Intro

Long ago in a distant land, I traded for a fully built trapper using pretty much the "standard" gear/skill setup. As I was examining the different matchups and gear switches that I had, I realized that the character is horribly inflexible and in some circumstances just outright bad. So here is my guide to what I believe is the most flexible way to build a level 30 trapper.

This guide intends to teach the reader what items I believe to be the best on a level 30 assassin focused on using the lightning sentry + mind blast combo, why I chose them over other setups, and some different dueling strategies ranging from basic to more in-depth, complex ones.

As a side note, yeah this can be optimized a little better for strictly 1v1 with lots of switches, but #1 I think having too many switches is gay and #2 you are going to really suck in some tvt situations.





Stats

Str: enough to wear gear
Dex: enough to wear gear/for max block
Vit: the rest
NRG: nothing

I'll bet you didn't see that coming.





Skills

Martial

0-1 Dragon Flight


Shadow

1 Burst of Speed
1 Mind Blast
1 Weapon Block
0-1 Shadow Warrior


Trap

7 Lighting Sentry (max)
X Charged Bolt Sentry (rest)


1 into all prerequisite skills, of course. If you want, you can take 1 into Shadow Warrior. The shadow can use mind blast, absorb hits from guided arrows/bone spirits, detect when a desynched paladin is nearby, and some other random stuff. It can also kill newbies pretty easily with its own Lightning Sentry. However, I find it to be only marginally useful and didn't skill it on my latest build. (I had it on a claw anyways, lol) If you are too poor to afford a 5 ls x Dragon Flight claw, you should absolutely put one into Dragon Flight. The skill is critical in some matchups. I would, however, advise the reader that if they cannot afford such a claw not to attempt to build this character, because it won't turn out very well. 4 points not into synergies is a pretty big deal. for realz



Breakpoints and General Equipment Considerations

Before we even discuss equipment setups, we need to examine why you are wearing any of the gear in the first place. For instance, I don't think you should use Sander's Boots. Typically most people would say "well herp derp they give 40 frw and lots of stats so why not use them?" I would respond, hellz no homio, read on and learn a bit of knowledge fo shizzle.


Assassin FHR Breakpoints

15% 7
27% 6
48% 5
86% 4

Here's the range of breakpoints that we are talking about here for fhr. Typically in LLD, 80+ fhr is only achievable by a character using a spirit weapon. (or a paladin with imba spirit shield) Since we are going to be claw/claw or claw/shield (I will be referring to these as c/c and c/s later in the guide), there's no way in hell that we are going to be able to get 86 fhr. It's good to dream sometimes, though. The main breakpoint that we will be using will be 48 fhr, but some setups will only achieve 27 fhr.


Assassin FCR Breakpoints

27% 13
42% 12
65% 11
102% 10

Again, the top breakpoint is only for spirit-using characters. We aren't, so we're going to go with 65 fcr. 42 is too low, no matter what people tell you.


Equipment Considerations

Now that we know what breakpoints we want to be hitting, let's discuss some inevitable deviations in our equipment setups.

1. Max Block!!!!!
- - Charge, Whirlwind, and Guided arrow will kill you if you don't have it, which is a bad thing...
2. Cannot be Frozen
- - Trap laying speed is based on your ias, not fcr. Therefore, the cbf mod is imperative when fighting against cold sorcs and tele wind druids.
3. Stacked Cold+Lightning Resists
- - Want to know what happens to a frog when it gets struck by Fist of Heavens/Blizzard without max resists? Same thing that will happen to you.
4. High FHR
- - Getting stuck in hammer fields, whirlwinds, tornadoes, fireballs, bone spears, and so on can be brutal, and can definitely lead to you losing a duel that you could have avoided by just having a good fhr breakpoint. Make sure that you always have at least the 27 breakpoint.

The main problem with trappers is that they are incredibly tight on sources of fhr and resists. Your primary source of fhr is from a rare/crafted belt (24) and a shael rune in your armor/circlet. Therefore, if you ever want cbf when going against a druid or sorceress, you sacrifice a ton of fhr and resists. You can make up for it in charms, but soon you start really eating into your mana pool that in team duels or just long duels in general, you run out of mana incredibly fast.

With my proposed setup, you can achieve all four of these at once, without sacrificing much overall.





Equipment

Some of the stuff is just given that you're going to have to use it in order for your character to be at all effective.


Primary Claw

+2 Trap
+3 Lightning Sentry
+x Dragon Flight
20+ ias/shael'd (for max trap laying speed)

if your claw has 20 ias like mine did, socket it with a resist/-req jewel


Secondary Claw

+2 Trap
+3 Lightning Sentry

you don't need anything else on it so socket it with a resist jewel (or resist/-req if your primary claw had -req on it)


Shield

Whitstan's Guard, eth'd

yep


Armor

Skin of the Vipermagi, shael'd

gg


Amulet

+2 Trap
Life
Mana
additional mods: stats/res/rep

like a fireball sorceress with spirit, you don't need fcr on your amulet


Circlet

+2 Trap
20 fcr
30 frw
additional mods: life/mana/stats/rep/res

as many pskulls in this as you can fit

note: an alternative thing you can do is to socket a shael in this and to have multiple vmagis - one with a pskull, one with a cold res jewel, and one with a light res jewel if you think your duel is going to be short (however a pskull would be more useful over the base mana you gain for the mana/life regen in long duels)


Rings

SoJs

you want as many +skills and mana as you can possibly get on a trapper so nothing else should be considered


Belt #1

24 fhr
50+ life
rep
lightning resist

you don't need a caster belt since you will have 70 total with the gear I suggest, and relying on a caster belt will hurt you if you try to use Death's Belt for cbf


Belt #2

Death's Belt

cbf comes from here


Boots, AKA "Why Sander's Suck"

Sander's Boots:

40 frw
15 stats

Remember earlier on? We need to hit 48 fhr. Assuming we use a rare belt, we will get 24 from that. With the shael, we will get an additional 20 for a total of 44... Also, if we use death's belt for cbf, we will go down to only 20 fhr from that shael rune. Also, this gives no resists at all. What were the two things I said trappers are really tight on with their gear? resists and fhr sources

Rare Boots:

30 frw
10 fhr
0-3 dex
30-40 cold res
30-40 light res

You lose out on 10 (item) frw and 45-36 life, but you gain that 10 fhr that we were trying to figure out how to get. You also gain up to 40 resist in cold and lightning. That's huge, considering how you'd have to make it all up in charms if you were using Sander's Boots. Think about it: the maximum amount of mana on a small charm is 12, the maximum amount of resists is 5, and the maximum amount of fhr is 5. If you had to make up 40 resists and 10 fhr, you'd be losing out on 8 charms of mana, and 2 charms of life. After the SoJ bonus, that's a total of 144 mana and 30 life that you could be having if you just had the fhr and resists on your boots.

60 gear frw in ALL situations
vs
70 gear frw/45 life in SOME situations and 70 gear frw/15 life/-144 mana in SOME situations

144 mana is a lot of fucking mana that you're losing out in fights vs sorcs with any cold damage (frost nova, blizzard, or what have you), wind druids, and foh paladins.


Gloves

Magefists

you need 5 fcr even if you have 10 on your amulet, so you need these to hit the fcr bp, the mana regen bonus is useful in long duels, and the +1 fire skills helps your fire blast damage out

gg


Miscellaneous Useful Items

Insight

+5 LS claw #3 (somewhat useful in tvt, will explain later)


Charms

40x life/mana
enough life/@ to hit 150 light/cold res
spare life/cold+life/light charms for 1v1 optimization (tournaments and whatnot)





My Assassin

some example stats for comparison

1771 trap damage

1035 life (14 rep)
947 mana

48 fhr
65 fcr

circlet: http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/550/trappercirclet.png
amulet: http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/7766/trapperamulet.png
belt: http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/2407/trapperbelt.png
primary claw: http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/5145/trapperclaw1.png
secondary claw: http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/783/trapperclaw2.png

i would like the royalty to the reference to my likeness in the title

Dueling Strategy Section 1: Your Skills and You

This section aims to help familiarize yourself with your skills and how to use them. Damn the person that makes a trapper, only to surround themselves with traps and wait for their opponent to walk into them, calling it their "strategy."


Lightning Sentry

Aside from the obvious newbie tactic of surrounding yourself in traps for defense, traps are a pretty decent offense as well. They have their own line of sight independent of your own, so any traps cast at the edge of your screen can shoot at enemies nearly an additional screen away, making it a reasonably medium-long ranged attack. Lightning Sentry has a sprite that is visible on the screen by anyone that the lightning itself comes from, so opponents that are very aware of their surroundings can sometimes avoid them. Lightning Sentries also have a short delay from when they are initially placed to when they fire. They also have a short cooldown between attacks. Also, each Lightning Sentry doesn't do much damage by themself, (1-1.8k is pretty average) but multiple ones do much more together. (5-9k average) Finally, due to their rather random damage/firing rates/times the lightning actually find their mark, it can take a while to actually kill your opponent, and thus most duels consist of you slowly wearing out your opponent. Rarely will you have a quick win.

It's also worth noting that you can hide the sprite behind some obstacles, such as shrubs, some rocks, the rock walls, roofs and chimneys on houses, and even the cow that is in that one shed.


Mind Blast

I didn't really understand Mind Blast until I read a guide to a high level ghost assassin where it explained how it worked. After reading the article and experimenting with the skill myself, I finally understood how this damn skill worked.

The instant you cast Mind Blast, your target will take some physical damage and will have a chance to be knocked back a little bit. If you have a high cast rate, you can lock people in this knockback. Additionally, a short debuff will be put on the target. The duration of the debuff is shown when you hover over the Mind Blast skill itself. The debuff itself is shown by some swirling white lights above the afflicted's head. Any creature affected by the debuff will be put into a hit recovery animation whenever the afflicted takes any damage at all. This means that if you cast Mind Blast on a target, for the next 2-ish seconds, your traps will always hit recovery their targets. This effect can be devastating to low fhr characters like sorceresses if they are caught in multiple traps with the debuff. You can also hit recovery your opponents with other methods. I know some high level trap builds tell you to skill dragon claw so that when you mind blast them you hit them with really fast claw attacks to constantly hit recovery your target and keep them in your traps. (the reason why you would want to do this and not rely solely on your traps is because your opponent can end their hit recovery animation and get away in between the cooldowns of the lightning)


Burst of Speed

This isn't super important, but with level 4 Burst of Speed you need 20 ias on a hand scythe to hit the maximum trap laying breakpoint. (hard point + viper magi + soj + soj = 4) Also, skill frw is not affected by diminishing returns like item frw is, so skill frw is much more valuable than item frw. This skill kicks the crap out of fade, especially considering how my item build gets you to maximum resists, anyways, yo.


Weapon Block

This one is pretty straight forward. You can block attacks when you are not walking/running. You can block while you are standing still, attacking, laying traps, or casting spells. You can block pretty much anything and everything with this skill, including attacks, Blessed Hammers, Fist of Heavens, Smite, Fireballs, Bone Spears, Tornadoes, Blizzards, and other stuff. This skill helps gives you the edge over other casters. For instance: you have 2-3 traps near you and a fireball sorceress dives in for a quick telestomp. You block the initial fireball, mind blast, and start fire blasting the crap out of them for a fhr lock, and maybe even throw down 1-2 more traps. During that whole time, they are getting pounded on by your traps, giving you a huge advantage or just outright killing them.


Cloak of Shadows

Some people are pretty good at being aware of where your traps are, but cloak can help with this by dimming their vision to where sometimes even if they see the trap, it'll be too late. It can also help against paladins that charge a lot. With the decreased vision, they'll end up charging into puddles, rocks, trees, and other obstacles in the moor that can screw them up.


Fireblast

This skill casts really quickly and can help hold people down in fhr locks while your traps do the rest. This is mainly useful vs sorceresses.


Dragon Flight

This is what will help you hunt down and kill bowzons, and can be useful in catching sorceresses off guard for potentially devastating trap+mb+fireblast combos. It can also be useful vs bone necros.


Shadow Warrior

If you have this, it will soak up some guided arrow shots and bone spirits. It will also cast spells at desynched paladins, alerting you to when you may be hit by some desynched hammers or charge. The main con to this skill is that it has a cooldown that is shared with cloak.





Dueling Strategy Section 2: Matchups and Tactics

Amazon - Charged Strike (FRW Variant)

With your skill frw you should be able to stay out of range. They're also vulnerable to fhr locks from fireblast+traps. This should be an easy fight


Amazon - Charged Strike ("Legit" FC Variant)

Since range isn't an issue for them, lay some traps, mind blast, and telestomp them with dragon flight when they are in hit recovery and follow up with another mind blast and fireblasts to lock them. I don't think this will be that much more difficult, but CS does some sick damage, so try to keep them in hit recovery and go for a fast kill.


Amazon - Jab

wtf just fireblast lock them lol (if you want to be a dick you can wear a shield too, lol)


Amazon - Bow

DF, LS, MB, DF, LS, MB, DF, LS, MB, DF, LS, MB

See a pattern? Keep on their ass with dragon flight and throw in traps and mind blasts when you can. If you can't fit in a trap and mind blast before they go off your screen to be able to dragon flight them, just go DF, LS, DF, LS, DF, LS. It's more important that you stay on their screen and constantly pressure them. If they ever stop for anything, cast more traps and mind blasts. Otherwise just keep chain locking them. If you never break the chain, you should be able to always win vs bowzons. A word of caution: make sure to use c/s. If you go c/c, some people can surprise you an turn around with jab/harpoons that can seriously injure/outright kill you. You'll take a little hit to your trap damage with c/s, but you won't be running the risk of dying to jab and you'll also be able to block some arrows that they might actually get to fire at you.


Assassin - Lightning Sentry (mirror)

To be honest, I don't really have any good tips for this matchup. I've only done two FT5's in it, and I remember both of them being really unpleasant and long. Basically just try to mind blast them and avoid their mind blasts. Try to remember which traps are which, as it can get kind of confusing. Generally, however, the winner of this matchup is whoever has more replenish life.


Assassin - Wake of Fire

Your traps outrange their traps, so you should have an advantage over WoF builds. To compensate for this, however, WoF trappers will play absurdly defensive vs you. When chasing them around, try not to walk into their traps, as the damage will build up over time. Again, sadly, the winner is whoever has more replenish life.


Assassin - Melee

Wear a shield and run around in circles. Some builds will be clever and will try to lay their own traps for mind blast hit recoveries. If they try to do this, just use your own, superior mind blast on them, and they will take heavy damage from your traps while you easily tank their traps with almost nonexistent damage.


Assassin - Hybrid

This is just a combination of the two previous. Their traps are going to be weaker than yours so as long as you focus on having a lot of traps up and threaten mind blasts, they will be too pressured to try to lay their own ones and mind blast and use melee attacks.


Barbarian - Whirlwind

Poorly built whirlwind barbs will have low frw. Kite these fools and watch them melt to your traps. Well built ones, however, will have lots of frw and can be a pain to go against. Try your best to dodge their whirls and just slowly wear them down. Mind blast is highly debatable whether or not it is actually helpful in this matchup. Generally you want to always keep moving and never stay in one spot. Try to keep your movements as random and unpredictable as you can and have a lot of traps up. Depending on how lucky you feel, you can go c/c with a shield on switch and switch weapons + walk when you think you are about to get hit by a whirl. It's safer just to go c/s, though. Be really careful for barbarians that desynch.


Barbarians - Not Whirlwind
looooooooooooooooooooooooool xDDDDDDDDDDDD


Druid - Shapeshift

skill frw >

also wear a shield and use mind blast a lot


Druid - Fissure

Just constantly dragon flight+trap+mb them. Since fissure is only good vs things that run around, you can completely sidestep that and kick the crap out of them with your pseudo-teleport and fhr combos.


Druid - Wind (FRW Variant)

again, skill frw >

use mb a lot and maybe wear death for cbf


Druid - Wind (Teleport Variant)

Wear death's belt for cannot be frozen, and make sure that you have amount of fhr. Your first goal is to take out their summons. Those things will make it impossible to kill the druid, so take care of them before anything else. After that, the druid is much more vulnerable. Use your judgement to when you think it is safe to telestomp them or not. Be careful in this duel as you can get hit by the same tornado multiple times if you are walking in the same direction as it. Try to set up traps and bait them into telestomping you without summons. If you can successfully do that, hold your ground and mind blast+fire blast them.

</3 ibzack why u so pro


Druid - Summon

Kite them and stomp them with mindblast/fireblast when they have no more summons.


Necromancer - Poison

Poison Nova has a pretty limited range so just stay out of its range and put traps around.


Necromancer - Bone

You'll need to keep the pressure on 100% of the time while dodging bone spears and outrunning 3+ bone spirits the whole time. Don't let the necromancer be free to cast bone spirits that will turn into eventual IBS, which can really ruin your day.


Necromancer - Summon

wat


Paladin - Charge

Earlier on, I looked down on surrounding yourself in traps and having a cook out at your camp while waiting for your opponent to attack you. Against chargers, that is precisely what you are going to be doing, and there's not much you really can do, to be honest. When they charge away you can sometimes get some additional hits by namelocking them with your traps, but that's pretty much it. Try to camp out in some sort of choke point where you can limit their angles of attack to force them to have to charge directly into your traps.

Don't forget your shield: you'll be needing it.


Paladin - Zeal

Grab your shield, lay some traps, walk a lot, and throw down an occasional name locked mind blast. There isn't much to talk about here. It's probably worth mentioning that zeal is uninterpretable, so trying to do fireblast fhr locks are pretty worthles.


Paladin - Smite

Same as zeal, but you won't need a shield, unless they are smite+charge hybrid. (which is kind of crappy, to be honest)


Paladin - Hammerdin

Just throw down traps in strategic places, and spam cloak of shadows. Also, alternating trap/mind blasts with a namelock can be effective, as hammerdins generally stop occasionally to cast some hammers, so you can get some extra damage in. As with just about any ________ vs hammerdin matchup, your goal is to try to avoid getting hit by hammers as best as possible. You'll probably be switching to insight occasionally during these duels, as they can be pretty long.


Paladin - Liberator

same as hammerdin, but with a shield


Paladin - Fist of Heavens

namelock trap+mind blast and use a shield if they have charge

gl


Sorceress - Blizzard

Grab your death sash for cannot be frozen and just throw traps down and stuff. Since blizzard needs to be cast directly on/near you, they'll always be threatened by your traps. Try to set up a trap for a dragon flight combo.


Sorceress - Lightning

It's basically a watered down fireball sorceress. Treat them like one and you should do fine.


Sorceress - Fireball

This is IMO the most dynamic, exciting, and rewarding duel for a trapper. It mostly consists of dodging fireballs and setting up traps to catch the sorceress off guard for either just straight up damage or a really good dragon flight combo.

Your success in this matchup is mainly determined by how well you can read your opponent and figure out their habits in their play. For instance: some people always attack you horizontally and some people like to teleport passed you and attack you from behind. Use these to your advantage and exploit them as much as you possibly can.

Some suggestions:

A lot of people really like to hide/teleport behind those convex corners in the moor where there is some wall hanging out that you can hide from projectiles behind. Exploit this false sense of safety and put some traps on one side of it, hidden behind the wall/shrubbery, and run to the other side and engage the sorceress with 1-2 traps. If you're lucky, they'll run to the other side of the corner, right into your traps.

Some people really like to chainlock. Punish this foolish and risky tactic by putting down 5 traps away from you and charge at the sorceress. Seeing you defenseless, the chainlock-happy sorceress with stomp you and prepare to chainlock when you run away, seemingly caught off-guard. Once you get to your traps, turn around and mind blast+fire blast the crap out of them for heavy damage. (side note: try to control when they chain lock you, and make sure that it is always on purpose. if they do catch you off guard and chain lock you for some good hits without traps nearby it can be really bad)

Also obviously you want to watch for movement patterns and put traps where you think they are going to go next. IE: I dueled someone that always seemed to teleport around me in a big arc and then attack me from the bottom, so I naturally just put a lot of traps in the path of said arc and giggled when they teleported right into them.

As stated, your success in this duel is determined by how well you can read your opponent and counter their strategy/dueling habits.





Team Dueling

Lightning Sentry Assassins are great at supporting and defending vulnerable team mates, like bowzons, with mind blast knockback/fhr and traps. For more info on that and how other characters work in team duels, check out my TvT Guide, here: http://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=50840917&f=143





Conclusion

Thanks for reading my guide, I hope it provoked some thought in building your own LS sin or any character build, for that matter. The dueling strategy and special tactics section is basically all of my personal experience in some tournaments (3rd in gobb's winter escnl tournament, under ClanBK and Ass_Hat, two fantastic duelers) and lots of 1v1s and tvts on battle.net in private and public games.

Thanks to IAmAsylum for the bulk of my initial gear, gobb for always making me rage against his charger, ibzack for kicking my ass on his wind druid, ClanBK for being reallie up against my mind blast, and all of Mistakes guild. much n4ptex

you are the second asshole to post in the middle of my guides

asshole

oop

but ya basically the point of this is to be able to have the most balanced setup so that you can be effective in tvts and 1v1s as well

in case anyone was wondering

ty

huhu! You can thank me for that Nice guide sticky ofc.

wouldn't enigma of peace be more better?
save skill in dragon flight giving more damages

nice guide though lol sorry for fucking it up