Steelheart - Spear + Sword PvE Build
- High Defense
- One of the best tanks
- Easy to Play
- Good Damage
- High Skill Ceiling
Overview
This Sword + Spear PvE build is designed to deal significant damage while maintaining strong self-healing through 
Bloodleech Aura. Its standout feature is its crowd control (CC) capabilities, enabling the group to keep targets locked down for extended periods while your party’s DPS takes them out. This makes the build excellent for AoE farming mobs and also highly effective as a durable tank for dungeons.
Attributes
Strength
Perception
Wisdom
DexterityWith this build, prioritize investing points into Strength and Perception as your primary stats. Strength not only increases your maximum HP but also enhances your defensive stats when coupled with Perception increasing your buff duration and hit chance, making it much easier to stay alive in PVP by keeping your buffs active throughout the duration of the fight.
Skills
With the build focusing on being the main tank of a party and also doing good damage. You should first update 
Culling Arc alongside 
Vicious Fury to highly increase your damage thanks to their synergy. 
Cyclonic Fury is another important skill that will boost your damage as it deals high AOE DPS and is another obvious choice for upgrading.
This Spear Sword build also offers great CC through the use of skills like 
Tempest Strike to stun mobs and deal damage, so upgrading it along with 
Abyssal Cleave is an obvious choice to improve stun and Prone durations, making it trivial for your team to burs down the mobs while they are exposed.
Nex up, you should focus on upgrading 
Counter Barrier and 
Shield Strike as you make great use of them a lot to hold aggro and remain alive as you do so. 
Stalwart Bastion is another important skill, both for your party and yourself as it can be used to negate some boss mechanics and help others survive. Meanwhile, 
Unyielding Sentinel offers increased Heavy Attack chance for your party, greatly increasing their DPS.
Focus on passives next as they quickly increase your resistances and allow you to tank easier for longer and do your job in the group with ease. 
Impenetrable & 
Aegis Shield are the main two defensive passives while 
Imposing Form, 
Malice Surge and 
Retaliatory Strike improve your damage by a large margin.
Equipment
These are the first items you should strive for through the leveling period as they are very easy to get and upgrade or trait as needed. However, you shouldn't try to trait these items too much as you won't be spending too much time playing with this setup before you start changing pieces into the Midgame. The green accessories however are very easy to trait as you can craft many of them quickly in order to get the correct traits so you should consider traiting them until you change into purples. The same goes for the blue ring as you keep it for a long time.
This is the gear you should transition to once you're leveled to 50 and start grinding gear. It is comprised of gear you can get either from dungeons or by completing Litographs, they are relatively easy to trait up and you will spend most of the time wearing this set before advancing into the late game so traiting these items is very important and should be your main focus.
This is the current endgame gear you should aim for, and while it isn't easy to acquire, it offers great power without the need of acquiring archboss gear pieces. However, items like 
Tevent's Fangs of Fury or other archboss weapons are superior but difficult to acquire for the majority of players. If you do manage to get the archboss weapons for your build, feel free to use them over the weapons shown here.
Weapon Masteries
Ranged Defense |
 |
Magic Defense |
|
Shield Block Penetration Chance  |
|
Melee Evasion |
|
Cooldown Speed |
|
Endurance |
|
Max Health |
|
Debuff Duration |
|
Movement Speed | ||
Damage Reduction |
|
Melee Critical Hit Chance  |
|
Mana Regen |
|
CC Chance |
|
Bonus Damage |
|
Buff Duration |
|
Ignite Damage |
|
Damage |
|
Melee Hit Chance |
|
Skill Damage Boost |
| Melee Hit Chance |
|
Movement Speed |
|
Cooldown Speed |
|
Max Mana |
|
Damage |
|
Skill Damage Resistance |
|
Mana Cost Efficiency |
|
Melee Critical Hit Chance |
|
Added Attack Speed |
| Melee Defense |
|
Health Regen |
|
Weaken Chance |
|
Max Health |
|
Melee Evasion |
|
Shield Block Chance  |
|
Buff Duration |
|
Damage Reduction |
|
Stun Resistance | ||
| Shield Block Chance  |
|
Melee Hit Chance |
|
Damage |
|
Boss Endurance |
|
Max Health |
|
Stun Resistance |
|
Boss Damage Reduction |
|
Mana Cost Efficiency |
|
Melee Hit Chance |
|
Bonus Boss Damage |
| Max Health |
|
Melee Hit Chance |
|
Collision Chance |
|
Damage Reduction |
|
Weaken Chance |
|
Collision Resistance |
|
Damage |
|
Melee Defense |
|
Cooldown Speed |
Spear: Invest the first 9 into Charge for extra Endurance and Shield Block Penetration Chance and movement speed. Four point go into Destroy for extra CC chance. Use the last 6 remaining points in Face Off to improve Skill Damage resistance and cooldown speed.
Sword: Investing 8 points in Provoke & Counter offers great Shield Block Chance and more defenses. Allocate 2 points into Collision and finally 9 into Boss to improve overall PVE defense.
Rotations
- Start the rotation by pre-buffing with Unyielding Sentinel and Counter Barrier so both your offense and defense are boosted.
- Pull mobs together into a nice stack before using
Provoking Roar to stabilize threat. Follow up with Shield Strike for some damage and also debuff them before using 
Annihilating Slash to slow them down and deal extra damage. Position yourself in such a way that Abyssal Cleave hits multiple targets before you use Cyclonic Fury as follow-up damage and also apply burns.
- Use Culling Arc to deliver extra damage before transitioning into Vicious Fury. Finish off the rotation with another Annihilating Slash so the mobs remain on top of you.
- This rotation focuses on dealing boss damage and holding aggro, being rather simple to execute.
- Start by putting up your main buffs, Unyielding Sentinel and Counter Barrier before using Shield Strike to deal a bit of damage and debuff the boss. Transition into Provoking Roar so the damage from your DPS doesn't attract the boss and then use Annihilating Slash two times to deal some extra damage.
- Continue the rotation with your Spear skills and couple Abyssal Cleave to apply the Shocked debuff. Follow up with Cyclonic Fury and Culling Arc to apply debuffs and deal damage. The last spell in the rotation is Vicious Fury.
Bloodleech Aura: This is your sustain ability, use it when stacking mobs together to heal yourself and make it easier to survive when making particularly big pulls.
Counter Barrier: Use when you start drawing focused attention. Utilize your defense skill to reflect damage when you're under pressure or when an engagement doesn't go as planned.
Stalwart Bastion: Use this to help your team sustain damage, especially useful during certain boss mechancis in dungeons as it greatly increases resistances.
Useful Information
- Select Green Ranger Elowen as your guardian; it roots people around you and can assist in executing your rotation. If you manage to root enemies using this guardian, you can effortlessly execute both rotations and eliminate groups of enemies on your own.
Comments
We are seeking an experienced Build Admin for Throne and Liberty with a deep understanding of the meta across most weapons and game modes. Get in touch with Galaxian on Discord if you're a good fit for the role or know someone else who is. This is a paid position.
