Darksiders 2 Execution Chance

[Tabita Knezevic]

Ive been focusing on criticals - my weapons have health and wrath on crit, critical % bonuses, and the rest of my gear boosts critical % or critical damage. Also turning in stonebites to boost critical %. End result is that I have a 50% crit rate, dealing 300% damage, and getting 40 life / 20 wrath back for every crit. Combine that with fully upgraded Teleport Slash for slowing enemies and dodging around, and Unstoppable to further boost damage and crits when needed.

The only thing I'd change is to maybe take the wrath steal away and add in ice damage - both for the damage boost and for freezing enemies. With Teleport Slash slowing and ice damage freezing, you can almost endlessly stagger any non-boss, and Teleport Slash by itself can be self-sustaining in terms of building wrath. Though I've been interested in combining wrath on crit with some of the Necro skills to support constant spells, which I've otherwise been completely ignoring so far.

I'm just starting newgame+ at the moment (abyssal). Harbinger focused mostly. Halfway through normal game finally settled in on a good build. Tho by build i mostly mean weapons as skill trees are sorta secondary :P

Always roll with 2 posesed weapons (get new ones every few levels), secondary doesn't matter but a heavy weapon is nice for the 2-3 types of enemies that can block. Scythes are absolutely killer especially when you get the air spin move.

All armor is focused on 3 atributes Strengh, Crit %, and Crit Damage foremost. Same with the posessed scythes, when i need to feed new ones, i go STR, Crit %, Crit DMG, and Health % leach it's on every hit and is % based which means with my huge damage hits the amout restored every hit is incredible, its a rare stat but is insanely good, much better then health on crit. I'm getting hundreds of health back with each hit.

Teleport slash is useless for my build, it does less damage them my regular dps, and my health restoration needs are met by the weapon enchant, don't care about status effects when everything just dies.

And for Teleport Slash I'd agree the damage isn't great, but the slow and explosion effects make it good for crowd control and dodging while still doing damage for anything that does enough damage that you need to dodge. It's also a great unblockable way to get behind guys with shields, and combined with the slow effect means you can get off quite a few hits before he turns around. I'm not doing enough damage that I can rip through equal level guys that quickly.

Yea Teleport Slash isn't bad initially, i've used it for a while myself. Only switched from it later on when I got my first posessed weapon with Health Steal crafted, which conincided nicely into unlocking the second tier of Unstopable allowing me to make a complete switch and dump all points into that, which in turn allowed to quickly destroy tougher enemies.

For guys with shields i'm using any heavy weapon and their charge up attack, it will go through and open them up for any follow ups. They are slow enough in their swings that there is plenty of time for this powered up heavy attack.

Was fortunate to find a Scythe that had around 20% execution chance on it. Fed it to a possessed weapon. Kept feeding execution chance health on crit and crit chance items. Found a decent Health on Execute talisman and some Ex chance items.

My best Crucible run was to 14. I was doing well right up until 14 when I cleared about 5 corrupt constructs before I realized that the goddamn floating mask was just resurrecting them. Have since added more HoE and a better possesed scythe so very motivated to clear at least until 25.

Still using the same stat build. Crit chance at 71% now with 300% dmg increase. Well over 4000 dps on scythes due to str stacking. With unstopable i'm sittting at 91% crit and 340% extra dmg. Most bosses and bigger enemies die almost instanteneously (unless multistages obv), sometimes in a single scythe air spin, even on apocalyptical dificulty. The 20% plus health leach makes it that every swingheals for over 1k health even wuthout unstopable (with unstopable when a dozen 6-8k crits start flying around it's a full heal several times over lol). I seriously can't keep up with the dmg and healing math at some point after factoring in the Reaper AoE thingy that boosts dmg for every enemy hit.

2 more levels and i'll upgrade my gear for the final time, then finish the last 76-101 waves of the Crucible, tho at this point i'm just procrastinating for the funzies (Deposed King on newgame+ died in 3 of his getting stuck animations, giant firebat boss only landed for a few seconds and died after a single scythe air spin)

You guys inspire me. I don't think I'm high enough level to even see Health Steal items yet (level 11), but I'm keeping an eye out. Got a pair of lvl 10 possessed scythes with crit chance, crit dmg, health on crit and execution chance (came on it). It's already making the game a bit easier. Looking forward to getting some true Health Steal. I use a lot of Teleport Slash now, just started unlocking some of the bonuses to Unstoppable as I work my way down the Harbinger tree.

I'm in my new game + playthrough, and so I'm saving good weapons for the Crucible. I'm thinking: apart from the essential Health Steal, while most here seem to focus on Critical Chances & Damage, isn't Execution Chance a better enhancement to focus on? I mean, execution can completely bypass the enemies' HP and level, so virtually a high execution chance can bring down tough enemies fairly quickly to increase survival chance, perhaps better than a high critical chance or damage.

If that's the case, you're better off just having the extra damage and dealing out the bonus hits. You'll kill them faster, meaning you can deal with anyone else around in a quicker manner. Not having to watch and wait for the animation all the time.

That's not entirely true. I have a weapon with 40% execution chance and I get option to hit B to execute as early as with 65%-75% left on the enemies. It is by chance, but I think the higher the chance on the weapon the sooner it kicks in too...

I wouldn't waste your time on Execution Chance if I were you. Health and Wrath Steal combined with their respective abilities on Kill and on Critical coupled with a high Critical Chance buff are far more effective. Just set up your scythes for Health and a fast secondary (armblades or claws) for Wrath. Then you can spam abilities all day and never run out of health or wrath. It's insanely overpowered and awesome.

True, I do love executions. But since my weapons deal so much damage I can usually get them on the larger enemy types. The rest die too quickly for it to happen. Everyone has their own style of play with these types of games though. So there's hardly any wrong way to play. Unless you're using your feet. Then you're just doing it wrong. lol

I got the same possessed glaive from the vulgrim shop for 20 boatman coins. Since I am only in the second realm, the weapon is only level 14 after leveling it 3 times. But I have been feeding it strength, resistance and critical chance.

The game absolutely refused to give me a proper Hammer in the final acts. From like lvl 15+ I didn't get a single "proper" hammer. I was committed to using the hammer from the start cause I like smacking the shit out of things with large blunt objects, but sadly I had to change my style of play a little bit towards the last half.

To be fair I gamed the system a bit to get the models of the weapons i wanted, especially the scythes. Because at the ending levels weapons have several models each, which are applied randomly regardless of stats or anything when they are spawned.

For example the scythes at 30 have 3-4 deferent looks. So what you acn do is save right before buying a possessed weapon from Vulgrim, if you don't get the look you want, altF4 and reload to try buying it again.

I think I've got the best weapon of you all. And my two handed mace grants me insta-wrath on one hit. 54% melee crit, you can't see but 45% magic crit. My character is basically a '' mage '', since I only have Necro talents. When I launch '' Frenzy '', the last spell, oh man. The game turns into god mode, so much that I might respect due to the total lack of any form of challenge. I've got nearly guaranteed executions on mobs and supreme life-leech.

Do you mean the execution stat on that weapon (because otherwise it seems fairly standard if lacking a 4th stat)? Not a fan of it at all personally, for me it's faster to kill mobs without the execution animation even on Apocalyptic difficulty due to the sheer dmg numbers. And it not affecting boss tier monsters.

Execution meter does affect the mini-boss *large* enemies like the beetles and bone giants. The big-ass angels are also easily downed with it, making the game a lot easier on Apo. difficulty. As I said, I'm playing as a mage-like character, so I rush in for the finisher when the fights gets really tough, especially in the late 50 parts of the crucible. Combining all this with 45% crit, health and wrath leech, I think I've built the best ( to my style ) weapon possible.

Now that you mention it I can definately see how execution is great for a mage setup with lower overall physical damage. Tho the crit on that scythe seems wasted. (for the same reason). I would suggest putting arcane on it as well. Don't remember if you can put arcane crit and arcane crit damage on a weapon.

Thanks for the idea btw, execution for a mage seems brilliant in retrospect, gonna definately try it out on my mage playthrough with that 1 life mode (don't recall what its called atm), when i come back to it.

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