Pure Caster Build for Inquisitor

[Von Bek 0]

So, this is my first actual post on one of my builds (I've got a lot that I have written up but haven't posted yet. I'll get them up here if I see it's unique). So, my reason for this build is to set the inquisitor up as a complete mage. For him, I feel that he'd much rather let other things do his dirty work for him (ala Emperor Palpatine. . . muwahahahaha). Well, here goes:

 

 

1. Armor Lore

2. Nefarious Netherworld Lore

3. Nefarious Netherworld Focus

4. Astute Supremacy Lore

5. Astute Supremacy Focus

6. Concentration

7. Dual Wield

8. Toughness

9. Constitution

10. **Tactics Lore

 

**I may change this skill out. Tactics could be changed to Riding or Combat Discipline or Combat Reflexes depending on how it all goes. I don't really see myself hitting things all that much. Dual Wield could be a good choice. Weapons can augment your Combat Arts nicely and since he can't use shields (lame), it could take some of that slack up and help your Doppel deal more damage.

 

Skill point allocation: Point-wise, you're going to want to choose one of the aspects and stick with it. Either is good. The other I wouldn't keep at a max level, as you can always find gear to augment the one you don't choose. Concentration is going to HAVE to get to 75. We're going to need those buffs. Toughness and Constitution may need a decent pool of points, but I haven't really met too much trouble with this build (you may be able to change them out with something). Armor lore is almost a must. That increase to armor values can keep you alive, but its reduction to the armor penalty is kind of moot for this character, whose only heavy armor is his helmet and his spaulders.

 

Attributes- We're going to be needing Stamina, Intelligence, and Vitality. I would say to go heavy on Stamina and Intelligence. We're casters, we need to be able to hit fast and strike hard. Vitality will keep you alive a bit better, but again, I haven't had too much trouble. Use your own judgment with point allocation here. You've got a lot to use and gear can help take up the slack a bit.

 

Combat Arts: Here's the meat of what we'll be doing:

 

Inexorable Subjugation- This skill is going to be a good friend of your's. It'll kill enemies and make friends! What more do you need? It's also a wonderful disabler so your soul companions can take a whack at 'em.

Mods:

Brunt- Damage can be increased with other things and this gives more chances for crit strikes.

Menace- The companions have to be able to tank for you and do a considerable amount of damage, hence we need them stronger.

Probation- Can't be having those companions quitting too soon, make 'em stick around longer!

 

Levin Array- This skill will be used in conjuction with Dislodged Spirit. Paralyze them and then zap them. These two skills will also help you net souls to the buff Soul Reaver.

Mods:

**I'll leave these up to you. It'll have a lot to do with play style. I tend to lengthen it and take away attack speed, with an increase to crit rates.

 

Dislodged Spirit- Read above. You can also use this to gain some think time when dealing with champions. Touch them and run for some needed time to regroup.

Mods:

Spite- This is a wonderful disabler and allows you to run from big baddies. Make it last longer! Damage can come from other Combat Arts.

Torture- I suggest taking this, it makes the skill more viable as a killer by itself and can lead in nicely to Wildfire (3rd level mod), but I've got other plans.

Stimulate- Oh my, this is the Holy Grail, right here. We're a caster and need our Combat Arts ready for use. Coupled with the increased duration from Spite, this works wonders!

 

Clustering Maelstrom- See a mob of enemies? Use this with due haste and use those numbers against them. This CA is AWESOME in tandem with Soul Reaver.

Mods:

1st level mods- I'm not sure how Chaotic works. . . So, I'm not really going to suggest too much here. Sorry. I'll keep testing to figure it out.

Vortex- We'll be needing to both keep baddies away from ourselves and pull more together from longer distances. Increase that range.

3rd level mods- Either of these mods are great. An increased range will augment the spell to do more damage by grabbing more mobs, and a stun chance can be really good. Keep in mind that stun chances (I believe) can be added to equipment, an increase to CA range can not be.

 

Buffs- I would mod out Zealous Doppelganger as soon as possible. It'll keep a meat shield with you at all times, and that's never a bad thing, is it?

 

Soul Reaver- This is going to be modded to help with those Regen times. Try to keep a soul or two with you whenever you can. This can be done by letting your minions kill a mob when you're close enough, or just use your spells (Inexorable Subjugation can not add a soul to this. Why? Because it's being used for another purpose: creating a ghost to run around with you.)

Mods:

Zealot- These souls have to stick around when you've got them, and we're going to try to stay away from mobs. Take this one.

Source- Yay! More CA regen bonuses! Nab it.

Zealot- I suggest this one to take full advantage of the Source mod and we're going to try not to get hit when we're playing. Let the minions take the pain.

 

Zealous Doppelganger- (THE 2nd LEVEL MODS ARE BUGGED, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK UNTIL IT IS PATCHED) Mod this guy first. It's a life-saver, believe me, and it'll buy you some time to let your Combat Arts regenerate.

Mods:

Incentive- We're going to be needing this guy to tank for us and actually hit things. (In the Wiki, it says Vigor gives him 600 hp/s + 6 hp/s. Personally, we need him to hit stuff and not get hit. Use your own discretion.)

Equal- He's going to have to melee and we need him to get his butt up there. Give him the tools to hit things. (I'm not sure if the CA levels are based on your's, or if he gets any of the mods you choose. As more info comes in, I may need to change this.)

Companion- I'll bet you already guessed what the last one was. Smarty-pants. Grab a friend and let's keep going!

 

Reverse Polarity- What a wonderful little buff this is! It essentially has a chance to reflect EVERY attack type that's out there, and will add a defense value. Whoa. . .

Mods:

Rebound- Yuck, other caster's spells. Just send 'em back with this mod.

Couterblow- If mobs seem to be getting too close, don't fret; make them hit themselves, instead.

Evade- Nobody likes to take damage. With the increase to your defense value, this mod makes it all the harder for enemies to land any hits.

 

So, there's the build. He does take some micro-management but I've had nothing, but fun playing him. I'm currently awaiting the next patch to see if the doppelproblem gets fixed. . . It makes me so sad. Well, have fun all and I hope to hear any suggestions!

Edited January 30, 2009 by Von Bek

[Dobri 55]

I like your build. I'm doing something like this - I only added bargaining since the Inqisitor doesn't have enhanced perception, which makes him somewhat short of uniques and set items and added dual wield.

 

Why dual wield?

 

In my opinion, this will make him slightly more universal. Dual wield will allow you to equip:

2 combat weapons

2 all skills weapons

2 staves for faster cast/spell intensity

 

since you have 4 weapon slots, you can switch between the required stuff effortlessly.

 

I still took tactics lore to compensate for the damage.

 

EDIT: I think chaotic is a great mod for clustering maelstrom. However, in order to shine you need to get a lot of monsters in the same spot (I'd say 7+). When they get drawn in the center of the maelstrom, they will collide with eachother, increasing the damage taken. My favorite thing to do is find a place with lots of enemies, make them follow me until I'm satisfied with the count and just whack a maelstrom. 10-15 mob kill at the same time is just grand, and chaotic will help you, since they'll be constantly colliding into each other, thus increasing the damage they take.

Edited January 29, 2009 by Dobri

[Von Bek 0]

Wonderful! I was tentatively awaiting a reply. In the mean time, I was mulling over dual wield and added that to my build. I'll make the required revisions.

 

As for chaotic, when I've tested it, I didn't see an increase in the numbers being dealt. However, I think I saw MORE instances of damage being produced, but I can't say anything definitively.

Edited January 29, 2009 by Von Bek

[nokka 0]

I agree with Dobri on the Dual Wield idea:

 

The Inquisitor doesn't use shields anyway, so he's either stuck with one one-hand weapon or one two-hand weapon.

The extra slot will really come in handy for bonuses - as Dobri said.

 

Great idea for a build, by the way. Makes me want to try my hand at it.

 

nat

 

As for **Tactics Lore, I would take Combat Discipline (pure caster, right?) OR Combat Reflexes (better safe than sorry).

Since you eventually will have Reverse Polarity at a considerable strength, I'd go for the damage and regen enhancing CD and take my risk with only +160% evade chance from items.

Edited January 29, 2009 by nokka

[Dobri 55]

Well, you do miss out on the weapon-specific bonuses based in their class (hafted/ranged/sword, whatnot), but in my opinion the only thing that you need as a caster are items with death blow, + all skills and a lot of sockets to add runes/rings/amulets for armor and/or regen time. I'm starting to get over that +XP per kill mania with casters... A caster needs all the bonuses he can get.

[Llama8 9]

My understanding of Gravitation/Chaos is that Gravitation increases the damage that CM does per hit (so if it said it was doing 100 damage, now it's doing 1xx damage) regardless of the number of monsters involved, while Chaos does more damage if you've got more mobs involved, but I could be wrong.

 

Another CA that you may wish to use is Eruptive Desecration (Corpse Explosion). If you can get a kill from/before Clustering Maelstrom, use CM as close to the corpse as you can, then when all of the monsters are clustered around the corpse from CM (if they're not all dead), use ED & most/all of them will take damage! May well be useful in a combo as well. The only downside is that ED targets the nearest corpse to your Inquisitor, it doesn't let you target a corpse yourself & I'm not sure about some of the mods for it:

 

Silver:

Violence - Increases the damage dealt by explosions. (50% increased physical damage)

Danger Zone - Increases the damage range of the explosions. (50% increase from base value)

 

Violence sounds like it gives a damage increase to the CA, but what does Danger Zone do? IIRC, the CA doesn't have a damage range (eg 50-100 damage), & there's a Gold mod that increase the Area of Effect of the CA & if there are two mods that do the same thing, they usually have the same name (see Soul Reaver).

[Von Bek 0]

My understanding of Gravitation/Chaos is that Gravitation increases the damage that CM does per hit (so if it said it was doing 100 damage, now it's doing 1xx damage) regardless of the number of monsters involved, while Chaos does more damage if you've got more mobs involved, but I could be wrong.

 

Another CA that you may wish to use is Eruptive Desecration (Corpse Explosion). If you can get a kill from/before Clustering Maelstrom, use CM as close to the corpse as you can, then when all of the monsters are clustered around the corpse from CM (if they're not all dead), use ED & most/all of them will take damage! May well be useful in a combo as well. The only downside is that ED targets the nearest corpse to your Inquisitor, it doesn't let you target a corpse yourself & I'm not sure about some of the mods for it:

 

Silver:

Violence - Increases the damage dealt by explosions. (50% increased physical damage)

Danger Zone - Increases the damage range of the explosions. (50% increase from base value)

 

Violence sounds like it gives a damage increase to the CA, but what does Danger Zone do? IIRC, the CA doesn't have a damage range (eg 50-100 damage), & there's a Gold mod that increase the Area of Effect of the CA & if there are two mods that do the same thing, they usually have the same name (see Soul Reaver).

 

 

I think Danger Zone means that the radius of the explosion is increased. Not all Mods that do the same thing have the same name. The Shadow Warrior CA, Frenzied Rampage, has two mods that increase chance for double strikes. One is named Double Attack and the other is Double Strike. But, in the tool tips, the Area of Effect is very specific. So, I can do some testing for ye all and find out for certain. And, I like the combo. . . I'm going to give that some tries as well

 

Oh, and I did some pretty extensive testing with Chaos. . . I wasn't really seeing huge numbers, even when there were 10 extra baddies included in the spell. The damage range stayed pretty equal. I may just have to increase the damage to see a noticeable change. I'll test this when I'm running around, too.

Edited January 30, 2009 by Von Bek

[Angry Slick 0]

I was just wondering if you add extra CA on top like lvled up the CA would it b wise or should I stay bulkstandered

[Chareos Rantras 0]

Zealous Doppelganger- (THE 2nd LEVEL MODS ARE BUGGED, USE AT YOUR OWN RISK UNTIL IT IS PATCHED) Mod this guy first. It's a life-saver, believe me, and it'll buy you some time to let your Combat Arts regenerate.

Mods:

Incentive- We're going to be needing this guy to tank for us and actually hit things. (In the Wiki, it says Vigor gives him 600 hp/s + 6 hp/s. Personally, we need him to hit stuff and not get hit. Use your own discretion.)

Equal- He's going to have to melee and we need him to get his butt up there. Give him the tools to hit things. (I'm not sure if the CA levels are based on your's, or if he gets any of the mods you choose. As more info comes in, I may need to change this.)

Companion- I'll bet you already guessed what the last one was. Smarty-pants. Grab a friend and let's keep going!

 

 

What's bugged about the 2nd level mods? Do you mean the doppel army when you take the Astute Supremecay mod?

 

 

cheers!

Chareos Rantras

[StiCk_eM 1]

This is a very cool build idea and there has been a lot thrown around about it!

 

One thing I was thinking when I was going through your build and especially your modifications was when I got to Reverse Polarity and the whole time you talked about this being a companion build right? Why not take the gold mod that spreads damage around to all your little friends? Say you have 5 minions...that's 25% damage dealt from your enemy taken away! Sounds pretty sweet to me especially since that percent will grow as you increase the level of it!

 

Deff use Eruptive Desecration take:

Greed for the bronze mod because you don't want the souls to heal you when they should be going to your Soul Reaver

I would go with Violence for the silver mod just because the damage on the CA is pretty small in the beginning and range is not so much a factor with this combat art

And deff take Plauge for the DoT because it is really great!

 

I would also think about using Raving Thrust later on because it is a good CA to use in conjunction with Clustering Maelstrom...Push em out then pull em in and watch the damage fly! Oh right and don't forget to explode a body and then hit em with the lightning bolts? So many options! Sounds like a lot of fun...

 

Regarding the skills I would deff take Combat Discipline because it increases your damage across the board and allows you to have crazy combos making your Inquisitor more deadly...Combos are so much fun in Sacred 2!

Everything else seems fine my only other thing would be to think about if you really want Toughness because the bonuses you get from that skill are minimal unless you really pump the points into it...so you might want to take Combat Reflexes or Spell Resistance depending on which you are more worried about OR just stick with Toughness and play off the synergy between Armor Lore and Toughness.

 

Hope this helps,

 

StiCk_eM

Edited June 13, 2009 by StiCk_eM

[MTCityHunter 0]

This is a very cool build idea and there has been a lot thrown around about it!

 

One thing I was thinking when I was going through your build and especially your modifications was when I got to Reverse Polarity and the whole time you talked about this being a companion build right? Why not take the gold mod that spreads damage around to all your little friends? Say you have 5 minions...that's 25% damage dealt from your enemy taken away! Sounds pretty sweet to me especially since that percent will grow as you increase the level of it!

 

StiCk_eM

 

I think this is a fantastic suggestion. For a build based on having Dopp and 3-4 IS minions about all the time, the exploit mod would provide some serious mitigation (5% per party member, capped at 25% I believe). The + defense mod is good too, and has great synergy with SR, but in this case, I'd be inclined to go with exploit. Heck, you're already stealing souls from SR if you use IS a lot anyways!

 

Nice build regardless. I've always liked casters. Cheers!

[Doz 0]

Thats quite genius, I shall use this one when I decide to make an Inquisitor thanks!

[super-avianti 1]

I've one question about CM, I tried the Vortex mod and they work great but I never tried the other mods?

Did somebody gave them a chance? It "seems" to me (I never tried to make proper measurement) that the range of CM is growing a bit over time and both the stunning and the bleeding effect are tempting. COuld it be a "sane" trade off to maximize the utility of CM on tiny mobs and simply spell some more time against bigger mobs? (when facing bigger mods the stun effect + bleed may compensate a bit for taking your encounters faster, the longer they stand the more likely they are to hit you but if stunned or bleeding?)

 

Edit

I'm not that willing to try my self as testing is so time intensive on console and bad items managements (my fault) did not help either (At some point my chest was so full I cleared it a bit too recklessly ~armor sets aside I no longer have +% XP per kills and the like...)

As a note I would compensate for the likely a bit lesser damage against huge mod by taking the LA "paralize" mod as slow down enemies leave you option for m more strategic positioning.

Edited June 3, 2011 by super-avianti

[essjayehm 58]

I played a few GI-NN inquisitors and sometimes I was using a level 1 CM just for "defensive" purposes. Unmodified, I found that it can make enemies forget about you - often after a maelstrom some of the mobs would stop agro against you and just wander around. That did get me to consider taking the wounding/stunning setup but I never did get around to it.

 

Unfortunately, I do think that it is strictly inferior to using CM as a "smash everything on-screen" when you have both vortex mods and some +CA range (Hello, Nlovae's Mystery)... but it could be 'effective' if you planned around it, as you indicated.

[super-avianti 1]

I played a few GI-NN inquisitors and sometimes I was using a level 1 CM just for "defensive" purposes. Unmodified, I found that it can make enemies forget about you - often after a maelstrom some of the mobs would stop agro against you and just wander around. That did get me to consider taking the wounding/stunning setup but I never did get around to it.

 

Unfortunately, I do think that it is strictly inferior to using CM as a "smash everything on-screen" when you have both vortex mods and some +CA range (Hello, Nlovae's Mystery)... but it could be 'effective' if you planned around it, as you indicated.

Interesting I may try to play a build for some hour to see how it goes, I'm addicted to the game and fraked up experiments too...

Who knows may be I will find that it's an effective way to not still the show from my minions (can't mean slower killing too, then it depends on what is the safest strategy if one were to try in hardcore fashion).