Hey. I was thinking about making a bleed build for S1, utilizing the Creeping Deat malignant hearth. And, at first, I got actually pretty excited about it.
But thinking about it for couple of seconds, I realised: What CC options do we actually have? Slow is now gone. We can stun. With the new unique sword, Azurewrath, we can freeze, but… That’s it, right? Two CCs, with no 100% uptime. Or I’m I missing something? There must be something else I’m missing.
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I was thinking of the unique chill effect boot, it gives chill effect + 8% damage.
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I don’t think you’re missing anything. I did some testing using ground stomp instead of a basic skill, but with the nerfs to cooldown reduction, you can’t really get 100% uptime with shouts, and the CD for ground stomp is still too long, so you’re often (especially against single enemies) at 0 fury and cannot do anything for 2-3 seconds until your CD’s refresh, so it’s not a good option.
I get that they want people to use other affixes instead of crit damage and damage vs vulnerable, but now we also don’t have a way to proc damage vs. Slow and damage vs. Crowd controlled, which leaves us with very few options, none of which have 100% uptime (vs. Healthy, vs. Injured, vs. Close, pretty much).
The changes to hamstring have completely destroyed several synergies in the class, and I hope Blizzard reconsiders them, because they really, really hurt barbs even further than the double-dipping that we’ve taken with the nerfs to gear (as we use 4 weapons, we’ve taken double the nerf than other classes have in this respect).
I think this is why they made slow only apply to healthy enemies, the synergy with Creeping Death, Punishing Speed, The Barber, and Smiting. With freeze, chill, stun, knockdown, and slow you would potentially be able to apply 200% DOT to any and every injured mob with a 100% crit rate. Potentially more; fear, and knockback are also CC’s we can get. So you have a maximum of 280%, technically. I could see a scenario where a super buffed bleed → rupture → bleed → rupture gets racked off in the opening of “The Barber” proc, that stored dmg is increased by 10% per second… That isn’t even considering the other synergies.
I think with too many CC’s reliably applied it could have been a combo to 1 shot the entire screen even at high tiers, largely all during a CC window where you aren’t taking dmg. And those explosions would be happening for every mob in melee range, since crit procs The Barber and Punishing Speed/Bleed applications are AOE. So it could be game breaking for bosses too even though they are largely CC immune. Still seems like a strong and fun build option, just maybe not quite as strong since you can’t get the slow from hamstring and the crit from Smite simultaneously.
The Barber proc wouldn’t go up on all of them at the same time either, so with multiple mobs it would double dip itself essentially. With too high a crit rate it could make anything other that single target just a delete loop.
There is that other heart that does knock down? Not exactly sure how to read it or whether knock down counts as a different CC.
There is that other heart that does knock down? Not exactly sure how to read it or whether knock down counts as a different CC.
Yeah, it does. Technically we have access to chill, freeze, slow, stun, knockdown, fear, and knockback. Unsure about immobilize, daze, and tether.