It looks like it should be a completely viable build that you can dedicate your entire setup around. You even have access to 100% resist reduction without requiring any gear, which on paper should make it viable against enemies with any reasonable amount of bleed resistance.
Then you realize a rather large portion of the enemies you fight have 150% bleed resistance. It just feels sooooo shitty to enter the Old Archovia area when you’re dealing 1/4 the amount of damage you normally do. I actually gave up on focusing on bleed simply because I don’t like the idea of being completely inept in specific circumstances. If I want to do Steps of Torment, I shouldn’t be reluctant to go there because those enemies (and mostly only those enemies) specifically counter my build.
Focusing on bleed feels great 90% of the time, it looks viable and as long as you don’t run into any skeletons or ghosts it is completely viable. But the fact that playing bleed makes certain sections of the game unplayably bad means it’s a trap for those who don’t know any better, and unless you’re at the very end-game where you can choose where to farm and where not to farm, these areas are unavoidable.
To be completely fair, they shouldn’t be affected by vitality, %health reduction, poison and pierce, as well ghosts shouldn’t be affected by physical and probably cold. Wait, it’s half of the damage types.
Bleeding is completly viable even against undead, yes they take longer to kill, but most bleeding builds also deal physical or another secondary damage type.
Check out the bleeding threads that are already around, you might find some insight there.
Favoring 1 damage type builds is kind of boring, honestly, and it would pigeonhole everyone into those builds. Different mobs having different resistances and damage types allows for more gear variety, switchable sets, and makes friends in multiplayer a lot more desirable.
Your observations are correct. It’s a trap.
There are monster types highly resistant to it, along with the majority of heroes and bosses. So it’s unreliable, as your main source of damage isn’t supposed to betray you when you need it most.
Also we recently got pleasantly surprised by nerfs to the sources of resistance reduction.
And there’s more. As already said, if you invest full in, you risk of getting caught pants down by resistant mobs. If you invest partially, to make it serve as an additional source of damage, in late elite and ultimate it provides insignificant amounts of damage, unable to cut through the high monster hp. And while they bleed, but stay alive, they damage you. It’s a bad idea to keep mobs in ultimate alive for long.
This said, the only reliable sources of damage are direct ones. As they are affected by attack/cast speed as well and can be increased significantly in numbers through skills and devotions, much more than DoTs.
No matter DoTs are able to crit now, a great part of them still suck, for the above mentioned reasons.
Did you give up on the trade sim, or just wasting some time here.
On a serious note, a lot of games use damage amplification for things like this: i.e., something immune to bleeding damage could be extra sensitive to holy damage, so now you don’t need as much holy damage to make it work.
The classic one for skeletons is being sensitive to bludgeoning weapons…
Benn’Jahr is a little tough, Alkamos being undead, but what are the others from this majority? I found it on the contrary super effective against any hero and boss mobs.
There is no holy/unholy magic dichotomy in GD, so healing doing damage to undead (which aren’t even dead to begin with, just cursed by immortality) doesn’t make sense.
It is an immortality curse, at least the Arkovia ones. Uroboruk, founder of Death’s Vigil and noted immortal was held in Arkovia and tortured for the secret of immortality. So he gave it to them…but not quite in the way they expected.
I know about that, but that still doesn’t really explain the physics of it. The “physics” of it is what would determine the kind of damage they’d be sensitive to, if any. From what I know, this and the lore of the damage systems in general hasn’t really been touched upon TOO much but I haven’t played beyond AII yet.
Unless there is something unintuitive going on with the way resists work, my math says they have 150% resistance.
I have 100% resist reduction, and they’re taking around half as much damage as my tooltip shows. Other mobs take around double the damage my tooltip shows.
Additionally, when I bleed mobs with only one source of resist reduction, they take less than 100 damage per tick (probably 100% resist, capped at 80?).
I play a bleed build now to switch it up and think it works very well on most bosses(its not meant for trash really, they die too fast). non resistant (on ultimate)can tick for 40000 plus a second and resistant undead bosses still 15000+ a second, that’s independent of what other things you hit with. I feel its better against bosses than lightning for a shaman. Lightning shaman destroys trash and definitely has tons of gear made for it(2 level 75 2handed lightning weapons?) I still do areas like SoT just fine.
Do you mean you have 100% from different sources or do you have like… 50% and 50 flat? Since if you only have percentage values on reduction they will not actually stack which could explain what you see, you reduce the 100% by 50% or the 0% by 50% which should then give either half the damage on tooltip or double of it… shouldn’t it?
I’m talking about 100% resist reduction through combination of Rend and Devouring Swarm.
So against 0-resist enemies I am dealing 2x damage, and against 150% resist enemies I’m dealing half. The difference between skeletons/ghosts and regular enemies is a factor of four.
