I’m been working on a few new characters past my Cadence Witchblade and have decided not to use other people’s builds verbatim, now that I have a high level toon to farm with. Working on a spellbreaker right now that looks like this: http://grimcalc.com/build/vqshLr8
Yes I actually have full devotion, I play a lot of crucible. I maxed it out last night and spent about an hour rearranging and spending a bunch of crystals, but ended up on this to see if it felt worth it while playing. Points are wasted on the fox and hammer just to get enough points efficiently to get into Leviathan and Elemental Seeker (again, I feel 100% certain I’m going to need way more defense for Ultimate and plan to respec later) but I was curious to see how Seeker felt.
While leveling up I was using Tidal Wave -> Amatok then worked down into Leviathan. The thing is I can’t decide which is better. All the threads I read on Amatok v.s. Leviathan are six months old and at some point defensive devotions got nerfed and the t3 offensive ones got buffed, I hear around the water cooler. Right now Leviathan has way more up-time than Amatok ever did. I have whirlpool on ring of steel and elemental seeker on blade burst, the cd’s line up nicely on both. Is there a way to get more than two whirlpools at a time, though?
I noticed my damage on my cold skills was about equivalent when moving off Amatok to Elemental seeker, you’re getting right around 180% on both, although I think amatok is better for frostburn. Just felt like I barely noticed blizzard outside of a few fringe cases, but maybe OA is just too low for it to shine.
Any advice on current point distribution would be appreciated. Hard to figure out what is optimal when you live on an island of poor knowledge.
On a Cold/Pierce DW Proc Blademaster/Spellbreaker with Belgothian’s Carnage, and binding it to Beronath’s Fury, you can have 4-5 out at the same time.
Same when its bound to a pet.
As you mentioned, you need good OA for Blizzard to do anything.
It has a decent cooldown, so you need to be critting often to get the most out of it - which means it doesn’t do well with cooldown skills, but requires either a spammable or an offensive debuff like Curse of Frailty (and one that works on bosses, so not OFF).
Also, its a T2 vs T3, so Blizzard will only be equivalent if you have high Weapon Damage.
With low WD, I would say Whirlpool probably wins.
And also if you’re ranged, Whirlpool wins just by virtue of the slow.
Whirlpool will do more damage hands down. However Amatok is much easier to get to if you end up needing a defenses oriented setup. You may even end up meeting the requirements by accident with many builds. You’ll never come close to the requirements for Leviathan without a dedicated effort, and potentially taking a constellation or two of near useless to useless junk just to get there.
Why does it cast multiples when you plop it on a Pet? Blade Spirit for example has a decent CD unless I misremember it is longer than the whirlpool cd?
So it is less a case of “I want a cold build, get all the cold stuff” and more to tailor your choices to explicit needs then. Wizard and blue devotions are not valuable enough to go out of my way to get Amatok way up north when I want Leviathan. Plus like you said, no Savagery to proc it forever.
I suppose I’m just surprised in general looking at builds on the forum because I see a lot with no T3, or what I find to be surprising, T3 devotion choices. Either way you’re probably gonna want good defensive investment be it through devotions or your class trees.
That makes sense, I had to really fuck around to get those two T3 devotions to work, and wastes about 8 points as you said. Plus some of those other constellations are doing less than a few defensive ones would.
I’ll just play with these ones awhile and pump some more class points into Maiven’s Sphere and my invulnerability buttons, can always swap to defensive devotions down the line.
Did defensive devotions used to be superior to offensive ones? Seems like a lot of the older guides completely right off the offensive ones, but when I strip them out completley my DPS plummets, can’t imagine not having at least a third of my devotion tree pumped into damage…
I know what I’m trying when I get home, thanks for the tip! This seems pretty crazy assuming the whirlpools are treated as individual/unique damage sources.
Its a good skill to attach to Blade Spirits or Wind Devils, and since it has no %WD you’re not losing anything by attaching it to them - timed semi-pets still have their own ‘weapon’ that %WD devotions use.
I think you could also attach it to mortar, though I’m not sure why you’d want to do that
It depends? Some are outright bad, some are meh, and a few are good.
Blind Sage is like a weaker Wind Devil that costs untold amounts of utterly unrelated points to get.
Unknown Soldier doesn’t scale unless your bleeds are really high - yes it scales with weapon bonuses but it doesnt get the flat damage most pierce builds depend on. The passives are good, so people get those.
Light of Empyrion: Just say no, unless you already have the affinity due to taking tree and could use the passive nodes.
Dying God: Chaos damage is weak and it costs too much health - chaos builds only take the passive nodes.
Leviathan is strong with Cold Damage - but Cold is a weak damage type with lots of immune enemies needing heavy de-resisting.
Tree of Life is a good heal, but only if you’re already heavily blue invested and have high base regen, or behemoth is better.
Spear is sort of meh but not terrible if you want a lot of lightning and/or aether +% and 5%OA. The radius is small, but it does %WD at range without your intervention, triggering procs.
Abomination is used occasionally by poison/chaos, though the chaos arm is on-kill and thus not terribly useful at bosses.
Obelisk is used by hardcore builds and retal builds.
Hourglass - frankly OP right now, it lets you just vaporize bosses.
Oleron is used by every physical/pierce/bleed/trauma melee-attack build that can get there.
Mogdrogen the Wolf is is a strong pet devotion.
Torch - everyone likes explosions.
Dying God: Chaos damage is weak and it costs too much health - chaos builds only take the passive nodes.
It adds 30% crit damage. You’d have to be insane not to take it if you bothered with the constellation in the first place.
My Vitality/Chaos conjuror doesn’t even notice the life degen even when it has permanent up time thanks to CDR. And the affinity requirement makes it double up very nicely with Hourglass.
Torch - everyone likes explosions.
On a personal level, I really want to like it, but by the time the meteors hit the ground all the trash is already dead, and it’s a very small damage increase for the Fire Strike builds I tried. It’s probably a lot more attractive on a fire caster.
Very nice info on Leviathan and blade spirit. Didn’t know each had it’s own CD although I should have after i tried Blind Fury on them just for fun. Thank you.
Personally, I feel that it should be greatly reduced as it requires high crit chance to be effective. And it’s not really a “Blizzard”, it’s more of a dumping of small cold meteors. If you have a high crit chance with a lowered cooldown, then you could make it look more like a Blizzard with it happening more often.
The damage seems a touch lacking as well since Cold is so well resisted and requires lots of resist reduction to make it effective.
Having said that, I have both Whirlpool and Blizzard on my Winter King Trickster and they are bound to Blade Spirit and Wind Devil, respectively. Goes well with their themes!
Unfortunately, the Fire Devotion Skills greatly outclass the cold-based ones, IMHO…
