Wolcen Build Guide: Voodoo Queen [1.0.8.0 Version]
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Wolcen Build Guide: Voodoo Queen [1.0.8.0 Version]

In this Wolcen Build Guide we’re going to be covering an advanced Gun-mage Hybrid Build that focuses on the use of all Occult Ailments, summons, and mark of impurity explosions to decimate entire groups of enemies, or big bad bosses. Wolcen has quite a complex Passive Skill tree (Gate of Fates) that can be difficult to figure out, and many mechanics are not always easy to min/max. In this Build Guide I’ll explain how to get the most from this Build, so if you’ve been struggling to find a good Hybrid Ailment Ranged/Caster Build, then this Guide is for you.

Wolcen Builds Guide: Voodoo Queen of the Dark Arts

Voodoo Queens are powerful female practitioners of all dark arts, they were known to exercise great power in their communities, and had the role of leading many of the ceremonial meetings, ritual dances, summoning of dark spirits, and raising Zombies. These necromancers use a combination of summoning spells, ranged attacks, and shadow spells to stack all occult Ailments to increase player’s and summons damage. Make use of The Dark Ailments set up for big corpse explosions, turning monsters’s big life pool against their brethren.

As a Vodoo Queen, you will want to prioritize fast hitting spells and attacks, to hit multiple targets and multiple enemies per second. Before a fight, you will need summon/re-summon zombies. Usually opening fights with the shadow version of Thunderstrike, modified by “Law Manifest In lightning” rune, to stack 30 curses and add burns to all enemies. This first cast buffs all shadow damage for themselves as well as their zombies, adding more damage and making enemies receive more as well. Once enough rage has been built, use a Mark of Impurity on one of the enemies, then shoot Stings of Krearion, to poison and put enemies into stasis. This allows all damage done to enemies to repeat with increased efficiency, and stack further damage.

As a finisher for strongest of the strongest of enemies, cast Solarfall to add more Damage over time, and to weaken dangerous foes who might pose a threat to the Voodoo Queen. Previously marked enemies will explode, spreading their mark in the process, and their ailments to nearby targets. This sets off a very satisfying chain reaction, that will bring any boss to its knees quickly. All the while staying in the clear, back behind your Shadow warrior!

Please note that killing enemies affected by a certain ailment will give you a buff multiplier for relevant damage type. So you know when you are doing good, if you constantly have 5 different damage buffs on the left side of screen positioned over your health bar. This will be in addition to the shadow buff on right side of screen, located over your resources bar.

Voodoo Queen Attributes

Voodoo queens choose both attacks and spells that scale with cast and attack speed, in addition to the Ailment build up. That’s why keeping both Agility and Wisdom on a high scale is mandatory. I prefer to spread them evenly as I level up, and push wisdom higher by stats from gear.

I put Toughness at half of value of Wisdom and Agility. So a good general rule is to put 4 points in agility and wisdom, and 2 points in toughness every level, and don’t think twice.

Your added agility will be very good for Thunderstrike casting speed, but for Stings of Krearion, you would probably need more attack speed from gear to make the switch between attacks and spells very smooth and fulfilling.

Voodoo Queen Active Skills

Being a hybrid with so many different types of skills, this build is hungry for skill slots. That’s why I highly recommend getting your fifth skill slot from the endgame Champion of Stormfall game mode before starting your Voodoo Queen character. It’s also recommended to get your main spell Thunderstrike and attack Stings of Krearion as soon as possible, they will carry you through Act One.

By Act Two and by the time you reach the Act Two boss, you will need to have acquired Zombie skills plus leveled your character. That’s a very important for this particular boss.

Active Skills

Thunderstrike

This skill’s cast speed is very good, as well as coverage. It can auto aim, auto chain from target to target, it can hit twice per cast once you have Law Manifest in Lightning , and it can chain from your summons to your enemies, or vice versa! Thanks to Rebuilding the Trinity , this skill rune not only allows you to attack enemies from far far away behind your minions, but also to buff their shadow damage, increasing their overall performance.

Make sure to get Storm at Sunset as soon as possible to start building curses and get your core mechanics going. As for the last 2 modifiers, grab “reduce willpower cost” and “increase ailment chance” for smoother gameplay. You can keep the “Increased damage” modifier in early game though, as it will help you before you get all your juicy Ailments stacks and summons.

Once you get your second ailment application from “Grievous Affliction” on “Cabalist” tree, you would want to get a good roll of “Added fire damage to spells” so this skill would apply burn as well as curse. I chose burn because it can do AOE damage to all nearby enemies, so all enemies would burn all other enemies for huge damage over time overlap. In the early levels while I had no survivability, I used frost damage to freeze the entire screen in place so nothing hits me.

Stings of Krearion

This ranged attack is the best to dump your Rage: It has no cooldown, it scales with attack speed, it has auto pierce, and it also has a built-in increased number of projectiles. It’s a self contained attack, with no required investment from the tree for it to work as intended.

You have the option to modify the base damage of the skill to either frost damage or poison. I experimented with both, and to be honest the freeze from frost damage is not worth it on this skill, you need something that wil deal damage, and the poison modifier is much more effective as it adds additional stacks of poison per hit. This doubles again by “Power of the First Men” from the tree. Poison also lasts longer than other damage over time forms, so it’s more suited to put on our less used attack.

Grab yourself Pincushion and Phantom Volley as soon as they are available, and keep them all the way. At the endgame you’d need to get Ardent Nock as well for smoother performance. For the second Ailment, I’d highly recommend “Aether damage added to attacks” to benefit from “Which time can’t heal” from “Time Weaver” tree, and also “Persistence Hunting”

Livor Mortis

This is the bread and butter for the Voodoo Queen. Known as the immortal warrior, the protector of the the shadow realm, and the unrelenting friend of the necromancer. This summon can dive through packs of enemies and never flinch, tanking and dealing damage. It will also sacrifice its own health to keep the Queen alive.

The good thing about this summon, is that you can cast once and pretty much forget about it. It will do its own thing, until you get an occasionally  bugged AI and then you will find your zombies overwhelmed. In this case simply re-cast them again, but it’s not really a common occurence.

Grab Foul GuardianRavenous Reach , and Generational Grief. From here you are free to grab more damage, health, movement speed, or ailment chance, depending on your preference.

Hunting Swarm

Say what you want about summons, but these three basic ranged zombies are simple and effective due to the extreme attack speed you can get from them once you get “Cataract” skill modifier. They shoot single arrow each, which pierce all enemies, and that’s it. After 1.0.0.5 patch, they fixed their AI to engage enemies from very far. And if you manually let them shoot at cursor location (by pressing the skill while you have max number of summons) you will find the arrows goes surprisingly far and further to shoot off screen enemies, which could be used tactically if you want to lure some enemies rather than walk into one of their traps.

Their damage on their own is not that great, but OK. The way we scale it by buffing them with shadow damage and adding debuffs and curses to enemies make them good companions to have though. Their huge range helps make them stay alive through most fights, and you can build them to do toxic, frost, or shadow damage. However, their ailment chance is not as huge as yours, so I prefer going shadow damage for the highest direct damage.

You’d want to take “Forces of Ruination” , “Oxidized Edge” for base 3 zombies with pierce, then you can just try take damage modifiers. Simple and easy.

Mark of Impurity

This skill’s a late bloomer, and don’t shine until very late in the game. It’s very widely used in many builds in Wolcen: Lords of mayhem, and it’s rightfully so, because of the sweet little explosions it do to monsters once they die, doing damage related to their max life pool. That’s why it scale very well with enemy level, the higher the health, the bigger the explosion. You need “Fate of the Unholy” for it to work, in addition to “Strange Mercy” , then Guilt by Association

People tend to scale its damage with critical, but we rather scale it with debuffs and increasing damage dealt to monsters, and repeating damage taken after 1.5 second. And man! Whole packs can just vanish the moment one single monster dies, sometimes even before we attack them with anything. just cast Mark of Impurity on first monster that appear on screen, and your minions will make the whole screen blow up with their arrows. Such sweet popcorn!

Note that most builds that use this skill needs a specific unique belt to be able to use, which could prove difficult to farm. We use it naturally with our pistol, so it’s far more convenient for Voodoo Queens.

You can take “Defect of Creation” and “Big Game Hunting” to make enemies take even more damage from all both direct hits and damage over time.

Solarfall

I originally planned this build to use 5th keyboard skill slot for a movement spell like “Aether Jump” but once I tried integrating Solarfall  into the build, I fell in love with it. With the right modifiers, it cast once and stay for long duration, it do damage over time, it do Sacred damage and apply stacks of weakness very fast, and its Area of effect increase over time. You could also use the skill during cooldown time to move to another location.

Overall, it’s good spell for both offense and defense, for packs and bosses. Just a great tool for any Ailment build.

Rune modifiers to take: Glare of Judgement,  Scorching SalvationWeight of the Sun,  Sunrise,  Dawn Abridged, Condemnation

Wolcen Builds: Voodoo Queen Passive Skills

Figuring out how to align your Gate of Fates is one of, if not the hardest part of making a Build in Wolcen, and generally takes a respec or two before gotten right. In this section, I want to show you how I’ve set this up for maximum performance.

Build planner Link:

Before we go further, let me introduce to you the Wolcen Universe, a build planner made by the community for Wolcen: Lords of mayhem skill tree. In this link you will find a complete representation of all passives we take in our build in endgame, and a complete skill list will all modifiers. Also all attributes allocated.

For The Voodoo Queen Build

Scholar

We’ll start right here with 2x “Heightened Concentration” and “Adept” , then take Attrition Strategist for Ailment chance. We don’t need cooldown reductions for this build, so we’ll skip it and take Emotional Intelligence and 2x Steadfast instead to prepare our transition to next tree.

You can come back here later to grab “Increased Awareness” but for now we’ll move on.

Cabalist

Cabalist is our main source of Ailments stacks and other good modifiers, we can take every node and passive in this tree and it will be good. But while starting, we rush towards “Immortal Offering” to get the best multiplier in the tree, then move straight through middle to get Grievous Afflictions then go Enfeebling Energy and Power of the First Men and grab one or two “master of curses” before heading for next tree as soon as possible.

We will come back later to Cabalist to grab “Insidious Decay” , Artefact Analysis , Enneract Expert , Tormentor , Crippling Decrepitude , and Incessant Infirmity but now we move on to Plaguebringer

Plaguebringer

In Wolcen: Lords of mayhem, Plaguebringer is the only available on the summoner tree. This is where you can grab all maximum life and health regeneration for summons, and increase summons damage. I take exactly 12 passives here, with one major node “Sacrifice of Flesh” , and the “Endless Litany” passive prior to it which reduce health by 5% and force shield by 15%. I wouldn’t recommend sacrificing anymore health than that until the very endgame, when you will get a very high dodge chance and high resistance. This is also where you can never be one-shotted nor die to a nasty poison pool.

You will finish the tree around the Act II boss, and this should carry you through the fight. You will focus on active dodging his AOE attacks and spells, and only debuff  him when it’s 100% safe. You will also have to re-summon all your zombie archers, because he will kill them. It will not be super quick, but will be smoother than most streamers builds at this point.

After Act II and finishing the recommended nodes in Plaguebringer, we will need to then reach the entire opposite side of the tree, to Timeweaver which is really far, and really needs smart planning to get there. It took me a couple days to find the shortest way possible, and that’s by utilizing Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem’s most intriguing feature in my opinion, by rotating the tree more than once. So bear with me while we take it for a spin.

Soldier

We are here to take one point only, and that’s “Zealous Might” next to steadfast from Scholar. Once we get it, we rotate the middle ring so Warlock tree align with “Zealous Might” rather than steadfast. Now our job done here.

Scholar (Once more)

Time to take another single passive, which is “adept” next to the Sentinel tree, the reason we take it now, is because this makes for the shortest path possible.

Sentinel

Again, one point into Chemically Empowered Metabolism to get to warlock, which wouldn’t be possible this fast if we didn’t rotate the tree previously.

Warlock

There are good passives here, but we will skip them all as we’re taking the shortest path again. Going through Dominator to Strike like Lightning to Focused. But now we have a choice to make, whether to go for offense or defense first.

It’s almost the end of campaign, and you are getting ready to face the final boss in few levels, so I’d recommend to delay getting your damage, and focus on getting to “Exorcist” which will give your ultimate endgame defensive mechanic. But you can still to choose to go with Timeweaver first if you want to, it all depends on how good your offense and defense at this point.

If you have decided to take Self-Preservation Instinct and get to Exorcist, you can return in a couple levels to grab “Duty to Exterminate” and the nodes behind it, but let’s move on for now.

Exorcist

Aloof Hunter –> Profane Of Body –> Arcane Dissolution –> Branded Burst –> Indifference

Long story short, you will be immune to damage for the 1st hit, then immune to 80% damage for 2nd hit, then 60%, and finally lose all your immune points after 5 hits. It might not be obvious, but the best way to scale your defense from this point onwards is “passive dodge chance” on all your items, because the higher your dodge chance, the less times you get hit, and the easier your Tenet points recharge and make you immune again. That’s why you need this before final boss, to save yourself all the hassle of trying to avoid every single hit or area damage.

Note that this tree provides some “% increased dodge chance” which will not start to be beneficial until you begin putting “+ passive dodge chance score” on gear. So don’t get confused if you have these nodes from tree and find your dodge chance on character sheet still zero. It’s because you need base dodge score first before you increase it, so keep that in mind.

Time weaver

Now we’re finally here, and probably by now we’ve unlocked Champion of the Storm mode after finishing the campaign already and doing our early expeditions. So what to take?

Path to Which Time Cannot Heal through Temporal Shift to take more dodge chance, and get 120% more damage Multiplier. Then go Impossible Soul towards Dire Juncture This will split the damage you take into smaller parts, which would be easier to negate and recover from. Another Impossible Soul to get our Max Ailment to 30 (Make sure you grab any Master of Curses points you missed in Cabalist)

Also make sure you get back to Cabalist and grab all remaining nodes we mentioned earlier.

Sentinel (Once more)

Once you establish a good “chance to dodge score” from high level gear, and you start seeing your dodge chance on the character sheet go over to 20% –> 30% –> 40% and more. You will want to go and grab Covert Operative to make it even harder for monsters to hit you twice. Shortly, you will start feeling invincible, and for most content, you won’t need to use active dodges anymore, as your passive dodges will do everything for you. That’s where you’ll start increasing expedition difficulty above your level without much worry.

Ranger

At this late point in endgame, it’s up to you how you want to perfect your build. Grab more attack/cast speed, or take more dodge nodes, or look for pure “damage” nodes to increase your damage. Or even go take Toxic nodes we left in Plaguebringer. It’s your choice. But I have a final interesting rotation as a recommendation.

  • Rotate the Middle ring once more, this time to switch Warlock and Cabalist, so Warlock meet Soldier, and Cabalist meet Sentinel.
  • Rotate the Outer ring the entire way around, so Time weaver still meet Warlock, and Plaguebringer meet Cabalist.
  • Now path to your Ranger tree is open, straight forward from “Steadfast” at Scholar Tree.
  • Take dodge nodes towards Body and Mind Then take Persistence Hunting
  • Don’t forget to grab Puncturing Shot for additional Pierce for Stings of Krearion
  • At this point, and if you don’t plan to take Residual Energy from Warlock (I don’t recommend it, if you want to use the other two Ailments that are a not curse on your attack), you can reset your passives to remove the point in Soldier and the first two points in Walock. You can replace them with merely two points from Ranger Swiftness and Lithe to connect the tree and save one point to use it somewhere else more important.

Wolcen Builds: Voodoo Queen Equipment

In this section we’ll be covering the type of equipment that you want for the Voodoo Queen build. You will need a Pistol and Catalyst, as both are mandatory.

Ailments will work by the following: The two highest damage types of the given skill will be relevant to two Ailments, while spell and attack modifiers works separately. This means you will need to handcraft each highest damage type for each skill for this build to work at the peak of its potential.

You will also have to remember that Thunderstrike buff shadow damage, and don’t buff other damage types, while our kills buff every type of damage the monster had relevant Ailment from. So these could also mess up our damage order. So be sure to remember the following:

Flat added damage on equipment

My Ailment of choice are five: Shadow – Fire – Poison – Aether – Sacred. Be sure that we don’t want to scale our direct hit damage, so not all added damage is good. We only need to make certain damage types higher than others so our Ailment proc properly.

I separate them as follows:

  • Thunderstrike: Shadow & Fire
  • Stings of Krearion: Poison & Aether
  • Solarfall: Sacred & fire

Damage sources become as follow:

  • Shadow damage: ThunderStrike gets it from rune modifier, and from shadow buff from itself. We are safe here.
  • Sacred damage: From Solarfall itself, and by not converting its types.
  • Fire damage: We must get “added fire damage to spells” from: catalyst modifiers, weapon sockets, and jewelry modifiers.
    • Spells must not have added “Aether” or “poison” damage, because it will get multiplied by our buff and overtake Fire damage.
  • Poison damage: We get from converting base physical damage of weapon for Stings of Krearion
    • Base weapon physical damage must be high enough to not be overtaken by shadow damage after we use Thunderstrike.
    • We can take either flat Toxic damage, or flat physical damage to increase Poison damage.
    • We don’t want any added shadow damage, or sacred damage, or fire damage to our attacks as these will ruin our setup.
    • If we take Residual Energy it will mess our damage order if we want to build around it, we need different setup.
    • Jewelry can be good place to balance poison damage.
  • Aether damage: We don’t have Aether damage built-in attacks, so we need a lot of flat Aether damage.
    • Weapon is your first choice for flat Aether.
    • Weapon sockets is second source.
    • Jewelry still good, if you don’t need much added damage for other types.
    • If all else fall, there’s some % Aether damage in Time Weaver tree that can help us get that few percentage needed to make sure Aether is one of top two damage types for attacks.

What other stats Voodoo Queen’s weapon may have

% Ailment chance score – attack speed – Burn Ailment damage – Poison Ailment damage – % Transfer Time decrease between Willpower and Rage – % Life Leech

Ailment chance score specifically could be huge, like taking your chance from 48% to 56% , which is really great. Ailment damage is just another additive modifier, and our Ailment is not main source of damage, but it’s still nice to have.

What stats for armour

I would recommend the follow for best option:

  • Flat Dodge chance score: The best sole defensive stat, hands down.
  • Resistances: It’s better than life in most cases, and just saves you all hassle of trying to recover big health pool when you get a big hit. you wouldn’t ever get big hits with resistances on top of Tenet points.
  • % transfer time reduction between willpower and rage: Just allow you to spam more Solarfall on top of everything else.
  • Rage and willpower cost reduction: same as above, it rolls on items that don’t roll transfer time reduction like gloves and shoulders.
  • Wisdom: scales both damage and Ailment chance.
  • Attack Speed: it’s nice bonus to have, more quality of life than requirement.
  • Toughness: sometimes toughness rolls on heavy armour would give even more health than Bruiser armor.
  • Movement speed: Because I dodge most of damage passively, I put it in late order, still very nice to clear with better rank on ranked dungeons.
  • % Increased damage: This pure modifier is one of few things that scale Ailment damage as well as direct hits.

What stats for armour sockets

  • % Dodge chance score: don’t be afraid and use all your Defensive III for that. It’s better than anything else. I reached 70% dodge at level 60-70 armour. would get much higher at equipment level 150 for instance. so don’t underestimate this on to Tenet points.
  • Defensive II sockets is counter productive, it could help with low resistance, but the lower your base resistance, the less you get from % increased. The best result you will get from increasing your highest resistance even further, but then you wouldn’t need to increase your highest resistance that much ..
  • Defensive I good for poison(toxic) or burn(fire), these two are most dangerous, bleeding(rend) is third.

What stats for Jewelry sockets

  • % Transfer time reduction between willpower and rage: Again, if you can’t get enough on armour and weapon, get them here.
  • % Ailment chance score: It’s good because it’s universal. You get it from the unique gem
  • % [Type] Damage: Only good if you struggle with certain damage types and want to push over certain threshold for applying its Ailment. Probably Fire, Aether, or poisonm is still not the best way, but it’s an option.

Final Tips

If you struggle with damage while leveling, you can get items with spell damage and shadow damage. Mark of Impurity is not much effective before you get both Fate of the Unholy  and Guilt by Association , roughly after you finish campaign. You can either power level it with your Primordial Affinity , or skip until much later. I prefer using your Primordial Affinity to level Thunderstrike instead, it will get more damage and utility.

If you are set to keep lightning damage on Thunderstrike rather than converting it to shadow (And save three points in the process), you would need to change the setup dramatically. You shouldn’t convert Stings of Krearion to Poison nor frost, and get added shadow damage to attacks instead and go shadow/lightning for attacks. That way you need to add Aether damage to spells, and convert Solarfall to fire. That way you get more damage over time overall, but lose the weakness Ailment from sacred damage.

One of best modifiers to get on accessories would be the special “+2 Ailment inflicted” from sarisel affix. That modifier does not only add 2 more ailment per hit, but it gets multiplied by 2 from “Power of the first men”, allowing for total 10 poisons inflicted from Toxic damage on Stings of Krearion , or 8 burns from Thunderstrike which is really very powerful, and it’s like doubling ailment chance.

If you enjoyed this Wolcen Build Guide be sure to check out more on our Wolcen Lords of Mayhem Wiki.

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