Check out this new build guide for Warlock in Last Epoch 1.0, which is called the Torment Warlock. The Torment is an exceptional ailment that delivers a tremendous amount of damage with a single application. This build doesn't rely on special skill combos. If you’re new to the Warlock, this build is perfect for you.

Pros & Cons

The main reason to pick this build is the traditional gameplay of damage over time build that doesn’t require constant reapplying. You can achieve very high amounts of ward with a method to quickly recover it in case of danger, paired with access to a strong crowd control effect.

On top of that, your boss fights are very safe because of the high uptime of Profane Veil, which makes you almost immortal while your Torment continues to deal damage. You will have excellent damage with low gear requirements to start, and you will breeze through the campaign as soon as you unlock the Warlock Mastery.

Of course, this gameplay has some drawbacks that you should know of. The Chthonic Fissure skill has high mana consumption and requires proper skill usage management, which is especially noticeable during Echo. The single target damage is limited by the single stack of Torment, which can make boss fights a bit longer at higher corruption levels.

Gear Setup

Most of your ward comes from specific modifiers that are generated based on your missing health, available on specific unique and experimental items. But you don’t need it to farm low corruption levels. The more health you have, the more ward it will generate. The other items are very synergistic with the modifiers they provide, but are not required for functionality. You can decide which Uniques you need based on your amount of Last Epoch Gold.

The Marina's Lost Soul is a simple wand, but it grants you exactly what you need. It offers a lot of flat Necrotic damage for your spells and decently increases your spell and curse damage.However, it also lowers your maximum health a bit.

The Exsanguinous is one of the core items for your ward generation. It drains your health but restores a portion of your missing health as a ward, which you can then boost via ward retention or ward decay threshold. You will also gain a decent boost to your movement speed when you use a potion.

This pair of Last Steps of the Living boots offers the same modifier as the previous armor, further improving your ward generation. It also offers a decent amount of movement speed, but it is mostly negated because of the chill applied to you every 3 seconds. Your skills will cleanse negative effects on you, but not as often as those boots apply it.

This Boneclamor Barbute helmet offers plenty of intelligence and Necrotic Resistance and greatly increases your ward generation thanks to the resistance modifier you stack. It is fairly common, so getting one with good Legendary Potential shouldn’t be too daunting to acquire.

The most important modifiers to scale your damage are flat damage for spells, Necrotic Resistance, critical strike multiplier, and intelligence. You will also need some mana regeneration to comfortably spam your Chthonic Fissure during Echo, although it is not that important against bosses. The Necrotic Resistance and intelligence are also the major methods of improving your ward.

You will need an experimental mod on your gloves that grant you a ward based on the missing health, which is why you should improve your maximum health too. By increasing the health of your minions, you will improve the Vampiric Pool interaction. Capping your critical strike avoidance at 100% is mandatory for your survival.

Active Skills

Chthonic Fissure: This skill creates a rift in the ground that deals with a bit of damage and releases spirits upon contact. The spirits apply the curse of Torment, which is the major source of damage in this build. Most of your damage scaling comes from the Twisted Waves and Grim Tide, which grant you more damage per point of Necrotic Resistance or critical strike multiplier. You will also deal more damage against bleeding or poisoned enemies. The Stygian Coal, paired with the Gloom and Flames, increases the frequency of your spirits, making it easier to apply your Torment.

Spirit Plague: Inflicts your target with a curse of Spirit Plague, which deals with a small amount of Necrotic damage. In this build, it is used to buff your Torment damage even more. The Pestilence grants you global increased damage as you continue to cast the skill. The Enfeeblement weakens the enemies you hit, and the Anguish causes them to run in Fear.

Transplant: This is your movement skill. You should cast this as soon as it goes off cooldown as it also restores your mana and grants you the Bone Armor buff. The Acolyte’s Fervor also grants you Haste and Frenzy buffs for 3 seconds. The Azure Veins and Pale Blood restore your mana, but only if you hit at least one enemy. The Bone Armor and its upgrades grant you the Bone Armor buff, which reduces the damage you take.

Profane Veil: It is a very powerful defensive skill that makes you dodge any incoming hit when you keep channeling it. In this setup, it is also used to generate a lot of ward with the Vampiric Pool. You will consume your minions to get the ward based on their maximum health. You will also deal more damage to your Torment applied during channeling the Profane Veil. Thanks to the stream of profanity, you will lower the cooldown of the veil by spamming any curse skill.

Bone Curse: With this skill, you can weaken enemies and create a Bone Prison, providing a substantial ward increase when consumed. The Sigil of Mortality applies a Mark for Death on enemies, resulting in increased damage taken by them. With the Marrow Thief, you will occasionally gain Bone Armor when you kill enemies affected by the curse.

Passive Trees

Acolyte: Your basic Acolyte tree is focused mostly on defense. It will boost your ward resistance and intelligence. During leveling, you can pick Blood or a Blood Pact and Eye of Damnation to boost your damage, but it isn’t very effective in the endgame. The Stolen Vitality enhances the health of your minions, resulting in a greater amount of ward gained when you consume them.

Lich: The Survival of the Cruel is extremely useful during the campaign as it offers health leech. You may also opt for Dance with Dead and Grasp of Fate to augment your Necrotic damage. However, given your endgame setup, these passives are redundant and should be refunded. The Apocrypha is universally useful as it grants mana regeneration and intelligence.

Warlock: The Unholy Torment and Duskbringer are very valuable as they add flat spell damage to your Torment. The Doom Herald grants more damage when you channel the Profane Veil. You will take slightly less damage if you invest 5 points into Harrowing Armor, Dark Protections and Wither. With the Fleeting Crone, you will constantly have the Haste buff with an increased effect. Lastly, the Wreak Havoc grants you crit multiplier, which is converted into more damage.

Idols & Blessings

Then let's talk about idols in this build. You can use them to get more health, ward retention, stack more resistances, or improve your spell damage a bit. If you find yourself channeling to Profane Veil very often, you can try to get a modifier that generates ward for each second spent in the Veil.

For blessings, in the Black Sun timeline, you're faced with a choice between critical strike multiplier and void resistance. Opting for the resistance bonus is advisable, as it allows you to allocate more resources towards Necrotic Resistance elsewhere. In the Age of Winter timeline, you'll encounter a straightforward decision: cold or physical resistance, depending on your current needs.

Moving on to the Spirits of Fire timeline, you'll have the option to either reduce your enemies' Necrotic Resistance, particularly beneficial against bosses, or enhance your damage output by stacking more Necrotic Resistance instead. In the Reign of Dragons timeline, you can select one of the resistance bonuses or prioritize critical strike avoidance for improved survivability.

As you approach the end of the Storm timeline, choosing the Lightning Resistance blessing is a viable option, although ward-related bonuses should also be considered, especially if you lack the necessary Uniques combination.

I believe many players have noticed that there is a stat called Ward Retention in Last Epoch 1.0, which you sometimes see on gear and passive skills. Most notably, for every 1 point of intelligence you gain, you gain 4% Ward Retention, which I think is where most people’s Ward Retention comes from.

In fact, Ward Retention affects how quickly your ward decays over time. If you have a basic understanding of how Ward works, it’s not hard to see why a stat like this might be useful. In this guide, we’ll provide a brief overview of how Ward Retention works and explore how it affects Ward Decay rate.

Ward Decay Rate Formula

However, it is unclear how to judge the opportunity cost of Ward Retention modifiers. Fortunately, we have an equation:

Ward Decay Rate=0.4* (Current Ward - Ward Decay Threshold)/1+ (0.5*Ward Retention)

This means that Ward Decay rate depends on Current Ward, Ward Decay Threshold and Ward Retention. If you can invest some Last Epoch Gold to improve these stats, extending the duration of the ward will no longer be an issue.

For those not interested in math, here’s a summary: Just think of 2% Ward Retention as an increase of 1% Ward.

We will assume that Ward Decay Threshold is zero and ignore it. Because I want to focus the discussion on Ward Retention.

When you gain Ward, you gain some extra shield on your health bar, which decays exponentially over time.

With zero modifiers to ward, your Ward Decay rate is 40% of the current ward per second. This means that in order to maintain a certain number of wards, you need to generate 40% of the current ward value every second to offset the decay.

The Impact Of Ward Retention On Ward Decay Rate

Ward Retention reduces Ward Decay rate, but its implementation is a little unintuitive.

When you have Ward Retention, your Ward Decay rate is divided by 1 plus half of your Ward Retention stat. Because of this strange factor of 0.5, you actually need 200% Ward Retention to halve Ward Decay rate, which is 20% of the current ward per second.

In other words, 200% Ward Retention will extend the duration of your Ward by 100%. A Ward Retention of 400% extends the duration of Ward by 200%, and so on.

I’m not sure why the developers decided to put 0.5 into the formula here instead of simply dividing all Ward Retention values in the game by 2. This changes nothing except making Ward Retention value more intuitive and easier to understand.

For example, 100% Ward Retention means the ward lasts 100% longer. This seems more logical, but maybe we’re missing something.

The 2% Ward Retention Is Approximately Equal To 1% Ward

Even though you now understand how Ward Retention affects Ward Decay rate, there’s still a degree of separation between it and what we’re ultimately interested in, which is how does Ward Retention affect the total number of Wards you can maintain?

If you can generate 100 wards per second, you will reach a steady state of about 250 wards without any ward retention. Your Decay rate at that point is 100 wards per second, and since you can only get 100 wards per second, that’s the amount you can sustain.

On the contrary, if you have 200% Ward Retention, your ward will even reach 500. That’s because you now lose 20% of your ward per second instead of 40%. So you need to reach 500 wards first, and then your Ward Decay rate is equal to 100 ward gain rate per second.

Following the same pattern, 400% Ward Retention will triple Ward retention, and 600% Ward Retention will quadruple Ward retention. In other words, you can think of every 2% of Ward Retention as “a 1% increase in Ward.”

Anyway, this concludes this guide to Ward Retention mechanism. As always, if you have a different opinion, don’t forget to share it!

Today comes a new Last Epoch 1.0 guide that dives deep into the art of crafting an incredibly formidable Detonating Arrow Explosive Trap Marksman. I will provide you with all the essential information necessary to master this highly potent build.

Pros & Cons

Pros: It offers an outrageous amount of damage with easy access to scaling it further. You will have very fast movement speed thanks to an almost permanent haste buff with high effectiveness. You can easily reach high amounts of health paired with excellent health recovery and solid damage mitigation. A pair of commonly found unique daggers is the only requirement to start, and you can easily level up with bows.

Cons: There are also some disadvantages. The damage is inherently delayed by throwing the trap and waiting for the arrow detonation. The sources of health are fairly limited, and playing without gear and idols can be annoying.

Gear Setup

The only requirement is a pair of unique daggers, which are necessary to eliminate the Mana cost of your Detonating Arrow. Without them, you can use a traditional bow setup to level up, but it won’t be as powerful. The unique amulets offer useful defensive bonuses but are not required. This build is suitable for players who don't possess a substantial amount of Last Epoch Gold.

The Jelkhor’s Blast Knife is a unique dagger that converts the Detonating Arrow into a melee skill, offering an insane amount of damage for this skill and lowering its Mana cost. When you use 2 of them, you will gain tons of damage and eliminate the Mana cost completely, which is very important with such a high trigger rate. It is very easy to reach absurd amounts of damage, so you should focus mostly on your defense.

At first, the Bleeding Heart is a great amulet option to use. It enhances your throwing speed and provides you with a vital leech for sustenance. It is a common unique, so it is easy to get one with good legendary potential.

Omnis is a very convenient amulet that can grant you over 300% total resistances and boost the level of all your skills. It makes stacking health much easier as you don’t need to include that much resistance on your remaining gear.

To improve your damage, you should seek critical strikes, flat damage for melee attacks, and throwing speed. Do not get confused by throwing damage. It’s specific to Explosive Traps, not your Detonating Arrow. On your rings, it is essential to lower the throwing Mana costs. Ideally, you should source your health leech from the Stolen Tithe relic, but it might be hard to find one with good modifiers at first.

At later stages of the game, improving your survivability is much more important. Focus on increasing health, capping critical strike avoidance, improving dodge, armor, resistance, and endurance. It is possible to opt for the Ward version for better protection against single hits, but it has worse sustain and requires more unique items with good Legendary Potential bonuses to work.

Skills & Specializations

Detonating Arrow: The Detonating Arrow is your major source of damage in this build. We convert it into a melee attack, but since it is triggered by traps, you can essentially use it from a long distance. The Arcing Blast is a very important notable for your clear speed. It adds the Lightning Tendrils to the explosion.

The Weak Spot applies the Critical Vulnerability, making it much easier to cap your critical strike chance. The remaining notables are very straightforward. They just boost your damage, which is why additional levels of your daggers are very useful.

Explosive Trap: Upon detonation, this trap will activate adjacent traps, subsequently initiating the Detonating Arrow. Notably, the initial trap does not initiate the arrow's activation, necessitating the simultaneous deployment of multiple traps. The Explosive Trap notable is pivotal, facilitating the activation of Detonating Arrow.

You will also need the Traps corresponding conversion nodes and Clustered Explosives for 5 traps thrown at once. The Subtle Sabotage and Jelkhor's Blueprint are very helpful in reducing the Mana costs. The Trap Sprinkler and its upgrades grant a high chance to create a new trap upon detonation.

Shift: The Shift serves as an invaluable skill, swiftly propelling you toward a designated area while providing beneficial bonuses along the way. Shadowslip renders you impervious to harm during the shift. Through Swift Recovery, Shadow Recuperation, and Breathing Technique, you'll recover health and Mana.

The Molting effect will purify any adverse ailments affecting you. Following the use of the shift ability, you will experience a surge in speed, courtesy of the Arcane Momentum notable. Lasting Presence generates a shadow clone, providing supplementary damage.

Net: The Net stands as a powerful skill. When hurled, it enhances your DPS for a brief duration while slowing and enfeebling your adversaries. It can serve as a means to evade incoming attacks if preferred. The primary allure of this skill lies in the Leading the Hunt and Rapid Throws nodes.

Upon activation of this skill, your damage output increases by 10%, and your throwing speed receives a 20% boost for a duration of 6 seconds. Entangled adversaries will suffer reduced physical damage and acquire 3 stacks of Frailty, diminishing their damage output even more. The Bold Throw allows you to eliminate the backflip or modify jump behavior using alternative notables.

Smoke Bomb: The Smoke Bomb exhibits considerable potency as a defensive maneuver. It generates a veil of smoke that grants both offensive and defensive advantages, while also spawning Shadow Clones at regular intervals to emulate your actions. Enhanced melee damage is conferred by the Smoke Blades as you remain ensconced within the smokescreen.

The Umbral Assault generates shadow clones to further amplify your damage output. The Moonlight Bomb bestows upon you a stack of Silver Shroud, ensuring evasion of incoming attacks, even in the absence of natural dodge abilities.

Passive Skills

You’ll be using up most of your points in the initial Rogue skill tree. The Twin Blade holds the utmost significance in this build. It allows you to use 2 melee weapons at the same time at the cost of taking slightly increased damage when dual-wielding. You will gain all bonuses from each weapon.

• The Evasion provides a significant damage reduction, but only when you are moving. By wielding 2 daggers, Critical Precision provides a substantial increase in critical strike chance.
• The Sapping Strikes are very important early on, as you can use your Detonating Arrow manually to refill your mana to throw more traps.
• The Agility grants you haste on hit, which you will have almost permanently. The remaining passives will boost your glancing blow chance, dodge, health, or dexterity.

In the Bladedancer passive tree, you will get even more chance to receive a glancing blow and a bit of movement speed. With the Cloak of Shadows, your Glancing Blow chance is significantly boosted. You can convert your dodge chance of an even more Glancing Blow chance for a more reliable defense via Apostasy. The Shroud of Dusk grants you Dusk Shrouds when you’re hit. If you find yourself manually using the Detonating Arrow often in the beginning, the Veil of Night is a good option for you.

In the Falconer skill tree, you will gain minor bonuses to your attack speed, dodge, mana regeneration, and damage. The Raptor’s Wings grant you a chance to gain haste and improve your damage if you have that buff active. We didn’t spend a single point on the Marksman Mastery, as most passives there do not work with daggers. But you still need that Mastery to unlock the Detonating Arrow active skills tree.

Idols & Blessings

You can obtain a significant amount of health with your Stout Lagonian Idols, which can also grant resistance or armor. If you prefer to get more damage, look for critical strike chance or multiplier while dual-wielding, armor shred chance, throwing speed for explosive traps, or some increases to your damage.

The Health Leech blessings from the Black Sun are somewhat underwhelming, yet still preferable to having none at all. Alternatively, you can prioritize enhancing your leech rate or getting enough critical strike chance or multiplier.

While the blessing from the Age of Winter might serve as the sole means of boosting armor in this setup, you also have the option to select physical or cold resistance if those are more pressing needs. In the Spirits of Fire Timeline, you have the choice between fire resistance, armor, dodge, or endurance, depending on your current priorities.

The Reign of Dragons offers you the melee Health Leech, which you need for your sustenance if you don’t have it elsewhere. All options in the Ending the Storm Timeline are related to lightning, but you should aim for the Lightning Resistance Shred to significantly improve your damage against enemies.

Hi, gamers! Get ready as today I unveil the ultimate Plasma Orb runemaster build in Last Epoch 1.0, delivering the highest damage output. I’ll walk you through the best setup and the key nodes you should prioritize. Furthermore, I’ll detail the most potent gear, blessings, idols, skill rotations, and more. It's time to delve deeper into this.

Moving over to the build, and it’s called Plasma Orb runemaster. This build will blitz onto the battlefield, building fire and lightning. Because of the Runic Invocation, we will create Plasma Orbs that will hit all our enemies with lightning and do insane amounts of damage.

Skills

Let’s move on to the skills of this build. We will select the Flame Ward, Static Orb, Flame Rush, Runic Invocation, and Runebolt:

Flame Ward: This skill will give us a burst of 400 Ward, and then for the next 3 seconds, the enemy hits will deal 30% less damage. Because we will use the Astonish passive, this will make the skill automatically proc when you are stunned. So, we don’t have to put the Flame Ward on our actual action bar. So, we will use the Lightning Blast instead. By doing this, we will get 2 skills that we can use from one skill bar.

Static Orb: This will cast an orb that deals with lightning damage and pulls enemies that it hits towards it. In this setup, Static Orb serves as a support ability. So, we will use it to generate the cold runes for the Reowyn’s Frostguard. Static Orb passive will ensure that this lightning is always up 24/7. To make the setup work, make sure that you copy these exact allocated points.

Flame Rush: This skill will make your character turn into a ball of flame and launch yourself in the targeted direction. Flame Rush is our movement skill, and our setup will let the Flame Rush also cast a Static Orb when used. You will also gain Ward on use thanks to the Lunar Protection and a powerful damage reduction buff, which will be enhanced by the runic eclipse and Celestial Guidance nodes.

Runic Invocation: This is our main damage ability, and we will have to combine fire, lightning, and fire again, which is known as the F-L-F Runic, before casting the Runic Invocation.

So then we could cast the Plasma Orb. Plasma Orb is a secondary action of the skill that orbits around you and deals massive AOE damage to the enemies that it hits. Because we have selected the Copied Scrolls node, so once in a while, we will get to invoke twice as many Plasma Orbs as normal, thus doubling our damage output.

Runebolt: This is an ability that will fire piercing projectiles. The first part of the skill is fire, then the second part is lightning, and then the last one is cold. Runebolt’s major function in our setup is to enhance your Plasma Orbs and generate mana. Thanks to the Arcane Restoration node, it will guarantee that it only creates fire runes by grabbing the Searing Dart and Blazing Flare nodes.

Passive Skills

Next up, we have the passives, and they will provide powerful effects that dictate the play style of a class and its masteries. Remember that you can allocate passives in the first half of all the masteries, regardless of the one you choose.

For this build, we will mainly focus on intelligence, cast speed, and spell Critical Strike Chance. For the Spellblade, we don’t use anything. I recommend for you to fully complete the campaign so you could collect the remaining passive points.

Gear

Next, let’s turn to the gear. Of course, you can also use your Last Epoch Gold to get other items. For the endgame gear of this build, I recommend getting the following:

• Amulet: Omnis
• Wand: Shade’s Mad Alchemist’s Ladle
• Armour: Fundamental Criterion of Fortification
• Off-Hand Catalyst: Imbued Sealed Crystal Skull of Warding
• Ring: Scholar’s Sealed Opal Ring of Deflection
• Ring:Scholar’s Sealed Opal Ring of Life
• Belt: Cleansing Sealed Spidersilk Sash of the OX
• Gloves: Scholar’s Sealed Eternal Gauntlets of Acid
• Boots: Mercurial Morningfrost of the Giant
• Relics: Dexterous Twisted Heart of Unkeiros

Our main stat goal with this build is to cap resistance, get 100% reduced bonus damage taken from crits, get 100 plus intelligence, 500% plus Ward retention from 30 to 40% plus armor, 200% cast speed, 100% Critical Strike Chance, 500% increased damage, 2,000 plus health, and from 30 to 60% plus movement speed. But you will only achieve these stats by upgrading your setup to Tier 20 with Exalted items.

Blessings

When you complete a timeline in the Monolith of Fate, you have the opportunity to pick one blessing from a diverse selection of randomized blessings. Their benefits are permanent and persistent even outside of the Monolith of Fate.

Empowered blessings are a fundamental part of all builds in Last Epoch, so getting the correct one is a big deal. For the runemaster build’s blessings, we want to farm:

• Grand Sight of the Outcasts
• Grand Arrogance of Argentus
• Grand Hanger of the Void
• Grand Cruelty of Formosus
• Grand Light of the Moon
• Grand Hope of the Beginning
• Grand Resolve of Humanity
• Grand Memory of Masters
• Grand Resolve of Grael
• Grand Body of Obsidian

Idols

Finally, we have the idols. Idols will grant your character bonuses when equipped in the dedicated Idol Container. I strongly recommend you to unlock all the slots of your Idol Container as soon as possible, and you can do that by completing the campaign and some of its side quests.

As for our endgame setup, I recommend finding 4 Large Arcane Idols with the increased cast speed while you have Lightning Aegis and then the Elemental Resistance prefix. Then get 2 more Adorn Arcane Idols with the Ward Retention or Health on Kill prefixes.

Rotation

The Plasma Orb runemaster attacks enemies from close to long range, ensuring that all the skills at his disposal can hit the target from any distance. Before even attacking enemies, we need to combine the CFC by casting Static Orb, Runebolt, and then again, the Static Orb.

After this, cast the Reowyn’s Frostguard with the Runic Invocation. Then, we cast the Plasma Orb 2 times by repeating combining F-L-F Runics with the Runebolt, Lightning Blast, and Runebolt again, and then casting Runic Invocation. Engage your enemies with the assistance of the Plasma Orbs orbiting around you.

We only attack enemies by using the Flame Rush to move around the map and use the Static Orb, which will provide you with multiple buffs. Then, we cast more Plasma Orbs between Flame Rush and ensure that all the things orbiting you don’t go down.