[Guide] MOTE6 Earthquake

One note on that setup: you have pulls resulting from both Leap: CoA and Stomp:WS. That will really lower the returns you’re getting from your Parthans a lot. You may want to think about dropping WC for BR:StP, which will help keep you alive via healing, and then use Strongarm bracers, which will be a much better item - for EQ - going forward, since Tribes will most likely not have its big dibs bonus anymore. Strongarms will add at least 15% damage to EQ. Less for Avalanche, because of the 200% dibs on DI.

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Ok, I’ll do up a D3planner with those changes so I don’t forget. I salvaged all my Lut socks and now have to farm for them :roll_eyes:, but that shouldn’t be to hard.

Haha, bro, tell me if I’ve lost my mind?

https://ptr.d3planner.com/808103490

Hmm, well, that depends, I guess, on what you are going for.

For instance, if you want to play the most powerful EQ build, then you should probably pick between the “StrongZei” and “Rage 2” Fire Leapquake variants I describe in the OP.

Or, if you want the most powerful build that primarily deals damage with Avalanche, then I think it’ll be the setup I described yesterday.

If you’re after fun rather than power, I guess it depends on what you find fun. If mostly standing in place and spamming SS seems fun, then I think the setup you posted will do ok, though you might be better off taking another look at Prokahn’s Slam guide (and, there is a S+B setup for that. Have you ever played it?).

Or, if what’s fun to you is a setup that gets as even a share of its damage as possible from EQ, AV, and SS, then I think you’re going to want a build that doesn’t use GoG anywhere, and applies about as many AVs as it does EQs. This is because each MF EQ does 6k% weapon damage, while each AV does 2.4k%. So, even taking DI’s 200% dibs buff into consideration, that’s only about a 20% advantage to AV, if you are applying the same number of EQs and AVs. And it’s easier to apply EQs faster, due to Lut Socks.

So, I think the “even-split” build looks like this: D3planner.com

Your cycle will be Leap - Leap - Leap - AV - Stomp - Slam, with TS and hard-cast EQ thrown in when they’re off cooldown.

It gets pretty even portions of its damage from each of its 3 major skills: SS, EQ, and AV. And each makes use of a different element: Fire for EQ, Phys for SS, and Cold for AV, equalizing the elemental damage bonus via SoJ.

You need to keep the cooldown of AV below 13.64 seconds for this to function properly.

Anyway, you get the idea: there are lots of different setups to try out, depending on what sounds like fun.

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Good question. I started off wanting to use every Av/EQ as possible within good measure. Then I thought, “Can I be stationary and face tank?”. Then you suggested having SS play a bigger role. I then thought, “How can I do that within the previous stated parameters if I don’t have adequate sustainment?”. Then I remembered Rogar’s, Disregard boots, and Wildebeest’s Leg gem and figured that maybe passive life per second will do the trick. And that how I theoretically figured that that amount of sustain could allow me to equip Fury’s Peak and Destruction bracers and face tank. And that where I now am. But the focus is fun and then power, and how much of it can be muster up of the process. And every suggestion that you made has contributed to the “vision” of where this setup is now. Thank you!

Now I need to farm SS bracers and wep. And I’m excited about! So I’ll be taking a break from Wolcen to return to D3, my first luv.

@BLACKARROWS

You changed your avatar! That image always gave me the heebeegees. :grimacing:

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Halloween ftw…

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I added a LightningQuake section to the OP. Take a look when you get a chance!

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Hey Rage,
well done.
I can agree with everything you mentioned. Well written.
Thanks for quoting me there as well. The build guide from diablofans is almost ancient and never touched it since.
So as you wrote the exact rotation is not set in stone. There are many different rotations to try and the optimal solution also heavily depends on the exact amount of CDR you have.

I especially liked your “death wish” build at the end. Made me laugh. It’s almost certainly not possible to play without some stupid amount of paragons and vit added. However that’s also a reason I like the upcoming additional cube slot during season 22.

Playing around a bit with the build (preparing for the patch, maybe I even try some runs with IBs when it hits) and since Captain Crimson is a set that synergizes so well with the setup it really should be included no matter what. Remember I pushed with this build when Crimsons revised version didnt even exist.

Cleared a 120 with my 3rd key (3.7k para, 67 AD, primal BotT with Str, CDR, LpfS - would prefer AD) - no conduit, no power on boss - admittedly a good battlefield into spire with swarms and used the the EW + Crimson setup. It feels smooth even without a CDR roll on the necklace. Which is obviously a big dmg boost.
I was surprised and have to admit was stubborn to think CoE is mandatory for the build. Even though of course it’s still a big plus to have it!
Should rather comfortably clear low 130s without too much fishing needed.

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Of course- credit where credit is due!

Just remember to take (and spam) BR rather than WC- since IB doesn’t activate from the Lightning rune of EQ.

Congrats!

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thanks.

no worries, with this build it activates and keeps 5 stacks from SS alone.
spamming BR would be counter productive for this build since it messes with refresh times of EQ
however you’re right with IBs (extra 10 cdr) and animosity + templar fury passive it’s almost smooth to swap WC for BR (leap+ts, EQ, slam, leap, EQ, slam, repeat). dunno if the trade-off is worth it. I’ll see.

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What are the top 5 build of Patch 2.6.10, in non-season?

Whoops, haha yep, sounds right to me!

For Barb it’s Zodiac Rend #1, Leapquake #2, Frenzy #3, Pro-Slam #4, and probably LOD HOTA #5.

For all classes, I have no idea.

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The new DIBS picture for Leapquake is a bit more complex than it used to be, so I wanted to talk about that a bit. Now that the 200% dibs on Tribes is (presumably) gone, other individual rolls are going to be more valuable. There’s also one roll that didn’t even exist before, a 15% EQ roll on Tribes.

So the full list of dibs rolls you might reasonably pick up is:

25% from TS: Falter
10% from Battle Rage
15% on Chest
15% on Shoulders
15% on Tribes
30% from Strongarms
20% from Brawler

If you take it all, it’s +130% damage to EQ. But, of course, you will have to give up something else to get each of those rolls. Let’s look at each in turn.

TS Falter: 25% dibs. Net dibs 25%. Increase over 0% dibs: +25% damage. Give up: TS Demoralize, which adds about 20% mitigation and grouping.

Battle Rage: 10% dibs. Net dibs 35%. Increase over 25% dibs: +8% damage. Give up: War Cry, which adds about 20% mitigation (and a bit of damage, but not as much as BR, even just considering the base effect of 10% dibs and 3% CHC).

Chest: 15% dibs. Net dibs 50%. Increase over 35% dibs: +11% damage. Give up: AllRes, Elite Reduction, Vit, or Life% (i.e. generally between 6-12% toughness).

Shoulders: 15% dibs. Net dibs 65%. Increase over 50% dibs: +10% damage. Give up: AllRes or STR. STR is generally going to be better to give up since you only need to be above 6500 STR for the dibs to outperform in terms of damage, and the number of places you can get AllRes are limited.

Tribes: 15% dibs. Net dibs 80%. Increase over 65% dibs: +9% damage. Give up: generally, STR, since you only need to be over 14650 STR for the dibs bonus to give more damage. For low paragon players, this roll won’t generally be worth taking, since STR, AD, and DMG% will all be somewhat superior to 15% EQ, assuming you have all the other rolls listed above (and even if you are missing the roll on shoulders, this roll on Tribes will only give you +10% dmg, so still not worth taking vs either DMG% or AD). So, to be clear, best rolls at low paragon are probably STR, AD, DMG%, and at high paragon, EQ%, AD, DMG%.

Strongarms: 30% dibs. Net dibs 110%. Increase over 80% dibs: +16.7% damage. Give up: it’s a bit complicated. You obviously have to give up Parthans, which costs you a variable amount of mitigation- sometimes enormous, sometimes small. As a result, you also must take BR: StP, in order to stay alive.

If you were previously using BR: ItF, this costs you a variable amount of CHC, which ranges between +1% (+1.3% damage) and +30% (+38.5% damage), but is most frequently in the 10-15% range (+13 - 19% damage). So, taking Strongarms is roughly equivalent to taking BR:ItF, in terms of damage, though better in low density, and worse in high density.

In order to proc the Strongarms, you also need to switch from Leap: DfA to Leap: CoA, which packs your enemies together. This adds even more damage, via AD, but your enemies don’t get stunned, which means you end up taking more damage from them hitting you.

So, taking Strongarms is a somewhat complicated proposition- at least at the aforementioned level of prior dibs. If, on the other hand, you only had Falter, BR, and Chest (50% dibs total), then Strongarms would represent a +20% damage bonus, at which point they would probably outperform BR: ItF in most situations.

Brawler: 20% dibs. Net dibs: 130%. Increase over 110% dibs: +9.5% damage. Give up: Either Ruthless or Boon. Ruthless gives an actual damage increase of about +9.29%, and it is a bit more guaranteed than Brawler. After all, even though Ruthless is obviously not up all the time, you need to reduce enemies to 30% life in order to reduce them to 0% life.

Boon gives somewhere around +7.5% damage from decreased cooldowns on WOTB and EQ, so it’s actually the least damaging of the three passives, but it is nice to have WOTB up more often to avoid CC in big fights against multiple elite packs. So, generally, I would choose between Ruthless and Brawler, keeping in mind that either one will be a solid choice.

Of all these dibs rolls, the easiest to get, and with the smallest tradeoffs in terms of damage, are generally going to be TS: Falter, Battle Rage, and Chest, which brings you to 50% net dibs. From that mark, adding Strongarms, as I mentioned, would be +20% damage, adding a 15% roll on Tribes or Shoulders would be +10% damage, and adding Brawler would be +13.3% damage.

Anyway, the bottom line is: the value of each dibs roll is contingent on what other dibs rolls you’ve got piled up. Make sure you check the damage added vs what you’re giving up before you make any permanent decisions. And if you need help with the numbers, just let me know and I’ll give you a hand.

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I would always go Ruthless over Brawler. Brawler is still a solid option now cus as you said when the 200% from BotT is gone dibs on other slots gain alot of relative value.

Obviously Ruthless actually helps on single targets (many RGs).
Also low life targets in density proc bigger AD numbers across all mobs adding more value to it.

As far as I know Ruthless is its complete own multiplier when activated so I always thought even without the AD benefit it provides it is a 12% dmg increase (30 / 100 * 40)
can you elaborate on 8.5%? Am I missing something here?

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Actually, I just realized I made a small error, particularly in the way I phrased it, but here are the numbers:

So, Ruthless’ actual damage: let’s say you’ve got a target with 1,000,000 life, and, without Ruthless, you do 1000 damage per hit.

So, to trigger Ruthless, you need to deal 700,000 damage, which takes 700 hits.

Now you do 1400 damage, so to remove the remaining 300,000 life, you need 215 additional hits, for 915 hits total.

Without Ruthless, it would obviously take 1000 hits.

(1/915) / (1/1000) = 1.0929, i.e. a damage increase of 9.29%.

The % decrease in hits required to kill is (1 - (915/1000)) * 100, or an 8.5% reduction in kill time (that’s where 8.5% came from).

It’s a question of Harmonic Means… there’s an essay about its implications for D3 on Reddit, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo3/comments/eb5vgz/harmonic_means_you_ft_ruthless_ambush_frailty_100/

As for Ruthless and AD, this doesn’t exactly settle the issue, but I put together this spreadsheet comparing how some various things interact with each other in density, including Ambush, Ruthless, and AD.

As for Ruthless helping on single target RGs: yes!

But, keep in mind that the value of any damage increase against a single target is somewhat reduced by the use of Stricken. For instance, getting a flat +10% damage increase will only let you kill a single-target RG about 5% faster.

Anyway, thanks for getting me to double check that Ruthless damage number. Fixing that in the previous post now.

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yep my calculation were wrong. it’s an easy trap to fall into when trying to do basic maths. so Ruthless gain as you said is ~ +9.3% dmg
Logically I always try to remind myself whats relevant inside of 100 or outside of 100. Calculating Ruthless being 12% is the wrong way to think about that.
Difficult to explain what I mean with that but the basis of the Ruthless calculation is obviously the mobs healthbar which is 100% max.

reduction in kill time and dmg increase are obviously two different values. For Ruthless 9.3% dmg increase (or 8.5% reduction in kill time)

Also interesting spreadsheet. However I’m missing the “Ruthless, no AD” column to compare the results in that particular example.
With Ambush I can see that it’s still a thing that adds value to that passive (both Ambush and Rushless. probably higher value for Ambush) but with reducing hits from e.g. 105 to 103 - with max AD - that’s a very tiny additional benefit (across all mobs less than 2% additionally added killspeed in density)

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Hey Rage, can you expand on this. Do you think Blizz will nullify the 200% dibs on legacy Blade? I for one believe that if they do, it would an be unprecedented. Or at least I can’t recall a time when they took that course of action.

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If I remember correctly, one Item I can think of is, when they updated the new Skull Grasp they nullified the old.

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That’s what they were talking about doing in the patch notes for the PTR. Then, in the updated PTR, they seemed to have tried to do that, but kind of messed up the process.

Over in PTR feedback, Alex gave me this history reminder:

"Just my 2 cents - 2.6.1 was the largest patch that transformed all legacy dibs to separate multipliers in many, many items from all classes: FotVP, GoJ, Blade of prophecy, Frydehr’s wrath, Golden flense, Jekangbord, DML, Manticore, Balance, Incense torch, Chiroptera, Grand vizier, Unstable scepter, Woh… I might have missed some… the absence of blade of tribes from this list is really notable.

In each and every case this is how the change was made: “Existing versions of this item will also be changed to include the damage roll in the orange text, but will always roll a damage roll equal to the previous maximum possible.”

So, the last time that legacy dibs were changed to multipliers (and that’s three years ago), no simultaneous versions were allowed."

Anyway, complete demolition of the dibs bonus is the only reasonable way to proceed. If they don’t get rid of it, then the best setup will be to carry an old Tribes and put a new one in the cube, an outcome that will ruin the build for every new player, since Legacy Tribes will no longer be obtainable.

If the patch goes live and that dibs bonus still exists, I am literally going to make a new General Discussion thread every day to holler about it. All of us were new players, once. And if we had gotten royally screwed over, I’m sure we wouldn’t have been happy.

I put that together for a Demon Hunter thread with some questions about Ambush, hence the focus on that skill.

The point where you get to just a tiny bit of added value from Ambush or Ruthless is perhaps where the modeling starts to break down. Because of course, if you’re a good player, then what you’ll do once you’ve killed all those weaker mobs is kite the big mobs to more density.

At that point, with Ambush, you regain the damage bonus from the weaker mobs proccing extra AD onto the big mobs, and with Ruthless, those weakened big mobs proc extra AD onto the small mobs. As for the amount of value added by that strategic move, I could try to calculate it, but it starts to get pretty complicated.

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I’m confident that this is the ideal setup for me at least. It has some significant changes:

https://ptr.d3planner.com/753467366

Edit: you’re right about Strongarm being the better bracers.