Intro
Prioritizing parry damage, survivability, then block damage/stagger, and then 2h club stagger, this build allows for a lot of variety.
Break Down
This build uses mostly magical gear, largely because stagger resistance and barrier generation only appear on that type of gear. That makes this much easier to build than full plague sets. The only plague gear is the chest mainly for the 40% barrier gain enchant. We put a lot of points in to health since this increases how big the barriers will be. The build leverages mottled black pearls to maximize barriers and parry/block damage. This is why we take max health reduction plagued enchant and plagued ring so that staying at low health is not a hassle. Whenever not at low health, like when initially loading in to the game, use channel to get below 50% health. If you don’t have enough pearls, since we always have a barrier, mottled shield emblem is a good alternative for 65% empowerment rather than 100%.
With exalting, it is very possible - only one enchant of each needs to be buffed - to have 100% armor pen and 100% stagger resistance. We want to cap stagger resistance so we can block or trade for eternity and beat those shield boys to death without getting stunned. We use all agile gear for crazy amounts of stamina regen since who doesn’t love to shove?
Note for the videos, I fight echo knight with no echos purchased on hard difficulty. This gives a good indication of viability, survivability, and damage.
Parry Gear
This will use falstead’s fury and heraldic crest shield. Parries will generally one shot trash and slap bosses. Since this build always has snake ring equipped, it still does damage when you block attacks that cannot be parried.
-
Block Gear
This will use shrike tree and crimson guard. Stamina on block is used to counteract snake ring and also generate stamina while blocking. Since it pushes stagger damage hard, it is very good at staggering bosses by simply blocking and using the first charged attack of shrike tree. If you don’t like to parry, this works very well.
-
Though I would suggest weaving parries in since it is the main way to keep a barrier up throughout a boss fight. You can eat trash food to refresh it as well, but that is not as fun.
-
Since we almost always have a barrier, leverage that survivability by intentionally standing in ground effects while blocking.
-
Brutish Cudgel
The weakest part of the build, existing mainly for variety and to take advantage of being at the stagger resistance cap. Focus gen sucks because of the agile gear, and it doesn’t have the sustain of a pure stagger build which would use the 40 stamina on stagger plague enchant. The huge stamina regen helps, but still requires taking breaks to regen. It doesn’t do as much damage either because we couldn’t stack physical damage increases. It staggers fairly well, and this video shows how strong the survivability is even without a shield. Fun for trash, with most things staggering in one hit after a kill. The weapon definitely lacks moveset variety though since the running and dodge attacks are too slow with too much recovery. The initial attack is our opener, followed up with a non charged attack to cleave, or a charged attack to do more damage.
-
For reference, this is a better stagger build. Being at the stagger resistance cap isn’t that important unless you want to block a lot.
