It's another broken slam setup!
Styanax is an interesting candidate for a slam character, for a few reasons:
- His kit is innately defensively complete once he uses his Intrepid Stand augment.
- He has innate shield generation to fuel Empowered Blades
- He has a passive that directly buffs most slam weapons
Styanax's defensive power also means he has very flexible modding, which I abused to combine Arcane Consequence, Nira's Anguish and 4x parkour shards for a very speedy boy with frightfully powerful slams.
Not needing to run knockdown exilus in general opens up Nira's Anguish, which is in my opinion the most unreasonably powerful exilus in the game: it provides 15% parkour speed, 100% pressure point and 100% seismic wave-type damage to slams, including combo slams and slam-type ground finishers. (According to the wiki, at least--I haven't rigorously labbed and replicated all of these findings.)
At 180% strength, Rally Point totally refunds the cost of Empowered Blades. Going past is still preferable, as it leaves room for enemies surviving and more importantly charges Styanax's passive. To recap, his passive is that every 40 shields, including Overshields, he gains 1% modded crit chance on all weapons. With Primed Redirection and full overshields, this is 94% CC totally for free.
For less KPM-intensive missions, Styanax can pivot this build to a single-target killer by opting instead for Melee Retaliation and Ready Steel aura, giving him a 6x initial combo and 420% pressure point.
So, what is the build?
The skeleton is very minimal:
- Blind Rage or Transient Fortitude + Intensify for >180% strength
- Primed Redirection or similar shield stacking
- Empowered Blades aura
- Intrepid Stand
And you're done!
My personal loadout is:
- Blind Rage, Umbral Intensify
- Overextended
- Primed Continuity
- Primed Flow
- Primed Redirection
- Nira's Anguish
- Intrepid Stand, Axios Javelineers
- Arcane Consequence, Molt Augmented
I run Overextended and heavy strength stacking to round out Styanax's objective defense and party support.
Fun build! I tried this out on my support Styanax and it works quite well.
Here's my variant, with 2 cast speed and 3 ability strength shards.