Guide to Jace Floor 124+ Armor Steal Build
By Mihealsick
Foreword
Jace is back with an incredibly powerful build, and this one takes some very careful play and smart choices once you get past floor 80 or so. If you make bad choices, you’ll die on floor 124 like I did.
This build revolves around the Armor Steal talent, which you can find in Jace’s Harbinger spec. Armor Steal is the single most powerful talent node in the game, allowing you to take enemy armor, multiply it by your armor%, and add it to your own. The scaling on this is so powerful that even love tapping one single enemy in the endgame will allow you to get so much armor all at once that (most) enemies will never be able to touch you.
This talent on its own provides strong enough defense that it can basically carry your entire build in a lot of fights… but what happens if there are no enemies around that you can steal armor from?
This is where the Madness potion comes in. Turtle set gives you turn 1 damage immunity, so with 4pc Warrior / 1pc Swift / 1 pc Turtle you can attack yourself 10 times. Every hit will build up armor from Sparkle AND you’ll be able to steal armor from yourself. The scaling on this is so good that, by floor 120 or so, I was starting a fight with about 200K base armor and after one round of madness-self-armor-stealing I was ending up with over 100 billion armor.
With that much armor, the Turtle Gauntlet can deal a massive amount of attack damage… but the bad news is that there’s an invisible damage ceiling of 999Q. You can reach that ceiling and even exceed it to some degree, but if you go too far past it then your damage will be canceled and just result in “Blocked.” If you hurtle towards that damage cap uncontrollably, you’ll find your run ending very early on.
As a result, a big focus of this build is to strictly control your Armored Attack%, Power%, and Faith% stats to ensure that you don’t break this barrier.
If you make the right decisions, you should be able to carry this build much farther than 124!
Here’s the talent tree. It’s central to the build, non-negotiable.
Early Game (1-24)
Your job is to survive until floor 25 with a super awkward dismantle rotation. I recommend this 5pc Warrior / 1pc Turtle / 1pc Demonic setup as pictured, and to focus on either physical or magic damage with most of your dismantles. I used physical, but I was sweating a bit. Magic might be a little more comfortable.
Harbinger allows you to drop a multi-attack (for your full attack count) after you kill a target that has Harbinger, which is super helpful.
- For Kotyas, Turtle set does all the work. Attack right into them.
- Make sure you are Precision capped at 100% before floor 20.
- You do not need Penetration at all, but it will probably make things a little easier before floor 25 if you dismantle to 100%.
- Definitely open the Opportunism Chest. This is critically important for several reasons. You want the 25% damage reduction. It allows you to deal with Suns. It allows you to hit Suns, which means you can steal some of their (massive) armor. And it also means you can hit (most) targets even while you’re Mind Controlled (which allows you to build up sparkle and armor steal when you would normally miss). Don’t skip the Opportunism Chest!
- Open the Swarm Chest which will cause every fight to feature 6 enemies. This improves the chances that at least one enemy will have armor and avoids awkward fights.
- No Power or Faith! This is the most important and weirdest part about the build here. I would recommend you do not exceed 300% Power or 300% Faith, which means you basically need to keep a lot of very good items clear of your dismantle rotation entirely. No Ring of Unity. No Mask of Cataclysm.
- Dismantle for armor and for damage to tide you over – I’ll touch more on the dismantle tier list below, but at this stage you want Sparkle, Armor, Armor%, and anything that helps your base damage to help you survive til floor 25.
- You need 1 Madness Potion and 1-2 Tears of Iron. Use Mercenary as needed.
Midgame (25-60)
Once you reach floor 25, you have access to the Turtle Gauntlet and everything changes. All that armor, armor%, and sparkle you’d been stacking turns you into an absolute wrecking ball–especially in combination with the armor you steal with your normal hits.
Equip the first Turtle Gauntlet you find, but do not dismantle any Turtle Gauntlets EVER. Remember, you must tightly control your Armored Attack%.
For Saturns and Iron Golems, armor steal and Turtle Gauntlet allows you cut through these guys like butter.
For Death, these are no problem as long as someone else in the fight has armor. When you see your first room with 3 Deaths in the front row, that’s the first time you’ll probably need to drink your Madness potion. Keep a pair of Swift Boots around to swap away from Demonic to double up your attacks–that also lets you stack about 10x more armor than you would without it on your self-armor-steal turns. You’ll use this same strat for the rest of your run anytime there’s no way to steal armor from an enemy.
For dismantles, you want to dismantle as many Gloom (jade neck) and Gold Wardens (gold neck) as you can possibly find. Don’t even upgrade them past Mythic or Eternal rarity, just consume them as often as you can. You’ll also care a bit about your HP because Venomous Spiders can poison you a bit on your Madness turn, so dismantle 1 Throngler and 1 Vampiric Chestplate every 20 floors or so. Aside from that, default to anything that has decent flat armor (like Celestial Chestplate, Magma Chestplate, or Turtle Chestplate) Again, do not dismantle past 300% or so Faith and 300% or so Power, and never ever dismantle a Turtle Gauntlet.
Stash a low rarity copy of Turtle Gauntlet and Ring of Unity in your inventory. You’ll need them later and they’ll be hard to find. Feel free to equip higher level copies of these for now, since you’re not in danger of breaking the damage ceiling (yet).
Endgame (60+)
The only new enemy here is the Perfect Slave, and your strategy for the PS is to just have an insurmountable of armor and armored attack it to death. The Madness-self-armor-steal trick will be plenty for a very long time. I expect that the PS might be able to outlast your damage output around floor 160 or so, in which case you may want to swap out Swift for 1pc Celestial and let your Magma damage take over… but I didn’t get to that point because I’m dumb.
The real threat after 60 is the damage ceiling. You’re all-in on armored attack, so if your damage output gets too high then you just won’t be able to deal damage at all and you will lose the fight eventually from Curse of the Tower. (In fact, I recommend you keep a second Madness Potion in your inventory just in case you need a quick exit when that happens).
You want to deal enough damage to keep up with Perfect Slave and Death health pools just using your self-armor-steal strategy, BUT you don’t want to do so much damage that you break through the cap after stealing armor from Saturns and Iron Golems.
The good news is that this build has the tools to (almost perfectly) control your damage output.
As far as I can tell, the damage ceiling is either 100x or 1000x 999Q. You can go a bit past 999Q and your damage still just reads as 999Q, but I once you break that barrier by a certain number of digits you break the game.
Some tips for riding the edge
Armor Steal does not trigger on the hit you land that kills the enemy – You get no armor when you one-shot a critter. Likewise, If you are attacking an Iron Golem with 999Q armor, you don’t end up with 999Q armor! I found I was usually maxing out around 500Q armor, and from there my armored attacks were killing the huge-armor enemies without stealing from them.
Adjust your armored attack% and faith by ear by swapping in different rarities of Turtle Gauntlet and Ring of Unity for different fights!
If you overflow damage or end up short just hurry up and die, then eyeball it and swap to the right combination of items for the next attempt. In general, use your common/uncommon Turtle Gauntlet and Ring of Unity set when you can connect an armor steal in the first turn, and use your divine Turtle Gauntlet and Ring of Unity if you can’t. Just get a feel for the math and you’ll be fine.
Watch out for certain flunkies – There are a few little guys that can give you a hard time with this build. Frozen Strike / Weakness can be a problem in fights where you have no armored enemies to steal from, and Pinto’s “Drop of Chaos” ability has a couple of random debuffs that can be really aggravating (like the one that reduces your total attacks to 1 for the rest of the fight). Venomous Spiders can also poison you, but you can outscale that with a good hp pool. Be prepared to have your lunch money stolen from you by the occasion goblin.
Dismantle Armor% > Sparkle > Armor – These are the only things you care about in the endgame really (aside from a bit of hp and some incidental Cinder damage in case you want to use Celestial set later on). The problem is that you can’t dismantle Wooden Crowns (because of their Power%), so you pretty much only really care about Gold Warden and Gloom when it comes to dismantling. After floor 80 or so those will start to dry up in the market. Just dig for them as hard as you can, and remember you don’t need to actually buy anything that’s expensive ever again in the endgame.
Your dismantle tier list, with the top row being the best by a wide margin. The only other thing not listed here is Precision cap and some more flat HP from the occasional Throngler. And remember, never dismantle a Turtle Gauntlet and don’t dismantle past 300% or so Faith and 300% or so Power!
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