Obviously the build isn’t 100% finished and the amulet should be Mythical Aeon’s Eye but at this point I’m not convinced it exists .
First of all I finished all the campaign on ultimate. Numbers look good, I was optimistic about this build. But then I tried to finish on Acendant but the build was slow.
Looking at Aetherthorn shield, one immediately sees the synergy with Veilkeeper set to maximize uptime on Arcane Will. The chance to reduce Vines cooldown while active should allow you to spam vines and basically negate the +1s cooldown mod. However, there are some problems with this.
Grasping Vines is good at dealing with huge crowds (totems, etc.). However, Arcane Will generally won’t activate against them, so the +1s cooldown is just a plain nerf.
Given that the shield support Vines and Wind Devils, which respectively slows enemy attacks and give impaired aim, the cooldown reduction part is pratically non existent, especially against packs of enemies.
Should be good against bosses right? Well no, fighting Reaper of the Lost on Ascendant felt like fighting Ravager.
Single target damage is BAD. While the flat 500 aether damage is good, the DoT damage is insignificant (1 point in Entangling Vines increases damage as much as 1 point in Shaman mastery bar). The inconsistency of the cdr really hurts here. Plus you need to intentionally get hit by a big attack to even proc Arcane Will, which isn’t ideal. Juiced up Sanginis isn’t enough here. Highest damage was this
and I’m not convinced this wasn’t from Spear of the heavens
There’s is no accessible % damage blocked (general problem among non phys/retal shield builds).
Solutions
Replace adcth to Vines with weapon damage (pretty please?)
Remove +1s cooldown
Add extra duration
% lighting/electrocute scaling on the shield + vit->lightning conversion so there’s a reason to put points in Entangling Vines and opens up hybrid aether/lightning shenanigans
Give Veilkeeper % total speed instead of attack speed on Arcane Will (I don’t think this set is overperforming right now anyway)
I’m glad I came across this post, I just spent the time make a Druid build around this shield. I went a different route, but still I am unimpressed. I noticed that the vines and the wind devils do not gain any damage from flat aether damage devotions. Could you explain what you mean by adcth? Thanks for the post, i may just put this one on the back burner.
One just needs to look at the pitiful values on the skill itself:
At softcap: 71 Phys Damage, 71 Bleed and 174 Vit Decay per tick.
That’s pitiful. Like, it’s comparable to god damn Inquisitor Seal’s damage (240 Fire damage per tick) and that’s only if you’re able to convert the Vit Decay (Which Aether cannot).
The skill is very much entirely based around the RATA for damage as the rest of it is utter dog water.
it’s not, for a very important reason(s),
Vines, stack, seal doesn’t, and vines tick at 0.5sec rate, so at two vines cast you’re already over seal
it’s like spam BWC, except requiring mad mods and conversion (since no one wants to play phys vines vs armour )
-and vit/wildblood vines used to be neat, until untold amounts of powercreep left it behind
And having that 1.2s base CD, which slows down its stacking process…
Which is part of what holds back even the “Good” Vines builds like Cinderborn, it takes so long to even start stacking them up to get the full DPS that it makes the build really clunky.
cdr exists, so it’s not really that bad, bwc already has a cast limit because slow animation so you get less than usual, while it ticks slower than vines too.
So dps(potential) is only bad in a meta where everyone can unload “everything” in less than 3secs (which is a whole other debate/personal gripe)
It’s still some extra nonsense you have to deal with to actually use Vines. Either you need to find some CDR or you’re stuck with this.
The only notable advantage is that it means technically, it can actually benefit from Onslaught stacks.
Also a meta where there exists things outside of 1v1 bosses…
Which is a noted aspect of the Cinderborn build. When doing any of the many types of content that feature groups of trash, the DPS for Vines takes a while to get going because each new pack of trash you have to stack up your Vines for them to do damage.
Hence, the skill being clunky.
It’d play a lot smoother if it couldn’t stack but the base damage was increased to compensate. Thus you then just have to keep uptime of the skill rather than worrying about CDR and stacking it.
Which would make it more boring mechanically as a result. Should we make Sigil & Blackwater the same while we’re at it?
Finding the CDR is not different from finding attack speed for DAR builds or cast speed for spam casters.
cdr exists on every caster offhand by default, is possible on every shield, and has potential on every helm/caster weap and amulet.
only bonus factor is class buff, which is a general drawback for any cd skill build not having arcanist/oath
i’m pretty sure retal modifier was increased, because requested to make useable as rata skill, while acid vines? was still made prior before retal bonuses got increased from Kingred or Lee’s feedback. - and made Lightning retal vines nice too then i suppose.
There has never really been a non retal vines besides that because Vines kinda always had very little itemization, the vines offhand outright conflicts with the vit vines set. Pretty sure gutripper was reletend on deliberately to troll us
And as mentioned wildblood worked before, but was left behind from other feedback and powercreep, not that it mechanically sucked as such or don’t have the potential (if anything it has high potential, but limited mods)
Eg lightning vines from GrimLeague Maverick mentioned; just give shaman a dedicated lightning vines set/item that isn’t retal enabled. The dps mechanic is there, the items just don’t exist… - and 0 RR class making aether vines good? seems like it was kinda “intentionally” meant to be fun meme but suboptimal from the start because of it.
BWC already has the transmuter to provide the same effect of “Less spam and more damage” making it a CD skill.
Sigil… I dunno much about. I haven’t really seen many builds using it as a primary damage source (Especially given that Sigil’s damage types tend to end up being hijacked by Doom Bolt)
The thing is that most CDR builds aren’t based around finding CDR for a 1.8s CD skill that needs to be stacked up.
This short CD means that %CDR is less effective per point and you need to spam heavily because damage relies on stacking it up (Compared to most other CD skills where they do their damage without needing to stack up)
CDR is also not as universally found as AS/CS which is found in spades on many items (Not just Off-hand/Shield) and as part of most Mastery auras/passives (While CDR from Mastery is exclusive to Star Pact and Path of the Three)
The overarching thing with Grasping Vines is its base damage is low (Because it can stack) while the default CD makes stacking somewhat clunky (Even with CDR).
RATA Vines works, because it can bypass the low base damage by using the RATA to provide base damage for the skill. But even for “OP” builds it’s still considered clunky and bad for trash due to the need to stack the skill to deal damage (Which is slowed down by the CD)
If Vines was changed (If only by a Transmuter like for BWC) to be less stacking reliant and buffing its damage to compensate, it might have a smoother playstyle.
Though so long as its base damage is so trash (Especially concerning conversion whereby its Bleed cannot be converted and the Vit Decay has limited conversion, leaving certain things like Aether Vines with JUST the base physical to work with…) it will be heavily reliant on item mods to provide damage outside of RATA.
Vine is extremely under the curve damage wise. Worldkeeper needs to triple vine damage to make it competitive for example, that shows how much non-retal vines need its base damage improved.
Even with 4 onslaught stacks and 3100% damage vines tick for like 40k. There just isn’t enough flat to make it dangerous and the additional cooldown makes it so much less stackable. I’ve been farming ascendant a little with it and while it’s totally doable kill speeds are soooo slow. Dread is a snooze fest.
At the very least I’d like the additional cooldown removed. I Intentionally left the HP low on my build so that arcane will actually procs, but even then it only comes on when facetanking tempest totems or nemesis. For the rest of content you’re playing a vines build that can only stack just over 2 vines which makes the 500 flat modifier way less impactful. Adding a damage modifier to an additional aether item would also be very welcome. I don’t feel like it needs too much help to turn it from a bad meme to a semi effective meme.
Same thought process, same exercise, got the same results…
I even went along and maxed out block chance (to get to 100% under arcane will) and… for some reason I didn’t get enough blocking going on to have a meaningful impact…
Retal is fine… but so is worldkeeper… in fact, it’s one of my best builds ever, one of the rares I can clear most celestials with (can’t do N’erf)
The fact that it needs to triple the damage, and pick up almost all other acid vine support in the game to get there is a bit sad…
Acid retal works great, but fire retal (cinderborn) needs to be REALLY dialed-in to work.
I have and it’s pretty bad as well… I mean… it’s decent, but it’s not worth playing IMO
The issue with bleed vines is that vine’s strength comes from the possibility of stacking them on the same area (Kinda like how they had to nerf spam sigil) … but if your main damage is DoT… then that advantage is completely gone.
A good bleeding mod for vines would increase cooldown massively so that stacking them becomes irrelevant, add a LOT more bleed proportionately, and widen the area. ideally it would also include a proc that leeches.
Yeah, it has 200 % TDM Pretty much says all about the base skill…
This TDM everywhere… I really hate it. It should be almost nowhere. Just buff the base skills. Same with onslaught stacks… Are cooldown skills bad? Well then buff them
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