Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem guide – Endgame builds, skills, passives, and gems

It’s been a week since Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem launched. More and more players are doing their best to progress and grind in Wolcen‘s endgame. For those who are new to the party, it’s imperative to know how stats, passives, and gems affect the build you’ll create. This guild helps you with all of these and more.

Note: For additional info about Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem’s Expedition ranks, Champion of Stormfall upgrades, skill builds, tips, and more, check out our guides and features hub.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem – Experience, stats, and gems

Experience and stat allocation

Leveling in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem can be quite easy until you reach level 75. From this point onwards, the experience point requirements will skyrocket. For instance, it takes over 26 billion experience points to go from level 80 to 81.

As mentioned in our Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem beginner’s guide, you can allocate your attribute points into four distinct stats. At level 80, you’ll have 790 attribute points to spare and you can reset your stats for 40,000 gold. So, which one should you prioritize?

• Agility – This is probably the weakest stat of the bunch. Most of the “meta” spells in Wolcen aren’t particularly attuned to having high attack/casting speed requirements.
• Ferocity – Ideally, you should have over 30% critical chance. Still, you shouldn’t dump a lot of points into this stat since gear rolls, gems, and passives can take care of this.
• Wisdom – This is quite an ideal attribute to partially focus on since the strongest endgame builds in Wolcen focus on ailment stacks. Then again, if you can get the passives and decent armor rolls, you shouldn’t worry about this too much.
• Toughness – Your health and force shield are of utmost importance in Wolcen‘s endgame. You can’t go wrong with dumping all your points into toughness, especially if you don’t want to be a squishy glass cannon.

Note: Many of the perks and affixes you’ll see in Wolcen tend to be additive as opposed to multiplicative — ie. the percentage of “X-chance score” simply adds that value to a base stat. For instance, if you have 50 dodge and an item gives a “+10% dodge chance score,” you’re only getting an extra 5 dodge. That’s [50 + (50 x 0.10)] = 55 dodge.

Gems and sockets

There’s no gem crafting/merging in Wolcen, so you might as well sell the ones that you don’t need. Once you reach level 75-80, Eternal-quality gems will start dropping from mobs. They may also be sold by Fate-Adjucatrix Zeitgeist. The gist is this:

• Offensive (weapons) – For Offensive III, use the gem that coincides with the ailment damage that you want to focus on. Alternatively, have Offensive II sockets for a flat increase in your spell’s damage type.
• Defensive (helm, chest, legs, offhand) – Always get Defensive III sockets for Alexandrite gems (All Resist).
• Support (rings, amulet, belt, offhand) – All three socket types can be useful, though Support I tends to edge other options. Support I is for life leech/life steal depending on the damage type; Support II is for a flat increase to that damage type; Support III is for increased application chance for an ailment.

Defenses: Damage type resistance vs. avoidance vs. mitigation

Since we’re on the subject of toughness and survivability, it’s time to talk about defenses. There are three concepts to take note of once you reach Wolcen‘s endgame: resistances, avoidance, and mitigation.

Resistances

First, we need to address the different types of damage in the game:

• Material – Physical, Rend, Toxic
• Elemental – Fire, Frost, Lightning
• Occult – Aether, Sacred, Shadow

Offensively, you’ll want to increase the overall damage type of your main skills as opposed to a specific damage type. For instance, if you’re using Bleeding Edge (Rend) and Plagueburst (Toxic), then increasing Material damage when possible is your best bet as opposed to focusing on Rend or Toxic damage separately.

Defensively, there’s only one way to go, and that’s prioritizing items with “All Resist.” The Festering Exoskeleton chest piece and Elemental Bascinet helmet primarily focus on the All Resist stat (over 1,000 points), as well as the Alexandrite gemstones. Ideally, you’ll want 75-80% resistances against all damage types, or even higher, when tackling Wolcen‘s high-tier content.

Avoidance

Avoidance is, basically, your capability to dodge attacks and negate any damage taken. There are two factors to take note of:

• Active dodge – The actual dodge ability that’s used by every character; spends your stamina pips.
• Passive dodge – The dodge rating on your character panel. This procs depending on your rating, allowing you to evade an attack completely.

Mitigation

Mitigation has three factors for you to take note of:

• Force shield value – This is essentially like a second health bar for you, and this chunk is removed instead of your health when taking damage.
• Block chance – This means how often you’ll block attacks.
• Block efficiency – This represents the amount of damage mitigated by each block. This caps at 75% so, even if you focus on this stat, you’ll still end up suffering 25% damage from each successful block.

Note: In Wolcen‘s endgame, damage type resistances/All Resist would be the best defensive measure to focus on. Blocking is no longer as godly as before due to the Siegebreaker node fix and the efficiency cap, and clunky combat and animation locks can make dodging feel unreliable at times.

Endgame skills: The “meta” choices

Because of proper scaling, sheer nuke potential, ailment stacking, and usefulness, there are only a handful of skills in Wolcen‘s endgame that are worth looking into. Of course, you’re not required to focus on these skills. It’s just that they tend to be the “meta” choices for high-end content:

• Bleeding Edge – The single top-tier skill in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. Bleeding Edge’s “Despotic Perseverance” node scales immensely with all the ailment stacks you’ve applied on multiple targets.
• Bulwark of Dawn – It’s a healing spell that will keep you alive countless times. The “Sacred Grounds” node also lets it deal damage and apply stasis and weakness ailment stacks.

The extras:

• Plagueburst and/or Anomaly – Both spells are perfect additions to any build due to wide AoE coverage and ailment application. Plagueburst’s explosions can create health orbs for you to keep you in tip-top shape (combined with a passive that increases your resistances when you pick up an orb). Anomaly, meanwhile, is perfect for pulling in enemies to set them up for Bleeding Edge’s nuke.
• Aether Jump – Your active dodge is limited to the number of stamina pips. If ever you’re in a pinch, this teleport will save you.

Currently, I’m using a Bleeding Edge build, just like 99% of players, I guess. Even though I’m using a melee weapon and catalyst offhand, I hardly use my melee attacks. Infinity Blades does that for me (while also regenerating willpower).

For my weapons and offhand, I’ve got The Apex and Foreboding Memento respectively. For armor pieces, I’ve got Festering Exoskeleton and Elemental Bascinet as my primary boosters of All Resist. I’m also using The Trial unique belt which applies Mark of Impurity (weakness debuff) on each hit.

Anyway, here are my skills and chosen nodes:

Aether Jump

Bleeding Edge

Plagueburst

Bulwark of Dawn

Anomaly

Infinity Blades

Wolcen’s passives tree

Finally, let’s take a look at the passives tree. Below, I’ve simply provided an overview of what each branch provides. Naturally, there are some additional tidbits that you can gain from each node. Do remember that some passive skills remain bugged or not working as intended.

And here’s my actual passives tree. Note that I did rotate the rings a bit:

More builds and options menu tips

If you’d like to experiment or learn more about other options for endgame builds, you could always check WolcenUniverse.com’s builds page. There are some amazing specs there made by Wolcen‘s community such as the Battlemage, Dotsplosion Archer, Juggernaut Tank, and the cheesy zero cooldown Winter’s Grasp freezer.

There are a couple more tips that you should be aware of once you reach Wolcen‘s endgame. First, enable “Show Item Level” in the gameplay options panel. All items are only up to level 60. But, they’ll have different item levels depending on the Expedition rank that you’re doing. It’s just unfortunate that scaling tends to be really wonky at the moment. Second, go to your control options and change your active skills keybind from “S” to something else like “Z.” This will prevent you from accidentally opening the skills tab once fights become more hectic.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is available on Steam. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.