This build can solo most of the bosses in the base game, without any issue especially when your items are upgraded. it might be able to solo some dlc content, but I haven't tested it since I don't have them all. So a little summary and explanation why I chose to use these items:
First things first, the monster set:
Valkyn Scoria's set gives you some much needed penetration, since we are using heavy armor, and our crit chance is pretty much non existent we are going to need it. It also gives us a rng meteor strikes that looks dope and can trigger almost every time we fight large groups of enemies, since both Carve and Stampede deal damage over time. (Drops from The city of ash 2)
Next up we are going to talk about the armor and the weapons we are going to use:
The first set of armor we are going to talk about is the Rattlecage set. This set drops from the Vaults of madness dungeon and gives us some hp a ton of offensive stats and a couple of useful Buffs as well: Major Brutality and Sorcery. These buffs help increase our overall damage by 20%, my character hits about 5k on 2 handed and 4,5 k onsword and board, which is a lot considering the fact that we are also very tanky, sitting at 30k defense on the 2 handed bar, which is already close to the cap, nevermind the fact that if we activate frost cloak we go beyond the cap of 50% on our second bar.
The second armor set we are going to talk about is Vampire Cloak, which gives us health and weapon and spell damage, kind of like the rattlecage set, except this one gives us Minor protection at 5 pieces which reduces the damage we take by 5%, which might not look like much but it is quite welcome especially in the first phaese of our journey, when we won't have a lot of defense. This is also the first set you want to go for since it is easy to obtain, you can find it as a drop from delve bosses/world bosses/public dungeon bosses in Rivenspire.
For our main weapons we are gonna use The Vampire Cloak Maul, because of the passive skill from 2 handed that gives mauls 3k penetration. We are gonna use nirnhoned as our trait since, as I said we lack crit chance so we are going for raw damage. That penetration stacks well with the lover's boon giving us enough penetration to go through most overland content, group dungeon enemies have higher resistances, hence why we are going to play as a tank whenever we go in public dungeons or trials for that matter. As for our secondary weapon, any one handed weapon from the vampire cloak set works. I recommend using the defending trait for more defense in case you haven't upgraded your armor yet, but otherwise you can use anything really.
This is the build I used so far and it worked. If you aren't interested in grinding for antiquities you can Ignore this paragraph. If, however, you want to stack LOADS of buffs and don't mind grinding, then you should get The Oakensoul Ring which is arguably one of the best rings in the game. The only problem is, you'd have to either ditch one of the 5 set bonuses from your armor or the 2 set piece bonus from your monster set (I went with losing the monster set meteor strike).
For the final part of the build we are gonna talk about the ability rotations, for our 2 bar and one bar builds:
The 2 bar build has 2 rotations, one for group dungeons and one for anything else outside dungeons and trials:
For the 2 bar build:
- The dungeon rotations:
For Bosses: Buff with Frost Cloak>Activate Subteranean Assault>Stampede>Carve 3 times>Wrecking Blow>Pierce Armor>Heavy Atack 2 times>Defensive Posture>Polar Wind>Budding Seeds
For anything else in the dungeon Stampede>Frost cloak>Spam Pierce Armor on everything that moves>Heavy atack>Polar Wind - Outside dungeons you are mostly going to use the 2 handed bar rotation:
Activate Sub Assault>Stampede>Carve 3 times> Wrecking Blosw> Heavy Atack 2 times
For the one bar build:
2 Handed: Sub Assault>Stampede>Carve>Heavy Atack>Reverse Slice (on enemies with at least 60 k health, the ones with less than 60k usually melt by the time you heavy atack)
Sword and Board: Frost Cloak>Shield Assault>Pierce Armor>Defensive Posture>Budding Seeds/Polar Wind