Pragmatism - The Melee Answer?

Before we get started let me preface this by saying not everyone wants to play with Regalia and stack stats running a ludicrous 100 Div build. Some of us would like to play the game rather than walk from A to B wiping screens without looking.

For you melee enjoyers, especially Monk, take a look at Pragmatism. A near perfect roll can be got for around 1 Div and what it offers is a way to play melee class without getting stun-locked or frozen.

Pragmatism gives your charms much more than the single use garbage they normally are. Oh cool, my charm saved me from stun but now I have to kill a gazillion mobs to get another stun break.

I suppose this is better for those who aren’t running a spirit dependent build. My Invoker has 250 spirit and uses every bit of it. My Chayula has 100 spirit and I’ve made it work. Looking back I may not have needed 250 spirit worth of passives to be effective, and my Chayula proved it to me.

With pragmatism you’ll get another 40 or so Spirit as Invoker using that node. If you pass on that you’ll be stuck with about 50 max from Amulet and enjoy the prices on those rolls.

There’s some shenanigans you can do with Pragmatism also. Charms can be gotten with “Guard during effect” and this can scale to over 200 damage. What I’ve discovered is that my Chayula is literally stun-proof and the guard triggers every 2.5 seconds. Couple this with Grim Feast and Mana steal filling my ES and I’m walking thru T15 maps at level 78 (will quickly be 80) like it’s nothing. FWIW I have 1.5k HP and 2K ES.

Another trick I am looking at toying with is Catalysis. Catalysis is a node that makes you take 5% of physical damage as a random element. I am wondering if I put a charm for each element in my belt, and those charms have guard, will I become a Guard machine?

Needless to say I’ve stumbled upon some really cool interactions with Pragmatism. I opted not to use my budget Ingenuity (60% bonus with 25% Max ES corruption) and instead am using a belt either a solid triple resist (fire resist is corrupted on) and +2 charm slots. Also, with Pragmstism not giving me ES, I got a helmet with nearly 400 in its place and went with Subterfuge mask. This character has just broken 2k ES and has 75% evasion. My gloves and boots are not optimum yet, either, so we will see where I land.

This got a little out of hand but tldr; there’s still a lot of niche interactions I think we as a community are missing out on because we follow streamer builds and don’t explore as a whole.