Torchlight 2 Akimbo Pistol Build Guide

Torchlight 2 Akimbo Pistol Build Guide by Empyrean

Poison is great, but variety is nice as well. This build uses a quite different skill set from the shotgun build I posted earlier. Attribute allocation is the same; 50/50 Str/Dex until you hit 110 Dex, then the rest in Strength. It should be a little better for group play due to a stronger emphasis on buffs and debuffs that others can benefit from. You’ll eventually have an extra skill point to put wherever. This is just a theory build for me at the moment; I may test it out in an Elite run later. Skills are as follows:

Rune Vault – 1
Chaos Burst – 10
Cursed Daggers – 1
Venomous Hail – 1
Long Range Mastery – 15
Akimbo – 15
Tangleshot – 1
Glaive Sweep – 1
Brambles – 1
Dodge Mastery – 15
Share the Wealth – 15
Blade Pact – 15
Shadowshot – 10
Repulsion Hex – 15
Stone Pact – 15

Like I said, the buffs/debuffs are better here. You do exclusively physical damage, with the exception of a tiny DoT from Tangleshot that doesn’t amount to anything. Once you get going, you should be safe from a lot of melee attackers; full strength Blade Pact slows them down greatly, and full strength Repulsion Hex can handle even more, so those skills synergize well. It would probably take around a dozen enemies closing in on you while stationary before any of them could actually hit you. Blade Pact also debuffs targets’ physical armor, and all of your attacks do physical damage. If you play with a friend who fights in melee, the combination of Blade Pact and Stone Pact provides huge defensive benefits, and a fair amount of offense from the armor debuff as well. Cursed Daggers is strictly a damage debuff for this build; you’ll do basically no damage with it, but dropping enemy damage by 20% can help a lot in conjunction with the other buffs/debuffs. Chaos Burst and Shadowshot both get ten ranks; the incremental gains for more ranks are moderate; feel free to take five points from one and add to the other if you’ve got a favorite. Ten ranks in each is a good allocation though, since they get most of their effectiveness by that point (including the ‘poisoned’ status, which debuffs armor and offense by 33%) and they are generally useful in different situations. Chaos Burst around walls, Shadowshot in the open. Brambles makes for a good distraction and is full strength at one rank, plus with a rank in Glaive Sweep you can build charge off of it before you go into a fight. With a moderate amount of mana leech, this build should have a lot fewer mana problems than the Rapid Fire shotgun build, thanks to your high attack rate. Single target damage output is less mana dependent than with Rapid Fire shotguns. Venomous Hail shows up again and will do a trivial amount of damage; use it when nothing else can hit to score free kills without exposing yourself to danger, but don’t use it when under attack. Each of the 8 waves can apply damage over time effects if the weapon in your right hand has them (albeit at half strength) and they do stack with each other, so if you’ve got “does X damage over Y seconds” on the gun in your right hand, Venomous Hail will do a lot more damage than you’re expecting just by repeatedly applying the DoT. Tangleshot is fully functional at one rank; snare enemies with charge/teleport attacks and they can’t use them against you.

Against bosses, you have a somewhat complicated strategy with a lot of different things you’ll want to have going. Stack up all your buffs and debuffs: Stone Pact, Blade Pact, Cursed Daggers. Autoattack as needed to get the mana to keep them all going. If you have plenty of mana, fire off a few Chaos Bursts to see if you can apply the Poisoned condition to drop their damage and damage resistance by a third, then spam Shadowshot until the poisoned effect wears off. Bosses are huge; all the projectiles that normally hit walls or chase butterflies over the horizon will hit them, inflicting quite a bit of damage. This approach is made somewhat simpler by the fact that if you’re juggling all of these skills effectively, boss damage output should be cut by more than half, so you should be able to play a lot less evasively without getting killed. Dodge the big obvious attacks if you can, but your time is better spent keeping your buffs and debuffs going than jogging around trying to dodge everything.

In terms of gear, you’ll want fast attacking pistols with mana steal if you can get them. Bonuses to Execute would be nice but are not essential; attack skills don’t care what your Execute rate is. Stuff that improves attack speed helps your autoattacks, but casting speed buffs improve your ability to spam Chaos Burst or Shadowshot, so they’ll probably be more useful for increasing your peak damage output. If you find good weapons aside from pistols, you can use them but you’ll lose the Akimbo bonus. None of your skills care what your damage per shot is, only your damage per second, so feel free to use whatever you want. It might be worthwhile to carry a shotgun with a good DoT just to switch over to for Venomous Hail and get a little more damage out of it. That skill scales off Strength as well as Focus, so any Outlander can use it if they’ve got a gun.