Man I having so much more fun pushing with these clones. It’s like every pylon is a baby conduit.
121 down in 6 keys
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Does bloodbath interact with area damage at all? I’m not even sure the right question to ask - just curious how bloodbath fits in with everything else. Used to be that I though bloodbath was the big reason density was so important for this build, which is one reason the “99% of damage is from hard casts on the physical cycle” got my attention in the first place. Made me wonder how important bloodbath is if area damage is by far the biggest thing. How would lacerate compare? I don’t doubt the guidance - I’m just fascinated by the “why” and all the analysis y’all have done.
Thanks for this detailed analysis to everyone else who chimed in. This really highlighted for me that I had no idea how area damage worked, and prompted me to go read up on that.
Do you stop spinning to hard cast? This is a concept I’ve kind of struggled to grasp. I feel like I need to keep spinning for fury and healing but from a lot of the discussion here about ambo’s and hard-cast rends canceling each other I’ve picked up that I’m not really supposed to do that.
Yes. Bloodbath can cause up to two extra Rends on a target beyond the two that you can apply directly. And these Rends seem to follow the same rules as the Rends that spawned them, i.e. if you kill a target affected by hard-cast Rend, the Bloodbath Rends that spawn will also apply AD.
Technically, you kind of have to stop spinning to hard-cast, in the sense that while hard-casting Rend, you aren’t channeling WW.
But, you don’t want to stop spinning for long, because Taeguk will drop, which costs you both armor and damage. So, you intersperse your hc Rends into your spinning.
I believe Chris has said he more or less continuously taps Rend while also holding down the WW key. Other players press the Rend key long enough to apply hc Rend twice, before releasing it and spinning again for a short time (<= 1 sec). Either way, you are mixing your spinning and your hc Rends together more or less continuously.
So you do in fact hold down the WW key the whole time. No need to let it up other than to conserve fury when there are no enemies around to proc windshear.
Given that hard-casting rend interrupts WW, what does that do to MoC? Does it mean you never get the MoC damage buff for hard cast rends?
No realistic way to control this, right?
No COE? What about COE and Furnace in place of Focus and Restraint?
p.s. I’ve found 4 each Focus and Restraint this season and they’re all terrible! 
I’ve about hit a wall at GR107 (P821) so I’m poking around at possible tweaks. Toughness became a problem around 104 so I’ve been trying Stone Gauntlets, which is nice as long as you don’t let WotB go down. Need more damage though…
This has me thinking about trying crimson’s but I have a primal Lamentation with str/vit/ra/life.
Did a quick trial using just regular Rend, with Wastes (2), looking at the interaction with Mantle.
Tinne, as you mentioned, the defensive bonus does seem to hold for nearly a second after the WW animation stops:
Mantle of Channeling active time with WW/Rend - YouTube
And for the damage, in this video you can see that the Rends retain the higher, MoC-buffed damage even when I am interspersing WW and Rend together:
WW / Rend damage interaction with MoC. - YouTube
So: it sure looks like the MoC bonus will basically be in effect all of the time, including for all hard-casts.
Well, you just want to hard-cast regularly, but you already should be doing that.
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Very cool, thanks for checking.
Took a while for that to sink in with me but I am now. To my question, I take it that you just intersperse hard-cast with ww, and you’ve got no way of controlling or influencing or even knowing whether ww is canceling hard cast or vice versa. I know you guys did testing on that a while ago and I think you concluded they’ll both cancel each other. So you just spin and hard-cast and accept the fact that sometimes your ambo’s rends are interfering with the aod rends.
Yeah, I did most of that testing, and that was my conclusion: that Ambo Rends and Hard-Cast Rends overwrite one another. It was pretty hard to test, considering the short duration involved (1 second), and the fact that you are looking for AD procs, which are hard to distinguish from other white damage (for instance, Rend itself).
I do know for 100% sure that Ambo Rends and HC Rends cannot overlap, i.e. you can’t have two Ambo Rends and two HC Rends on the same target (which would double your damage). I specifically tested for that, and determined it didn’t work.
And, we know overwriting obviously does happen, since:
- most enemies around you are going to be hit by a ton of Ambo Rends via WW and
- it is obvious that hard-casting Rend leads to much higher clears.
So, those HC Rends are adding a lot of damage somehow, and since they can’t overlap, they must be overwriting.
I’ve always kind of assumed they overwrite each other on a 1:1 basis, i.e. if you have 2 Ambo Rends active on an enemy, and then you Hard Cast Rend, one of those instances of Ambo-Rend would be replaced with an instance of HC Rend.
But, I suppose it could be that hitting with HC Rend or Ambo-Rend converts all active Rends to that type, i.e., if an enemy has 2 Ambo Rends on him, and then you hit with HC Rend, both of those Rends become HC. That might better explain why the “1 HC Rend at a time” that Chris uses works as well as it does. I had always advocated 2x HC Rends, as I figured it would take 2 casts to get the maximum amount of AD-dealing Rends in place. But, perhaps this is not the case.
Anyway, to answer your question:
Yes.
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Maybe it actually upgrades ambo’s rends to aod rends and doesn’t downgrade aod rends to ambo’s rends. If true then there’s literally no downside to hard-casting at will (other than the obvious, like when you’re on the move).
Pretty sure Ambo Rends also overwrite. That’s what several hours of testing seemed to show, anyway.
Ok, here’s a weird one for you:
In the course of doing a bit more testing on Rend, I ended up recording all the damage numbers occurring when auto-applying Rend via WW to an enemy (and this was looking at changes in the health bar number, not the big “pop-out” numbers). This included damage numbers from WW, from Rend, and from Thorns damage dealt to the enemy when he hit me.
Those damage numbers were:
1,409,024
2,785,280
194,646,016
475,570,176
47,258,656
6,656,992
231,428,096
The greatest common factor for all of these numbers is 32.
Does the game only calculate damage in 32 point increments? I know the big “pop-out” numbers are sometimes odd, and would thus not have 32 as a factor, but these are rounded. Are actual damage numbers always even?
Edit: did another test, numbers are all even again, this time including damage from Seismic Slam, in addition to WW, Rend, Thorns. GCF this time was 8192, which is 32 * 256…
At the risk of over-simplifying, I’ll add that you shouldn’t worry about which overwrites which. If you want to fully optimize the build’s performance, focus on correct play, which follows this cycle:
- Find a T-tile or intersection
- Group several (2-3+) screens of enemies together using Spear
- Stomp them into/near an Oculus on your Physical COE cycle and hard-cast until the density is significantly thinned out
- Drag elites and remaining valuable trash to the next intersection and repeat
Hard-cast Rends are applied for only two reasons:
- To proc AD
- To proc additional Zodiac cooldown reduction
Against single-target RGs, only hard-cast when necessary to assist in proccing Zodiac. Otherwise, you should always be spinning. Even when you do hard-cast, you don’t ever have to take your finger off Mouse 2 (or whatever button/key assigned to Whirlwind).
Everything I posted above is the key to the build. You can get nit-picky and worry about which Rend overwrites which, and in certain situations that can be useful–when density is thick, you want to maximize your hard-casts so that your Rends and Bloodbath Rends all proc AD–but you also need to keep up the bonuses from Taeguk and Wastes 4, so you’ll always intersperse some spinning into hard-casts. Generally speaking, there’s a kind of rhythm–spin, hard-cast x2, spin, hard-cast x2, and so forth until density thins out and it’s time to move on (or, as noted above, against single-target RGs).
Wild shot in the dark, but could this be a holdover from the tech’s 32-bit origins? Remember, chunks of this engine pre-date 2010.
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Low level characters can hit for less than 32. A level 1 character can hit for single digit damage can they not?
Could just be rounding somewhere to simplify calculations? When things have trillions of HP, the last digit of precision is kind of irrelevant.
These all being multiples of 2 seems telling though. Might have something to do with the way some integer operations are set up in the game or something. I’m not a programmer, I don’t know enough about programming integer operations to have any insight beyond that. Definitely seems odd though.
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Hi Rage, from your second link, It seems MOC buff lasts for two tics after you stop WW’ing before the dmg buff drops off. Do you know if this is enough time for 2x rend casts? Or even 3x?
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Haven’t checked, but I think you are right.
Edit: I checked, and low level characters can hit for both single-digits and odd numbers.
Seems likely, though I wonder how that works. If the game performs a complex calculation and then rounds to the nearest 32, that doesn’t really simplify anything.
Just a reminder: when talking about Rend “ticks”, we are actually looking at the monster’s health bar, and not at the “pop-out” numbers we usually think of as showing damage. In the case of Rend, these “pop-out” numbers add up multiple individual ticks.
The actual tick frequency of Rend is also kind of weird.
Anyway, the MoC buff definitely holds long enough for hard-cast 2x.
3x is probably cutting it close on both MoC and Taeguk, so probably not worth it.
Hmm, I don’t think so…
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Confirmed, I’ll continue with my 2x HC ways. Thx bro 
Edit - been playing a lot (to me) of seasons. Decided to throw some keys at 141 again to change up the pace. First floor Thrall battlefields. Got a condi at the end and zapped up to 65% progression and 3 minutes a head of timer.
Second floor, small spiders non four corner festering. Going well and got to the end with just over 3 minutes left and 97%. Spawned the power pylon at 98% and I’m freaking out. Go to pull the last bit of trash mobs and I’m at 99% with 2:15 left on the clock.
From my previous testing, I can kill RG with power pylon in ~ 1:50 mins with no adds. At this point, my adrenalin is pumping haha. I fumble, miss time my stomp and die. I respawn and get instagibbed… four times in a row!!! Hit wrath during one of those deaths too so now I’m extra F’d with a wotb cooldown.
There goes my 141 clear. I hate wallers, was trying to go around it and screwed up my stomp timing, FUUUU.
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Oof, sorry bro! That stinks!
Did you spawn the boss? Who’d you draw?
EU, Season 22, Rank 190 Solo Barb, GR121, Paragon 1038, 13.5K STR
https://i.imgur.com/ZRF9hKQ.jpg
Early days.
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Yup, after the stint of deaths, I got my wotb off cooldown and spawned the RG with a few rends. Got Ember and killed him within 2 minutes. Did the walk of shame back to town and got my exp points. 
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Quite possibly the most painful Diablo story I’ve ever read. Hit me in the stomach.
Keep pushing, mah dude. You’ll get it. In the meantime, I’ll be pouring one (gallon) out for you.
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