Building a High-Crit Dragonknight

Drakensang offers lots of choices to the end-game dragonknight: 1H or 2H, tank or dps, hammer, axe, or sword, and so on. The nature of this capricious game is such that we have to plan well in advance to coordinate our gear and gems to craft the build we dream of.

I've been playing DSO for years, taking a ranger up to lvl 45 until I learned that, at least pre-155, everyone wanted to group up with dks. For most of my career, I was exclusively 1H. I prioritized damage and speed offensively, health and block defensively both pre and post-155. But once I FINALLY ripped the full warlord set out of Dragan's greedy hands, I was ready to try 2H DPS. Those of you who have experienced the fun of a Dragan-powered DPS DK know what makes this build so fun.

What is interesting is that I didn't realize until a couple of weeks ago that I'd unintentionally raised my crit rate to a level worth exploiting. Since then, I've tweaked my rate to a respectable 5272/47.5%. But the benefits of a high crit on a DK didn't hit me until I reviewed Baragain's brilliant updates on DK skills. Since then, I've been trying to mine all the synergies possible. I'm sharing my thoughts to raise a discussion on how a 2H DPS dragonknight might best leverage a high crit rate.

WHY?
DPS is how 2H DKs contribute both offensively and defensively. Offensively, high crit can be the only way to substantially increase DPS once a player has exploited most obvious damage adders and multipliers. Defensively, DPS powers both healing and aggro, so if a DK wants to stand and bang, he better be able to dish out damage.

GEAR
Gear choice obviously makes or breaks optimized builds. I wouldn't want to try this kind of DK with the Black Warlord set, but other sets actually increase crit rate and/or crit damage. Witch Chaser or Armor of Darkness might be fun to play around with too.

My gear is not currently selected to maximize crit rate. In fact, I kind of backed into a good one because of two items, then added a third to make the most of the opportunity:

1. A good axe: in the new weapon system, axes lack the raw damage of some hammers or the native speed boost of swords, but the native crit rate is pretty sweet. The best weapon I've found to date is a lvl 50 2H axe with +200 damage/46.21 increased weapon damage/+1399 crit rate for a total of 2786. Nice start.

2. Dragan's Mighty Signet Ring: This ring is made for DPS DKs, since the summoned knight draws aggro just when you need a moment to regroup. Even if you don't need the help, you might appreciate a reminder that your health has dropped below a certain level. The knight even dishes out a little damage. For these reasons alone, I will always wear it. The +200 armor and +600 crit the lvl 50 ring gives are just nice bonuses

3. Bloodtooth: With the axe, signet ring, one flawless onyx, and a couple of random crit adds, I was suddenly up to 4000 crit. Then Gnob came to town. Once your crit rate is high enough, Bloodtooth is a powerful addition; why would you turn down 990 hp and over 1000 crit for your DK?

SKILLS
Scoring crits nearly 50% of the time seemed worthwhile just for the damage boost, especially once I started looking for crit damage boosters. But Baragain's analysis of DK skills highlighted some synergies I never paid attention to. My current active skill list, which is always under revision, is as follows:

Rage Attack 2/3/5
Smash 5
Rage Jump 2/3
Furious Battle Cry
Iron Brow 2/3/5
Mighty Wild Swing 2/3/5
Dragon Hide 2
Banner of War 3
Fury of the Dragon 5

Some of these skills are auto-picks for DPS DKs. Nobody rolls without MWS or Smash, right? But some of these choices are new to me, based entirely on high crit synergies.

Rage Attack, for example, never looked as interesting to me as Rageful Swing as my basic attack. But who knew that for 5 points, each time you crit with RA, all active cool downs are reduced by 1 second? Does that Jester gem that lowers cooldowns look good to you? This works just as well or better. Plus, for 3 points, each hit increases attack speed 10% and run speed 5%, stackable 5 times. So the high crit DK spams this attack to recharge and pay for better attacks while attacking faster. Nice!

Iron Brow has always been my go-to stun, since that tasty armor break is baked right in. You know what's better than one Iron Brow? How about two or more in a row? For 5 points, Iron Brow doesn't get a cooldown on a crit or fatal blow. For a high crit DK, this means lots of extra IBs, which not only save you from damage and effects through the stun but also amp up damage through the armor break.

IN PLAY
What I'm finding is that this new approach allows me to work through mobs more quickly. Obviously scoring crits nearly half the time will lead to better overall damage, especially as I find more crit damage multipliers. But uncorking an additional Iron Brow every other time adds excellent control. What is most impactful is how much quicker MWS, Rage Jump, and Dragon Hide recharge. Even an extra second or two matters with MWS, which of course heals more with all those crits.

WHAT'S NEXT?
I'm trying to find the right balance of gear and gems. For example, since I use Rage Attack so much, maybe I can swap another onyx in place of a sapphire in my weapon adornment. I just replaced a +69 dam/+223 crit seal for a +22/+357/+11% crit dam seal, but I still have to see if the loss of basic damage is offset by the extra crit damage. Every addition requires subtraction, but with the right planning and luck, this build can become more effective and enjoyable to play.

What do those of you who enjoy fine-tuning your DKs for performance think? I've been influenced by so much of the outstanding theorycraft and number crunching here that I'm looking forward to your collective feedback. How would you improve a high crit 2H DK?

 

A well written guide to a crit based 2H build... I have some thoughts (I do love 2H DKs after all) and am making this post to reserve space for when I have time to actually comment in depth.

EDIT:
OK, here we go... My apologies in advance for the wall of text. Props to those of you who actually read it all.

You covered some of the better skill choices that make best use of having a high crit rate, so I'll just focus on gear choices.

You discussed the three sets that are the best choice for a 2H crit oriented DK and there is no doubt that you are right.

Black Warlord set:
One of the best choices when it comes to damage and defense. The 30% weapon damage gives a massive boost to your weapon damage, gem damage, and it effects both min and max damage. If you are using a hammer, I think you would be rather foolish to not use this set. The other nice thing about this set is that you don't need a torso to get the set bonus, meaning you can mix in a high % Damage torso if you get lucky. The problem is that this set is awful for crit, crit damage, speed, or almost any other attack stat other than damage and if you are using an making a crit build with an axe, those stats are what you need to make it good. That being said, with a good decoration, a good belt, a good amulet, or a couple of other potential crit items, it is possible to get 40-50% with an axe. It just takes a good chunk of luck.

Darkness set:
I won't even consider the old Dark Armor because it is no longer avaliable, but the Darkness set is excellent for crit (as long as you use the helmet), gives a good amount of attack speed if you use the gloves, decent armor, and even some nice damage from the 10% bonus for 3/5 parts. The issue of course is HP. You want to use at least 3/5 or 4/5 parts from this and this impacts your ability to use high HP and this impacts your ability to get HP from other sources (especially if using some specialty items covered below). All told, offensive stats-wise using 4/5, you can get +55% crit rate, 10% damage, and 15% attack speed. This is nice, but it comes at the expense of survivability. If going for DPS, this is likely the way to go with an axe, but you will need to be careful and won't likely play the tank as much. In fact, it isn't too hard to max out at 80% with this set and then as items get better you can begin to swap out items in favor of survivability or even more damage/crit damage. The other interesting/useful/handicap about this set is it's flexibility/lack of flexibility. If this seems contradictory, stay with me for a second. You can chose between 3/5 or 4/5 (after all, 5/5 is useless when considering DPS) which allows you to sub in things like a damage torso or crit damage gloves or boots from another set...etc, but limits you because you lose an offensive stat no matter what item you decide to swap out in favor of adding a different offensive stat. If you have helmet, shoulders, torso and gloves, you can use offensive oriented boost (set or otherwise), but if you want to use a damage torso, you have do decide if the crit loss (both from the set bonus and the crit line on the torso) is worth the damage gain. Or maybe you swap the boots back in to keep the 4/5 when you use a damage torso, but then you lose flexibility in regards to footwear. See what I mean?... Confusing.

The Witch Chaser set:
So much potential... soooooo much frustration. This is the only good crit oriented DPS set with randomized stats meaning that you can get a really nice set or an awful set. Assuming that you can get a decent set, you start with the 3/3 set bonuses of 11.1% attack speed (respectable), 22.2% max damage (a shame it is only max damage), and the 33.3% crit (highest single boost to crit other than the Darkness helmet). Given the crit line on the helmet, you get a rather nice amount of crit from the set as a whole when combined with an axe (about 20% before considering anything other than the set and the axe). And lets not forget that in addition to the 22.2% max damage, you also can easily get 90-100 max damage from lines on the armor, and while this increases your damage gap, it also serves to improve your average DPS. The other advantage is that this only takes 3 slots to get as opposed to the 3-4 that the Darkness set would to get max benefit out of everything. You also end up with better HP and resistance than you do with the dark set, at the expense of some armor. Another interesting feature is that you get the attack speed without using up your gloves slot (as opposed to the Darkness set) leaving you open to use specialized items.

Specialized items...

Sets:
Dragonache:
You touched on Bloodtooth's +25% crit rate and that is no joke. Just working off of the axe's base 12.5% crit rate, that means you gain 4.13% crit rate from just this one item, not considering any other items with crit rate. This alone makes it a useful item, even if it is just used on it's own, without the rest of the set. Add in the Tear Holder and you gain some damage (ok damage, but nothing significant compared to the damage you get from rings these days) and some nice attack speed that will often move you between speed break points. Finally, if you are going for DPS, If you are going to do 2/3, you might as well do 3/3 for the 130 damage which, when combined with the 50% damage from the knowledge tree is worth an extra 195 damage. I don't know about you, but the fact that I could gain 195 damage from doing 3/3 instead of 2/3 is hard to pass up unless I have a really nice amulet (crit or crit damage) to take it's place. Really though, that 3/3 is the only real reason to use the amulet in a DPS build because it doesn't bring anything else offensive to the table. In addition to the nice damage boost for the set, a DK does gain a huge amount of HP and armor from the ring and amulet which helps with survivability, particularly in the two squishier sets (Darkness or Witch).

Keen's set
This is the holy grail of many DKs. Unquestionably, it is hard to get a better defensive set of three items than these three and this defensiveness can help counter some of the squishyness of two of the other sets (Darkness or Witch) or reinforce the tankyness of the other (Warlord). It even give some OK offensive stats for 3/3 considering that it is first an foremost a defense driven set. Additionally, if you get a good crit/crit damage belt or attack speed/damage gloves, you can go to 2/3 and gain significant without game changing loss of defense because you still have the 750 HP for 2/3 (which is more like 1088 if you use your 15 floater wisdom points for HP as opposed to attack speed). Sure, you may lose the +10% crit and 40 damage, but, as said, with a good belt or gloves, what you gain is way better than what you lose. Of course, there is a caveat here... The set can be !%$^ hard to get and complete!

The Grimmag's Fury set:
This is a new one and even harder to get than Keen's, but it has a lot of potential if you have one or two nice onyxs. So often we have a hard time finding weapon decorations with good crit, but this one give some good crit right out the gate. If you put a 250 or 335 onyx into it, you'd gain 25% on top of it's normal value (313 or 419). Now I don't have this item (PRNGs hate me), so I can't 100% say if this is taken into account before or after other crit enchantments, but comparing it to the old defender's belt, I'd bet on before, making it even more valuable. Also, if you get the boots, you can break Keen's set without even losing the +40 damage, but you'd be able to use a pair of the gloves from below without feeling any guilt. The catch is that this may interfere with the Darkness set... it is rather annoying that you need 4/5 to get that last 15% crit boost and you'd have to make the choice between 4/5 or 3/5 if you wanted to use an alternate pair of gloves with this set. On the other hand, I think this set has a lot of potential in Warlord or Witch set based builds. That being said, good luck. Unless you got it using the bug during the last release, I'm sure that it will take a good long while to get it now.

Gloves:
Steam-powered Steel Fists:
These fit nicely into any axe based build 30% crit damage with a 50% crit rate is the same as adding 15% to your displayed damage (which is much bigger than 15% weapon damage or even 15% more than the base damage). The problem is that in the Darkness set it comes at the expense of the 15% attack speed. In other possible builds, it would also necessitate breaking Keen's set, but as said, the 2%-4% loss from your crit rate (over all) is compensated by your crit damage DPS gain. The catch... they cost andermant, so you'd need to save and wait for them to be on sale (if you are a F2P).

A nice legendary:
With attack speed lines (theoretically) as big as 10%, you can conceivably get legendary gloves with 15-25% attack speed on them. Now these likely won't replace the Darkness gloves because you'd lose the 4/5 or 3/5 bonus to put them on, they do go very well with both the Warlord set and the Witch set. If you get 3x lines on a legendary, and the lines are respectable, if the last line is damage, HP, or armor, they can all significantly improve the build. Now, if you get a godlike pair with >30% attack speed in 4x lines, I'll just say it now... I hate you.

Boots:
A nice legendary:
If you've already broken Keen's into oblivion and are just looking for an option to improve your DPS (not caring about defense either) you can get 60-90 damage on a pair of boots if you farm in Fatal PWs often enough.

Nice essence boots:
These can give some OK HP, OK armor, and some OK damage... there are much better options, but at least you are guaranteed 4 slots. You might as well just go for defensive boots at this point if you aren't using Keen's or the Grimmag's boots since you have obviously sacrificed a lot of other defensive options.

Belts:
There are no good uniqes for offensive belts. Which leads us to...
A nice legendary:
If you aren't using keen's for defense, you are likely better off looking for a crit or crit damage belt. Theoretically, you can get 800 crit or 60% crit damage, or some mix of the two from a good belt. If you already have nice crit elsewhere, you can gain significant crit damage here.

Amulets:
If not using the Dragonache one, you only have a couple of good choices...
The Steam Seal:
There are better crit damage amulets possible or good crit rate amulets, but this one is easy to get because it just has to be bought for andermant, no luck involved.

The Powerful Gear:
Same as the steam seal, but with 25 damage too. Still not as good as a good legendary these days, and tough to get making it hardly worth mentioning it.

Seal of Betrayal:
Nice crit damage (30%-40%), but the HP regen/andermagic resistance, plus the difficulty in getting it makes it also hardly worth mentioning also.

A nice legendary:
Already talked about that above. It is much more likely to be useful if not using the full Dragonache set.

Rings:
If not using the Dragonache set, you have several good item choices.
Dragan's ring:
600 crit goes very well with Bloodtooth and the other % enchantments from the Darkness set or Witch set. Sure, you can get better legendaries, but the guardian that can spawn can be useful at times.

Ring of Death:
While it is good, it is not as good as it used to be. Now that crit damage and damage lines have been improved on rings you can do better with legendaries.

A second Bloodtooth:
This isn't always an obvious option, but using 2 Bloodtooths make for +50% crit from your two rings, which can mean that you could use your other items to focus on crit damage.

A good legendary:
I'm sure that you are sick of hearing it by now, but a good legendary can beat most uniques when combined with one of the crit oriented sets.

Torsos:
These are only important for use in case of a Black Warlord set.
Darkness torso: A little crit and some nice armor to be boosted by 15%.
Untouchables torso (Tier 3): 11% Damage (so they say) and some nice HP/armor... good luck getting it though since you'd need to do tons of runs of Khalys
Destructur's Breastplate: Getting 10% attack speed from a torso... not bad. Good luck getting the darn thing though.

Gems
Onyxs:
Use sparingly. If you have one or two high crit gems, they can replace one or two saphires on the decoration (especially if you have the Grimmag's decoration), but the increase in the DPS needs to outweigh the DPS lost from losing the speed since you are already using a slow axe.

Jewel of Rage:
One of the best gems for a crit oriented builds... free crit damage at the expense of defensive gem, not an offensive one. I currently use 4 and will add a 5th after this next Defeat the Undefeatables event. This, in a crit build, would account for 12.5% DPS increase if you have a 50% crit rate.

The new Winter gem:
4% crit rate from a "defensive gem" is great. 4% of 1387 (just the axe) is 55 crit from a defense slot.

While this is rather exhaustive, I'm sure that I missed several important aspects or items. I hope you enjoyed it and offer your own feedback.

 

well it ain't my video but this is my favorite CHR build char
he is on german forum nick HerrNiemand

Link removed

 

Outstanding analysis, Baragain. I've been farming Grimm to see what impact the set might offer, but Grimmag is stingy!

What are your (or anyone else's) thoughts on optimal crit rate? Is 50% enough or is there a sweet spot at a higher rate?

 

amulet, dont forget arachna's vigor, it gives u 15% health boost+825 hp, actually i have end up arachna set and heredur, i am farming grimmag for 2 items and break keens set!

 

If you farm enough you can find nice weapons adornments... i found mine in q3 easy with 858 crit and 4 slots, the after day it dropped a 808 crit with 2 slots, and like 1 week ago 757 crit one... Also dropped a 845 crit ring with 4 slots... Always same map.... I don't think grimmag's adorment worths the effort being nice legendaries around (even losing the 20% charge extra dmg.. Imo this is an interesting PvP boost). I've been checking this iron brow talents.... OMG with 50.89% crit many times i do 3 consecutive iron brows, and checked with 53,44% and seems to be the same... May be it must be more like 60% to feel significative changes... But yeah... Iron brow talent is a gold mine for farming minibosses. Anyway i'm still running the rageful swing cause multiple targets damaging and bleeding talent with crits accelerate the wiping...
By now i use dragan set, 2 bloodtooth (2nd cause the extra hp allows me to allocate more knowledge points from hp to att speed and graduate to my needs ), dark gloves+dark boots (their decent % for att and running with the 5% of crit are enough to discard many other options cause you cannot get crit in these parts),an axe, a 27,75% crit dmg and 54 dmg amulet, legen torso with 2 %dmg línea and 2 armor lines... It is quite interesting to focus all % bonuses on same items in order to save gliphs.

 

Because of the changes to crit in R155, there is no longer any diminishing returns. In the past, the "sweet spot" was about 50%-60% because past that what you gained for what you added was dwarfed by the amount of DPS you could gain from a damage or crt damage line in place of the crit line. However, with the linear scale, it never hurts to get more crit (to the 80% max that is). The fact is that you get 1% Crit rate for every 110.96 CHV that you get, up to 8878 total CHV. That being said, if you get a nice damage item or crit damage item that may replace a crit item in your build, it never hurts to plug the numbers into a DPS calculator and see what happens (but that is good practice in any circumstances).

No doubt! That is one of the nicest defensive items I've seen in a long time (legendary could be better, but not by much). Problem is that we're discussing a DPS based build and if you waste your amulet slot and don't get any offensive stats out it, then you're making a mistake. And if you are looking for defense with offence, you'd be better off with the Dragonache amulet with 3/3 for the set due to the 130 (195 knowledge upgraded) damage.