- I apologize in advance for the poor quality/non-existent formatting/structure and missing data/videos which the proper posts usually have. This is based on Shard of the Eternal Flame, which is unfortunately a random drop, if you don’t have it, you cannot make use of this story.
- Why post this? Well, I was looking on grimtools, and googled a bit, and did not find such build. If there already are similar builds and I just did not find them, I apologize and I am happy to delete this.
- When I was farming for The Vanquisher set, a Shard of the Eternal Flame dropped from the Port Valbury chest that is supposed to drop Vanquisher’s gem (which was the last missing set piece). After checking the item, I made a Forcewave+Vire’s might warlord, with Skybreaker Circlet and Mythical Stonefist Rebuke, which I then used to farm the missing Vanquisher’s gem. Unfortunately I no longer have this build, as I respecced it into something else (see later), but it is a good build to farm base game dungeons.
- After this I made a Vanquisher following Mysterymeat’s awesome guide. I was not blown away by its performance (high expectations (my gold standard is the chillwhisper reaper from the top 20 list), lack of optimized gear and piloting issues - the build is good), so I went back to tinker with a non-vanquisher skater. When looking for items that buffed Vire’s might, Sentinel of the Three caught my eye. So I went and respecced my former forcewave+vire warlord to a retal warlord, which is also a skater. Here is its current state: Sentinel of the Three retal skater, which sports quite high block chance and recovery, and can do 300k+ vire’s mights every second. I found that I liked it better than the normal vanquisher build as it somewhat combines the mobility of a skater with the tankiness and passive damage of a retal build. Obviously both builds were quite unoptimized and poorly piloted, so I am by no means saying the retal skater is better than the original (which is a well-tested and optimized build)… I started farming gear for this build, and while farming Ring of Sethris, instead a Nightbringer dropped (which I have been farming for ages, but have long ago gave up of getting one)!. And then another Nightbringer dropped, but still no Sethris’ ring…
- Despite the high defenses, I still managed to die with the retal skater against some mundane enemies like nemesis (things like ground aoe + low sustain, or eating a nullification) and probably gargabol (was also farming Vine ring at the same time). Nevertheless, I found it quite good to farm the base game (without further optimization, it is in no shape to face celestials or farm SR 30-31 efficiently, if it’s possible to optimize it to that extent at all).
- Back to the drawing board… I got the idea to combine the Nightbringer (which is a very powerful item worth building around and gives fantastic passive damage) and skating (which is superb for offensive and defensive mobility and proccing stuff, including for example Nightbringer’s built in rifts).
- This led me to make the Nightbringer skater (the gear I am using now: Nightbringer skater). With this build, I did my first Callagadra kill (was quite easy after I learned not to stay in melee range), plus did a SR 32-33 run (to unlock SR 30) and a couple of SR 30-31 runs and it felt very good.
- With .6-.7 sec cd vire’s might and most of the damage coming automatically from Wind devils and various procs by that same vire’s might used to zip around, it is naturally fantastic to farm the base game.
- Add to this 150ish easily applied/automatic RR, leech, behemoth regen on a reasonable cd, 28k hp, permanent hungering void (you can also include permanent healing rain, but I had to make OA/DA concessions for it and could not bind behemoth to resilience so I ditched it for Acid spray RR and extra dps), few buttons to press (I quite often don’t bother with Judgment, Ascension and Wendigo Totem, practically I use them mostly against nemesis and bosses - yeah, I know lazy and bad piloting), I found I had a quite decent endgame farmer as well which I enjoyed play.
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curious why you’re maxing wind devil node instead of Stride, since devil dmg doesnt’ stack, and stride does 
actually, for that matter, why max raging tempest when you have no elemental dmg?
I had stride maxed, but removed it to put points to elsewhere (brute force mainly I think?). I removed it, as some of the fire damage is converted away to acid, which I don’t scale. Also, I did not notice a performance drop after removing it (just a feeling - I did not use a stopwatch and test if SR runs are faster or not).
As for why wind devil and raging tempest is maxed: well, I (mistakenly?) thought that howling wind is an ability which each wind devil use (doing vitality damage) and the electrocute (converted to vitality decay, right?) stacks as it is coming from different sources (just like the bleeds stack for the brutallax dervish’s blade spirits). Thought the same about the cold damage (also converted to vitality) from raging tempest, if it does not stack for some reason, then it is indeed useless - there are some free points then. 
you should have 0 fire dmg on stride because you have over 100% ele conversion, so that should outrank fire conversion from PotT
(you can’t avoid fire dmg showing in VM tooltip because of amulet, but Stride is unrelated to that fire dmg)
Wind Devil uses a debuff aura class, so main node and raging tempest node doesn’t stack dmg wise (debuffs never stack even if different source); maelstrom stacks since it’s a regular attack. (Blade spirits use attack aura so those stack). Likewise dmg mods “to” devils (gloves etc) then dont’ stack either as still just added to debuff
And ofc raging tempest doesn’t convert to vit RR either despite celestial presence transmuter might indicate otherwise to some 
(not saying you did, but was brought up recently)
I thought PotT conversion is the same “rank” as the items’ conversion, none of them takes precedence? So sure, I have over 100 ele conversion, but 40ish conversion still makes some of the fire damage convert to acid. My understanding was that if I have over 100 total conversion, the conversion will scale back to 100 and be proportional? Btw, stride looks blue, possibly because of the helmet, no idea?
As for the devils using non-stackable aura, I was not aware, then the +2 devils coming from nightbringer are not as good, also, the damage addition from the morgoneth’s grip is also a lot less valuable than I thought. If howling wind is a non-stackable aura (is this mentioned somewhere in the skill description and I just missed it?), does that mean that the proc chance only stacks for maelstrom, but not the devils themselves?
Also, what determines when the devils use maelstrom, there is no cd displayed on it, yet they use it fairly rarely?
Though the points are still somewhat useful if for some reason the devils attack different targets, for example during clearing. And also it is still a damage increase, but agreed, if it does not stack on single target, there should be a better use for the 20+ points there.
I was aware that RR does not convert, I just had the points left there from leveling and thinking the damage stacks from 5 devils…
Btw it’s funny that despite such a glaring misunderstanding of wind devil mechanics the build still seems to perform very well somehow. 
yes, but still deals fire dmg (it’s a secondary effect unaffected by direct skill modifiers)
mono ele and tri ele → x is “special”
aside from stuff called slot priority (contra normal conversions), there is a thing where if you convert all of “1” type of mono ele vs tri to X, it sorta “consumes” it all, leaving nothing left. Ex can be with Avenger we can use it to convert 100% lightning to phys, and still use blade twister ring and not lose any lightning to pierce via the elemental conversion ring; provided mace rolled 100% conversion.
So if/when you have 100% ele conversion it overrules the fire conversion as it simply eats up everything first, also despite slot priority, but if you had 100% fire conversion combined (say you had belt with another 50% fire converted to acid) then it would cover fire to acid as the slot priority is then intact and fire “wins”. But because you don’t get 100% fire but do have 100% ele, fire loses and all elemental dmg gets taken to vit.
they are still fine in that they stack maelstrom, stack devo proc dmg, and ofc gives you area coverage. It’s more that sometimes/perhaps maxing main node/raging tempest isn’t always the biggest dmg scaler then compared to others that do stack dmg (stride/empy bros etc)
you can’t tell by tooltip wording only by either confirming on dummies, or looking in the game files to see the aura class.
not sure what you mean by proc chance?
main and second node is just fixed static dmg every sec, Maelstrom is a separate skill, think of it as Wind Devils (each/individually) firing off a lightning bolt with an internal cooldown (tooltip ofc also doesnt’ show this cooldown ) - basically Devils get the tempest devotion skill
aye, it’s not about them being totally useless or horrible (they’re actually pretty great to level with even despite non stacking dmg, atleast until stacking dmg becomes necessary by when Maelstrom is usually maxed)
So it’s more a note/was more a curiousness about this being for endgame, where those types of “moar damadz” often gets considered, so could have been there was more specific cause for ex not having Stride
“test showed dmg gains wasn’t that big, aoe coverage of spread out devils was more helpful even if less single target dmg” etc etc.
Even if something can be missed sometimes, other times there’s also been reason to the “madness” so never know until asked.
ok, “nevermind” this, atleast in part/this case
seems like something has changed and path of the three can’t be overruled anymore with subsequent 100% conversion, it will take place regardless now
edit, still works with regular slot priorities tho, eg Avenger/bladetwist example, unsure why PotT has special priority now or when that changed as it definitely used to work
Wow, thanks for this detailed explanation! This 100% conversion “overwrites” non-100% and slot priorities (whatever they are) were all new to me (after over 1k+ hours and trying dozens or possibly hundreds of builds)… Even though it seems that PotT is a special thing, and does not behave like this apparently?
I find the dummies a bit messy and not super helpful, as there are all kinds of numbers flying above them (whirling blades, procs etc.). Interestingly, your education prompted me to verify tentacles of yugol (procced by morgoneth’s ring), and they also have a debuff aura, but thankfully also a normal attack, so at least they can overlap/stack to some extent.
I have fiend devo bound to the devils, the proc chance of that.
Unfortunately I lack the means (and inclination?) to precisely verify the performance, so I usually just play the build and see how it feels. Pretty inaccurate I know, but if there is a big difference, I should notice it. Also means that I heavily factor in QoL related to my playing preferences/style, leading to inaccurate and subjective evaluation. For example I prefer the chillwhisper reaper to the dawnbreaker warder, despite the latter supposed to be in a “league of its own”.
Well, it definitely taught me something and got me thinking. I will remove the points from the tempest and see if there is a noticable difference in performance. I don’t see big wins on where to put the points (will probably put them back into stride despite pott special conversion messing some of it up).
*ignoring path of the three for now
if you have ex Elemental conversion to X in slot one, and fire conversion in slot 3, if elemental is 100% , slot 3 fire → Y is ignored/“alrady consumed”
and vice versa if you have lightning conversion in slot 1(avenger), and elemental ->pierce conversion in slot 5(twister ring), no conversion is lost if you already had 100% conversion.
There is then a cumulative effect, where you don’t need the 100% in a single slot, it can be combined, so again if you had 50% ele to X in slot 1, 50% fire → Y in slot 3, and another 25-25% ele → X on slot6+10(ring and shoulder) totalling 100% tri Ele, the mono ele/fire conversion on slot 3 would still not happen.
*if the earliest slot priority don’t reach 100% combined conversion, then remaining is still regularly converted ofc by the other/“cross” element
Now it seems like Path of the Three finally completely counts as “slot 0” if you will, so weapon slot and combined kit cant overrule it (atleast not in any of the combos i quickly tried again earlier, no pierce retal sadge)
Not sure when that changed, because i’m positive “we” messed around with something silly where it was successfully in overruling PotT priority at the time, with the aforementioned combined 100% on slot 1+xyz.
But Path of the Three takes proper precedent now, so the above/“slot priority + 100% override” then only counts for regular global item conversion.
(fire/cold/lightn to X or tri ele → X specifically, any other conversion types don’t have these interactions or priority slots)
yes, that’s part of what makes multi devils great, better devo procs, and dot stacking per devil from each proc each devil triggered, so +2 summons is still nice
and aint nothing wrong with that 
(i’m not gonna pretend i dps compare my chars anywhere near that extensively either, beyond “assumption and feel” )
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Just ran SR 30-31 now, with only 1 point left in raging tempest (put 3 into presence of virtue and the rest into volcanic stride). Cleverly I did not do a run with raging tempest maxed just before that, so I can only use my memories from previous runs.
Anyway, the runs seemed pretty smooth, I did not notice any big change.
Used the wrong reply button…