pretty much the title. this is my 2nd or 3rd time I tried making stormheart Pyromancer, and again I failed quite miserably.
as you can see, stats and resists are decent, FS tooltip with rings’ procs is up to 107k, which is really fat flat but …
I did like 6 or 7 runs and wasn’t able to finish any of them.
death at 170
death at 170
death at 157 by a shitton of debuffs
death at 160
death at 165
death at 165
4 deaths were because of Grava, either because of him just destroying you by his attacks or him messing around and spawning the fumble pools.
the problems are:
build is really squishy. 19% ll + 6% mod to FS doesn’t help at all.
low CS on a build that has 160% cs at best is really cancerous, as you waste too much time on casting both cof and mines.
the current bonuses on Stormhearts are too weak and don’t provide enough aoe for a no movement skill-no wps-low aoe melee build.
what could be done:
buff Stormheart dagger. add 16% cs, maybe some CC-resist (like trap one), buff the current mods: increase the arc to cadence and fs to 60’ and number of targets to 2. also third mod to, say, solael’s witchfire could be good.
do sth with Grava. it’s the ultimate nemesis of 95% fire/lightning AA builds, especially with current moronic behaviour.
Arcane Mine proc could get a slight buff too, at least getting it’s cd halved and/or arming time reduced.
I know that @Nery and @banana_peel both tried builds with Stormhearts so they can probably contribute to this thread.
Don’t get me wrong, but somehow I think a dw melee build with 2500 da, ~1600 armor (with 92% absorption), and 25 physical res should not work that well in a enemy rich environment - somewhere should be a bottom line on the current trend to ignore defensive values - but likely that just me. :dunno:
it’s not a trend to ignore defensive values, but high DA is not a panacea, same for phys res - I’ve made and posted builds that live very well with either quite low phys res, or low da. They may be “ignored” if you have other layers of defence, but if you have nothing except blastshield, hen you definitely want to have some obscene damage to kill enemies before they kill you.
and that’s the key - no high DA or 100% absorb on 1600 armor will save you from fumbles or disrupts when you miss half of your attacks, cannot leech and then die.
I used the obvious low hanging fruits for my “argument”. That the complete defensive value of a build is the sum of multiple levels - and the mentioned values are only of them - is clear. Also, I know that builds with comparable values as the build above have worked (I likely would however disagree with you and say that this is not necessarily good). And that fumble has a rather low number of hard counters is also clear (and the number of counters that are not an effective dps loss is - lets say - rather limited).
That player skill is also an important feature and allows a stronger offensive vs defensive focus is nothing to debate (and I would likely die with a build at level 160 or lower which allows you to finish 170 rather reliable). However, there is now a complete different value of let say 3000 OA vs 3000 DA. High OA builds have some sense (or are even needed if crits are necessary), high DA builds are seen as waste (almost never seen worth the investment). The damage output itself is more often than not the strongest offensive - and defensive feature of a build (adcth, kill them before they hit or debuff your character, … - with all its implication e.g. importance of RR)., while the pure defensive values have become of less worth over the years (if they are above a certain threshold that has become lower and lower for some values).
Sorry for derailing your feedback thread - my “points” itself are only rather losely related to your build and your specific feedback about the weapon.
Grava pools can be really annoying on some melee builds
and what’s worse is it can also be so super inconsistent you don’t really know what might help
in one fight you might actually survive him, because you lucked out a bit on the fumble RNG, and got juuust enough hits in to maintain survivable sustain. Then on another fight you die before you even get him down to 50% hp
So you try to up your sustain, double your lifestal to try alleviate the missed sustain hits so you’ll survive this time
and then you still somehow end up and got the same result, a fight where you win and a fight where you die before his HP is even close to 0, because this time you still got just enough fumbles to not last you through…
idono if maybe reducing the radius of the pools and or their speed so you can stutter step him a bit better will help?
Even though Possession/Blast Shield/Ghoul combo looks impressive on paper, build is paper thin and have really really serious surviving issues. Low health for instance is quite nasty for melee attacker.
Grava is next level of difficulty. Basically super boss able to sneak in Crucible arena undetected. I mean even with double skull (my GT have single) you will never kill him in time before he destroy you. Even single Grava without other nemeses will be a challenge and in Crucible for instance he’s passively buffing other nems chances to kill you. I like Crystallum approach with added racial boost to Chtonics and in result Archon is actually proper single target killer even with less sheet DPS.
FS is weaker default melee attack compared to Savagery, so need something ‘‘extra’’ to justify being used for lightning DW melee.
Archon DW Crystallum version with less physical resistance and less DA is actually way better.
Can confirm, Stormheart is still bad. Tried Sabo with them and it was much worse than dual Crystallum Trickster. 90 degree arc from two of them feels underwhelming, 120 from 2 Crystallum is much better and actually allows for consistent AoE melee hits.
I support arc increase, also suggest phys to lightning conversion for FS (similar to Blazeheart) instead of fire to lightning which does absolutely nothing for the weapon that already converts fire globally. Also arc + targets mode for Cadence is whatever, leech or even DR for it would be better.
There is no point in any bottom lines. The game has multiple mitigation mechanics, DA and armor are only two of them and not the most important. I have a 1700 armor (92% absorb), 24% phys res, 2690 DA DW build that facetanks Ravager.
And from experience i can say with 99% certainty that if forementioned build had twice the armor and phys res values, it would still die to Grava pretty often. Defensive stats don’t mean a whole lot if you are not gaining the health back.
so I tried to do some more runs, actually managed to finish 2 of them - by 5:30 and 5:14 (the second was w/o Grava luckily). build feels awkward with quite low aoe and bad sustain.
imo, alongside with increasing the arc/targets number to FS some kind of mod to Solael’s Witchfire could be added as well, like some flat/% lightning and some %HP, as pyro definitely lacks it and witchblade doesn’t have a ton of it as well.
changing the conversion for FS from fire>li to phys>li is also highly appreciated.