Brigand Guide

[Brigandboy]

THE BRIGAND

K well it seems that ever since Dream came out, Brigands have been replaced and overshadowed by Haruspex's as the best bow-users. But in my experience, brigands are still on top. Seeing as the other brigand guides I see focus on the spear (ew) or don't max Marksmanship (wtf?), I decided to create a new one to show all of you guys which class is still boss. My current Brigand is Level 56 in Legendary Asia and doesn't afraid of anything. No but seriously, nothing gives him any problems at all. I personally have tried a number of great class combos, but nothing plays quite as smoothly or is quite as fun for me as my trusty Brigand.

The Premise
The bow-using Brigand class seeks to abuse the awesome powers of Mandrake and Nightshade poisons to the fullest by combining them with quick-shooting bows with puncturing arrows for maximum poison spreading. If played right, the mobs of enemies should be too confused and slow to even get to you, let alone hit you (ridiculous defensive ability to dodge attacks).

The Build
Please note that because Brigand is such a naturally good class, this guide does NOT need to be taken word-for-word. As long as you have your basics set, you can basically f*** around with the rest of your skill points.

The Basic Build:
http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...0-6-0-0-12-6-0
This is the basic build for a Brigand archer. As I said before, after this you can basically do whatever the hell you want.

Getting There: For the greatest ease, you probably want to start off with the Hunting Mastery. Max out Wood Lore immedietly just for the hell of it. Later it's vital, and since the game is so easy right now, just do it. After that, head up an extra three and go for Marksmanship, dipping a point into Art of the Hunt. Then you can either dump more into Art of the Hunt, or go immediately into Rogue for poison. Either way, get Art of the Hunt maxed by the time you hit Normal Asia. Max out Envenom Weapon, as early on it gets you tons of damage. Then go up Rogue for Nightshade. The game should still be nice and comfortable, so it isn't that big a deal if u go into a couple stupid active skills for fun. After this, you really want to head back up Hunting until you hit the 16 marker. Once there dip into Find Cover, Gouge, and Study Prey, whilst maxing out the all-important Puncture Shot. Puncture Shot should keep the game extremely easy for a while to come once it's maxed out. Next, head up the Rogue tree to Toxin Distillation and max that out, dipping a point into Open Wound along the way just cuz. Then head up to 24 and MAX MANDRAKE IMMEDIATLY. Just as the initial ease of Puncture Shot was beginning to wear off, you get another absolutely ridiculous skill. And this ease pretty much never wears off. Now you can head up Hunting again to max out Volley and Scatter Shot. Then you're good to go.

The Full Build:
http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...0-6-0-6-12-6-0
Full Level 75 Build here. As I said you can basically do whatever you want once you're done with the basics, but this just adds some minuscule poison and bleeding damage by maxing all that out, as well as adding Herbal Remedy (so nice at a full 10, lasts basically forever), Call of The Hunt, and maxed Study Prey tree. Exploit Weakness is focused on over the basic Call of the Hunt because your attack speed should already be maxed out or close to it by then.

Attributes: Don't even touch Intelligence, Health, or Energy (maybe a few points into Energy if Mandrake and Marksmanship are eating you alive later in the game). Brigands are stupid and frail as shit, but rock all the same cuz you can't touch 'em. Focus of Dexterity and Strength in around a 2:1 ratio, with maybe even a little more Dexterity focus than that.

Items: I'm not gonna go in depth into specific items here, but I will lay out the guildlines. Basically, what you look for in items are: +%Attack Speed, +%Movement Speed, +%Total Speed, +%Pierce Damage, +%Damage, +%Dexterity, +%Strength, +All Skills, +Rogue Skills, +Hunting Skills, +%Chance to Avoid Projectiles, +%Chance to Dodge Attacks, and +%Defensive Ability. Pretty obvious really. Oh and later you might be wanting for some Energy and Health recovery.

Attack Speed % is the most major thing here, as you need to be able to stuff your enemies with as many arrows as possible for the greatest possible Mandrake abuse. Plus it works wonders for your DPS. Even when a certain item might improve your DPS a bit but significantly lower your Attack Speed, your might not want to take it because you'll find Mandrake is a lot harder to abuse when you can't shoot super fast.

Attack Speed is followed closely by Pierce Damage %, Damage %, + Hunting and Rogue Skills, and Movement Speed %. The first two help a ton with simple DPS; Movement is absolutely vital to run around dodging meteors from bosses and to simply make the gameplay more action-packed; + Hunting Skills makes Marksmanship, Puncture Shot, and Wood Lore even more ridiculous; and + Rogue Skills mean literally off-the-charts Mandrake abuse.

[Darklightr]

I see you didn't put any points into the Trap tree. Care to elaborate on that? Other than that, nice build. If I ever make a Brigand, I may use this one

[Brigandboy]

Honestly traps aren't that good. They are half-decent in Act 1 Normal, but that's so easy anyway you don't really need to bother. After that they suck, because any bosses that could give you trouble are either ranged or immune, and against little mob bosses you may as well just shoot with your uber-powerful piercing arrows.

Yeah if your ever bored of your other characters, keep Brigand in mind. Extremely fun and potent class combo.

[ASYLUM101]

o.O

Traps aren't that good?

Brigand and Assassin are notorious for having the most broken traps in the game...

Brigand gets Art and Call of the Hunt, which will buff your traps as well. Rather than dealing 83-113 damage per projectile at max level(which they shoot 6 of if you fully spec into traps), you're dealing -

+50% (improved firing mechanism)
+75% (from aoth)
+139% (from coth synergy)

giving you a grand total of 302-411 minimum damage, on normal. On epic and legendary traps are buffed MORE than pets damage wise (they are considered monsters not pets, and monsters receive better per difficulty buffs)

This also doesn't take into consideration the attack speed boost from CotH. Traps have a base attack speed of 1.3, with the full COTH bonus, they're hitting 1.7 attacks per second (and 1 attack from the trap shoots 7 projectiles)

So... 3 traps, shooting for 300 minimum, 1.7 times per second. (forget the multi projectiles, you'll really only ever hit one target vs bosses, but mobs will be melted) After 3 seconds, the traps have each attacked 5 times, so you're looking at 1500 piercing damage per trap vs a single target. (in 3 seconds!!)

Considering the fact that you have TWO methods to draw aggro (monster lure and study prey), brigand trapper is actually VERY powerful, if not the strongest.

I've only ever used an illusionist trapper, which was incredibly powerful considering he has NO way to buff the traps, they were just incredibly tanky.


Anyway. Tangent aside, your build could use some work, there's a few issues that bug me...

First: 12 points in Open wound and 8 in Anatomy. wtf? First, you're doing (141*[1+1.2+1.39+.48]=) 573 bleeding over 3 seconds. Ok, that's a good number of damage, sure. The problem? You have no way of debuffing your targets' bleeding resists. In epic/legendary, EVERY enemy has 15/30 bleeding resist. So you're actually dealing 487 over 3, or 400 over 3. Against undead, nothing. Constructs, nothing.

In legendary, just about all the enemies have around 1000% of what the hp was in normal, so those satyrs who had 50 HP? Yeah, now its 5000 HP. Good luck doing 400 bleeding damage over 3 seconds when they have that much HP... Say you even manage to break their resists (you can't without bramblewood and 3 monkeykings/shendongs), and you even bring them down to -50, (50% more damage), that bleeding is dealing 860 damage over 3.. it's really not a whole lot. Per second, it's only287 damage tops. As a brigand, you can easily break 3000 with a single auto attack, that meager 287 bleeding damage is not gonna get you anything extra really.

Second: Maxed Toxin Distillation and Envenom weapon. again, wtf? I won't go through the whole argument above, but poison resists are just as hard to break, if not harder because there are more enemies resistant to it. Sure, you can stack poison and get poison% bonuses on items (which also destroy any survivability you might have), but with skills alone you're topping out at (152*[1+1.5+1.44]=) 221 poison damage over 3 seconds, per second is 74 damage, and per the 5.3 with distillation, you're getting 390.4 poison damage over 5.3 seconds. I'm not gonna go through the argument above again, but really, the damage is wasted unless you're doing a full poison build. (in which case, I don't think a brigand is the best poison build)

Third: Gouge, while it fits with the bleeding thing, again, I'm not seeing it being any more useful than open wound (which does less damage, granted, but the argument still works for this skill too). For a full bleeding build, imo it's better to go with either dream or spirit along with rogue or hunting. (bonecharmer is a good bleeder, as is a warlock. dream is good with either because of total damage increases, which benefits poison/bleeding)

Fourth: Level 75??? who gets to that level? Even on my most played toon I only hit 65.

Fifth: No monster lure??? WHY???


Don't misunderstand me, I'm not stomping all over your build, I'm just not seeing a reason for some of these things.(additional damage sources that really don't add much in total compared to the amount of insane piercing you can do.)

My typical Brigand build, would look like this:

http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...0-1-0-0-12-6-0

1 point in Call of the Hunt cause you really only want the synergy, the attack speed is a nice bonus but unless you have no attack speed anywhere else, not worth maxing. (unless you have alot of pets..)

No points in flushout. I play Brigand as an archer, because brig has no AoE without traps or knives, and I didn't put focus into knives.

Why 1 point in knives and max synergy? They carry the effects of envenom weapon, aoe confusion/fumble/slow is priceless.

Everything else is self-explanatory I think.

[Darklightr]

Instead of just reiterating what ASYLUM said, ill just say I agree.

I had to look over the build quickly my first time (I was at school at the time). But what he says is right. BUT, I'll still probably use the build some time

[D3fault]

Yeah asylum pretty much hit the main points. Bow brigand was my first toon ever

To explain why he said no points in flush out, -% defensive ability seems cool...until you realize that it only matters with a melee toon. And you're not doing any elemental damage as a brigand so you don't need that either.

My final build when I finished legendary: http://www.titancalc.com/TitanCalc.a...0-1-0-0-12-6-0

I don't like knives very much so I didn't invest, it's all up to preference. I also only put one point into trail blazing and monster lure because with +3 or +4 skill items (which weren't hard for me to get on my brigand), you get 4/6 on both, which was more than adequate for me. I also like maxing herbal remedy because if you can get it to 10/6, you've essentially eliminated the legendary resist handicap for poison.

Then if you chose to play beyond legendary and farm bosses or whatever, you could max call of the hunt, trail blazing, or even the synergy to lethal strike.

[Irma2]

Maxing out Volley and Scatter Shot last seems weird to me. Those are the first two skills I max as an archer, heh.

[ASYLUM101]

Maxing out Volley and Scatter Shot last seems weird to me. Those are the first two skills I max as an archer, heh.

Yea...I thought that was odd too.

[Poinas]

What I do as an archer is to max Wood Lore and put points in Marksmanship. When I have enough points to max the mastery and put 6 points in scatter, I do that. Take out points from Marsksmanship. Usually in Delphi or soon after that. Then max Scatter and Volley.