Asking advice for Pushing at PL 1.4K

Hi!

Currently GR118 that I can do with Dawn and Valla, Flavor Amulet and Elusive Ring in Cube. I know this is not a dps orientated version, but better to be alive, then lay down on the ground.
Would be better to try with Ballista and Squirt, then CoE in Cube would be a good choice?

What is your advice or experience?

Last time when tried on 105 runs the Ballista and Squirt pair it was not much faster.

With Ballista/Squirt’s you have to have enough in VIT to keep the shield high and then not be in the middle of mobs. As soon as you take a hit, Squirt’s resets and you have to build up that bonus again over time and so does shield. Slotting points into vit (para or gear) takes that away from DPS.

There’s some discussion in another thread here about the efficiency of that combo…

Me personally - I just rolled a primal Valla’s the other day so I’ve been running Valla/Dawn/FoT with CoE cubed for most GRs now (including the 118 top clear I have in S21). It’s a bit squishy at higher levels, but I can live with that.

Can you tell in which one?
Read about quite a few, but not remember where it was it written.
Tried some combination so far, here are my results.

Ballista-Squirt-Elusive ring -> Squirt bonus was not always up and died a few times.
Ballista-Squirt-Coe ring -> Boss was quicker this time, died on some random damage.
Ballista-Flavor-Coe ring -> This was best so far.

^ so youve never tried vallas?

i really think fortress is overrated, at a max 30% shield, you could add that toughness for 240 paragon points into vit. losing 240 pts in dex would(based on your profile stats) be a bit less than 13% dmg loss. if vallas makes up more damage than that, you are gaining damage while adding unconditional toughness.

i would work on playstyle some and add it in slowly, not just 240 at once or you’ll get/keep bad habits not having to worry about dmg.

maybe your profile isnt up to date, but are you using diamonds? and stricken? using fortress and emeralds seems completely counter intuitive.

i would guess you can do low 120s at least at that level

I have issues when running Dawn + Vallas. Dawn is primal and the best primal I’ve ever found. My Vallas is ancient and near primal rolls. I find I can’t kill anything even when grouping well (area damage is near 140).

My highest clear is 119 with Dawn & Fortress with Squirts this season. The Fortress shield stacks replenish quickly and squirts starts to stack. It’s harder on confined levels like Caves and Keeps, but shines in more open maps. I find it’s not important to have all 10 stacks of squirts, but just that you have stacks of squirts. (This was explained very well by Dieoxide in another thread). Of course, you want to keep it up as long as possible, but it dropping off isn’t the end of the world as it comes back fairly quickly and you’ll never be so happy to see a shield pylon lol. My Vit is really low as my health pool isn’t much above 600k, so that needs work, but it’s going fairly well, just needs some optimization that only comes with gear and/or paragon in Vit (which at under paragon 1200 isn’t time yet).

The best advice I can give for pushing is to get more comfortable with positioning, interweaving Hungering Arrows while strafing, and learning when to skip mobs in GRs.

I did a GR118 very very early in season (2 days into season with under 1k paragon) with Yang’s Recurve (for fun). The key here was that I knew when to skip trash and when to clear mobs as well as efficiently clear stuff as I pushed forward.

As for Valla’s vs Fortress. I prefer Fortress as Valla’s doesn’t really help as much with strafe weaving (even without Squirt’s Necklace). That said, Valla’s does help and can provide you more damage throughout the rift (not so much on the boss). You can also try fishing for a good starting map with a good pylon. The season theme can carry you a lot as well if you’re willing to put hundreds (if not thousands) of keys into fishing.

That’s not quite accurate. Remember that the shield gets stronger with more vitality so think of it as a 1.3x toughness multiplier with 2.3% max life/hit (3%/130% = 2.3%).

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Hey man. I think you have bigger issues going on than just the combos you’ve mentioned. Both weapons have equipped have low damage range (not sure about your vallas as you have fortress equipped), and you gear isn’t setup well to run dual wield. You need to have crit chance on your ammy if you’re going to dual wield (since you lose crit chance by not using quiver) and the fact that you had to give up crit damage on rings to get crit chance mean you sacrificed a good bit of crit damage just to do so, which is not doing you any favors.

Your flavor of time amulet leaves a lot to be desired. These are really hard to roll well, but simply having a flavor of time does not compensate for having poor rolls on it. Any ancient amulet with dex/chd/chc or a non ancient cold/chd/chc amulet would be better than running a flavor until you can land one with better stats. Take advantage of the double bounty seasonal buffs for some reforges if you wanna go flavor.

As someone else mentioned, you definitely want to use diamonds in chest/pants instead of emeralds. If you like being a little more tanky, fortress is a fine weapon for that, but it doesn’t mean you are obligated to run squirts with it. What it will allow you to do (with diamonds in gear) is drop elusive ring for CoE to get that damage back without feeling glassy.

In conclusion, If i was in your shoes, I’d continue to work on weapons (or weapon/quiver) and jewelry and focus on getting the right stats. Congrats on your helm though, that is as GG as it gets man.

well thats essentially what i was going for; 4k vit + 1200 ~ same total toughness without using fortress. shield regen is a good point i didnt consider, but with a 30% higher life pool, SS heal will be, what, about 1.3% extra life per hit? so you’d lose roughly 1% life per hit for freeing the weapon slot in exchange for more damage. 4k vit is certainly not endgame, and scaling the same % through paragon would get expensive, but i think after not long the dex toughness+ damage would still be more worthwhile in most cases, especially with true pushing where you probably arent playing high dmg/unavoidable mobs anyway. idk, it is my opinion, but i do think its overrated.

shield regen rate is the most important factor and is the reason why fortress is good for survival. It’s not just about how much damage a full stack of shield can take, it’s about how often any stacks of shield is up.

When you run with fortress, the majority of the damage you take throughout the rift is on your shields. If whatever amount of damage you take goes through your shield, you regenerate this so fast (2 to 3 seconds for max shield stacks) that you hardly see any real significant damage taken on your actual health pool. You don’t even have to “build around” fortress shield if you don’t want, granted one plays well enough to know their shields limitations at whatever GR being attempted.

I glanced over it early season when i found a primal one, scuffing at the fact that it does poorly on big hits without significant investment in vit/DR, but now I generally like it because it allows me to practically build glass cannon every where else and also does a decent job of keeping squirts stack quite often, even at the higher GR’s. For anyone looking for “comfort” in terms of survival and want to strafe to oculus rings with a lot less fear of dying (indirect damage bump), fortress is a great option.

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not to derail this further, but if fortress adds 3% life per hit, but SS adds 4%, arent you gaining more ehp by having a larger life pool healed than by adding stacks of a shield? if you have 1m hp + 300k shield vs 1.3m hp, taking 300k dmg would take 10 hits with fortress or 6 hits without to regain full “strength” with each one being equally tough. an 800k hit would take 17 hits for full health, after 10 hits with full shield again you’d be at 1.1m hp vs 1.02m, however it falls behind again after the 14th hit. so the larger % of health lost, the smaller the overall window of recovery being higher, and the longer total time to recover to full health. so the initial recovery from big hits is actually the only time its stronger healing wise. losing vit would negate this as the life% recovery + lesser shield will be a net loss vs simply relying on hp + SS.

i can see the slight value in squirts but ime even that was dropped pretty frequently and the tradeoff of half pylons in either pushes or speeds is pretty large.

The perspective you are coming from is all based on having a significant amount of paragon points to spare for 4k+. The die hards that are attempting 150’s with seasonal theme aren’t even putting that many points into vit because it’s too much of a sacrifice to damage. The majority of the players don’t have 30k+ dex to even think about that route.

Also need to consider that some may have rolled a better fortress than a valla’s, and thus want to consider it as an option. Maybe some like the peace of mind of being able to stay in oculus rings a bit longer, thus a bump in damage. It’s not so black and white under 4k paragons.

No one is denying that FoT in a fished GG rift isn’t the undisputed king, however it’s the exact opposite for speeds. You should have 100% uptime on squirts with fortress in speeds and GR’s shouldn’t last long enough for FoT’s extra duration to even be a factor.

im well under 4k para myself, and using his sheet, like i said above, roughly 240 points (of ~800) going into vit would equal the same ehp as fortress, while the loss of dmg (~18%) can be made up by vallas. not to mention all of this math was done without counting (hmm forgetting…) that squirts takes up to 50% extra damage as well.

i wasnt including any difference in rolls, just variables from this side. obviously if its a better bow there are more merits to using it than just its shield.

if you dont have fot for a speed in a group arent you going to be far behind, only catching up at an elite, then fall behind again? a power OR conduit every other rift is like spending 20% of playtime doing 3+x the damage. sort of like a more volatile comparison to aughilds vs coe setups.

im certainly not saying it doesnt have its merits, i just find it to be overrated.

What is SS? I am missing the context. Do you mean smokescreen healing vapors or something?

Thank you the lot of answers and advices.

I am playing at EU server, but that forum is hardly alive, so my profile is found there.
I had been using until now Dawn-Valla with FoT on me and Elusive Ring in Cube (reason the Emeralds in armor slots to compensate the missing CoE) to be alive as I was struggle on hits. GR 118 was the maximum I could do earlier, but it was without some (2-3) Augments it’s true. I have really bad luck on Amulet and Ring drops and rerolls, these are the best I got so far, had around 600% CHD and when got usable Ancient rings finally I started to use them. Less CHD, bit more AD along some extra damage points.
Main gain was using CoE again in Cube, but found myself a bit glassy without some protection, that is why tried using Ballista, but not got good rolls on them either.
Now I am trying to find out which Weapons and Amulets should I focus on Rerolls, so this is the reason why I am trying different combinations and asking advice here. Yes, will do more Bounties for Materials, just not wanting to use them on item I will swap out. Until now worked on Belt and Rings, finally they are Ancients and was able to Augment them too.
Stupid question, but what is SS in HP+SS you mentioned?
When not used Stricken gems (not pushing), I have found better usage of BotT to have more uptime of Cull the Weak, thus needed more defense from Elusive Ring on top of being alive. I feel wasted skills (CtW and FoK) when running around from mobs a bit far from dangers, maybe Zei’s Stone could be a better option in that case?
Did some test with all the combinations, so far Dawn-Ballista-Flavor was the best.

Question, is it matter how far I am shooting to enemies, can I circle 20-30 yards away like did with Multishot? Apart from skills ground effect do I loose something to be far?

Edit: Did some reroll on Dawn without any good result then in another Bounty runs Ancient Dawn dropped with almosr 3,3K dps (+10% damage), 827 Dex, 65% and RRC which will be rerolled probably into RCR.
Rolled a Ballista with 3,3K dps (+10% damage rolled) along Dex-Vit, 2.9% Shield.
Flavor Amulet is impossible to reroll, wasted rest of Forgotten Souls withot any good (Ancient) of it. Not seen other good Amulet along the road.

Simplicity’s Strength, he’s referring to the healing effects.

Ah okay, then the issue is why not both then! Simplicity’s Strength is a gem and Fortress Ballista is a weapon, so there’s no reason both can’t be used for even more healing.

Edit: to clarify, you can regain up to 4% of your max health on hit AND 3% of your max health as shield. Thus, if you are not at full shield and health, you gain 4% of your health as life and 3% as shield which is about 5.4% of your total life + shield amount. But remember your max life + shield pool is 1.3x your life if not using Fortress Ballista (it’s multiplicative to max life, not additive like vitality).

Is there a difference in the application rate of LpH vs FB shield when using GoD Strafe? I know LpH is only supposed to trigger “once per attack, on hit”, no matter the number of targets hit, though this seems a little unclear when it comes to Strafe, since it now not only shoots 3 Strafe projectiles “per attack”, it also shoots out equipped primaries.

I assume healing from SS is at this same rate, yes? i.e. not effected by proc rate (as long as it’s above zero) or by number of targets hit (beyond the first)

Does FB shield stack/refresh at that same rate?

every FoT could be THE fot, cant stop the hunt

i included that in my math.