weapons: dr vs speed

[Nemesis7884]

I looked a bit for that but didnt find a good thread - whats the consensus on "faster" weapons vs "more damage reduction"?

 

are faster weapons gonna be useless later in the game due to higher armored enemies and you should focus more on slower hard hitting weapons or are enemies varied and both is viable? Im especially looking at the flail for example...

[Kaylon]

Yes, fast weapons become less effective vs enemies with high DR (15+) with a single exception - Drawn in Spring.

[Boeroer]

Throughout the game you will encounter enemies both with low and high DR. For example higer level ghuls still have 0 DR, but low level paladins will have high DR. But genrerally speaking the average DR of enemies gets higher the more you advance.

 

DR bypass enchantments are nice when used with fast weapons. So look out for that if you want to use fast weapons. Besides talents like Vulnerable Atttack there are also other items than weapons whioch can have this: Ryonas Vembraces (glove slot) for example give you +3 DR bypass. Then there are certain abilities and spells that lower DR - this can be important.

If you use fast hitting stilettos (3 DR bypass) with Vulnerable Attack (+5) and those Vembraces (+3) you'll have 11 DR bypass with fast weapons - that's not bad. With the Bleak Fang Stiletto you can even have +14. Stilettos are also not too bad of a choice because there are not only piercing ones in the game. Lagufaeth sometimes drop slashing stilettos. Use those when you meet foes which are resistent or immune to pierce damage.

 

This basically works with all fast weapons (without the inherent +3 DR bypass of stilettos of course). So you can make them work even against foes with higher DR. But against enemies with very high DR all the fast weapons are nearly useless - except the wounding ones like Drawn in Spring and Persistence, because the raw lash gets calculated before DR and immunities, so they will still do good damage against slash or pierce immune enemies or enemies with very high DR. 

Edited July 24, 2016 by Boeroer

[KDubya]

The flail Starcaller is one of the best weapons in game and gets little fanfare. it is available as soon as you get to Twin Elms, has a spell strike on crit, has fast attack and stuns on crit. It is much easier to keep an enemy chain stunned when you swing faster, even grazes on the stun can last long enough to refresh the stun. The extra graze to hit adds approximately 5% damage and adds more the worse your chance to hit is (relatively anyway).

 

Starcaller is my go to weapon for a Rogue. With Barbarians the graze>hit helps with their low accuracy and there are several good ones available early in the game.

 

Plus they look cool especially when dual wielded.

[Clerith]

 whats the consensus on "faster" weapons vs "more damage reduction"?

For cc, like stun and prone, fast weapon are nice, of course, but the go-to 1h dps weapon is sabre (highest base damage, average speed). The go-to 2h dps weapon is estoc (dr bypass). For dps, people like to lower the recovery as much as possible, so the weapon speed isn't as important as you might think. Basically, damage > dr bypass > speed when you want damage, generally speaking. The high speed, per and int on-hit cc build is another thing entirely, and even then, you pick the superior cc over weapon speed.

[Boeroer]

Fun fact: one handed weapons with official "average" speed are as slow or fast as two handed weapons which are officially "slow" - in terms of frame count. So a sabre is as fast as a Great Sword. But of course you can dual wield sabres which gives you 50% more speed - or later wear a durganized shield which will give you 15%. That's really sad for two handers. They should either give the Two Handed Style more damage boost (30% instead of 15%) or let durgan steel give more benefits because there's more steel on a 2h than on a 1h which should make the effect more dramatic. 

 

Leaving uniques aside, I still think the go-to 1h dps weapon is not sabre. At least for PotD (don't have much experience with the lower difficulties). I mean if you look at the stats it seems so, but it has slash damage only. If you concentrate on sabres (and ignore Bittercut for a moment) and do a solo run, you will see that a lot of foes are more resistant to slash than to anything other - also in the early game. I don't know if that's a coincidence or done on purpose because sabres deal so much damage per hit. I mean I like sabres - especially for Full Attacks because then the slow recovery doesn't matter that much. They are great for Heart of Fury because there you want to squeeze out every point of damage per hit you can get. But in general I think that weapons with different damage types are the best - IF you don't plan to switch your weapons a lot and adapt them to every encounter (which you can't do very well if you don't know the game). Here, I really like the war hammers. Two damage types, great Weapon Focus group (arquebus, arbalest - which you can already get for free at Anslög's Compass, great swords ). Flails are not my favourite because of crush-only. But they can be great on a low PER fighter who uses all the graze-to-hit abilities with a flail. And of course Starcaller is great.

If you look at the raw stats then this might look different, but if you would take all the enemies in the game and make a statistic about all the resistances and immunitites, maybe it came out that sabres are not no. 1.

I think the best 2h dps weapon is Tidefall by the way. It's wounding should beat even the speed of the Blade of the Endless Paths. But I did no math on this one. And it also has no wasted points for Marking like the Blade has (which can be a nice enchantment, but is worthless for your own dps). So you can put more dps enchantments on Tidefall than on the Blade I guess? Never tested that out, either, just thinking...  

[Dr <3]

About tidefall&barbarian: i suppose ehen you hit the wounding lash applies in all the carnage area, right? If i remember good, the wounding lash stack with himself ( so you can get 2 wounding dealing dmg togheter). If you hit with hof ( and deal 50+ hit with carnage ) every one of them process a wounding lash?

[Boeroer]

Wounding works with carnage and it stacks, yes. It's damage also gets bigger (DoT effect lasts longer) with high INT (like Deep Wounds, only that Deep Wounds don't stack). I see no reason why it shouldn't apply multiple times on every target of HoF - it's no on-crit effect or something and other lashes also get applied correctly. But I didn't check this yet. But the combat log should give info whether it was applied or not.

[Kaylon]

Wounding works with carnage and it stacks, yes. It's damage also gets bigger (DoT effect lasts longer) with high INT (like Deep Wounds, only that Deep Wounds don't stack). I see no reason why it shouldn't apply multiple times on every target of HoF - it's no on-crit effect or something and other lashes also get applied correctly. But I didn't check this yet. But the combat log should give info whether it was applied or not.

 

INT doesn't affect the damage of wounding, only its duration - in fact it's better to have only 3INT because the dmg is dealt faster. However MIG affects the wounding damage twice (first because it's based on the total damage dealt by the weapon and secondly because each tick is again affected by might) - that's why wounding is even more effective with high MIG.

[Boeroer]

He? Doesn't it work like all the other DoT effects where both MIG and INT are beneficial? The first raising the damage per tick and the later raising the number of ticks? Deep Wounds for example works like that - as do The Dragon Thrashed and Envenomed Strike and all the other stuff. Why is wounding so different?

I mean there was a time when every DoT was better with low INT - but they patched that and I thought this applied to all DoT effects. Seems stupid to leave that one out - it's also highly counterintuitive.

 

In my opinion the wounding shouldn't be influenced by anything at all - just the 25% of weapon damage that was rolled. Like it says in the description.

 

But maybe I never realised it because I mainly used those weapons for triggering Predator's Sense with ranger builds and here the longer duration was highly beneficial.

Edited July 24, 2016 by Boeroer

[Kaylon]

I don't know, it has to do probably with the fact that it's based on a percentage of the weapon's damage. Wounding Shot and Runner's Wounding Shot don't have their damage affected by INT either (however their wounding percentage is applied to the final damage, after the DR - probably the devs considered the damage too high if it worked like a lash)

Edited July 24, 2016 by Kaylon

[Boeroer]

Hm OK. Good to know. News for me.

[Loren Tyr]

Indeed. When you look under the hood there are actually two distinct kinds of DoT, with different implementations. You have the OnTick DoT, which is specified in terms of base damage per tick and base duration. This will benefit from INT, since it'll give you more ticks (including a fractional tick at the end, depending on total duration). This is usually the type of DoT used, for example Deep Wounds or Necrotic Lance. 

 

The other type of DoT is the fixed damage DoT which is specified in terms of the total damage and base duration. This damage is smeared out over (full) three second ticks, so you're actually better off with lower duration. There's also a bit of rounding going on, so the final damage might be higher than it says: you get a full tick every three seconds, but each one does damage equal to 3 / (total duration) x (total damage) . So if the duration is 4 seconds, you get two ticks worth of 0.75 x (total damage).

 

Note by the way that for this latter type the behaviour is a bit different for Raw damage and other damage types. For raw damage abilities like the wounding shots the DoT damage is taken as a percentage after DR. But for example the Goldpact Knight one, which is 50% of damage as Fire damage DoT, this is based on the damage before DR is applied, like lashes. Each tick is deducted 25% of Fire DR though (which means that higher INT actually results in less damage). 

 

I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

[Clerith]

Leaving uniques aside, I still think the go-to 1h dps weapon is not sabre. At least for PotD (don't have much experience with the lower difficulties). I mean if you look at the stats it seems so, but it has slash damage only. If you concentrate on sabres (and ignore Bittercut for a moment) and do a solo run, you will see that a lot of foes are more resistant to slash than to anything other - also in the early game. I don't know if that's a coincidence or done on purpose because sabres deal so much damage per hit. I mean I like sabres - especially for Full Attacks because then the slow recovery doesn't matter that much. They are great for Heart of Fury because there you want to squeeze out every point of damage per hit you can get. But in general I think that weapons with different damage types are the best - IF you don't plan to switch your weapons a lot and adapt them to every encounter (which you can't do very well if you don't know the game). 

If you have enough damage bonuses, the sabre's ridiculous base damage can scale so high that it's the best weapon, even if the enemy is slash resistant. Of course, that's usually late game, when whatever you do doesn't really matter. I think what I bolded is the crux of the matter. If your enemy is super resistant or immune to your damage type, of course you ought to switch your weapons, assuming you have a good backup pair. For PotD, you probably should. If you're lazy, then sure, pick a two damage type weapon and stick with it.

[Dr <3]

Ok tested a bit tidefall: the results are a bit inferior to double purgatory but are good enough. Apparently the wounding lash have some kind of stack limit, since after a hof surrounded by mobs, everyone of them had only 1 "tidefall lash" icon on status but suffer from 2-3 dots ( Red number upon the head), but not 50+ as expected. So tidefall is strong but not broken.

[Kaylon]

It's not possible to have 50+ wounds on a single enemy because with Tidefall you can hit an enemy maybe 6-7 times on average. Also if the hits are done at the same time the dots can't all be displayed since they tick at the same time, but they should be there and they all stack.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Kaylon

[Dr <3]

Probably i'm wrong, but i had always tought that hof works like: hit everyone in range ( let say 6 people), and after that every one hitted trigs another carnage. So every enemy should be hitted by 1+6 other attacks... So i really don't know why i wonder 50+ hits

[Dr <3]

I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1

[Boeroer]

If you use HoF with a 2hander against a group of 6 enemies each of them gets hit 6 times max: one time for the initial hit of HoF and another 5 times from the carnage of the other hits (that target the surrounding enemies). In total that's 6² (or six times six) hits = 36. With Purgatory (or any other one hander that is dual wielded) you'll get 6²*2 hits = 72 hits or 12 hits for each foe (which is way better for Combusting Wounds of course). 

So I guess with Tidefall you maybe can have up to 6 (or how many enemies were there) woundings each, but as Kaylon said it can't be displayed properly. But that is the optimum/maximum because during the execution of HoF enemies tend to die, thus taking away targets/hits and also carnage hits. So maybe your observed 3 parallel woundings is correct. It's a pity that you can't see that things in the combat log.

 

Another reason why HoF is good is because it also gives a bonus to your crit damage multiplier. With purgatory or resolution or battle axes or any other annihilating weapon that means +150% damage from crit alone. As i said before: since most enemies tend to die or be at the brink of death after HoF I wonder how Bloody Slaughter and Death's Usher behave with HoF. It could make a difference between 6 foes with 5% health and 6 dead foes. Death's Usher will raise the damage of your last hits and Bloody Slaughter woul turn some hits into crits with +200% damage. I for myself chose Doemenel for the crits and not +2 DR.

 

I wonder how dual Drawn in Spring performs despite the lower base damage. If you put on Ryona's and also switch on Vulnerable Attack it shouldn't be so bad.

 

Firebrand with it's high damage per hit and it's Annihilation should also work well, shouldn't it? But as long as your initial target survives the first swipe dual weapons is the way to go for HoF

[Boeroer]

 

I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1

 

And isn't there a drug that gives you -4(?) INT? Blacsonn ? Or the new Carow Golan? I saw something...

[Elric Galad]

Does HoF give crit bonus damages ?

Are you sure you're not speaking about Barbaric blow ?

I thought HoF gives only bonus damages.

[Loren Tyr]

 

 

I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1

 

And isn't there a drug that gives you -4(?) INT? Blacsonn ? Or the new Carow Golan? I saw something...

 

 

Hmm, you'd think one of them does, I'll check tonight. And perhaps even better, one might give an INT penalty as drug crash. In combination with the WM1 hat that should indeed get the job done, gives a nice MIG and CON bonus too. And the Dandy Hat of the Diseased Yak, pre-Stalwart... it'll be glorious! Though I'd have to use a hireling for this of course, he'd be to dumb to speak so not much of a protagonist.

 

Of course this is contingent on the possibility of stats even becoming negative in the first place, can they? 

[Kaylon]

Death Usher and Bloody Slaughter trigger under 10%end (and Bloody Slaughter does nothing for grazes...).  Which means you don't need them if you can already remove 10% of the enemy's endurance with a single hit (you'll just see bigger hits which just overkill your target). 90% of the enemies have under 300end and maybe 1% have over 500end (a few very high level creatures). My barb, for example, was dealing 50dmg with carnage (without counting the damage from Combusting Wounds) wich means he could finish anyway a monster with less than 500end if they had only 10% left. Also Fighting Spirit (+helmet) is hard to beat for a barbarian - +15%dmg/+7acc for HOF&Vengeful Defeat is huge...

 

Drawn in Spring is close to sabres but still behind Bittercut, Resolution or Purgatory when you compare the dmg per hit... With Drawn in Spring my barb would do, on average and before DR, 33slash+10corrode+13raw per hit, while Bittercut does 51slash+15corrode per hit (and Bittercut will have higher dmg if targets are weak to corrode). From a dmg/hit point of view the order is Legendary Bittercut > Legendary Resolution > Legendary Purgatory > Exceptional Slaying Sabre > Legendary Drawn in Spring.

[Kaylon]

Wrong thread

Edited July 25, 2016 by Kaylon

[Kaylon]

 

 

 

I actually toyed a bit with this for an intensely stupid Goldpact Knight (he had his own private aura ). Wasn't satisfied with it it at the time, but I'm of a mind to try it again with a Gunadin-type build. Still need a way to hit that 4 second sweet spot, but can't go for -2 INT unfortunately.

But if reach wm1 you can get one hat that gives -2 to int and reach 1

 

And isn't there a drug that gives you -4(?) INT? Blacsonn ? Or the new Carow Golan? I saw something...

 

 

Hmm, you'd think one of them does, I'll check tonight. And perhaps even better, one might give an INT penalty as drug crash. In combination with the WM1 hat that should indeed get the job done, gives a nice MIG and CON bonus too. And the Dandy Hat of the Diseased Yak, pre-Stalwart... it'll be glorious! Though I'd have to use a hireling for this of course, he'd be to dumb to speak so not much of a protagonist.

 

Of course this is contingent on the possibility of stats even becoming negative in the first place, can they? 

 

1 is the min you can have for a stat.