Khonshu's Tribute: A Melee Moon Knight Build [Updated Feb 9 2015]

The Skills

Artifacts
I have played around with several selections, particularly with new stuff out, old stuff buffed, etc. Note that links take you to marvelheroes.info for max roll information.

• Sacred White Gorilla Necklace - This is one of the highest DPS artifacts for physical characters. Farmed from Man-Ape, it's not exactly easy or cheap to acquire, but if you have one, use it.

• Gem of the Kursed - A no brainer in my opinion, this is a must-have for MK. He's got high natural crit, and this helps pump that up and the brutal rating and damages also.

• Sabretooth's Furry Mane - Excellent option, a huge amount of critical rating and a good amount of damage. Get one if you can.

• Flag of the Imperial Skrull Empire - This will be my replacement to Fist of Apocalypse. Keep using Fist if you don't have a Flag yet; they're very similar artifacts.

StarkTech Power Cubes

I am going to opt to go with 1 Spiked Gauntlet and 1 Cestus Gauntlet Punch cube due to my rolls on Slot 1. I'd say make sure that your main attacks are as close to 50 as you can get. Once Grade 69 Medallions come along, I'll probably drop a Spiked Cube and add another Fist of Khonshu cube.

Alternatives:

One of the great things about MK is that you don't need super expensive artifacts to make him great. Here are some other options. If I couldn't pick any of the above four, I'd use: Zola, Advanced Meta, Advanced Circlet, Idol of Khonshu, Fist of Apocalypse or Zigg

• Fist of Apocalypse - Solid artifact that's easy to get from Danger Room. Made it on my Top 4; depending on how much you need Attack Speed this may or may not be in your Top 4.

• Mayhem Demonblood - Physical - This MUST be a Physical roll (not melee) IMO. Good HP, nice damage, and a fighting and speed proc that MK can benefit from. All-around excellent choice. Takes ~10s to build up the Demonic Mayhem stacks for the fighting and speed proc, so this probably isn't the highest DPS option for terminal rushing. Very solid alternative, and maybe better depending on setup, vs. Fist of Apocalypse.

• Taskmaster Guide - If you get good rolls on one, this is a very high-DPS artifact

• Iron Legion Armor Sheath - A solid HP artifact for a fourth slot in place of Demonblood. I'll likely be using this in addition to Demonblood once Red Axis comes around. There are higher DPS options out there for sure, but this has a nice mix of DPS and survivability, and MK can make great use of the HP too.

• Hulkbuster Physics Package - Next to impossible to farm, and expensive to buy. But you get +1 Fighting, some Attack Speed (which is most excellent), crit, brute, and extra HP. All-around great artifact for MK.

• Sharabus Neotum - Tied behind Mystic Mayhem Coffers, but if you get a good roll, this thing pumps out a lot of damage. Make sure you're around 60/60 to make the most of this.

• Arnim Zola's ESP Box - Low spirit is the name of the game when playing MK, and this helps maintain some spirit while not giving back as much as something like Maht's, for example. Once you get the hang of using Spiked Gauntlets effectively in your rotation, you won't necessarily need this anymore. It's a good artifact that has its place, but there are higher-DPS options available.

• Ziggurat of Kargul - I swap this out for my Hulkbuster when I run cosmics or patrol zones for the teleport functionality. It's a good alternative artifact, and some may prefer running with it on all the time.

• Idol of Khonshu - +1 to all powers is what edges this one above other artifacts listed in the Alternatives section, for me. It also has a great amount of damage which MK can take nearly-full advantage of.

• Advanced Circlet of Cyttorak - Solid bet with a little bit of defensive stats on here, too.

• Maht's Arrowhead - A great spirit return option, and easy to obtain from story mode (Chapter 7). It gives a little too much back and sacrifices damage or critical rating, so it's not for me, but it's a great placeholder to help with spirit management.

• Advanced Metasensory Array - One of the easiest artifacts in the game to obtain. Attack speed (which MK can benefit from), flat damage rating, and +1 to all powers.
  

I use all of his uniques across the board, with physical/hp enchants and Fighting challenge bonuses. Pretty self-explanatory, and easy to gear. It's important to note that you do have some options here - if you don't want to use his Slot 1 (and prefer Fragment) you can swap his out and sub in a Cosmic Slot 5 also with ranks to your main attacks and left tree.

Slot 1. Marc Spector's Spiked Gauntlets. Great ranks in CGP and Spiked, though from a pure DPS perspective it may be slightly outshined by Fragment if you can pump ranks up with a Cosmic Slot 5.

Slot 2. Lockley's Armor is a great option both defensively and offensively. Tons of HP and even more from the ranks in Carb Armor help make you tankier, and the procs give you some extra damage as well.

Slot 3. His Slot 3 because beast mode on. Awesome procs, ranks in Frenzy, power duration, and a healthy HP roll.

Slot 4. FoK Boots for sure. Critical Damage rolls quite high, and a flat damage rating is also good. Ranks in Bolas is good to boost up some of our damage layer attacks.

Slot 5. Again, MK's unique is king if you're using this setup. There's a huge amount of damage rating and some good sustain here as well. The ranks in tree helps with Bolas and Fan to get those DoT numbers high.

Challenge Bonuses - Strength is ideal for cost reduction, Fighting is ideal for DPS. If you do random, go with whatever you get first. If you craft a specific bonus, I'd go with Fighting.

Enchants - I swapped Slot 1 and 5 out for the Attack Speed enchants from ARMOR event. If you don't want to do that, stick with Physical Damage. I also went ARMOR HP. Regular HP will do fine here if you don't want to use ARMOR relics.

Uru, Legendary, and other item slots

Uru-Forged
I use a Defensive uru with Power Doop for the spirit return and great brutal damage buff. God of Mischief is a good option if you need the ranks. Power duration is nice too.

Legendary
With Grade 80 Legendaries, those who Main MK should take Axe. It's a nice brutal buff, and 1400 DR is nice, too.

For Grade 70 use Gungnir, Axe, or Ultimate Nullifier.

Relic
Atlantis (Crit Dmg), Asgard (Melee Dmg), or Subterranea are the only options here. I currently use Atlantis since I have another full stack now. Lemuria for Sentinels.

Medallion
MK has a lot of options here. Kurse is probably the easiest to farm, Grim Reaper is excellent as well, but for my money it's now Red Skull. Tons of brutal damage and also Strength and Fighting.

With the Medallion Upgrade recipes, though, Red Skull gets shafted. I'll be switching over to Red Onslaught Medallion when I can.

Ring

ICP Signet is a great option, but I'm using Xavier's Class Ring for Ranged/Melee. It's solid.

Costume
Everybody shield your eyes - I need to reroll this, but added this core while I was testing Psionic Overload with the new Defensive changes. I'll eventually get this straightened out either with a new core to put with my excellent rolls, or once the Crafting overhaul gets here and it's easier to roll costume affixes.

Insignia
There are tons of great aura options for us. Based on my stats, the order of preference (assuming +300 crit rating and +1000 crit dmg as the affixes) are

• Mockingbird
• Shang-Chi
• Iron Fist
• Taskmaster
• Spider-Man
• Moon Knight
• Captain America
• Black Panther
• O'Grady
• Hulk
• Daredevil
• Blade

Here's what I'm using. I opted for HP because it makes playing at low health easier, and I'm already around 68% critical chance so losing 300 rating wasn't super painful.

Passives: Synergies, Team Up, Cybernetics, and Omegas

I currently am using: Ant-Man, Cable, Moon Knight, Squirrel Girl, Thor, Venom, War Machine, Winter Soldier, Wolverine, and X-23. If you don't play at low enough HP typically, feel free to ditch Venom in favor of something else.

Venom will give +5% damage while below 50% health, so a good option for those of you that play with low HP.

Currently using Pirate Deadpool because his signature move is OP against bosses.

Straight forward. +spirit on basic hit is fantastic for maintaining low HP and using Spiked Gauntlets.

My omegas are consistently a WIP, and I'm capped. I hit up nodes that provide straight up damage (or Strength/Fighting), or critical/brutal buffs. I go with Oshtur and dropped Psionic Overload for the Sentinels fight.

Check out the build on MH.info for my Omega allocations.

Rotation

I've been getting a lot of questions on his rotation as of late (probably due to an influx of MK players). Since he lacks cooldowns besides Sig and Statue, timing can be a bit trickier compared to other heroes.

My typical rotation is:
Bolas > Fan > Dart > Spam Cestus

then, when I get to about 15% spirit, swap out Cestus for Spiked Gauntlets. This isn't a DPS loss. Keep the bleed from CGP up by applying it every 3s or so (I normally do 5-6 hits on Spiked). MK will like being at low spirit, and the extra damage vs. bleeding enemies makes this a great skill.

Using a Basic like this also allows us to forego the use of a 25% medkit core. This means we stay lower HP (more crit/crit damage) and lower spirit (more flat damage rating).

If I've used Bolas in the past 10s, I'll open with Fan instead to get the damage vs. bleeding targets going. I like proccing the Crit Dmg on Slot 4 though. I'm not sure how much of a difference it is from a damage perspective.

I use Statue, Avatar, and Sig at the same time when I can. Otherwise I typically hit sig when it's up.

Tank Knight

I'm messing around with building a tankier MK. With the new Defensive changes, we now get a 48% multiplicative bonus at low health. Damage reduction caps at 90%, so the goal is to maintain competitive DPS but be able to facetank basically anything thrown at us while playing at 40% health or so. To do that, we need a stat sheet damage reduction of 61%

Some itemization options to look into:

1. Shield of Perseus (i80) is an excellent option. Just this alone puts my base damage reduction to 47%. With everything procced, I hit 55% stat sheet. Low HP is at 81.4%

2. Subterranea Relics give me about another 3%...bump up to 50% base damage reduction. Procced, 57%. Low HP, 84.36%

3. Ultimate Guardian is an option, but I haven't tried this out yet. I'd imagine this will bump us up to around 52% base damage reduction, procced 59%-60%, and low HP around 88%

I personally only use Shield and am finding the results fantastic. 81% is sufficient to facetank Man Ape's telegraphed attacks as long as you're just about at that 40% threshold and not 10% or anything. It's a blast, and I still am putting up good damage despite not having the Axe equipped. For most people who don't main MK and don't want to drop 1k Odin Marks, adding Subterranea Relics is a good option.