How is losing a stat that had minimal impact on your dps in exchange for a significant DA reduction on enemies a crushing defeat?
Edit: And before somebody goes on about how % Resist Reduction is not minor, let me elaborate on how % Resist Reduction (note not -% Resist debuffs) works…
% Resist Reduction is applied last, after flat Resist Reduction and -% Resist Reduction. It cannot reduce a target’s resistance below 0.
So if an enemy has say 50% Cold Resist, you reduce that to 20% through other effects. 20% x 0.16 is a huge 3.2% Resist Reduction. Instead, you now reduce enemy DA by 80, which given that you probably don’t have any DA reduction effects with a Trozan build, is going to be much more impactful for you with more/larger crits.
Resist reduction is rarer then OA, it’s easy to have high enough OA that you can crit enemies without lowering their DA.
Druids need resists reduction
Sorcerer’s already have flashbang
Spellbreaker it will be decent but again resist reduction is still better
Battlemage have shit ton of OA
Warlock also has ton of OA
The way you made the game, resist reduction is most important stat even if it’s random.
80 DA reduction equals +80 OA. IIRC OA converts into crit chance by multiplying on 0.04 before breakpoint, so +3.2% crit chance. Normally trozan druid won’t be picking Stormcaller’s Pact, so about +75% crit damage from IEE and TSS, maybe +15% more from gear, so let’s say +90%. Let’s also assume we can’t do crits above x1.1, so crits will be x2.0, which is +100% damage. 100% * 0.032 = 3.2% more damage.
Slightly less but still ok.
Shared cooldowns on WD procs is bound to hurt much more. You couldn’t had possibly buffed base WDs damage enough to compensate for extra Whirlpool or Reckless Tempest, not even mentioning AOE, hadn’t you?
You are correct on the first part, but casters don’t pick Viper because they usually have no %Weapon Damage skills to channel Viper’s effect. Technically I can grab something like Exonerator or Northern Wyrm on a Druid and use occasional shots to apply Viper, but idk, somewhat weird.
Good luck applying Viper weapon-based RR with TSS though. It doesn’t really matter anyway, %RR was never very impactful.
That said reduced DA is even less impactful than Stupid Dragon estimated, for your typical Druid it’s gonna be under 2.5% damage according to my spreadsheet.
Not sure there’s much difference between the -DA and the multiplicate rr on a class combo that doesn’t provide stacking rr relevant to Trozan/TSS builds.
It’s Wind Devils (aka Maelstrom and that one point you need to unlock it) that got a nerf hammer hilt bash in the teeth with the devotion change. Change to totems surprisingly more than makes up for it and I was always using both anyway, but the change definitely made the Devil skill line (even) less desirable than pre-patch.
Reckless Tempest also became less desirable as a result, but the concept of bypassing cooldowns was silly anyway.
[QUOTE=Ptirodaktill;516223]So , ive tried a few druids casters: CDR-based TSS+Devastation, CDR based AAR+Devastation , CDR wind devils+storm totem, Crit wind devils+TSS, Crit AAR + Devastation.
Ive expected a lot from crit AAR build, but it ended inferior to battlemage in every possible way. Less dmg output, less mobility, less survivability. >_> 200%
You should try a reflect battlemage focusing on multiple melee attacks and elemental damage.
Just focus on the big boss and everything else melts itself.
Sure you can get more damage from retaliation, but at a certain point it just doesn’t matter usually when on hit nova procs are over 6k damage of more than 3 types.
After playing that all my fun builds AAR, warder, pure occultist, pure phys ranged… Well really brought out how completely nerfing inferior every other build is to the point there’s simply no fun scraping through the game with them.