it was explained somewhere (OP?), Chinese community i think it was?, brought to light to toxic gang the benefits of crit dmg and crit scaling because they were stacking crazy OA already, this lead to new crit meta in general, specially for skills/builds with attacks that had innate crit scaling (like AAR etc).
Lee also already had a concept build prior, showcasing that high OA was also a benefit in ex Ravager clear, because going from, numbers pulled from butt, 80% hit chance vs 100%(3k vs 3500oa), meant both better lifesteal and dps thus better clear. *obviously not universal and iirc he also wanted to show another point in terms of squish pre 1.2? or something/swiss cheese memory
From personal experience: High OA + crit plays much better even if you are not aiming for super fast clear speeds, because there is something very satisfying about seeing those giant 2.5 damage crits pop up and take down heroes in a single hit.
My own builds are now also almost all in the 3500-4000 effective OA range.
One of the major differences is archetype. In previous top 20 version, there were abundance of Nightblade DW builds. For once, they’re often unable to stack that much OA, even with cunning dump, and the critical damage is pretty low. This iteration is full of casters/hybrids with baked-in crit, on top of substantial global crit, so pushing OA is invaluable. DW Nightblades tested didn’t get 4k OA like casters. You can see for example DW Reaper vs Chill, and they are both using same MoD exclusive skill.
That applied to some of the older builds, but not all.
Last top 20 build number 1 is a Korba Trickster with an innate 45% crit damage, that’s quite significant. But only 3.1K OA.
Being unfashionable, I made a Korba trickster this patch, with 59% crit damage and 3600OA in Grimtools. Still not top 20 material, but a solid melee character who happily jumped on the OA/Crit bandwagon. And that’s on a build that doesn’t even use cunning.
I’m sure the folks here could have gotten higher OA last time if they’d prioritised that. A lot of the builds here do not just rely on baked in crit but go out of their way to pick devotions and whatnot that add extra crit multiplier damage.
Last time around it just wasn’t considered as much a priority.
We could’ve for some melees, yes, for some it was unattainable without selling too many defensive stats. Bottom line is that pure melee Nighblades fell off and we wrote about it in the op.
1.3 sees some of the melees come back to the top but none of those are classical melee nightblades. In fact one pure melee Nightblade that is near the top of the foodchain for me is Warborn Blademaster. Otherwise being pure melee still kinda sucks in 1.3 unless you are an Avenger or Warborn (or top22 Archon build from this top20) or few other exceptions.
From messing around myself, in both 1.2.16 and PT 1.3 increasing OA does actually seem to help. Not always mind you (hello Fire EoR lawl), but usually it works. And also OA shred and stacking it can help a lot too, especially when a build does not have access to enough OA.
Yeah, the loss of PR from Dual Blades definitely didn’t help with Nightblade’s defences, because armour stacking only helps if you can get over 3K and even then a shield or other forms of damage mitigation are more effective
Sigils Spam build works well in Ascendant mode, though it can’t now run easily in SR34-35 on Ultimate due to some of the new nemesi, which are now the most dangerous bosses…
Just a quick question to the participants in this amazing build test: Do you guys plan to update the list with min-maxed ascension bonuses, or have you moved on?
The topic of ascends has been a bit contentious within that group. Spamming 10 of those 5% wps chance affixes would be incredibly unrealistic, and there hasn’t been a consensus yet on what a realisitc ascension setup would be. That would require actually playing the game legit and getting to that point and as far as I know, no one among the group has gotten there yet on their legit playthroughs (except those who were praetorians)
Making a character with full ascends requires a LOT more farming. I’m far from sure I will have the patience or interest to do that for all my 25+ builds. And there’s veterans out there with many, many more builds.
Obviously doing it will result in stronger characters than a build with no ascends. But I can easily see build guides starting to distinguish between “Build with ascend bonuses” and “Build without ascend bonuses” for this reason.
Since the top 20 is about player-defined metrics anyway, I can likewise see a “Top twenty strongest no ascend builds” being just as or more interesting as a “Top twenty max ascend builds”
Same as previously for double rares, where most build guides and more recent top-20s assumed there would not be any.
For this guide, I’m not sure how useful that would be even if they did do it. Because a LOT more changed than just the ascends. New items, a few more skillpoints, the whole potion thing, etc.
And targeted affix preference farming also changes the definition of what a “realistic” single rare component is. Vitality damage on a cold item? No longer such a long shot.
All in all, I suspect that it would be much more logical to start over with a new top X builds than try to update these ones to account for all the changes. You could put a lot of work into updating this and still end up with very big gaps.
Personally, I believe that having a distinguish between build with no bonuses and build with max bonuses would be great, since I believe there will be people trying to farm ascended affixes (but I don’t know what is the number of realistic affixes one can farm).
Not my video, but I’m thinking Mystic Harbinger has high potential to end up as Top 20 just due to the sheer output you can do with Onslaught Doombolt (10mil Doombolt is possible with the build).
The fact a Tanky setup is possible to be able to facetank Ravager and delete him in 17 seconds doubles up my speculation.
