I’d like to expand a little more on my original post about my current Cold Pet build with the Winter King sword. Here is the current version of the build.
I’m starting to have problems with damage output and i believe the culprit to be the lack of full conversion of Physical to Cold. The Heart of the Winter King aura only gives 50% conversion and it’s pretty obvious that this is meant to incentivize the usage of the sword with the crown. Except that this isn’t good because this is the only incentive and it’s starting to feel like an obligation.
I have committed a lot of my devotions to RR and it’s starting to feel like this isn’t enough. My Pets deal 50% cold and 50% physical but i don’t have any phys RR (only flat from Bysmiel’s Command) and the damage feels wasted because of that. I have a lot of cold and elemental RR and i believe the damage output would be a lot higher if i had full conversion. However, if i drop the beastcaller helm for the crown then i’m still losing a ton of damage because of the loss of the second briarthorn.
My suggestion remains the same: incentivize the usage of the sword + crown combo a little more by making them a two piece set with some minor bonuses. I have another suggestion, however. Move the cold conversion from the crown into the Heart of the Winter King aura (or directly into the sword) to make these items feel a little more independent from one another when it comes to a Pet build. The crown could keep its lightning to cold conversion and spawn its own little niche of meme Pet builds. This will make these items better for Pets and have zero impact on non-pet builds using them.
My dream would be for this time https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/2488 (Empowered Stake-Thrower) to get a mythical rare or even legenday version with a no cooldown bomb throwing skill.
It’s not so rare as Rentless prefix gives + 4 to Cadence, as well as of Kings suffix + 2 War cry. And they are classless affixes, which are nice. It would be nice if class affixes (mostly prefixes) give some res or total dmg rather than only 1 useful and 1 useless skill bonus.
Mythical Divinesteel Hauberk is a unique armor that focuses on defense, but I haven’t seen anyone using it lately, but I haven’t seen any examples of builds that use it recently. so I think it deserves a little more love.
Physique(4-6%) instead of Constitution is better.
Light Radius looks not too useful as well, but personally I like having this.
As for Toggle Skill, instead of getting some extra resistance, why not change it to 2% max resistance?
Awesome argument. The character I’m playing right now (Warder, 2H with Savagery + Blade arc) is wearing it. You missed my house on your trip around the world.
The build is good enough for the main campaign and the RL dungeons. It is a fun build to play, but its overall efficiency is limited, maybe by the lack of support of the Shaman mastery by vitality-melee related items. Such items usually only support Devouring Swarm (e.g. M. Boneshatter Treads and M. String of Maggots). Of note, M. Wendigomane Leggings does support Blood Pact, but I went for M. Dread Knight’s Legplates for its support to Reaping Strike.
I had to resort using both the Nightshard and the relic Eye of the Storm to only get a meager +2 to all skills in Shaman. In order to further boost its survivability I also had to resort using both the Shieldmaiden and Obelisk of Menhir constellations to buff my shield-based defense.
Moreover, as @fordprefect noted, we don’t have access to a good pair of gloves combining both flat vitality damage and AS.
change Conduit of Night’s Whisper’s Chaos Phantasmal Blades prefix to be spam blades
now we have so much conversion avail on items it’s simpler to make things work. But the baked in Vitality transmuter on PB means either you sacrifice a ton of native dmg going out of your way to make diff dmg type PB’s work, or you go no transmuter and nuke with a bit of CDR
However, it’s basically impossible to stack CDR on chaos PB, as all other mods give cold transmuting aside from groble offhand.
Removing vit transmuter on Frenetic Throw i understand could open up spamPB too easily to too many dmg types/being a balance overhaul nightmare
But since there are 0 items with chaos dmg and PBline support, means you not only do you have to go out of your way to get conversion, you also have to sacrifice +%bonus dmg for PB+skills;
^while still ending up with less than meh cdr-less “nuke” or lackluster spam blades https://www.grimtools.com/calc/62aalqO2
I think it’s time to mention one of the classes that has fallen off the meta long ago and, unfortunately, never returned to it. The Tactician.
so, Tactician could be built in several different ways, like
elemental (dw Cadence with Malakors or FW with Arcanor)
pierce (dw with Reavers or 2H with Nadaan)
phys (Octavius)
but all of these concepts are struggling to be good. the reasons are:
for elemental - Inq has 0 flat in mastery, elemental flat is also almost non-present in Devos or has very low values to be significant. Also both ele Cadence and FW has very poor itemisation support (and FW is a weak skill iself) which results in poor performance. The last vid of Malakors I saw was like 5:48 or sth like that. And another big (not saying HUGE) problem is that Tactician is a 1-RR-mastery, which is especially crucial when talking about ele damage.
for pierce - Tactician is just a beta-version of Blademaster. Less AS, less flat, less mobility, more buttons to press.
for phys - so, one day Octavius tactician was one of the best phys builds but since then both he and IT damage lost their power.
I specially made a build to see how the original concept performs now: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/lNkG4MQN
as you can see, there are some issues with build and set itself:
very low OA for phys build, and set lacks flat or % OA bonuses terribly.
no phys RR except conduit
also resists are modest, something like ele/poison resists could be added to helm/shoulders.
rune gameplay is very cancerous and unpleasant. it requires super-positioning and predicting, the charge time is too long.
fw part is extremely weak and does almost nothing.
crucible video:
usual runs are about 6:30 which is very long. Even Spellscourge is faster despite having 0 phys RR.
Can do SR75-76 safely but slowly, but was a non-starter in crucible when @romanN1 tried it, couldn’t finish because you get overwhelmed and damage isn’t there. Arguable if it needs a buff, but I would never purposefully play this for physical cadence when deathdealer is sitting out there now (which performs well but not over the top imo). Non passthrough, elemental damage unconverted inquisitor wps just don’t provide any AoE clearing. Maybe part octavious set for some conversion would help?
My suggestion - as stated many times before (in a now closed threat)-
Get us an Poison and/or Acid-Albrecht’s-Aether-Ray to diversify all the different types of rays around the game.
What would it accomplish: More diversity for AAR-lovers, creative builds (Poison Arca - Occultist // Arca - Nightblade // Arca - Oathkeeper with Acid and Posion-damage) and to distribute power between the rays in general.
How could it be accomplished: By adding a suffix on an item, for instance a special "CONDUIT-"stuff, (C. o. acidious deeds) / (C. o. poisonous desires) which converts the types as stated down below. Should not be that difficult for our lovely mods.
Converting details: It could be stated that on said item with a suffix or a newly generated one “100% Aether Damage is converted to Acid”, or “100% Aether damage is converted to Poison, 100% Fire damage is converted to Acid” or something in between those lines. I would go with Aether-Acid / Fire-Poison, since it is a unique and interesting conversion for this niche-build.
Difficulty in making this change: Absolutely no difficulty involved. In fact, Stupid_Dragon has created such an item and even a graphic-update in a closed thread regarding Acid-AAR and / or Bleeding-AAR, but bleeding is off-topic and too difficult for now.
Also suggesting: Of course you can do this with the one, I think, Basilisk-Amulett that lets you convert damage via Dreegs Blood, I know. But this has much more flavor with an actual item, the Devo-Paths would be super-unique and we NEED this graphics-update with a spicy acid-green-toxic-looking aether ray. I can’t stress it enough, so please - Dreeg would be so proud. Zantai, I besiege you - let this wish be granted by thy eternal grace. And with the help of this wonderful community.
Edit: changed threat to thread - I am sorry, this is meant to be a constructive post and not something that urgently pressed.
Here comes the split. Nice keep the heat on guys… So people can focus on this thread(not threat) instead my fiery mistake of doing 3x 75-76 runs without augments with Fire Saboteur
