Fire second march Dual mage w. Baldwin & Trajan (2.4 patch update)
This guide is part of my article series on fire builds. If this build is not to your likeing, have a look at the rest of my builds on the lightning build page. I have multiple builds for any taste available, IB, PvE, arena/ToS builds and F2P/cheap builds.
ToK passives spread between main and secondary march
It is very important that you think hard on what you want to run as your main and as your secondary army. Your main needs to be as strong as possible with no quarters given. This means, you need to make yoiur secondary team synergize with the ToK skills you have left!
This build is made for players who run heavy physical damage teams as mains. Thus you will have all the strong magic passives available. Moreover, fire does well as a secondary because it scales nicely with graces and blessings (which are not strong enough to be used in main).
The build
This article is on dual mage fire. This build revolves around dealing massive amounts of damage in record times. By relying on heavy crit-buff stacking and magic damage debuffing enemies, we are able to boost the output of Wu (and Baldwin) to insane highs).
This is an example of this build in action versus a shadow main 30k stronger than the fire.
I am personally running it with Baldwin because I like the magic damage debuff, but it will work just as well – maybe even better – with Merlin as the second mage.
This is a F2P build able to kill even big spenders. You can unlock Baldwin for free via events and max him only with gems. Making this build F2P. If you don’t want to do that, run Merlin instead!
This build perform well versus shadow, however, it looses big time to holy! It also has a hard time nuking defensivly built earth setups, but is otherwise a very good and solid build.
Can be altered to include Khan-fire (see guide) if you are having issues with earths and holys.
How does it work?
This setup is pretty standard and revolves around pumping big magic burst damage from Wu and Baldwin. Trajan and William provides insane crit buffs pumping your mages to the max.
ToK passive setup
This build can both function as a main and as a secondary march. In the ideal world where all the standard passives are available to you, this is the setup you want to run:
Main march dual mage:
You want to run this passive loadout:
Empress Wu: Annihilation + Death Breath + Chase
Empress Wu will have a big crit artifact and be the one to proc massive chase burst damage. As such, if you are running as a main you wanna give her Death Breath instead of a nova.
Baldwin: Root/Fire nova + Toxic Nova + Concentration
You will be running a magic damage artifact on Baldwin (with crit bonus) as we build him for pure magic damage and not crit bursts.
If you can, Spell Disintegration is absolutely best skill to get here or on your frontliners. If you are running Death Breath on Wu I would use Toxic Nova instead of Root. But I like Root a lot, as it often deals insane damage plus is works towards a CC with its root effect. Fire Nova can be used in case you do not have Stormeye.
Alternatively, you can also opt for Root/Nova + Concentration + Absolute Defense, if you have that available and feel like your Baldwin dies too quickly.
William: Fighting Will + Energy Suppression + Rage Blessing
William is pretty set. You might not have Energy Suppression available for a second team, in which case you can opt for either Adrenaline rush for more offense potential or Resist or Oaken for defense. If those are not available either, you can run Misleading / Malice.
Trajan: Weakness + Blessing of Defense/Resist + Blessing of War
Weakness is a must. If you run a fire team, you always want to give that weakness. If you are not able to give your second team weakness, do something other than fire. For the Blessings of War and Defense, you can swap these for Resist, Oaken, Misleading, Malice.
This is my personal setup as a secondary to earth-wind hybrid main:
- If you do not have Stormeye, simply change into:
2. If you want to max on RNG, you can do an anni-chace-burst build on Wu.
You are going to want a very very good artifact for that to work well. Something like this
Free to play version
If you are running your second as a free to play, you can make it work very well with Merlin and Hippolyta.
You want to do something like this. Depending on your crit rate, you can run Burst on Hippo. If you do not like the RNG or have low crit rate, run Resist / Blessing of War / Defense / Malice / Misleading.
These versions are based on what I have available to use with an earth-wind hybrid as a main. You main march might differ, in which case you can swap out non-key skills. The important thing to be aware of are:
- Keep weakness in the setup at all costs
- Make sure Chase is active on Empress Wu and is matched with two strong proc passives (many damage instances) and a crit-boost artifact.
- You can opt for more defense on your secondary mage if you die too fast. Absolute Defense and Fighting Master can be handy in exchange for Root.
- Energy Burst can be used if you have enough crit rate.
- If you are not using Blessings of War and Defense in your main, they are VERY powerful in fire and should be used. I would rather have War and defense than skills like burst, adrenaline rush, resist, maybe even Fighting Will (if you do not have Stormeye).
- If you have Stormeye available, Root and Fighting Will become high value.
Published: 02-12-2022