War Hammer Greataxe (Bruiser)

Bruiser is a brawler style build that focuses on clump fighting. This weapon combination excels in medium-large scale PVP modes and has an emphasis on killing multiple players at the same time with a combination of crowd control and burst damage.

Attributes

With your attribute split you want to be focusing going 200-350 constitution and put the rest into strength. I’d recommend starting with lower constitution and working your way up as needed. This allows you to maximize your damage output while bumping up the hp you need as needed. Your armor perks and passive lifesteal will make you significantly tankier with this build than it looks on paper.

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 and serum potion.

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. Elemental aversion will help us versus boltcaster, firestaff, and detonate while slash and thrust condition will help us trade out with other classes. Strike protection is a must have for the bruiser vs bruiser duel.

We also utilize Ankh to allow our healer to keep us alive with less resources. Teardrop will allow us to get extra cooldown reduction and gorgon’s ring with strike damage will help us do more damage in the neutral stage.

We opt for freedom due to the amount of crowd control present in clump fights and 1 hasted vigor to help us move around a little faster. Thorny reflection also will allow us to charge ult faster.

Weapons

Our war hammer must have sundering shockwave, trenchant strikes, and plagued strikes. The style of play favors war hammer heavy attacks and this combination help us do that the best. The great axe’s enfeebling maelstorm and refreshing move are must haves, but the last slot is much more flexible now. Rogue or thwarting counter seem like decent options with the 300 con grit change.

Heartgems

There are 2heartgems that are viable for this build:

  1. Stoneform - the best heatgem overall in the game. Will let you survive almost anything if used correctly and more importantly gives us grit.

  2. Detonate - Allows us to do more damage in a large AOE to clumps.

Skill Tree

The war hammer skill tree is build for crowd control while the great axe is build for combo-burst damage. Path of Destiny is better to use toward clumps now since players do not have passive grit. Armor breaker is used to nuke single targets, while charge is used to escape. All other perks are used for combo-oriented damage.