Hatchet Leveling Build

The hatchet is a powerful leveling weapon due to its fast melee attack speed, Berserk and its abundance of stacking passives, as well as its hard hitting abilities Feral Rush and Raging Torrent. Players who choose the hatchet will find that Berserk’s 20% flat damage bonus as well as Berserking Refresh and On The Hunt passives help to keep them on their feet and questing quickly.

Berserk

Berserk is always the bread and butter of any hatchet build a hatchet player finds and for good reason. Berserk gives a leveling player tremendous amounts of buffs that will enhance their leveling experience significantly in both raw power and utility. With both On The Hunt and Berserking Refresh, hatchet players will be leveling quickly and will rarely find themselves waiting for health to regenerate.

Passives

• On the Hunt
  • Increases movement speed by 20% while in Berserk mode.
• Berserking Refresh
  • While Berserk is active, gain a portion of your health back every 5 seconds. Amount of health gained increases the longer Berserk is active.
• Berserking Purge
  • Triggering Berserk removes all Crowd Control effects (stuns, slows, roots) from the player.
• Uninterruptible Berserk
  • While in Berserk, your attacks are uninterruptible during Berserk and you cannot be staggered.

The hatchet player will want to keep Berserk up at all times that it is available. With a 15 second cooldown and a 15 second active time, Berserk should have a 50% up-time.

Feral Rush

Feral Rush is taken in this leveling build to supplement the hatchet player’s damage between monster kills. Hatchet players should use Feral Rush as a basic attack animation cancel ability and gap-closer to chain together monsters while leveling. Hatchet players should try to use Feral Rush when Berserk is active to take full advantage of the 20% damage bonus.

Passives

• Dispatch
  • If the target is below 30% health, Feral Rush deals 20% more damage.

Passive Dispatch is great for adding that bit of extra damage a hatchet player may need to take down a tough monster or a pack of monsters. The passive Crippling Strikes is not taken in this hatchet build due to the level value that it provides vs AI driven foes.

Raging Torrent

Raging Torrent is the hatchet’s main damage dealing ability that deals a total of 435% weapon damage after all 5 attacks. Because hatchet players have access to such a strong damage dealing ability, the opportunity to eliminate many monsters at once becomes viable.

Passives

• Aggressive Approach
  • Hitting a target with Raging Torrent grants Haste, increasing movement speed by 20% for 6 seconds.
• Final Blow
  • Press Light Attack at the end of Raging Torrent to deal a final attack dealing 120% weapon damage.

Both Aggressive Approach and Final Blow are great passives that should be taken by a leveling hatchet player. Aggressive Approach will allow hatchet players to chain monsters together a bit better due to an increased move speed. Final Blow gives Raging Torrent its hardest hitting and final attack, and should not be passed up.

Melee weapons that provide healing to the user will almost always be some of the best weapons for leveling in MMOs because the user does not have to worry about running out of mana or ammunition and the healing provided by the weapon keeps the player topped-off and questing without waiting for health to regenerate as often. The hatchet provides this type of healing to the player in the form of Berserking Refresh. While leveling, hatchet players should aim to use Berserk on cooldown with a theoretical up-time of 50% (active for 15 seconds, on cooldown for 15 seconds). Due to the breadth of passives under Berserk, having the ability up, regardless of what a player is doing is important. On The Hunt will allow hatchet players to run between quests and monsters much faster, Berserking Refresh will continually regenerate health, keeping a player on their feet, and Uninterruptible Berserk will allow hatchet players to bypass many staggering abilities that monsters dish out, decreasing the amount of time it takes to eliminate enemies, and increasing leveling speed tremendously.

Hatchet players can dispatch enemies very quickly with its empowered light and heavy attacks as well as its two high-powered abilities Raging Torrent and Feral Rush. To properly weave light and heavy attacks with the hatchet abilities, a moveset while fighting monsters may look something like this (Berserk is active):

Heavy Attack → Raging Torrent → Light Attack (x2) → Heavy Attack → Feral Rush

In this sequence of attacks, both Raging Torrent and Feral Rush will be used to animation cancel the recovery animations of the heavy attacks that precede them. With this sequence of abilities, leveling players should have no problem defeating normal and elite enemies that they come across.

The hatchet scales with the Strength attribute at 0.9X and secondarily scales with Dexterity at 0.65X. This means that for every point that a player puts into Strength, the hatchet will gain 0.9 weapon damage and for every point that a player puts into Dexterity, the hatchet will gain 0.65 weapon damage.

Both Strength and Constitution are vital to a hatchet player’s success while leveling. The most significant Attribute Threshold Bonuses are listed below:

Strength

• 50 Strength
  • +5% damage to melee weapon light attacks
• 100 Strength
  • +10% damage to melee weapon heavy attacks

Constitution

• 50 Constitution
  • All consumables are +20% stronger
• 100 Constitution
  • Increase max health by 10% of physical armor
• 150 Constitution
  • 10% reduction to crit damage taken
• 200 Constitution
  • +20% increase to armor

Getting to both 50 Strength and 50 Constitution as quickly as possible is important for getting off to a good start with almost any Strength-based melee weapon. 50 Constitution is valuable early on because it reduces the amount of consumables that a player will need to use by a significant amount. Light and heavy attacks serve to provide a majority of the damage that this build dishes out, so 50 Strength will give players a small boost in leveling speed and performance.

Weapon Ability Perks are generated perks that can be found or applied to:

• Weapons
• Chests
• Helmets
• Gloves
• Pants
• Shoes

These weapon ability perks augment the power level of a weapon ability in a positive way. Currently, each weapon has 6 ability perks available to players, one for each active ability. Below are all of the weapon ability perks currently available to the hatchet and pertain to this build.

Energizing Feral Rush

Gain X stamina for each successful hit with Feral Rush.

Keen Berserk

Increase Crit Chance by X% while under 50% health HP while berserking.

Refreshing Torrent

Every hit of Raging Torrent reduces all Hatchet cooldowns by X%.

Refreshing Torrent is a fantastic weapon ability perk that allows a player to reduce the time between weapon abilities by a significant margin. Raging Torrent has a total of 5 attacks after a passive Final Blow is taken, summing-up to a large amount of cooldown reduction for both Berserk and Feral Rush. Keen Berserk and Energizing Feral Rush are not considered in this build due to their low value for leveling. While Keen Berserk seems like a great passive at first glance, the general perk Keen makes Keen Berserk much less attractive with no active requirements and similar critical chance improvements.