Last Epoch: Best Highest Damage Build for All Masteries

It has been some time since the release of Last Epoch, and most people are now pushing towards the endgame content, with a lot of people now being at least at base-level empowered monoliths, so 100% corruption. As you progress and push up those corruption numbers to increase your chances at higher quality loot dropping to make yourself stronger, you find yourself getting one-shotted most of the time.

So to tackle that we're going to go over the Best Build (Highest Damage) for each class in Last Epoch. Without any further ado, let’s jump straight to the facts here.

Acolyte Class

Best Build in Warlock Mastery

First up then, let's start with Acolyte, and we are going to present these masteries in strongest to weakest order within their base class. The strongest Acolyte mastery and build is just far and away Warlock, and there are a couple of nearly equal power builds that focus around one bug, it's worth noting that this bug is specifically planned to be changed. 

But this ranking is based around right now, and this bug is an incredibly big deal at this moment, which is the Vampiric Pools node in Profane Veil. It consumes minions to grant you a ward, it's supposed to give you 4% of the minion's health as a ward, but it is instead giving 40%, giving Warlocks a way to generate over 100,000 wards extremely frequently and consistently, covering pretty much all survival concerns as a result of that. 

Then the rest of the build can sort of go two ways, but the one that we think has a higher ceiling is Self-Ignite Torment, which uses a couple of uniques to cause you to apply Ignite to yourself, then also give yourself a high flat spell damage boost per Ignite stack that is on you, combine that with Snapshotting the Torment applying to an enemy, and you have a damage over time curse with 200 or higher bonus flat spell damage, even outside of the other supporting parts of the build.

It's just extremely, extremely strong, hard to give an actual ceiling to it, and for anyone interested, we do have a version of both this and the next build on the channel itself. 

Best Build in Necromancer Mastery - Wraithlord Build

Second, then is the Necromancer Mastery, and it's worth saying that while this is weaker than Warlock, it is still one of the strongest builds in the whole game. We talked about this the last time we went over the strongest builds for Mastery, and it's just getting better over time.

It's the Wraithlord build. Wraithlord's Harbor, the unique to make Summon Wraith, creates a big, strong minion that fires off Necrotic Beams and consumes other minions to boost its damage and health. Pair that with a bunch of minion buffs so he has 100% crit rate and permanent haste, things like that, then just build pure survival for the players themselves.

And this is one of the top builds in the whole game right now. 

Best Build in Lich Mastery - Volatile Zombie Potion Bomber

Third up we have the Lich, and Lich is the best third Mastery at the moment, by which I mean if we are ranking the Masteries of each class from 1 to 3, it is the highest overall ranking bottom of a class compared to the others, which is just to say that Lich may be last among Acolyte, but it is still quite strong. And the build itself is a volatile zombie potion bomber.

It works around re-performs and 8 damage and survival boost as well as other parts of Lich to boost the damage in general. But the main source of damage is volatile zombies, and the main way that you summon them is not through the raw skill, but instead from the experimental belt affix to make consuming a potion summon a small horde of these zombies. 

The actual raw offense and survival of this is actually pretty potent, but the main problem is that because it relies on potions to do at least its proper damage, you are sort of limited to your potion count, but you'll reach extremely high corruption before that even really becomes a factor, honestly.

Mage Class

Best Build for Runemaster Mastery - Frostclaw and Frostbite Build

Then let's move on to our second base class, Mage, and his top Mastery is unsurprisingly the Rune Master, whose best build that we have seen so far and since release is a Lightning Frostclaw variant. 

We have been working on my version of this over the last few days, but the main idea of this is that Frostclaw builds for Rune Master especially get just insane ward generation. The problem is that it tends to cost so much mana that it is hard to permanently cast without taking some losses in actual damage unless you go Lightning because Lightning Frostclaw specifically has its mana cost reduction nodes that solve this problem.

Stack spell crit chance and multiplier on top of that, apply some buffs to yourself with Lightning Blast, then just fire off Lightning Frostclaw like a madman for insane ward generation and damage. It's just pure fun with a high ceiling. 

Best Build for Sorcerer Mastery - Rune Master Lightning Frostclaw

The second best Mastery for Mage right now is going to be Sorcerer then, and the build that they are doing it with is based around Spark Charges.

From a lot of what we have seen with this, it is sort of a similar concept to Rune Master's Lightning Frostclaw, just a much lower-power version of it. That said, it is still reasonably powerful, so worth using if you're playing this Mastery. 

Best Build for Spellblade Mastery - Frostbite Shatterstrike Build

The third slot for Mage is the Spellblade, it just sort of is lacking the synergies that the other two Masteries have.

The best build we have come across for this is a Frostbite Shatterstrike build, where the focus is applying maximum stacks of Frostbite to enemies as quickly as possible, then just watching them tick down while you dodge attacks. It's pretty good, but it hits a hard limit of power before the other two Masteries' best builds for this. 

Primalist Class

Best Build for Druid Mastery - Lightning Swarmblade

The next best build with the highest damage in the Last Epoch for Druid Mastery is Lightning Swarmblade.

The build that we have seen doing the most work for them is a Lightning Swarmblade setup, with the general idea being to take advantage of Swarmblade form and stay in it permanently, while not only surrounding yourself with a tornado but also firing off lightning tornadoes outwards towards the enemies as well. 

This build is generally pretty strong as an all-rounder, with the damage I would say falling off a bit before the survivability does. 

Best Build for Beastmaster Mastery - Poison Scorpion

Then for the second Primalist Mastery, it's extremely close, and it's going to be Beastmaster, who I would say is pretty equivalent to Druid, they are super close right now, at least with these builds, and the best Beastmaster build going around at the moment this cycle is Poison Scorpion, which is quite cool.

Use the Scorpion Companion to apply and buff loads of poison stacks to slowly burn your enemies down, while you just sort of survive with Super Sai health, regen, and armor surrounding it defensively. 

Best Build for Shaman Mastery - Thorn Totem Build

Then third we have the Shaman, and Shaman is in a pretty decent place too. Extremely survivable, but the damage just sort of drops off sooner than the other two Masteries for the class.

The best build that we have seen for it is just a slightly revamped version of the classic concept Thorn Totem build, that this class has used for ages, even before the proper release of the game. 

It's extremely fun to have, you just make yourself super tanky, make the totem super strong, place them on the ground, and then just dodge incoming damage while the totems do most of the heavy lifting. 

Like the Beastmaster, the survivability mostly just comes from health, armor, and regen, as opposed to our first two classes, where most of the time survivability comes from just how big of several wards you can get, and how consistent your ward generation is compared to your ward decay.

So Primalist just gets to build to be big and beefy, instead of having a barrier to deflect it all away. 

Rogue Class

Best Build for Falconer Mastery

Then for the next base class, alphabetically, let's go with Rogue, and his strongest Mastery is without a doubt the Falconer. New in 1.0, and as tends to happen with new things, players will discover things that weren't found in QA testing.

And these bugs will result in hilariously overpowered interactions, such as the Smoke Bomb, Dive Bomb, and Shadow Daggers combo builds that have been just running rampant around the place, with the main synergy being a combo that makes Dive Bombs that hit Smoke Bombs also trigger a Shadow Falcon, if there is a Shadow Clone in the radius of the Smoke Bomb. 

So every time you Dive Bomb, you do a fairly large number of Dive Bombs at the same time, thanks to these Shadows, which both generate ridiculous amounts of ward and do incredible damage. So you can't ask for a whole lot better than that, honestly.

Best Build for Marksman Mastery - Lightning Blast Build

After that, we have the Marksman, actually, as the second-best build for this class right now, and it's very specifically because of the Lightning Blast build that's been going around with Jalker's Blast Knife, which makes Detonating Arrow count as a melee skill and give it other bonuses. 

But then you change it to Lightning and play with Detonating Arrow Lightning Explosions, specifically by using Explosive Trap. It has a node that auto-triggers Detonating Arrow around the trap's radius when it explodes with a specific node.

The Blast Knife uniquely makes any enemy that is hit by the Detonating Strike's melee variant get a Detonating Strike Arrow stuck into them. So this version of the Explosive Trap applies one Detonating Strike to each enemy in the radius, with this combination, with this synergy, which is quite silly. Then you also just make it Lightning Damage to have the damage of its chain to nearby enemies.

So essentially, this combo just makes Explosive Trap apply a secondary explosive that scales with the number of enemies before exploding once again, and this happens every time that you throw a trap out. So it's genuinely quite offensively strong for mobbing, and it even does bosses relatively fast, too, to a certain extent. Though it is a little bit less tanky than some of the other masteries in the game.

While it can genuinely speed farm as well as just about any other build in the game does, it does have a lower corruption farming limit as far as its proper peak, and survivability is a big deal in the endgame for this game. 

Best Build for Rogue Mastery - Blade Dancer

Then the final mastery that we'll talk about for Rogue is Blade Dancer. It's not bad by any means, it's just not in an exceptional state right now compared to its competitors, and the main build for this is similar to what was used before Patch 1.0 as well, which is focused around Shadow Daggers and Shadow Cascade.

Specifically using Shadow Cascade to auto-cast Shadow Daggers, so that you just specialize the hell out of daggers, and then make the rest of the build around having Cascade trigger as frequently in as many different places in as large an area as possible. 

As it fires off daggers from every shadow clone that you have up, and this works for mobbing by spreading the shadows out before casting Cascade, it works for bosses by grouping the shadows up and overlapping them before you cast Shadow Cascade, It's just a fundamentally very solid build all around, but with a survivability ceiling compared to a lot of the other builds that we've talked about today. 

Sentinel Class

Best Build for Paladin Mastery

Then for our final base class, we have the Sentinel, and the best mastery without any doubt here is going to be Paladin.

Especially with the addition of Healing Hands, Paladin has just sort of become an absolute juggernaut since the release of 1.0. The main build that is pushing the real heights of content right now is a Smite-Healing Hands combo build, where you essentially just make yourself so unbelievably tanky that it becomes difficult to die even at high corruption, which is crazy, and even the damage itself is pretty respectable. 

This is just a meaty beefcake of a build, capable of shoving his face through anything that you could ask it to currently in the game. 

Best Build for Void Knight Mastery

Following that, we have Void Knight and poor Void Knight is in a bit of an awkward spot right now.

The main build that we have seen managing to work for this mastery is mostly just known as Healing Hands Void Knight because offensively, it's pretty standard for the mastery. High crit and void damage shenanigans, Erasing Strike, Void Cleave, the classics, but then it also works in Healing Hands for the defense, which makes it extremely difficult to kill, even on its own, even without the other parts of the things buffing its survivability. 

So what you end up with is an extremely tanky character with an unfortunate damage ceiling, but it still definitely can function up to, like, 500 corruption if you want it to, which is much more than an average player will ever really have issues with, so it's really good anyways, and the best that Void Knilly has at the moment for sure.

Best Build for Forge Guard Mastery

Then our final mastery of the day is the Forge Guard. Nothing changes, really, for this mastery in Patch 1.0 or since, sadly, and the result is that it can get unbelievably ridiculously survivable and tanky and defensive, but it just can't achieve particularly impressive damage in any way. There just aren't enough synergies available to make it as crazy as some of the other classes get.

That said, if you like the sound of just covering yourself in armor, the build that you generally want to use right now is going to be Rive-focused. It's the only real one that we have seen manage well above, like, 200 corruption without farming slowing to an absolute crawl getting there, and that just about does it. Now, the guide for Last Epoch Best Highest Damage Build for All Masteries is completed.