In PTR, Both IK and CC variety should be tested with new fjord cutter and another off hand. As new fjord will up IAS a lot, fury management may become an issue with CC version. So off hand could be a shield and sword and board passive. With IK setup,off hand could be offensive as well.
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A shield with the S&B passive isn’t a bad idea since Fjord alone will outshine the IB set in terms of attack speed and damage.
With Fjord’s attack speed bonus, you can forgo any and all IAS and ASI rolls on gear. If you use the Fury shoulders, the extra Ancients attack speed will replenish Fury very, very quickly (which is why we asked for it to be included on the item).
So, S&B + a shield means you can likely drop IP and Cassius from the later builds, and use Zodiac strictly for Wrath. My oh my.
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So…many…things…to…test
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With the new weapon change, there may be a change in stats. Right now I don’t have an issue with fury when I go 19FPA using Gogok. With the change I believe I will hit 16 FPA. If this causes a problem we might have to add a little more RCR as opposed to the 28% you get for free with the CC set. Getting to 33% is simple if you go the zodiac route you just change the ASI to RCR. I have been trying to get RCR, AD and CDR on my shoulders and have found that this combination of stats (although possible) is just about impossible for me to get even in a non-ancient piece of gear.
I am very interested to try the Fjord with EF.
I also think with the added damage we are going to have to change things up some more and add a bit more defense. Right now GR120 at 2.5k paragon I don’t have a lot of extra defense. Not an issue right now but if I add 5-10 more GRs I can see it becoming a problem.
Just a quick sanity check, the HotA attack speed calculator should work for SS correct?
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I tried pushing GR120 today and I cleared it with 7 seconds remain. Going to try and add some more dps and see how I do. Using storms build, everything is ok except for the RG fight. That just sucks not being able to add stricken stacks for half the fight. If I didn’t have a power pylon for the RG I would not have gotten the clear.
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A Sword & Board build at long last being viable?
Sign me up
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I might check out the PTR over the weekend.
The Mortick+Crimson Permafrost build I used in HC to get #1 earlier this season should still work.
Lose 1.3x damage, 30% ASI and 30% Armor from Istvan.
Gain 2.5x damage, 1.5x attack speed with Fjord Cutter.
Stormshield @ Sword and Board grants 30% damage reduction, which more than negates Istvan Armor loss, not to mention another 20% damage reduction from the RCR effect @ Crimson, plus 30% melee reduction on the shield itself. That on top of the improved aps and Life per Hit should keep you alive rather easily. It was a very tough to kill build already, wow.
BUT (#1), shield means losing 130% Crit Damage in exchange for 10% Crit Chance.
5% base + 5% paragon + 6% helm + 10% amulet + 10% gloves + 6% ring + 6% ring + 6% bracers + 3% battle rage + 10% insanity = 67% crit chance
50% base + 50% paragon + 100% amulet + 50% gloves + 50% ring1 + 50% ring2 + weapon1 + weapon2 = +610% crit multiplier
1 + (0.67 * 6.1) = 5.087 crit multiplier if dual-wielding
1 + (0.77 * 4.8) = 4.696 crit multiplier with a shield
5.087/4.969 = 1.08326 which means DW has a 8.33% higher crit multiplier plus you gain another neat bonus, let´s say 30% Elite from Sunkeeper or Echoing Fury (don´t remember, is it 75%?).
So yeah, DW would deal considerably more damage, BUT (#2) the attack speed multiplier on Fjord Cutter which is higher than that of Istvan will hurt Fury sustain.
It was already pretty close with the seasonal CDR+resource ring on the ground, no idea what will happen without it.
Seems like Mortick would have to make room for Fury shoulders and I switch the rune to Together as One = Striding Giant, I would lose the awesome Fury heal from Thrive on Chaos though.
5384 * 10.8 fury per swing = 58147 life healed per swing, that´s quite a big dent in life sustain.
Either way, actual in-game runs should clear this up fast.
Good luck and have fun.
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Newest test:in 2.6.7, Weapons master will put in passive skills, it will works very well!
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I tested to see if you can use weapon master only to get enough Fury. Weapon master with 2 mighty weapons and the templar still isn’t enough. It works if you have lots of mobs but once the pack thins out you will have fury problems. When you have a RG without any adds, you will have lots of fury problems.
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I do not mean we should give up CoA, we can use these two to solve fury problem very well.
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Agreed. If you have fury problems changing one passive to Weapon master would probably solve the issue.
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Please do not record any video in the PTR. Trolls came out of their caves.
How about Weapon Mastery + War Cry?
With Stormshield you probably may replace BoM to Zodiac to compensate the damage lost (not sure about HC).
If you don’t use zodiac WC will be bad. The amount of fury you need is going to be large. With the Fjord, we are going have 19 FPA and if you use EF up to 13 FPA. Each attack should require around 8-10 fury based on how much RCR you have.
Fury is going to be an issue that is going to take a bit of time to figure out what works best.
Right now I am leaning towards getting rid of Ruthless and going with Weapon master with Fjord, EF and the templar. With weapon master we not only get more fury but we also get an extra 5% crit chance so we will loose very little dps from getting rid of ruthless.
Edit: no crit bonus for mace in the off-hand.
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@Felix: If I´m not mistaken, Weapons Master is determined by Main Hand you will not get both benefits.
@Corwin: Dropping BoM is not an option, it´s the single strongest defensive item in the game, equal mitigation to the combined power of double Unity + Striding Giant + Threatening Shout.
You guys run Zodiac? Hmm.
I went to check this out on NS and you are correct, a mace in the off-hand will not improve your crit ability. Sorry about that.
GR 128 with Zodiac (no BoM):
(post #224)
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I got around 15 different variations of SS that I have been testing to see which is the best and which one you run is going to depend on your Paragon.
The highest damage output is the one Arch ran when he cleared 128.
Zodiac, RoRG, EW, and IB’s. For defense you have Mortick, IP Iron hide, and the CC bonus. More than a bit squishy, but the damage is really good.
I am guessing after the patch this build will need some more defense.
Played PTR yesterday and here is some of my findings
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EF with Fjord does not have a problem with fury. I still ran the enchantress and ran with ruthless as opposed to weapon master and didn’t have a problem. Going this route I highly recommend that you get rid of all ASI and IAS. Going this route, the extra attack speed does wonders for your LPFS. I didn’t have much of an issue until I got to GR124.
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Using EF with Storm’s build I think is a mistake. Yes, it adds attack speed which equates to around 30% more damage but since you run out of fury and have to wait until CotA and WotB is back up again, you will lose the speed buff and it takes a few seconds to get it back again. I think there are better weapons, and I am leaning towards Azurewrath.
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If you go the Zodiac route, cooldowns are easier to manage as we attack faster and get more zodiac tick and are not required to have CDR on every slot. Right now I am leaning towards changing the IAS on EF to AD instead of CDR. You can also do it to replace strength but right now that strength is a 5% added to all damage for me where the IAS is only 4% or less.
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I think there may be a bug in one of the items that got buffed and I think it is the damage multiplier on Fjord. I am mentioning it here first as I haven’t gone over the numbers with a recorded video first. Yesterday I cleared 124 which is 4 GRs than my best. This is normally around 60% increase in damage but I didn’t fish for the clear so make it approximately 100%. The damage lost from not using IB’s is around 30% damage. There is no loss from attack speed because EF and Fjord attack around 75% faster than IB’s. I have inferior weapons right now PTR so I would call the change in weapons close to a push (I don’t have any AD on my PTR weapons). The damage increase from the change on BoD should be close to 100%. Which is around where I am approximating I should be without the damage bonus from Fjord. My Fjord is 147% damage increase so that should be another 6 GR levels.
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As for incoming damage at the higher GRs that is going to take some time to play with. Zodiac, RoRG, EW with Morticks and Iron hide is definitely the highest damage but I need more defense on this build. The easiest change is to take out bloodshed and replace it with WC. If you do this is only encourages you to stay at distance more which may not be a bad thing.
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I have one other build that works to an extent which has defense but requires more fishing. That build removes the EW set so you have BOM, Zodiac and RoRG for rings and use the FoT for the amulet. You wear Morticks, cube BoD and this frees up one active skill which can be Wreching Smash or Killing spree. A damage comparison is 100% loss from EW. FoT add around 30% more damage and killing spree is 13% for me. This is 50% less damage which seems terrible but in the other build if you had to drop bloodshed it is much closer.
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