You're putting so much emphasis on AC that you're on the verge of being gimped.  You don't need a 72 self-buffed AC to be good.  Once you factor in inspire heroics, recitation, and haste you're sitting at a 79 AC.  That's 9 points over the needed AC that could all be spent on damage instead (the only thing in this game that really matters other than healing).

Instead you could drop that finesse crap and put your levelups into strength.  With a +3 dex tome (which you will eventually get) you'll have a 34 dex, thus losing only 2 AC (down to 77, but dealing +3 more damage per hit with +3 strength tome).

Drop your wisdom by 1 and account for a +3 wisdom tome.  This will give you the same ending modifier but give you 2 more points to spend on stats.

Drop your initial dex by 2.  This will give you a finishing 32 dex (thus 76 AC) but allow you to raise your strength to 18, giving you another +1 damage on every swing.

You forgot to add in toughness and enhancements to your hit point calculations.  You'll have another 43 hit points.

Take the ranger level first.  You'll get another 8 skill points by doing that.

A regular bloodstone will be better than an epic duskheart.  10 hit points isn't going to make or break the character, but an average of 4 damage per swing (30% crits with rapiers, 12 damage per crit) could very well cost your life quite a few times.

The feats finesse, improved critical, oversized two weapon fighting, and two weapon defense are all expendable.  You said you already have two greensteel rapiers, but you didn't mention what kind.  Assuming they're MinII (which they should be) then you don't need improved critical.  Your attack bonus will already be high, so the only time this would even be a slight benefit is on epic content.  Finesse is useless if you have the appropriate strength.  Your AC is already over the minimum, so the only time you'll notice two weapon defense is if you're soloing (and even then it's only a 5% difference).

Instead of those four feats you could have things like khopesh (which deal more damage than rapiers, even for an elf), iron will (which will get you to the +28 will save you need for ToD), or more toughness feats (which I usually wouldn't recommend, but in this case it will allow you to break the 500 HP minimum for ToD tanks).

That's all I can think of for now.  In general, when building a character, just remember that defenses are near useless and offense is one of the only two things in the game that matter.  Never ever ever ever EVER sacrifice significant offense for useless defense.

quickgrif wrote on Feb 8^th, 2010 at 12:20pm:


It's one of the options.  Oversized TWF is another of the options, so either of those will suffice.  If I were making the character I'd stick to the offensive feat (especially if I planned to do epic content where AC is meaningless and the attack bonus helps), but that one decision won't gimp your character in any way.

Yeah was a toss up. But I solo things like Sins a lot now even with the current 3 yr old gimp dex build Figured some ac helps there more than not lol.

this build is very similar to my floating leaf build, urden. same with you, he's a finesse build but with help of madstone and rages in situations like shroud 4/5, he stands at 36 str/36 dex (i have FB set). i dun have a chattering ring yet but i'm not too worried as i'm gunning for shintao set. i also do not have a +5 prot item, instead using the +4 prot on icy. this frees up a slot for 1 ac which i find is quite worthwhile. i do not have a min2 45 hp cloak but instead use a smoke II 45 hp cloak. this allows me to solo stuff. also i took empower healing which with ranger devotion and a potency item (you can also go for bard necks for sup pot VI) for uber self healing

Demoyn wrote on Feb 9^th, 2010 at 12:17am:

The Epic Queen hits my 13/6/1 about half the time.  That's essentially doubling his HP into barb range, and it works just fine.  Epic Velah is a bit different - she misses more but has other attacks that are apparently unavoidable.  So he fares less well than a hunk of meat there, though he performs much better than meat in the pillar portion of the quest (which is different now).

On epic, AC is not the god-like thing that it can be on the other settings.  But it's not useless if you're talking uber numbers (70+).

quickgrif wrote on Apr 24^th, 2011 at 3:41am:



If you want the most viable, you will never ever fail with max con and max strength for melee.

Other then that, anything you can make effective and enjoy is viable.

quickgrif wrote on Apr 24^th, 2011 at 4:39am:


If you go fire stance, having wisdom at least 24 is a good start.  Anything higher is just groovy.  WF and dwarf I find it worth getting the extra +2 to dcs for the 6 ap.

Arkat wrote on Apr 24^th, 2011 at 12:37pm:



slightly fixed

quickgrif wrote on Apr 24^th, 2011 at 1:42pm:


That looks fairly decent.

This guy is about five years old. He started out as a gimpy dex build ranger that used wounding and puncturing back in the day when it was king.

My 2nd life was a strong solo build to help me transition towards stronger modern builds. Got bored at one point and soloed Amarath quest at 16 just for kicks.