Guardian Melisandre - Fire Dancer

**crawlingdeadman** · 07-06-2012, 02:31

Hello again everyone. This time around I have a Character I thoroughly enjoyed playing. As such, I'll be rambling around in this post, wanting to convey my happiness with this character while not being able to express exactly what I want to express. This character is named after the one in ASOFI. She's all about fire and kicking people in the balls so, it's perfect.

This character was played with this group. Pyrotechnician and I were the only two who finished. I must confess that I slopped my way through the planning of this character. There was a bad time had early on, but since it was MP I was able to at least get my gear if not all my other junk. After remaking I went a bit more safely and used Fire Blast and full Iratha's set. This kept me out of trouble until I could equip some serious gear.

Here's some stuff to look at:

Stats/Skills:

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Gear:

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Inventory:

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LCS kick
LCS trap

Noteable finds:
Um (NM hellforge)
Lo (Pyro's)
Nothing screenshot, nothing found.

I thought I had some good action shots of all my pretty traps going off at the same time as Pyro's Blizzard Blitzkrieg, but I must have deleted them. Here's one of lots of traps and kicking.

I didn't want to do any maths to figure out what break points I was going to get so to make it easy, I stuck with fast weapons and Burst of Speed. Trap laying and kicking were fast enough for my taste. Through most if not all of nightmare I wore mostly the same gear including PB crescent moon, treachery, orphan's face, gores. I pretty much played this character as a kicker. I knew if i went w/s that I'd never get enough +skills to get the fire traps to do much damage so I went standard kicker and put on as much CB as I could. I tried several weapons towards the end of Hell including a Silence Phase Blade (the chance to cast flee was more annoying than I'd have liked) before settling on Lawbringer PB. I wasn't too sure about the RIP on it since I was using death sentry but at the same time DS was just a one point wonder. It was sad to get rid of treachery, but after we got into Act 4 I wanted to start doing more damage with kicks (not just CB) and I was pretty comfortable with the play style so I decided to risk my Fortitude. Melisandre is the first character to wear it. I made it then didnt really know why I'd made it and threw it on my Hammerdin's merc to help him with wave 2 on baal runs. It worked great on Melisandre. I used Guillaume's face and was sad to see it go, but I was being lazy and trying to change as little as possible and still use BoS and not Fade hence the Kira's.

I would recommend this build to anyone who's already well versed in kickers and in trappers. This is a very active build with many hotkeys.

**DaveW** · 07-06-2012, 03:34

Sup CDM, grats on your Guardian. This post is really helpful as I have a Firedancer in NM Act4 and Im starting to think how to improve her gear. She is using 2 Strength claws for the CB and wearing upped Gores but having seen your Lawbringer PB I may make one of those. I guess Decrip makes kicks more effective. Is the Fire and Cold damage added to your kicks? Does the RiP mod on Lawbringer mean no corpses for Death Sentry? That ammy is spot on, just right for the high strength requirements of your Gores. What's your trap layout like? 4 Fire Traps and 1 DS + CoS and get your kick on? Any tuff areas? And how were Hell Ancients?

**crawlingdeadman** · 07-06-2012, 03:52

Good questions! I was going to have answered them in my post, but I rambled around too much and lost track of what I'd said and what I'd intended to say.

-Lawbringer is good, but Crescent Moon is very good as well. I used CM a lot of NM and loved it, but it only offered the ctc static really. ITD is good and OW is good, but I felt the need for more from my weapon.
-Decrep works with kicks very well.
-Fire and Cold does add to kicks.
-RiP does affect DS a bit, but I found that CE would still go off a fair amount of the time.
-Yeah, I really wished the ammy had +2sin, but it really was the best ammy I had for the build.
-I usually spam traps ahead of my path until one starts to go off, I'll then put one DS down and start kicking stuff in the face. If I'm starting fresh on a group, no traps on the ground yet, I'll do 2 WoF traps, kick some, 2 more WoF traps, kick some more, etc. intermix in a DS when one runs out. I found that WoF traps really burn (pun) out quick so staggering them that way made it so that there was at least two going at a time. If I remember correctly next delay makes it so that 2 WoF traps is the most efficient*, but don't quote me on that.
-I tend to spam Mind Blast against a few, heavy hitting targets and save CoS for whole roomfuls of monsters or vs many ranged attackers.
-No real tough spots, the worst were the areas that featured large Physical Immune monsters (the Death Lords or w/e the name of the blue frenzytaurs) or many small fire immunes. In reality there were no tough areas for us since blizzard annihilates everything and I kicked in the heads of everything else.

*I think it's something like how the waves are too close together so that only every other wave from one trap hurts a target.

**pharphis** · 07-06-2012, 04:13

I think your DS would have worked on the corpses made by your merc, but I may be wrong. It seems likely, though, as that's how Nihlathak works I believe.

Congrats on the guardian! Like I said in Pyro's thread, it seems like mping would be a lot of fun, so I'll have to try it sometime. This character seems like a fun build, too, so I'll add it to the list of builds to try out some time

Seriously, how are there so many builds out there and that we've only tried so many, each? What have I accomplished in 10 years? A few zealots and lite sorcs, I think :/

What's your next plan? S&S and then something else in mind or already begun?

**crawlingdeadman** · 07-06-2012, 04:36

I'm going back to my pnova necro to give him another shot. I've also got a(nother) javazon in the works. Nothing new or special, I just wanted to have another zon to play. Lastly (for now) we're starting a new MP thread, I'm going to make a chargedboltress. Other than those I have something like seven other characters that are in some form of upbringing. Two in Hell, some in NM, and the rest are in early Norm. The one I regret dropping was the Avenger. Dunno why I stopped playing him, he was rolling along real well.

**coju** · 07-06-2012, 05:39

Nice! Glad to see y'all carried it out! Very nice kick numbers! 1k per?! Preposterous! 6k per click? Nice.

**Drystan** · 07-06-2012, 12:42

"Conqueror Azula"
She wouldn't happen to be a Lightning/Fire (Ball?) sorc would she? :grin: And if so, I have following questions.

Congrats on the Guardian! I agree that HC MP would be a great way to play.

**Pyrotechnician** · 07-06-2012, 12:59

Nice writeup cdm! I knew that if I did mine you would get to yours eventually. I think I'll link yours to mine now as well so that the are easy to find eachother. Too bad you didn't have a screenshot of the traps and blizz at the same time, it was quite fun to see everything drop in no time. The frenzytaurs were definately the worst part, immune to physical and couldn't be frozen which made them quite annoying, I remember one pack in specific that was extra fast which made them so much worse. Other then that I had a great time running with you, always enjoyable.

Also, everyone saying HC MP would be a great way to play, it is, so join our HC MP group!

**naranjadita** · 07-06-2012, 13:14

Hey that's a neat character!
I've always been enchanted by fire traps, but I have never thought of mixing them with other skill tree. So thanks for general idea :3

Oh and congrats) You guys rock! )

**crawlingdeadman** · 07-06-2012, 13:57

Originally Posted by Drystan

"Conqueror Azula"
She wouldn't happen to be a Lightning/Fire (Ball?) sorc would she? :grin: And if so, I have following questions.

Congrats on the Guardian! I agree that HC MP would be a great way to play.

No, unfortunately. She was another MP character that I needed a "Firey" name for, but couldn't think of anything appropriate. She's a ranged enchanter that probably wont get done any time soon.

Originally Posted by Pyrotechnician

Nice writeup cdm! I knew that if I did mine you would get to yours eventually. I think I'll link yours to mine now as well so that the are easy to find eachother. Too bad you didn't have a screenshot of the traps and blizz at the same time, it was quite fun to see everything drop in no time. The frenzytaurs were definately the worst part, immune to physical and couldn't be frozen which made them quite annoying, I remember one pack in specific that was extra fast which made them so much worse. Other then that I had a great time running with you, always enjoyable.

Also, everyone saying HC MP would be a great way to play, it is, so join our HC MP group!

The best I could do was us vs Baal, but I didn't bother laying traps that time so it was just you and your blizzard and you could barely see me behind Baal's fat ***.