anyone try messing around with the spears in off-hand? I tried overcapping my fury it seemed to have interesting effects. I couldn’t really squeeze it into LoD but it was fun with the IK version.
There’s some discussion of that topic in posts 145 - 192 of the IK HotA thread… I believe Wudijo also made a video about it, which you can probably find if you search. The bottom line is that using Arreat’s as an offhand is fine, but overall less good than the other available options (Echoing Fury or Sankis).
Cool beans. I found a primal spear and was goofing around with it.
Congrats on the clear, that’s very well done!
It’s a tough situation to analyze, since we obviously don’t know for sure how it would have played out if you’d had a more standard setup equipped. But, let’s look at some of the different components, and try to see what they’re doing here…
Furious Charge vs Ground Stomp
So, for the first 30 seconds of the video, you are zipping around with Charge, and aggroing mobs with WW. You could of course do the same thing with just WW, but it would probably take roughly 2x-3x as long. So, if you actually did it that way, you would start to fight at around 1:00 or 1:30, instead of around 0:30, meaning Charge has saved you around 30-60 seconds. Of course, if you didn’t have Charge, you might not have spent your time that way, but for now let’s play it out like this.
From 0:30 to about 3:25, you are mostly stationary, so not getting much use out of Charge. Then from 3:25 to about 3:37, you are doing a little more scouting, though most of this time is spent WWing. So- maybe another second or two of time saving? So now we’re at 32-62 seconds of savings.
The next major use of charge is at about 4:27, when you start looking around to see what’s in the rest of the map. This goes on until about 5:05, and in this stretch, you are doing a lot of WWing, so Charge maybe saves you 25% - 50% of the time. So without Charge, instead of taking 38 seconds, it would take maybe 47-57, or a savings of 9-19 more seconds, bringing the total to 41-81.
A bit more Chargeing around from 5:25 - 5:40, maybe you save 5 seconds. 46-86. And maybe 4 more seconds savings when you go back to pick up the Shield pylon at 6:24, 50-90. And, after you enter the next level, you do some Chargeing to scout the level from 6:46-6:56, saves you maybe 5 more seconds, 55-95.
And that’s about it. From then until you spawn the boss, you are mostly just hammering and spinning. But, you could make the case that taking Charge has saved you about 1:00 - 1:30. Of course, Ground Stomp would save time in a different way, by helping you to kill the mobs faster.
I gave some thought to what you said about killing trash too fast… and I’m not sure there’s really a case to be made for Charge improving that situation. After all, the radius of Stomp (24 yards) is really close to your “kill zone” radius, where you are hitting with all 3 of hammers, shockwave, and bloodshed (20 yards). So it’s not as though leaving Stomp out would leave a lot more mobs outside the kill zone, where they’ll only get hit with the shockwave (and thus stay alive much longer, acting as a source of Bloodshed damage that hurts the elites). Yes, if you use Stomp to pack all the mobs within range, they’ll die faster. But they’re also much more likely to deal Area Damage to the elite before they die if you’re packing them.
In the first big fight, for instance, that takes place from about 0:30 - 2:15, I’m quite sure you would have chewed through all the trash, plus killed those blue fatsos, faster. But, it’s really hard to say how much time might have been saved. The shockwave shifts the proportions of your total damage towards Bloodshed and away from Area Damage… but AD still makes up a good chunk of your total damage, and Stomp does such a good job of maximizing that.
I guess my gut says it actually would have been really close between “time saved by using Charge to scout quickly” vs “time saved by using Stomp to kill stuff faster”.
Strongarms + Ess + Butcher Sickle vs Squirt + Nems
First: I don’t think missing Nems hurt you much in this rift. You almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to kill elites spawned from either the Speed or Shield pylon. If you’d gotten a good draw and gotten Illusionists from the Channeling and Power, maybe you would have killed the boss a little faster (you did it in 2:13, with 52 seconds spent actually hammering after taking the Power. With illusionists you might have cut that down to 30 seconds or so, or maybe 1:51 total).
But: if you’d gotten Conduit rather than Speed, which would have been more ideal, then you definitely would have been missing out on a good bit of progression by not having Nems. So: in this situation, you got away with it, but I don’t see that as a great choice in general.
As for Strongarms, well, that’s 30% dibs… how much dibs were you running with otherwise? With 30% on gear plus 10% battle rage plus 25% Berserker’s Rage, that’s 65%… you said you didn’t have Rampage equipped, were you using Brawler too? But, you really would have gotten more out of Rampage in this rift, so let’s just go with 65%.
So, 30% more from Strongarms on top of that gives 18.2% extra damage, but we only have it active when the follower procs Ess (every 30 seconds I believe) or if they hit with the Butcher Sickle effect (only single target). And, the effect lasts 6 seconds. So, that’s about 20% uptime on 18.2% extra damage, or about 3.64% extra damage overall. That’s not great, definitely worse than the “average” value of +13% you get from Squirt’s if you find a Shield pylon. And Squirt’s can also be “leveraged” for considerably higher value than that, if you get the Shield at the right time (a big fight vs lots of elites, or against the boss).
In this particular rift, you spawned the Shield at 4:32, meaning you could have taken it at any point between then and killing the boss. If you had grabbed it around then, you probably could have finished off the yellow construct and the blue skeletons, or if you had grabbed it before zipping to the next level, you could have blown up that first big pile of mobs pretty quickly.
As for the packing effect of Ess- well, that’s definitely good. But, if we’re betting on packing being that valuable, we probably would have been better off taking Ground Stomp after all.
Bottom line: I think that Nems + Squirt is generally going to be much better than Strongarms + Ess + Butcher Sickle.
Rampage vs anything else
You would have been a lot better off with Rampage! And this would be true in most good rifts. It’s always going to be better to take Rampage.
Final Thoughts
I guess my overall impression is: you drew a really good rift for maximizing shockwave damage, but without a Conduit, which meant that not taking Nems didn’t hurt you much. I think you would have cleared this rift quite fast with a different setup, and definitely faster if you had had Squirt’s and Rampage.
As for Charge vs Stomp: I don’t think Stomp would have made you much faster overall here, though I also don’t think it would have made you much slower. So, if you really like the mobility of Charge, I think it’s definitely a solid choice, but I don’t think there is evidence, at least not yet, that it is an overall superior choice.
Anyway, well done again on the clear!
How much strongarms are proccing from the follower?
Ess can only proc once every 30 seconds I believe:
That SS MOTE build looks like fun! You took the tedious boss fight and fishing out of the equation. You should make a video for it. And we should prob talk about it more in the MOTE thread lol.
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Actually, something I think you once mentioned, that might come into play at some level of paragon for LoD HotA this season: maybe you could drop BoM for Unity, and then instead of either Charge or Stomp on the bar, take Rage Flip, and use it alongside the shockwave power.
Pull a whole big map to one spot and then detonate them with the shockwave.
Also, nice work on that Slam clear, fun stuff!
The shockwave is more fun with IK hota. I have a ZEI stone as my third gem and it basically stun locks the map. I’m starting to catch up to my LoD clear even. I don’t think i’d drop BoM anytime soon thou, lol. I am looking forward to trying the SS stuff. Im pretty sure I have the gear for it.
Hmm, that shouldn’t be the case- Unity plus Aquilla gives 75% reduction, which is 20% worse than BoM. But, you can pick up 20% mitigation by going from about 3000 paragon to around 4000.
Unless Aquilla is sometimes dropping, or something like that, Unity + Aquilla + ~1000 extra paragon should give the same mitigation as BoM.
Interesting… It’s surprising to me that this would be a problem when using Spear, but wouldn’t be a problem when using WW crucible pull. I know WW pull kind of protects you while moving, since the mobs are being continuously knocked back, but once you start hammering, that protection no longer applies…
Would changing the WW rune help? Could do lightning or physical.
Dust Devils is the only rune that helps you stack Stricken on the boss. All the other runes are no better than HotA in that regard, which kind of defeats the point of taking WW.
Nice job on the clear!
As for Bloodshed w/ Rend, yeah that doesn’t make any sense to me either. Rend can’t crit, and even with Skull Grasp (which he isn’t using), WW doesn’t do very much damage. Puzzling.
I think bloidshed works on hard rend casts. I know it does SOMETHING. The pulls are so big that a little quirk might be amplified.
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I doubt it. These sorts of things usually happen when you lose track of whether a skill is actually contributing because of the 10-tier spread between a good rift and a bad one. Without methodical testing, it’s really hard to tell if X or Y skill is doing a lot, something, or nothing at all.
If TN is getting something out of Bloodshed, it is not that much- he is sitting on the same tier as Enryu and Lebron, in a bit better time, but also with 2-2.5k more paragon.
It could be something stupid like interaction between the exploding enemies when they die. It does SOMETHING. Ive tried it lol.
Well, what I’m saying is that in those situations where you’re like “I know this skill is doing something, I’m just not sure what!”… it’s fairly likely that the skill isn’t doing much.
I had exactly that experience with Bloodshed, while pushing Leapquake a few years ago. I went back and forth between Bloodshed and Into the Fray, trying to decide which one was better, and ended up clearing 123 (which at the time was one of the highest clears worldwide, pre-Tribes buff) with Bloodshed on the bar. But, later testing determined that Bloodshed is actually really bad with Leapquake.
So I basically got the clear using a junk skill on the bar, and the times I felt like “wow, this is working great!” were just because I got a good rift. I would have been clearing the monsters fast in that rift even if I’d had nothing in that skill bar slot.
It’s really hard to tell with this stuff, when you’re just playing the game (rather than methodically testing) because a good rift is about 10 tiers better than a bad rift, so there’s a huge amount of volatility to work around.
Rage,
I think it would be a good idea if you tested this for us. For science!!!
Well, I don’t have a seasonal character to test with, but I just did a quick test in non-season, and the results are exactly what you’d expect: Bloodshed doesn’t proc from Rend casts, doesn’t proc from Rend ticks, and doesn’t proc from Bloodbath causing Rend on neighboring enemies.
Even if it did somehow proc… how much damage would it do? I mean, Bloodshed’s damage is based off of crits, and Rend can’t crit. So even if it procced for some reason, the most likely thing is that it would do zero damage.
Anyway, maybe something funky is going on in season where the WW pull causes all of Rend’s ticks to count as crits or something… but I doubt it.