Well, here’s a bit of a pickle.
They forgot to put Gavel of Judgement in the PTR Weapons Pack…
LOL 20 characters hahaha
Had a chance to play with it now. The HOTA power causes there to be four hammers at cardinal points, and the shockwave is around a 30-40 yard explosion, which seems to clear lots of mobs very nicely.
Haven’t run out of fury at all, even with the four-way hammer hitting in all directions.
Nice!
I tried loading up the PTR and it was just lag, lag, lag for me. Care to test a few other things? None of it would be very time consuming.
The lag’s probably all those hundreds of Wizard homing missiles. I’ll be back on the PTR later today. Was planning to see how high a GR I can do with IK/HOTA. What did you have in mind?
Hammer works nicely from what I can “feel”. My latency is arund 450 to 550 so hard to get numbers with the lag so bad.
The HotA shockwave 7 stack damage doesn’t feel too powerful but it does do some damage.
Yeah, and infinite casts of Army of the Dead!
Just a few mechanical things that ought to get checked. I can lay out what’s needed if you’re game.
Depends what you want checking, and how I’d need to check them. For example, I can’t record video (my PC’s old / a potato) so couldn’t check anything frame by frame, if that level of investigation is needed but if it’s stuff I can just observe naked-eye then sure.
By the way, everybody, I did manage to test one thing in the game: Blizz put Empyrean Messenger back into the pool of Spears we can get.
So: if you’re going to attempt to get a better 300th Spear or Arreat’s Law via Rare–> Legendary upgrade (or any other method), you’re much better off doing that now, rather than later, since it’ll be about 1/3 less efficient later on.
Recording is always great, but really not necessary in this case. Here’s what to do:
Get rid of your follower, they just get in the way.
For the HotA power…
Question 1 (you may already know the answer to some of these): do the extra hammers appear when you don’t hit anything?
Test: don’t hit anything, see if you get extra hammers.
Question 2: is the “shockwave” procced on every seventh hit or every seventh cast? (the notes say cast, but I wanted to check).
Test: swing your hammer 7 times at nothing and see if you get a shockwave.
Question 3: do the extra hammers proc Bloodshed?
Test: find an enemy (I suggest a skeleton in cemetery of the forsaken). Turn your back on him. Hit him with the hammer that spawns behind you, rather than the normal, forward-facing one. If you don’t crit the enemy, try again until you do. Once you crit the enemy, note how much damage you do, then watch carefully to see whether Bloodshed procs, and if possible note how much damage it does.
Question 4: does the shockwave proc Bloodshed?
Test: This one will be a lot easier if the shockwave appears every 7th cast, and also if the shockwave has a range greater than HotA itself. If you can also be in range of Bloodshed (20 yards), even better. Just cast HotA 7 times, with a mob in range of the shockwave, and Bloodshed, but not of HotA. Keep trying this till you get a crit. See how much damage the shockwave does, and then see if Bloodshed procs, and how much damage it does.
For the Whirlwind power…
Question 1: how long can you keep an enemy stuck to you?
Test: This one is pretty easy. Since we don’t want to kill the enemies, just drop your damage (i.e. don’t have Wastes 6 equipped). Then, just suck up a mob or two with WW, and see how long you can keep them stuck to you- just count it out in seconds, doesn’t need to be super precise.
For the WOTB power…
Question 1: is the damage boost additive or multiplicative?
Test: we need to do a little math here. First, make sure you don’t have too much damage, or you’ll kill your test subject, so get rid of any big damage bonuses, like set 6 piece, Ambo’s, Focus+Restraint, CoE, Trapped, Stricken, Taeguk, etc. And also make sure you get rid of any conditional damage buffs, like Berserker Rage or anything like that. Also, make sure you don’t have any additive buffs to Rend on your gear. Basically, we just want our damage to be flat, flat, flat.
But: also equip a pair of Strongarm Bracers, and note the % of the affix (ideally max, 30%).
Make sure you have ground stomp: wrenching smash on the bar.
Next, you want to check the damage of Rend on a target without any stacks from the Angelic power, but with the 30% additive debuff from Strongarms. So pop WOTB with 0 angelic stacks, then hit a mob with Stomp, and then with Rend. Note the damage that Rend is ticking (it should mostly tick the same number over and over).
Then, get your angelic stacks to 50+, and repeat the experiment: Pop WOTB with 50 stacks, then hit mob with stomp, then with Rend, note the damage.
And then we just calculate to see if the extra damage is going into the same pool as the Strongarms (in which case, it’s additive) or not (in which case, it’s a multiplier).
Question 2: Can you stack that buff on top of itself?
Test: pretty easy. Just get a bunch of CDR + Zodiac, and WW around, getting angelic stacks and reducing the cooldown of WOTB. Keep popping WOTB as soon as you can. See if that buff just refreshes, or stacks up on top of itself (like how Vyr Archon does it, with multiple sets of stacks).
I think that’s it. Some of this stuff might seem kind of long and complicated, but it really goes pretty quick once you get into it. Let me know if you’ve got any questions.
I share you some videos I do during my tests :
Whirlwind Sanctified Powers :
HoTA Sanctified Powers :
Rhythm Sanctified Powers :
Ty, Just a lot of screen clutter. No wonder there is so much lag…
It is per-cast. As soon as you hit the button, you have to the cardinal points.
Once again, per-cast. I noticed it the second I started casting to top of rage before starting a rift.
Thank you for the videos.
I’m not on the PTR but I’m curious to know if WW/Rend compares to HOTA for solo pushing. I assume it doesn’t and HOT for the win s27.
Only asking as your video for WW was a low rift level (by comparison).
Many thanks!
Barb4life\m/
I just stumbled upon this :
Such a use of this power is a pleasant surprise 
.
Same. I then tested and holy moly the pull effect just keeps giving and giving.
Thanks for posting this, Arno. This is exactly what I wanted to know about this ability.
The bottom line is: this pull from WW does two important things. First, it turns off monster collision boxes, like Stomp: Wrenching Smash, which mean it’s really maximizing area damage. And second, it either ignores (or at least, does not increase by pulling) monster CC resistance.
So: you can just pull everything infinitely. That makes this power very powerful, not only for “push” WW/Rend, but probably for zbarb and perhaps other builds as well.
So, from your video here, it looks like the Gavel effect is maybe linked to each individual hammer, or maybe the extra hammers just ignore the “get fury back if you hit less than x enemies” effect of Gavel. At any rate, those extra hammers don’t seem to make it any harder to keep your fury up.
Also, the shockwave looks like it does a pretty trivial amount of damage. I’m looking at the points in your video when you’re fighting in density, and then I watch the shockwave roll out and hit enemies 30 or 40 yards away, and it doesn’t seem to do much. For instance, at 3:54 of your video, you’re fighting some elites, and there’s a zombie off to the left of the screen. He gets hit with the shockwave, and his health barely budges. But then at 3:58 he walks into your HOTA range, and basically gets pounded into a paste in less than a second.
So yeah: shockwave appears to be more or less useless. But those extra hammers will probably help with clearing density. What still needs to be done is to test those extra hammers to see if they proc Bloodshed. I’ll reiterate the test I described to Meteorblade, in case you or anybody else want to conduct it:
The real, big question for HotA this season is whether the highest clears will come from the power using the extra hammers… or the WW pulling ability.
So, the damage increase to enemies is a debuff, applied to enemies within 16 yards, triggered when you cast WOTB (basically, just as it’s written in the text of the ability). Good to know.
It sure looks like it just stacks up one time on an enemy (shown by a glowing orange dot over their head), and just refreshes when you cast it again, rather than stacking multiple times.
I still wonder whether this is additive or multiplicative…
So I just saw a LOD HoTA GR 140 with the WW Sanctified Powers by Kozmik (1191 paragon). Impressive !
Indeed!
@Kozmik#11892 , drop by when you can and let us know your thoughts!