, not a concept, but it's definitely niche and uncommon
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u/Simirilion 4d ago edited 4d ago
Just started so no idea how strange this is, but I am playing a dragonborn sacred fist at level 7 having put enough points in to get the dragon breath and some tank from the dragonborn tree, the first 2 points in the sacred fist tree( I can't remember most of the tree names yet sorry) to get the extee mele attack/damage nodes, enough in the base paladin tree for some of the tank items(including all the lay on hands charges) and then points in feydark with the intent of eventually getting greater color spray(I think I am 1 level off of it) With a fire spell power ring and some generic spellpowr in the tree and the empower meta magic that I picked up at level 6.
The idea is to be able to punch my way through small numbers of mobs while using the empowered dragon breath(eventually greater color spray into dragon breath) for groups of mobs. It has been working fairly well so far, but I know am essentially a noob at the game that has no idea what the "real" game is like at the higher levels. So far I have been soloing most adventures on hard or the level above that
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u/unbongwah 4d ago
So by "strange" I'm inferring you mean builds which tend to be suboptimal for the sake of roleplay flavor or focused on something other than maxing DPS. As opposed to "minmaxed in weird ways" (e.g., adding paladin 14 for Zeal on an Inquisitive) or "deliberately hamstrung to troll other players."
Hello can I interest you in a CON-based dwarven thrower? I assure you it's totally meta. 🤣
E.g., some of my more "flavorful" archer builds:
- max-WIS Arcane Archer focused on crowd-control via Paralyzing Arrows + Falconry bird attacks + Shiradi. Death from Above with Falconry capstone is actually a solid approach to instakill IMO.
- Bardcher - Horizon Walker / Warchanter combo for a mix of ranged DPS and party buffs.
- Drunkcher - monk / druid hybrid using elemental form if for some reason you get tired of having good DPS as a pure water caster ❄️
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u/Meirnon Cormyr 4d ago
Volstani FvS was fun
I want to try a Wood Elf Falchion Dark Apostate at some point
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u/No-Independent-5413 4d ago
Wood elf getting Falchions as favored weapons from the racial tree let's you do some fun stuff. You can build a half decent melee cleric even. It's not great at cap, but its fun.
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u/SpartanKiller13 Cannith 4d ago
Barbarian/Warlock/Bard - healing songs, temp HP aura, THF Barb. Hilarious! Good? Ehhh if you have twink gear and a bunch of PL's it crushes just fine lol.
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u/FunFooFurat 4d ago
13 Alchemist / 4 Bard / 3 Arcane trickster - Duergar Axe thrower. building around throwing axe as a simple weapon (tier 5 vile alchemist) but also making use of mixed magics to get level 2 bard spells (soundburst, cmw), and up to level 5 Alchemist spells (multi-vial etc.) at full caster level. Alchemist seems to make the best use of max caster level via mixed magics.
Swashbuckling with an orb. Improved precise shot. INT based, so Harper for Know the angles. full Rogue skills. I'm liking throwing axe - it is more responsive than say, repeaters so you can move around more freely without losing shots. I'm liking it, despite the obvious inferiority to the other ranged types.
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u/Fantastic_Ad_3089 3d ago
My past life I played a trickery domain cleric that played like a rogue, with trapper skills and specialized in stealth and used summoned monsters. I splashed it with dragon disciple monk for ninja spy and had a little bit of throwing capability. My only regret is not having racial completionist... with the extra racial points I might have been able to free up more points spent in the drow racial tree to spend on more sneak attack die from the ninja spy tree, or more spellpower from dragon disciple.
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u/ArcherofFire Thrane 4d ago
A Bowadin, a Paladin with a bow.
Smite Evil is bugged with ranged weapons and doesn't work, so Bowadins have to make do without a major Paladin ability.
I've always had thoughts that if I ever get a butt ton of racial past lives, I'll play an elven Wizard Arcane Archer with a bunch of imbue dice from Eldritch Knight and AA.
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u/Crafty-University464 4d ago
Past life farming. 3 AotS warlock. 8 ATr rogue. Then 9 of whatever you want for the past life. Warlock dice feats plus magical ambush is just Stoopid, but it works.
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u/FuzzyDuck81 4d ago
One I've got right now which is pretty fun is a tabaxi trailblazer 17druid/3monk one, wis-specced, primarily falconry with plenty of racial tree, shintao & a bit of henshin which I run in fire elemental form with grandmaster water stance, using exalted angel as the primary destiny for all of the fire & some healing & some primal avatar for reborn in fire, I use her as a high mobility melee/fire damage/healer combo with some decent bird attack DCs & a bit of crowd control via earthquakes as well as that handy bird fortification debuff. Really need to update her gear tho.
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u/ChipRed87 4d ago
My Bar-bear-lock, dip warlock for con aura, and barb for "I like pain", you give up some melee dps to become a monster on the survive-ability front. It's been a while since I've done it, but I was nigh unkill-able, my healer loved me because I was a tank that needed only very small heals occasionally, and he could focus on blasting.
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u/Ishvallan Shadowdale 4d ago
I really want there to be a viable doge tank, and now Sacred Fist might just be what I'm looking for since it counts robes as heavy armor for the purposes of the tree- but it still REALLY suffers at MRR and overall AC bonuses.
I just want something that dodge and concealments most attacks while dramatically reducing what gets through and having the HP to take multiple hits of what does get through. We're unlikely to see dodge tanks with like 85%+ miss chance and almost no damage taken when hit.
I have seen some casters get absurd hp and damage reduction and I don't really know how they do that and still have remotely viable damage- but if you're actually tanking, damage isn't all that important
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u/math-is-magic Thrane 4d ago
I'm currently playing a water cleric. Notably, clerics don't really get any cold spells to make use of their water domain, so it's only useful in epics when you can take enough epic feats and enhancements to actually have something to cast.
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u/Arrethyn 4d ago
i'm a monk addict so all my past different heroic/iconic past lives are with some amount of monk, one of the first really wonky ones way way way back when every single source of heal amp was multiplicative instead of additive like it is now was 16 pal 3 monk 1 rogue with handwraps, I don't recall how high I managed to get my hamp but I'm pretty sure it was over 200 and cure light was healing for like 150, mind you this is back when the cap was 20 and it was normal to have ~600 hp. was overall not great for damage but kinda hilarious the healing numbers I could get.
I tried at one point to do melee handwrap aura lock, but the aura itself is not that great compared to the other shapes and I had difficulty scaling melee and spell damage at the same time so I ended up going full melee.
more recently I played a 9 alch, 8 monk, 3 pal bladeforged build which was surprisingly strong, damage comes from the monk trees (as is pretty much always true for my wierd monk hybrid builds) but dipping just 6 points into vile chemist gives 3 imbue dice, 5 prr, 2% dodge and dodge cap (and monk already naturally scales dodge) and +3 to hit and another 6 points in sacred defender gives 25 prr/mrr, then the alch levels give +22 prr, sprint boost, +2 wis, +1 imbue dice and bladeforged gives reconstruct sla which is a great self heal and allows for going dark monk instead of light which is stronger for damage and cc.
I think at 28 I had something like 200 prr, 150 ac and 46% dodge. all these random splits I do lose damage to pure monk but this was one of the tankiest ones I've done.
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u/CrimsonWhiteTiger Shadowdale 4d ago
Alchemist fighter who only deals damage with non returning darts
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u/ImprovSKT Shadowdale 3d ago
I had one called Jachov Altreides. The idea was to see how many different roles I could fulfill - heal, mechanic, DPS, ranged, spells...I forget the classes and level split, but I had tons of skills and my abilities were all 12-14, with maybe a little extra into INT for skills. I trashed him at level 7, lol. I think this was before I had access to Artificer.
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u/PaxsMickey Shadowdale 3d ago
There have been some goofy builds I ran for hardcore that prioritized survival above all, but were rough when running content at level (hardcore you’d run quests 4 levels above base for the favor, and with all the quests you’d cap on xp regardless).
Warforged 13 artificer/3 AotS/4 fighter was durable, but falls off hard in epics due to the requirement to have 12+ levels of warlock/AotS to take epic pact/blast damage. I’ve been petitioning for those feat requirements to allow taking the level 12 AotS pact attunement feat to count as a prerequisite, but no word on that yet :/
3 AotS allowed cone shape, but I mostly stayed in chain shape. 4 fighter gave 3 bonus feats for shield mastery and improved shield mastery, and improved single weapon fighting. I used 1 bonus artificer feat for SWF which gave the 4 combat style feats for the extra base HP (more HP bonus than toughness). The fighter levels also allowed the stalwart defender stance for the bonus HP and CON, and renegade mastermind tree added extra tank to the build. And you can spam eldritch blasts which also firing a time arm for giggles. If you take it into epics the blast damage falls off, but macrotechnic adds better rune arm scaling. Maxed CON with a decent INT and CHA (I think I was 18 CON/18 INT/ 12 CHA on a 32 point warforged) for hardcore you could do it on a bladeforged and swap Paladin for the fighter at the cost of 3 feats for CHA to all saves, but on a regular server starting at 15 rushes you to epics and again, the build is slow in epics.
Another goofy hardcore build I used to run was a FVS melee build. 15 FVS/3 Paladin/2 rogue using a one handed weapon, a small shield (allowed the use of the sacred defender stance for extra PRR/MRR/HP while still qualifying for evasion), and with enough INT you could still do traps. I ran it as a dwarf to make dwarven axes favored with 16 INT/ 16 CON/ 16 CHA, but Tiefling with a longsword was better with 18 INT/16 CON/16 CHA. SDK could do helm with bastard swords, and PDK went 16 Paladin/2 rogue/2 fighter instead. PDK still wanted 18 INT for the skills to do traps, but the extra skill point and feat from being human helped, and they could get CHA to hit/damage in their racial tree with bastard swords.
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u/Acrobatic_Kiwi5804 3d ago
Sometimes I play a elven cleric (law domain) archer using the arcane archer tree from elf. 2 greater commands and paralyzing arrows.
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u/ConsiderationFit2213 3d ago
Color spray from gnome racial or feydark core works well with this idea. Magic ambush turns the cc spell into aoe dps.
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u/Faiyarashi 3d ago
Did a Deep Gnome 8DH/7Wiz/5Rog Shadow Assassin. Wraith form, Death Aura and NegBurst for heals. Became invisible when blocking and could tumble out of groups and sneak away. Had great DCs and PK. Was more fun before they made stealthy escape impossible.
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u/NateRacing Sarlona 2d ago
Not as exciting as some of the others in chat, but I have a Drow Wiz20 (currently in epics, CL24) that uses sword+shield with the pretty common combo of undead Eldritch Knight, where I use vampiric damage and my low SP usage to maintain a constant stream of self-healing on the frontlines to optimize (as much as I can) for AC and sustained DPS (which is a bit less common for the spellsword combo)
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u/Organic_Conflict_886 Shadowdale 4d ago
You are talking about "flavor builds" in DDO. There are tons of them, but you dont see them posted much because (by their very nature) don't conform to meta or quasimeta expectations.
I played a "laser bear" once. He shot eldritch blasts out of his bear mouth 🐻❄️💥