Phlogistoneer build guide for fearless

## Description

This guide is for those who want to do playthrough on fearless with Phlogistoneer class.

## level 1-10

### Skills, auras and abilities

Goal here is to focus on mines and grenade lob for damage. Noxious charge gives us not too bad poison mine which applies 25% vulnerability to enemies allowing us to deal more damage to them for 10 seconds. Resistance allows us to sacrifice rage for some additional health recovery if things don't go as planned. Skills suffer from diminishing gains so we can save upgrading them above level 5 for later.

For the first perk you can pick Berskerer as provides you with 10% damage boost for most of the time. Rage only decays when you're not attacking something for a while so it's not that hard to keep up.

Phlogistoneer
 Grenade lob | 5
 Noxious charge | 1
 Resistance | 1
 Aura
 Upgrade forcefield | 2

Goal here is to make Katarina as tanky as possible while being able to dish out some damage as well. Increasing her attack speed allows her to hit more often and benefit more from enchants that provide life steal. Withering kiss is for the Curse blast that unlocks at level 10 and Stroke of terror is for occasional paralysis proc.

Katarina

### Gear

Best enchants early on for damage are +x% weapon damage, +x weapon damage, +x elemental/poison damage, +x bonus to all damage. Early on percentage based modifiers are often worse than those that provide flat damage bonus. Both grenade lob and minefield have 1.0 enchantment modifier which makes them receive full damage from flat damage bonus enchants. Due to this something like +5 poison damage can be extremely good way to increase damage with mines as it will be applied to each mine.

In terms of survivability health and shield hp is the easiest to increase early on. Luckily Exoskeletal core increases both physical damage and health making it the best choice for ability points early on. From items you should look for ones that provide the highest defense.

Don't forget alchemy as if your weapon has essence capacity you can throw in some essence for extra flat bonus damage, bonus points to Exoskeletal core ability for additional health and damage. If your exoskeleton, gloves or boots have essence capacity and you're lucky enough to buy or find profane essences that'll give you whopping +25% item defense for each.

### Strategy

Run around and use minefield to deal with crowds and use grenade lob and noxious charge from distance. Don't forget that you can have up to 1 minefield and 3 noxious charges out in the field at once. This allows you to pre-emptively prepare line of 3 noxious charges and 1 + 1 minefield to lure mobs in to.

Since shield starts recharging rapidly after 5 seconds of not attacking, it can be fairly easy to get back to full shield by just running around while letting Katarina act as decoy. If things get rough resistance can be popped with 3x invigorating resistance power-up for some extra healing.

## level 10-20

### Skills, Auras and abilities

Improve upgrade forcefield to level 5 for the extra shield hp and for the faster shield recharge. Then it's best to go for the additional mine and after that eventually for the Cluster Grenade and Incendiary mine array for damage.

Veteran hunter or Destructive are probably the better perks to pick here unless you somehow manage to unlock Alchemist. Since critical hit chances are generally very low early on it'll take a while for it to be useful. More skill-points and ability points always helps.

Alchemist perk is one of the best perks in the game and should be stable in pretty much any build, it allows you to throw more essences to gear which means more of pretty much everything stat wise.

More health for Katarina and curse blast for the extra damage.

Katarina

### Gear

Not much different from levels 1-10 except that you might be running out of mana every now and then. If you can find a weapon with some essence capacity and some Quintessence you can get 2% of your damage as mana (description of quintessence is misleading as it's missing %) which will solve most mana problems. Other than that mana regeneration enchants are really good, generally much better than mana per hit enchants.

if you have left over money don't forget that you can enchant gear at the Romany camp and buy some essences from if you successfully escorted the merchant to the camp.

### Strategy

Be very careful around Vilas, especially their elite and special variants in tight spaces. They have move that can pull you to them which might lead to one getting stuck, surrounded and painful death. Also be vary around large groups of Dreadknecht as they can melt shield and health quite quickly with their hit scan barrages. When entering new area like orichalcum mines it pays to be careful and take out enemies group by group by luring them to you with noxious charge or grenade lob. The entrance areas can be quite tight and aggroing 2-3 groups at once can leave very little room to avoid attacks.

## level 20-30

### Skills, Auras and abilities

Start pumping up shield mastery as having around 300-400 mana around level 45-50 range will help a lot. It'll also increase shield health which is a nice bonus to surivability.

Some prefer to respec points from Grenade lob and Minefield for Liquid fire and Rocket swarm here which is fine. However being able to throw out Minefield when Incendiary mine array is on cooldown allows some nice rapid AOE damage when enemies are chasing you.

Unlike liquid fire, Grenade lob deals physical damage and as such benefits more from points in exoskeleton core ability making it better against single targets. Grenade lob also costs no mana so if you have Quintessence in your weapon you can use grenade lob to speed up mana regeneration.

Pick alchemist perk here if you can, it should unlock after doing some amount of alchemy on gear. Item quality, essence, level and capacity probably affect how fast this unlocks.

Start pumping up her ethereality her more resistant and increases her chance to proc things Stroke of terror and curse blast more often. Later on it'll help her proc Chillwave and Transcended fury.

Katarina

### Gear

Most problems with Mana recharge can be solved by putting couple Quintessence to the weapon as you'll get most of your mana back just by spamming mines. Alternative is to use +x mana regeneration enchants which can be surprisingly good. Flat damage bonus enchants still remain the best source of extra damage but +x% bonus to all damage isn't bad either.

As for other essences profane essence is best for armour, Quintessence, Vigorous essence and Absorbent essence for weapons. For accessories you could go with Essence of vitality, Material essence, Primordial essence, Absorbent essence or Mercurial essence as rest of them don't really scale as well.

### Strategy

Some of the bigger mobs start to have pretty crazy amounts of health and it can take a while to take them down. Fastest way is to utilize damage over time effects and clear out the rest of the mobs first.

But generally you'll be running around deploying mines to kill enemies that chase you. If you run out of shield then stop attacking for a while (4s) for the shield regeneration to kick in.

It can also be hard to keep up with gear due to high experience multiplier and monsters that level with you. If you want to make things a lot easier for yourself you can check out Exploits for tips on how to farm epics from the Ink rift in the well but this guide doesn't expect you to do so.

But generally it should be enough to remember to enchance your gear and not to forget alchemy.

## level 30-46

### Skills, Auras and abilities

Keep pumping ability points to shield mastery until 300-400 mana you'll need a lot of max mana for Exocore boost, Chrono lock and Scatter bombs later around level 45+.

For perks you should have alchemist by now, defense matrix specialist is another good skill that basically provides us with temporal invisibility for 3 seconds with 1/20 chance when taking a hit. Phlogistoneer usually takes a lot of hits due to slow speed and lack of dodge or deflect so this should proc fairly often. Destructive is also pretty good if you can get decent critical hit chance from gear even something like 15% might already make it worth it.

Keep pumping up her ethereality the chance to proc her abilities really help and if you've equipped her with some proper gear she should be quite resistant to damage. Chill wave is nice skill for slowing down enemies and Touch of death just might help us kill stuff faster occasionally. Transcendent fury is nice since it provides us with slow way to regenerate rage when dealing with single enemy that has a lot of health, it should be enough to offset the rage decay if that happens.

Later on we will respec her to mainly have sentinel skills so keep on the look out for gear with good +x% magic and gold find.

Katarina

### Strategy

You can continue the campaign but try to get to level 45 before facing the final boss of VH1 campaign. You can set respawn monsters to true and farm for gear and levels fairly easy with this build already so you might also do that and with fearless levelling is really fast.

With fearless you can get to level 46 around the time you're clearing old town by doing most of the side quests and maybe couple extra rounds in few maps with enemies set to re-spawn.

## level 46+

### Skills, Auras and abilities

Feel free to level up few more levels using mines if you wish, but level 46 is about earliest point in the game where one can start to abuse the ridiculously powerful Exocore boost, Scatter bombs, Chrono-lock combination. But in order for it to be effective you'll need weapon with 36 or more essence capacity so you can get up to 8% damage gained as mana with Quintessence. Then to be safe one should get equip bunch of gear with +x mana regeneration enchants even if it costs some damage.

The key strategy is to agro large group of monsters and activate exocore boost which will reduce cooldown of skills to one at the cost of 150% increase to mana cost. During exocore boost we will be spamming Scatter bombs and activate chrono-lock few times for extra mana regen and damage. This will deal so much damage that you can kill even most bosses on fearless within seconds. Also for some reason Scatter bombs isn't considered an attack so you can regenerate 10% of your shield per second while spamming it.