Penance Brand of Dissipation might be one of my fastest-leveling characters ever. I started it pretty late on Monday night, leveled it through Kitava on Tuesday night, and then geared it yesterday and started mapping. The skill is not the best thing in the world for map clear, but it does a phenomenal job at deleting anything that is even the littlest bit tanky. This build has become a bit of a bossing meme during this league and given that I have never really played anything with a serious bossing focus… I decided that I would give it a shot. I had around 20 Divines left to spend and I think as of this morning I am sitting at 8 left, so I spent quite a bit gearing this character out. The challenge is that because this is so popular it means all of the optimal gear for it is also wildly overpriced. A Replica Dragonfang’s Flight for Penance brand with max reservation efficiency runs around 20 Divine Orbs for example.
The biggest challenge for me is that I do not know anything about gearing characters for damage output. I know this is a bit of an irony given how many characters I have leveled… but for the most part, my focus has always been on survival and defensive layers leaving the damage that I dealt as a bit of an afterthought. My “kink” if you will for games is being able to take the maximum amount of punishment without falling down. I mean I play almost exclusively tanks in MMORPGs for example… so I am big into being a chonky juggernaut of meaty goodness, and could give a shit what I am dealing for damage output. Bossers, however… are about dealing as much damage to a single target as they can in as short of a period as they can. So I have no clue if I am even dealing enough damage to the boss successfully and even more so no clue how to set up POB to accurately display my damage output. In theory, if I am even vaguely close I should be somewhere around the 8 Million DPS range currently.
Right now I am mostly focused on leveling and running a bunch of the random t14-t16 maps that I have laying around in the bank. I would really like to get this character to the level 90-95 range before I deal with focusing on bossing. I might start dipping my toes into the water with some Guardian maps soon as I can seemingly handle t16s without any real issues. One of the most annoying things about shifting from a private league to the trade league is that it reset all of my master missions. I had around 80 Kirac missions that just poofed when we left private league, and this would have been the perfect opportunity to utilize those since I don’t really care about the output of the map and just care about the experience gained.
The biggest thing that I am trying to get used to is not spamming my brand ability. In theory in a perfect scenario, you only want one brand on your target at any given time, and you want it to tick for the maximum number of pulses because each pulse ramps the damage. I am so damned used to spamming abilities that this is requiring a bit of a rework of my brain. On a boss fight you would be spending most of that downtime moving around and avoiding things so that seems doable. I need to get better at keeping up my Hatred as well which I have on Divine Blessing. I am contemplating dropping some of my defensive layers to stack on additional offensive auras and MAYBE go low life with this build. Taste of Hate and the damage conversion that I have on my chestpiece along with good resists and maxed spell suppression go a long way toward helping with incidental damage. If I take a bit hit though I am going to die regardless of how much Evasion and Armor I have.
I am so out of my depth though because again… the thing I care about most is NEVER dying. So playing a squishy character that cares about damage output is just completely outside my wheelhouse.