[0.4] Lexd's Spear & Shield Wall Bleed Warrior

Skill Gem Priority for Lexd's Spear & Shield Wall Bleed Build

Skill gems are overall pretty straightforward, but there's actually quite a bit that can be up for preference, sometimes at the cost of damage... and sometimes for more damage, at the cost of more challenging setup. Explanations below.

Starting out, Rake is our main way to clear, very straightforward. Try to target mobs towards the back of groups as you want to make sure you are getting the dash-portion of this skill to occur, which grants you a bunch of extra bonus damage. IMPORTANT NOTE: You actually want to deal as much Bleeding damage as you can to targets, quickly, not hit damage since Herald of Blood's damage is based off of the Bleeding damage a target takes before dying. This is why we run Deep Cuts II, though you can juggle some other Support Gems here if you feel like you aren't hitting things hard enough, e.g. Heft or Momentum.

Resonating Shield I use for one or two taps after each Rake, because this is socketed in a way to spread Poison which in turn helps with our chaining effects. I don't channel Resonating Shield as much as most of my other builds here since we have so much Passive Block and Leech to bolster up our survivability. This is also socketed with Uruk's Smelting to help stack that permanent damage debuff on bosses by simultaneously fully-breaking armour with this skill and consuming it via Fortifying Cry and Exploit Weakness. Last note, this is one of our main ways to generate Endurance Charges via Armour Break III, which is easy to generate while clearing, but tougher on Pinnacles (though not impossible, since we can loop full-armour breaks so easily).

Shield Wall is set to Weapon Set II and only ever used in boss fights really. Sometimes I'll use it against juiced Abyss rares. I've also experimented socketing this with Exploit Weakness instead of Fortifying Cry (which we'll go over next) to some strong success; however, this means you have to be extra-careful of Shield Wall placement. If you place one down on top of a boss, it consumes the Fully-Armour Broken debuff immediately before detonation, since that "creation" portion of Shield Wall can technically damage things and is considered an attack (just a much lower-damage one).

Fortifying Cry is used to detonate our Shield Walls, though there are some options with this one. As mentioned earlier, it is currently socketed with Exploit Weakness to help loop full-armour breaks on bosses with Resonating Shield, but you can also just socket this skill with Armour Break III as well to help break MORE armour while spamming Resonating Shield on bosses, and Spear Stab is socketed with Exploit Weakness so that you can just remove it over-and-over with the default attack instead, until the boss has the full 20% extra physical stacked up from Uruk's Smelting.

Blood Hunt is amazing for finishing off bosses that have suffered a ton of Bleeding damage; use it accordingly. Just be aware that it will consume all Bleeding effects currently active on the target, so you want to make absolutely sure this will finish off the boss before using it.

Magma Barrier is probably our most assured way to get Endurance Charges; this is mostly here for Pinnacle bossing. As long as you aren't trying to block red attacks all the time, you'll be able to consistently get some Endurance Charges off of this, and that should be your green light to try and use Shield Wall ASAP.