October 21, 2024
-Build created for NW: Aeternum
-New weapon trees added

Rapier is a dynamic weapon that excels in dealing high damage over time (DoT) while emphasizing skill usage over basic attacks. This finesse weapon thrives on agility and precision. By focusing on strategically positioning themselves to hit enemies where it hurts most players can maximize their DPS potential through high base crit values of rapier. The Rapier's unique mechanics encourage a playstyle that rewards skill timing and mobility, ensuring that players can consistently deal devastating damage. With its ability to apply bleeds and weakness to enemies, the Rapier stands out as a formidable choice for those seeking to dominate in melee combat in dungeons and open-world Bosses.

Let's take a look at the Rapier weapon tree:

As you can see it is mainly the Blood side of the tree as we focus on pure DPS. Flurry is incredible for bursting a group of mobs and refreshing its cooldown. Flourish and Finish with Bloody End Ultimate Passive is making detonating our bleeds pop any target we encounter. Remember to use it on 3 stacks of rapier bleed for maximalizing DPS. This weapon will deal more damage while our enemy has more than 50% of the health pool.

Active Skills:

1. Flurry: hitting groups of mobs will allow us to spam this ability for incredible damage. Now it provides grit so we will not be staggered while performing this ability. It also applies a stack of rapier bleed
2. Floury and Finish: The first use case for this ability is detonating our bleeds when we see those reached 3 stacks. The second is staggering and pushing back mobs with Flouring, then using Fiinish to escape.
3. Tondo: our main source of applying bleed to all targets in the cone. While using the Finisher artifact it will weaken targets and provide a huge crit chance buff.

Core Passives:

1. Red Curtains: The main way to decrease our cooldowns on any attack.
2. Desperation and Perfectionist: are two out of four damage passives we use, however for those to be active we need to keep our stamina under 40% and our health full
3. Unerring and Engarde: those we do not need to worry about as conditions will be met automatically
4. Bloody End: our Blood three ultimate is strictly connected to Finish ability. We will consume all bleeds and deal the damage those would provide over time instantly increasing their potency by 50%.

The Spear excels in dealing sustained damage while applying powerful debuffs to enemies. As a thrust weapon, the Spear is particularly effective against corrupted foes, making it an ideal choice for our build. Its ability to inflict bleed, rend, and weaken enemies allows players to contribute significantly to their team's overall damage strategy. Whether you’re aiming for single-target elimination or enhancing team synergy, the Spear offers unparalleled benefits.

Speaking about our Weapon Tree choices:

This weapon will deal more damage while our target is below 30% of its health pool.

Active Skills:

1. Skewer: great skill to open the fight as it will deal more damage on full hp targets and leave a strong bleed that will remain for long. If our attack crits we will be provided with 20% empower for 10s
2. Perforate: one of the best sources of Rend in the game. Now it also inflicts Weakon on hit.
3. Sweep: is only hard CC in our kit that will also deal great amounts of damage. spear deals more damage to knocked down targets which this skill lets us take advantage of. Using perk for Sweep will cause Coup de Grace, which is a heavy stab after the Sweep also leave bleed on the target.

Core Passives:

1. Merciless Strength: this passive increases our damage to knock down enemies greatly.
2. Finishing Blows: as the name of the passive suggests, we will deal more damage to low-hp targets.
3. Aggressive Maneuvers: is an amazing way to get our cooldowns down. We need to use dodge before hitting the ability to use it.
4. Exploited Weakness: our damage is increased for each debuff on the target which there will be a lot while we use both spear and rapier.

Your main task as DPS is cranking the most damage numbers so it is essential you understand how to build and achieve it. Your damage values are based on a mathematical formula taking into consideration things like your level, gear score, level of your enemy, affixes and armor and so on. To simplify this people often use the concept of damage buckets.
Each bucked contains a similar type of buffs that are additive with each other so adding more of those will not give bigger results.
However, if you combine buffs from different buckets magic starts as those will be multiplicative with each other.
In this case you should be aware of three buckets:

• base damage
• empower / weaken
• fortify / rend

Most skills and even basic attacks have their own base damage value which is more than often over 100%. Many passives from the weapon tree and attribute bonuses bring this form of damage increase as well. For this reason that bucket is often overpopulated and adding more of those buffs is not translating to that much more damage when attacking your target. That is exactly why empowers for example like 20% empower you get when criting with perforate is such an important buff. Standing in an oblivion placed by your healer will give you empower as well. This type of effect are capped at 50%, however every percentage of weaken on you is bringing your empower down as empower and weaken are in the same damage bucket. The third bucket is fortify and rend. Those are strictly connected to your armor and gems. 

Long story short it is very important to use different methods to increase your damage. Have a lot of easily accessible buffs to base damage, use empowers whenever you can and don't forget to put rend debuff on your enemy so everybody deals more damage to it.

Weapons:

• Rapier: 

As soon as you get your hands on the Finisher artifact it will increase your damage basically at all times on both of the weapons.

Perks: Vicious, Rogue, Leeching Flurry, Keenly Empowered

Gem: For group content, as dungeon Cut Pristine Diamond is commonly used. If you are going for solo activity you can use Opal or Onyx to double down on rapier passives.

• Spear: 

Perks: Enfeebling Skewer, Rogue, Vicious

Gem: To follow what we said for gems in rapier, it could be Diamond, Opal or Emerald if you decided to slot Onyx in the Rapier.

We are aiming for a light equip load for the most damage output and long dodges.

Fir the armor pieces make sure you stack as close to 4 refreshments as possible.
5 x Health
5 x Enchanted Ward
3 x Refreshing
1 x Bleeding Sweep
1 x Fortifying Perforate (optional for survivability if you use your spear for longer than your skills rotation)

Gems: Split gem resistances evenly or use more elemental protection. If you are going to play Mutation dungeon, slot gems that correspond with the mutation.

Amulet: Health, Divine, any Protection perk for example Frozen if you are going to play Icebound Mutation dungeon.

Ring: Hearty, Thrust damage, Blood Letting

Earring: Refreshing, Regenerating, Empowering Toast

Brutal Heartrune of Fire Storm - will deal a great amount of damage and not interrupt your combo without taking any risks like detonate would bring.

Stalwart Heartrune of Stoneform - will make you immune to crowd control while healing for a short duration.

ENDNOTE

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