A Rough Guide *updated* A gadget? Swing guns, wands or swords. Whatever.

[Korro]

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Contents:

1. PvE Marksman DEX build

2. PvP / Relic tank Tinkerer STR build

3. PvE / Relic damage Tinkerer WIS build

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1.

Simple marksman build: PvE

   Most efficient at low level is either Piercin Barrage farming or Rapid Refire - both are good, it's that RR is stronger against bosses, allowing you to solo easier. Piercing Barrage can be used to clear entire rooms in seconds, so if you're in a party you can take PB and help with the aoe and not worry about the bosses, letting their minions tank the bosses and take them down. In short, PB is quicker on mobs, RR is relatively quick, but quicker on bosses than PB.

   Since this is the build you're most likely going to go relics, due to high damage from Rapid Refire, it is also useful to take the first 6/6 for supression widgets, making it easier to kite bosses.

At level 51, you get 120 skill points in total, allowing you to fully take both RR and PB.

Here's the build:



The passive bonuses are obvious; the rally bonus is very good, but only for aoe clearing, as the buff will ramp up as you kill mobs. I've noticed my top end damage range to go up by about 200 at max stacks. I don't know if insight is bugged or not, but since you'd already have picked up your main skills, it's not a massive loss - there isn't much you could spend your points on otherwise at 51.

At low level, you want to start on this tree, maxing out either PB or RR first, don't split level them. Every 5 levels you get extra skill points, you can begin to split them into your tinker and black powder passives. Rally and insight should come last, as the % buff will be very small at low levels.



Simple stuff, galvanic widget gives 27% extra electric damage on your attacks when the widget is buffing you. You get 3 widgets, but you can't be buffed by multiple of them, so spawn them close to other party members that use basic attacks. You can start putting points into these skills after having maxed out PB or RR. Supression is useful for relics - level this the very very last, you'd be wasting mana on them.



The bauble trap taunts everything around it. Can be used for bigger pulls, or just drop at max range and kill the mobs that chase it with your skills.

You will have 4 points left over - it is up to you where you want to spend them, possibly in the + tree of either marksman or tinkerer, for the wis bonus % or the hp bonus %, whichever you feel like you need more. HP is preferred, as you need about 16k HP to not get one shot too frequently by stray novas from bosses.

The stat for this build is dexterity. You might even want to go full dex, as technically you should never be hit by any attacks if you kite them properly. For items, just look at the damage range you produce, and if a piece of equipment increases it, use that. The main equip stats are % ranged damage bonus, % crit chance and % critical damage bonus. I believe that % crit damage bonus caps at 300%.
 The gem for crit is the blue square on it's tip - Lapis, keep those. The other gadget gem is Onyx, which is dex, and the best relic gem is Bamon's Heart:

 

which is dropped by (surprisingly) Bamon, the final boss of Sorcerer's Cottage.

This is a PvE build, it's terrible in lamento.

[Korro]

2. More advanced build - STR PvP and tankiness in relics:

****WARNING****

Only try this build after hitting 51. Unless you have friends you can level with / grind for gear, this build is fairly slow at levelling due to low amount of damage, and at low levels it is especially weak. (Strong AoE from teslas tho). Gather all the gear, then work out your attributes with a reset. You will then be able to improve your gear as you go along.

Achieving a lot of HP:

You only need to pick up enough STR to be able to wear your items, the rest goes into HP. Since your items boost your STR, you need to only put enough points to wear a single item, equip it, get some the STR bonus from it and do this successively until you have enough to wear all your items.


**EDIT**



The purpose of using STR as the main stat is to be able to pick up a shield and a weapon with +minion bonuses, seeing as there are no 2h rifles with those bonuses. You also get a 32% block chance, and more defense; this synergyses well with Body of Steel as it scales off of your current DEF, and Thorn of Revenge. If I could I'd probably wear 2 shields on this, since your entire damage comes from photon cannon and tesla widgets. (You still do around 1k swings with your sword. Damage is damage)

The stats you should chase are +minion % and health; this is because you become tanky enough with 50 second uptime / 60 second cooldown body of steel, and the healing widget heals for 78% of your health, making it more efficient as you stack health.

Gemming choice becomes a balance of Bamon's Trapped Souls and Amethysts (for trinket sockets) and Opals (for all other sockets).


(It's Bamon again.. start farming Sorcerer's Cottage soon, these gems will be quite the sellers )

**UPDATE**

The best gem I've found is now

Drops from Tanche, the final boss of Cold Spirit Cave (or something like that, the one in Cold breath, but not the Altar of Rites)
For trinket sockets +490 health, +20% minion damage, whereas perfect opals are +500 health and perfect amethysts are +700 health.




No skills are used in the MM tree.




Skills are self-explanatory, and whilst thorn of revenge is purely a PvP choice, you can use it to aoe clear mobs that are attacking you, as the cooldown is too long to effectively tank bosses or larger groups of mobs regularly;

For PvP and relic boss settings, you still want to be kiting, the DEF bonuses are there to avoid stray damage; as I max out my gear by stacking HP and enchants, I'll update it on the viability of actual tanking high-hitting bosses.

**VIABILITY**

Okay. So since thorns gives you a static 500+ DEF, and body of steel gives you 750% extra DEF, you get more DEF if you activate thorns, and then body of steel. With around 30k health, you can tank high hitting bosses and their abilities for 30 seconds, as long as your thorns are up + healing widget is healing you. So to make it easier to land skill shots for your entire party, just stand there eating damage, chugging potions and using a healing widget. You can take a lot of punishment, and your party can go all out for 30 seconds.
Try to place your minions so they don't get AoE'd down by bosses, they die really quickly.




Cooldown on healing widget - 20 seconds cooldown, uptime 13 seconds, 6% health per second. By combining it with body of steel you actually become quite hard to take down with white hits, whilst with thorn of revenge up, your opponent will be taking more damage than you, about 3x - another reason to stack HP, should they ever actually decide to engage you with your ultimate ability up.

Should you get your hands on a skill gem with this build, you would want to put it into the tesla widgets - the next level increases the number of widgets to 3, essentially increasing your stable damage by 50% (without counting the photon cannons, which one shot most players anyway... if they use sprint, space divide and phoenix, they can actually die once and avoid the rest of uptime of the cannons, granted they're good enough at kiting you away).

[AutyPasty]

hmm, a very familar build

[Korro]

Yep. This is a basic as it gets for gadgets, just wanted to put it out there for new players.


****UPDATE**** 13th feb:



The STR build is crazy strong in PvP, simply because it picks up 2 overpowered ultimates.

Ways to counter:

Thorns of revenge [30 second uptime, 180 second downtime] used at most twice in lamento battles (3 fights to win the match) - you cannot kill anyone with this ability up, unless you currently have about 10x their current health, and there were still times when both players died, simply because a 16k overkill crit hits the attacker back for around 50k (330% damage reflection)

So.. You have to be good at kiting away the teslas / healing the small damage from teslas. Bloodletters can lifeleech off of bleeds, and should not be attacking a gadget with thorns up. Pyromancers can use space divide to kite away / kill minions with ranged abilities, or their shield and phoenix combo to survive the 30 seconds of inability to attack the thorned gadget.

Other gadgets should begin to focusing your minions instead of you, or simply doing their best to run away from teslas - they are slow. If you're dueling a gadget, always pay attention for a blue glowing aura:



That's the thorns.


Of course, if they see that the opponent is overly aggresive they can bait them into damaging them and using thorns at the correct time.

OP lazer cannons:

These things outdamage any heals, unless you're a 60k health BL with great guardian, and even then the health goes down slowly, but steadily. They have a 20 sec uptime / 120 second downtime, so can be used twice or more in lamento fights, and long duels.. well I've used it 3 times in total once.

 The way to deal with these things is running - BL's can have adrenaline rush and the phase ability to kite away / great guardian, if you think you can survive the damage. Pyros can phoenix, blink and shield away, again, stay as far away as possible, and run + keep your teleport on cooldown nonstop. You have to be aware of the position of both the gadget and his minions at all times, keeping max distance in lamento.

Blood sleet or any aoe abilities can also bring them down fairly fast, but only with luck. A bloodletter has once killed the cannons with 1 blood sleet, because they were directly on top of him, and he got a few crits off. From this I gather they have around 7k-10k hitpoints, buffed with armor and even more life from minion stats. When I re-positioned the cannons further from him, it took about 3 blood sleets to kill, but he took way too much damage. Therefore,  long range AoE spam is the way to go, probably the best counter to the build.

Gadgeteers can only counter this ability with thorns themselves - the minions suicide on the player in less than a second, and the dmg reduction allows the player to survive their damage, making thorns a no question in lamento.

Also, some minions, when attacking a thorned gadget, will instead deal damage to their master, and not suicide, the tesla widgets being one of them.

The same way that this build works around kiting characters it cannot beat face to face, the ultimates of this build must also be kited away - meaning it's a complete counter to melee characters.

What would happen in a perfect situation for melee against this build, is a silenced, slowed gadget gets nuked down. It's all about picking those abilities up in your skill tree, and then landing them, meaning this build is weaker 2v2 than 1v1 as there are more choices to control the fight.

Medical widgets actually heal for twice what they say, maybe it occurs twice a second, but the tooltip is bugged. We tested it and I went from 6k hp to 30k from 1 widget only - seems like roughly 80% over 13 seconds. Therefore, you have to be aggresive vs this build as much as you can, force the use of thorns and back off, force the use of teslas, and do your best to aoe them down before dying / run away. During this time this build will be able to heal back to full with medical widgets - rotate your CD's smartly, and keep pressure as much as you can. You might think that 1.5k damage from teslas isn't much, but when that damage is hard to avoid, and is being dealt constantly, whilst you're being kited, it adds up fairly fast.

Outlasting:

This build can also be outlasted - if you can sustain yourself and kill teslas quite fast, but are a strong enough threat to the gadget to not make him chase you and be present in the fight with melee hits, just kill the widgets. The gadget will run oom and won't be able to cast either ultimate - it all becomes a cat and mouse game.. Cinderblades do pretty well at that. Whilst their skills are fairly easy to dodge, 1 lava field will knock you to around half HP. And that's on about someone with 33k HP - 16k crits are fun to see on yourself, whislt you are also slowed and a crazy pyro whom you just kited for half an hour is finally getting some blood out of you.

(yeah.. whatever class you are and you want to PvP, stack some hitpoints. Don't let Freezin one shot you)

[AutyPasty]

wow u bin busy

[Reiko]

This is awesome!

Wish there was one for Pyros though.

[Korro]

I would like to ask if you're planning to make a guide related to a strong/decent pve build for tinkerers as well. Since it's always nice to see what others build are and restructure the build or even customize it to your own liking.

The only way I see that working is going WIS and minion gear, since you'll be running through your mana constantly. That means being able to avoid stray novas from bosses, or just having a good tank. I'll try to work out a skill build that focuses on damage, sure.
Personally, I'd sacrifice some WIS for HP, as the only damage boost you get from wisdom are boom zippers, + you'll be one shot less if you wanna go solo relics or try any PvP at all.

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Having tried this build and the marksman one, I would highly recommend the tinker build for level 51 damage - relics. It has AoE just as strong as Piercing Barrage, and far stronger boss damage, plus it is able to solo relics with ease. You will still want to put extra points into health - around 200 HP and 300 wis is a good idea to have, this will prevent you from being one shot.

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*****WOOO, WIS tinker guide*****


3. Really simple build:



This includes the 2 skill points from Pulley's quests - what you might want to alter is to take out the 2nd tier surpression widget skill (which allows you to summon more) and put them into bauble trap, however, everything dies so fast that I really found no use for bauble, unless for PvP - but so far this sux in PvP, you become way too squishy to do anything, and your consistent, unavoidable damage is far too low. (This worked in the STR build, because you were unkillable)

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Itemization:

The stats you should focus on are mana regen, minion stats (damage > life > armor) and some health. The scaling of wisdom with boom zippers is fairly miniscule, and they scale with minion stats anyway. Mana regen can be gained from wisdom, but the pure stat is just higher (Agate gems).

The choice of relic gems now becomes:



again, or:



whether you feel like you're dying too much or you don't care and you wan't wisdom. Remember, your tree gives you 121% HP and 109% wisdom, so it's more like 8.47 HP and 7.63 wisdom per gem.

A little trick I use:

The materials used for getting sockets for level 48 accessories are crazy (several tier 10 mats, as far as I remember), which means you don't get the full benefit of gems. What you can do is find accessories with beneficial stats of around level 35-40, and make sockets in them with the lower tier mats, which are far easier to access (and actually exist within the game), allowing you to get the best possible stats from your gems, and get crazy, 60% minion damage rings and necks with 20 wisdom, 1k life, etc.

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Viability:

You do crazy amounts of damage with 6 lightning turrets and the boom zippers, and  the supression widgets lowering the resis for both fire and electric (when soloing).

What you will want is a lava field pyro in your group when partying - the 180ish weakness to fire causes your boom zippers to hit for 4k each - that's 20k spammable. If you have a tank you want to position so you're close to the boss, and spam the zippers as soon as they hit, the boss will go down insanely fast - final bosses took around 15-20 seconds for a 5 man party with 2 of us wis gadgets.

What we didn't test yet was the fire turrets - combined with lava field that could be one of the highest dps builds in game, their limit being the position. The downside of this build is the mana costs, you can cast a lot of spells, but certain bosses frequently kill your turrets and widgets, meaning you have to re-summon. A solution could be stacking some Perfect Agates for some mana regen, and that could be a massive benefit to PvP situations too.

[[Moderator] Scotland]

At level 51, you get 120 skill points in total, allowing you to fully take both RR and PB.

122 points if you have completed job quests, and holy crap nice work.
Im pretty sure mana regen (agate) isnt as good as +wis unless its been changed.

[Korro]

Mana regen could be true - I'm taking somebody's word for it that about 4 wis = 1 mana regen point, meaning 1 perfect agate = 52 wis.
However, I currently have 328 wis and 71 mana regen, but at one point when I was marksman I put lower level agates into my gear (I had no wis from attributes) and had 130ish mana regen, so I'm fairly certain agates are better.

[Reiko]

I'm currently trying out that STR build, and you're right. It's HARD to PvE! (I should have listened to that "only do this by level 51" disclaimer, but hey... "Challenge accepted")

It starts working really well on PvE when the Minion Damage equipment start appearing (level 30+) and when the Giant Helicopter Widgets gets summoned.

[Korro]

Updates!


Marksman:

With strong gear, you might prefer to take out RR or PB and instead use the points for seeking shot, it works just as well, does AoE damage and is viable in PvP.

Deafening explosions does massive damage - it synergyses very well with attack speed


If you ever go tinkerer PvE-

You MUST pick up flame turrets. I switched out my tesla widgets for flame turrets due to a pyros lava field - the vulnerability makes you hit 4k per tick, with 6 turrets. It melts bosses, making relics a complete breeze in parties, taking mere minutes to complete a run.

[nutzalmond]

Hi Korro,

Do you think Dex build can pvp well?
Any suggestion on build?

[Korro]

Theres currently 2 good dex pvpers - Eliza and IvyWings, I'll see what I can get out of them, and maybe I can plagiarise one of their builds!

 Rough idea is to use seeking shot, stack attack speed, and personally I'd stack as much movement speed as possible too. I figure if you can rely purely on seeking shot damage, you should just max out the marksman passives and seeking shot - then pick up either control abilities from other trees (bauble vs minion, mute bomb to silence, supression widgets for slows) or defensive abilities from the grenadier tree (body of steel and thorns).

One problem with the build is it is very very mana hungry, so mute bomb / widgets become fairly limited. Mana regen again becomes a valuable stat, in PvP, as you cannot use potions in lamento.

I'll work out the specifics at some point, probably after having a chat with the pros

[AutyPasty]

Some awesome work here Korro, you been busy
I look forward to your thoughts on the ideal gadget Crystal Defence build if we ever get a patch that includes it.

[Decibelriot]

Never seen crystal defense but i suppose one of the best would be the Tinkerer // Turret built.
Or Marksman // Tinkerer Hybrid, which would be pretty hard to build up.
  %Range dmg. 
  %Range attack speed.
  %Minion dmg.
It's already hard enough to find %Range dmg + %Range attack speed.