Sword and Shield Hatchet

Sword and Shield Hatchet (SNS/Hatchet) is a glass-cannon style build with one of the highest skill ceilings in the game along with a moderately high skill floor. This weapon combination excels in close quarters PVP and has an emphasis on locking down an opponent, penetrating their armor, and deleting them within a few seconds. This weapon is responsible for the current highest amount of kills in a single OPR match at 76 and is probably the strongest solo carry build in the game right now!

Attributes

With your attribute split you want to be focusing getting 350 strength, 200 dex, and put the rest into constitution. This allows you to maximize your damage output on SNS/Hatchet while taking advantage of the hatchet’s extra life for tankyness. We do miss out on some armor bonus’ but since our damage is so high it more than makes up for this.

Consumes

We run fire absorption potions with lasting consumption bags to buff the duration to 45 seconds. With a 90 second cd, this gave us 15% fire resistance with 50% uptime! We also use health, serum, and mana potions. Mana potions are used to proc the healthy toast bonus. These have a much shorter cd than typical potions.

Armor

This build excells in close quarters so we want to build our armor in a manner that will help us sustain to close distance to the target. Shirking heals and elemental aversion will help us versus long range poke like fire staff and musket while conditioning will help us while taking duels. We’ll use thrust protection to help versus spears and a 5/15 elemental/physical gem split. This leaves us vulnerable to strike damage, which mainly comes from the war hammer, but will allow us to be moderately tanks versus all other match ups.

This build will passive hit the empower cap due to passives on both SNS and Hatchet, so we don’t need to run deckhand or shirking empower on this build.

We opt for contagious upheaval to boost the damage of our upheaval and allow our SNS to deal 8-10k damage on a crit!

Weapons

This build requires a lot of customer weapons to preform at its best. You can use 700 gearscore variants, but these will come at around a 10% damage loss compared to their 725 variants. Hatchet’s Shirking Nature may be replaced with Penetrating the Empowered. The idea before Shirking Nature is this build is very dodge-centered, so it allows us to deal higher damage per second than Penetrating the Empowered will allow. For the sword we opt for perks that will enable our hatchet to deal more damage while allowing us to chase down kills effectively.

Heartgems

There are 3 heartgems that are viable for this build:

  1. Stoneform - the best heatgem overall in the game. Will let you survive almost anything if used correctly.

  2. Vines - a heartgem that focuses on crowd control. The exhaust is no longer cleansable with purifying heart, but this still is a solid option.

  3. Cannon - a finisher style heartgem that can be used after the main combo is finished.

Skill Tree

For Sword and Shield we focus on taking gap closers that provide slows as well as upheaval, which deals a large amount of burst damage. The main combo is to leaping strike -> heavy attack -> shield rush. After this is executed the target will be slowed and you can finish them off with the hatchet. Use social distance throw as an extra root/escape tool as needed.