weapons: dr vs speed

[Boeroer]

@Kaylon: Yeah you're most likely right that Bloody Slaughter is uselessfor 90% of all enemies because of the 10%. Why is it so low by the way? 25% would make much more sense. Or to make it like Predator's Sense so it triggers when the target suffers a DoT. That would be so cool...

 

Fighting Spirit is best for a barb who also uses Blooded and HoF, right. It's also good for Vengeful Defeat of course.

 

I really wonder now what happens if you buff yourself, jump into the mob and do HoF with Spelltongue? Most buffs on the enemies should be gone (if they are nor dead) while your own buffs should have very long durations, or not? Fighting spirit gets prolonged by Spelltongue - as well as all the other timed buffs, even healing and buffs from potions. So maybe this can be a great opener for encounters where the enemies are not all clumped together. Just buff, do an HoF with Spelltongue and then switch to your "real" weapon setup, maybe a 2h to finish the bystanders. Also gives you +15% attack speed which stacks with everything for a very long time by the way. Also works with Vengeful Defeat I presume.

 

@Eric: HoF gives you +0.5 crit damage multiplier. Barbaric Blow does this, too. Vengeful Defeat doesn't. It's like HoF without the bigger area and without increased crit damage. It's a HoF "light". Or diet HoF.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Boeroer

[Loren Tyr]

Darn. INT of 1 puts the duration on a hit at 5.5s at the lowest, that's no good. Then I'd be better off with 6.5s (unless DR is more than 17% higher than total (intended) damage), it's almost like it doesn't pay to be a gibbering idiot!

 

I don't suppose there are any (non-weapon/shield) items that give you a general duration penalty? I vaguely recall there being something like that, but I don't know for sure.

[Elric Galad]

Like Diet Coca, Diet HoF might be more dangerous for your health.

[Kaylon]

HoF just gives 25%dmg. Only Barbaric Blow gives crit dmg bonus.

[Boeroer]

Damn you are right. I totally mixed those two up. HoF only gives you 25% dmg for 1 sec - it doesn't even have hit to crit conversion, that's also Barbaric Blow. Sorry for that guys. Not the first time I don't remember correctly. Starting to build a bad reputation here...
Maybe it was because I couldn't decide if I should drop Barbaric Blow after I got HoF or not and read the description too many times - so it burned itself into my head.

So Vengeful defeat seems to be like HoF - only without the 25% bonus damage. But the description is totally different. Maybe someone with insight to the code could look up what exactly the difference is...? 

 

But wait a second... when HoF raises dmg for 1 second and you do HoF with Spelltongue - would this mean that Spelltongue prolongs this damage buff, too? Maybe so much that you would have +25% damage for the rest of the fight? I have to try that out... hopefully this damage bonus get's listed on the sheet, never looked that up while doing HoF. Now I regret that I'm on vacation and can't fire up PoE.

Edited July 25, 2016 by Boeroer

[Elric Galad]

I think someone on this forum did test HoF + Spelltongue and confirmed it works.

[Kaylon]

HoF also has -5acc penalty and affects the area around your target, while Vengeful Defeat affects the area around you. 

The drawbacks with Spelltongue are it lowers the output dmg of HoF and it can increase also the duration of some debuffs...

[Boeroer]

Yeah - I was thinking about pairing it with a more heavy hitter like a sabre or mace (or even Drawn in Spring - if you want to stay in the same weapon group). A lot of times (in not so hard encounters) my second swing of the full attack gets cancelled anyway because the initial target dies - with Spelltongue there's a bigger chance that most enemies survive the first attack and then get finished by the second. It surely isn't as powerful as dual sabres but maybe fun and good enough. For people who want to play that distinguished barb from Old Vailia.

[limaxophobiacq]

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.

 

How does Unlaboured Blade compare if you calculate the average firebug damage? HoF with Unlaboured Blade vs. a large group of enemies should on average result in multiple triggers of firebug.

[Boeroer]

Kaylon posted earlier (maybe in another thread) that with HoF those things only proc once per HoF - for whatever reason. So - no multiple Firebugs when using HoF

Edited July 25, 2016 by Boeroer

[limaxophobiacq]

Well ****. It's such a good barbarian weapon otherwise. Sad that it's not great for HoF.

Edited July 25, 2016 by limaxophobiacq

[Dr <3]

I can confirm that spelltongue prolong hof +25% dmg. Against a buffed crowd you can get a very long duration. I tested it with a 0 recovery barb, paired with Godansthunyr. Works good.

[Loren Tyr]

By the way,  

 

Death Usher and Bloody Slaughter trigger under 10%end (and Bloody Slaughter does nothing for grazes...).  

 

Death's Usher triggers at 25% rather than 10% Endurance, so that can still be reasonably helpful. Not sure it's necessarily worth losing a head item slot or an alternate racial ability, but it's not too bad either. Bloody Slaughter still kinda blows though. Might help a bit against very high DR targets and it helps you crit with status effects as well, but that really does tend to fall in the "overkill" category. Mostly for a theme build, I'd say.

[Boeroer]

Well ****. It's such a good barbarian weapon otherwise. Sad that it's not great for HoF.

Yes, sad - but you can still use it for your normal attacks and switch to your second weapon set for HoF.

[Loren Tyr]

Just a bit of follow up on the DoT front, I've been experimenting a bit with it, turns out they changed the code! (I actually have a dump of an older version I can compare it to) Based on the code itself and a bit of experimenting, how it seems to work now is as follows:

 

DamageOnTick DoT (which is most DoTs, eg. Deep Wounds, Necrotic Lance, etc.): damage is fixed per tick (gets Might bonus), ticks on 0, 3, 6, ..., etc. Still does fractional ticks at the end if you have less than 3 seconds left (with damage proportional to the fraction), but what's changed is that it now does this regardless of how small the fraction is (it had to be at least 1/3 before). If duration is an exact multiple of 3 the last tick does full damage, eg. Deep Wounds of 9 seconds will do base 3 damage on 0, 3, 6, and 9 (not sure whether the last tick in this case did or didn't happen before).

 

DamageOverTime DoT (eg. Wounding Shot, Enduring Flames): total (intended) damage is fixed and gets spread over the ticks. Ticks are on 3, 6, ..., etc., but not on 0. Damage per tick is 3 x (total damage) / (total duration), and this now also gets a fractional tick at the end (it didn't before, if I recall correctly). Interestingly, if the duration is an exact multiple of 3 it triggers twice on the final tick for full tick damage. So a Wounding Shot of 6 seconds that is supposed to do 18 damage will end up doing 9 damage per tick for a total of 27; but on 5 or 7 seconds it will do the intended 18. 

 

So for my Thick Paladin Gunner build I'll need low duration but in a multiple of 6.

 

An addendum: the double trigger on the final tick doesn't actually happen reliably. It happens much more often on a graze than a hit or crit. But it does start to happen quite consistently when you're running in slow mode (this must be linked to the DeltaTime, the size of the discrete time increments on which the game operates).