LoD Blessed Shield

Crusader
21

Anelyn,
The problem with some of your questions is that the numbers all change based on your current gear etc. My personal recommendation for ancient/non ancient is that when it comes to your DPS pieces the right stats are more important that if it’s ancient or not. I have a non ancient flavor of time this season that when I test it on D3planner is actually more DPS than my ancient WITH a level 105 augment. I still went with the ancient only because it has 22,000LOH which i really need the LOH and it allowed me to swap to critical on my law.

I would also highly recommend looking for a new shield asap. It looks to me like the damage boost on your shield is an old max value? It says 300% on your profile, that’s the current shields minimum value these days. I also don’t see a unity on your profile, that makes a HUGE difference.

If you check out my profile it will give you a good idea of what to be shooting for. Currently it’s displaying my tankier gear set for speed farming 100-105 GR’s to level gems. My full blown fire dps that I completed a 118 GR seasonal on last night swaps my cube stone gauntlets for aguila and equips a cindercoat for the fire damage. I also swap my iceclimbers to illusionary for the mobility. I’ve still been running the steed, though i’m tempted to try a different skill to see if i can find something that helps me more.

22

Aye, that’s what am asking pretty much. You say you use your tankier setup for farming and more squishy setup for pushing. How don’t you die in GR118 w/o stone gauntlets or defensive gem etc. I know it’s impossible to have 100% uptime on Akkharat Champion for LoN / LoD BS unlike the set, and you generally pop it once you found an elite pack or gathered enough mobs to start DPS, but while you’re moving on the map and rounding mobs, don’t you like get 1-2 shot (even with iron skin / provoke cycling).

I mean you can’t have more than ~350m toughness outside of CD’s and that’s not enough (especially if you get a map with ranged mobs or mobs that charge you from offscreen etc).

The biggest DPS does come from having all items ancient (since you get 750% per item instead of 350%), obv fire cycle on ring plus laws of valor critical activation plus provoke for 100%+ block chance for more BS damage.

I did got a new ancient shield and will swap to that one as soon as I figure what I want on it based on rest of the gear (and this one doesn’t have a socket) :slight_smile:

With my setup I am peaking ~1.4B with everything up which lets me stand and tank in plague / mortar / molten etc in middle of mobs, so I am thinking upgrading my 5 non-ancient pieces to ancient will give me more dps than fine tunning the ancients I already have, to be able to speed farm 105 let’s say.

Cheers!

23

Anelyn,
i don’t know how to explain it, but you are survivable and not getting one shot. Having a good health pool and 30k LOH really helps. I just completed a 119 GR seasonal with 1677 Paragon (WOOT that made me #1). I have 654,000 life and running 31k LOH. I died one time in the run using my “squishier” setup, but it’s 72% fire damage(7,082,094 sheet fire damage) and 4,117,496 sheet dps. Standing in town i have a toughness of 181,273,392.

One thing to keep in mind when you’re thinking about the “big gains” and the 375% increase for having ancient over non ancient. In the grand scheme of things it’s not actually 375%. You have 13 pieces of gear. If they’re all non ancient that’s 13 x 375% or 4875% damage increase. Now if you get one of those to be ancient, you’re now technically 4875 + 375 or 5250%. Technically that’s only a 7.2% increase, while that’s still a super nice increase, if you took a 20% damage hit because the stats are wrong, you just went backwards. It feels even less at higher numbers. So you have 8 ancient, 5 non. that’s 8 at 750% and 5 at 375% (6000+1875 = 7875% increase total). If you get one ancient, you go from 7875% to 8250% total or a massive 4.5% increase. Keep in mind, those numbers are assuming the non ancient and the ancient you swap are exactly the same dps. If it’s a DPS loss, that gain is less or negative, if the ancient is a DPS gain, that number is on top of the item upgrade.

Also,
Keep in mind, a good setup you can face tank stuff in the 90’s to low 100’s. But when you’re talking about GR 110+, no you are NOT going to stand in molten, laser beams, poison pools and face tank it all with the squishier set up, it’s just too much. You do have to move and play smart about positioning. Hell, in the 119 i just completed i skipped an elite pack completely because of the affixes and the lack of trash around to help boost my shield bounces.

I try to save my champion form and Law to use together for a fire cycle. If you pop champion just as you enter a fire cycle, it will last all the way through your next fire cycle thus netting you a big boost in two fire cycles. alternate provoke and iron skin or use together if you’re in trouble. and again, at high level, don’t stand in bad things.

I hope this helps a little bit.

PS- blizzard, if you’re reading this, stop dropping Primal helms for me! For the love of god I have 3 primal Rolands, 2 primal lights, 2 primal akkhans, and a smattering of others that are worthless! Some primals that i can use would be nice!

2 Likes
25

So, would you recommend BotT and BoS or BoS and PE?

26

Depends on playstyle but I think PE might be best. The attack speed can increase your Leniency stacks and your recovery via Life on Hit.

It’s close though. If you have a high level Trapped and don’t have trouble surviving, I think that does provide a smidge more damage.

27

PE = IAS = more damage to RG than trapped. Don’t prioritize trash damage.

28

I personally have been running pain enhancer. Mainly due to the amount of trash and face tanking things. It’s a pretty big attack speed gain when you have a screen full of trash and it causes a large increase to your Life on hit and the stacks of shield impacts in 3 seconds. When you hit the riftguardian I kinda think bane of trapped would be the winner. I need to do some simulating on D3 planner to know for sure. But PE on the rift guardian is only 3% IAS versus BOTT at a high percentage the whole time.

Just napkin math, and maybe i’m way off here. But let’s pretend my attack speed is 2.00 APS. If i get 3% on a rift boss that means my AS is now 2.06. at 2.00APS it would take me 20 seconds to hit a guardian 40 times. At 2.06 APS in 20 seconds I would hit the guardian 41.2 times. With my stricken gem that would net me one extra stack of ~1.95% damage increase. With BOtT I’m running at 50% damage increase from the very start. Doesn’t seem worth it to me. To me PE is for trash, and BOtT is for the guardian. Problem is that 10 minutes of your run is trash, and 3 minutes is the guardian

MIght try to high GR tonight with BOTT and see how it does. It’s been a long time since i’ve tried it, I think i have it at 110 gem level so would be a good quick test.

3 Likes
29

Remember that it only works on certain guardians, only those that have high enough spawn rate of adds to grant enough attackspeed. In any case trapped works against guardians and is a must in almost every build. The damage bonus is too large to disregard.

30

running two generic tests on my character upload with NO paragon points put in etc. a simulation says:

PE: 9434.196 B done in 4 min. (little less than 1 trillion damage)
BOtT: 10.039 T done in 4 min.

If i’m reading that correctly, Bane of the trapped would do more than 10 times the damage in 4 minutes…dear lord. I’m going to have to test this tonight.

Little side note: it also shows my shield damage jumping from 80B to 117B per hit (no paragon input into the sim).

31

Yea, I don’t know what you’re reading.

Pain Enhancer: less than 1 tril in 4 minutes.
Trapped: 10 tril in 4 minutes.

Where do you see PE doing more than 10x the damage? Also, trapped will not affect RGs, but the planner thinks it does; same for Strong Arms.

32

I notice you keep posting this in several threads. Why do you think Trapped won’t work on RGs?

33

Typo, typed the wrong gem name. At work right now multitasking… :slight_smile:

34

Bane works on RG’s it’s the reason why my N6M4 cold DH can explode Guardians, if it didn’t It would be a huge hit on dps (since I have 6 turrets that all benefit from the extra dmg).

My take is that running Long Arms of the Law to have 10s on Valor Critical is a better dps gain than bane since with Gogok of Swiftness I will have 23% AS increase and +15% CD reduction AND 50% more crit damage up for the entire fight with the guardian irrelevant if am in fire cycle or not, if I have to move to dodge out stuff or if there are adds or not. Having 100% uptime on Valor Critical - to me - along with 23% AS (8 more from Valor and 15% from gogok) seems like a much better deal than a flat 50-60% dmg increase from Trapped (which may not be up at all time if you need to kite / move away from some difficult RG and not be in 15 yards range and your follower doesn’t proc his slow etc).

Pretty much doing this (I dropped towering shield 20% BS dmg for the valor 10s duration) made it so I can clear GR 105 with 8-7m left after GR death depending on map / mob types instead of 2-3m left after GR death (when was running Towering shield, bane of trapped and bane of stricken or w/e is called that multiplies dmg vs GR / bosses each time you hit them).

I was able to reproduce this several runs in a row (the clear time) on various maps / RG’s so for me it’s better by miles than trapped. Am quite positive once I get some better rolls on my ancients and find an ancient Lantern to get last ancient in slot (and replace my shield) I can probably do 110 with 2-3 minutes left at my 1.2k paragon.

35

I tested and compared PE and BotT quite a bit when I was pushing GR130 in NS, and I settled on BotT because it’s more consistent.

During rift clearing phase, both gems performed about the same as far as clearing speed is concerned, and I didn’t need the extra healing from higher attack speed with PE so I call it a tie.

The key difference is RG fight. BotT is far stronger than PE even on RG with adds because those adds usually die too fast for PE to provide consistent and significant Akkhan’s Leniency stack advantage over BotT, and on a single target RG PE is basically worthless.

2 Likes
36

I am thinking to convert my Akkhan Condemn Crusader to LoD Blessed Shield.

Do I need the cooldown reduction as much as I need for Akkhan?

Also, why is LoD Blessed Shield is more favorable to LoD Condemn Build?

37

You still want 50%~55% CDR, but it will be much easier to get than Condemn because you will be using Fervor instead of Heavenly Strength.

Without Akkhan 2p RCR, LoD Condemn has to use the Fire rune with Cindercoat in order to keep wrath consumption in check so it loses the ability to pull monsters together as well as healing from Holy Cause, making it less ideal for pushing.

Another possible reason is that people become tired of playing Condemn season after season since S12.

1 Like
38

I would love it if Blizz would simply nerf or alter condemn ----> which can lead to a buff for Akkhan Set to open up more builds, and make other skills be more relevant at end game.

2 Likes
39

Depends on the build. You can freeze RGs, but their immune to knockbacks and slows including the BoT aura so Strong Arms are useless and I can’t think of anything a BS build has that hard CCs RGs. So why would you run trapped in this build?

40

Because Trapped’s slow aura does trigger Trapped on RGs. Why do you think it doesn’t? RGs aren’t Juggernauts. Trapped works on them.

So once again, why do you keep saying it doesn’t?

1 Like
41

Like Jako said, RG can be slowed so BotT works on them.

You also have the common misconception about Strongarm that it can only be triggered by displacing monsters with pull/knockback effects. The truth is Strongarm is triggered by “hitting” monsters with those effects, whether they are actually displaced or not is irrelevant. Strongarm can work on even Juggernauts.

A visual effect will appear on top on monsters’ heads when they are affected by Strongarm debuff. It looks like a small sparkling cloud.