Retaliation Skills Showcase: Ward Slayer Build Analysis

The retaliation Slayer excels in mapping but struggles against Uber bosses due to clunky mechanics.

### Ward Retaliation Slayer Showcase: Crushing Fist vs. Eviscerate
* ⚔️  The build focuses on a **unique playstyle** using retaliation skills, primarily **Crushing Fist and Eviscerate**, to deal damage.
* 🛡️  The character achieves **12,000 Ward** through specific gear and passive nodes, which boosts **damage output significantly**.
* 🏹  The player showcases the build in a Phoenix map, highlighting its **effectiveness in clearing high-tier content**.
* 💰  The main source of Ward generation is the **Yinda's Stand belt**, combined with **high armor and evasion** on the chest piece.
* 🔒  The character has **88% block chance**, which, combined with **high Ward**, provides **strong defensive layers** for mapping content.
* 🧊  The player experiments with **damage conversion** to maximize defenses against ailments, particularly **shock**.
* 🎯  The build struggles with Uber bosses due to the need to be hit to activate retaliation skills, suggesting the use of **Penance Mark for consistent hits**.
* 🔥  Overall, the build is described as "**not particularly OP or bad**," offering **decent damage for its budget** and providing a **fun and different playstyle**.

hello and welcome Exiles to my retaliation Ward Slayer. Now before we get into the details of what I'm doing here, why I have 12,000 Ward, I'm going to go ahead and run a phoenix map for you just to give a little Showcase of what the build looks like while mapping. I decided I wanted to ping pong between multiple retaliation skills. Originally, I started out with Cyclone, which is for the spinny AOE and the fun times, but since then, I've moved on to doing just both retaliation skills and ping pong between them with crushing Fist and eviscerate. Now, I have to say from my experience so far, um, crushing fist I think is just a Bar Superior skill. Has insane AOE and range. You see how far that thing goes out and its hit is about 20% higher at base, so it hits a lot, a lot harder. The way retaliation skills work is pretty simple. You need to block. If you blocked, then you can use the skill. That's how they activate, and then there's a cool

down from the last time they've been activated that you can use them again. As far as I can tell, they are basically unusable unless you have the Gladiator node measured retaliation, which is what I'm using right now, which basically gives a 50% chance to not use or put the skill on cooldown. Otherwise, your time between skill use would be very, very long. I am combining this with the node that gives 25% chance for when you use a retaliation skill to bring another off cooldown and another 10% Mastery for that exact same stat. That all combined with the big notable, the hidden notable that gives 20% chance to not put a retaliation on cooldown, means basically I can ping pong fairly consistently between the two skills as long as I've been hit semi-recently by an attack or by something. I should probably take off the Speed try just so I don't have that on for the boss here. I don't want to give you guys a false representation of what the

damage looks like, but it pretty much just looks like this. This is the key to a crucible that's pretty decent, I think, for having 85% more Monster life and 45 chaos res. This character is a full K damage build, and those mods are very significant in terms of making that boss four times to five times as tanky as it would be otherwise. So hopefully, that's a decent Showcase of the fact it can do fairly good damage, and it can chain a decent amount of those attacks back to back. Now, let's get into the basics of what I'm doing or the setup for this character, just to break down so to speak. I am using specifically the night grip gloves. These gloves give you 10% of your ward as chaos damage. You'll notice I have 12K Ward. That means this is giving me 1,200 flat chaos damage. This means the paradoxa, although normally is a sword that has no flat damage, scales quite well when you pair it with something like this, which gives a bunch of Black Chaos. So that's the

idea and how do we get this Ward. It's basically just through the new Yinda stand belt. This belt with quality starts out at 50% armor and evasion as Ward, but it goes all the way up to 60%. Pairs quite nicely with the new bases. You can get easily 4K, 4K plus. Here, I just have a 3.8, 3.7. This is like a T1, T2, T1 situation for hybrid. This is a pretty good dense fossil spam is what you want to do if you're going to craft this and then do some tailing orbs for 8% defense is what I recommend. So, the idea is a bunch of evasion, a bunch of armor on a chest piece, and then using this belt, we get a ton of Base Ward. So, with 8K, let's just say 8K is the raw number, 60% of that is 4,800 Ward. So, when you have 4,800 Ward, it's pretty easy with a little bit of increases to Ward for that.

to scale quite nicely, and hence we combine it with faith guard. Now, I don't think I'm particularly min-maxing this well at all. I think there's probably some weird potential for some like inst stack weird shenanigans where you could push this number really high up. I mostly just have um, I have the flat W from here, and then I have a little bit of in. I have about 200 in, and then I have one key piece that gives me a lot of percent, which is this thing right here, light of meaning. You'll see where the difference in this is, going from 8K Ward to 12K Ward. Now, something I want to note, light of meaning, uh, when I checked it out, has, I believe, it's quite a bit more expensive than, oh, I'm going to find where I put this, the light of meaning for per. Oh, here it is. The light of meaning for percent is very expensive. I think it's ballooned up because of trickster. Uh, what I recommend, if you don't want to spend 18 of vines.

because it's a huge price point in a way where it can really gouge you for price for trying to make this character replicate it is just get a light of meaning with percent chaos damage. You'll notice our average damage goes from 52 to about 440 average hit. That is about, I want to say, 20% less damage, something like that. You're still going to be shredding t16s, you're still going to be able to kill t-17s, um, but it is going to um break the bank. So if you want a more cost-effective solution percent cast damage, I'd recommend. Now you might be thinking Lance, you just dropped a lot of Ward. Does not ruin the defenses of the build. No, it does not ruin the defense of the build. The way these gloves work, as far as I understand, is when an enemy hits you with the way Ward Mechanics Work, is they will absorb one hit and they can absorb as much damage as they can absorb and then it'll disappear. And so if you get hit by, for example, 5K

damage about uh. I don't know 75% of that. Not about just exactly 75% of that will bypass and go straight to my life pool with 7K Ward, which is what we'd have if we have or 8K Ward if we have this out. If we have a hit that's going to have enough damage to bypass uh up to 3500 of my HP pool, that happens well before you get to AK Ward. Because if you like think about the proportions for the whole Ward to be effective, I would need to have um four times the HP pool or something or three times times the HP pool. You get what I'm saying? So I would need like a 24,000 life pool for this all the ward to be used uh. So the point is this is only an offensive upgrade. It's not defensive. Even though the ward looks cooler, it looks like it's more tanky. It's only an offensive upgrade as far as I understand how these gloves work. Speaking of Ward though, is I fa a

fairly substantial nice additional boost to defenses 'cause it doesn't give me like a 7K extra hit pull, but it gives me about an extra, I don't know, 1500, 1200, whatever it is, hit buol to my 3500 HP life. And with faster stter or faster restoration Ward that comes back every 0.9 seconds, you pair that with our saalan Shield, which we have 6565 Lucky Block, which means we block about 88% of all attack and spell damage. It ends up feeling quite consistent where that thing pops up, and it's there for almost every hit you take for the most part. And you'll see that in the gameplay, how often we have downtime of w is very, very low, and it feels quite good. All right, so that's some of the basics of the building blocks, the character. Um, outside of that, it's about stacking basically percent damage where we can with things like, you know, cluster Jewels, uh, because we have a lot of, we're dealing base cast

damage, so we need generic percent damage. So, most of our percentage damage is coming from cluster jewels, it's coming from damage with endurance charge, damage with frenzy charge, stuff like that, generic percent damage while holding a shield nodes. It's a lot of generic damage, nothing chaos-specific, nothing really melee-specific too much, mostly just generic percentage damage, and then crit chance and crit multi where we can get it. That's the damage scaling, and then we have, of course, Paradox for the double damage and the pen with chaos. So, that's the idea of the character: stack a lot of ward with a chest piece, get a big flat chaos number, and then use the retaliation skills. The retaliation skills specifically, the way they work is you have to get hit, that procs your ability to use the skill where they have a duration where they become, where they're active, and basically once you use the skill, it goes back on cooldown. These things have this cooldown, that's base 3 seconds, base 4 seconds for Crushing Fist, and when you look at this

our cooldown time here says 0.9 and 1.2 respectively. That's because we have CDR from these nodes here, these small points, as well as we are using expert retaliation. It feels like expert retaliation is all but mandatory, as far as I can tell, in terms of making these skills a lot more poppy, in terms of being able to use them a lot. From what I can tell, there's also a situation where, um, when you're using measured retaliation, it is all about the chance to not consume your use of your retaliation skill. Like, if you don't have this, it's basically like you get hit, you get to use it once, and then you have to have some, like, completely other supporting skill if you want to use basically only retaliation skills. This is all but mandatory. And I will also add, if you want to use retaliation skills on Uber, which I did test them on Ubers, you probably need to add in the Penance Mark ring so you have something that's

constantly hitting you so you can constantly be using your retaliation. I would actually highly recommend it. I did not do this, and it was very rough on a lot of Ubers where, for example, shaper's beam. When he goes to beam, that's usually your DPS phase. That's when you get to get the most damage in as a retaliation build. If he hadn't hit me recently, I had no active skill, and I was just watching him beam it. I was just twiddling my thumbs. It felt stupid. So, number one is you need something like measured retaliation just so you can use multiple skills in a row. And I think you need to combo it with the chance to activate another retaliation skill when you've used one. The idea is with 70% chance to not consume, I could probably use a skill seven out of 10 times or whatever it is, and that would generate my other skill. So, I could use that skill and then generate the other skill, and you ping pong between the two, activating the others off their cooldown, and that's

when you don't need to take a hit to proc them. I will say this for a time. I was using vengeful cry for a very short time, basically last night. Chad told me to try it out, and I believe—I could be wrong about this—I believe this thing picks one skill to become usable. And when you use vengeful cry, that means it kind of messes with your uptime of your other skills, or at least I felt like it did. Because it might—what normally would have activated my crushing fist now activates vengeful cry. And vengeful cry isn't that great to spam because it's a war cry, doesn't have the same cast time of having decent attack speed and stuff like that. And on top of that, it has a longer cooldown, and it's not a hit that's going to generate leech and stuff like that. So I prefer ping pong between two skills, but you can do this to have a higher high of max rage, and it does work decently, but I wasn't

necessarily a fan of it per se. All right, so that's retaliation skills. They're a bit weird. This is a Slayer. I'm also doing some weird stuff with. I'm trying out the new Sublime vision for purity of ice in combination with Divine flesh to try the combination where we go for Max cold and Max chaos and we don't worry about fire and lightning. I wanted to try this for a few reasons. I wanted to test it out in a way, in one number one, a way to deal with ailments from my experience so far of doing some damage, taking conversion, as was the experience with the trickster. I had it. It is very effective at mitigating ailments. One of the most dangerous ailments to characters are things like shock. When I take all my lightning damage, it's either chaos or cold. I do not get shocked. I did not see shock on my character a single time outside of shock ground. That was like the only way I could experience shock, and that was just not very common. It's basically just shock shock ground.

map mod and that is it um so actually like these damage conversion Jewels even more than I did before because they allow you to one mitigate ailments. So for example, I could have this purity of ice Watcher's eye with cold fire and lightning taken as I can blind with sublim vision. That's 50% of my lightning or lightning and fire taken as cold, and then 50% of my all my Elemental damage taken is chaos, which means I don't take fire and I don't take lightning damage, and I didn't get ignited, I didn't get shocked, and solved that. I think where this is going to really, really shine is with doran's prototype, the chess piece. I think this is fairly ideal because you don't, you don't get the less damage or the less lightning res from uh tempered by War, so it's easier to hit the minus 200, and I think it would really shine. So strongly recommend checking this out if you're think about dorian's prototype and even

If you're not thinking about Dorian's prototype, it was a way to get some decent Max at one point. I was considering probably doing like an impossible Escape here, grabbing Max R here, and potentially changing my pathing to go outside to get Max cold R here. And then our purity of ice plus the max R scaling would put us like 87, 88 Max R would be pretty decent. I opted not to do that and just went for more damage because I wasn't really dying this character while mapping. I think I died a sum total of one to two times, mainly just because of uh degens, just like if I stood on a d gen and I wasn't leeching type of thing. Um, it was pretty rare. The block felt very good. We deathless simmer laum, that felt pretty chill um, so it was great against most Ming content. Where this character fell apart in my opinion was the Uber bosses. It was way too clunky to rely on the Uber balls to hit you. They hit really hard, so if you have

some weird scenario where you don't block the proc your hit to start your Lee to start generating your charges. All this sort of stuff, it really crumbles while mapping fantastic, but when doing Ubers, it crumbled. And I think you really need Penance Mark, so that's something I would recommend if you're going to play this character. Probably do a Penance Mark ring. I just have a ring with life and Dex and strength 'cause I had an ATT problem, and I had a ring with some c r and allr, which the allr really wasn't very efficient. The in helped me with some of the W scaling, but it was just kind of rare as I bought in the moment and I was happy with, but I probably should have M Max more if I really cared about it. Ultimately, this character I had a decent amount of fun with, but it was super clunky when it came to Uber bosses, and I like to do those a little bit more. I'm just excited about building more characters now and doing shorter projects, so the next project is probably

going to be righteous Fire Chie and uh cuz I have a plan for that as well. Now let's get into a t7 showcase, give you guys a look of what it looks like to do a little bit more challenging uh map content, and hopefully I can either convince you yay or nay. I would say retaliation skills very good damage for the investment level, very clunky on Uber bosses, acceptably clunky on mapping. That's how I'd put it, and hopefully I can showcase in this map here as we do a t177 ziggurat or zigurat. But anyways, we'll see how this goes. Maybe I'll showcase retaliation being good, maybe I'll showcase me flopping or doing something incredibly wrong. I don't think I will though, cuz so far my experience with this has been quite good. Now initially, you always have to wait for the first pack to uh hit you initially, but after that you can pretty well for the most part just keep chaining your skills going around to the

various packs and hitting them with whatever you have as you go around picking up loot. Moers will continually hit you, and it doesn't really feel like an issue in terms of downtime. You do have the weirdness of like, you know, you have to rotate between the skills. Did I click on this or did I not? I can see it. You have to rotate between the skills, right? I don't like always getting to use the same skill over and over, and that is a little bit of a weird factor. I definitely took some getting used to it being like, Okay, I see the symbol. I know I have, for example, The Shield thing. That means eviscerate's ready. The cross sword, that's crushing fist, right? So, I can see based on the logo, like above my head, what is and what isn't available for my character to use. Um, and that took definitely some getting used to. I would say outside of that, when you're mapping, uh, you don't really feel like you have too much downtime on the ski. You pretty much can do whatever you

want there will be an occasion, awkward situation where you run into some monster that just doesn't have a hit mechanic. Doesn't happen too much, happens more specifically on Uber bosses. That's when I actually had an issue at all with it. As for that, you still get to block a lot and have a really good time doing that, and that feels pretty good. Um, and of course, you hit enemies really, really um, so like as you can see right here, we could basically like clean these bosses with just a few swipes in terms of like damage numbers. I will say problematic is one of our defensive layers is endurance charges. I'm not happy with the endurance charge generation I have. I think I want to add an enduring composure specifically for this reason 'cause I have endurance charge on block, I have the charge ratio, but it's not really enough. Like you can see regenerating the charges ATT, but if there's downtime on a boss fight, there's that's not ideal right um, especially when you're dealing with like you see that mechanic there that is a de

gen ground that deals Fizz damage over time. Having downtime on my endurance charges is not ideal. The other thing I will say is I am doing Slayer reg or Slayer, not Slayer regen, Slayer leech for my sustain mechanic, and that works decently until you just get a really long period without being able to fight enemies because eventually your leech does fall off, like Karina, for example, really long freaking intermission times and doing all this stuff and stall, stall, stall, etc. It's not ideal. This is not an ideal boss, but hopefully, I'm showcasing it could do the boss still fine regardless, even though a lot of these dudes have some setup moves where they're not even hitting you and they're wasting time, etc. But it is not like something that's ending how the plays out. Finish Katarina off. Goodbye, Katarina. It was nice knowing you. So you can see I'm showcasing hopefully the weakest part of the character, which is a boss where there's

down time and stuff like that. You could still do it; hence, I would recommend the pendant marker ring. I didn't do it myself, but after doing Uber bosses, I'm fairly convinced that is a good way to do it 'cause that just guarantees you keep those blocks up. You then would sustain your endurance charges consistently. You probably sustain your frenzy charges consistently with blood rage kills, and then on top of that, you would also sustain your blocks very consistently, very consistently, which is ideal. I'm talking that hit me there are definitely scenarios where you're like you're fighting an enemy and you just start telling like, Hey, please hit me, man, please, I'm begging you, take a swing at me. But while mapping, shouldn't happen too much. Boss fights, mainly just Ubers, it happened as well. But yeah, pretty much just walking around, and then whenever we get the blocks, we get to do a super freaking big AOE eviscerate. I really have to say that this is probably

my favorite part of the build is just seeing that slash go out, and it just, it just, it's like an eraser, it just erases everything in front of you. CU, it's, it just hits so incredibly hard. Um, and just, you do one swipe, and everything in that general direction is just gone. Crushy vist is cool, but for me, Evis rate was the clear winner. If I do another r ition build, eviscerate is definitely going to be on my list for skills I'm going to prioritize doing, and hopefully have a lot of fun using and trying out. Um, I don't, if we have to need to Showcase more of this map necessarily gu, we could probably just P out here. I think I've demonstrated what this character looks like doing uh d7s and simulacrum. I could do, but it's good, great at mapping style scenarios in terms of defensive layers, that 88 block, block recovery, the leech, the endurance charges, the four to five with crushing fist, all that stuff works out.

fantastically in mapping scenarios. It does fall apart on Uber bosses specifically. I didn't have any issues with t-17 bosses. I only had an issue with Uber bosses where we failed due to not being able to proc our block skills, hence the recommendation for pennet. I wouldn't say this is a particularly OP build or a particularly bad build. It's pretty decent damage for the budget, and it's cool for something different. I had some fun doing it. This definitely makes me want to build Ward, believe it or not. After this experience, I might do a weird dead eye Ward setup where I go for avoidance layers like block, spell Dodge, and evasion, and then pair it with some Ward scaling. I think that could be very interesting. So, I'm glad I did this character. Part of me playing builds is I want to test out different skills, retaliation being one of them, test out different mechanics like, for example, the damage conversion, see how that feels as a defensive setup, and it did feel pretty decent. Um, yeah, so hopefully you guys

enjoyed this was the ward retaliation Slayer. As always, thanks for watching. Take care, Exiles, and peace out. Have a good one.

Ward Retaliation Slayer

CaptainLance9

The build focuses on ping-ponging between two retaliation skills, Crushing Fist and Eviscerate, for maximum damage and AOE.

The Gladiator node, Measured Retaliation, is crucial for reducing skill cooldowns, while additional nodes provide chances to reset cooldowns and maintain skill usage.

The Night Grip gloves, offering 10% of Ward as chaos damage, synergize with the build's high Ward to provide significant flat chaos damage.

Maximizing Ward with the New Yinda Stand Belt

The Yinda stand belt offers 50% to 60% armor and evasion as Ward, pairing well with high base stats.

Aiming for 8K raw number, the belt can provide 4,800 Ward, which can be increased further.

The Light of Meaning is key for scaling Ward, but a cost-effective alternative is to use it with percent chaos damage for similar damage output.

Offensive Upgrade and Damage Scaling in Character Build

The ward system in the character build is primarily offensive, with a significant portion of damage bypassing the HP pool.

The ward provides a consistent boost to defenses and works in tandem with the saalan Shield for effective damage blocking.

The character's damage scaling relies on stacking generic percent damage, crit chance, and using retaliation skills for double damage and chaos penetration.

The Importance of Expert Retaliation in Skill Usage

Cooldown times for skills are reduced through CDR nodes and expert retaliation, which is crucial for using retaliation skills effectively.

Measured retaliation is essential for chaining skill uses, while the Penance Mark ring is recommended for constant hits to maintain skill activation.

Vengeful cry can disrupt skill uptime and is not as effective for spamming, making it less preferable for maintaining a smooth rotation between skills.

Testing a New Build for Ailment Mitigation

The player is experimenting with a Slayer build using Sublime Vision and Divine Flesh to maximize cold and chaos damage while ignoring fire and lightning.

This damage conversion strategy effectively mitigates dangerous ailments like shock and ignition.

The player plans to use Dorian's Prototype chess piece to further enhance the build's effectiveness, while also considering alternative pathing for maximum cold and chaos resistance.

Challenges and Strategies for Playing a Specific Character

The character's skills are effective for mapping but struggle during Uber boss fights, making Penance Mark recommended for better performance.

The player's ring choices were suboptimal, leading to an ATT problem and inefficient all resistance.

The character's gameplay involves skill rotation and chaining hits, with a learning curve to recognize available skills, but overall, it provides a smooth mapping experience.

Encountering monsters without a hit mechanic is rare, but it can be problematic during Uber boss fights.

The player's defensive layer relies on endurance charges, which are not generating enough during downtime, leading to issues.

Using Slayer leech for sustain works until there's a long period without fighting, making it challenging to maintain buffs.

The Impact of the Eviscerate Skill in Gameplay

The Eviscerate skill is favored for its powerful, erasing effect on enemies, making it a top priority for future builds.

The character's defensive layers and recovery mechanisms work well in mapping scenarios, but struggle against Uber bosses.

The experience has inspired a potential future build focused on avoidance layers and Ward scaling.