Are you having faster times with this skill points arrangement?
You put 4 more points in ascension, and reduce point from one that give OA like passive.
Also do you need some prep to kill Avatar of Mogdrogen?
What do you think about rune of vampiric shadows.
I change the one that you put with this , and my SR time got much better. like 3-4 mins .Use it just for dmg and life leech .I’m farming Elite SR from 65-76, and all levels are faster .
I have enough OA, more absorption as well as more damage is better
Put more points in second nod of Ascension for stun res + potion for lightning res
Blink is way more useful on Ultimate, can’t say about Elite.
On Ultimate you just can’t choose the right moment for life leeching with this rune. Your HP rides up and down too fast
Tnx for all the info, I will change skill points as you did and try it out .
This build has a huge flat damage bonus thanks to relic and Lethal Assault. So even little % bonus helps.
If you feel ok with Vampiric Rune, keep use it. At the end, you should be comfortable playing your char
But how do you have so much in Lethal Assault, 21/12 ?
I have all items thate you have and only 16/12
How many skillpoints did you invest in LA?
12, this is max
So you have 12 points invested in LA. From gear you have:
In total +9 to LA, 12+9=21
Yap ,now I see, didin’t change medal and dont have new gloves, thats the diference.
Just hit 100 on HC Ult with this build! Loving every second of it. Very powerful, even without the proper gearing. Working my way towards the venomblade set, but this is doing fine for now
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/nZo4LEEN Found this build on google, but I assume your build is likely the original variant, and obviously more up to date, so I have a couple of questions.
This is my first character, so I might not now some obvious facts, but I hope the questions are reasonable.
First of all, why not Breath of the Belgothian? It basically halves the cooldown of the spell, and also adds in some health regeneration as a bonus, or am I missing something? Considering that it’s such a good healing spell (and it feels that cast time is instant, so you can just spam it), 1 point to halve its cd seems very reasonable to me. Maybe it has soem downsides I’m not aware of, or it’s simply unnecessary, not sure. The only explanation I can think of is that enemies usually just one shot your character, but then it would mean that the build needs some more survivalbility rather than damage, to at least be able to withstand one hit from any opponent (or is it pretty much impossible?). So far I’ve gotten to level 50 on veteran, and most of my deaths were due to distractions, if I concentrate on gameplay it feels nearly impossible to die with health potions and this PB combined. Same question about Nidalla’s Justifiable Ends, isn’t extra CDR and damae worth it over e.g. poitns invested into skills like Belgonian Shears?
Secondly, how exactly % chance to be used effects work? I assume total chance of all such effects can’t be higher than 100%, is that correct? How does it synergise with % chance skills on weapons? e.g. can Venomspines and Smite trigger simultaneously? Since I noticed that you have total 100% chance on such skill triggers from the skill tree.
Also why not softcap/max Nidalla’s Hidden hand if it boosts the damage of all such effects? Or is the boost simply too small to make any difference? I just compared it with Merciless Repertoire, and the latter gives 55 poison damage and 36% to acid and poison per 3 points, while NHH gives 9 acid, 60 poison damage, 26% to acid and poison, extra 10% pierce damage conversion and 4% extra slow for the same 3 points. Of course it only provides bonuses to basic attacks, but aren’t basic attacks a significant part of DPS anyway?
Following this up is another noob question that is crucial to understanding of the build inner workings: how exactly % damage conversion works? We have 2 weapons with 15 +10 % physical to acid damage conversion each, so is the total conversion 50% or bonus applies only to the weapon itself, so actual total conversion would be 25%? We also have Path of the three that grants 15% more, so I assume total conversion should be 65%? And then, when do % modifiers apply, before or after conversion? E.g. if I have 100 physical damage, 0% bonus physical damage and 1000% acid bonus damage as well as 65% conversion. So will the actual extra acid damage we get from conversion be 65 or 715, after all bonuses are applied? I assume there is no double dipping (applying bonuses to physical damage, then converting it and then applying extra bonus to acid damage on top of it, for example).
Another question: how consecration and retribution work? Are they always applied fully, or are they stack based on % from RF stacks? I’m just wondering why do we have a 4% overcap on attack speed without ghoulish hunger or Prismatic Diamond buff, so maybe we can save some points from stuff that usually grants attack speed and spend them on improved survivalbility instead? For example take 5 or more points from consecration and put them into Phantasmal Amor. Or is pierce resistance much less important than overcap on elemental resistances (maybe there are enemies that reduce resistances). Armor rating difference will be less than 15 points, so this seems reasonable to me, unless I don’t know something important. The same question about attack speed overcap: is it really important?
Depending on how exactly % chances on attack work, Belgonian Shears and Whirling death definitely look like good options for some cuts in order to save some more skill points. Belgonian Shears has fixed % weapon damage, so only % chance is affected by rank, while Whirling death has very small scaling with rank, so the effect seems minimal, and the build doesn’t have any problems with multiple targets anyway.
I’m also unconvinced with the gloves choice, Handguards of Perdition really look much better compared to Iceskorn talons. The biggest upsides of Talons are crit damage, Pierce resistance and +2 to Lethal assault, and as I’ve mentioned before, it looks like attack speed is mostly wasted. All the % damage bonuses are mostly for the irrelevant damage types, while +2 points to path of the three is better than +2 points to lethal assault, as it seems. Retribution looks almost completely useless (I think you might even remove the 1 point from that skill and there won’t be any noticeable difference). Frostburn and cold damage are irrelevant for the most part as well. And the difference in armor rating is huge, almost 400 points (3100 instead of 2700 with all buffs). They also help a lot with overcapping elemental resistances and provide extra 1% CDR and slightly higher Offensive ability. Again, I’m not sure how exactly stats work in this game, but I think this boost might be enough to solve survivalbility problems in crucible and SR, possibly sacrificing some speed but improving consistency tremendously. Loss of pierce resistance can be covered by redistributing some points into Phantasmal armor and possibly using some pierce resistance components/auguments, if it’s necessary.
Final question: Is maxed Amaranta Blade Burst actually worth it DPS wise, compared to 1 point investment? Base damage of the skill is 208% weapon damage with 6.4 meters radius, while with 15 points invested we get 295% weapon damage with 7.4 meters radius. I wonder how much damage comes from % weapon damage and how much actually comes from the dots? Also isn’t single target damage a real bottleneck here? So focusing on effects that amplify dot and single target damage such as Nidalla’s Hidden Hand, Clarity of Purpose and Celestial Presence as well as survivalbility (in particular Phantasmal Armor) might have a better overall effect.
Here is the theoretical modification of your build I made using my very limited knowledge that is focused more on survivalbility than damage:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/qNYdEMJZ
How do you think it will perform in Crucible and SR? I would be happy with any kinds of criticism, I just wonder if my thoughts have at least some sense in them, or am I just dead wrong about everything?
I really don’t know how important overcapped stats are, how much impact armor actually has, what is average critical chance with such levels of Offensive ability in crucible and SR, and how impactful Critical damage actually is, how useful is Nidalla’s Hidden Hand and some other abilities you mostly ignored are in practice, whether any types of damage besides poison and acid have any impact on overall DPS, etc.
At the very least I think that if your build is focusing on DPSing using Amaranta Blade Burst, it’s definitely worth soft capping Clarity of Purpose to maximize crit chance in order to trigger those big crits more often. Maybe take some points from Consecration for this, 13 sounds like a sweet spot there. You get over 100 points of OA when ascension is active at the cost of 26 points of DA and 71 points of armor (and 4% elemental resistance overcap). Extra CC reduction might also come in handy.
Can’t say anything about devotions yet, since I didn’t familiarize myself enough with them yet to make any suggestions, but will try to think of some ways to improve them if it’s possible when I level up my character a bit more and get a hang of it.
I like your detailed feedback
You may utilize if you don’t get used to the build. Hiwever, when you learn to pilot, there is no need in CDR for heal. In Cruci you play like a slaughter machine killing everything you see. Your HP rides up and down too fast - hard to take right moment
Yes
Venomspines is a proc. Smite is a WPS. Different WPSs can’t trigger simultaneously, while WPS and item proc can.
NHH boosts only three NB WPS
At first, item mods and transmutes, then global conversion (Path of the Three, for example).
% to damage doesn’t convert
This ->
With NHH boost it deals good gamage by scaling with Righteous Fervor
This ->
100% sure. There is hude difference in DPS between ABB variant and non ABB. RF with WPS boosted by NHH deals less damage then maxed ABB
Build still has one of the fastest Ravager killtime, so single target damage is fine
If you craft your items for stun res, then 8/12 Clarity of Purpose is enough for cup. Trap res is fine, extra 5% res on freeze doesn’t make much sense.
I like that little defensive stats I’m getting by investing only 4 skill points. Extra OA makes less sense while I have good OA rolls on gear
Retribution is always worth 1p on VB, and skill bonuses to it are very welcome. Reason is it’s one of the best scaling DoT (poison) sources, better than Merciless Repertoire.
Dmt disagrees on this but most veterans here do agree: Veil of Shadow is (almost) always worth a softcap. Especially on VB where you need radius for your rr so that ABB hits strong everyone in the radius. This, however, doesn’t really matter if one plays SR only because SR boils down to one-on-ones.
Presence of Virtue is not just for oa. It’s got a pretty well scaling flat DoT dmg (all trauma gets coverted to poison on Fervor). I consider softcapping it whenever possible but not go any further as diminishing returns on oa kick it after 12/12.
Not capping Clarity with Aeon is criminal, imo.
Dual Blades is 5/16 minimum. 1% phys res for 1p is always worth it.
Points for some of the above are in Phantasmal Armor, NHH, maybe Merciless Repertoire. Mid ranks of Merciless scale very badly. Imo if you cannot hardcap it, and got more important things, sometimes it’s better to just 1p it. Especially when you don’t max ABB that uses that flat to the fullest with its high weapon damage.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
Still not sure about couple of moments. First of all, Nidalla’s Hidden Hand. Does it affect only the damage listed on the WPS trigger, or the total damage that is done when the trigger happens? For example Belgothian’s Shears don’t have any pierce damage listed on the skill description, but the build still has 336-497 pierce damage. I assume that’s the number after applying 1021% modifier, so the original pierce damage is 30-44, please correct me if I’m wrong. While acid damage before bonuses is 335-427. So with 23% pierce to acid conversion the average acid damage would be increased by 37x0.23=8.51 before the % damage bonus, and 238 damage after the damage bonus. So every 1% increase in pierce damage conversion will effectively increase the total damage of Belgothian Shears by 6.2. On the other hand, Amarasta’s quick cut has a pierce damage in the skill description, so the basic pierce damage will be 74-88 (81 on average), and it will be multiplied by 3, I assume (since it says 3 hits). As a result total acid damage from this skill will increase by 3x81x0.01x(27.97-11.21)=40.7 extra damage per 1% conversion. Finally, whirling death will have a (56+37)x0.01x(27.97-11.21)=15.6 damage per 1% conversion.
So average autoattack damage increase will be 0.2x(68+26+10.3)=12.5 damage/1% conversion from pierce conversion alone (not including extra % poison damage), since every of the 3 attacks has a 0.2 chance to trigger. Is my math correct, or I misunderstood how conversion works in this scenario? I guess if we take RR into account, actual increased damage will be higher, since we have lower pierce RR than acid RR. So level 12 NHH will provide 30% pierce damage conversion compared to level 5 NHH, so total 375 extra damage from conversion. As well as 160x26.28=4205 poison damage and 25x27.97=700 acid damage per trigger (triple for ACC). So the total average damage increase per basic attack will be 4905x0.2+4905x0.2+4905x3x0.2=4905. And that actually doesn’t take into account the % damage increase from NHH, with it the total increase will be: 388+ from converted pierce damage, 1150 acid damage, 4415 poison damage per attack on average. So it increases on-hit acid damage by roughly 10% and almost doubles poison damage. The numbers look good to me, but the actual question is, how much on hit damage contribute to total DPS. if acid and poison damage only deal 10% of total DPS, then boosting it even by 50% will only increase DPS by 5%, which is not super impressive. But if it’s 40% of DPS, then it’s a different story. I hope I’ll be able to get to the full build quite soon so I can test how it performs with different modifications.
Can you explain how Retribution provides a dot? Does it come from Retaliation damage? I’m not sure I understand how exactly retaliation damage works, I thought it’s just a fixed damage or % of monster damage like in other games, a.k.a. thorns, and I’m used to think that’s it’s basically useless in most games.
Is it correct to assume that -85 extra offensive ability to monsters is essentially the same as +85 extra defensive ability to your hero? If so, then the buff indeed looks worth softcapping. Although I’m not quite sure how exactly OA and DA scale.
Wait, I missed this part. Is internal trauma considered as physical damage, or is Dreeg’s Reproach description outdated? I only see mention of physical damage and fire damage being converted, can’t find anything about internal trauma conversion.
Well, I didn’t understand devotions fully yet, but if you can get a almost 100% upkeep of Ascension, I guess I see where it comes from. Still, isn’t there a softcap on OA where you start getting very little once you reach certain breakpoint? I guess I’ll need to get there myself first to test it out.
I see, it wasn’t quite clear to me how important physical resistance is, for other resistances it seemed that 1% increase per level was very small, but it makes sense that physical is an exception.
Is fantasmal armor that bad? Flat armor seems to synergize pretty well with Perdition set bonuses, so you can get a significant boost in armor rating with it, but again, I’m not sure how useful it actually is. I’ve read that since the last couple of patches the build became less fragile, so I tried to find ways to make it more sustainable with my limited knowledge of game mechanics, but maybe I put the cart before the horse here. I was also surprised by extremely low pierce resistance value compared to other resistances, and Phantasmal armor provides a good boost to that stat. But maybe in crucible/SR it’s mostly irrelevant.
Also it’s good to know that % weapon damage actually takes into account flat bonuses, it makes more sense to max ABB now.
Yes
And you forget about Righteous Fervor that affects your WPSs.
But it was tested many times by @ya1 and then me that ABB outperforms RF+WPSs.
Correct
Internal Trauma is a physical DoT.
Phantasmal armor isn’t that bad, but we have way more important skills to invest.
Retribution provides you flat DoT AND retaliation damage added to attack
Oa shred is not as good as flat da because flat da is affected by +%da bonuses on top of its raw value. Sothat -130 oa is worth maybe +110 da. Still good. I like the radius, though.
Here we go with update for 1.1.4.2
GT link updated, there is no sence in Anatomy of Murder now, so go for extra OA and damage by Presence of Virtue
I follow this build and am now lvl 100, but have gone for acid devotions and Revenant.
Any changes you want to make for this build for the latest patch? I was mainly wondering about the buffed Guardian’s Gaze. Is it worth having with an acid dervish now at the cost of something else?
Update is in plan
Guardian’s Gaze is one the best T1 devotion in the game and definitely worth trying
