The issue is if the extra stats from a ring slot can bump you up another MP level. If so, then it is worth using another ring over Hellfire. Still, Hellfire can still roll decent stats, so for most people it's still better to wear, despite not being as big of an exp boost anymore.
Just for fun, I crafted about about 10 of the Int Shoulders, and actually got one better than the Vile Ward I was using. The extra int was equal to about 1k dps boost, with similar mitigation and 70 extra vit. Plus it looks a lot better, IMHO. Since it costs 75k for each craft, plus 10 Tomes of Secret, I figure my shoulders cost me a little under 1 mil for the 10 crafts. That is worth it to me, and makes me happy.
This is basically a "help me gear!" thread, but my first question is what is the recommended dps and EHP for mp2? What about life steal, and when does extra dps to fuel LS trump EHP?
Basically, I can breeze though mp1, and with the changes to exp (not to mention extra loot and keys) I want to graduate to mp2. I've tried a few runs with my current gear, and its doable, just not quite the mindless cakewalk of mp1. For gear upgrades, I have about 20m, although that could go up soon. Not to mention that I have stashed a huge pile of crafting supplies if I wanted to go that route with the new recipes.
For reference, my current unbuffed paperdoll dps is 107k (with glass cannon) and EHP is ~250k (again with glass cannon) although obviously EHP goes up a huge amount in archon form.
The issue I've been running into is that I can buff my dps, but at the expense of EHP. I can survive mp2 with Archon Teleport and some fancy footwork, but I don't want to kill my defense too much. However, with my recent Mempo purchase my Life is insanely high, and I wouldn't mind losing some vit.
I already have some thoughts on what I should upgrade, but I come here because you guys always have enlightened ideas that I never would have thought of. Please, illuminate me with your shining wisdom.
Basically, I want to be able to do mp2 by the time the patch comes out, both for the exp boost and any key farming/crafting drops. I can easily do MP1 with my gear, but I can't quite make mp2 work. Right now I have about 20m to spend on upgrades, possibly more. Any advice would be appreciated.
For my CM build, I switch out helm for stormcrow, bracers for a yellow crit & EHP, gloves for crit & speed, hellfire for crit & speed, and offhand for APoC.
Obviously, I need a better hellfire ring. The other slots I've looked at could be big dps upgrades but kill my EHP, or visa versa. Or they are just financially out of my reach atm.
While I haven't actually tested it, i'm sure diamond skin works AFTER damage reduction. After all, every monster in Inferno hits for more than 20,000 damage base, and would destroy diamond skin in one hit, making is worthless.
My thoughts on hp vs all resist (or armor, which gets a bigger boost from energy armor). Higher damage reduction makes your LoH and Life Steal work better, while pure hp only lets you last longer. Once you have enough hp to take a couple hits while diamond skin refreshes, armor/resist is the better method to increase EHP assuming equal budgets. Less damage taken = less to heal through LoH/LS = you stay at full hp longer.
Of course, it is always possible for me to be wrong.
I'm going to agree with most of the advice in here and say start small. If you've been playing less than 50 hours it's hard to know what you really want.
If your budget is $1,000 you can easily add $20 to the game to buy gold with. That will get you 80m to play with. You can get a very nice set of gear for 80m, and if you blow it on a bad investment? It is worth the education. Twenty out of a thousand is not very much, and it will give you a boost to your performance so you can really experience the game.
I don't do a lot of theorycrafting, so maybe I'm a little confused. The "multiplier" you are talking about is how much higher your effective DPS is over character sheet DPS, right? I was under the impression that the damage Energy Twister (and any rune variation) was not affected by attack speed, only the number of ticks and thus crits/LoH.
So that would mean that boosting attack speed would greatly increase your character sheet dps, but would have no effect on the damage done by WW, creating a smaller multiplier. The opposite is true, when you reduce your attack speed, your character sheet dps goes down, but WW damage stays the same, resulting in a higher multiplier.
I'm right on the verge of being able to handle MP2 in archon with teleport, so with the exp changes I'm going to have to try it with both runes and see what I like.
I expect that I'll stick to Teleport. As you pointed out, it really helps for stuff like molten and desecrate, especially when you get stuck by wallers or jailer or just giant mobs in your way. I also use Teleport offensively, to instantly get in range of elites that I want to take down faster with the 1 key (arcane destruction?) although I mostly only need it for the key warden.
I actually did this a few days ago, and my life basically didn't move. I assumed it was because my dps wasn't high enough to get one-shot, which let my life steal kick in.
But with your report, I'm starting to think that something changed with reflect damage mobs. Either Arcane Destruction doesn't proc reflect, or Life Steal now procs before the damage gets reflected.
i play alone more than in a group,but i do play ina group if my friends ever decide to get on, and tbh im not sure what i need, wether it be dps vs survivability. and im not sure wat build i should be using with my current gear. but id also like to know if its any hybrid arch/CM builds out here, so i wont need 2 gear sets.
A CM spec requires specific stats, such as high crit and AP on Crit, as well as high defensive stats. An archon spec only requires high dps, and enough defense to survive before you blow up everything (plus that extra move speed item to bring it up to 24%). This means that if you build for a CM spec you can just use that same gear for Archon, with maybe a few pieces to swap out. It might not be optimal, but Archon spec is very forgiving once you get past a certain threshold.
For example, I have a bracer with high vit, resistance, and crit that i change out for a cheap (300k) Lacuni just for the move speed when I run Archon.
The Tyrael's Might chest is probably about as good as a Tal Rasha's for Archon, but the attack speed from Tal Rasha's is invaluable for a CM spec.
The weapon is the biggest single upgrade, most likely. I recently found a sword (with white damage) with over 900 dps, life steal, life on hit, and a socket for 1.2m. It might not be as big of an upgrade compared to a 1200 dps weapon, but as the dps goes up the price jumps exponentially. You can still get a sizable dps boost with some useful stats for fairly cheap. I actually gave up a higher dps weapon so I could get the life steal, and it has been invaluable.
Your shoulders should be another easy upgrade. You can easily find a Vile Ward with higher int, armor, and similar resistances, although getting good vit can be expensive. Still, the extra armor should be worth more than the vit anyway.
Gems could use an upgrade. At your dps level, a few points of int can make a surprising difference. You don't need top tier (and the price is crazy) but a couple 500k gems may very well give you more dps for your money than any other upgrade.
Besides very generic tips like this, it really depends on what you want to do, or what you need. Do you need more dps? More survivability? Do you want to switch to a CM build? Do you ever play in a group? These questions are ones you need to answer for yourself before you can really decide what gear you need.
I believe the issue is that if you hit 1, your damage gets split to all of them, and they all trigger the reflect.
However, the game calculates Life Steal as if you are just hitting the first one, which means you are getting the full reflect amount but only 1/4 of the life steal. For those people that are basically "break even" on life steal vs reflect mobs, that can be really bad.
Not sure if I get this. 1.7 is not a breakpoint (1.68 and 1.77 are), and Chantodo's is just a weapon, don't forget about IAS on other slots as well. (Weapon attackspeed * (the sum of all IAS on items) = final APS).
Thank you for the link to WW tick rates. I probably should bookmark that.
The thing with Chantodo's is that it comes with significant attack speed. You can't find another weapon that is nearly as fast with the same kind of stats. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the .25 attacks per second was directly added to the speed of the weapon. The following travesty of math is based on that.
So with a little napkin math, if the OP traded out amulet, both rings, and bracers for pure crit chance (actually 1.5% crit less than max rolls) he would gain significantly more procs per cast. This should be an easy decision, considering the survivability and money saved from those expensive IAS+CC rings & amulet.
This is assuming he keeps the source, the gloves, and the Tal Rasha's chest with their IAS.
Of course, higher attack speed might be better for LoH and there is always the fact that casting faster means you can have more tornados out at once. But if we're only talking breakpoints here, I'm sure someone will come along to correct my math because I always end up screwing something up.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but there is a good Attack Speed breakpoint at 1.7 . Since the OP already has a chantoto's, that should be really easy to obtain.
That's what I'm currently trying to hit. Anyone happen to know the next breakpoint, and if it's even worth trying to get?
Yeah... I agree. Your dps is really really high for a CM build, especially if you're in a group of 3. Your goal should be to survive and freeze lock enemies while your teammates do the killing. That isn't to say that your dps doesn't matter, but it is secondary to that goal.
Both rings and your amulet have a LOT of dps with that attack speed, but the actual crit on them is somewhat lacking. If you changed the rings out for some with 5% or 6% crit, and the amulet for 9%+, you can still get Resist, Vit, and/or Armor on those pieces without spending too much. The actual uptime for frost nova and diamond skin might not change too much with crit instead of attack speed (I'm not that good with math, but it SHOULD proc CM more) but your EHP will go through the roof when you don't have to spend money on that expensive attack speed stat.
Same with your bracer slot. I have a Lacuni's similar to yours, but I change it out for a crit, resist all, and armor bracer when I run CM. The run speed is nice, but if you're cranking up the MP to farm keys, you will spend more time killing each group rather than running to the next.
Those four "upgrades" might cost you 10m or less if you are smart with your purchases or play the bid game. (Your amulet has a lot of crit already, so it's probably the last one you need to worry about. Still, you can get vit or resist or armor in that slot instead of attack speed and it will help you stand toe to toe with seigebreaker.)
Your build is focused on dps, which might not be the best option. If you change glass cannon to blur, your survivability will go up tremendously. I run with Astral Presence instead of Cold Blooded, but that's because I chose to go with a head that has 6% crit and a socket and I only have 10 APoC. It works very well, but I had to get above 45% crit chance.
Just wanted to reiterate that the above advice is based on my own experience running with people that are heavily focused on dps, so my own dps was secondary to locking down the enemy and absorbing hits.
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Just for fun, I crafted about about 10 of the Int Shoulders, and actually got one better than the Vile Ward I was using. The extra int was equal to about 1k dps boost, with similar mitigation and 70 extra vit. Plus it looks a lot better, IMHO. Since it costs 75k for each craft, plus 10 Tomes of Secret, I figure my shoulders cost me a little under 1 mil for the 10 crafts. That is worth it to me, and makes me happy.
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Zeyn-1153/hero/3275686
is me, and I won't change to CM gear/spec for a couple days so it should stay on my archon gear.
Basically, I can breeze though mp1, and with the changes to exp (not to mention extra loot and keys) I want to graduate to mp2. I've tried a few runs with my current gear, and its doable, just not quite the mindless cakewalk of mp1. For gear upgrades, I have about 20m, although that could go up soon. Not to mention that I have stashed a huge pile of crafting supplies if I wanted to go that route with the new recipes.
For reference, my current unbuffed paperdoll dps is 107k (with glass cannon) and EHP is ~250k (again with glass cannon) although obviously EHP goes up a huge amount in archon form.
The issue I've been running into is that I can buff my dps, but at the expense of EHP. I can survive mp2 with Archon Teleport and some fancy footwork, but I don't want to kill my defense too much. However, with my recent Mempo purchase my Life is insanely high, and I wouldn't mind losing some vit.
I already have some thoughts on what I should upgrade, but I come here because you guys always have enlightened ideas that I never would have thought of. Please, illuminate me with your shining wisdom.
0
My profile (In archon gear, hopefully)
Basically, I want to be able to do mp2 by the time the patch comes out, both for the exp boost and any key farming/crafting drops. I can easily do MP1 with my gear, but I can't quite make mp2 work. Right now I have about 20m to spend on upgrades, possibly more. Any advice would be appreciated.
For my CM build, I switch out helm for stormcrow, bracers for a yellow crit & EHP, gloves for crit & speed, hellfire for crit & speed, and offhand for APoC.
Obviously, I need a better hellfire ring. The other slots I've looked at could be big dps upgrades but kill my EHP, or visa versa. Or they are just financially out of my reach atm.
0
My thoughts on hp vs all resist (or armor, which gets a bigger boost from energy armor). Higher damage reduction makes your LoH and Life Steal work better, while pure hp only lets you last longer. Once you have enough hp to take a couple hits while diamond skin refreshes, armor/resist is the better method to increase EHP assuming equal budgets. Less damage taken = less to heal through LoH/LS = you stay at full hp longer.
Of course, it is always possible for me to be wrong.
0
If your budget is $1,000 you can easily add $20 to the game to buy gold with. That will get you 80m to play with. You can get a very nice set of gear for 80m, and if you blow it on a bad investment? It is worth the education. Twenty out of a thousand is not very much, and it will give you a boost to your performance so you can really experience the game.
0
So that would mean that boosting attack speed would greatly increase your character sheet dps, but would have no effect on the damage done by WW, creating a smaller multiplier. The opposite is true, when you reduce your attack speed, your character sheet dps goes down, but WW damage stays the same, resulting in a higher multiplier.
0
I expect that I'll stick to Teleport. As you pointed out, it really helps for stuff like molten and desecrate, especially when you get stuck by wallers or jailer or just giant mobs in your way. I also use Teleport offensively, to instantly get in range of elites that I want to take down faster with the 1 key (arcane destruction?) although I mostly only need it for the key warden.
0
They can't pass the bar.
If a threesome is with three people, and a twosome is two people, does that make me handsome?
0
But with your report, I'm starting to think that something changed with reflect damage mobs. Either Arcane Destruction doesn't proc reflect, or Life Steal now procs before the damage gets reflected.
I'm interested in other testing or reports.
0
A CM spec requires specific stats, such as high crit and AP on Crit, as well as high defensive stats. An archon spec only requires high dps, and enough defense to survive before you blow up everything (plus that extra move speed item to bring it up to 24%). This means that if you build for a CM spec you can just use that same gear for Archon, with maybe a few pieces to swap out. It might not be optimal, but Archon spec is very forgiving once you get past a certain threshold.
For example, I have a bracer with high vit, resistance, and crit that i change out for a cheap (300k) Lacuni just for the move speed when I run Archon.
The Tyrael's Might chest is probably about as good as a Tal Rasha's for Archon, but the attack speed from Tal Rasha's is invaluable for a CM spec.
0
Because I can.
The weapon is the biggest single upgrade, most likely. I recently found a sword (with white damage) with over 900 dps, life steal, life on hit, and a socket for 1.2m. It might not be as big of an upgrade compared to a 1200 dps weapon, but as the dps goes up the price jumps exponentially. You can still get a sizable dps boost with some useful stats for fairly cheap. I actually gave up a higher dps weapon so I could get the life steal, and it has been invaluable.
Your shoulders should be another easy upgrade. You can easily find a Vile Ward with higher int, armor, and similar resistances, although getting good vit can be expensive. Still, the extra armor should be worth more than the vit anyway.
Gems could use an upgrade. At your dps level, a few points of int can make a surprising difference. You don't need top tier (and the price is crazy) but a couple 500k gems may very well give you more dps for your money than any other upgrade.
Besides very generic tips like this, it really depends on what you want to do, or what you need. Do you need more dps? More survivability? Do you want to switch to a CM build? Do you ever play in a group? These questions are ones you need to answer for yourself before you can really decide what gear you need.
0
However, the game calculates Life Steal as if you are just hitting the first one, which means you are getting the full reflect amount but only 1/4 of the life steal. For those people that are basically "break even" on life steal vs reflect mobs, that can be really bad.
0
Thank you for the link to WW tick rates. I probably should bookmark that.
The thing with Chantodo's is that it comes with significant attack speed. You can't find another weapon that is nearly as fast with the same kind of stats. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the .25 attacks per second was directly added to the speed of the weapon. The following travesty of math is based on that.
2.51 attack speed (The OP's) : 33 ticks/cast
2.029 attack speed (Chantodo's + 23% IAS) : 26 ticks/cast
33 ticks @ 38% crit chance = 12.5 crits/cast
26 ticks @ 51% crit chance = 13.26 crits/cast
So with a little napkin math, if the OP traded out amulet, both rings, and bracers for pure crit chance (actually 1.5% crit less than max rolls) he would gain significantly more procs per cast. This should be an easy decision, considering the survivability and money saved from those expensive IAS+CC rings & amulet.
This is assuming he keeps the source, the gloves, and the Tal Rasha's chest with their IAS.
Of course, higher attack speed might be better for LoH and there is always the fact that casting faster means you can have more tornados out at once. But if we're only talking breakpoints here, I'm sure someone will come along to correct my math because I always end up screwing something up.
0
That's what I'm currently trying to hit. Anyone happen to know the next breakpoint, and if it's even worth trying to get?
0
Both rings and your amulet have a LOT of dps with that attack speed, but the actual crit on them is somewhat lacking. If you changed the rings out for some with 5% or 6% crit, and the amulet for 9%+, you can still get Resist, Vit, and/or Armor on those pieces without spending too much. The actual uptime for frost nova and diamond skin might not change too much with crit instead of attack speed (I'm not that good with math, but it SHOULD proc CM more) but your EHP will go through the roof when you don't have to spend money on that expensive attack speed stat.
Same with your bracer slot. I have a Lacuni's similar to yours, but I change it out for a crit, resist all, and armor bracer when I run CM. The run speed is nice, but if you're cranking up the MP to farm keys, you will spend more time killing each group rather than running to the next.
Those four "upgrades" might cost you 10m or less if you are smart with your purchases or play the bid game. (Your amulet has a lot of crit already, so it's probably the last one you need to worry about. Still, you can get vit or resist or armor in that slot instead of attack speed and it will help you stand toe to toe with seigebreaker.)
Your build is focused on dps, which might not be the best option. If you change glass cannon to blur, your survivability will go up tremendously. I run with Astral Presence instead of Cold Blooded, but that's because I chose to go with a head that has 6% crit and a socket and I only have 10 APoC. It works very well, but I had to get above 45% crit chance.
Just wanted to reiterate that the above advice is based on my own experience running with people that are heavily focused on dps, so my own dps was secondary to locking down the enemy and absorbing hits.