[Guide] Zodiac Rend (Season 20)

Barbarian
1353

Thanks for your feedback. Ambo’s + Doom is going to be trickier to play since you’re relying on Weapons Master and Ambo’s to generate Fury. In many situations, you can end up Fury starved, and when that happens, you’re dead.

For speeds where none of that matters, yes, Ambo’s is definitely better, and it’s also likely better in the top 1% of push attempts provided you’re willing to fish hundreds upon hundreds of keys for the perfect soft rift. Really, though, Ambo’s + Doom only really shines with the S20 theme if you can make use of the Season theme to wear FnR and put Zodiac, BoM, and CoE in the Cube.

Results from last Season, this Season, and non-Season testing indicate that both combos are more or less equal in terms of GR clears for most players, though truly dedicated players who are willing to grind several thousand Paragon, blow thousands of mats on perfect gear, and fish hundreds of keys will likely push the Ambo’s + Doom combo a little higher (1-3 GRs is the estimate). But again, that’s only for the most persistent players.

If you’re playing non-Season, I wouldn’t bother with Ambo’s + Doom.

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1354

Thanks for the response (on here and reddit!)!

What are your thoughts on CoE vs Furnace as the 3rd cube slot for the Ambo setup?

1355

https://www.d3planner.com/533177681

Think you all are going to like this one. I went a little Leap crazy in the beginning, but then I settled down.:laughing:

Added Demoralize and Leap (real nice mobility) with Iron Impact. I make mobs and Elites come to me. Cleared GR 122 with 3:33 to spare.

Edit: Free I’m realizing why I die more with StP and it’s because I’m constantly hard-casting, I don’t wait for Oculus ring (hard cast doesn’t benefit from StP). That said, I think I have enough DR to hard-cast for one total second. I wonder how beneficial that would be to allow for one full second of uninterrupted AD. :thinking:

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1356

Nice job and interesting take on the build!

I can’t help but think ground stop would be more efficient at pulling mobs into the occulus circles and also less downtime from spinning. Leap takes up considerable time you can otherwise spend DPS’ing. Any reason you chose it?

Like you I fervently resisted rage flip for a while, but then I started plateauing at GR121 so I reluctantly trained myself to use it, and now I can’t live without it lol

1357

Thanks.

I need a lot of room for error, so I think Iron Impact give me that needed cushion. And it seems to allow me more time to sit and reap greater benefit of the Oculus ring (worry free of arcane beams and the sort.

I want to test what the combination of GS and Leap for possibly better grouping, but it carries more unwanted redundancy.

1358

An interesting thing I just found out:

So, in his early testing on WW/Rend, SVR said that Rend ticks damage every 12 frames. I think that’s close to right, but something a little strange is actually happening.

In testing with a few 1H and 2H weapons, it appears to me that there is, so to speak, a continuous timer running on Rend, even when no Rend is active. In other words, when it comes to Rend ticking damage every 12 frames, “frame 0” is not when you cast Rend, it’s some arbitrary time determined by the game.

The result of this is that your Rend damage gets chopped up kind of randomly.

An example: I cast Rend on a skeleton. He takes damage 4 times: 4.6 mil, 10.3 mil, 10.3 mil, and 5.7 mil.

You’ll note that the 4.6 and 5.7 mil add up to another 10.3 mil.

In another instance, this time using a 2H mace, the skeleton takes damage 5 times: 10, 5077, 6381, 6381, and 1276.

You’ll note that 10 + 5077 + 1276 adds up to 6363, pretty close to 6381.

So, as a result of this “continuous timer” your Rend could actually deal damage as little as 1 frame after you cast it, or as long as 12 frames.

This makes no difference in terms of the total damage dealt, but if you are throwing in HC Rends while spinning, the result is that some of those HC Rends may deal AD before you overwrite them, while others will be overwritten before they tick damage.

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1359

This makes perfect sense, and explains why some of the AD procs are occuring almost instantly (before what visually appears to be the Rend detonation). Thanks for testing.

1360

I should note that those Rends that are most likely to tick damage + AD before being overwritten are also those that are going to do the least damage via an AD proc.

Because if your Rend gets applied 1 frame before the “tick point”, it’s only going to do a small fraction of the damage dealt by a Rend that got applied 12 frames before the “tick point”.

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1361

I like using leap also, I find it gets me out of situations I can’t spin out of and if I am halfway lucky I can hit that pesky circle from time to time without running to it.
Good luck!

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1362

Ideally, how long would one want to wait after the second hard-cast before Ambo-Rend to get all 12 ticks to cause AD?

Tomorrow I’m going to try to clear 123 for the first time.

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1363

It’s not 12 ticks, it’s a tick “every 12 frames” (every 0.2 seconds / 5 times per second).

It’s just that the counter on those 12 frames is always running, so when you cast Rend, you may be 12 frames from when Rend will tick, or you could be 4 frames away, or 1 frame away.

If you’re using the IB set, you should have 2.52 sheet attacks per second (and as far as I know, Rend hard-casts at your sheet rate). I think that works out to a HC Rend every 24 frames.

Taeguk lasts 1.5 seconds, or 90 frames. So, you really ought to be able to HC Rend 3x (should take 72 frames) before Taeguk drops. But, that only gives you less than 1/5th of a second to react and start WWing again, so that’s cutting it pretty close.

If you HC 2x, then immediately WW, your first Rend will get to tick 2-3 times, depending on where on the “timer” you hard-cast, before you cast your second Rend. Your first and second Rend will then get to tick 0-1 times. If they do tick, it’ll probably be a “short tick” which does less damage than a “long tick”, since it’s accounting for less frames of Rend damage…

My advice: don’t worry about it. Just try to squeeze in your 2x HC Rends when you can, or if you’re feeling ambitious, try to make it 3x. It’s impossible to time out the actual ticks, because the timer itself is essentially invisible. I mean, maybe a bot could do it, but a human certainly can’t.

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1364

Precisely.

In the end, some hard-casts are going to get the full BLAMMO of the Rend detonation, and others are shorted on the tick count. That’s life. It’s still ridiculously strong, and counting ticks is the last thing anyone, skeletons included, want to do.

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1365

Ok, so let’s say I wasn’t constrained by Taeguk 1.5 seconds timer, but was using Bane of Power, could 6 consecutive hard-cast reap a full 5 ticks of AD?

1366

Taeguk is too much damage to give up, period.

You’re starting to stretch the bounds of the build to unrealistic (and completely broken) bounds.

Gems are locked. Gear is more or less locked. Stomp > Leap. If you want to push it and succeed, don’t reinvent the wheel.

1367

Just thinking out loud and I don’t me to agitate anyone. A second thought came to immediately after posting last night and it was this:

Maybe it would in our best interest to continue to hard-cast even if Taeguk dropps in order to guarantee an AD proc. You’d have 3 hard-cast with Taeguk buff and 2 with out, the AD damage is so great that it may pay off.

1368

Don’t forget that Taeguk also provides a 2% armour bonus for each stack. Letting 10 stacks fall off means losing 20% armour bonus, which is a lot of mitigation. At higher GRs, that might end up with a dead Barb.

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1369

Right, I think more along the lines of if I could pull it off if I had Iron Impact and TS up. Maybe if could of set s the drop of Taeguk 20% armor buff for the extra chance to proc AD.

1370

But then your AD doesn’t have the added damage from Taeguk! You get what I’m saying? If Taeguk goes down, you lose a lot of damage. It’s more damage lost than if Trapped were to momentarily shut down.

The key is to maintain all damage buffs, hit your hard-casts, and get out of there without overwriting your Rends. That’s actually pretty simple–just exit in a straight line to minimize the risk of Rend overlaps.

Edit: Saw your other post and want to clarify: It’s cool to think outside the box, but the box is, well, already more or less stretched to its limits. Most any other direction you go is going to result in a significant loss in damage, efficiency, or toughness. The build is flexible, but not that flexible without taking a major hit somewhere.

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1371

About 12% mitigation.

About 43% damage.

That would have been true for old-school WW, probably not for WhirlRend. Still a lot of damage to lose, though.

I’m pretty sure this is somewhere between difficult and impossible, unless you’re using Rend: Ravage. Most guys who you hit with 12-yard-radius Rend will also get hit by 9 yard radius WW/DDs.

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1372

1st time clearing GR 123 Rank 483 w/ 25 sec to spare(I really need to make better game play decisions). At this point I’ve dropped 3 CDR roll for AD 134% (weps & one of my rings).

https://www.d3planner.com/749165226

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