Ultimate Brawler Tactics - The MTL Vit Dps knuck

This thread is a long time coming. Several months ago, a few items became available that made a DPS MTL VIT knuck viable. A few weeks ago, a skill rebalance made this build even more swexy.

Behold the Mtl Vit Dps knuck. Now this build is optimized if you have access to the Curious Dress or get extra lucky with Avatars (crit/ailment). Otherwise you will drop DPS quite a bit.

A quick summary od what ive been able to do with this build.

-solo pretty much all ulti bosses (albeit relatively slowly because shell break only does so much dmg.
-land first attacker ranks at venena nightmare and several other bosses with high def. usually get 3rd or 2nd attacker on most others.
-gloat

Spoiler: Gear And Stats (most important)

255 Vit 215 MTL rest agi (i have ailment and crit avas)

arrange your vit and mtl in a way that you can get 100 mtl. top priority.


Wep - highest refine tonfas (Mardula and Ultima) (i use this for multiple characters)

Shield - highest refine possible vulcan
for shield cannon damage and guard strike passive damage (sometimes i spam a wave of 10k dmg on waves. Im not sure if they changed guard strike because it doesnt spam anymore in spikes)

Armor - Curious Dress w Iron empress

Additional - Sakura Hair Clip w Yashiro mom
2s non machina with zelbuse and Seele


Substitute items - if you dont have Tonfas then you should get FC or ACdCd knucks high refine

Eagles work here as well and you can wear full dragoon and use other type of shield

However your Dps will drop tremendously since youll be sitting at around 1k attack without tonfas.

Spoiler: Skills

Mandatory Skills

Martial
Shell Break (your main dmging skill)
Heavy Smash low def dmg skill and lethargy
1 to earthbind for HP recovery on mass kill
Martial Masteries

Optional - aggravate, martial skill dmg up

Shield
-Shield Cannon
-Guardian

Optional
-Max protect n Aegis
-Guard strike for small passive dmg
-Hp and resist passives

Shot
-Decoy

Optional
Max QD and long range (Shield cannon buff)

Battle Skills
-Crit up

Optional
other damage skills

Survival
Hp up
Mp boost optional

Support
Sanctuary
Heal and First Aid optional


Dancer (optional)
Breaking skills
Mp recover skill

Halberd (Optional)
quick aura

Magic (optional)
impact

Spoiler: Combos (important)

Set up combo
Sonic wave - Guardian save - Decoy swift - protect and aegis swift

Burst combo (5mp)
Shell Break - Shield cannon smite - Pdef
Use once your minds eye timer drops

DPS combo 1
starter - Shell break smite - shield bash(minds eye)

Can trade out dancer skills as save tags for dps combo if youre breaking or need better mp management.

Use Heavy Smash spam for low def dps.

Have fun!

 

@Lenwok

it works. wish we could put our mtl knucks together

 

Nice writeup. Interesting choice to go without any attack stats

I'm getting more and more tempted to come back to the game too, but RL is still a tad too busy lately. Might at least get cooking again...

 

Skipping chariot and going shell break + shield cannon only huh?

 

yeah at best, i get 500 base atk from agi but id be sacrificing way too much hp. gotta make sanctuary worth it so sleeping in the waves doesnt kill me.

Thats also why im choosing Heavy smash as my dmg skill since it gives a huge constant as opposed to chariot. Also fear is unpredictable and ive realized it leads to buggy boss mechanics.

Shield cannon has gone upwards to 500k dmg though.

 

At venena im doing 300k - 400k shield cannons and 100k shellbreak spams.

heavy smash typically is 120k dmg or so

 

Not bad for zero agi/str/dex
How much HP you have now? I'm wondering if 255 MTL would allow you more room to use a bit more atk gear (like oni horn), but guess it depends if you have enough ailment res from avatar stats.

 

1620 ATK, 23k Hp

All that atk from passives and Tonfa XD

 

Could you please update the skill stats for each skill, how much points to assign?
I am currently lv 141 converting from DS to Knuckle, so I need to know which skills I need prioritize (maxed out) to be able to do the combos and effectively atk and survive boss/mini boss battles. I am resetting all my stat and skill.

 

For tanking you will need pdef and guardian maxed.

For attacking you will shield cannon and shell break maxed. Note, new toy gun weapon from event could allow you to go back to relying on chariot over shell break for main dps.

Generally you would need decoy shot maxed for the mp regen.

The rest are all entirely optional, depending on how much sp you have left, it's up to you if you want to squeeze out more damage (warcry + attack passives + impact as combo starter) or focus more on survivability (hp boost, resistance passives or sanctuary), or a reasonable mix of both

 

also to note with new toy gun, shield cannon becomes unuseable as a dps skill since you cant stu

 

I see thank you!

 

Noted. The unstun on toy gun sucks. Lol ty again.