Thanks very much, mimung. Haven’t played Skyrim in a hot minute–currently playing through Prey again–but I just might with your recommended mod!
DH, thought you might get a kick out of this. Did something I had been intending to try for a while now: running the build with a 2-handed weapon (Bastion’s).
Did a 125 on the first key. About 20k STR, gems in the high 120’s. Ran with Aughild rather than CoE for the extra defense, since you don’t heal nearly as fast as you do with a dual-wield setup, or the extra toughness of the S&B setup. This felt roughly as strong as S+B, i.e. maybe 3 or 4 GRs weaker than the main dual wield version.
I think the ideal rolls on Bastion’s would probably be STR - IAS - DMG% - Socket (from Ramaladni’s). Since the item always rolls with a socket, you’re stuck with STR.
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Wow! I know you wouldn’t have posted had you not cleared, but I have too say that I had my doubts.
Clearing that high with a 2H was barbaric and a sight to see, it just looked right. And you definitely have room for higher clears. Those were by no means good maps. Thx for posting that clear, it was worth the watch. I wish 2H weps had an innate 50% DR. Oh well.
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50% would be a lot, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable if they did something like add an extra property to the Weapons Master passive: “2H Mighty Weapon: 20% damage reduction”, or something like that (or 10% AS, or 30000 LpH, etc)
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That should be changed.
I was wondering about your secondary, was it freeze or stun by any chance?
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Yeah, 4.4% freeze on belt. Would have been good to have stun on gloves, too, but haven’t found a pair like that.
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Yeah, it wouldn’t be hard to incentivize 2-H weapons, and I agree that the Weapon Master passive should reflect it. In fact, the entire passive is wildly out of date. Maybe something like this:
- Dual-wielding grants 8% critical hit chance and 50% critical hit damage.
- Two-handed weapons grant 10% damage reduction and triple your Life per Hit.
- Wielding a one-handed weapon with a shield grants 7% attack speed and doubles your Life per Fury spent.
This way, the passive would target our three weapon options and target the weak spots for each. Just a rough idea. Thoughts?
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I like Rage’s suggestions, but I like yours a little bit better (no offense Rage😁), especially the 2H & SB suggestions and this because you target there obvious flaws. Take away from either of them and it would be no improvement at all.
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Hmm, I guess the thing is that you don’t really need to incentivize dual wielding at all, since this is already the superior option, both overall (Zodiac Rend), and for most of our builds (Rend, Slam, Frenzy, HOTA). We also already have a passive for using a shield, it’s just that S&B too is undertuned.
If you fixed S&B, then WM could probably be a passive just for 2-handers. While I’d love to dual wield 2-handers, that is probably not happening since they’d need to add a massive new set of animations.
There are a lot of issues with using a 2-Hander… you end up with less AD, CDR, CHD, and AS, all of which leads to stat crunches, slower healing, slower stacking of Stricken (making it much harder to kill bosses), and the only thing you get in return is higher base damage, which often doesn’t even compensate for the AS + AD + CHD.
If WM gave 10% damage (multiplicative, of course), 10% AS, and 10% CDR when using a 2H weapon, this would probably be a solid option without being OP…
Haha, none taken buddy.
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Yeah, I’d like to see the passive take that approach so that it makes all potential combos worthwhile depending on the build and preferred play style. Not sure my numbers are up to snuff, but you get the idea.
Generally, passives provide a, well, passive bonus, some kind of benefit that doesn’t directly address a weakness or flaw in design, so I have to admit that my ideas run counter to the standard design philosophy.
I mean, a truly good D3 wouldn’t have the optimal meta setup for a build be so much stronger than off-meta, for-fun variants; if I had my say, every whacky “DieHard” build would be as capable and viable as the set-designated builds.
That’s an interesting idea. Maybe something along the lines of:
While wielding two-handed Mighty weapons, you attack 25% faster and gain 50% critical hit damage.
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Right, though you probably don’t want these passives to homogenize weapon choice so much that it just feels irrelevant, i.e. we don’t want to make S&B just “you attack 15% faster when using a shield” or something like that. It’s good if there are still differences.
Yeah, that would work. Ultimately, an addition of any combination of CHD, AS, CDR, RCR, LpH, and LpFS would be welcome.
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100% agreed. I’m cool with some builds always being better with certain weapon types. For example, EQ and Tribes are made for each other, and I love that Rend and 1-H weapons fit together with WW.
But I don’t want the gap between those optimal setups and other combinations to be as massive as they currently are, you know? It would be nice if a 2-H Rend setup could get within 3-5 GRs of the dual-wield version and not suffer the whole way there.
When it comes to optimizing and incentivizing 2-H weapons, I’m thinking specifically of Vile Charge, Pro-Slam, Fire/Phys EQ, and HOTA. I’d love to see those builds actually use their associated build-specific weapons, right?
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You both are making some great points. This is off topic, but I really the like Wolcen skill and passive implementation. It allows for great customization option. And with so many nodes, you often have a node route that you can travel to offset a flaw in your build. I hope D4 will considers this design and not be too linear in there design. Anyways…
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Bro, absolutely.
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Hmm, I’m not quite sure “use” is exactly the issue. After all, Leap does use Tribes and HOTA + Slam both do use build-specific legendaries (just not the 2H one) in hand. We should know, since we made those weapons up!
Fire EQ: Already uses Tribes
Phys EQ: Uses Tribes, but should be able to carry FotVP instead, if desired.
Slam: Honestly, all you need here is to add an extra dibs bonus on FotVP. I hope they don’t do that for Tribes, but for this weapon, it could bridge the gap between DW and 2H versions of Slam. All it would take is maybe a 100% dibs bonus, on top of the existing multiplier. That would help out Phys Leap too, assuming Tribes was able to go in the cube.
HOTA: Again, all you need here is an extra dibs bonus to HOTA. Might need to be a bit higher than 100% in this case, since HOTA runs with a fair amount of dibs.
VC: Here you are kind of stuck, since you need all those slots filled with specific set items. To carry Standoff, you’d have to tear the build down to the ground and rebuild it around a completely different Raekor set.
While wielding a Two Handed Weapon,
- double your area damage.
or
- Double your Attack Speed.
or
- Gain 50% CDR and RCR
I agree with Rage that Two Handed weps are the problem.
With regards S&B, the passive should have the following adjustments:
-
the RCR should synergize with Captain Scarlet, and
-
the original 15% attack speed bonus bearing a shield gave should be reinstated.
For a guy who usually wants more general types, I think for 2-h passive, 25% dmg reduction and double/50% increased life increased from all sources is better.
I would love to be able to run GoJ in hand with IK HotA without it being such a huge nerf. Just something fun about smashing with a big 2H mace (even if HotA animation makes that happen anyway, it’s less jarring when you have a 2H also).
I think 2H definitely suffers from CHD since you lose out on the extra 130% from the second weapon, but if that damage can be equalized other ways then it makes sense to still give 2H their own feel.
Of course if they did something to make 2H viable I would be kicking myself for salvaging a primal GoJ haha.
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Couple ideas not sure if they were mentioned.
Easiest one: 2 sockets in 2 handers or in 2handed Mighty Weapons. Seems easy to implement I think. Or it could be a Barb passive.
How about another passive: While using a 2-handed weapon, your fury spenders consume 50% more fury to deal 50% more damage.
2handers can’t attack as fast so we can’t heal enough from fury spent. It never made sense to me that the fury cost is the same.
I had one question: what do you guys think of Frenzy builds proccing FnR with WW in S22? I know it was mentioned in the OP. Is it competitive solo?
That’s mainly just for RGKs- used to get Stricken stacks. Would not recommend for solo.
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