Aiming to improve a SSF pierce / physical WPS-based SSF blademaster

Your lack of attack speed and OA will be the largest factors towards your low damage I imagine, especially as a WPS build. I understand you're playing hardcore and prioritising defensive stats but those two in particularly are insanely low, I'd suggest finding any path you can to increase them. You also want an auto-attack replacer ideally, since all your damage is coming through those - cadence is tricky without solid gear and has anti-synergy with WPS skills, but DW pierce Blademasters traditionally run Shard of Beronath if you have the recipe/components.

As far as your skill points go, I think you've over-invested in Markovian's advantage. Unless you're using it for the DA shred it tends to be a rather weak investment, offering horrible returns for damage per point. Take Execution to 8/8 instead. The DA shred also doesn't stack with Blindside, which you should put a point in along with Blitz - extra movement is always fantastic, the knockdown makes a fantastic opener and again it covers the DA shred. A lot of people like it, but Fighting Spirit for me is unfavourable due to low uptime - move the points into Scars of Battle instead and take it to 8/8. Even though you don't currently need the bleed/stun resist, it's a fantastic source of them that will increase your gearing flexibility and perhaps more importantly the armour absorption is fantastic. You should always try and cap armour absorption on melee builds in my opinion. Also worth taking War Cry to 12/12, it's fantastic for softening enemy blows. Another option for you is the Ring of Steel transmuter - obviously it'll deal less damage but the extra second and a half of freeze can be a nice relief against some mobs.

Minor devotion optimisation - take the 4% health node out of Tree of Life and put it into Scales of Ulcama instead. The other thing I'd change is to replace the augments on your weapons to Ulgrim's Guile instead - flat pierce damage is incredibly important for your type of build and it's helpful to grab as many sources of it as you can muster. Again this reduces your defensive capacity a tad but I think given your current augments you can get away with it.

I should state that I don't play hardcore so make sure you test yourself before changing everything, but I'm sure you know that. Hopefully it helps point you in the right direction at least. Good luck.

Edit: Forgot to discuss your relic. Nemesis is not fantastic outside of cold builds and I wouldn't bother it unless you can also craft Belgothian's Carnage, which requires Nemesis as a material. Also a heavy investment, but the latter would be the relic to go for rather than Nemesis.

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Last edited by Stencil; Today at 03:32 AM.

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Aiming to improve a SSF pierce / physical WPS-based SSF blademaster