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Does the reduced damage debuff from warcry, ulzuin’s wrath, ill omen etc. reduce only the damage output of their melee attacks, or does it also apply to their spells? I’m wondering if this is a complete damage reduction debuff or not. For example if the boss spawns an AoE field of damage or a vulcano that spews fire - will the reduced damage debuff also apply to those abilities? I’m basically just wondering if the reduced damage debuff covers everything (like crystals spawned, boss pets etc.) or if there are exceptions to what this debuff covers. Also wondering if reduced damage debuff is weaker when it counts most - vs bosses.
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I’ve read that life leech is weaker against bosses. Coupled with the danger of being CCd, pathing failure or stuns etc. Does this mean that AdCtH and life leech items like lifesteal nova, or spells like soul siphon - are unreliable and bad vs bosses? Both to my experience and from what I’ve read. The best recovery mechanics are damage absorption, life regeneration, and circuit breaker abilities that I see the community calling it like blast shield, resilience etc that procs at a certain life percentage. When starting to learn and theorycraft the game I put high value on life leech through attacks and spells like soul siphon. But in reality these are weak and unreliable against bosses?
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I’ve gotten feedback that SnB vs 2H melee in ultimate, doesn’t matter that much. Because in ultimate and in endgame content, shields aren’t strong enough to save you from things that would have killed you anyway. And that the exception to this, is if one heavily invest into devotions and have a mastery that buffs shield CD reduction and increases damage blocked. So is it correct that for ultimate and endgame content - a shield is ONLY strong as a defensive layer with heavy investment?
Dmg reduct should cover all, unless the type of dmg reduct specifies something, like Horn of Gandar used to just reduce elemental dmg i think, tho i don’t think there is specific/individual types of dmg reduct now?
whether or not it affects spawn dispensed/things you can’t target i’ve no clue about
Lifesteal might be weaker against bosses but it’s by no means useless and is still your main method of sustain
the others you listed, aside from regen, isn’t methods of sustain but ways of either dmg mitigate or layer defense, but they wont heal you constantly through dmg, so you need lifesteal/some form of constant heals for that to top you off back up, leech being the main way
as far as the shield goes, yes, it only works as defensive layer if you build around it, otherwise it’s nothing but a different type of stat stick
think my most recent “shield”/non-shield build has like 800dmg absorbed with a nice 0 recovery, and 30% block chance lol - absolutely worthless defensively
if you have 0 shield focus, with crap stats on the shield, your shield is worse defensively than an offhand with good stats like phys res etcs.
the benefit shields have is their affix pool make them more likely to come with some nice defensive stats like phys res, which makes it decent for a “stat stick”, but still not much point in taking if your build overall benefits better from an offhand
Either you need to use the shield offensively, Blitz, Aegis etc etc, or you need to focus in it defensively to be of use one way or the other/have reason to equip it
Nullification only reduces elemental damage, i believe.