So, mucked around some more today with my Vitality Blade Arc Warder test build and managed to push sheet dps to 220K with the following:
Not bad, and now handles SR75-76 much more smoothly, though it’s health bar yoyo’s significantly still, mainly due to lack of sustain from other sources + somewhat lower armour. But in SR85-86 where I stress test my builds I’ve found that relying on BA alone just doesn’t work. Doesn’t matter how much I stack OA for crits etc, without other skills to provide damage support + the fact Dying God is a must have means it’s too weak. Which lead to only 1 run out 10 getting to the end due to dying at the drop of a hat at due to BA not providing enough sustain even with Bat proccing constantly.
This is in contrast to a Deathknight using the Blood Knight set, which has Counterstrike for damage + adcth support, boni to Bone Harvest that allows you to use Bone Harvest as both an AoE attack and damage boost + Siphon Souls for added damage and sustain.
Doesn’t help I’m tired as hell today, so not the best at piloting lawl.
But I model, that even if I could squeeze more flat physical or vitality damage on to it and maintain resistances it would still be insufficient to match a similar physical BA build, never mind the gold standards of using Spellscourge, or Bloodrager’s sets. Which make BA work by itself due to the damage boni they give it.
There’s a potential solution though - for while bleeding can’t be transmuted to vitality, vitality decay can be added to the weapon as a bonus for BA. As while more flat damage would help, adding vitality decay would enable players to build further into vitality decay for it.
I’ve also tried vitality/bleeding and sadly it was lacklustre as hell despite Howl of the Wendigo seemingly supporting bleed. Probably need Bloodrager’s for that though, but since that mainly supports physical 2 hander BA it might not be that good.
Otherwise, now that my brain recognised it - adding some adcth to the mace would also help on the sustain front without making the mace too OP.
Anyhow, might test out a Spellscourge version lawl, I suspect it might be better. As might a Bloodrager version, though that will be more of a vitality/bleed variant that drops Dying God.
