By a wide margin.
http://www.grimtools.com/db/itemsets/114
TL;DR - Darkblaze Garb is Darkblaze GarbAGE because it fundamentally does everything wrong that it possibly could.
I cannot find a single redeeming quality of the set other than the fact that the headgear is aesthetically amazing.
Let’s review what Darkblaze is:
- A 1H Pistol Attack Speed set that gives bonuses to Fire Strike and Vulnerability.
- Primarily centered around Chaos Damage, converting and adding Chaos Damage to Fire Strike and having a global Fire->Chaos conversion.
Simple enough? And sounds good in theory; since Fire Strike already has innate Chaos Damage from Brimstone and because Pyromancer can give you a lot of flat Chaos from Solael’s Witchfire and Possession, you should reasonably be able to stack up a lot of raw damage potential. So what went wrong?
Well, slots, for one. The choice of slot usage for the Darkblaze Garb somewhat-accidentally makes the set an extraordinarily terrible choice to go 4/4 with. Why? Every single piece of the Darkblaze Garb is in a slot where you could alternatively get +1 all skills (or more). You give up a minimum of +4 all skills (granted, the amulet gives you +1 demo) for a set involving one of the most point-intensive and squishiest mastery combos in the entire game. This is terrible, but it gets worse.
You also give up a lot of relic synergy. There’s a fantastic relic known as Korvaak’s Deception that would work wonders with the set…except it doesn’t, because its skill (while amazing) requires a melee weapon. And the Darkblaze is stuck to a pistol. The other Chaos/Fire/Pyromancer relics don’t boost aspects of your character that you need to focus on, either. So at this point you have a dearth of +skills and are taking some lackluster relic that you’re probably only making 50% use out of. This is terrible, but it gets worse.
Darkblaze Garb is a Chaos Vulnerability set which converts most of your Fire Damage to Chaos Damage. But Vulnerability does nothing to reduce enemies’ Chaos Resistance, only their Elemental Resistance. Meaning converting Fire -> Chaos actually reduces your applied damage output overall. Shame the set doesn’t give you any bonuses to Hellfire Mine, although that wouldn’t matter much either (since Hellfire Mine scales terribly too and -Fire Res on Thermite Mine is more efficient…so, again, an applied Damage Loss). This is terrible, but it gets worse.
For a pistol build, there’s exceptionally few reasons to use an offhand or a shield. For Pyromancers, there’s even fewer. Generally you’d want an offhand if you’re scaling Casting Speed somehow, which isn’t unheard of (Arcanum Sigilis PRM, for instance). Pistol/Shield with Soldier also isn’t unheard of, and Soldier is definitely the go-to for that sort of thing with few alternatives. But this set is doing neither, and yet gives no means to dualwield ranged weapons, forcing the loss of ANOTHER item slot. It can’t be the belt, because that’s part of the Darkblaze set, meaning you have to lose another +1 class bonus from your relic or take Pyroclasm Mark, which eats up a medal slot and doesn’t give any Chaos bonuses. You could also take one of the Barrelsmith pistols, but again, you’re giving up Chaos Damage and potentially a +1 class bonus. This is terrible, but it gets worse.
Finally, if for some bizarre reason you do equip the full set, you’re rewarded with some meaningless +skills (since Fire Strike doesn’t scale well in Ultimate ranks and scaling Vulnerability means literally nothing for the build at all) as well as an abhorrently bad cast-speed-scaling granted skill with a large energy cost. Great. Once every three seconds you get a Fire/Chaos version of Callidor’s Tempest with no Weapon Damage whatsoever. Casting this thing is almost guaranteed to be a general dps loss.
How do we fix this? Well, it’s gonna need a lot of work. Lets review what we need:
- We need more +class skills. Many more, probably in set bonuses somewhere. It’s one thing that Darkblaze is eating up a bunch of +class slots, it’s another that Pyromancer needs more points than most other classes.
- We need more -% Chaos Resistance. It doesn’t help that overall -% Chaos Resistance is hard to come by and when it does appear it is not in large doses.
- We don’t need to be focused on CoF/Vulnerability, since even if we had a skillmod for Curse of Frailty with -% Chaos Resistance, it wouldn’t scale with level and wouldn’t have anything to do with the actual parts of the skills themselves.
- We need a means to DW pistols innate to the set, or we need the set to give bonuses to Inquisitor. Actually, Inquisitor beats out Occultist uniformly in almost every regard. Great WPS, DW enabling, -% Chaos Resistance on a Word of Pain modifier, etc. If Darkblaze Garb is meant to be a Pyromancer set through and through, it needs some reason to actually use Occultist.
- We need 4/4 set bonuses that aren’t garbage in every way.
- We need more Attack Speed. As it happens, the Darkblaze pistol has one of the worst possible Base Attack Speed modifiers and yet the set only grants us +21% overall, which isn’t much in light of the aforementioned modifier. Adding Attack Speed to Voidheart Rings, for instance, would go a long way and have amazing synergy with the build.
- Needs Relic support.
Some people have said that Darkblaze Garb should convert Lighting -> Chaos due to the flat Lightning offered by Static Strike. However, unless the set gives +skills to Static Strike so as to up the chance of proccing that Lightning AND also gives -% Chaos Resistance, I see no great benefit from this change. In fact, as mentioned earlier with Fire->Chaos Conversion, without -% Chaos Resistance this would ultimately be a damage loss in the presence of Vulnerability/Thermite Mine.
Discuss.
