Hi guys, welcome to Megaloot Meta Build. The cool thing about Jace is that he gets to use Excalibur without it taking up an extra equipment slot. This puts him in a class along with Fael and Viran where his built-in set tag is super relevant in the endgame allowing for some extra freedom in his build.
This build is going to focus on pure, fair attack damage. No wonky combos, no dense synergies: we’re just attacking for as much damage as we possibly can by leveraging the Shadow set and its many damage multipliers.
The Basics of Damage Multipliers and the Value of Shadow Set
Your attack type is determined by whichever single value of (attack * attack%) is highest. It doesn’t check other values (like wisdom or combat), and whatever attack type you use is used to the exclusion of other attack types. For example, if you have 100 physical attack and 99 magic attack, your attacks will deal 100 physical damage and 0 magic damage.
Physical attack damage is calculated as something like (((physical + physical%) + (combat + combat%)) * criticaldamage% * power * grace)
Critical rate determines the likelihood for your attacks to hit critically. If you have 50% crit rate, then half of your hits will be considered critical hits. On a non-critical hit, the “criticaldamage%” of the equation above is removed.
Crit rate cannot be dismantled in v1.14, and it only comes from talent trees and from actively equipped items. Critical damage can be dismantled (to great effect).
Insight is an item stat that cannot be dismantled and grants you that many stacks of Magic Blitz at the start of combat. Each stack of Magic Blitz increases your magic damage by 100%, but only on the first round of battle. Magic Blitz dissipates after the first round and there is no way to benefit from it again in the same battle.
Shadow set allows your magic damage to hit critically and for your physical damage to benefit from your Magic Blitz. This allows us to benefit from crit AND blitz
Talents – For this build, you want to use Jace’s Harbinger spec for three reasons:
1) Harbinger lets you do 10x damage to the target marked from Jace’s built-in Legacy set starting on the second turn. This, in combination with Grace, is enough of a multiplier to make up for losing Magic Blitz after turn one.
2) This spec has a path to get Jace a very-important extra 20% critical rate (which, combined with our endgame gear, brings us up to 95% crit rate total).
3) Jace’s other spec trees are trash in v1.14. Challenger is actively detrimental and Lionheart basically does nothing (and its talent nodes are super low impact).
It’s tempting to go Toughness > Armor Steal > Armor Steal, since Armor Steal is a very powerful ability. But we’re going to go for Physical > Crit > Crit to virtually guarantee critical hits on every attack.
Challenges – I recommend you activate the Swarm Challenge and disable the Honor Challenge (even though that extra 5% crit from Honor Challenge would bring you to exactly 100%). I recommend this for all runs since Swarm Challenge is worth it and Honor Challenge is not.
Early Game (Floors 1-15)
Jace can be a tough in the early game because he only has one attack and his built-in Legacy tag is useless. Just do what you can to survive. Scrape by on Wood and Silver until you can piece together a set of Orion and open the Swarm chest for your extra attack.
Your gear should look something like this until you find your first Demonic Blood. Then, everything changes.
Midgame (Floors ~16-59)
Once you get Demonic Blood, you should be ready to switch over to murder mode. With very few exceptions, you should be able to one-round-kill everything clear to floor 110 (where your run will suddenly end because of the known bug at that floor 😂 ).
The important elements in your build are the Alchemist’s Wisdom ring (for Insight) and the Shadow Cloak (for Shadow set and also a huge amount of crit rate). Your other slots should just be looking to maximize your physical damage and attack count. I recommend starting with the blue section of the image below, then working your way up to the purple side as you get up to floor 30.
Note – Consider Soul Collector instead of Throngler as your weapon. (See: Dismantle section below for more info).
For Kotyas, you’ll want to keep a Zephyron’s Tome around and hit them with Silence. This means you’ll need to target them when they appear. If they show up in multiples, just turn off your Demonic Blood potion or skip the first turn. Note that if you skip, you don’t spend your potion or your Magic Blitz stack. Agility from Corward’s Ring and Pantaloons of Greatness is also very effective against Kotyas–allowing you to dodge their parries or to survive a skipped turn against them without any problems.
For Magma Golems, you probably won’t care about them too much early on, but by the time they become a problem around floor 35 you’ll want to be close to 100% agility from your Cloak, Pants, and Coward’s Ring.
For Saturns, your damage output should blast straight past these. Later on, Excalibur breaks Armor Shield and your Shard of Power lets you bypass their armor, so they’re never an issue.
For Jupiters and Suns, you’ll need to drink Moonflower Extract.
For Iron Golems, your damage output will blast these until the very late game. By the time their armor starts to catch up, your Shard of Power should be levelled up enough to bypass it anyways.
Endgame (Floors 60+)
You’ll want to swap over to Excalibur immediately as soon as you hit floor 60! Don’t get caught Excaliburless by your first shielded Perfect Slave at the end of floor 60, because it will have a pretty good chance of ending your run!
By this point, your attack count should be pretty decent (thanks to your levelled up Pantaloons), your crit rate should be closing in on 95% (thanks to your levelled up Shadow Cloak and your 20% crit rate from talents), and your agility should be over 100% (thanks to your levelled up Pantaloons and Coward’s Ring). You don’t really need anything else, so your last equipment/set slot (helmet) can be dedicated to pure damage.
Your viable options here are Warrior, Cataclysm, Berserker, Flesh, and Demonic. Warrior gives you 4 more attacks, which increases your damage output by 50%. Cataclysm effectively doubles your damage. Flesh is bad, and Berserker only starts working after turn 1 (when everything is hopefully already dead). That leaves Demonic, which is actually very powerful since its physical damage multiplier exists in a whole separate multiplier layer from your regular physical attack% stat. It just means you’ll need to give your hp a little love (which is no problem as it widens your dismantle rotation).
I recommend the items below for your endgame equipment set.
For Perfect Slaves, Excalibur and your damage output should tear through these like tissue paper.
Dismantles
In general, you want to practice a good dismantle rotation with this build so that you can avoid diminishing returns. In other words, you don’t want to dismantle one thing over and over again, you want to keep things rotating over time. If you spam one stat then its relative value starts to fade. (For example, your first 100% power will double your attack damage, while your second 100% power will only increase your attack damage by 50%).
The divine items in the image below are your favorite dismantles, and you’ll want to include these in your rotation as often as you can. They have the best values of the multipliers you like to see, which include physical attack, power%, physical attack%, and critical damage%. Note on Dismantling Thronglers – Dismantling Thronglers is so good that it’s probably better to dismantle them than equip them. For that reason, I’d suggest you equip Soul Collector as your weapon from 30-60 even though Throngler is probably a bit better. (Don’t worry, your attack won’t swap to magic type).
The Cosmic items are ones you want to sprinkle in from time to time in your rotation. The Shadow Ring has great crit damage to bolster what you get from Thronglers, and Giant’s Ring can help scale up your Demonic set damage.
The Abyssal items are fillers that you should include from time to time, especially if you’re running dry on the better things. The Faith% from Ring of Unity is theoretically good because your Grace damage multiplier can help on turn 2 and beyond, but in v1.14 you shouldn’t ever need to worry about that.
The gray items in the image are special cases. If you dismantle just one item with Dazzle, you can get the Ephemeral Locked debuff from enemies that you don’t kill in one round and that will allow you to cleanse the debuff and access your Faith multiplier. Celestial Plate has great flat armor, so dismantling one of them at some point is nice. Bloodedge and Locket are just early game stand-ins.
Essential Items
Zephyron’s Tome is your main way to deal with Kotyas. Your agility can keep them from killing you, but you’d really prefer to kill them on turn 1 so you can hit the thing behind them before your Magic Blitz falls off.
Ethercrest’s Tome is there because, why not? You have 2 mana, you might as well spend it. It never came up in my run, but it’s nice having the peace of mind that even if enemies did take a turn somehow, they wouldn’t damage you 😂
Moonflower Extract – Critically important for dealing with Suns and Jupiters.
Holy Water – This didn’t come up in my run because everything died before turn 2. But if you’re playing on the PTB and get to the late late endgame, this will help you unlock your Faith multiplier and stay in the fight after your Insight goes away.
Demonic Blood – Critically important. This is how you kill everything instead of just one thing.
Gold potions, mana potions, and armor potions just aren’t meaningful for this build.