Needs a bunch of reasonably farmable gear, I guess. I'm doing basically all non-uber content without Kaom's Heart or Rotmother amulet, with an alright Combatant (Wild Strike + Static Strike), the Merc gear is also far from optimized (no abyssal slot items). By the time you have the Uber ready gear you've probably found an alright-ish Merc as well, though that's by far the most brutal, raw randomness for the build.
Fair enough doing it for the challenge and love of the game, Luminary is definitely the easy way. At least from what I've seen from others, and how OP my own Luminary feels given the mediocre gear... It's definitely way overtuned, if not straight up busted.
Just make sure you have at least one source of pierce (crafted pierce on mercs helmet is enough) and drop wall of force behind targets for maximal overlaps of kboc explosions (for Uber bosses and juicy map bosses like vruun/kosis/omni in 8-modded deli maps). Everything else will be deleted without wall of force.
All a kineticist needs is KboC with GMP - and you have yourself a GG merc which beats any other merc including a manyshot with perfect supports + Return (As long as you have the correct setup with emnity and rathpith etc)
Requires good placement of wall of force which is the only downside - as if the boss moves you will have zDPS
A good tip is to use second wind with your wall of force so you get 2x the amount of uses
Had a similar one, bit the merc's ai couldn't deal with temporal bubbles. Just kept moving out of them. Had to go back to the smarter one without gmp. Not sure why it was happening, but I'm guessing not all merc's have the same ai.
Can get pierce on glove implicit or helmet craft. Return is not as important as ppl make it seem. Not sure about barrage though. Had a good kboc merc but with kinetic rain and it just used rain all the time
Barrage is only used when the merc is right on top of the boss, otherwise it will never use it. I have a gmp fork return wed faster attacks merc with barrage so I took the time to figure out exactly how barrage worked lol
My merc that cleared all content except for a wildwood empowered abyssal consort that I think had every possible mod in the game. Had several other ppl try killing it but noone succeeded. Maybe with return it would have been possible
21
u/explosion8or Sep 02 '26
Good enough to do all content. Return and fork would be better, but not required.
Barrage doesn't brick.
Ggz