Sampire Artifacts

[Credinus]

I'm thinking of making a sampire, as I have yet to try them out and am very interested in the idea of soloing high end monsters without using my tamer. After much research, I see that making a successful sampire requires the right equipment much more than any other type of character. Unfortunately, getting runic-crafted equipment that's good is just outright overpriced on my shard, so I delved around and found that I could piece together an all-artifact suit for about 10 mil that I believe should do the trick. Here's the set:

-Soul Seeker (or better weapon if I can find one, I've already got several SS's)
-Heart of the Lion
-Ancient Samurai Helm
-Resillient Bracer
-Ring of the Elements
-Totem of the Void (switch to primer talisman down the road, it'd double the suit price)
-Quiver of Infinity
-Jackal's Collar
-Leggings of Bane
-Stormgrip
-Song Woven Mantle

This setup will give me various nice mods, but specifically, it will give me 45% DCI, 35% HCI, 8 HP regen, and 70/70/70/70/75 resists. Adding in a crimson cincture would be a nice extra once I can get my hands on one for a decent price, as well.

Anyway, to you sampire guru's: Does this setup seem like it will be an effective one for peerless/doom solo's? For reference, this is the template I plan to run:

120 swords
120 parry
120 bushido
100 necro
100 tactics
60 chivalry
100 anatomy/resist (situational)

125 dex, 105 str, 25 int, elf

I'm also considering mace and shield glasses in place of the ancient samurai helm... Would the HLD be more useful than the 10% DCI from the helm (if I calculated right, setup above has 50% total DCI so dropping the helm would leave me with 35% DCI)? Granted, this would basically double the price of the suit, so it'd be a down-the-line deal anyway, but I'm just curious if the DCI or the HLD would be more useful.

 

[Connor_Graham]

Yes, the glasses would be better for you overall than the helm. The template looks fine, but I'd suggest looking for at the least a different ring. Something you might want to look into is crafting your own arms & gorget using horned kits. They's much cheaper than barbed, yet can yield some very good pieces.

 

[Lynk]

I agree with Connor.. every one and a while I'll just buy up all the horned kits I can find and burn em all.. they give you some really nice 4 mod pieces, plus you get double the charges of a barbed kit.

 

[Credinus]

Thanks for the advice. I'll get to work on getting some horned kits for my tailor and try to make some replacement pieces to get those resists maxed without the ring.

When all's said and done, what mods would be best for the ring to pair up with the equipment (I plan to keep the HCI/DCI gear regardless)? I'm guessing I should look for 10% HCI to max that out and either as much stamina/dex as I can get, anything else that I should go for on it?

 

[Connor_Graham]

You'll want DI as high as you can get it, and LMC as well. Any extra MR you can get between the gorget and arms is also helpful.

 

[Credinus]

Thanks for the advice so far. I went ahead and got the original set since the pieces that weren't that great for a sampire anyway I wanted to have in the future for other characters. After some playing around, I realized that the leggings of bane left me with a serious hole in my fire resist after vampiric embrace, so I swapped them out for royal leggings of embers. I'm keeping an eye out for good runic crafted replacements for the rest of the parts, since I've still got quite a bit of training before I can really attempt to make anything good with my own crafter.

However, I thought I'd post some information about the set in case anyone else ever wants to try it, or if anyone has some suggestions for specific replacements. First off, it should be known that my sampire isn't fully trained yet; current skills:
-102 swordsmanship
-100 parry
-100 anatomy
-100 tactics
-99 necromancy
-79 chivalry (slowly dropping, used to be pure chiv/bush warrior)
-40ish focus (dropping as well, leftover from before)

Fighting cyclopean warriors, titans, stone gargoyles, and stone harpies offers no trouble at all, as I expected. I went up against a balron (non-paragon of course) and there's only one problem I'm seeing: mana consumption. As I'm sure most of you would've noticed, the lack of HCI and HLD makes lightning strike essential with this suit, especially with only 102 swordsmanship. The 10% LMC from the totem simply wasn't enough (note: 53 total mana, 25 base +8 from stormgrip). By the time the balron was at about half health (about 20-30 seconds), I was out of mana and without lightning strike quickly fell victim to his magic. Taking that into account, more LMC or a weapon with higher HML is really necessary for this suit; I will try again later with a new scimitar I bought which has 52% ML. Hopefully swapping between the two weapons will help with mana conservation. However, with a better weapon and fully trained skills, I think this suit could definitely be a good learning tool for aspiring sampires to get used to the class with. Even though it's not necessarily cheap, the most expensive pieces are good to hold onto for other characters.

All things considered, here is what I see as the pros and cons of the suit:

Pros
-Easy to piece together, as most pieces are readily available on vendors
-Decent luck bonus: 515 base luck when wearing robe of eclipse/equinox
-Great resists; after vampiric embrace: 70/66/70/66/75
-50% total DCI
-3 blessed pieces (including quiver) to reduce insurance costs
-2 self repair 10 items to reduce repair costs
-+15 resisting spells allows for extra 15 points of tactics if you run resisting only
-Not overly expensive; hunting bargains for 3 days netted me the entire suit for less than 8 million total gold; comparitively, one good single piece of runic armor generally costs 2-4 million

Cons
-Only 10% LMC
-Only regen present is 6 HP regen
-Only 25% DI
-Only 140 stamina without potion
-No HLD

Suggestions for improvement
1) Replace ring of elements with +10-15% DCI ring that has some LMC and/or DI
2) Replace resillient bracer with +10-15% DCI bracelet with some LMC and/or DI
3) Replace ancient samurai helm with mace and shield glasses (so espensive )
4) Replace soul seeker with, well, a better weapon
5) Replace song woven spell mantle with high resist and +dex/stamina
6) Replace royal leggings of embers with high resist and +dex/stamina

Or if you already have HLD on your weapon:
- Keep ancient samurai helm, then use ornament of the magician or high DI/stat boost/LMC jewel (instead of looking for +DCI on both jewel slots)

I think heart of the lion, jackal's collar, and stormgrip setup a good foundation to work off of though. The collective resists and bonus from them allow for more flexibility in what to look for on all the other pieces; most artifact suggestions I see call for fey leggings and rune beetle carapace, but I see the low resists on those two pieces making it much more difficult to piece together the rest. Thoughts?



P.S. - Does ANYONE on Catskills have a decent sampire weapon, especially an ornate axe, that they'd be willing to sell? I can't find a single decent weapon anywhere, not even with the help of finduo.