Hey Iria!
First: congrats on the 130! That’s a really excellent clear.
Forgive me if I reiterate some stuff you already know, but I figured it’s best to start at the beginning:
Rend deals its damage entirely in ticks. This is the same whether or not you have Ambo’s active, it’s just that with Ambo’s, there are less total ticks, but they do much more damage.
There is no on-cast damage from Rend (you can see this if you start a game on a very low difficulty and then manually cast Rend on some foes: instead of dying instantly, they have full health for maybe .20 seconds or so and then explode).
As you know, Ambo-Rends (applied by WW) do not proc AD, while Hard-Cast (HC) Rends do proc AD (20% chance- the usual- on each tick of damage).
Ambo-Rends and HC Rends overwrite one another. So, if you HC Rend and then immediately start spinning, you will probably overwrite your HC Rend before it ever deals any AD.
As a result, the best rotation seems to be HC Rend - HC Rend - WW, repeat. This gives those HC Rends enough time to proc some AD before you overwrite them.
It’s possible to HC Rend three times, but this cuts it very close on dropping Taeguk.
The less WWing you can do, the more damage you will see, but the vast majority of your healing comes from WW, so there’s always a delicate balance between doing damage and staying alive.
I hope that answers your question.
I’m all for DH buffs, but as Free mentioned, 1) We already tried to be helpful with that and it did not go so well, and 2) It’s probably getting a little late in the game to be proposing more changes.
That said, I’d be happy to give it another try. I will say I don’t have enough recent DH expertise to really “crunch the numbers” on tons of items, but, I know you are a numbers guy yourself, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ll caution you that putting together a super-long list of suggestions like Free and I did is probably not a good play right now. The majority of our suggestions were not adopted, which, in a roundabout way, is what has led to WW/Rend being so far ahead of all other Barb builds.
Instead, I’ll refer you to a handful of posts in the recent DH buff thread in GD that Idolis started. In this section, dmkt suggests just a few items, one of which is designed to buff ranged builds, while another would buff mid-range/melee builds.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be these exact ideas, but I think this is really the way to go. It would allow for all DH builds to be significantly improved in one fell swoop, without the need for revisions to a zillion different items.
The most pertinent posts are 395 - 411, take a look:
I’ll say it again because I think it’s important: focusing broad-ranging buffs onto just a few items is the way to go.
In BBP, Free and I suggested 30-ish changes of which 7 or 8 were adopted, directly or indirectly. It was pretty cool to see that happen, but the uneven adoption of these changes led to the all-WW-all-the-time situation we have now. People are playing H90 a bit now, because it’s new, but my guess is that next season that will fade.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Let me know if you have thoughts on any of this, or specific ideas you want to talk through.