Assuming you unlock everything from the Altar of Rites, approximately how many tiers will it add to our current builds? I saw one youtuber say about 5 tiers. Will all our main builds be (or be close to) 150 capable? Has the starter set been announced?
Although the buff to Frenzy seems underwhelming, when combined with the Altar of Rites (AoR) buffs it might have the best increase of all our Barb sets. Almost every AoR buff either directly makes a Frenzy Barb better at it’s main mission (boss/elite killing) or shores up it’'s weakness.
The +200 dam (D), +10% elemental (J), +10% damage (L), +15% damage (R) are a general increase in damage but +15% elite (G), +20% elite (K), and +25% boss (W) make an elite hunter shine even more.
Normally, an elite hunter’s weakness is low AoE and being squishy when surrounded by a horde of enemies. But, with the AoR buffs, they are much less of a threat. With elite packs dropping one more orb (V) and them being picked up automatically (P), the elite hunter’s time around the hordes is reduced. Additionally, CC immunity (S) and passability (T) ensures an escape route when the hordes try to surround you…just make sure you can use Furious Charge {FC} (Dreadnaught might be best choice of runes to ensure you always have a way to escape).
With all the added defenses {-25% missile (E), -25% melee (I), +15% dodge (Y), -25% elite (Q), and -25% enemy (AB)} along with CC immunity and passability you might just be able to ignore the hordes and move faster {+25% uncapped movement (F) and FC} from elite to elite.
Every barb build is 150 capable already just depends on your paragon. And yes the direct damage buffs are about 5 tiers in season. You will also see additional help from things like
extra globes drop from elite packs and they are auto pickup. I think speed builds like rend will benefit the most in farming do to the in direct buffs on some of the seals.
Well, let’s see… the main thing we need to do is evaluate extra damage. Things like extra toughness will only factor into the equation if they let us drop defensive gear/skills to equip offensive ones.
+200 damage - this is going to be roughly a 7-10% buff when using optimized gear.
+35% elite damage- of course this is probably additive with other elite damage. Frenzy carries 30% and Leapquake + Raekor 50%. Maybe… a net 6% buff for Raekor + Leap, 9% for Frenzy, 12% for other builds? Even that is probably overly generous.
+10% elemental- generally worth 7% in most of our builds, about 6% for Frenzy if using Azurewrath.
+25% damage- if this is a separate multiplier, worth 25%. If it’s additive with weapon damage %, and doesn’t scale on top of the +200 damage and damage range on rings, then it’s worth more like 20%.
+25% damage to bosses- hard to factor in. I guess that a good and simple way to do it is essentially to discount this damage buff to the % of time a build generally spends fighting the Rift Guardian, and then discount again to the √ of that number, due to the effect of Stricken. So for our super-fishy builds like Leapquake and Rend, that’s probably 1/3 of the total rift time, so √(.33 * 25) = about a net 3% damage buff, when assessed vs the entire rift. For our other builds, that number would be lower- maybe about 2% for Slam, the HotAs, and Raekor, and 1% for Frenzy.
The big unknown is how, exactly, the potion abilities will work. If the “randomly get a shrine or pylon power” one is able to give you one of those powers at full duration, then the game basically becomes a big roll of the dice on every rift to see how often you can get the effect of a Conduit or Power pylon. If on the other hand those powers only last for the duration of the legendary potions (6-7 seconds), then they aren’t nearly as strong. Same goes for the one that spawns Triune circles. My gut feeling is that those powers aren’t going to be super broken, with the potential to give you, potentially, a ton of Conduit or Power uptime. Let’s call this one, maybe, a +50% buff, on average.
So, totaling all that up, and using the max number in each case, we’ve got 1.1 * 1.12 * 1.07 * 1.25 * 1.03 * 1.5 = 2.54x, which is almost exactly 6 tiers worth of damage. Some of those numbers are a little fuzzy right now, of course, so I’d say any result in the 4-8 tier range would not be entirely unexpected.
As for the defensive buffs (25% vs melee and missile, 25% elite reduction, and 15% dodge), they total out to about 50% extra mitigation. That might be enough for a build to drop something like Mortick’s (if you don’t need the healing from LPFS) or Parthans. It’s definitely not enough to drop BoM. So in most cases what that means is picking up a modest source of extra damage, something like Magefist or Strongarm bracers, which would get you ~1 extra tier of damage.
The last thing to assess is the “critical hits grant resource” ability. That will have no effect on Frenzy, but will give a modest buff to some of our other builds. Raekor might gain a tier or two of damage, if you can throw multiple full-Fury boulders consecutively, without needing to Charge after each one. We might also see a CoE-based Raekor setup more often, since you could sit in in an Oculus circle and throw multiple boulders on Physical phase. WW/Rend will be able to take Blood Funnel rather than Wind Shear, meaning they can also probably take BR:ItF instead of StP, which gives ~2 tiers of damage. The HotAs will have an easier time keeping up full Fury in density, maybe that’ll be worth something like 0.5 tiers of damage. Slam will have an easier time keeping up Fury in general, maybe also 0.5 tiers buff.
So, I guess I’d say say that the most likely buff amounts we’ll be seeing, totaling everything up, is about +6 tiers for Frenzy (not counting the 4.4 tier buff from the 10k–>20k increase, with that factored in it’s 10-11 tiers), +7 tiers for Leapquake, Slam, and the HotAs, and +8 tiers for Rend and Raekor.
That means that at around 2k paragon, you can probably expect to see good players hitting 150 with Raekor, Rend, and LoD HotA. IK HotA and H90 Frenzy could also do 150 at 2k, but I would not really expect to see many 150 clears below 3k paragon. Leapquake won’t be able to do 150 until about 5k paragon at the lowest, but I’d be surprised if we don’t see somebody do it during the season. Slam would probably need something like 7-8k paragon for 150, and isn’t that popular a build these days anyway, so I doubt we’ll see that happen.
Anyway, as for this:
I mean, you kind of already do that, but it doesn’t work in the way you’re suggesting. There’s no way to specifically target elites with Frenzy, unless they just happen to be standing on their own in a corner with absolutely no other mobs around, which basically never happens. Frenzy is going to play in almost exactly the same way that it does right now.
Edit: oh, actually, I forgot to look at “elite spawn 1 extra progress orb”. So, the most elite packs that you will generally kill in a push rift is about 10, and it’s usually less than that. Blues give 3 orbs and yellows give 4, so let’s call it 3.5 on average. Each orb gives 1.15% progression. So that’s 10 * 3.5 * 1.15 = about 40% progression from those orbs. Getting an extra orb in each of those cases would give you an average 4.5 globes, rather than 3.5… I guess one way of putting it is that you’re essentially going save about 25% time on 50% of your progression, which is a time saving of 12.5%. This buff is also going to be worth ~1 tier of damage, so add +1 tier to everything I listed above.
The boost will be better than 5 tiers for average frenzy barb. An important feature is getting a 10 minute empowered shrine from your potion for a big CDR boost, which leads to way more WoTB uptime.
Raekor will overall benefit way more than frenzy due to its reliance on fury generation and the altar power to give fury on crit. Raekor also benefits way more from the altar toughness buffs because the set gives none, so you can play more aggressively.
Between Insanity, extra CHC, and extra AS, having WotB up adds about 94% damage. Getting an Empowered shrine takes us from 45% WotB uptime to 89%.
So that’s ((.89 * 1.94) + .11) / ((.45 * 1.94) + .55) = 1.29, i.e. 29% extra damage, worth about +1.6 extra tiers.
As for how many total tiers the buffs will give… really depends on the final fate of the potion powers. Could be anywhere from about +5 tiers to about +20 tiers!
Yeah, you could drop a bit of damage in a few spots, like damage range from rings, in order to get up to 100% uptime. A bit of damage loss, probably slightly suboptimal overall, but gives the security of always having WotB up.
So, re-totaling everything with some updated numbers:
The altar gives:
About 2x damage directly: +4.5 tiers
Extra orbs: +1 tier
Extra toughness: lets us pick up, generally about +1 tier of damage. But Raekor could probably drop Esoteric for Zei at much lower paragon, which would be ~2 tiers of gain. Same if you go for Shi Mizu.
Critical hits grant resource: +0 for Frenzy, + 0.5 for Leapquake, Slam, and HotA, and +2 for Rend (which will probably be able to pick up BR: ItF). The big winner is Raekor, which in high density will be able to spam consecutive boulders from an Oculus circle. +2-3 tiers.
Damage debuff potion: +0 tiers
Triune ring potion: +1-2 tiers
Pylon/shrine potion: Assuming you don’t get both a shrine power plus the Power pylon power… In an average situation, you’ll also get about an average 25% buff from the Power pylon ability, though of course you could win the lottery and get it for all 30 potion uses, which would give 53% uptime on the ability, equal to a ~5 tier buff. So about +2 tiers average, + 5 tiers max (unless FoT doubles the 16 second duration to 32, in which case you could get 100% uptime / +8 tiers)
For shrines, Frenzy will pick up about 48% extra damage from the combo of Frenzied + Empowered shrines, worth 2-3 tiers. Leapquake gets almost nothing from Frenzied, but a good bit from Empowered… I’m thinking these 2 shrines give about 2-3 tiers to most of our builds, between higher uptimes, extra attack speed, and direct damage via Crimson, where applicable. Wastes could actually run without Zodiac, if you get lucky and have an Empowered shrine most of the time.
So this potion power probably gives about 4-8 tiers of power.
Total buffs seem like they are in the 15-20 tier range, depending on the particular build… that’s a lot!
Will this actually work well? I’m not sure. It relies on a bunch of unusual interactions to increase its damage. Usually, you can’t just spam Rumble effectively, since you need to build up your fury in between slams, and unlike Raekor, which can fill its bubble with one charge, MotE Slam has to rely on the Ancients plus a little Leaping, which is much slower. But, with the “crits grant fury” altar ability, you can get a ton of fury really quick in high density. I also slotted in Arreat’s Law + Weapon Throw, (replacing Echoing Fury and War Cry) to increase that max fury to 350. Rumble, unlike Boulder Toss, does not reset the level to the base 150, so once you “unlock” 350 with WT, it’ll stay there and you can fill up to that level with any other ability.
In order to get as many crits, and thus as much fury, as possible (plus more damage, of course) I replaced Mortick’s with Shi Mizu, and then swapped Ruthless → Relentless. Because we use Crimson, we can take advantage of the same crazy defensive synergy that keeps Raekor alive.
And, because we are not using the SS: Permafrost rune, we don’t get the extra 150% “chilled or slowed” damage from Fjord Cutter. So I replaced BR: Bloodshed with Avalanche: Snow Capped Mountain, which will chill enemies and group them too. With the amount of Fury we’ll be spending, and our high CDR, this skill ought to come off cooldown extremely quickly.
I’m really not sure about this one- it might end up being better to just stick with Bloodshed and just rely on Trapped to proc slow on the the mobs near us, plus the Enchantress’ Temporal Pulse ability. Rumble has a bad proc coefficient and so is quite inefficient in tandem with Bloodshed, but in high density that could still add up to some serious damage.
Against the rift guardian, we wouldn’t have density for generating Fury, so the play would probably be to stack Stricken with Weapon Throw, and just hit with Rumble when our bubble is full.
I really don’t know if this will play well, but it might be worth a try.
IMO, the empowered shrine potion proc is the unsung hero of S28 for so many builds. It just makes any cooldown-reliant builds so much more fun to play, which is pretty much every crusader build like LOD bomb and invoker.