I always figured that set would be fun with stacking life on hit, but I haven't seen anyone using it.
You can get it going to do T6 clears in an acceptable, ten minute manner, but that's it.
The most fun I've had with it is bowmen. If I had a better bowmen setup I bet snapshotting the attack speed from Roland's onto the bowmen via Gogok, Roland 6 piece, Zeal, etc. would be great for guardian killing but you have to weigh that against using Cain's, Aug's, etc. for all the easy to get bonuses you can use for your bowmen.
If you want to actually melee with shield bash or sweep it doesn't feel worth it. You never get enough healing to outpace damage, and if you do, you're doing so little damage you have wrath issues. Compare that to what I can do with Condemn on seasons, or ponies and shotgun outside of seasons, it's a nice diversion with a good start that needs a serious overhaul.
Since you don't have Champion up 100% of the time, or close to it, you run into being CC-able. For hardcore and grift progression that's character loss and/or lost time. You also miss out on the free damage boost from Champ so the 100% skill damage boost means nothing since the attacks already do less damage and/or less group damage than builds you use Akkhan for, so you're even clearing T6 slower before you get into grift progression.
For a concrete example, I've got a solid Sweep setup with it. Sweep damage on helm, boots, gloves with CC, CD, STR, and AS (don't need CDR too much for Roland's since you aren't ever getting Champ without a 45 or so seconds CD), Golden Flence with great stats, etc. With as low as, I think it was at least, three targets I basically have unlimited Wrath. Best case scenario I was getting all kinds of guys into a giant pack and slowly witting them down with an insane attack speed, but it could take forever even though at the time my Roland's had better stats than my Akkhans. Since Champ isn't up that much it was basically smooth sailing doing that until Champ burned out, got CC'd by something, and then died.
Similar situation with Shield Bash, which I really wanted to like given all its changes since xpac's release. It's still annoying as hell doing the charge and whether you go all out on single target damage or aoe damage you're still killing slow relative to Akkhan builds.
Then you run into the Miri problem comparing Sweep or Shield Bash to Condemn. Every skill Crusaders have is garbage for proc rates, except for Condemn. Condemn procs Miri, relatively, every cast since every bubble, be it the initial, the second, or the third from BoP's legendary effect. So now that Condemn is a viable build again you have a build constantly causing Miri to do her thing for the bulk of your actual damage, allows you to move while casting, does more damage than sweep no matter what and more damage without tanking other stats for block% when comparing with shield bash, works with Akkhan 6piece, and is more wrath efficient even running the bonus 100% CD rune instead of the wrath reduction rune.
Basically Roland highlights all that is good and bad about the Crusader class people have brought up here and elsewhere numerous times; Akkhan six piece. It's just that good and important to anything worth running, even most of the fun builds. Dumping it or changing it entirely is the wrong way to go because it's too fun, and still not as broken as Barb Raekor charging nor DH's playing tower defense. Personally I'd rather just get another set focused on playing super defensively and emphasizing block % so you have a reason for a large chunck of the current passives and some of the lesser to never used skills and seeing how else to min-max block % into damage; hell you could even incorporate thorns into this and make Invoker a Crusader set since we're down a set from the other classes anyway. That way you're just using assets already in the game. Then keep Roland's and its attack speed and damage buff to flail focused melee for Swipe, just tweaking the numbers to get an acceptable level of damage out of it to make up for the loss of defense, especially Champion. Ideally with that line of thinking you'd have a general set in Akkhan, a super defensive set that can still kill things due to on block effects and damage from block % for shield skills working better than what we have now, and an all out offensive set in Roland's that makes up for the defensive losses.
Mind if anyone could give me some advice with some mystic rolls?
So I have these two BoPs sitting in my stash and I'm torn to which one I should put a gift and reroll...
The 3.4k one would roll around 3.7k when enchanted for 10% damage and it has a decent secondary. The 10% damage BoP could be rerolled up to 3.8k when I enchant the damage range but have a terrible secondary (fear on hit? really?) and so-so strength roll.
Or get two Ramaladni's gifts to enchant both and call it a day.
Do the second. Fear on Hit isn't bad when farming T6 where you're one shotting everything but in higher grifts, especially blue/yellow guys, the fear will cost you time. It's why they finally made the ghosts not run as much in the latest patch. The damage loss of 3.7k instead of 3.8k will be negated some by less running from things since you're getting life per kill. Not as nice as life per hit or life per wrath spent, but every little bit of healing adds up since you're stuck in melee range.
I know it was like two or three weeks ago so I can't remember for sure, but in the four you linked in gchat didn't one of them have life per wrath or life per hit? If so what were its stats?
I tossed the other two BoPs earlier. Both were hovering around 3.4k-3.3k. One had 10% CDR/9% RCR/STR and the other had the lowest CDR roll with STR/VIT. I probably should have kept them as I can't remember what the secondaries were. I'll punch my self later. Neither of the BoPs had wrath spent for life on or whatever... Or at least I don't remember... Damn... Oh well...
Thanks guys! Looks like the general consensus is the second one
Of course now I never see any more BoPs drop.
Ah okay I was just mis-remembering then. You should be good going forward though, either one of those would have been great as your only option, let alone getting to pick one.
Life per wrath or life per hit is like the only thing I think might be worth having over what you already have, but even then that's assuming high end if not perfect rolls and the other stats you have, when doing grift 40. The damage is so wacky at that point even as often as you're spending wrath/getting that life per hit it still may not matter as much.
rolands is squishy even in t6. I don't understand what their goal with the set was, it makes no sense. you remove the set bonus that gives crusaders both defense and resource management, and replace it with a set that makes you churn through wrath like fucking crazy and gives you no defense. said set turns out to be shit. no. fucking. way. didn't see that coming at all.
Part of the reason why Akkhan's (or more realistically, 100% uptime on Prophet) is super good and Roland's is super not is because the Block mechanic is super bad. You shave off like 20k damage from blocking, which is nothing. They've discussed previously that they want to change Block to a % based damage reduction (so imagine Blocking reduces a hit by 50% or something). And I mean, doing just that wouldn't automatically make Roland's good or anything. But it'd be a step in the right direction, considering Roland's has zero defense.
Aside from changing Block, here's other things they could do to even things out:
- Add a defensive bonus to Roland's. 100% offense clearly isn't working.
- Add a cooldown to the 2nd life effect from the Prophet rune? It just seems like Prophet is way too good to use any other rune, and it might end up being okay with changing Block?
- Buff the other Akarat's runes. Firestarter and Prophet are great, the others... not so much?
At the very least, changing Roland's and Block would be a good start, anyway.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
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imdointhisI should actually stop doin' this.Registered Userregular
Part of the reason why Akkhan's (or more realistically, 100% uptime on Prophet) is super good and Roland's is super not is because the Block mechanic is super bad. You shave off like 20k damage from blocking, which is nothing. They've discussed previously that they want to change Block to a % based damage reduction (so imagine Blocking reduces a hit by 50% or something). And I mean, doing just that wouldn't automatically make Roland's good or anything. But it'd be a step in the right direction, considering Roland's has zero defense.
Aside from changing Block, here's other things they could do to even things out:
- Add a defensive bonus to Roland's. 100% offense clearly isn't working.
- Add a cooldown to the 2nd life effect from the Prophet rune? It just seems like Prophet is way too good to use any other rune, and it might end up being okay with changing Block?
- Buff the other Akarat's runes. Firestarter and Prophet are great, the others... not so much?
At the very least, changing Roland's and Block would be a good start, anyway.
The second life on Prophet is actually less of an issue than the bonus armor. If you're causing Prophet to go off far more often than not you'll still be getting hit by something that will kill you anyway. As your gear gets better it's less of a thing in T6 but the higher you grift the more apparent it becomes Prophet's second life is often whatever. The constant 50% armor is basically a free ~10% damage reduction when you look at your sheet DPS and no other rune does anything close to as good for grifts even with 100% uptime.
Like I mentioned in the essay above, they didn't even really add any damage with Roland's. The builds you use Akkhan for, Condemn, Baleful Remnant, Shotgun, Pony, all have more a lot damage than Swipe flat out or from item effects, and typically more than Shield Bash due to needing to work block% into your gear. Then you have wrath issues on top of that. And finally the problem with only Condemn benefitting from Miri which builds that aren't Roland based suffer from. There's just no way to compete without a drastic overhaul or someone finding some synergy no one's come close to finding that likely doesn't exist.
Sweet Jesus finally got the 6 piece bonus for firebird. The rolls are kinda garbage but it's still good enough that I can now probably clear Grifts into the 20s and finish off my legendary gems. Still hoping to get 2 more pieces to drop the source for a 2 hander and go back to magefist.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Prophet gives 150% bonus armor (so you're at 250% armor with it active), which is why it's so dang good.
Eh if you die because you're boxed in with stuff you're basically dead anyway, Indestructible is much more useful in that regard because it makes you invulnerable for 5 seconds.
Seriously, fuck the asshole on the dev team decided "we're going to have no offiline mode and fuck anyone that gets a DC, they should just not get DC'd." Just love sticking in a 20+ grift key (today it was my lvl 25 season grift key) and getting DC'd, thus getting fuckall for my efforts (worse, since I got that by just doing a trial, another reason I fucking hate trials). Maybe the current grift design fucking sucking and the latest round of DDoS and lag issues, will force that asshole or assholes to get some fucking perspective and realize that people should not get punished by such BS for playing solo. Get DC's in solo rift, get your key back. Get DC'd during soloing bounty farming, progress gets saved. Get DC'd in group grifts, you can port the start of the current floor instead of having to run through several floor. Get DC'd and all legs on the ground get mailed to you.
As for the discussion on Akkarat's Champion. I feel like they should just fold the 150% armor from prophet into the skill baseline. Grifts pretty much make it mandatory for the spec. Granted I suppose the other option is adding bonus armor to all the other runes, but that still leaves the issue that Prophet would need a redesign in the end. I think both Firestarter and Embodiment of Power would do perfectly fine if they had 100-150% bonus armor. They just don't get chosen because that 150% bonus armor is huge in end game content. Firestarter has the DoT going for it and Embodiment has the bonus wrath regen, that can be converted into damage. As Column points out, the second life from Prophet is very underwhelming. I'll repeat, you hit a point in rifts where some things can proc that second life and then the hit after just kills you anyways. The second life from indestructible is far more reliable because you have a couple second of invulnerability (so you can either kill something after procing indestructibility or worse case, proc indestructible running by something obnoxious and hope you never have to deal with that thing again). So if they made all or part of the bonus armor from prophet baseline, they'd need to give it something else (ideally not armor, I could just see the problem coming back if Champion gave 150% baseline and prophet bumped that up to 300% because it just be required again at grift 40+).
I think ultimately, Blizz is just going to have to redo mob damage scaling and probably give melee more than 30% damage reduction baseline. They might also be well served by adding in a mechanic that causes successful melee hits to increase a character's survival and make that baseline for everyone. The issue I see with just boosting baseline melee survival is that does nothing for melee WD, Wiz or DH builds (assuming they want those viable) and could be possibly unneeded survival buffs for builds like Stampede. I suggest mob damage scaling because I don't find one-shot central fun, compelling gamepley. If I have to fail, I would rather it be a case of not killing things fast enough, rather than cause I have to keep running back from the entrance after dying to something unavoidable stupid shit (I'm fine dying, if I do something stupid, like standing in sentries or obviously visible exploding moltens - just a note here, I do think they need to give us some graphics options to turn off or greatly tone down the visual effects of other players abilities, I'm noticing that certain builds case lag like no ones business).
there's plenty of other things you can die to over being boxed in, like jailer. crusaders have a huge edge when dealing with unavoidable damage because it simply won't kill them.
Alkmaar will eternally taunt me with his find rate of Ramalamadingdongs. Maybe I should actually join a game he's in so he can drop one for me out of pity.
This is exactly what I did last night and it worked!
And @Mill, definitely roll the second BoP. Higher top end damage, max CDR and better secondary. Good luck finding a gift for that beauty!
A quick recommendation for condemn saders, most of the builds I see use a Law of Valor (critical or unstoppable force) I think both kind of suck until you get to a grift lvl where you just have to have the Critical dmg. Attack speed is pretty worthless as a condemn sader and you probably don't have any issues with wraith (if you do just use Reaper's wraps). There are a lot of good Laws of Hope or Justice that really help with survivability. Wings of Angels is my favorite the extra movement speed and being able to walk through enemies is awesome for clear times and survivability.
theres some sorta legendary consumeable that puts a socket in an item
Ramalandi's Gift, allows you to put a socket on an item that doesn't have a socket. You can keep your crazy weapon and re-roll whatever you need to be better, like weapon damage, then add a socket on top of it.
theres some sorta legendary consumeable that puts a socket in an item
Ramalandi's Gift, allows you to put a socket on an item that doesn't have a socket. You can keep your crazy weapon and re-roll whatever you need to be better, like weapon damage, then add a socket on top of it.
I'm pretty sure it's limited to weapons only.
At least, that's what I've read. I've never seen one drop, personally.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
edited October 2014
Ramaladni's Gift is only for weapons, yes. It's also generally pretty rare. I've gotten one in about 30-40 hours of play.
A quick recommendation for condemn saders, most of the builds I see use a Law of Valor (critical or unstoppable force) I think both kind of suck until you get to a grift lvl where you just have to have the Critical dmg. Attack speed is pretty worthless as a condemn sader and you probably don't have any issues with wraith (if you do just use Reaper's wraps). There are a lot of good Laws of Hope or Justice that really help with survivability. Wings of Angels is my favorite the extra movement speed and being able to walk through enemies is awesome for clear times and survivability.
I mostly run Critical for guardians. More CD for Miri is less time spent plinking away at them because I'm too lazy to do it right and find a conduit shrine to kill them.
AS can also be useful if you're running Slash - Zeal since it's holy and gives you more AS to stack with the law. More attacks is more chances to proc Miri during a guardian, more wrath if you need it, and some small % of the guardian's overall health pool. But it's arguably a moot point since Slash has such a terrible proc chance like everything else compared to Condemn.
Is there anything in particular I can do to get Boon of the Hoarder faster or should I just do bounties and hope I run into goblins?
Unless they've been nerfed recently you can only try to be as efficient as possible by running high spawn rate areas. The run before Skeleton King, Royal Crypts?, and Core of Arreat are both linear areas that are easy to explore the entire place and both have a higher than average spawn rate. Couple the spawn rate with how linear they are to search all of and you can get more lever pulls at goblins, and thus lever pulls at portals, than spending time running other places where you spend more time searching for goblins.
Given how boring that is, since you can still spend days doing this for hours and not getting a portal, farming Act 1 bounties and checking those two spots is a nice way to work on getting a great RoRG while looking for portals. I often run Act 4 bounties because they're pretty easy and offer a chance at every act's cache loot table, but that's more to mix up the act 1 monotony than being super efficient.
If you google portals there's some other places that have better than average spawn rates for people that can be worth checking to break up the monotony too like Tower of the Cursed/Damned or something like that in act 3.
Woot, second Unity acquired! ...Of course, all my gems are already 35+ so that doesn't actually mean much, haha. Still, nice to now be crushing G32 rifts like they're T6. I quite like the 65% uptime on Epiphany so I'm not sure if it's worth gunning for a Peshkov over Leoric's Crown. I suppose I could do with some trifecta gloves, and a new ammy would of course be much appreciated.
I never realised how dire Jailer is until I tried running a T30 rift without Ice Climbers. Fuuuuuuck that.
You still take the damage from it even though you're never snared by it, don't you?
Barbarian: Relentless
"While below 35% Life, all skills cost 75% less Fury and all damage taken is reduced by 50%." (Note, does not keep you from dying)
Crusader: Indestructible
"When you receive fatal damage, you instead become immune to damage, gain 35% increased damage and gain 107284 Life per Kill for 5 seconds.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds."
Demon Hunter: Awareness
"When you receive fatal damage, you instead vanish for 2 seconds and regenerate 50% of maximum Life.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds." (You can still take damage while vanished, I'm pretty sure) Bert tested, makes you effectively immune in that two second window
Monk: Near Death Experience
"When receiving fatal damage, you are instead restored to 35% of maximum Life and 35% Spirit.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds.
When Near Death Experience is on cooldown, your Health Globe Healing Bonus, Life per Second and Life per Hit are increased by 35%."
Witch Doctor: Spirit Vessel
"Reduce the cooldown of your Horrify, Spirit Walk, and Soul Harvest spells by 2 seconds.
In addition, the next time you receive fatal damage, you automatically enter the spirit realm for 2 seconds and heal to 15% of your maximum Life.
This effect may occur once every 90 seconds." (Dunno if spirit realm makes you immune like spirit walk)
Wizard: Unstable Anomaly
"When you receive fatal damage, you heal to 45% of your maximum Life and release a shockwave that knocks enemies back and slows them by 60% for 3 seconds.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds." (I've absolutely had Unstable Anomaly proc, then taken a hit within <1 second and had Firebird 4p go off)
I'm fairly sure you're immune to damage during the 2 secs that extra spirit walk persists? This is how an "extralife" ability should work in my opinion, you should be given time to react to the danger and at least have some means to relocate/regroup before becoming a target again.
Just got some damn near perfect gloves (if you think CDR is better than aspd, which is maybe the case?), so off goes the Crown and on goes my rad Hellfire amulet. Will keep rolling helms, and might craft more hellfire amulets in the meantime (lol, def won't do that).
And I've not noticed any damage from Jailer w/ Ice Climbers equipped.
I feel like I really should lvl a dedicated petsader now. It would make some good use of the gear I'm find on my condemn sader.
I finally got around to redoing my other non-season 70 sader as a holy shotgun build. Just need to find a good pair of Akkhan pants for her. Then when I'm motivated fine tune a few pieces. She needs a better RoRG, a solid Leoric's Crown would be great, a holy SoJ. Not sure if I should be content with my belt options for here or not. If I want a vigilante belt, I need to find her one. I could also forgo shield glare, run punish and make use of the angel hair braid sitting in my inventory. Also gems, she need legendary gems at rank 25. Definitely won't be a super serious toon, so I only need to gems to 25 and not have to be too crazy with fine tuning gear. Just need to make sure she can do well enough in lower grifts and crush T6.
Also is anyone else getting lag issues and lots of network disconnects lately? Trying to figure out if that's on my end or if it's Hughesnet fault or if some jackasses are DDoSing the servers again.
On the Crusader I'd have to specifically test it but I'm 99.99% sure any damage you take from all enemy CC abilities you're now immune to do damage. Like, Frozen for sure causes damage before the explosion still and in higher grifts is a prime example of something that if it kills you to cause Prophet to go off it will likely kill you again before you're out making the bonus armor that amounts to ~10% more damage mitigation better than the extra life.
Ice climbers literally say "Gain immunity to Freeze and Immobilize effects," while Champion says "Explode with the power of your order, increasing your damage by 35% and increasing your Wrath regeneration by 5 for 20 seconds." I thought Wrath of the Berserker said in the tooltip it made you immune to CC and was going to compare that wording to climbers just to see, but guess that won't work. I'm pretty sure the way they work, despite tooltip wording and lack of transparency like other places in the game, is Ice Climbers negate both the CC and the damage but skills like WotB and Champ only negate the CC not the damage the CC does when you test them out.
Also the Barb cheat death is in a weird place. On its own and at first blush it may not seem very good, but that damage reduction is on top of Ignore Pain, which is made better by the new belt, the Unity buff if playing solo, and you have all the new Raekor stuff with stun, unlimited charging, etc. that it's actually a very good passive.
Also is anyone else getting lag issues and lots of network disconnects lately? Trying to figure out if that's on my end or if it's Hughesnet fault or if some jackasses are DDoSing the servers again.
My connection to BNet has been worse than normal the past week. Couple that with Hyrule Warriors coming out and I haven't bothered to play much since the game is so DC unfriendly.
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Big Red Tiebeautiful clydesdale style feettoo hot to trotRegistered Userregular
edited October 2014
the awareness "vanish" effect is basically smokescreen so it should make you invincible for 2 seconds
Is there anything in particular I can do to get Boon of the Hoarder faster or should I just do bounties and hope I run into goblins?
Unless they've been nerfed recently you can only try to be as efficient as possible by running high spawn rate areas. The run before Skeleton King, Royal Crypts?, and Core of Arreat are both linear areas that are easy to explore the entire place and both have a higher than average spawn rate. Couple the spawn rate with how linear they are to search all of and you can get more lever pulls at goblins, and thus lever pulls at portals, than spending time running other places where you spend more time searching for goblins.
Given how boring that is, since you can still spend days doing this for hours and not getting a portal, farming Act 1 bounties and checking those two spots is a nice way to work on getting a great RoRG while looking for portals. I often run Act 4 bounties because they're pretty easy and offer a chance at every act's cache loot table, but that's more to mix up the act 1 monotony than being super efficient.
If you google portals there's some other places that have better than average spawn rates for people that can be worth checking to break up the monotony too like Tower of the Cursed/Damned or something like that in act 3.
Thanks for the words.
A completely different question: Do legendary gems benefit from +element? The item tooltips all say element skill, but the character sheet details just say element damage increase.
Is there anything in particular I can do to get Boon of the Hoarder faster or should I just do bounties and hope I run into goblins?
Unless they've been nerfed recently you can only try to be as efficient as possible by running high spawn rate areas. The run before Skeleton King, Royal Crypts?, and Core of Arreat are both linear areas that are easy to explore the entire place and both have a higher than average spawn rate. Couple the spawn rate with how linear they are to search all of and you can get more lever pulls at goblins, and thus lever pulls at portals, than spending time running other places where you spend more time searching for goblins.
Given how boring that is, since you can still spend days doing this for hours and not getting a portal, farming Act 1 bounties and checking those two spots is a nice way to work on getting a great RoRG while looking for portals. I often run Act 4 bounties because they're pretty easy and offer a chance at every act's cache loot table, but that's more to mix up the act 1 monotony than being super efficient.
If you google portals there's some other places that have better than average spawn rates for people that can be worth checking to break up the monotony too like Tower of the Cursed/Damned or something like that in act 3.
Thanks for the words.
A completely different question: Do legendary gems benefit from +element? The item tooltips all say element skill, but the character sheet details just say element damage increase.
I haven't looked into it enough to know if it's universal for sure, but Mirinae definitely gets a damage boost from holy damage %. I think the other gems follow suit from physical, poison, lightning, etc. where you'll see a damage boost if you, say, run Wreathe in lightning gear.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Ice climbers literally say "Gain immunity to Freeze and Immobilize effects," while Champion says "Explode with the power of your order, increasing your damage by 35% and increasing your Wrath regeneration by 5 for 20 seconds." I thought Wrath of the Berserker said in the tooltip it made you immune to CC and was going to compare that wording to climbers just to see, but guess that won't work. I'm pretty sure the way they work, despite tooltip wording and lack of transparency like other places in the game, is Ice Climbers negate both the CC and the damage but skills like WotB and Champ only negate the CC not the damage the CC does when you test them out.
Ice Climbers doesn't prevent any damage. It only prevents the root/CC from affecting you. Jailer, Frozen, etc. all still do damage to you. The additional damage mitigation against cold affix doesn't do much of anything given you will want to avoid pretty much all of the cold skills and you aren't going to be sitting in them anyway, because they do way too much damage.
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That's the spirit!
The most fun I've had with it is bowmen. If I had a better bowmen setup I bet snapshotting the attack speed from Roland's onto the bowmen via Gogok, Roland 6 piece, Zeal, etc. would be great for guardian killing but you have to weigh that against using Cain's, Aug's, etc. for all the easy to get bonuses you can use for your bowmen.
If you want to actually melee with shield bash or sweep it doesn't feel worth it. You never get enough healing to outpace damage, and if you do, you're doing so little damage you have wrath issues. Compare that to what I can do with Condemn on seasons, or ponies and shotgun outside of seasons, it's a nice diversion with a good start that needs a serious overhaul.
Since you don't have Champion up 100% of the time, or close to it, you run into being CC-able. For hardcore and grift progression that's character loss and/or lost time. You also miss out on the free damage boost from Champ so the 100% skill damage boost means nothing since the attacks already do less damage and/or less group damage than builds you use Akkhan for, so you're even clearing T6 slower before you get into grift progression.
For a concrete example, I've got a solid Sweep setup with it. Sweep damage on helm, boots, gloves with CC, CD, STR, and AS (don't need CDR too much for Roland's since you aren't ever getting Champ without a 45 or so seconds CD), Golden Flence with great stats, etc. With as low as, I think it was at least, three targets I basically have unlimited Wrath. Best case scenario I was getting all kinds of guys into a giant pack and slowly witting them down with an insane attack speed, but it could take forever even though at the time my Roland's had better stats than my Akkhans. Since Champ isn't up that much it was basically smooth sailing doing that until Champ burned out, got CC'd by something, and then died.
Similar situation with Shield Bash, which I really wanted to like given all its changes since xpac's release. It's still annoying as hell doing the charge and whether you go all out on single target damage or aoe damage you're still killing slow relative to Akkhan builds.
Then you run into the Miri problem comparing Sweep or Shield Bash to Condemn. Every skill Crusaders have is garbage for proc rates, except for Condemn. Condemn procs Miri, relatively, every cast since every bubble, be it the initial, the second, or the third from BoP's legendary effect. So now that Condemn is a viable build again you have a build constantly causing Miri to do her thing for the bulk of your actual damage, allows you to move while casting, does more damage than sweep no matter what and more damage without tanking other stats for block% when comparing with shield bash, works with Akkhan 6piece, and is more wrath efficient even running the bonus 100% CD rune instead of the wrath reduction rune.
Basically Roland highlights all that is good and bad about the Crusader class people have brought up here and elsewhere numerous times; Akkhan six piece. It's just that good and important to anything worth running, even most of the fun builds. Dumping it or changing it entirely is the wrong way to go because it's too fun, and still not as broken as Barb Raekor charging nor DH's playing tower defense. Personally I'd rather just get another set focused on playing super defensively and emphasizing block % so you have a reason for a large chunck of the current passives and some of the lesser to never used skills and seeing how else to min-max block % into damage; hell you could even incorporate thorns into this and make Invoker a Crusader set since we're down a set from the other classes anyway. That way you're just using assets already in the game. Then keep Roland's and its attack speed and damage buff to flail focused melee for Swipe, just tweaking the numbers to get an acceptable level of damage out of it to make up for the loss of defense, especially Champion. Ideally with that line of thinking you'd have a general set in Akkhan, a super defensive set that can still kill things due to on block effects and damage from block % for shield skills working better than what we have now, and an all out offensive set in Roland's that makes up for the defensive losses.
Life per wrath or life per hit is like the only thing I think might be worth having over what you already have, but even then that's assuming high end if not perfect rolls and the other stats you have, when doing grift 40. The damage is so wacky at that point even as often as you're spending wrath/getting that life per hit it still may not matter as much.
What does "gift it" mean?
Aside from changing Block, here's other things they could do to even things out:
- Add a defensive bonus to Roland's. 100% offense clearly isn't working.
- Add a cooldown to the 2nd life effect from the Prophet rune? It just seems like Prophet is way too good to use any other rune, and it might end up being okay with changing Block?
- Buff the other Akarat's runes. Firestarter and Prophet are great, the others... not so much?
At the very least, changing Roland's and Block would be a good start, anyway.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
theres some sorta legendary consumeable that puts a socket in an item
Like I mentioned in the essay above, they didn't even really add any damage with Roland's. The builds you use Akkhan for, Condemn, Baleful Remnant, Shotgun, Pony, all have more a lot damage than Swipe flat out or from item effects, and typically more than Shield Bash due to needing to work block% into your gear. Then you have wrath issues on top of that. And finally the problem with only Condemn benefitting from Miri which builds that aren't Roland based suffer from. There's just no way to compete without a drastic overhaul or someone finding some synergy no one's come close to finding that likely doesn't exist.
Eh if you die because you're boxed in with stuff you're basically dead anyway, Indestructible is much more useful in that regard because it makes you invulnerable for 5 seconds.
As for the discussion on Akkarat's Champion. I feel like they should just fold the 150% armor from prophet into the skill baseline. Grifts pretty much make it mandatory for the spec. Granted I suppose the other option is adding bonus armor to all the other runes, but that still leaves the issue that Prophet would need a redesign in the end. I think both Firestarter and Embodiment of Power would do perfectly fine if they had 100-150% bonus armor. They just don't get chosen because that 150% bonus armor is huge in end game content. Firestarter has the DoT going for it and Embodiment has the bonus wrath regen, that can be converted into damage. As Column points out, the second life from Prophet is very underwhelming. I'll repeat, you hit a point in rifts where some things can proc that second life and then the hit after just kills you anyways. The second life from indestructible is far more reliable because you have a couple second of invulnerability (so you can either kill something after procing indestructibility or worse case, proc indestructible running by something obnoxious and hope you never have to deal with that thing again). So if they made all or part of the bonus armor from prophet baseline, they'd need to give it something else (ideally not armor, I could just see the problem coming back if Champion gave 150% baseline and prophet bumped that up to 300% because it just be required again at grift 40+).
I think ultimately, Blizz is just going to have to redo mob damage scaling and probably give melee more than 30% damage reduction baseline. They might also be well served by adding in a mechanic that causes successful melee hits to increase a character's survival and make that baseline for everyone. The issue I see with just boosting baseline melee survival is that does nothing for melee WD, Wiz or DH builds (assuming they want those viable) and could be possibly unneeded survival buffs for builds like Stampede. I suggest mob damage scaling because I don't find one-shot central fun, compelling gamepley. If I have to fail, I would rather it be a case of not killing things fast enough, rather than cause I have to keep running back from the entrance after dying to something unavoidable stupid shit (I'm fine dying, if I do something stupid, like standing in sentries or obviously visible exploding moltens - just a note here, I do think they need to give us some graphics options to turn off or greatly tone down the visual effects of other players abilities, I'm noticing that certain builds case lag like no ones business).
This is exactly what I did last night and it worked!
And @Mill, definitely roll the second BoP. Higher top end damage, max CDR and better secondary. Good luck finding a gift for that beauty!
Ramalandi's Gift, allows you to put a socket on an item that doesn't have a socket. You can keep your crazy weapon and re-roll whatever you need to be better, like weapon damage, then add a socket on top of it.
Twitch/Mudzgut
Fall down seven times. Stand up eight.
At least, that's what I've read. I've never seen one drop, personally.
AS can also be useful if you're running Slash - Zeal since it's holy and gives you more AS to stack with the law. More attacks is more chances to proc Miri during a guardian, more wrath if you need it, and some small % of the guardian's overall health pool. But it's arguably a moot point since Slash has such a terrible proc chance like everything else compared to Condemn.
Given how boring that is, since you can still spend days doing this for hours and not getting a portal, farming Act 1 bounties and checking those two spots is a nice way to work on getting a great RoRG while looking for portals. I often run Act 4 bounties because they're pretty easy and offer a chance at every act's cache loot table, but that's more to mix up the act 1 monotony than being super efficient.
If you google portals there's some other places that have better than average spawn rates for people that can be worth checking to break up the monotony too like Tower of the Cursed/Damned or something like that in act 3.
Barbarian: Relentless
"While below 35% Life, all skills cost 75% less Fury and all damage taken is reduced by 50%." (Note, does not keep you from dying)
Crusader: Indestructible
"When you receive fatal damage, you instead become immune to damage, gain 35% increased damage and gain 107284 Life per Kill for 5 seconds.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds."
Demon Hunter: Awareness
"When you receive fatal damage, you instead vanish for 2 seconds and regenerate 50% of maximum Life.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds." (You can still take damage while vanished, I'm pretty sure) Bert tested, makes you effectively immune in that two second window
Monk: Near Death Experience
"When receiving fatal damage, you are instead restored to 35% of maximum Life and 35% Spirit.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds.
When Near Death Experience is on cooldown, your Health Globe Healing Bonus, Life per Second and Life per Hit are increased by 35%."
Witch Doctor: Spirit Vessel
"Reduce the cooldown of your Horrify, Spirit Walk, and Soul Harvest spells by 2 seconds.
In addition, the next time you receive fatal damage, you automatically enter the spirit realm for 2 seconds and heal to 15% of your maximum Life.
This effect may occur once every 90 seconds." (Dunno if spirit realm makes you immune like spirit walk)
Wizard: Unstable Anomaly
"When you receive fatal damage, you heal to 45% of your maximum Life and release a shockwave that knocks enemies back and slows them by 60% for 3 seconds.
This effect may occur once every 60 seconds." (I've absolutely had Unstable Anomaly proc, then taken a hit within <1 second and had Firebird 4p go off)
And I've not noticed any damage from Jailer w/ Ice Climbers equipped.
I finally got around to redoing my other non-season 70 sader as a holy shotgun build. Just need to find a good pair of Akkhan pants for her. Then when I'm motivated fine tune a few pieces. She needs a better RoRG, a solid Leoric's Crown would be great, a holy SoJ. Not sure if I should be content with my belt options for here or not. If I want a vigilante belt, I need to find her one. I could also forgo shield glare, run punish and make use of the angel hair braid sitting in my inventory. Also gems, she need legendary gems at rank 25. Definitely won't be a super serious toon, so I only need to gems to 25 and not have to be too crazy with fine tuning gear. Just need to make sure she can do well enough in lower grifts and crush T6.
Also is anyone else getting lag issues and lots of network disconnects lately? Trying to figure out if that's on my end or if it's Hughesnet fault or if some jackasses are DDoSing the servers again.
Ice climbers literally say "Gain immunity to Freeze and Immobilize effects," while Champion says "Explode with the power of your order, increasing your damage by 35% and increasing your Wrath regeneration by 5 for 20 seconds." I thought Wrath of the Berserker said in the tooltip it made you immune to CC and was going to compare that wording to climbers just to see, but guess that won't work. I'm pretty sure the way they work, despite tooltip wording and lack of transparency like other places in the game, is Ice Climbers negate both the CC and the damage but skills like WotB and Champ only negate the CC not the damage the CC does when you test them out.
Also the Barb cheat death is in a weird place. On its own and at first blush it may not seem very good, but that damage reduction is on top of Ignore Pain, which is made better by the new belt, the Unity buff if playing solo, and you have all the new Raekor stuff with stun, unlimited charging, etc. that it's actually a very good passive.
My connection to BNet has been worse than normal the past week. Couple that with Hyrule Warriors coming out and I haven't bothered to play much since the game is so DC unfriendly.
ill go test it
edit: it does
Thanks for the words.
A completely different question: Do legendary gems benefit from +element? The item tooltips all say element skill, but the character sheet details just say element damage increase.
Ice Climbers doesn't prevent any damage. It only prevents the root/CC from affecting you. Jailer, Frozen, etc. all still do damage to you. The additional damage mitigation against cold affix doesn't do much of anything given you will want to avoid pretty much all of the cold skills and you aren't going to be sitting in them anyway, because they do way too much damage.