Goon Brawler Guide 1.1.5
Tips
Use leather gloves whenever possible. At the very start you may find that your damage is shit enough to necessitate using the gauntlets, but the instant you get gloves with a remotely good ego, slap those fuckers on and your lethality will rocket into the sky, punch the sun, and knock space the fuck out. Don't use gauntlets unless they're substantially better than your gloves. Hitting more often means landing more crits and laying down more on-hit effects, and you already hit fast due to being a Brawler, so leather gloves with an on-hit effect will pretty much turn you into a pugilistic blender with the sheer quantity of little colourful numbers you'll be farting everywhere. This is even funnier with talent-on-hit gloves because you will honestly be triggering that shit nonstop.
Get Vitality. Poisons, diseases, and wounds will fuck you up and this talent will significantly mitigate them. The added regen and healing modifier can let you narrowly bullshit your way out of certain death occasionally, too. I really don't like Daunting Presence but YMMV; Unflinching Resolve is fucking nuts though. You will never need Adrenaline Surge because you are a Brawler and Brawlers uncontrollably explode stamina from every orifice every time they do literally anything.
Get everything in the Field Control tree. Yes, there are a lot of places you'll want to put generics initially, but being able to say "welp, later fuckshits" and backflip out of trouble can be a huge boon at very early levels, Track is stupidly useful if you use it regularly and well, Heave is useful when you Disengage and some fuckhead rare immediately Rushes you or whatever, and Slow Motion is Slow fucking Motion get it GET IT. You can honestly just put one perk in each of those; between Slow Motion and Heightened Reflexes you will be able to dodge arrows and spells like fucking Neo and then uppercut their owners in the dick so hard that their skulls explode, which I am pretty sure is also a thing that Neo did. You don't need Weapons Mastery anyway so you can easily spare a generic now and then.
Unlock Dirty Fighting when you can spare the category point. You probably don't give a shit about 75% of that tree, but Backstab? You want that. You want it bad. With 5/5 Backstab every one of your tens of trillions of punches will be 50% more likely to critically strike a stunned opponent, and everyone of your zillions of crits will have a 15% chance to stun anything you hit. Because you will want a high critical chance by default, this more or less means that you will almost immediately stun anything you start punching the shit out of and then proceed to relentlessly crit the piss out of it until it is reduced to a fist-shaped crater in the ground.
If you're going AM and you find the Spellhunt Remnants, keep them with you always. Their killing power isn't spectacular even at tier 5, but they inflict manaburn damage and have a chance to destroy magic with each hit. Slipping them on to fight the Master or some other spellslinging superfucker can immediately transform a horribly shitty fight into a cartoonishly one-sided beatdown with Yakety Sax playing on loop in the background. I have had horrifyingly strong caster rares just stand there going while I slapped them to death.
Bladed hats/helms are awesome. They give you Skullcracker, which is important because a) it causes Confusion and Confusion is amazing, b) it scales off of stats you'll have lots of and can do quite good physical damage (my last Brawler got the Size Matters achievement off of a Skullcracker critical), and c) it's a headbutt and, as a fist-fighting fantasy MMA expert, you should never not headbutt motherfuckers. Running up to a dragon and headbutting it in the goddamn face gets funnier every time you do it.
You should save up +str items so you can get the Flexible Combat prodigy. Rings that give weapon focus (xx% chance to hit again every time you hit) are great for doing huge bursts of damage.
