Neck - Valdun’s Bounty (Mogdrogen’s Sanctity) (Dread Skull)
Chest - Valdun’s Jacket (Mankind’s Vigil) (Sanctified Bone)
Helm - Valdun’s Hat (Mankind’s Vigil) (Sanctified Bone)
Weapon - Valdun’s Rifle (Potent Outcast’s Might) (Vicious Spikes)
Shoulders - Divinesteel Shoulderguards (Mankind’s Vigil) (Antivenom Salve)
Hands - Grasp of Unchained Might (Mankind’s Vigil) (Unholy Inscription)
Legs - Legwraps of the Tranquil Mind (Mankind’s Vigil) (Antivenom Salve)
Feet - Golemborn Greaves (Mankind’s Vigil) (Antivenom Salve)
Medal - Mark of Divinity (Dread Skull)
Rings - Open Hand of Mercy AND Closed Fist of Vengeance (Mogdrogen’s Sanctity x2) (2x Corpse Dust)
Belt - Reforged Chains of Oleron (Antivenom Salve) (Mankind’s Vigil)
Relic - Plunderer’s Talisman
Chaos resist is not bad, but so is Aether especially considering 1.0.0.6 rogue Aetherial dungeon. Devs need to improve Aether resist on gear and augments. Getting aether resist through devotions is stupid, and so is chaos resist, but somehow chaos resist is easier to find through gear and both resist is easy to find through devotion but only for a particular build i.e aether resist is found through lightning devotions, chaos resist is found through fire devotions.
Doesn’t Valdun’s set contradict itself a little? It has a 35% combined weapon pool proc for rifle attacks, but focuses on Cadence, which automatically denies weapon pool procs every third hit.
Actually, Cadence denies almost any WPS, because almost 75% of Cadence damage is “concentated” in 3-rd hit. Boosting remaining 25% with WPS is literally pointless.
So, you either focus on WPS and deny Cadence (using Savagery or Fire Strike), either you use Cadence and deny WPS (meaning you deny Valdun’s set essentially)
Unfortunately yes. That’s one of the reasons I’m a bit leery of doing it. However, you’re forgetting that Deadly Advantage is now much more powerful, and it will actually add quite a bit of damage to the non-Cadence hits, and therefore the WPS procs.
Also it has a 50% pool, not 35%. There are 2 25% procs.
Yeah Divinesteel could be good, I did consider it initially, but a lot of the other stats are pretty crap, I’ll play around and see how much of silk swatch swap around can lead to better component bonuses.
Relic choices, there aren’t really any others that could be used for this build. There are a few other viable alternatives ex.
Juggernaut - 5% OA and +1 soldier skills. Proc ain’t great though, might be useful for Crucible.
Zeal - proc is great and other stats are decent.
Nemesis - pet does more damage now, % pierce damage and total speed are nice.
Belgothian’s - decent 100 reduced DA proc, % pierce and other bonuses
Plunderer’s - total damage with % total speed and an ok proc.
Honestly the main goddamn problem with this set, and this build is that, apart from not offering enough resistances, there’s just not that many decent alternatives for a ranged build focusing on pierce damage. For melee there are plenty. And with developer design focusing more on nerfing overpowered sets i.e Deathmarked/Ultos(which for some reason they still haven’t done), rather than buffing other sets/alternatives up to Deathmarked/Ultos, it just seems horrible to try and make other builds. Markovian’s is a great example of an alternative set, but it’s more defensive than offensive. Jajaja found a way to make it very offensive, but it can’t be said for other builds. I wish he were still playing so I could pick his mind about Valdun’s.
I was considering a Harbinger set build but I can’t find many alternatives for that either, not to mention I’d have to convert physical to chaos which seems hard, although the Harbinger set is awesome for a 3pc set.
Harbinger is good.
Converting physical into chaos is pretty easy. You just should take Abomination constellation, and use that awesome proc, that converts 50% physical into chaos. You also get 15% conversion from Slael’s Witchfire transmute and rest can be get with items.
I did a second take on this, mainly reworking the devotions and I think this is much better. Doing some testing…
I have similar equipment but my differing gear is:
Legs - Hellforged Legplates
Shoulders - Merciless Fabius’ Shoulderguard of Mending
Boots - StormTitan Treads
Medal - Badge of Mastery (+skills were useless though)
Sheet DPS around 29k, then 39k with buffs, up to 61k with procs.
I was able to kill moosilauke, but unable to test with other nemeses.
Overall okay-ish but i can just play faster with FS. EDIT: this hits pretty hard with bosses though especially with the penetrating round. Granted skill from rifle is pretty ok both for CC and single target (almost point blank). And yeah my aether resist is low (haven’t bothered with it really)
Still I’m toughing it out myself and seeing what can be done. Hitting 25k crits on multiple mobs in miostly blues stacking straight physical/pierce is far too satisfying to give up.
It stacks everything on one shot but that one shot hits so ridiculously hard at times I don’t even know that I kill heroes until i’m picking up their crap.
Just watch those reflective heroes. I’ve one shot myself before.
He’s plowing through elite right now. The real test comes when i get his stuff together and put him through ultimate/crucible.
Biggest issue i’m having atm is having enough spirit for jewelry.
I’m going to go against the grain here and say that mixing Cadence with other WPS is indeed a very strong combination. The way I see it, Cadence is a very strong skill but it only hits 1/3 times leaving the other 2/3 hits as default weapon strikes. Having WPS in place of your default attack (especially Markovian’s Advantage if you’re running a physical damage setup) greatly increases your DPS and clear speeds.
Another factor is the attack speed cap. Before the cap you could get oodles of AS and basically negate the downtime of Cadence, but now it’s much more difficult to acquire AS on gear/devotion without severely gimping your build, let alone reach the cap.
It may work somewhat with MA, because that WPS debuffs an enemy (though, Blitz upgrade is much better there).
But other WPS? No way! Most WPS do the following - they offer a good %weapon damage increase when triggered.
Let’s take Zolhan’s Technique as example. When maxed, it has 175% weapon damage multiplier and 25% chance to proc. Let’s say it’s used with maxed Savagery, that has 200% weapon damage multiplier itself. Then, 25% of hits will deal 350% Weapon damage, and 75% of hits - 200%, averaging at 237.5% weapon damage (18.75% increase from original value).
Now, let’s use Cadence, that deals 450% weapon damage on every 3-rd hit, thus averaging at 216.67% weapon damage per hit. With ZT, only first two hits are eligible for WPS proc, and average % weapon damage from those hits will be 118.75%. Average %Weapon Damage for Cadence will be 229.17% (5.77% increase from original value).
Now compare a solid 18.75% damage increase to neglible 5.77%, and say that WPS are viable with Cadence, again :).
Salient points, but a few things you’re not factoring into your argument:
1.) Multiple sources of WPS (for instance I have a blademaster who hits 100% of the time with a WPS on top of Cadence)
2.) Multi-hit WPS (the aforementioned Zolhan’s Technique)
3.) WPS skills with life reduction + high weapon damage (e.g. Execute)
4.) Builds that have plenty of +skills that are able to spec easily into the aforementioned WPS without gimping their build.
5.) Equipment with freebies (e.g. Valdun’s set)
Multiple WPS act the same way as single WPS - because their chances just add to total “weapon pool”.
ZT doesnt hit multiple targets with ranged weapon. And even if you take it with melee weapons, do note that Cadence itself is multi-hit (3 targets with Fighting Form). So, the boost from WPS will be even weaker if you consider multi-mob fighting.
Heroes and bosses are almost immune to life reduction anyway, and against trash, it hardly matters. As for added damage - most WPS dont add noticeable non-weapon damage. Including Execution.
Well, you can put 1 point into it, then, i suppose. But dont expect wonder from it.
Usually, those “freebies” mean equipment has worse stats.
Thank you for all the discussions, however WPS for this build is fine, especially those that can do more AOE damage i.e the Cadence WPS proc constantly and really help with AOE.
For now I’ve made a test character and it’s working great. It could definitely be better so I’m going to look at doing some more tweaking. I was able to clear BoC fairly easily, even getting close to 150k crits on Cadence, which is great for bosses. Shar’zul was a bit tough, but I killed him in about 30s with some kiting. Hopefully after more tweaking he’ll be easier.
Haven’t done Mad Queen or any nemesis yet. I think Fabius will be very difficult with this character, although this character is reasonably tanky.
I was going to try and do a Blademaster esque build with maxed Night’s Chill and Pneumatic Burst, however the utility and damage that Demo provides is much more useful than a pierce resist reduction and extra speed/heal. On the other hand, Occultist may also be pretty decent, CoF and Aspect of the Guardian are pretty good too, extra AS from Solael’s and OA/Heal from Blood of Dreeg, this easily beats Nightblade but may not be as good as Demo.
Btw Fragmenting Round is awesome. It’s definitely worth using on CD and I was having almost zero energy regen problems. I’ll update OP with gear and grimcalc later.
On another note I tried Harbinger but it’s so squishy, 8k health with full augments is not great and I was getting smothered. It looks really flashy though, but the damage still seems low compared to Cadence. Perhaps others will have better luck.
Not exactly on topic, but has anyone tried dual wield cadence since the buffs? I never tried dw pistol cadence before and kinda wanted to give it a whirl cause fuck it why not
Would appreciate if you can share your modified setup, thanks! I’ll probably swap some points into Markovian’s Advantage i forgot about that. Kinda short on points for BWC for the resist reduction…
Updated new build, bastion took about 15 minutes but can definitely be improved. Video is going to be difficult without a better video cutter. Shar’zul took about 30s but can also definitely be improved. Have not tested any nemesis yet, a bit drunk today, maybe tomorrow.
