I'm fairly new to DDO, about a month playtime, and after trying a handful of different classes(paladin, barb, sorc, warlock) I've really fell in the love with the warlock. Regardless of how "op" or "not really op" they are, I'm having a blast playing them. That said I've mostly been playing the pewpew style, using the bursts and spells like evard's, disco ball, etc.. I have a GOO Drow pure warlock 20 and a Fey Bladeforged lock/pali 18/2(17/3).
I really want to mess around the a more aura focused build but I'm having trouble deciding how to go about it. From what I've gathered and experimented with there are 3 basic ways to play an aura build. 1. Supplement your aura damage with melee while bursting. 2. Focus on a burst/spell rotation(easier in Epic it seems). 3. Grab heavy armor and a shield and just block while things pile up on you and burst them down as they refresh. I guess my questions revolve around how viable these builds/tactics are in epic and what sort of multiclass can benefit them without losing too much warlock.
Apparently evasion tanks used to be the thing, but now PRR/MRR and heavy armor is king. Using some ASF enhancements and gear it seems doable to reduce it to 5% or even 0%, but the ES tree gives bonuses to MRR based on light and heavy armor, giving nothing to heavy armor. I messed around with 3 levels of paladin using sacred defender to maximize my PRR/MRR but after doing some excel numbers it didn't really seem that much more compared to all that I was losing in lock.
So I guess what I'm getting at from someone with experience, is how would you go about this build. So far I have paladin in mind for the sacred defender, heavy armor prof, saves boost but also considering a bardlock. Apparently swashbuckler is a good build, and since cha synergizes between lock and bard, it seems it could work.
If I did something like Bard 3/Warlock 17 would that be enough of the swashbuckler enhancements to make a difference over pure Warlock? You get something like 13% dodge with minimal investment(buckler in swash stance), plus a bunch of "when the attack misses you xxx". The idea is to stand in them middle of mobs with the aura going, cycling bursts, meleeing in between while mobs that fail their save trip and/or take extra scaling sonic damage. My "thoughts"(without much to back them up) are that a high dodge chance and my displacement SLA combined with shining through would keep me fairly tanky even in light armor. If I'm taking a beating I can switch to active block and bursting.
Does this sound viable? I'd lose my 18 warlock 2 sec aura core ability, meaning it'd only pulse every 3 secs. I'm not sure if the benefits of the Swashbuckler abilities and probably mediocre damage would make up for the lost levels. In theory, having a high dodge bonus combined with displacement SLA and shining through could make me somewhat survivable. To take it further, since I'm losing out on the 18 core warlock ability, I could theoretically lose a few more levels and pick up rogue 2 or monk 2 for evasion, etc..
Sorry for the long post, I'm still learning the mechanics so it's hard to really understand how helpful some of the damage mitigation abilities work in paper. Also I getting prepped for my first TR and want to play this build on my 2nd run.
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