As Banished Lords does not work with Weapon Mastery Skills - what is the most reliable way to proc OP with Deathblow? There are a few timer related ones (every X secs) but that’s too restrictive on low uptime. There seems to be 2 sources
Using Earthstrikers for the life of me I cannot seem to get the 8 weapon swap rotation down reliably. Any tips on how to do this? Combat Bash is more straightforward but it does take time to buildup 4 crits.
Bone Breaker Legendary Paragon Node.
That falls under the “timer related ones (every X secs)” which is too low uptime from my perspective.
I mean those are basically the only options, maybe using double swing with the dust devil aspect would help around knowing every 2 attacks.
The blood boil vamp power guarantees an OP every 20 seconds as well. I know that’s a timer one as well, but with a bunch of timer ones, plus Tibault’s pants and Banished Amulet you shouldn’t have a problem with OP
I think the problem with timers is that they are not exclusionary and you cannot pick the skill to proc it. To wait 20 seconds only for a Ground Stomp or Basic Skill to eat your Overpower is insulting. When playing an Encroaching Wrath Deathblow build, you have to build Weapon Mastery damage with the use of Core Abilities so there is a very high chance your Core Ability (which is a secondary form of damage) will eat your Overpower and not a big ol juicy maxed out Deathblow.
To answer the OPs question, unless you come up with a damage rotation, it will be pretty hard to manage. Your best bet is combining Earthstriker and Bash. With IAS and high Crit, you can get your Bash stacks very easily. Just need to make sure you get 3 stacks only then use Bash right before you want to DB with an OP.
They really need to change OP timers to allow all attacks to OP for 2 seconds instead of limiting you to a single hit.
In the patch notes it says that overpower will only happen on the next non-basic attack didn’t it? So you could maybe weapon swap frenzy or bash or lunge if you don’t want to watch the buff bar.
Patch notes said a lot of things. It procs on Basic Skills. This has been reported the very 1st day of Season 2 and has gone completely ignored. Blizzard does not care.
I decided to test out Earthstriker’s Aspect for your problem and believe the quickest way to achieve an overpower is to use two basic skills and swap between them by assigning the weapon to the skill. This costs no resource, produces resource, makes it easy to control, and is extremely fast to do. I can overpower with this set-up about every 5 seconds (It’s faster if the enemy doesn’t die right away).
I ran the test by just switching between dual wield and large blade and assigned to left and right mouse so it was painless.
Except Encroaching Wrath requires Core Skills to be used to buff Weapon Mastery Damage.
Encroaching just needs 100 Fury spent - doesn’t need to be core. I use Power Kick to drain all Fury for Encroaching.
I think this sums up well the challenges surrounding proccing OP with DB. Whilst it can be done “on demand” it requires quite a high level of attention being paid onto the buff bar and there is always a chance that the required buff might be hidden behind others.
Overall the uptime on OP is just not there as compared to HOTA which just requires Banished Lords. Having to allocate an aspect towards Encroaching Wrath and Weapon Master makes the skill fall further behind.
You have to also have the Unique which makes it viable. This is a similar complaint to HoTA also. Ancestral Force is needed just to make it be an AoE. Any Aspect or Unique that is nearly -required- in order for it to be worthwhile is bad design. This will only be amplified as more and more Uniques/Uber Unique items are added along with Aspects. Still have the sammmmmme amount of Item Slots available.
This is particularly why I think the current Aspect system needs an entire overhaul. Basically Blizzard simplified the Skill Tree by taking and moving a lot of the functionality over to Aspects and Paragon. They got rid of Attribute gain and just put it on a silly UI Board (Paragon) and made it available after level 50 like this is some revelation. The entire design is bad and uninspired. Same stuff just spread out.