Path of Exile Duelist DW Frenzy and Cleave Build

Path of Exile Duelist DW Frenzy and Cleave Build by Wallach

Late game build: Link

The above template is the DW setup I’ve been working on to prepare for Open Beta. I’ve seen the tree changes and I don’t believe there’s anything that changes my plans.

Basic idea is to try and get as much survivability as I can while still having having fast-paced, mobile gameplay.

My current plan is to run Frenzy to be able to reliably maintain five stacks, with Cleave making up the bulk of my standard damage. I’m running Blood Magic so Hatred is hard to support in this build; it’s currently set up for Anger and Grace auras with reduced mana to put as little pressure on my total life pool as I can. Lava Lash is in this build both for Anger and Added Fire Damage support gems, but I’m not actually sure the two points are efficient enough to take over, say, the two 10% melee physical damage nodes on the other side of the Duelist start branch. I’m leaving Flicker out of this build so as to be able to more easily maintain full Frenzy charges. Personally I’ll be running Whirling Blades for mobility but Leap Slam is also a good choice and has the added benefit of being able to change height levels.

The foundation I posted is honestly pretty flexible and I feel is branched out in a way that makes it easy to modify to suit your tastes. Ice Bite and three 10% elemental damage nodes are easy to reach if you want to increase or change your elemental damage output, there’s all sorts of physical damage accessible without any further highway nodes, and there’s another 24% life behind the Strength notable if you feel it necessary. There’s also an additional Endurance Charge and duration bonus if you want additional mitigation, but I personally tend to only run Warlord’s Mark for support.

Feel free to leave comments or suggestions, thanks!

Edit: Here’s a video showing progression roughly halfway through the main game (A2, Cruel difficulty) with roughly half the points in the above template spent: Video Link

Edit 2: Here’s a 1080p video taken just after that on a much harder map: Video Link

This is just to give you an idea of what it looks like in action – it’s not really that awesome, after all this is my first OB character so I’m still using whatever I can scrape together. Unfortunately it also highlights how good this build is at exposing Path of Exile’s relatively poor approximation calculations between server and client; between Whirling Blades and very high movement speed you can see how often my position is clearly not well matched with where the server reports I am.