Nope, Ancients do no damage directly. But they do enable the big buff from Remorseless.
Four hammers, of course!
And four sounds like Thor!
So, I would say we can all agree that Four Flaming Hammers gets the Win.
Haha, you know, Iâve got a friend in a Queer Death Metal band, I think Iâm seriously going to need to recommend to her that the band be renamed Four Flaming Hammers.
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I want royalties, or at least recognition if they do!!! =)
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Multiple Mega Mjolnirs!
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Ah yeah, remorseless, damn.
Once again mathbarb does not disappoint. Where would D3 forums be without rage
Perhaps Alexis? 
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Nice job! Iâll look forward to seeing you repeat once the season goes live.
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Update: everything in this post is wrong. See post 178 of this thread for explanation.
I decided to run the numbers on two more situations, to see what came out.
Same assumptions as before (boss has 1m life, we do 100 damage per hit, etc)
First, just using HotA to kill the boss (no WW), since I figured it would be interesting to see how much time using WW to stack Stricken might be saving us.
Here, it takes us 890 HotAs to kill the RG.
890 hits * 19 frames per hit = 16910 frames
16910 frames = 282 seconds
Total time = 282 seconds (4 minutes 42 seconds).
Next, I wanted to compare just using WW for the first minute, then switching to âhammer on fireâ for the rest of the fight.
1 min WW gets us 493 stacks. It then takes us 886 HotAs to kill the boss.
But, because we are here flipping back and forth between WW (75% of the time) and HotA (25% of the time), the effective frame rate of HotA is actually just 10.225 frames, rather than 19 (and our effective damage per hit is 50 rather than 100).
So, 886 hits * 10.225 frames per hit = 9059 frames.
9059 frames = 151 seconds.
151 seconds HotA/WW + 60 seconds WW = 211 seconds.
Total time = 211 seconds (3 minutes 31 seconds).
So, in the first case, we can see it takes a LOT longer to kill the boss without WW (which of course we already knew). WW can actually save up to about 1:40 on the boss fight, which is pretty major!
And in the second case, it looks like this setup, where we just stack WW for the 1st minute, then swap to âhammer on fireâ, is still not as good as just starting out at âhammer on fireâ and sticking with it for the whole fight. (3:31 for âWW then swapâ vs 3:04 for âhammer on fireâ).
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Awesome!
My impression is that much of the damage is actually coming from the shockwave proccing Bloodshed, rather than directly dealing the damage itself.
i.e., maybe the shockwave is critting for 100 trillion or something like that on each mob, which is good, but not huge.
But, since you can easily hit 100 mobs at once, because the shockwave seems to travel 50 yards in every direction, then you get:
0.2 (bloodshed %) * 100 trillion (damage per mob) * 100 (mob count) * ? (proc coefficient of shockwave⌠same as most HotA runes, 66.7% ?) = 1.33 quadrillion, dealt by Bloodshed to all mobs within 20 yards of your character.
You have any sense on whether that accurately describes whatâs happening?
Hey Kozmik, only a quick response for now but I promise to have more for you soon⌠may not be till this coming week, I have a busy IRL weekend ahead, so donât think I have forgotten about you if I am silent a few days.
Iâm not sure if you saw my post about S27 for Barbs in general⌠Season 27 notes for Barbs
I already had the details on the shockwave via Robâs video, but thank you for passing them along again. I wish I had stuck around on his stream a bit longer, I could have saved him a good bit of time on that Bloodshed testing- the discount on damage due to proc coefficient is something Iâve known about for a long time. This is why I basically forbid people to use Bloodshed with Leapquake (EQ has 5% proc coeff).
Anyway, my quick gut-check response to your overall question is that I think Zei is going to give the fastest clear in an ideal situation, but that Pain Enhancer might give better results in an average rift. Iâll give that some further thought, but the âmathâ explanation for why I think that is already percolating in my brain (warning: may be rather long, when it arrives).
Related to your question about Ruthless, you may want to check out this study I did a while back on the effect of Ruthless (also Ambush) on the kill speed vs a group of mobs (the type I looked at here was Lacuni/Phasebeast):
Iâll get back to you with more as soon as I can, thanks for reaching out.
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Ok, first thing:
Just checked, this doesnât seem to be the case- Birthright returns 13.3% of your crits via Bloodshed, just like all the other runes other than Rolling Thunder. That 13.3 comes from 20% * proc coefficient 0.667 = 13.3.
So, if you are playing a trash killer spec that uses SoJ, youâre really better off using Smash than Birthright, at least when it comes to straight up damage. Because: letâs just say that the shockwave does damage equal to the 10 hits of HotA that spawn it. On average, itâll actually be a bit less because the shockwave doesnât have 100% CHC, but for now letâs just treat that damage as equal.
With Smash: in CoE Lightning phase, you do 200 damage (100 from the hammers and 100 from the shockwave), and in Cold, another 200 damage. Then, in Fire phase you do 300 damage with hammers and 100 with shockwave, for 400 total, and in physical, 100 damage with hammers, and 300 with shockwave, for another 400.
So thatâs 200 + 200 + 400 + 400 = 1200. And since Smash gives 20% extra damage, this would then be 1200 * 1.2 = 1440
With Birthright: in CoE Lightning, Cold, and Fire phases, you do 200 damage each. And then in Physical, you do 300 with hammers, and 300 with shockwave, 600 total.
So thatâs 200 + 200 + 200 + 600 = 1200. So, less damage than using Smash. If you werenât using SoJ, then Birthright would be much more competitive, because you would have to choose what elemental damage % to stack on your gear.
Next, letâs âdraw some circlesâ. HotA itself looks to me like it basically hits a point about 10 yards from your character, and has a small aoe, roughly a 10 yard radius from that center point. That means that it deals damage all the way back from that center point to right next to your character, and also 10 yards further from your character, so it can deal damage anywhere from right next to you to about 20 yards away.
And, with the HotA crucible, you get hammers in all 4 directions, so that means your Hammers basically share the same damage radius as Bloodshed: 20 yards in every direction. So thatâs our first circle, centered on our character, with a 20 yard radius.
Our next circle is the one described by the shockwave. This effect looks to me like it travels 50 yards in every direction, so this circle has a 50 yard radius.
So a circle with 10 yards radius has an area of 314 square yards. A circle with a 20 yard radius has an area of 1257 square yards. And a circle with a 50 yard radius has an area of 7854 square yards. From previous testing, I know that the basic limit for the number of mobs you can cram into a single AD radius (10 yards) circle is about 30. That means that the 20 yard radius circle can fit (1257 / 314) * 30 = 120 mobs, and the 50 yard radius circle can fit (7854 / 314) * 30 = 750 mobs.
Now, we are very unlikely to ever completely fill up that 50 yard circle with mobs, but I wanted to give you an idea of just how much the shockwave expands our ability to hit extra enemies.
Now that we have that picture of our two circles in mind, letâs look at an example of what our damage might look like.
Letâs assume that we are fighting a group of mobs, and within our 20 yard circle, where they will be subject to our hammers, Bloodshed (and Pain Enhancer, if we are using it), there are 3 âbigâ mobs, 9 âmediumâ mobs, and 27 âsmallâ mobs, for 39 total. And then letâs say that beyond that 20 yard circle, but still in our 50 yard circle, we have less densely packed mobs- letâs say 1/4 that density. So that would be (7854 / 1257) * 39 * 0.25 = 61 mobs.
So thatâs 39 mobs that just get hit by our hammers, and 39 + 61 = 100 mobs that get hit by the shockwave.
Letâs also say that we have 67% sheet CHC, which gives us basically 100% for our hammers. And, +660% CHD sheet, or a 7.6x multiplier when we crit. Based on these numbers, the shockwave, with its lower CHC, essentially represents a 70% increase in our damage, so if 10 hammer hits do 100 damage, the shockwave will do 70, on average.
Finally, letâs assume weâve got the regular 178% AD.
So when we swing our hammer 10 times, each of those closer 39 mobs takes 100 damage. That then means Bloodshed deals 100 * 39 * 0.2 * 0.667 = 520 damage. And, because the mobs are all packed within 10 yards, but within 20 yards, letâs say that instead of all of them being in range to hit each other with AD, each mob is only in range of half of the others (letâs say 19). So thatâs 100 * 1.78 * 19 * 0.2 (AD proc chance) = 676.
So thatâs 676 + 520 + 100 = 1296 damage. Now, what about the shockwave?
Well, that will deal 70% of the hammer+Bloodshed+AD damage to those 39 mobs, or 1296 * 0.7 = 907.
But then it will also hit those 61 other mobs in the outer circle. Letâs say those mobs are too scattered to actually deal AD to each other. And, theyâre too distant to be hit by Bloodshed. So each of those mobs just takes 70 damage. But that then means that you get an additional serving of Bloodshed damage on the inner circle of mobs, 70 * 61 * 0.2 * 0.667 = 570.
So thatâs total damage to that inner circle of mobs of 1296 + 907 + 570 = 2773. Even though all those mobs in the outer circle barely get tickled by the shockwave (70 damage each), all that extra damage routed through Bloodshed actually gives us an increase of more than 25% vs the mobs in our inner circle (2773 / (1296 + 907) = 1.2587)
Now letâs compare the effect of Zei vs Pain Enhancer.
With Zei, about half the mobs in our inner circle will be subject to the 10 yard effect (which starts at 0 yards), and get a 1.16x multiplier, and the other half will be subject to the 20 yard effect (starting at 11 yards), and get a 1.32x multiplier, or a 1.24x multiplier on average to all of them. That means that our âclose-upâ damage of 1296 and 907 will be multiplied by 1.24: (1296 + 907) * 1.24 = 2732.
And for all the mobs that are only in the outer circle, letâs say they are an average of 40 yards away, which gives a 1.64x multiplier, so this would then give 570 * 1.64 = 935.
So with Zei, rather than doing 2773 damage to those inner mobs, we are now doing 2732 + 935 = 3667, an increase of 3667 / 2773 = 1.32x.
Now, with Pain Enhancer, we are going to have 39 bleeding mobs within our radius. And, assuming we are also keeping up our EF stacks, thatâs going to take us from a 13 frame HotA to a 9 frame HotA. That represents a damage increase of (1/9) / (1/13) = 1.44x, which is actually better than the 1.32x we were getting from Zei.
But, the mob density weâre talking about here is not as high as it can get, especially if we have the assistance of a good zbarb. Even if we cram the 20 yard circle full to the absolute theoretical maximum, about 120 mobs, this still only lets Pain Enhancer take us to an 8 frame HotA, which gives a damage increase of (1/8) / (1/13) = 1.62x.
Whereas, on the other hand: there is a ton of room left in that big 50 yard circle for the zbarb to fill. Like we calculated before, that circle can fit up to 750 mobs, so the 61 we are accounting for now is really pretty sparse. So as the zbarb piles more and more mobs into that 50 yard circle, our Bloodshed damage to all those mobs within the 20 yard circle is going to grow and grow. When we reach 135 mobs within the outer circle, Zei matches the maximum potential damage boost of Pain Enhancer, and for a mob count beyond that, it exceeds it.
So, thatâs basically what my gut was telling me last night about PE vs Zei. In a pretty good rift, PE may be the way to go, but in a rank 1 world rift with crazy density, Zei is probably going to outperform PE.
As for negative interactions between Zei and Ruthless, I wouldnât worry about it. âIâm killing the mobs too fastâ is what we call a good problem. And in reality, I donât think youâre actually going to have a problem at all. As you may have gleaned from my spreadsheet, Ruthless gives about a 12% time reduction vs that diverse group of mobs. Unless you are just one-shotting everything, which seems unlikely in a 150, you are going to get value from Ruthless that is very close to that 12% time saving figure.
I may have more thoughts for you later, right now Iâve got to runâŚ
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I wonder if thereâs a case to be made for maintaining Stomp: Wrenching Smash on the HotA TK. This would let your Zbarb be a little more free in ranging further afield to gather up mobs- since they wouldnât need to execute every single pixel pull for you. Once they dump the mobs within the 50 yard circle, you could reposition a little and then pixel Stomp as you see fit.
Thatâs assuming you can stay alive a little longer without the Zbarbâs help, of course.
Right, Iâm not saying the WW Zbarb wouldnât be much better at executing that pixel pull (with WW) than you would (with Stomp). Iâm asking whether it might not be a better use of your Zbarbâs time to be able to leave you where youâre at, go suck up a bunch of mobs 400 yards away at the other end of the map, and then deliver them to you.
If he has to hang close to you 100% of the time, in order to pixel every last mob on top of you, itâs going to be hard or impossible for him to snag those faraway mobs. Your own solo pushes have shown just how good Stomp is at making those groupings. As good as WW crucible? Of course not. But maybe enough for you to keep racking up good progression in the kill zone while the Zbarb makes those longer pulls.
So yeah: not that youâd replace the WW Zbarb by having Stomp on the bar, just that your ability to execute some decent pulling on mobs that are already fairly nearby may allow your Zbarb to use his abilities to their maximum potential.
Just a thought.
Cut + Paste from my Season 27 notes for Barbs:
LoD + IK HotA
Both of these builds are going to face a significant choice between using the WW (âinfinite pullingâ) power and the HotA (âQuad Hammer + Shockwaveâ) power. First, a few notes on how the shockwave works:
- It doesnât benefit from the HotA Fury-based CHC buff. That means that if youâre using it, you want to carry a lot of CHC on your gear.
- It can crit, but it either crits everything, or nothing. In other words, if you hit 100 enemies with the shockwave, it will either crit all of them, or none of them. That probably means it also doesnât work with debuff-based CHC sources, like Iceblink, though I am by no means sure about this.
- Its damage is equal to 10x your direct HotA hits. And it procs every 10 uses of HotA. That means it significantly increases your direct damage (not quite doubles, since unlike your hammers it doesnât have ~100% CHC, the actual increase is about 71.3%).
- It has a proc coefficient equal to whatever HotA rune youâre using. That means 0.667 for all runes other than Rolling Thunder, which is 0.4. This means that it can proc AD and Bloodshed, and that youâre losing a good bit of Bloodshed damage if you take the Rolling Thunder rune.
- It always deals Physical damage, no matter the damage type of your hammer. So if you are using the usual Smash (fire) rune, with CoE, you get one damage bump in Fire, and another in Physical.
With all that in mind, I think that the absolute maximum potential for both IK and LoD may come with the HotA Crucible, rather than the WW one. Using this Crucible power to its utmost will require a lot more fishing than using the WW one, since youâll need to open a super-good (ideally single-floor) rift, where the density is already really high without you needing to pull it as much by yourself.
But, the âbaseâ HotA setup invented by Kozmik is already pretty good at pulling mobs, and in density, those extra hammers + the shockwave mean you will probably do more than twice as much damage, since you directly hit with your HotA on mobs that are on all sides of you, which jacks up your Bloodshed damage, and you hit all those mobs with the shockwave too.
In addition, if you draw a really good boss, like Saxtris, this means you can kill him significantly faster, since ~71% more dps from the shockwave helps a good bit, and once he starts spawning adds, the extra hammers plus the shockwave will speed the kill up a lot.
All that said, the WW power is going to produce results that are FAR MORE CONSISTENT. If you want to get a good clear without fishing 1000+ keys for a Fields with Lacuni/Phasebeast, a Conduit, and then Saxtris + Power for a boss fight, WW is the way to go.
At the end of the day, both are good choices, but I think the HotA crucible is capable of producing higher clears at the top end.
EDIT: One more thing I should note is that if using the HotA crucible for solo pushing, you face a choice between using Smash (fire) and Birthright (physical). Normally, Smash does 20% more damage. But since the shockwave always deals Physical damage, this means we are going to get a penalty to our Shockwave damage, if using Smash, since we canât effectively carry both Fire% and Phys% on our gear.
As a result of this, taking Smash only gives you roughly 6% higher âflatâ damage vs enemies close to you, and in big pulls, where you are hitting lots of mobs with the shockwave, and then âechoingâ all this extra damage through Bloodshed, you may actually do more damage with Birthright. This rune also gives you a ton of healing (3% of your max life for each crit, not discounted by proc coefficient or anything like that) especially since, between 4x hammers plus the shockwave, you will be hitting a lot of mobs.
With a decent heap of paragon, and using the Birthright rune, you might be able to drop Mortickâs and take Strongarm Bracers instead, which gives an 18% damage buff against enemies within range.
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Hey Kozmik, sorry about this very delayed response. Iâve been away for a few weeks.
So, first off, it looks like you, Lebron, and the rest of the excellent HotA players have already been turning in the highest clears using the HotA power, rather than the WW one. So perhaps Iâm now preaching to the converted. But, I did watch a little of your âaddendumâ HotA guide video, and it sounds like perhaps youâre still banking on WW pulling ahead in the end. Iâm not so sure about that, but letâs look at some numbers that might help explain where my thinking is coming from.
I did want to ask you about something though:
Are you sure thatâs correct? I definitely might have missed something, but the top clear I have listed for you on the PTR was 150 in 11:25 with about 3.7k paragon. Are you saying that you spawned the boss not just once, but multiple times around the 5 minute mark, but the fastest you were able to kill him was in 6:25? My apologies if I missed a later, faster clear that you turned in.
Anyway, on to the numbers.
So, think of a good mob type like Lacuni/Phasebeast, and imagine it, essentially, as 3 kinds of enemies. âSmallâ enemies, who take up 1x space and have 3500 life, âMediumâ enemies, who take up 2x space and have 10500 life, and âLargeâ enemies, who take up 3x space and have 31500 life.
And, letâs say that the maximum packing we can achieve, if using a good mechanism like Stomp or WW crucible, is 36 âslotsâ within 1 AD radius, or 10 yards. So, that would be 36 Small mobs, 18 Medium mobs, 12 Big mobs, or some combination of those. I think something youâd be likely to see in actual gameplay would be something like 2x Big mobs, 6x Medium mobs, and 18 Small mobs, (26 total) all crammed into 1 AD radius.
And, since weâre really going to be looking for as much density as possible, letâs say we have one of those groupings on each side of us, so 26 mobs on each of 4 sides, West, North, East, South.
And, letâs say weâve got 178% AD, and do 100 âbaseâ damage, âper cycleâ (an arbitrary unit of time⌠this could be 1 hit, 1 second, 10 seconds, whatever).
So, the plan is basically: whichever crucible weâre using, weâre going to pound on the mobs till weâve killed some of them, and then weâll re-stack them using Stomp or WW to continue maximizing our damage boost in density.
With WW crucible, we deal 100(base) + (100 * 1.78 * 0.2 * 25)(AD) + (100 * 1.78 * 0.2 * 0.67 * 26)(Bloodshed) = 1338.4 damage, per cycle, to the stack of mobs we are actually hitting, with the other 3 stacks taking 348.4 from Bloodshed.
With HotA crucible, we deal 100(base) + (100 * 1.78 * 0.2 * 25)(AD) + (100 * 1.78 * 0.2 * 0.67 * 104)(Bloodshed) = 2383.6, per cycle, on all 4 sides, and then the shockwave does the same damage again, with some discounts, 0.7x for not having 100% CHC, and another 0.7x for element mismatch (phys vs fire), so thatâs 2383.6 * 0.7 * 0.7 = 1168, making the total damage 3551.6, on all sides of us.
So, in just 1 cycle, with the HotA crucible, weâve mowed down all 72 of the small mobs that were surrounding us.
It takes a lot longer if using the WW power:
3 cycles of hammering âWestâ, to kill the small mobs in that group, which also deals 1045.2 Bloodshed damage to the other 3 groups.
Small mobs in âNorthâ then have 2454.8 life remaining, and we have to hammer those for 2 cycles to kill them. Remaining mobs have now taken 1742 Bloodshed damage.
Small mobs in âEastâ then have 1758 life remaining, and letâs say we can kill them in about 1 cycle. Remaining mobs have now taken 2090.4 Bloodshed damage.
And finally, Small mobs in âSouthâ then have 1409.6 life remaining, and we kill them in about 1 cycle.
So thatâs 7 cycles total, to do what we could do in 1 cycle using the HotA crucible.
If youâre then re-stacking using either crucible, into a new optimized grouping, you end up with 2 groups of mobs, each with 4 Big mobs and 12 Medium (again taking up 36 spaces).
If you continue this process through killing all the Medium mobs, it takes HotA crucible another 5 cycles to get those kills, but with WW crucible it takes 13 or 14 cycles. So thatâs 6 cycles total for HoTA and 20 or 21 for WW.
Of course, what makes the two crucibles much more competitive in reality is that with WW you can just grab all those Medium and Big mobs, and then drag them to more small mobs really easily, which increases your damage.
But, in a really optimal rift (for instance, with a great density roll of Lacuni/Phasebeast), youâll probably have a bunch of Mothers and Skeletal summoners on the outskirts of your pull continually dumping small mobs onto you, meaning youâll just stick to that spot, pounding away, until everything- Small, Medium, and Big mobs- is dead. Weâve all had that âbig fightâ experience- with HotA, with Rend, with Leapquake- where the big mobs eventually get ground to a pulp by AD and Bloodshed procs coming from a continuous feed of small mobs into the kill zone. In a rift like this, the time you spend dragging mobs around is actually not that large.
Anyway, this is why in my initial analysis, I was of the opinion that in a rift that is anywhere from Terrible â Good, the WW crucible would probably give you a better result, but in a rift that is somewhere between Great â Dream, you would start seeing better returns from the HotA crucible.
As for looking to the future, when you and the rest of the greats have more paragon, Iâm still thinking that the same factors Iâve just laid out will continue to hold true. If weâre really time attacking 150 and blowing up the mobs really fast, then it sure helps to blow them up with 3 extra hammers and a giant shockwave.
And when it comes to boss kills, using HotA power will save you about 20% of the time vs a single target boss (this is taking Stricken into consideration), and a good bit more, maybe shaving off up to about 33% of the time, against a good boss like Saxtris, Binder, or Hamelin. 20% time saving isnât earth-shattering, but itâs also not nothing, especially if youâre seeing boss kills as long as 6:25, which seems to be what youâre reporting from the PTR. In that instance, cutting 20% saves you 1:17- quite a bit! And 33% would be 2:07- over two minutes savings!
All of this kind of holds together with a principle that appears quite a lot in this game: that itâs generally (not always, but most of the time) a bad idea to bet against âmore damage.â For instance, without seasonal powers, WW/Rend is much better at grouping than HotA, since you can use both Spear and Stomp. But HotA has the more impressive clears. Why? Because HotA does more damage. Raekor completely lacks any mechanism at all to group mobs, unlike HotA, which uses the extremely effective Ground Stomp. But Raekor has the better clears. Why? Because Raekor does more damage!
Anyway, thatâs what I was, and I guess still am, thinking. Iâll be very interested to see how the situation develops as the season goes on!
if you miss the WW power you can always take the cold WW rune, lol. It actually kind of works. Running out of fury isnt really a thing. I donât know the ins & outs of hota so there might be a reason to take dust devils.
There is: much faster Stricken stacking on the boss. The other runes donât give much of an improvement over just stacking with HotA.
Ok, thereâs good news and bad news.
The bad news first:
The whole post I wrote about stacking Stricken with WW is wrong. I was in the process of preparing a version of that post for Reddit (since people are playing a good bit of HotA these days) when I got a bad feeling in my gut. After doing a bunch of digging around in the numbers, I concluded that Iâd introduced an error in the calculation via the way I was accounting for the combination of WW and HotA when you alternate them (i.e. âhammer on fireâ). Essentially, I was adding the equivalent of more HotA hits (and thus, more damage) with that method than there ought to have been.
Bottom line: âhammer on fireâ is a worse method, and you should just start the boss fight by WW-ing for a while, before switching to HotA. My apologies to anybody who got a busted boss kill due to using this method!
The good news:
I built a calculator you can use to look at boss kill time if you start HotA-ing after different amounts of WW-ing.
On the left side, you can change the numbers for your damage, the life of the boss, and the % per stack you get from your Stricken (aka its rank).
On the right side, itâll show you the kill time if you WW for 0, 1, 2, or 3 minutes, before switching to HotA.
Again, my apologies to everybody for the bad info in those posts.
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