Dark Agartha -- Offhand Immortal build tip

Secret World Legends General Discussion Orochi Labs
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This is a cheap (cheesey?) swap for the off-hand that will likely provide more than enough healing, cleansing, and an interrupt (if necessary) in case you’re having trouble with Dark Agartha.

NB (new bees especially): this is a niche / special-use build that tickled and surprised me because it found a use for things that are very rarely used. It is effective in DA, but I’d not recommend trotting it out in front of any group or even for scenarios.

Gear:

  • Blade (any can work, but Stormbringer is much nicer)
  • [optional] Ningishzada’s Rod (tiny heal every 1s for a bit more passive healing)
  • [optional] Biological Metamorphosis Signet (boosts rod’s heals)

Actives:

  • Soothing Spring (11.5% heal + 1.5% heal every 0.5s + 1 cleanse every 1s over 6s)
  • [optional] Snake’s Bite (melee range interrupt)

Passives:

  • Clairovoyance (12.5% barrier on chi hot)
  • Immortal Spirit (1% hp every 3s on chi gain)
  • Focused Breathing (1 chi every 9s, mandatory if not using Stormbringer)

Stormbringer is ideal (1 chi every 10s), but not required. It does not need to be leveled. All it’s heals are based on %hp. These heals can crit, but glyphing the blade isn’t necessary.

BTW, this isn’t MY build – found it lurking on the web somewhere way back and dusted it off for DA today. The things I used are marked in bold above. Inside DA @ E8 with Pistol MH, it provided enough passive healing that I only used SS for cleansing, but not enough to stupidly stand in all the AE. It was a pleasant change from the frenetic prayers for more cruel delight crits. Fights were slower due to no OH dps, but not enough to make time an issue.

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Doesnt Matter Creation buff the damage of weapons? or does the rod have special conditions?

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Uh, what Matter Creation signet, I don’t see a Matter Creation signet … (heh, just snagged wrong name from waist list without reading … thanks for the catch)

1 Like
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More efficient off-hand weapon alternatives:

Hammer

  • Pain Suppression: For the next eight seconds, every direct hit you receive heals you for 50% of the damage dealt. Activate it when you health is below 100% and the boss is using auto-attacks. Provides good passive healing on a low cooldown. The accompanying passive No Pain, No Gain increases the heal to 113%.
  • Blindside: interrupts spell casts. 20-second cooldown.

Chaos Magic

  • Rewind: All damage receive for the next three seconds is tallied, and then you are healed for the full amount. Activate when the boss is attacking you directly or when you can’t avoid taking non-lethal damage from a spell.
  • Evulsion: Interrupts spells from up to 15 meters away.

You have good reactive self-heals and interrupts at the cost of one active ability each, all without the need to replace passives better invested in damage or utility for your primary weapon. Moreover, if greater durability is necessary, you can use the Hammer abilities Thick Skin and Rock Hard to gain a 5-second absorption barrier or the Chaos Magic abilities Twist Fate and Backlash to gain a reflect barrier that halves all incoming damage for the next six seconds.

Interrupting spells and cleansing debuffs and damage over time effects, however, can be easily dealt with using gadgets. A Purification Drone Model UW-0 cleanses one effect from you every second for the next six seconds. And the Mistress Bashosen interrupts a spell in a five-meter radius around you. Both gadgets are equally effective at their function and both have a 30-second cooldown, no matter their quality. Pair them with an Epic Level 20 Time and Space Alteration waist signet, and you can reduce their cooldowns to 20 seconds.

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Lotta good points, but the one part blade brings that I don’t think you can do with any other build is the high passive healing. Most of the time, you don’t need to pay attention to your hp. Hammer/Chaos must actively maintain buffs and I just don’t like Rewind – too hard to use, gotta plan ahead.

Hammer or Chaos do provide more heals, but it’s about the same for slot costs. Ignoring interrupts: 2x actives and 2x passives with hammer or chaos and 1x active and 2~3x passives for blade, depending on if you have stormbringer or not. I do like Evulsion much better than either Blindside or Snake Bite. I used Kill Blind from Pistol for my interrupt. Ranged beats melee.

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My primary concern was that you were giving advice on a signet that has a particular use in this build over another signet that opens up invaluable versatility for every player, including in Dark Agartha, to improve the healing for a gadget that is better replaced for a cleanse or interrupt. It can be costly to replace and level up a new signet if you find that you made the wrong choice.

Your off-hand weapon should be a supplement to the healing you generate from either Cruel Delight or your primary weapon. What you suggest for Blade will, of course, provide sufficient self-healing if that is what you need, as well as some additional utility, but the build investment might cut into your damage potential for what would amount to an excess of healing. On the other hand, if you finish Dark Agartha with plenty of time already despite all this, it doesn’t matter as long as you’re satisfied with the results.

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Exactly this, Rod gives such a tiny heal that you will not notice it and BioMet signet is a waste.
I did not do the maths but I am under the impression that an interrupt gadget used to stun while the boss is auto attacking could prevent more damage then what a Rod could heal in the same time.
Gadgets are better used for interrupting, cleansing or (if needed) purging. If none of those is needed you better use a dps gadget.
Belt signet should be Time&Space, almost mandatory IMO.

That said I never used blade but it looks like a pretty solid build :slight_smile:

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Pain Suppression w/ passive also has the nice bonus that (as a melee player) you don’t have to get out of the dirty keeper’s Malfunction cast, you just pop Pain Suppression and it heals you instead of hurting you.

Cleanse gadget (Asibikaashi’s Hoop) is pretty much my default now, useful on the majority of bosses.

The Rod heals enough that it pushed me over to sustainable NYR story soloing when I was in the IP500s range with very low crit chance, but that guy only does about 200 dps.

DA doesn’t particularly reward my dps being higher so I just run it with Demolish, Immutable, Pain Suppression, Thick Skin, and Blindside. no chaos power move. I think I’m only down 20-30% from my all out glass cannon build.

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Ah, this was definitely far from my intent. It was more of a side-mention for completeness sake. I use Time&Space myself and consider it to be near-mandatory. There are those that feel differently, though – someone in game suggested rod+bio and linked me a red bio, which inspired me to mention the bio signet.

You just inadvertently touched on my MAJOR gripe with a lot of Dark Agartha. ALL the bosses are cc-immune. Some particular moves can be interrupted, but none of them can be stunned, KD’d, etc… This means that builds that use controls to prevent damage don’t fly in DA, like my real build – Pistol/Ele or Shot/Ele. It’s literally a backhanded nerf to every build but dps+heal builds.

Occult does the same kind of backhanded nerfing to kite/alacrity builds with it’s ramped up runspeeds and 5m uber-buff, putting a premium on dps+heal again, though thankfully controls do work there for the most part and have exactly the effect you described. My HamCha runs Pandemonium there instead of Immutable because the 2xKD it gives prevents FAR more damage than Immutable heals.

I have HamCha & ARel chars, too. They walk into DA and just mow stuff down mostly without bothering to worry about anything other than if there happens to be something that might want interrupting. My HamCha just heals through GK and stands in most AEs, too.

This post was for peeps that might be sorta stuck with a character that relied on controls for defense, like my Pist/El char. Same thing with the debuff-immune bosses. Builds that don’t debuff don’t care. So, in effect, it’s a targeted nerf on builds that do rely on debuffs (like say, Pistol).

It seriously feels like FC is deliberately making it easy for the AR & HamCha (dps+heal) chars while making it harder for Pist/El (dps+control+debuf). It’s a really dirty trick – both irksome and sad, because the control builds are higher risk and more fun even without the nerfs. If they didn’t want controls and debuffs to be used, why did they put them in game!?

Experienced game designers rarely put “immune to skill” abilities into solo play because it plays havoc with balance. As soon as you do something like that, you are effectively nerfing all classes/builds/etc with that skill out of that encounter. This is why when designers add something like that to a “boss”, it’s only for group content and then done very carefully indeed.

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Anyway, back on topic, I’d agree that Hammer OH would be both more defensive and have more healing, mostly at the cost of extra attention to keeping the buffs up. I suspect I didn’t consider it simply because I have a HamCha char and I like diversity.

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You are right, I was talking more generally and not about DA in particular, so kinda off topic here.
But my main concern was about inexperienced players who could favour using a Rod plus Biomet for general soloing purposes which, IMO, would be a mistake.

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Well, general solo’ing is usually so easy you can wear anything or nothing. IMHO, It would be a mistake to gear specifically for that in any way. I absolute agree that tougher solo is unlikely to run with Bio+Rod; eg. occult past your own E-level.