Bone Spear Necro here.
Has anyone done much testing on the Barber Vs Great feast?
Currently lvl 71 running the barber and it absolutely slaps, my thought process around the Great Feast is that, with a high crit build and the potential 75% dmg increase through the heart, does running the great feast have a higher damaged potential in the long run?
If anyone has tested The Great Feast at higher lvl’s and has insight that would be sweet.
Blood Lance / Aspd / Overpower build here. I just replaced feast with 2sec 14% barber since I don’t think feast wasn’t affecting my overpower damage. At 69 I’m seeing 300-800k damage. What sucks though is I don’t see orange numbers anymore, just huge yellow ones lol.
The Great Feast is a good alternative to The Barber for Infinimist (sorry!) build since it works instantly. That said, I tested both with Infinimist on NM90+ and found that The Barber to be stronger. On lower NMs, I think you might not feel the difference even on bosses.
Barber is technically better depending on the situation and the duration of the barber as well. With that being said, I personally would keep two rings with me that has both. I would use barber to clear dungeons and the other for bossing. This feels like a better overall experience in my eyes and probably provides better damage. Although I’m unsure how much better, it would depend on the fight, how often you have to kite vs how much damage can you put out in the barbers damage window.
Maybe I am missing something… but why not use both?
You can only use one wrathful heart.
Thanks, 20 characters
I noticed I was resource starved a lot when using the Barber, been reading a lot that the lucky hit proc off exposed flesh isn’t working correctly with Barber heart - while it still slap’s massive elite packs it was very lacking when it came to single target…
Since swapped to the Malignant pact and no longer have resource issues, seems barber is a very circumstantial as you’ve mentioned - I’ve got multiple Barber hearts so might just keep testing and maybe the lucky hit bug might be addressed this patch.
I noticed the same. Had a ring upgrade that was too good to pass up. My essence issues are fixed. It does slap but they need to fix the proc stuff. I like having essence better and I still slap without it. I have another copy but not sure I want to use it.
I think the Barber is slightly superficial, considering BS necro relies on having max essence for max dmg with expectant & imperfectly balanced - if you group a elite pack and toss a bone spear through it everything still gets almost 1 shot without barber.
Exactly and with barber not only do procs for essence not happen right but dmg is delayed and sometimes thats bad. I hate suppressor mobs.
If the lucky hit proc gets addressed The Barber will defs be BiS, until then I think I’ll continue to try other hearts lol
It does blow up once the stored damage exceeds the enemy’s health making it a great tool for killing elites using a bunch of low health mobs. What’s also fun is using it on dungeon objectives that need to be destroyed and spawn monsters once attacked. You can stack millions of damage and instantly kill any elite the moment it spawns.
It’s hard to test but I’m pretty sure the Barber double dips with itself. For example, if you have multiple enemies with infinite HP, stagger the activation of barber and deal 100k damage to each of them the first blows up for 100k, the second for 200k, the third for 400k and so forth.
What’s bugging my (pun intended) is that it doesn’t seem to work right on some single target enemies. The best example are blood blisters. They die to a single overpowered blood lance but if I land a regular crit right before the overpower I cannot kill them before they explode, at all. Some enemies take ~30k damage from my 4 second barber even though each overpower does up to 500k damage.
Regarding Great Feast, maybe someone can prove me wrong but from my limited testing, it didn’t seem to be a global multiplier. I was using a blood lance build with rank 1 blighted corpse explosion and a 100% great feast turned the 300 damage ticks into 400 damage ticks. On overpowers I didn’t see a notable difference at all.
I hit a world boss for 137M with Sever build I don’t think Feast is going to come close to that.
That’s because barber soaks up everyone’s damage not just yours. The other players saw 0 damage on their screen as a trade off for your big number =)
Don’t think that happens, I play with a group and we all use it, and all do crazy damage. We could probably do NM 100’s now as only 70s I bet, our damage is so high lol.
It does, it has been tested. You just take turns proccing it. The damage IS crazy even when solo, though. Just not that level of crazy. It’s not even the only mechanic that’s weird when not solo. Gore Quills uses Blood Orbs from other Necros without consuming them and I bet there are more.
The Great Feast is currently not multiplicative despite the tooltip saying so. On my level 100 necro with already a lot of additive damage it increases my DPS by 20% at best … I hope they fix it so it’s worth using. The barber is currently better because of that.
It would make sense to change the essence drain to happen only during combat, too. Otherwise it will be optimal to equip/unequip it all the time which is probably not the gameplay the devs were envisioning.
Overall, I like the wrathful dot gem a lot more than barber on my shadow sever/lidless build. Very smooth ramp up of damage over time as you stack more and more BCE dots on bosses.
Just tested the same nightmare dungeon and vashann tunnel three times with both, and the dot was the most consistent and more fun to do too.