Flame Reave Crit SpellBlade Build Guide

Good clear thanks to Teleport and Flame Reave with Sunwreath

Tons of ward generation on hit with fast attack speed due to nodes like Arcane Warden 5/8 and Pyroshielding 5/5

Fast leveling and getting through the story especially if you have access to Sunwreath at an early level.

Mana is never a problem end game and we can ignore using any passives or affixes dealing with mana, freeing up offensive prefixes in the end game.

Guaranteed critical strikes thanks to Illuminating Fire 1/1, No need to use up affixes here either.

Weak against dodge due to the nature of "charging" up big Flame Reave's. If these get dodged it can be annoying.

As a Crit Build, you want to avoid crit avoidance modifiers if you can.

If you intend to push 300+ corruption you will need ideal gear.

The general concept of the build is to attack a number of times with Firebrand and then unleash one huge crit with Flame Reave.

We are abusing the several more modifiers on the Flame Reave skill tree and the similarity between our passive tree's Blade Weaver 6/10 and Firebrand's Incineration 1/1.

With the Versatility 1/1 node it makes our Firebrand charge up Rhythm of Fire, Firebrand Stacks, and Blade Weaver 6/10. This creates a pattern of either attacking 3 times with Firebrand and then once with Flame Reave, Or 6 times then once based on our Firebrand stacks + Blade Weaver. 3 times is the minimum we want due to the Rhythm of Fire and Illuminating Fire 1/1 nodes, this will allow for quick clearing, while attacking 6 times with our Firebrand before unleashing our Flame Reave will allow for the highest damage, useful for bosses.

Flame Ward, Enchant Weapon, and Teleport are to be used as utility to our main rotation.

Flame Ward gives us a huge bonus to survivability while also giving us a great deal of additional Fire damage.

Enchant Weapon gives us a whopping 50% increase to attack speed, lots of fire damage, and cleanse ailments when it is activated, and if you use it on cooldown it will be up approximately 1/2 to 2/3 of the time.

Teleport is one of the best movement abilities in the game, and we specialize in it to reduce its cooldown and take the 5% global cooldown recovery offered by the Wormhole 1/1 node. There are several other useful bonuses on the teleport skill tree such as increased elemental and fire damage and increased defenses for 4 seconds after teleporting.

Early leveling (Level 1 to End of time/25ish)

During early leveling you can use any skill you would like, there are some that hit particularly hard even if you'll never plan to use them later, like Glacier. You can use fireball + elemental nova specced into the fire side that way you can just start grabbing fire damage on your equipment to set up for once you become a spell blade, or you can use something like glacier which hits hard and has a decent size area effect and mana strike, the downside to using a combo like that is that you'll either need to get elemental damage on gear or change your gear pretty immediately after becoming a spell blade. Mana Strike will be useful all the way up until you are using the Firebrand ability as your 0 cost attack, however.

Level 25-70

You should be able to use Flame Reave as soon as you choose your mastery as Spell Blade, it only requires 5 points into Spell Blade to unlock. If not, keep doing what you were in the Early Leveling Section until you get another point or two or respec the number of points needed to achieve 5 points in Spell Blade, maintaining a minimum of 20 in Mage.

Once you are able to use Flame Reave, specialize into it and start using it as your main skill. You will run out of mana while leveling and you will want to use Mana Strike in between Flame Reave volleys. Access to Sunwreath early is nice as it gives you the effect of the Worldfire node without having to spec into it and without the draw backs, making clearing easier. It also buffs melee fire damage and fire DoT at the cost of increased mana cost for Flame Reave. I suggest speccing Flame Reave to Ignite and Deal DoT while leveling as our crit cycle isn't possible until we have more points in the skills and access to Firebrand. So let Ignite do the heavy lifting for us until then, While leveling go ahead and get chance to ignite on hit on your gear, attack speed, and fire damage/Elemental DoT/DoT. They are all useful and the forge will allow us to quickly switch to our Crit build as needed later on.

I have pushed 200-250 Corruption so far with this build, I intend to continue to update the build with its capabilities as my own gearing is improved. The build has potential yet lacks some survivability so tight play is needed when pushing corruption or killing T4 Julra, though it is possible. Focus on increasing ward, armor, and having 75% resistances.