vs Undead Nemesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nYtbDxpU90&feature=youtu.be
If you only take only cunning, you will have 1000 max (that’s with equipping every semi-decent item with a cunning bonus as well, 800 is more likely on a Conjurer). That’s +400% bleeding. If you go max physique and don’t worry about cunning at all, you will still end up with around 400 (just form mastery and random item/constellation bonuses) which gives you 150% bleeding. This makes the difference of 250% bleeding.
Now take the weapon you mentioned, the Guillotine (this won’t be your engame weapon, you will want the Wildblood Crusher along with the rest of the set). It has around 150% bleeding on it. Do you see where I’m going with this? A massive stat investment ends up being comparable to the bonus from a single item.
In the end, you will have around 1000% bleeding bonus from items/constellations (1200% is more likely since you will focus mainly on bleeding, but let’s take the lower number). 1000% from items/constellations + 150% form base cunning is 1150%, while having the maximum possible cunning gives you 1400%. That’s a 20% increase in your bleeding damage output. Given that at least 1/3 of your total damage will be some spirit-based type (mostly vitality), dumping all of your points into cunning, as well as gearing for it gives you a 13% damage increase in the most generous case.
This is simply not worth the points. Not only will you be losing around 4000 health (when the Heart of the wild’s 40% increase is accounted for, probably more when counting the item/constellation bonuses), you will lose the ability to equip some amazing defensive items (Empowered legs of valor require 970 physique, for example) which is unacceptable. You will also lose defensive ability. 200 DA may not seem like much, but going from 1900 to 1700 will allow random mobs to crit you, diminishing the effectiveness of your armor and creating a whole cascade of bad things.
What about OA? 200 OA is much easier to get trough items than 200 DA, blood of Dreeg alone gives around 150 for comparison.
The only character that can really make use of a huge cunning investment is a Blademaster (the proc variant, not the Shadow strike one). This is because:
a) 25% bonus cunning form Anatomy
b) Field command and Shadow dance allow him to reach 1900 DA with 0 physique
c) On-crit procs are a large portion of his damage, he needs 3000 OA to reliably crit bosses, while most chars are fine with 2300 OA.
d) He does large amounts of bleeding, trauma, physical and, of course, piercing damage, making full use of the cunning bonuses
And even a BM can easily wreck everything with 50 or even 80 points in physique, being only marginally slower and much sturdier.
tl;dr - cunning = bad, physique = very good.
So Melee with high('ish) hit and crit chance (again guessing this doesn’t scale well?)
Which is to say, (in concept) I was going to axe their heads in casting primarily a fighting circle with buffs and debuffs. For those not seeing the “bleed components” (again in theory) bleed sources were:
AXE (primary), Bloody Pox, Feral Hunger proc, and Devouring Swarm.
I greatly appreciate everyone’s input thus far and hope I don’t come across as defensive on this concept… frankly at this point I am kinda on the fence of not doing it.
Grasping vines man, they are amazing, and they rapidly proc Falcon swoop, which is beyond awesome with a 2-hander. Pox is horrible.
The reason I suggested you do not do this build is not because it’s ineffective. I have a Wildblood set version someone suggested a few weeks ago and it works quite nicely, though I rarely play it because I find I have to cast too many things (I’m more of a hold-LMB-things-die kind of guy). The problem is that it only works because of how well certain late game items synergise with certain skills/constellations. Without those items (most notably without +10 to both Grasping wines and Devouring swarm, as well as at least +10% physical resistance form items), the effectiveness drops off dramatically.
It would probably still playable, but it would be slow as fuck and frustrating to farm with.
On the other hand, a Conjurer is a good shells for many different builds. You can always switch to ranged Primal strike or full vitality caster if you get stuck in ultimate, both builds work really even with crap items.
tl;dr - Grasping wines + Falcon + 2-hander = fapfapfapfap, play around with bleeds, if you get bored/frustrated you can always switch to Primal Strike and use that build to farm better items in ultimate.
Origin of the feces…I noticed that even with 16 points in Devouring Swarm…tougher mobs took more/faster damage with my melee hits than from the ticks of the DoT. So I thought to go melee and supplement that with bleed since both classes (or Conjurer class) supplement it very well (in theory).
Though a regen Conjurer (for lack of better wording) does look to be fun…have seen Pohx Kappa video and I know it works lol.
Thankyou all again for feedback
Yeeeeeeah… that build looks like it’s from an older version where Targo and Scales were good on every char. Also, doesn’t look too good either, way too slow even for HC.
If you want a high regen char, go for Witch hunter (DEE variant). You can easily reach 1500 health/sec while maintaining a good damage output. Dual wield Saboteur is also an option. Both are much less item dependent than a bleeding Conjurer.
Put Falcon swoop on Grasping wines!!!1111111oneone
No, rend should be on grasping vines. You have -Bleed resist, -OA and much more damage in a very wide radius. Falcon Swoop doesn’t even remotely compare to that. Rend is the #1 proc priority, therefore it should go on a skill which can proc the most frequently.
Now take the weapon you mentioned, the Guillotine (this won’t be your engame weapon, you will want the Wildblood Crusher along with the rest of the set). It has around 150% bleeding on it. Do you see where I’m going with this? A massive stat investment ends up being comparable to the bonus from a single item.
Better than Vileblood Mantle and Empowered Farmstead Liberator, at least for a warder? I’m not sure about that. The latter two give you not only more bleed damage, but even more -bleed resist and adds +3 to the strongest bleed skill in the game (providing you take its transmuter). Unless you are talking about a Conjurer in which yes, a set like that would be perfect but a Warden is better for a bleed build thanks to blade arc, bleed/phys/internal trauma is the way to go there. They synergise well with the two masteries.
My main toon who’s level 72 and just starting act 4 in Elite runs a bleed build now. He’s a Conjurer and I think that’s the best setup for bleed build, second best being Trickster.
I will show you what I run, Red. I recommend it. Grasping Vines wipes anything in my path. It’s insane sometimes. I only struggle once in a while on bosses because there is no spike damage and my gear needs improvements. I also need some form of energy management because it goes fast. I’m just waiting for Grasping to get nerfed, it does a lot of damage with Rend attached and recharges really fast.
This is my current skill setup, wasn’t 100% on the numbers and my end game devotion setup. Depending on outcomes I might switch a few around, key points are Falcon Swoop, Rend, Kraken and Behemoth for health purposes.
Forgot to mention I also use a 2H Melee weapon for this build because that’s what I like. I rarely have to use Totem, but when I do, I don’t die often unless I’m hit with big spike damage which I always try to avoid where possible.
Warder leaves both of them in the dust due to blade arc/cadence (fighting form) bleed combo. You get more hp, more DA and much more OA. You also have another DoT that compliments the bleeds, internal trauma.
Well this was my first character and definitely not my initial direction or I would have gone that route for sure. I have over 750% bleeding damage so Cadence would be doing some good damage.
Does the Savagery bonus add to bleeding damage? I know with Wendigo out I’ve seen 900% bleeding damage.
I know I certainly like the CoF mix because of the nice long slow it throws on the enemies. Even if I’m up in their faces, most of them are dead before I get there.
Yep. But when you have so much bleeding damage % as it, it’s better adding flat damage. That’s where fighting form shines over it in a bleeding build. Only exception might be if you have enough damage as is, and you want to go for more OA/DA/health regen with tenacity of the boar.
I know I certainly like the CoF mix because of the nice long slow it throws on the enemies. Even if I’m up in their faces, most of them are dead before I get there.
It also has a cool “wuuuuuuu” sound, like like the curses in Diablo II did!
I’m still in Elite so I don’t have all the cool gears yet, but my DPS is around 15,000, so with primary attacks I think they average between 10-22k or so with max Savagery. Mixed with Grasping and Devouring it’s really neat how fast Heroes drop. I rarely have to even break out Wendigo. And yes I utilize Tenacity.
The only place I could say I would prefer Soldier is in some of the boss fights just because of their incredibly high HP.
Also maybe you can help me with this, my energy gets sucked away so fast. Any recommendations there? I’ve been trying to use a few components here and there that boost energy, on my gloves and ring, but I can tell you right now that my DPS could be quite a bit more if not for that.
I use Modrogens (cause who doesn’t when you use Shaman right? Can’t beat that 40% health increase) and the component that gives you Chaos resistance toggle skill.
Savagery provides bonus to bleeding damage, depending on number of stacks. Both flat weapon damage bonus, and percentage. Percentage bonus may be not shown in your character list, but it works. And of course, %weapon damage on Savagery (and WPS skills) affect weapon bleed damage.
No, Rend lasts a long time, has aoe and no cd. You only need to proc it once per fight. It’s best used on Devouring swarm, which you cast at the beginning of the fight and then forget about it.
Falcon needs to fly around all the time, it does massive DPS and lifesteal if you can consistently proc it every time the cd is over.
That’s what I thought, I see the damage go up on Grasping Vine’s bleed when my Savagery bonus goes up.
So how does Falcon actually proc to Grasping? Does it have a chance to come out every second Grasping is up? That part of the game is kind of confusing to me.
Every time a skill creates a dmg instance(and does dmg) it has a chance to proc. So Grasping Vines has a chance to proc every second for every mob caught within it’s effects, making it a verifiable proccing machine 
The real killer tho is %Chance skills that you find on Greens and some Epics/Legs. These have a chance to proc on every damage instance, making DoT builds with a few skills really powerful. As an example… Devouring Swarm plus Grasping Vines plus Bloody Pox will really shine. The trick is to maximise number of dmg instances out at the same time…so DoT’s, Mob Density and Large Scale AoE FTW
Better then that, since Grasping hits 4 times/sec afaik.
Per Mob? That sounds… broken. I dropped it on my Vitality Conjurer due to the physical dmg being an outlier and Sigil of Consumption being amazing for sustain once you start putting points into it.
Grasping Vines and Sigil Consumption kinda mechanically compete for the same place. Low CD, Large AoE, On Click Targeting. Grasping has slow and SoC has Attack Dmg Coverted to Health but they compete for the same skill slot(Rt Click), for me anyway.
Shaman Skills, DoTs anyway seem so OP. You cant build a Vitality character without Devouring Swarm. The dmg% debuff combined with 100% pierce is better than some Skills, imo, You can spend 30pts in Bloody Pox and still be worse off than 16pts in DS, not even considering the extra skill pts.
Anyway Vitality caster is amazing, ill give another look at GV now that i got some devotion skills, considering my builds “gimmick” is proccing x% Doom bolts from gear(Have you seen 4 consecutive Doom Bolts go off at once? OMG it looks amazing :)) it sounds like i better give it due diligence and forget about the Physical dmg, or maybe convert it to another element if i can.At 4 procs a sec i better lol
Yeah it’s X bleeding damage every second and the duration is 4 seconds.
So, 1 Tick every sec. If it was a DoT that was applied to every mob, wouldnt the DoT’s cant stack rule take place. Devouring Swarm also says Bleeding dmg every second, that is x bleeding dmg every sec for y seconds. Nothing in game tells me that it attacks 4 times a second.
http://grimcalc.com/build/JZ9HLS,
GrimCalc and graceful Dusk for that matter both say Bleeding dmg over 1 sec. which would be the same as X bleeding damage for y seconds, if you consider Bleeding damages requirement to be a DoT.
Am i missing something ?
Well if you throw out Devouring first for the bleed resistance, the bleeding damage from Grasping should overwrite Devouring’s bleed damage if that was the case and still proc the same right? I know Rend stays on the mobs when I hit them with Devouring first, all the way through Grasping.
DoTs from different sources stack:
-: Devouring Swarm is a debuff <- it’s own source. So it’s compatible with everything else.
-: Grasping Vine, I am not sure any longer what it is exactly (wasn’t able to play the game for… 2-3 months now ?), but it will stack with Devouring Swarm anyway.
-: Rend is it’s own debuff too. So nothing gets overwritten between these 3 skills.
Everything stacks: the - resist and the bleed damage.
Imagine the mobs having 3 different “square debuff icon” on top of their lifebar, just like you would.
DoTs (bleed, poison, etc) dont trigger offensive constellation procs. Only direct damage/hit with skill does.
Yep, DoTs from different sources stack.