Guide to Viran (Berserker Physical) Build
By Mihealsick
This is yet another build that is exploiting Chromalure’s interaction with gold potions to survive an arbitrary number of turns without caring about incoming damage. For more information on that defense, see Viran floor 192 (Silver / Celestial / Magma) build guide.
Instead of using scaling elemental damage from the Celestial set, this build is going right for the throat with physical attack. The endgame viability comes from this build’s ability to absolutely shred a single target with Legacy / Warrior or Legacy / Swift while allowing the other enemies to stack up your damage bonus from the Berserker set.
Importantly, Berserker set is a lot more powerful than I thought it was. It gives you one stack of Fury each time your health takes damage, and Fury says “Increase your Physical Attack by 25% for every stack of Fury.” It reads as though it increases your Physical Attack% value, which would be only a small amount of damage increase due to diminishing returns. However, intesting, Fury appears to multiply your total physical damage by 25% per stack, so the damage scaling is fantastic.
This build is still probably not as powerful as the best versions of Celestial/Magma, but it’s super straightforward and can carry you to the moon.
For Talents, you want the Frailty spec (because Chromathorn doesn’t really do anything, and you don’t care about the +50% damage taken penalty). You can go for Energy > +1 attack > 25% physical if you prefer, but speccing into 20% crit rate as shown will actually end up averaging out as a little bit more damage (more on that below).
Floors 1-60
You’re focusing entirely on physical damage output here, and you should be able to steamroll your way up to 60 without any problems.
The only catch is that you need to wear Mercenary for as long as possible to make sure you can collect a pile of gold potions. More is better, but I’d recommend at least 6 if you plan on aiming for 200+.
There are a lot of ways to get Viran to 60, but I like Silver/Mercenary/Demonic (as pictured here). Silver isn’t necessary since it’s mostly redundant with gold potions, but I like it because it lets me hold down the spacebar all the way to 60. You should be able to kill everything with 2 multi-attacks.
Basic Dismantle Rotation – Rotate your dismantles for maximum physical damage. You’re looking for Ring of Unity, Throngler, Bloodedge, Berserker’s Helmet, and Mask of Cataclysm.
For Suns You could open the Opportunism Chest to handle Suns, but it’s more efficient to splash into juuuust enough Cinder damage to kill them. All it takes is a few Magma Chestplates and a couple of Jester’s Bone Masks and your Faith will carry you the rest of the way. I was dismantling another Magma Chestplate once every 20 floors or so just to make sure.
Precision Cap – Remember to dismantle up to 100% Precision before floor 20.
Penetration Cap?
You’ll want at least 100% Penetration before floor 20 as well, but from there you need to decide if you want to keep pace with Iron Golems or if you want to try and go through them with damage. I personally think that keeping up with Penetration is the right move because I think that after floor 100 their armor starts to scale up faster than your damage can, even with all the extra dismantles you’re netting. If you want to keep ahead, hit 154% penetration by floor 21 and then about 15% more per floor after that.
Adding a picture of your dismantle all-stars.
The top section you should be dismantling as often as you can in a rotation. Stop cold on Thronglers around floor 60 and switch to Excaliburs instead.
The middle section is what you might use to make sure you keep up with your caps. One Hunter’s Jerkin should be plenty, but if you’re really hungry for penetration then feel free to use Shard of Power and Warrior’s War Hammer.
The bottom section is your concession to Suns. Sprinkle 2-3 of each into your rotation around floors 15-25, then add in another Magma Chestplate into your rotation every once in a while to keep up with Sun health.
Normally I recommend doing this, but for this build do not dismantle any items with electricity, sparkle, or malice on them. This is normally a nice way to get free Combat Insight stacks and free armor and free pings at Armor Shielding, but we don’t want or need to do any of those things.
Endgame – Floors 60+
By the time the first shielded Perfect Slave rolls around, you want to have dumped all of the sets that got you to 60 and change your whole wardrobe.
Your dismantle rotation stays the same.
Your plan is to clear out one single lane of enemies at a time and to let the rest pile up Fury stacks from Berserker set. As I mentioned above, each stack of Fury appears to multiply your total physical damage by 25% rather than adding in another +25 to vanish into your existing physical attack% stat.
Your first target should be the nasty flunkies that put debuffs on you. Weakness and Stun are particularly bad for you, and you may even want to consider upping your Cinder damage commitment just to clear those critters out of the way. Keep a Demonic helm around so you can quick swap over just in case there are multiple stunners.
Make sure to drink a gold potion any time you don’t have a gold heart.
If you’re thinking about drinking a Madness potion, you had the same idea I did. It does allow you to stack up Fury on yourself and all it costs is a battle round and a gold potion. This might be effective if you’re not penetration capped vs Iron Golems, since it can help scale up your damage quickly. Otherwise, you’re probably just better off aiming that round of attacks at the enemy.
Warrior vs Swift
I believe that it’s correct to spec into 20% crit and use 4pc warrior for extra attacks. On average this multiplies your physical damage by a fifth of your crit damage rating (which is accidentally quite high from all your Throngler and Berserker Helmet dismantles).
The downside is that warrior parries attacks, which is nice sometimes but it’s a little annoying when you kinda want to get hit.
If you’d rather avoid that, you can spec Viran into a 3rd attack from his talent tree and then equip one piece of swift (as seen below – and yes, that’s actually Chain Mail on your chest).
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