So I tried really really really hard to make use of that Conduit prefix that gives you 16% weapon damage to AAR, but it seems below mediocre, at best. I gathered as much flat Chaos Damage as possible (seems to be the best option to stack because of so many skills granting it), also using 100% Elemental-to-Chaos conversion, but what I got was not good… I got about 55 flat damage added in total (if you can see it that way), which doesn’t sound bad, compared to the Essence flat chaos damage, but I had to sacrifice A LOT for that value. Also, I tried to stack life steal high. But 1/61/51/6=0.5% life steal in total. (1/6 for the 16%, 1/5 for the 20% LS, 1/6 because 55 is about one sixth of the total, already converted AAR damage). 0.5% is nothing, and the flat damage is also not great… So - is this prefix any useful at all?
Any AAR builds that don’t already have an amulet that supports them/they would use can consider using it. Like Essence of the Grim Dawn for Aether/Chaos, conversion ones like Cold has another Conduit or Lightning has Aetherbolt Pendant. Physical uses Essence for baked-in ADCtH looking at grey’s Templar.
I didn’t look for long mind you but I’ve found Fire AAR builds from a few major updates back that use it since they get conversion from medal + weapon and Vitality as they get conversion from weapon + armour.
Edit: I just remembered that it got nerfed from 24% weapon damage to 16% sometime in the past actually so that may effect it’s use on the Fire/Vitality AAR builds I found.
I’ve tried both using the conduit and using essence of grim dawn. Essence give better and bigger leech, while Conduit still need to have big ADCtH. In chaos build Essence is prefered, while in aether and other elemental type the conduit can be used together with the amalgamation MI, on Physical ray using krieg set, you need that conduit for the resist and it provides more skill than Essence.
Yes that’s the entire point of the nerf. Crate doesn’t want conduits outclassing items that are intended for the “normal use” of the skills, and before the nerf every AAR build wanted the conduit cause it’s got better all around defensive stats than essence while giving lifesteal on par with essence.
Right now conduits are intended to be used for gimmicky builds and imo that’s fair (not saying there aren’t strong conduit mods but many of the strong conduits are because the build gimmicks themselves are strong by nature i.e. aether binder and the aether bh mod)
It doesn’t anymore. Revenant + ghoul + seal of blades+restless remains was 16% lifesteal and with the old 24% wd mod you get 3.84% lifesteal. Not to mention AAR had way more damage back then.
I am sorry, but you are wrong here. You calculate the leech AS IF the life steal is applying to whole AAR damage, but instead, it is ONLY applied to the added weapon damage, which in my extremal example amounts to 1/6 of AAR damage. Meaning 3.8*1/6…
Edit: Whereas the Essence % to health amounts to the WHOLE AAR damage.
Wrong. It is applied to the whole AAR damage but the lifesteal scales according to how many %wd you have, up to 100%. Has been known since vanilla days. This is also why old conduit was so strong since everyone gets ghoul and when ghoul procs AAR is basically insta full hp.
Also this applies to every skill with weapon damage and non wd components.
Ok if this is true, then that makes more sense to me. Although then, I find it a little misleading that the lifesteal that is usually only applied to WD is steadily continued to the whole AAR damage…
There’s a lot of mechanics that are not explained properly in the official guide, and most of those will never be changed cause either the playerbase got used to it so much or it’s not worth the workload.
Or Pierce AAR . Like, some flat Pierce damage to AAR and 100% Aether-to-Pierce conversion (maybe some flat Bleeding as well, why not?). Elemental part is converted to Pierce like this https://www.grimtools.com/calc/a2EM0El2 (took Mage Hunter for damage support) - and another meme build is possible.
. Like, some flat Pierce damage to AAR and 100% Aether-to-Pierce conversion (maybe some flat Bleeding as well, why not?). Elemental part is converted to Pierce like this