If we had some gears that support %50 fire %50 cold Saboteur, it would be great but all gears support either complete fire or complete cold and the only thing coincides with them is phys>cold or phys>fire conversion on weapons.
But now it occured to me If they make it completely elemental, like splitted evenly to fire&cold&lightning then it would be very cool but that kinda rework also affects the gears supports these weapons so I don’t think devs spend their time to create such archetype and alter the gears around it.
I think Balance rings or Reign of Fire+Ice are the only ones? Only ones N&O builds are gonna use more or less.
Either way, I feel like Crate wants hybrid Fire+Cold to be Nex/Ortus’s identity rather than it leaning into full converting one or the other by player choice/gear as there’s a lot of other options for both routes already. If hybrid Fire+Cold is missing gear or some pieces that try to support it are plain bad (like how Mythical Sellecor’s March has no relevant/strong skill bonuses, no CC resistances and low-ish % damage) then I’d say it’s support itemisation is what needs improving rather than the weapons themselves.
Yeah but we know there is also no devotion route for that kind of split damage; you either focus on elemental damage route and choose not to get Rumor& Eldritch Fire or you gonna try to increase RR for your both damage type. At this point in the game, making such archetype viable is much more work than increasing QoL by changing weapon type.
Meteor Shower + Whirlpool are both easy to grab with Eldritch Fire+Rumor right? Especially as you don’t need flat RR devotions. Or instead, seeing as the set has full Acid->Fire+Cold conversion, Meteor Shower + Yugol should be possible with plenty of spare points and gives Saboteur a source of damage reduction.
Magi+Torch&Yugol; not much freedom https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2BXpezZ maybe you can save a few points by taking Fox+ Green Crossroads instead Magi and Hawk.
Torch & Leviathan path should be easy to manage. You’d want Fire Strike on either Eldritch Fire or Rumor as these are the hardest to proc by far. Blade Spirits should probably handle the other fine as well I think. Meteor Shower and Whirlpool both have high base proc chances and only need to be procced once every 2 or 3 seconds, so something like Mines or Shadow Strike should work fine. I’m leaving out transmuted BWC even though it would normally be a good Demo proccer as you won’t have enough skill points for it, it bloats skill rotation on DW melee and won’t have full uptime if just 1 pointed.
Only problem with the Magi+Torch+Yugol route is that you have to find good proccers for Rumor, Eldritch Fire and Fissure if you care about being optimal.
Eh, maybe it’s just that I don’t play DW melee even remotely as much as you Ford so my assumption that hybrid Fire+Cold melee being good is completely wrong . If there are too many problems to work around then I’ll take your word for it.
For such archetype work, we also need %100 lightning>fire since chaos will be cold. Cold flat is higher due to mods and lethal assault. There are elemental gears to use but you really can’t get equally split with Saboteur. If there was such gear that supports Cold&Lightning on Spellbreaker, that would be much much easier to adjust Some lightning RR to VoS and Voila! ofc you need to use Beronath as AA.
You forgot a my first ever posted build - a Fire/Cold Pyromancer:
Although it was improved with the SR set and is decent, but the damage could be much better if the swords were daggers. Last version is this: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/RZR8EBr2
I’ve made several suggestion threads for this set to no avail. Primarily I was hoping for Occultist support to be added, but changing to daggers would be great.
Honestly, I feel that this set should stay as Fire/Cold mix like the Elemental Balance rings.
Yeah I can agree with Nery. Probably the best way to approach this is to add something like 25% phys to fire and 25% phys to cold to either Fire Strike or Flame Touched (so basically what Evil_Baka said).
Chillflame is pretty bad though. I tried it once and… don’t wan’t to anymore. I mean, cold Sabo has so many toys right now, that this weapon is rendered useless. It has global fire to cold? Well, I can say with confidence that this conversion is one of the most abundant ones in the game as of right now. Which isn’t bad per se, but that skill mod with 100% fire to cold to Fire Strike is redundant. So what it does is just some flat cold to FS and that’s it?
I say leave global conversion, but change FS mod to 50% chaos to cold so you could either use two of those weapons and get ~100% cold FS, or use one and Galeslice’s medal to get the same result. Also maybe replace flat cold to FS with %WD to it.
What I’m offering does not prevent that kind of playstyle. Just don’t use fire>cold, or cold>fire gears and voila, you’ll have %50 cold & %50 fire build; and even better than sword version since %50 chaos will be cold and %50 will be fire.
I said rework, yeah it’s a big word but actually it’s just weapon type change and some touchings on chaos>cold conversion.
Yes one of the existing problems with this weapon set is to get high %damage stacking. Any defensive setup leave you with %1800/1900 on your base damage type which is sucks.
Really, the main 2 issues I see when looking at these swords are:
The physical base.
Lack of Cold + Fire itemization (Outside of Reign of Ice & Fire/Elemental Balance rings)
Outside of which, you rely on +Elemental damage gear to improve both damage types or you bypass the design of the swords and convert to try and make full Fire or full Cold damage.
The best I’ve build I’ve been able to theorycraft around the swords has been a Rune + SS Infiltrator which hits ~1950% Fire and ~2000% Cold damage but weapon damage is pretty trash due to the lack of phys conversion.
If they were made into daggers with pure Fire and Cold damage and replace the Phys conversion for Cold and Fire damage bonuses (So they BOTH improve both damage types) and had some other Fire + Cold gear to support them they’d be pretty sweet allowing for nice pure Fire, pure Cold or Cold + Fire builds.
Agreed, the physical base is problematic and hard to convert, but while changing that does boost damage at the very least, it still doesn’t really achieve what I think the intended purpose of the swords is…which is a cold+fire build.
I think the main problem is a lot of the gear that you’d ideally want if you were trying to stick to the spirit of the weapons actively interferes with the concept. Galeslice’s Mark has good bonuses but shifts you to cold. Ember’s Calling, at least the relevant parts of it you’d use even individually (like the medal), shift you to fire. Mythical Chains of Nightfire shift you to cold again, so if you want a “neutral” demo belt you have to go for well-rolled Chains of Ordas (or accept the more fire-favoured Mythical Ulzuin’s Torment with its nonexistent resistances and useless retal affixes). Meanwhile, Mythical Windborne Greaves, which feature some nice bonuses for the boot slot for both of the core masteries, are cold only. Mythical Nighthunter’s Chestguard provides beautiful skill bonuses to Sabo skills and, you guessed it, supports cold only and converts from fire. No Demo relic supports Cold or Elemental, only Fire, while on the opposite end no Nightblade relic supports Fire or Elemental, only Cold. Even if you try to go down the middle on your other gear and pick something silly like the Mageslayer Set for its RR and elemental bonuses, you’re hampered by lack of attack speed on the gloves so you’re almost better off taking the neutral SR set and something with mostly irrelevant stats like the Dawnshard gloves, because at least those feature attack speed, flat dmg and don’t go only cold or only fire like most other options.
Essentially the identity of the weapons is counter to the directions all suitable gear pushes you in. There’s like a 90% chance that if you browse through the list of items and find one with at least two good skill bonuses for N&O, it will be pulling you in only one of the two elemental directions at a detriment to the other. And Nex&Ortus are just sitting there stubbornly going “No, we’re Fire AND Ice. And Physical. With Pierce % conversion. Deal with it.” It’s like they live in their own little world.
If you were to just shave off the damage conversions from Chains of Nightfire, Nighthunter’s Chestguard, some of the medals, it would be so smooth and so easy to make a N&O build the way it was always supposed to be made. But of course you can’t do that cause removing those conversions breaks dozens of other builds that rely on them. So either N&O require an entire new lineup of gear to go along with them, or they need a major rework. More major than just changing the base damage types, cause you’ll still be fighting the conversions all over your gear slots.
this has been my favorite build with them recently https://www.grimtools.com/calc/L2JvpLa2 ~5min crucible 170
although a cold version with random gear pieces will be faster instead of using the set.
. If there are too many problems to work around then I’ll take your word for it.
