Earth Build Q's...

Returning player wanting to get back into Earth power. Seems a lot has changed over the years, besides loadouts we now have artifacts, allies and augments... oh my.

I mainly range DPS, so I'm looking for a good ranged build with RSK... both AOE and ST suggestions. I'm also looking for a melee JH DPS 'battle-tank' build for solo content & bounties.

Artifacts I have Grim at 200, and looking at possibly Quislet and Scrap for Entomb with the AoE and battle-tank builds; possibly swapping out Scrap for Solar on the ST build; I have Solar at 160. Or other suggestions?

Allies... HoL-Bot for Active and Cyborg for passive. Second passive I'm thinking of a tank-oriented passive to go with the DPS battle-tank build- possibly the new Future Lex Luthor?

Thanks for the help!!

For allies I’d recommend Batman who laughs for the passive. I believe his first passive which gives a random buff.

For arts you can go a good number of combinations depending on what you prefer. For example, as a few options:
Trans strat and EoG/quislet/grim would be a good all around build. Id personally recommend quislet since entomb is one of the best SCs in the game.
Source shard, Quislet, grim/mercy would be good if you want to do a pet build.
Soul cloak, Quislet, EoG if you don’t care about the Mets and just want to fire off as many SCs as you can.

As for loadouts. This also somewhat depends on what set up you end up going with and if you don’t mind using iconics

Welcome Back!
So to address the obvious point here, RSK over Crystal? Nope!
Earth dps is a monster now thanks to the new artifact that came out called MERCY. Kind of the main reason people did not want to use Crystal was because we had to set up, PI, Give it power and actually have the Crystal on the loadout. There goes 3 spots, then your SC which makes 4 spots gone and we only had 2 abilities that did damage.
With the introduction of MERCY, Crystal has become viable again and puts out good numbers as well.. The fact that Crystal will apply your PI and gives you synergy with your trinkets and reducing the cooldowns everytime by 4/5/6 seconds depending on what level you have MERCY has made it very appealing again.

I personally Run MERCY,Quislet,Trans and that combo is pretty devastaing combined with a T3 Motherbox, Henchmen and orbital strike.

Since MERCY came out the Grim really required for earth dps since MERCY does everything grim did with the added bonus of providing cooldowns to your trinket pets everytime the MERCY ability is used.
Only time Grim trumps over MERCY is for the stats in terms of 5% might compared to 4% might for MERCY but in "MY OPINION" MERCY brings more to the table than Grim. ( you could wait for a double nth metal exp week and feed it to MERCY if you like)

Soul cloak is also not needed since the SC gain from MERCY combined with Unstopabble is huge! couple that with Quislet 200 where you gain 1% SC back everytime it does Megablast, and having the 5% SC back chest mod, It's almost like you having a scrap anyway. Also take into account that EOG Spam is very common in endgame Raids So you will have Plenty of SC coming in.

Solar can be viable although I personally do not run it.
This is what I run atm.

Raid Hallways will always be Melee-

MERCY Skill - Unstoppable - Tectonic Break - JH - Crystal - Entomb
( 1 and 2 clip together to Tectonic and spam JH 8 times to Tectonic break and start rotation again )

BOSS Multi or ST

MERCY skill - Upheavel - Freezing breath - Sandblast -Crystal - Entomb
( Start with Sandblast to Mercy skill - Upheavel 3 times - frost breath 2 ticks tap cancel - sandblast - MERCY skill and start rotation again )

Instances where I have to Range Like in End Game Elites I just use the same Boss Multi/St Rotation but substitute Striking stone for Sandblast or Ill run the same loadout. ( Depending on what Elite it is )
Also make sure to use Your trinkets and henchmen as much as possible since summoning those when off cooldown also gives you damage thanks to MERCY and that damage can crit.

Hope this helps, hit me up in game if you have any questions

Ingame ID - GE0KING

Thanks for the info. Technically MERCY doesn't do everything Grim does, as it doesn't cancel out the power reduction penalty with pets, which can be a problem when soloing and I run a lot of solo content, which was another reason I always ran Grim with RSK.

As for the melee, wouldn't it be MERCY into Tectonic then Clipped with Unstoppable to JH?!? Every Earth loadout I've seen it's always Tectonic clipped with Unstoppable.

I'm thinking on the ST, I can add in Solar w/Heat Vision... and do a Sandblast to MERCY to Upheaval x3 to Heat Vision, rinse and repeat.

For the range AOE I'd remove HV and add Frost Breath. So Striking Stones, MERCY, Upheaval x3, Frost Breath 2 ticks, rinse and repeat. Also, how do you "tap cancel" Frost breath??

Still looking for a DPS 'battle-tank' loadout for solo play... I've heard soloing bounties can be a bit rough now with stat clamping. I could probably still use the melee loadout right, just in tank role with DPS gear? Less 10% DPS but more defense, and could keep Crystal as well, since MERCY doesn't benefit Brick at all.

As for Allies... I'm now leaning Cyborg with Aquaman, as Aquaman gives 10% pet increase and also reduces cooldown of active ally.

Thanks again for the continued help!!

So it looks like you have a pretty good idea about artifacts and loadouts and earth in general already. Thats good.

Welcome Back!

The big thing is: Do you want classic might DPS approach or do you want to use a Pet-Build with Source / Grim / Quislet or do you want to run a MERCY build?

You just use an range-tap to cancel it. Jumping should also work, but the range-tap gives more damage.

As for battletank:

You can run different setups and combinations of gear + augments + artifacts. All depends on what you want to (battle)tank.

Thats all about experience and depending on situations.

You have kind of 2 options for loadouts.

Either you run a brick-Setup with Jackhammer and the classic source shard build.

OR

The usual battletank where you basically spam Jackhammer all the way.

Yeah, I've been doing a LOT of reading... but problem is things change so much that sometimes what was relevant in March 2022 isn't necessarily relevant in JULY 2022.

I was also thinking maybe MERCY, Quislet -and- Grim. Grim would remove the power reduction and add a bit more passive DPS as well, since I already have Grim at 200. I know the dev who made MERCY basically said something like, 'you can't have a pet build without Source Shard', so in his view, you always had to run GW in your loadout with a pet; so it was either Shard, Quislet, MERCY or Shard, MERCY, Grim. However, as noted above by @CHARI EL, he runs MERCY and Quislet but no Shard and does quite well with Earth. I like having pets for passive damage, but I don't like sitting in the background just doing nothing but pushing buttons while my pet does everything. If that's what I wanted, I'd go Sorcery. One thing I like about Earth is that you can be range and do well or melee and do well, so plenty of options. Plus, I'd rather have a TANK role than healer in a pinch.

I was just watching ObsidianChill's battle tank video, and he was running (at the time) a Brick loadout without Shard but with Grim, Solar and Manacles. Since MERCY doesn't work for Brick, that artifact is out anyway. Yet, could replace Gemstone shield with Entomb and replace Solar with Quislet, since Quislet is pretty devastating when used with SC. Since I'd be just battle tanking to increase my survivability in solos/bounties, etc... I'm thinking I could get by without a shield.

Decisions... decisions.

Haven't seen the vid in question but I'm thinking Brick + Jackhammer really doesn't work well unless Grim is ranked all the way up to 200.

It's a good thing I have Grim at 200 then. Which I did mention in my opening post.

my bad... your first sentence in that post threw me off.

If you want to run a pet build than source shard is pretty much mandatory. It’s the last 2 slots that become a question. That being grim and quislet or mercy and quislet. Quislet is the stronger of the 2 per arts. Additionally quislet gives you more SC and when you are gonna pop a SC you use godwave first which. When you use a SC quislet also does its own mini SC. This attack can be buffed with source shards godwave attack. This is why the 2 are pretty much mandatory.

The big question is mercy vs grim. PI isn’t an issue since regardless you’ll have PI up with both arts. Grim places it by itself while mercy turns your fortify into a PI applicator. Each one has pros and cons so don’t listen to anyone who says one is mandatory. Each one will also change which utility slots you use.

Grim:
Buff trinket, trinket pet or turret, supply drop, orbital

Mercy:
Buff trinket, trinket pet, supply drop, orbital.

Doesn’t seem like much of a difference but with grim you may want to opt into using a turret over your trinket pet. Turrets can not get the source buff which means that your 3 pets will always get the buff. While yes the trinket pet does do more damage than RSK it can also take the buff from quislet instead. And you want quislet to get the buff when you use a SC. With mercy on the other hand the damage loss from your trinket taking the buff can be offset by mercy resetting your trinket pet faster.

Now. A pet build is pretty much standard when it comes to loadouts.
AoE: spam ability, stronger ability, pet feeder, godwave, pet, SC. This doesn’t change regardless of you using mercy or grim.

Alternatively you could run mercy, grim, Quislet. This can be done. But your overall damage will be lower since you don’t have godwave Buffon your pets. Ok the bright side, this will let you summon all the pets your heart wants. Since there is no godwave you don’t have to worry about pets stealing the buffs from each other. But again, not as strong.

As for the pros vs cons:
Mercy will give your more SC. It also does higher potential damage since you can get the faster pet resets while also having your quislet take the buffs (if you’re lucky). However it’s more clunky. Mercy modifies how crystal and RSK attack. They will do a mini attack to test how many targets there are. If there are multiple targets it will do an aoe attack. If there’s only 1 target they will do a ST attack. Because if this mini attack if you use godwave to early than you won’t buff your pets in time to do their big attacks. This gets even more clunky when you want to use your sc and your pet feeder at the same time to buff both attacks with godwave.

And finally. RSK vs Crystal.
Without mercy you will want to use crystal since it does the big burst attack when you use forty. This attack can get buffed with godwave. With mercy you can use either pet since they both do a big attack with fortify.

With mercy you have to compare 2 numbers. Sustained dps vs burst dps. Sustained dps is how much your pet is doing when not getting power while burst is how much their special attacks do. Rsk has a much higher sustained attack when compared to crystal. Their burst damage is pretty comparable. Overall dps favors rsk. Fury has a higher burst which means mercy favors fury but that’s a different topic. I tested all the base numbers a while ago. Can’t remember which thread has the latest numbers I posted but maybe someone can quote it since I’m to lazy lol.

Interesting info. I know ObsidianChill has a video out in which he did a test with MERCY and found Crystal slightly outperformed RSK, but not by a whole lot.

Thanks for the Source Shard input, but I am not going to be using GW... as I said... I want a pet build but not having to just sit there feeding pets while I basically do nothing, if that's what I wanted, I'd go Sorcery, which then it'd be Shard, Grim and Quislet. I see the above noted build by @CHARI EL as being a nice compromise between having a pet build while also having an actual Earth rotation. Everyone seems to also forget that Grim removes the power reduction penalty, which MERCY does not... and for a solo-centric player like me, that's very important to consider.

Tbh power isn’t really much of an issue these days. There are so many ways power bars can be maintained. Even soloing.

If pet builds aren’t for you than RSK is better. The only time you’d want to use crystal would be when you see a troll running bop commlinks. The sustained damage from rsk puts it above crystal. People always say “but if you feed crystal it does more damage”. Yes this is true. But giving crystal power takes an ability and because if animation times this means it’s 1 second. Without crystal you would never not use an ability for 1 sec. You would be using abilities back to back. So: 1 ability + rsk > fortify + crystal.

For a non pet build you best artifact options are trans, strat, and EoG/quislet.

EoG will be better if you have a healer using EoG themselves to give you SC but overall quislet will be better. Since you say you solo a lot than quislet is just the better option. Just keep in mind that EoG is just plain better when you’re getting fed SC.

Strategist is situationally the strongest artifact in the game. What I mean by situational is that it has 2 criteria. One being a major factor while the other being a lesser factor. I’ll explain how it works first. When you crit on an enemy there is a chance the strategist will proc adding a damage over time tick to that enemy that had been crit. The DoT ticks every 2 seconds for 8 seconds (4 ticks). On top of that if you crit on 3 enemies and each one gets.m a DoT tick than they all do full damage that does not split. The reason for this is that each tick is calculated separately and because of that each one is considered a different tick meaning it can not split.

So what does that mean for the 2 factors. The first being that splitting rule. The more enemies there are the stronger it is since it does not split like all other attacks (well there’s 1 other that doesn’t but that’s a different story). Now. It’s still strong one ST but it gets stronger the more enemies there are. And now for the bigger factor. The strat will give an 8 second dot which does 1 tick every 2 seconds. Because the ticks are over 8 seconds it means that if enemies are dying fast than the strat doesn’t do it’s full damage. On top of that, if the enemy gets the tick when they are about to die anyways than they barely take any damage. Remember, there’s a chance to proc it when you crit. So it’s a chance of a chance.

It sounds like a bad art right? Well it’s not. For situations when enemies live long enough it adds a huge amount of damage. Using 30 sec parsers my damage goes from 16k to 210k. That’s 50k per second extra damage on multi targets.

Trans also increases your chance to crit and makes your crits do more damage. However your base damage goes down. Overall between the lower base damage and the higher crits and crit chance your damage does go up.

With all that said in mind. If you don’t want to use pets you’ll want to run trans. Using strat depends heavily on what type of content you run. If you do a lot of open world bosses or elite content where adds are beefy than strat is your best friend. But if you do random none elite content than you’re better off using other arts.

Trans and quislet will basically be your bread and butter since you solo a lot. The 3rd depends on you.

Strat: for elite of a lot of open world bosses
Grim: for none elite content
EoG: if you run with healers using EoG themselves

Not to be rude, but I'm getting the vibe that you're not actually reading what I'm writing... just catching points here and there then structuring your reply according to what you think I'm saying.

If you run MERCY, you don't have to feed Crystal because the Mercy power becomes Fortify and only takes up two slots (Mercy/Crystal) versus a pet-build which uses three slots Godwave, Mercy/Fortify and RSK/Crystal. I'm not an elitest or min/maxer. I'm also not going to level 20 artifacts just because I might want to run this or that, or jump on the new meta-of-the-week. I already have Grim maxed, have Solar to 160, I actually have Trans at 160 as well. What I'm looking for, and I'll repeat again, a build that uses pets but is not pet-focused. Considering that many Earth builds utilize about THREE active powers, that leaves two for pet skills and one for SC (to use with Quislet)... being forced to run a three-skill build just for pets, that doesn't leave a whole lot of "EARTHing" left to an Earth power. It might do great damage, but, it's boring af. I want a combination of pet damage while also having active Earth skills to utilize... best of both worlds. Sure it might be 'jack of all trades, master of none' but it beats being bored to tears sitting back while my pets do all the work.

I appreciate your long response, I do... but again, it's not taking into consideration what I've been saying all along that I'm looking for in an Earth build.

Since you are wanting a pet build I would actually suggest Emperor Aquaman as one of you allies for his passive that buffs your pet damage when you are damaged. Quislet should outperform Grim if you don't need the power back.

Thanks. However, if you'd read the #4 posts, you'd see that I stated I would probably go with Aquaman because of the 10% damage buff and Active ally cooldown reduction. I also stated I'm leaning towards running Mercy, Quislet AND Grim for the power reduction.

Thanks to @DeitySupreme I'm also considering going full Fury build with Shard, Mercy and Quislet.

Artifacts always depends on what you want to do with your character.. The best advice I can give you if you're on PC is to download the test server and do some testing yourself with all the dps arts available and see what you like and works well..

In MY OPINION running content as an earth dps since the MERCY art came out, Im actually enjoying dpsing now. previously I ran a pure pet build with source,quislet,grim, the damage was there but was boring af..

Now i feel like im more involved wih this setup and dish out more damage as well..

When It comes to AOE, I got that top spot nailed down going into a boss fight, Then i might have some competition when it comes to ST damage if there is a Muni, gadget or mental player in the mix but that again I can hold my own thanks to my other sources of damage available on top of my own.

This is just 1 build compared to so many builds that are available.. So depending on how you want to play the artifact setup will change.. GL.

-GE0KING

Now see, YOU get it. There's more to this game than just numbers... if you aren't enjoying your rotation or power, etc... then you likely aren't going to stick around. So many people seem to focus so much on scoreboards (which apparently hasn't changed at all since I've been gone), that they lose sight of actual enjoyment of playing the game. To them, scoreboards are their enjoyment, great for them, but don't expect or demand other players feel the same way.

So I've come up with the following DPS loadouts... thank you to everyone for your input!!

AOE Range (switch Stones to Sandblast for ST) - (Mercy-Quislet-Shard)
Striking Stones-Mercy-Godwave-Upheaval-Crystal-Entomb

Melee - (Mercy-Quislet-Grim)
Mercy-Tectonic Break-Unstoppable-Jackhammer-Crystal-Entomb

Solo DPS Battle Tank - (Mercy-Quislet-Shard)
Sandblast-Mercy-Godwave-Jackhammer-Crystal-Entomb

Tougher Boss Solo DPS Battle Tank - (Grim-Quislet-Solar)
Heat Vision-Fortify Golem-Unstoppable-Jackhammer-Brick-Entomb

So there are my DPS builds for various content. I'll be running HoL-Bot as active and Cyborg/Aquaman as passives. Using AoE Turret trinket for builds with Godwave and Manor Henchmen for builds without GW.

So now I got the DPS side down, it's time to ask TANK Q's...

Actually, I have a loadout already and have Manacles-Mystic-EoG for arts all at 200... what I want to know is about gear. When going full tank role, do you use all tank gear, or do you have some DPS gear like weapons, jewelry, etc. I know last time I played, many full tanks would use DPS weapons and jewelry with full tank gear for the rest.

I have 2 earth dps. 1 all might, other pet.
Might build AOE; I use EoG, Trans, and Scrap
St; Trans, Strat, and Solar.
Battle tank; Mystic, Scrap, EoG.
Pet build, ST and AOE I use Source, Grim, and Quislet.
Both do good dps, but I believe my might build is better. Really don't know because my might build is 378 with 166k might and my pet build is 371 with 143k might