I would consider running a Hellfire Amulet, a Zei's Stone of Vengeance and Ninth Cirri Satchel instead of what you currently have. Also, since you're running a Lacuni Prowler, and we already discussed the lack of synergy between Attack Speed and Buriza, I would think it might be stronger to run dawn, cube Ninth and stick with the Holy Point Shoot. If you were to stick with Buriza, I would recommend switching to the Wraps of Clarity. Finally, since you've got a ~75% crit chance, I might consider dropping a little bit of crit chance on a few slots. That high isn't getting properly utilized imo. Unless, you were to use Single Out, and get a 100% chance on rift guardians. That would be a little bit crazy, cause every pierce is critting.
1) What do you mean by AOE dmg modifier? Are you referring to Area Damage? If you are, then yes. It has a 20% chance to proc every single time you deal damage with this skill.
2) Spray of Teeth doesn't give a 70% increased damage when it pierces. That's the only way we are able to dish out the insane damage we are. The skill damage is 100%*1.7 for each pierce. If it pierces 5 times (not unreasonable) it actually does 1419% damage. If it pierces 7, that's 4,103%. 9 is 11,858%. Now, assuming 3 pierces by default, and each pierce has a 60% chance to give another pierce (35% base plus satchel), that means that after one pierce, you have a 40% chance to have 2 pierces left, and a 60% chance to have 3. And so on and so forth. However there are a few things that have to be accounted for. The arrow isn't perfect, it will hit walls, and sometimes the Buriza doesn't flip the arrow back. But statistically, the odds of hitting 60% 8 times is 0.0279%. (3 from buriza plus 8 pierces). This means that its very unlikely that everything works perfectly and you get an almost 12k% damage bonus, but theoretically it's possible.
Eh, i didn't mention i am tryong it on live and not PTR because it's actually the worst case scenario for the build. I'm running GR53 to be on the safe side of completing it and checking the clear times to see if i am improving the build or not.
Current setup is on sig - just check the DH; it's far from being optimized, so there are great margins of easy improvements.
- i think UE is our best bet for a generator/HA build. Best synergy out between skills, set bonuses and complementary legendaries. Tough LoN may be a really nice option, it all depends on what we can stack with it.
- dual wield setup looks more and more the best choice. Reasoning: 1hand xbow can roll +disc which will be double as powerful in 2.4.1; Dawn is required; Fortress Ballista shields are insanely good. Equipped Buriza is not an option since you're passing over 12 points of discipline; may be worth running with 1hand xbow + Cirri and cube the second xbow
- MS:Wind Chill is more convenient than expected; ran with MfD:Contagion and while the damage buff was really nice having an aoe slow+15% CC on a single button click is even better, both in solo and party. Would try to go the long run and ditch a couple of CHC rolls on gear since we have 15% from the skill. It also helps quite a bunch for aoe so i don't think i can go back playing without it.
- passive skills wise, we don't actually have many that can boost our HA damage, directly and indirectly. I'm running F/R + hellfire because of no really better options, but also given my playstyle i think that EW is definitely better. If anything, it lets us use RoRG and equip DD while keeping an Aquila cubed. I am currently not using DD which is a great if not mandatory damage increase for the build.
I think we're onto something. Don't know how high we can push with this, but it's definitely fun trying.
I would tend to agree with the feedback you've provided. I've got an ancient Fortress Ballista on live (I had it non-season), and I'll give it a test in a duel wield form of the build in a few minutes.
Edit:
I tested a version with the following
UE 5
EW Set
RoRG (Dex, CD, AS, Socket)
Lacuni Prowlers (Cold, Dex, Vit, CC, AS)
Witching Hour
Depth Diggers
Fortress Ballista mainhand.
Cube: ~~~~, Hunters Wrath, CoE.
Gems: Zei's, Trapped, Simplicity's Strength.
I then tried using Dawn offhand and Satchel in the cube. Then swapped Satchel for Dawn in cube/equip.
Skills: HA:DA, Multishot:WC, Companion:Wolf, Vault:Tumble, Vengeance: Dark Heart, Preparation:Invigoration.
Passives: Cull the Weak, Steady Aim, Archery, Awareness.
My results were a clear conclusion that the dual wielding was better. To play devils advocate. I got a much better rift with dual wielding. So much better in fact it might explain how much better it was (7 minutes in comparison to 11). However, I have a VERY good ancient Satchel, and my ancient dawn only has 54% cooldown, which is like 2 or 3 additional seconds of downtime. Furthermore, I have vitality on both my Dawn and Fortress. If I had 48% area damage instead of 2k vit, I can imagine a significant difference in AoE potential. If I needed more EHP (which was no issue in the 60s I ran) I could switch back to the Wraps of Clarity.
I wanted to try the Witching Hour that I had, which is like 630 dex, 7 AS, 46 CD and 15% HA damage. I also was curious how fast the attacks would get with all the AS modifiers like the RoRG, Lacuni and WH. In case you were wondering, the APS displayed on my character page was 2.3 for both weapons. With the Satchel, my single Fortress Ballista was at 2.33. Not to mention the 30% from Hunters Wrath.
Ballista's mitigation is mostly useful for close encounter and melee damage as in LON or N6 builds. UE4pc distance requirement will reduce the benefit to ranged damage only. Other offhand options - maybe the good old Calamity could make much more sense. Or the sticky trap xbow could be added for some AoE but I wouldn't keep my hopes high for it :D.
Regarding Lacuni Prowlers, I swapped it with Wraps of Clarity, because the build in its current state is bloated with toughness features, so it's a simple trade off to buff the damage. LON is extremely tough but needs all sorts of damage boost to compete with UE
Actually personally, I found it incredibly useful to tank ranged attacks like thunderstorm, mortar, arrows from skeleton archers, poison darts from the goblin type fuckers and then frozen. Frozen ignoring was fantastic cause it was previously very problematic. Also stopped any 1-shot attacks like Cold Snaps dash attack, which previously would instantly pop awareness or kill me.
Ballista's mitigation is mostly useful for close encounter and melee damage as in LON or N6 builds. UE4pc distance requirement will reduce the benefit to ranged damage only. Other offhand options - maybe the good old Calamity could make much more sense. Or the sticky trap xbow could be added for some AoE but I wouldn't keep my hopes high for it :D.
Too bad we don't have sets/skills that cope well with sticky trap as i used it on first iterations of the shadow set and it was awesome to have, but the damage was severely lacking.
Anyway, back on topic: i'm quoting only this because quoting everything is not feasible.
UE4 dmg reduction works in a very specific way: you get the buff as soon you don't have anyone in a 10yd range and it lasts 8 second. This means you just have to vault away once every 8 seconds to keep the buff up indefinitely even facetanking stuff.
The power of the Ballista shields is that the dmg mitigation is insane and lets us have a much more reliable usage of Awareness since missing that juicy 30% dmg reduction melee characters have make the skill trigger from basically everything at high GRs. Also given this EW set becomes much more reliable to use since we don't actually need to move that much around (napkin math done, i estimated a movement time similar to my crusader while covering slightly more ditance due to more uses of vault compared to the Horse).
Point is: now we know that dw is better and AS looks a very nice stat to stack. Hence WH belt and LP bracers are more appealing. Can we stack enough toughness to survive higher levels without recurring to other defensive items? We can choose between Aquila and the bracers, but definitely Hunter's Wrath belt will be mandatory as will be Depth Diggers. Hence RoRG aswell will be - which is nice since it comes with baked AS we won't need to roll out.
Getting already on the second step: legendary gems. SS is a must with the buff and provides really nice healing. BotT looks like again the bestest one evah.
We have left one slot, so we could use:
- Zei: works like Steady Aim, so free damage as HA travels very far by itself
- Stricken: with high AS setup and the fact We will definitely cube/use Cirri every DA can count for multiple stacks, and in any case Vengeance flow of strikes will keep it raising very fast
- BotP: it's being buffed and listed as multiplicative, plus adds damage reduction against elites. May be the choice if we find we need more survivability on high levels without sacrificing too much damage.
EDIT: belt slot can roll 15% HA damage. Too big to pass over it - and given how WH has still 4 rolls available, we're looking for some serious tradeoff of toughness for damage (ideal rolls would be DEX, AS, CHD, HA dmg%).
@Alka: would really like to see a video of your build in action. Too bad i don't even have the rings to test it by myself.
I have ancient pieces that could run LoN with a 11 or 12 piece. I wish we had a good way to measure DPS like just attacking a stationary mob with infinite health. Ah well, more testing must be done. If we feel like taking the attack speed route, it might be worth considering attack speed over Area Damage on x-bows. 20% on a shoulder, 20% on gloves and 50% from paragon. Then we can put 10% damage, dex, 7% attack speed and a socket on our weapons. I feel like that would have a huge effect. Furthermore, a good rolled Compass Rose gives CD, CC, AS, Dex, Socket. One of which I have. Plus I have a well rolled Ancient WH with those 4 good stats. Then a non-ancient lacuni with the right stats. I've got the gear to run this build and a LoN build. I'll give both a test this evening when I get home.
Unfortunately, LoN just isn't a good set for this build, at least on live. I have 13/13 ancient gear. I tried DW, Dawn+Satchel (Cube Calamity) and Buriza+Satchel. The best build was the Dawn+Satchel. I used Depth Diggers, Witching Hour, Aquila Cuirass, Leoric's Crown, Frostburn, Wraps of Clarity, Hellfire (Cull the Weak). Then I just used set shoulders and boots (my UE and Shadow's) just cause they were the best ancient I had. I ran 60s, and the damage just wasn't there. DW was an insane toughness boost though. I didn't really take any damage and I had 223k toughness. Absolutely ridiculously high toughness. For shits and giggles I started a 90, and tanked a lot of hits. I did die, and did zero damage, but I did survive a lot of hits.
I'm pretty sure the best set we've discovered is going to be with the Attack Speed focus UE set. The toughness issue is definitely a lot better with the Fortress Ballista. It's really a very good weapon.
I managed to get my APS up to 2.40 on my stats page. I have 6% on my compass rose, 7% on my RoRG, 6% on my lacuni, 10% from paragon, 6% on my Witching Hour and an uncounted 30% from Hunter's Wrath.
With a different x-bow, I was able to get 7% attack speed, bringing my total up to 2.57 APS on my stats page. (the x-bow had 3,516 sheet DPS as well. Which I found amusing. It also had 9% damage)
I think that the last step is to figure out the best gems. I ran one with Zei's and one with BoTS, but both seemed equivalent. Zei's seemed to take down the rift guardian faster (not sure why). but my impression could definitely be wrong. It would be interesting to figure out which ones.
I love the use of Gogok. Gogok means we can use 8% CDR on shoulders, 15% from gogok, 65% on dawn, 12.5% from helm and 10% from paragon and get 100% uptime on Vengeance. This means that in total, we have free slots on gloves and the compass rose to stack attack speed or area damage in addition to crit chance and crit damage. Plus, it gives us great additional attack speed. I really like it as a choice.
I love the use of Gogok. Gogok means we can use 8% CDR on shoulders, 15% from gogok, 65% on dawn, 12.5% from helm and 10% from paragon and get 100% uptime on Vengeance. This means that in total, we have free slots on gloves and the compass rose to stack attack speed or area damage in addition to crit chance and crit damage. Plus, it gives us great additional attack speed. I really like it as a choice.
Don't forget the x% dodge per stack as well. I borrowed the idea from my SM6 setup and it works. I made a recent change. While keeping LP bracers, I traded Frostburn with Aquila Curiass and it improved toughness imbalance a lot. Over all, AD and hungering arrow's splash damage is really effective against trash. Build requires a little fishing to show its real performance though.
I love the use of Gogok. Gogok means we can use 8% CDR on shoulders, 15% from gogok, 65% on dawn, 12.5% from helm and 10% from paragon and get 100% uptime on Vengeance. This means that in total, we have free slots on gloves and the compass rose to stack attack speed or area damage in addition to crit chance and crit damage. Plus, it gives us great additional attack speed. I really like it as a choice.
Yeah, i never thought of that. Definitely appearing as a very good option.
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I would consider running a Hellfire Amulet, a Zei's Stone of Vengeance and Ninth Cirri Satchel instead of what you currently have. Also, since you're running a Lacuni Prowler, and we already discussed the lack of synergy between Attack Speed and Buriza, I would think it might be stronger to run dawn, cube Ninth and stick with the Holy Point Shoot. If you were to stick with Buriza, I would recommend switching to the Wraps of Clarity. Finally, since you've got a ~75% crit chance, I might consider dropping a little bit of crit chance on a few slots. That high isn't getting properly utilized imo. Unless, you were to use Single Out, and get a 100% chance on rift guardians. That would be a little bit crazy, cause every pierce is critting.
First of all, awesome thread. I love off-meta builds. I'll definitely be trying this in 2.4.1. Couple questions:
1) AOE dmg modifier has a chance to apply to every hit including the pierced hits?
2) Couldn't spray of teeth rune help with trash? Or does it not pierce?
1) What do you mean by AOE dmg modifier? Are you referring to Area Damage? If you are, then yes. It has a 20% chance to proc every single time you deal damage with this skill.
2) Spray of Teeth doesn't give a 70% increased damage when it pierces. That's the only way we are able to dish out the insane damage we are. The skill damage is 100%*1.7 for each pierce. If it pierces 5 times (not unreasonable) it actually does 1419% damage. If it pierces 7, that's 4,103%. 9 is 11,858%. Now, assuming 3 pierces by default, and each pierce has a 60% chance to give another pierce (35% base plus satchel), that means that after one pierce, you have a 40% chance to have 2 pierces left, and a 60% chance to have 3. And so on and so forth. However there are a few things that have to be accounted for. The arrow isn't perfect, it will hit walls, and sometimes the Buriza doesn't flip the arrow back. But statistically, the odds of hitting 60% 8 times is 0.0279%. (3 from buriza plus 8 pierces). This means that its very unlikely that everything works perfectly and you get an almost 12k% damage bonus, but theoretically it's possible.
Eh, i didn't mention i am tryong it on live and not PTR because it's actually the worst case scenario for the build. I'm running GR53 to be on the safe side of completing it and checking the clear times to see if i am improving the build or not.
Current setup is on sig - just check the DH; it's far from being optimized, so there are great margins of easy improvements.
- i think UE is our best bet for a generator/HA build. Best synergy out between skills, set bonuses and complementary legendaries. Tough LoN may be a really nice option, it all depends on what we can stack with it.
- dual wield setup looks more and more the best choice. Reasoning: 1hand xbow can roll +disc which will be double as powerful in 2.4.1; Dawn is required; Fortress Ballista shields are insanely good. Equipped Buriza is not an option since you're passing over 12 points of discipline; may be worth running with 1hand xbow + Cirri and cube the second xbow
- MS:Wind Chill is more convenient than expected; ran with MfD:Contagion and while the damage buff was really nice having an aoe slow+15% CC on a single button click is even better, both in solo and party. Would try to go the long run and ditch a couple of CHC rolls on gear since we have 15% from the skill. It also helps quite a bunch for aoe so i don't think i can go back playing without it.
- passive skills wise, we don't actually have many that can boost our HA damage, directly and indirectly. I'm running F/R + hellfire because of no really better options, but also given my playstyle i think that EW is definitely better. If anything, it lets us use RoRG and equip DD while keeping an Aquila cubed. I am currently not using DD which is a great if not mandatory damage increase for the build.
I think we're onto something. Don't know how high we can push with this, but it's definitely fun trying.
I would tend to agree with the feedback you've provided. I've got an ancient Fortress Ballista on live (I had it non-season), and I'll give it a test in a duel wield form of the build in a few minutes.
Edit:
I tested a version with the following
UE 5
EW Set
RoRG (Dex, CD, AS, Socket)
Lacuni Prowlers (Cold, Dex, Vit, CC, AS)
Witching Hour
Depth Diggers
Fortress Ballista mainhand.
Cube: ~~~~, Hunters Wrath, CoE.
Gems: Zei's, Trapped, Simplicity's Strength.
I then tried using Dawn offhand and Satchel in the cube. Then swapped Satchel for Dawn in cube/equip.
Skills: HA:DA, Multishot:WC, Companion:Wolf, Vault:Tumble, Vengeance: Dark Heart, Preparation:Invigoration.
Passives: Cull the Weak, Steady Aim, Archery, Awareness.
My results were a clear conclusion that the dual wielding was better. To play devils advocate. I got a much better rift with dual wielding. So much better in fact it might explain how much better it was (7 minutes in comparison to 11). However, I have a VERY good ancient Satchel, and my ancient dawn only has 54% cooldown, which is like 2 or 3 additional seconds of downtime. Furthermore, I have vitality on both my Dawn and Fortress. If I had 48% area damage instead of 2k vit, I can imagine a significant difference in AoE potential. If I needed more EHP (which was no issue in the 60s I ran) I could switch back to the Wraps of Clarity.
I wanted to try the Witching Hour that I had, which is like 630 dex, 7 AS, 46 CD and 15% HA damage. I also was curious how fast the attacks would get with all the AS modifiers like the RoRG, Lacuni and WH. In case you were wondering, the APS displayed on my character page was 2.3 for both weapons. With the Satchel, my single Fortress Ballista was at 2.33. Not to mention the 30% from Hunters Wrath.
Ballista's mitigation is mostly useful for close encounter and melee damage as in LON or N6 builds. UE4pc distance requirement will reduce the benefit to ranged damage only. Other offhand options - maybe the good old Calamity could make much more sense. Or the sticky trap xbow could be added for some AoE but I wouldn't keep my hopes high for it :D.
Regarding Lacuni Prowlers, I swapped it with Wraps of Clarity, because the build in its current state is bloated with toughness features, so it's a simple trade off to buff the damage. LON is extremely tough but needs all sorts of damage boost to compete with UE
Actually personally, I found it incredibly useful to tank ranged attacks like thunderstorm, mortar, arrows from skeleton archers, poison darts from the goblin type fuckers and then frozen. Frozen ignoring was fantastic cause it was previously very problematic. Also stopped any 1-shot attacks like Cold Snaps dash attack, which previously would instantly pop awareness or kill me.
Too bad we don't have sets/skills that cope well with sticky trap as i used it on first iterations of the shadow set and it was awesome to have, but the damage was severely lacking.
Anyway, back on topic: i'm quoting only this because quoting everything is not feasible.
UE4 dmg reduction works in a very specific way: you get the buff as soon you don't have anyone in a 10yd range and it lasts 8 second. This means you just have to vault away once every 8 seconds to keep the buff up indefinitely even facetanking stuff.
The power of the Ballista shields is that the dmg mitigation is insane and lets us have a much more reliable usage of Awareness since missing that juicy 30% dmg reduction melee characters have make the skill trigger from basically everything at high GRs. Also given this EW set becomes much more reliable to use since we don't actually need to move that much around (napkin math done, i estimated a movement time similar to my crusader while covering slightly more ditance due to more uses of vault compared to the Horse).
Point is: now we know that dw is better and AS looks a very nice stat to stack. Hence WH belt and LP bracers are more appealing. Can we stack enough toughness to survive higher levels without recurring to other defensive items? We can choose between Aquila and the bracers, but definitely Hunter's Wrath belt will be mandatory as will be Depth Diggers. Hence RoRG aswell will be - which is nice since it comes with baked AS we won't need to roll out.
Getting already on the second step: legendary gems. SS is a must with the buff and provides really nice healing. BotT looks like again the bestest one evah.
We have left one slot, so we could use:
- Zei: works like Steady Aim, so free damage as HA travels very far by itself
- Stricken: with high AS setup and the fact We will definitely cube/use Cirri every DA can count for multiple stacks, and in any case Vengeance flow of strikes will keep it raising very fast
- BotP: it's being buffed and listed as multiplicative, plus adds damage reduction against elites. May be the choice if we find we need more survivability on high levels without sacrificing too much damage.
EDIT: belt slot can roll 15% HA damage. Too big to pass over it - and given how WH has still 4 rolls available, we're looking for some serious tradeoff of toughness for damage (ideal rolls would be DEX, AS, CHD, HA dmg%).
@Alka: would really like to see a video of your build in action. Too bad i don't even have the rings to test it by myself.
I have ancient pieces that could run LoN with a 11 or 12 piece. I wish we had a good way to measure DPS like just attacking a stationary mob with infinite health. Ah well, more testing must be done. If we feel like taking the attack speed route, it might be worth considering attack speed over Area Damage on x-bows. 20% on a shoulder, 20% on gloves and 50% from paragon. Then we can put 10% damage, dex, 7% attack speed and a socket on our weapons. I feel like that would have a huge effect. Furthermore, a good rolled Compass Rose gives CD, CC, AS, Dex, Socket. One of which I have. Plus I have a well rolled Ancient WH with those 4 good stats. Then a non-ancient lacuni with the right stats. I've got the gear to run this build and a LoN build. I'll give both a test this evening when I get home.
Unfortunately, LoN just isn't a good set for this build, at least on live. I have 13/13 ancient gear. I tried DW, Dawn+Satchel (Cube Calamity) and Buriza+Satchel. The best build was the Dawn+Satchel. I used Depth Diggers, Witching Hour, Aquila Cuirass, Leoric's Crown, Frostburn, Wraps of Clarity, Hellfire (Cull the Weak). Then I just used set shoulders and boots (my UE and Shadow's) just cause they were the best ancient I had. I ran 60s, and the damage just wasn't there. DW was an insane toughness boost though. I didn't really take any damage and I had 223k toughness. Absolutely ridiculously high toughness. For shits and giggles I started a 90, and tanked a lot of hits. I did die, and did zero damage, but I did survive a lot of hits.
I'm pretty sure the best set we've discovered is going to be with the Attack Speed focus UE set. The toughness issue is definitely a lot better with the Fortress Ballista. It's really a very good weapon.
I managed to get my APS up to 2.40 on my stats page. I have 6% on my compass rose, 7% on my RoRG, 6% on my lacuni, 10% from paragon, 6% on my Witching Hour and an uncounted 30% from Hunter's Wrath.
With a different x-bow, I was able to get 7% attack speed, bringing my total up to 2.57 APS on my stats page. (the x-bow had 3,516 sheet DPS as well. Which I found amusing. It also had 9% damage)
I think that the last step is to figure out the best gems. I ran one with Zei's and one with BoTS, but both seemed equivalent. Zei's seemed to take down the rift guardian faster (not sure why). but my impression could definitely be wrong. It would be interesting to figure out which ones.
http://ptr.d3planner.com/639164020
Damage is satisfying although it feels a bit vunerable. Possible trade-off with minimum damage loss is LP to WoC bracers.
I believe, with the proper optimizations, this setup might push above 75 which is good enough for me..
I love the use of Gogok. Gogok means we can use 8% CDR on shoulders, 15% from gogok, 65% on dawn, 12.5% from helm and 10% from paragon and get 100% uptime on Vengeance. This means that in total, we have free slots on gloves and the compass rose to stack attack speed or area damage in addition to crit chance and crit damage. Plus, it gives us great additional attack speed. I really like it as a choice.
Don't forget the x% dodge per stack as well. I borrowed the idea from my SM6 setup and it works. I made a recent change. While keeping LP bracers, I traded Frostburn with Aquila Curiass and it improved toughness imbalance a lot. Over all, AD and hungering arrow's splash damage is really effective against trash. Build requires a little fishing to show its real performance though.