How to Craft the Perfect Graves Minion Build in Deadlock

Do you want to learn how to go from this to this? Well, you're in the right place because today I want to teach you how to

make the perfect build for whatever build idea you have in mind. I'm going to be going through the step-by-step

process that I go through whenever I'm making my own builds. So that way, you know how to create a viable, fun, and

impactful build. I'm going to be using this raging swarm build as my example. It's a build that I've crafted for

Graves recently that, as I'm sure you've seen on the channel recently, has been very successful in Eternis lobbies. And

I'm going to be showing you the step-by-step process for how I went about crafting and perfecting this

build. So, the first step in creating a build is to have a succinct and clear plan for what it is exactly you want to

do. In this example, I want to create a minion focused Graves build that maxes out the Jar of the Dead and Borrowed

Decree to do as much damage as possible and just overwhelm the enemies with a ton of minions. And so once we have that

goal in mind, we need to just figure out what items can help us achieve this goal. Now, discussing what every single

item in the game does is well beyond the scope of this video, but lucky for you, I already have a video discussing what

each and every item does and showing the best use cases for them. So, if you want to watch that video, a link will be in

the description. Now, when I'm thinking of the best items to put into my build, I first have to identify what type of

archetype the build is. Is it a spirit damage build, a gun damage build, some kind of tank build, or support build?

And in this case for grays, I am making a spirit damage build because jar of dead and borrowed decree are both heavy

spirit damaging abilities. So I want a lot of items that complement that. Furthermore, since we are trying to play

a lot around the jar of the dead and borrowed decree, we have to think of ways to augment these abilities in

particular and play around their unique effects. For example, it's worth noting that jar of the dead is a charged

ability and we get charge by picking up death around us. So having ways to get extra charges is probably a good thing

to have in this build. So to begin our build crafting journey, I first just create one very big category here and

then go into the weapon, vitality, and spirit categories and just throw a bunch of items in that I think will be

helpful. So I just look and identify any items that could be useful for me. Extra spirit, yeah, that'll be useful. Extra

charge, sure. Mystic expansion, well, it could improve the targeting range on the Jar of the Dead. That's a maybe. I'll

throw it in for now. Arcane surge could be good because it boosts the duration of borrowed decree and gives us extra

stamina. Compressed cooldown and duration extender are both going to be good for the ultimate. Improved spirit

is also fantastic. Mystic vulnerability could be good. Mystic slow maybe we can put it in for now and we can just keep

throwing in a bunch of items and also upgrades to the existing items in here and just lump it all together in one big

category. So, we'll finish off our spirit items here by picking up boundless spirit and escalating

exposure, both of which are fantastic. And well, we can also think about some unique items here that could potentially

be very powerful. Echo shard, for example, could be very interesting on the jar of dead if it actually gives us

one extra charge and doesn't really hurt our economy. And so, that's something we can actually test here while we're

throwing items into our build. And so we can just come over here in the sandbox, imbue echo shard on our jar of dead,

throw out a jar of dead, then echo shard, and see that, oh yeah, we do get our charge back. We can just have double

the minions out here. Okay, echo shard might be a phenomenal item. So let's keep that in the build. And since

echoard does that, refresher could probably be pretty good, too. So let's put that in possibly as another sort of

situational item. But of course, the build can't just consist of purples. We do have to get some greens and probably

some gun items as well. And so when you're thinking about items in your other categories besides your main

spirit category, you usually want to think about them in terms of your investment spikes. Investment spikes are

very important to hit because they give you a major bonus to your vitality gun and spirit damage. For example, here

I've hit my spirit investment spike thanks to echo shard. And I have 38 extra spirit power as a result. And

you'll notice that jump from 3.2k to 4.8k is substantial. We go from 19 to 38, double the amount of spirit power.

And the same is true for vitality. Here we go from 275 at 3.2k up to 525 at 4.8k. And then for gun damage, we go

from 20% up to 49%, more than double. So these weapon investment spikes are super important to

hit. And the way you do that often involves comboing three tier 2 items, one tier three and one tier 2 item, or

just going for a tier four item in some cases. Now, when we're thinking about vitality items here, our main goal is to

improve our sustain and also focus on fixing up some of our weak points. So, Graves here is a very slow character.

She has some of the worst mobility in the game. So, that's something I definitely want to remedy with some

green items. We could get Enduring Speed, which is a nice cheap 2k. Gives us a lot of extra move speed and also

reduces the effect of movement slow. Or we could also shell out a bit more money and go for stamina master, which could

be interesting. Although, if we do already have Arcane Surge in the build, there is a potential for stamina mastery

to be a bit redundant, especially because it is also expensive, but we'll put it in as a maybe for now. And then

for [music] some sustain for some healing, we do have some options, but I think spirit life steal makes the most

sense since we are playing a spirit build. This will give us a little bit more spirit power and it'll also most

importantly give us a bunch of healing when our dead heads and our ultimate start attacking. And then, well, that

gets us up to 3.2k. How could we get up to our 4.8k investment? Well, we would just need another tier 2. And there are

a bunch of options here. We could go for Enchanter's Emblem, which gives more spirit power, and ability coolown

reduction. That could be good. Let's try putting that in the build. Debuff reducer is a nice situational. We might

put that in the situational category later. Let's go ahead and put that in the build. Same with reactive barrier.

And then healbane. Now, this could be a really good item here because anti-heal is super important. We'll be able to

spread that easily with the jar of the dead. And this also gives us spear power and even more healing. I think heelbane

is definitely the best choice here. So, let's put that in the build, too. And we can make a separate category later on in

the build where we just chuck things like bullet resist, counter spell, dispel magic, all of our situationals.

But, we don't need to clutter up the main focus of the build with that right now. And then for weapon items, this can

definitely be a tricky challenge when you're coming up with a spirit build because a lot of gun items simply don't

synergize with spirit builds. Like, what are you going to get? intensifying magazine for your spirit build? I don't

think so. But luckily for Graves, we do have some very good options here. So, remember what I said, you have to think

about your abilities and what would synergize with them best, especially synergizing with their unique

properties. So, Jar of Dead here is a charged ability, and any charged ability is going to be made better with

recharging rush, which is a brand new item that will allow you to replenish a charge for each of your charged

abilities when you deal weapon damage. This sounds like a fantastic item if indeed it does work with the jar of the

dead. And that is always a big if because well hey some charged abilities don't necessarily work this way.

Wraith's cards for example don't really proc with recharging rush. So will this actually give us our death or not? Let's

test it out. We can buy recharging rush and let's just get I don't know any old sixk. Let's get spiritual overflow.

Sure, why not? just to make sure I have enough gun damage and then do some gun damage and oh yep recharging

rush procs and gives us an extra jar of the dead. Okay, this is probably a really good item to have, but we

probably don't want to invest in too many other tier 2s because one thing we have to keep in mind for a build such as

this is slots. This build already has a lot of items in it and of course a lot of these items upgrade into each other,

but we could still very well run out of slots. So, if I just go ahead and buy a bunch of these different items here, go

ahead and get my vitality spike online here with three tier 2s. And yeah, we really only have two slots left right

here. And that's assuming we get all of our walkers down. That's uh that's pretty hefty. And I still have a lot of

items here on the table like escalating exposure. So, I definitely want to get a tier three here instead of a tier 2

because yeah, this is a lot of slots to take up. So, what would be the best tier three for this particular build? A lot

of these give weapon damage, and sure, weapon damage and fire rate and stuff, all that's nice, but it doesn't really

synergize with our jar of dead or borrowed decree. And so, an item like Hunter's aura or weighted shots probably

won't be great. We could go for toxic bullets. This definitely does have some synergy. We get spirit damage, and we

also get even more anti-heal. That could be an option. The other thing we could do that would synergize really well with

our minions, though, is heroic aura. Assuming heroic aora applies to our jar of dead, which we can go ahead and test.

So, throw out a jar of dead and then pop heroic aura. And oh, that looks like it did something. And yes, they do attack

faster. So, we've done some item experimentation here with heroic aura, echo shard, and recharging rush. All

three of these are a go. And all three of these seem to be pretty powerful, so we are definitely going to put them in

the build. So, at the end of this item brainstorming session, we should have a build that looks something like this. It

is a total mess. And this is where we need to refine the build order for the early game, mid game, and late game. And

also make a category for some experimental items that we're going to test at some point or another throughout

our matches. So, we can go ahead and make some new categories here, a midame category and a late game category. And

we can start to separate some of our items out here. So, what I usually do during the stage is just take all my 6ks

and put them down here for now because most of these will end up being late game purchases. And then for the mid

game, we can put a lot of our big tier three items as well. So, our superior cooldown, superior duration, stuff like

that, just to make things a little bit easier for us. [music] And we still have a lot of items up here in the early

game. Some of these, as I mentioned, are probably going to end up being situationals. So, enchanters emblem,

debuff remover, uh, reactive barrier. We can put these down here for now. And yeah, we almost have our build

whittleled away here. But this is still a very bloated early game category. So, how are we going to solve this? Well,

this is going to require a little bit more experimentation as you figure out your early game build order. And

something we can do in the early game, by the way, is consider how fast we can get our 4.8k spirit spike online. We

will overshoot this throughout the match because this is primarily a spirit build, but getting it online super fast

in the early game is a great way to win our lane even harder because we'll get that big power spike and we'll do a

bunch of extra damage. And so we can try and make this happen by getting a couple of tier one items and a couple of tier 2

items or possibly even rushing a tier three item if it is important enough. And furthermore, some of these items we

can kind of whittle out through process of elimination just by thinking for a moment about how impactful they actually

will be. Mystic expansion, for example, here provides 20% ability range. If we were to put this on the jar of dead, it

would improve the search range, the dash range, and also the range at which we pick up our death. But I mean, how much

is that giving us really? It's giving us about 1.4 4 m of extra search range and it is giving 3 m extra dash range. That

seems helpful, but compared to our other options like arcane surge, compressed cool down, extra charge, stuff like

that, it seems like it probably just isn't worth taking up a slot because our other options here, well, arcane surge

is going to give us extra ability range on top of all its other benefits. Compressed cooldown and duration

extender are going to give way more uptime on borrowed decree just due to the nature of how the numbers work.

Extra charge is going to give us just more dead heads and more spirit power. It seems like that's not going to be

super good. And then mystic slow as well can be whittleled out through process of elimination by the simple fact that well

[laughter] we already have mystic slow on the tier 2 of Jar of the Dead. This gives us a 30% slow. So I mean this

would slow them down even more, but it's just probably not worth going out of our way for that. And now we have an early

game category that just fits in one line [music] here. So, we can whittle this down even further. This is where we need

to think about which ability we're going to prioritize in the early game and making sure we get that online as

quickly as possible. And we can't prioritize Borrowed Decree in the early game because we aren't going to have her

ultimate online right away. And even if we do get her ultimate online quickly, it's just not going to be that impactful

without getting a bunch of upgrades later on down the line. So, the Jar of Dead in the short term, especially on

lane, is going to be much better for us. And this is also because, by the way, our tier one here gives us healing for

collecting death. So, not only is this good for damage, it is our sustain ability on lane two. So, we're going to

want items that complement the jar of dead. So, compressed cooldown and duration extender. We can move those to

later cuz we're going to put those on the ultimate. That definitely makes the most sense for that. This thing scales

really well with cooldown and also duration. And then that leaves us with extra spirit, extra charge, arcane

surge. Okay, this is also kind of another alt-based item. So, we can move that down here. Improve spirit. Okay,

that's going to add some damage and healing. That's good. Mystic vulnerability. We can probably move a

little bit later. But now, we don't really have uh the ability to get our 4.8k online. This is only a couple of

spirit items. But if we were to move rapid recharge up here, what this would do is give us a bunch more charges. We

get two ability charges, faster time between charges, 14% cooldown reduction for our charged abilities, and 10 bonus

spirit power for our charged abilities. Now, will the cooldown reduction actually work on Jar of Dead? Well, we

can do some experimentation to find that out. I'll save you the trouble and just say that yes, we can actually boost the

pickup rate of Jars of Dead by improving the quote on reduction. So, this is just a phenomenal item for us and together,

rapid recharge and improved spirit get us up to the spirit investment. uh threshold where we will be very strong.

So that's pretty good. And then after that, we have an easy build path into our vitality and also our gun spike.

Just like this, we'll have all three of our spikes up. And then we'll be able to move on towards just supercharging our

jar of dead and borrowed decree. Now, not every early game is going to be cut and dry, and some early games will

require a bit more sustain because the enemies are being aggressive. So, while we may want to rush the gun spike in

some lanes, for other lanes, we might need a little bit more green. And also, these greens don't really kick in on

lane, they don't really provide much for us until later in the game because, well, life steal just doesn't scale

super well early. Healbane could be nice, but it's dependent on us getting kills. And then, Enduring Speed only

provides us two out of combat regen. So, we'll also need to think about some early game sustain options. And you have

a number of choices for these based on which character you're playing. Extra regen and healing right are the two most

common. But if you're playing a melee character, melee life steal can be good. If you're playing someone who has super

consistent spirit damage, then mystic regen can be okay, but this is really niche. It's mostly limited to just like

Ladygeist and Mirage. And Graves just doesn't have the consistency to really use this item. Then there is also

restorative shot, which is great for gun builds and is also great if you're just able to consistently proc it because if

you're able to consistently hit it on the enemy heroes over and over again, this will actually provide more sustain

on lane than an item like extra regen. And Graves actually has another very unique quirk about her weapon, which is

the fact that it is auto aim. So, we won't actually waste the restorative shot until we latch onto a target and

then it will instantly heal us, making this extremely consistent and thus actually making it the most impactful uh

sustain item for us on lane. And it's so impactful in fact that I usually in my builds just put it at the very start

like that. But for whichever character you're playing, you'll probably want to make a separate early game category that

has some of these nice early options. This category right here, for example, already has some of our earlier, you

know, situational items. And in there, we could also just shove a healing right or a rebuttal or something like that

just to make our laning experience a little bit easier. Now, things don't get any less complicated when we enter the

Midame because figuring out our item upgrade order is very important and rather difficult, especially because

you'll also usually want to make some situational purchases along the way. And we do once again have a lot of items in

here to whittle away at. And we could even bring some of these 6Ks up into our Midgame build order if they're deemed

important enough. So, let's try and figure out what we want to do here. Now, we don't want to go overboard with gun

damage in this build because it is primarily minion focused. If you're making a hybrid Graves build, then sure,

you could have more gun items in it, but this build is primarily spirit minion focused. [music] So, we already have

heroor in here. This synergizes better with our minions. So, I'm going to say bye-bye to toxic bullets. And then we

already threw range away earlier, so greater expansion is also going to go bye-bye. Now, we do have a lot of green

here. We have these three greens to get us up to our investment spike. And then we could potentially get more

situationals up in here. We just have a lot of green in this build. And arcane surge [music] looks really savory,

doesn't it? We get 15% duration, 15% range, and 15 spirit power. And this will usually be used to enhance our

ultimate as well as provide us with that one extra stamina. I don't want to go too overboard with stamina items because

we need every slot that we can get. So, unfortunately, we're going to say bye-bye to my favorite item in the game.

[laughter] Goodbye, Stamina Mastery. So, that leaves us with a bunch of items here.

And these are all still really good. We can move the superior cooldown and superior duration to the back. And we

could pretty much just order these however we see fit depending on our priorities throughout the match. Now,

Arcane Surge is probably a good item to get online straight away because it'll just be really good for mobility as well

as again enhancing our ultimate with a bunch of really powerful benefits. The bang for your buck on this item is truly

just absurd for a build like this. And then after that, we could get even more uptime on the ultimate with compressed

cooldown and duration extender and maybe move the mystic vulnerability back or possibly even move this to a situational

category where you buy it if the enemies just have a lot of resistances. But now our midame category is just looking a

little little weak. There's not much going on here. And that's because it is indeed time to bring in some 6ks. A 6k

item is usually a power spike for your build. And you want to try and get a good power spike online so that way you

can get active on the map and start just taking out the enemies. So it's important to think about which power

spikes here would suit our character best. And we do have a couple of options here. We have boundless spirit which

just provides us with a ton of spirit power and spirit power is always good on a spirit build. You pretty much can

never go wrong with this item. If ever in doubt, I always say just get boundless spirit if you're playing a

spirit build. There's also echoard which as we discussed earlier is going to give us a second jar of dead which is really

powerful and it only has a 30-se secondond cool down. So we can have this up very consistently.

Is this going to give us more damage than boundless spirit is the question. Well, let's take a look. So, if I just

go ahead and buy everything in the build up to this point, then we are at about 19 20k worth of value, and I have about

64 spirit power from investment. And I also already have improved spirit. If I buy boundless spirit, then we go up to

35 spirit power. So, just about double improved spirit. And I also get 15% more spirit power. And so, if I look at my

total spirit power, we have 95 right now. If I buy Boundless Spirit, I go up to 129. That's a substantial increase,

but it's not double. And Echo Shard provides us with double as well as some generally useful stats. Spirit resist,

bullet resist, all of that. So, instead of getting Boundless Spirit, we could get Echo Shard. And this will allow us

to do a bunch more damage. But it actually is even better than that because by amplifying and multiplying

the amount of minions we have on the field, it reduces the chance that all of our minions will just evaporate

instantly. It's much harder for the enemies to kill well 12 dead heads than it is for them to kill just six. And so

not only will this double our damage if all the minions are active, but it'll improve our overall consistency in a way

that boundless spirit will not. And these are the kind of questions you have to think about at this stage when you

are considering your power spikes. There are a lot of tier fours that are really, really good. And you probably will still

want to get balance spirit after the echo shard, but figuring out which one to pick first requires a little bit of

critical thinking skills on your part. So we end up with a build order here that looks like this. We get some basic

items online to improve our ultimate's consistency. And then we get echo shard for our minions and we get boundless

spirit as well. And for good measure, we can throw in escalating exposure, too. Escalating exposure for a spirit build

really depends on if you're doing spirit damage over time or spirit burst because it works so much better on spirit damage

over time. And indeed, we are doing spirit damage over time. These minions all hit the enemies

kind of staggered like this, right? And it's a buildup. And if we hit them with heroic aura as well, they're just going

to be trickling a bunch of damage and building up that escalating exposure super nicely, allowing them to do more

than 100 damage per hit. So, that's going to be another great item for us. And that is basically our midame sorted

by this stage in the game. I have all my slots filled and I also have spent pretty much all the credits that I'm

going to get throughout the match unless the match goes super duper late. But honestly, this is usually too many slots

to take up as guaranteed non-negotiable slots in your build. And that's because you won't always be able to get all of

your flex slots online when you want them to be online. And so a good build usually accounts for this and makes some

things optional and also gives you room to buy some situationals. Right now I have no room to buy a situational item.

And so then the question becomes, what can we shed from the build? Well, escalating exposure is a great damage

upgrade, but it is kind of the uh cherry on top and it is super late in the build. So by the time we would want this

online, we'll probably have the slot for it. And it doubles as a sustain item because it gives us 17% spirit resist.

So if we had enchanter emblem, we could literally just swap that out. But duration extender here on the other

hand, it is helpful on the ultimate, but it's kind of redundant cuz we already get duration as well as a whole bunch of

other stats from arcane search. So we could definitely shed the duration extender from the build and we could get

duration later on in the game if it's warranted. But by getting rid of that, we now have a slot here where we can

slot in some sort of situational item. And yeah, we won't really be losing that much value for it because we're making

up for the duration with Arcane Surge. It's very important that you keep your slots in mind and allow yourself to buy

situational items because good counterplay is one of the best skills to have in Deadlock. Even though you're

making a set build here, it pays to be flexible and add some flexibility to the build so that way you can counterplay

your enemies effectively. You can have all the damage items in the world, but it doesn't matter if you're dying

consistently to a lashalt because you don't have counter spell. [laughter] So yeah, make sure that you have the

ability to get some situational items when the situation mandates it. So now our build looks something like this. We

have an early game category with all of the items to get us up to our 4.8k spikes. that'll also be super helpful on

the lane. We have an early situational category for some other items we can buy on lane to help us out if we're

struggling. We have category 5, which had some experimental items in it. And if you have any experimental items that

you want to test, this is kind of where you'd put them and just experiment with them over the course of a couple of

games. Bear in mind that all of these build refining decisions can take place over time as you take a build into

matches. So, you can play a build once and then decide, I don't really like the build order. I'm going to move uh

recharging rush and heroic aura to the end over here because I want to get the green spike first. [music] And you can

totally do that. Experimentation is a very important part of build crafting. You don't have to theory craft and have

a 100% build ready to go before you ever step foot in a match. That's simply just unrealistic. But then we have our midame

category here where we get our big power spikes online. And then we have a late game category which is filled with

miscellaneous items that we can buy when the build is basically finished. And the midame category is really where the

build finishes up because well by this point the game has entered the late game and you should be trying to wrap the

game up rather than just now finally getting your build online. Right? So these late game items are helpful and

they're certainly good power spikes, but they're not the crux of your build. they're not the core and they're really

just, you know, extra fun little things to buy. But then at the end of my builds, oftent times what I'll do is

I'll add a situational category for some items that I can pick up in the mid game to help me out. Just things like bullet

resilience, spirit resilience, counter spell, dispel magic, um, anything that'll help your character stay alive.

Just having them at a glance here signals to your brain that, oh yeah, I should probably buy these counter items

at some point throughout the match because I don't want to die. I want to be able to beat my enemies. And um this

is a good way to do that. Now, in the actual raging swarm build, I haven't done this. And this is because I'm at

the stage in Deadlock now where I can comfortably just come over here to the item shop and buy the counterplay items

manually if I want to. But it is still just convenient. And I'm probably going to go back and add a situational

category to that build when this video is over. So now let's clean up the build and make it look all pretty because an

ugly build is simply just hard to use. You don't want your build to be ugly. So let me get rid of this random category

and I can go ahead and move this situational category down next to the other situational category. Already the

aesthetics have improved substantially. And we can also add some annotations here to make it easier to use the build.

And this might seem like just an extra thing that's not important, but I do actually really recommend that you

annotate your builds and add some descriptions here just so you know what's going on because you might want

to share this build with a friend and that friend will have no idea how to use it and so some tool tips can be helpful.

Or you might come back to this build after an extended period of time. Maybe you took a break from Deadlock or you

just haven't played this character in a while and you want to make sure that you have a description there so that you

know what your build is doing. You don't want to come back to this build and just be completely befuddled cuz you have no

idea what the build order is or what the purpose of each item is. So annotations are important. So, what I usually like

to do for these descriptions is just clarify whether or not they are left to right or just buy as you go type of

categories because well, a situational category like this is not going to have any set build order. It's just going to

be oh, buy it as needed. And so, we can tag that as optional and just be like buy as needed and these are situational

items. And then the early situational category can kind of be the same. So early situational there and then buy as

needed. And then the early game category, we can say generally left to right, get the green spike before the

gun spike if it's a hard early game. Otherwise, you can get the gun spike first because we want this build to be

flexible. If you're already snowballing the early game hard, you might as well get the gun upgrades next because those

are going to help you snowball more than, I don't know, spirit life steal. Or you may want to do a combination of

both. You could even in the early game here interweave your items. So let's say you want to get enduring speed first for

a little bit of mobility in the early game, then recharging rush for economy and then get your other greens before

finally getting heroic aura. You could do that, too. And I also like to say in the early game category here that you

can buy situational items as needed, just as a reminder that you should come down here and get a

healing right or a reactive barrier if it's needed in the early game. And the midame category is generally the same.

But this late game category over here is not ordered at all because well, [laughter]

it's the late game. You have already basically completed your build and so any extra you buy is going to be

dependent on the match. So, we'll tag this category as optional and also say just buy as needed and to read the

annotations. And this is where we would annotate. Oh, refresher. You can buy that if you want to do two ultimates and

do the epic uh just zombie swarm combo. Coolown items are good for overall tempo. Spirit burn is good for

anti-heal. You can swap this out for heal bane superior duration. You know, just explain why you would want to buy

each of these items. There's one thing left to do here, and that is figure out the ability point order. And this is

another kind of tricky part of the build because sometimes it's hard to know exactly what you want. But again, this

is where you have to just keep in mind the goal of your build. Do you want to make a minion build? Do you want to make

a gun build? Do you want to make a crowd control grasping hands build? That will determine the ability upgrade order that

you choose. So, for Graves here, we're obviously going to unlock the jar of dead burst. Kind of her most important

ability for this build. And then we can unlock essence theft after. And the reason for this is because it buffs up

our jar of dead. We steal spirit resist from the enemies and weapon damage as well. This provides us with sustain on

the lane and also makes them take more damage from our minions. And then we can get the grasping hands after that. And

then finally cap off with the borrowed decree. And then definitely put one point into the jar of dead for the early

game sustain because we get healing per pickup. This is huge. But now we have a question. What would be better for our

overall damage output? Do we max out the jar of dead or do we max out the borrowed decree? Well, before we do

that, let's put one point into the essence theft because this also provides us 5% max spirit resist stolen. That's a

damage increase for both of these abilities. But then after that, let's read these upgrades here. So on hit,

tier 2 will apply at 30% slow for 1 second. That's helpful, but it's not exactly extra damage. The tier three of

this is disgusting. Plus two dead heads, and the dead heads now trigger essence theft. That is a major upgrade. The

ultimate, however, will provide us a lot of very powerful benefits. Minus 20 seconds of cool down, plus 25% ghoul

speed, and plus 10 seconds duration. That means more ghouls just across the board. And then the tier three is a

major damage spike. So doing a little bit of experimentation here with your build and your character can help you

determine what the correct build order is. So at the start, just based on your initial gut instinct, you can choose to

say, "Hey, maybe let's upgrade the jar of dead first and then upgrade the ultimate second." And that's totally

fair. But then what you can do is after you play a match or two with your character, you can come over to the

graphs and figure out what's just doing more damage for you throughout the match and then decide to prioritize that

instead. [music] So in this match of Graves for example, if we look at the graphs here, you can

see that actually our ultimate is by far the biggest source of damage for us, [music]

doing more damage than the Jar of Dead consistently at almost every stage in the game. Jar of Dead does catch up here

towards the end, but still the borrowed decree is giving us a lot of value. And so it's probably more worth it then to

actually max out the borrowed decree first because yeah, it's doing more work for us. So we can come back over to our

build here and then decide to max out the borrowed decree, max out the jar of dead second, and then for these final

two abilities, it really just depends on what synergizes with our minions more. Essence theft doesn't really give us

anything. We do steal some more weapon damage from them. That can be good for sustain. We could upgrade to the tier

two potentially. We don't really need the tier three though because our minions are already triggering essence

theft. So, we can put one point here and then we can just max out the grasping hands after that because immobilizing

the enemies is a great way to ensure that they die to our minions. So, there you have it. This is our new Graves

build that we created from a blank template that had absolutely nothing on it. We defined a goal for our build.

That is to deal a bunch of spirit damage and swarm the enemies with a bunch of minions. And then we used critical

thinking and experimentation to deduce the best items for us. We just got a big category with a bunch of items and then

played around with them to see which ones would work best on the character. We ordered them in the early game

according to our 4.8k investment spikes and then got a big power spike in the midame that makes our character a lot

stronger. We also made sure to thoughtfully consider our slots here because we don't want to get overloaded

on slots and we want to leave some room for counterplay and situational items down here. So, we ended up whittling out

a few items that while strong just weren't good enough and were delaying our power spikes and taking up slots

that situational items could be in instead. We cleaned up our build and added descriptions to the categories so

we understand what exactly is going on here and added annotations to the items to understand when you would want to buy

them and why you would want to buy them. And finally, we determined the ability point order by thinking about which

abilities would be helpful to upgrade in the early game before then deciding what we wanted to prioritize going into the

mid and late game based on what would be most effective for us. We used graphs and experimentation in actual matches to

determine that actually the borrowed decree is better to upgrade first and then go to the jar of dead second. And

you can use these principles to create any build that you want. This is another one of my most popular builds. It's a

ball 7 build. And you can see a lot of the same ideas here. We created an early game category here that has our spirit

spike with some very helpful spirit items as well as some early sustain options and just good lane items with

monster rounds and extra regen. Then in the mid game, we focus on getting our gun spike and our green spike with these

items and also getting a little bit more spear power just to help us farm because we're seven before finally getting our

big power spike and then choosing what lateg game items are best to buy in the individual match because for some

matches you'll want ethereal shift more than escalating exposure. For some matches you might want lightning scroll

or you might just want a little bit of duration cooldown. The choice is up to you. And then we have situational items

here and here just to make your life easier. So hopefully you found this video to be helpful. And if you did, of

course, make sure to drop a like and subscribe down below so you don't miss out on future videos from me. I just

wanted to make a video explaining my thought process for how I create a build because build crafting is one of my

favorite things to do in this game. I did a lot of it when all of the new characters released, and this Graves

build is my particular favorite. I spent a lot of time refining it. I experimented with it in matches to make

sure that I had the build order just how I wanted it to be. And so you too can do the same and you can create any sort of

silly build that you want, prioritizing whatever abilities and play style that you desire. But with all that being

said, thank you guys for watching and I will see you all next time. Peace out.