My goal for this character was to try out the new changes to whirlwind and eventually find item. I also was going to pump the crap out of strength for ed while using big, big hurt sticks. Most everyone has complained about the changes to whirlwind and how the new attack speed formulations was a nerf to whirlwind. Was it?
Normal/ NM:
Envy poison to level 24. And god leveling from there to 30 was terrible. All the good twinking items I have are 2h, so frenzy/double swing felt weak. I was left slowly hitting things with concentrate or bash or whatever. Once I hit level 30 and had access to whirlwind, I wanted to give insight a try, I had one in a bill so it should be good. Well, I was underwhelmed. 2x Bloodletter walked (whirled) circles around insight. I will say the lowe rmana cost and increased damage at low levels was very helpful. Now I kind of want to make a ww assassin as they will be buffed quite a bit too...
I breathed a sigh of relief once I hit level 34 and could equip upped Steeldriver. With that I was able to whirl to my next goal, Obedience.
Somehow I did not have a 5os non-eth thresher so I had to wait until level 59 for Obedience. No biggie, Steeldriver was still going strong.
Using this https://warren1001.github.io/IAS_Calculator/ whirlwind calculator, wearing 20% ias gloves and hustle armor gave me a 6 frame whirlwind. In old patches it would have been 12 frames per hit check. Obviously this is a massive difference, and that Obedience CA slays.
Hell:
I used nm terror zones to level to 76 or so before I decided on my endgame weapons. I had the runes for death, botd, oath, hustle, lawbringer, etc. After doing some calculations, I decided that I would go for Death. (didnt want to use my zod yet). I had 2 eth zerker axes, but both rolled 6 os in the cube. Sad. I would have preferred a colossus blade due to 75 ias being the 5 frame breakpoint versus the 89 ias a colossus sword requires, but I did not have one. So I made my death in a 5 os eth cs and got this roll:
I did some more spreadsheet math and checked how a Hustle balrog blade would go with this weapon as fanaticism would greatly help with ias breakpoints. Sadly, the math shows that you lose too much damage going from 2h to 1h on the death and the attack speed increase isn't enough to overcome that. A higher level of fanaticism would be needed as lvl 1 only gives 50 ed and 25% ar. I did whirl around with death/hustle but it was slower. I dont think the new changes really affected how one incredible weapon is kind of nerfed when dual wielding with an inferior weapon. Obviously this only happens to 2h swords, but there are more weapon options to check now.
Hell went easy at players 3. I could have gone higher but was fine casually marching through. My companion was an act V frenzy merc. He was a nice tank, but decripify from lawbringer rarely went off. His main bonus was actually carrying around lawbringer for me, as whenever I cam across ghosts or undead I wanted to one-shot, I would just steel one of his weapons and use it in my offhand. It was actually quite convenient! I kept my hp in the 2k to 2.5k range and ran with 320 str and enough dex for phase blades. I didnt see a need for 3.5k life and preferred the extra damage.
Final gear at Hell Baal kill:
Arreats
Treachery Dusk
Death CS
Laying of the hands
Ravenfrost
Angellic ring/ammy
String of Ears
Goreriders (War Travs isnt a huge dropoff in damage, but this was my only source of open wounds. If my travs had better mf I would have worn them)
Inventory: AR GCs x 3, Gheeds, Anni, Necro Torch.
Finds: 3/18/14 sc, ohm, um(hellforge), Found an ohm while looking for 5os weapons for obedience, so now I can make a grief if I want.
Thoughts:
1. New ww calculations are nice and also not nice. They are not nice because old weapons (botd, ik maul, tomb reaver, ribcracker) are heavily nerfed. No more 4 frame 2h non-sword ww. As I understand it, 2h sword can still get to 4 frame, but it takes most weapons more ias now. Except grief, that is still untouched as the king of weapons.
2. Equipping two swords instead of one is a nerf to the damage if they are not equal in power. In my calcs, Death 2h did 37k damage at 5fpa, adding a grief only increased the damage to 41k. With the same gear, one grief did 28k and 2 did 56k. Upped steeldriver (not thundermaul) was around 10k, and my Obedience was 13k.
3. So while Obedience is a good endgame weapon and will beat hell, it gets passed over because it is not grief nor capable of being eth. And that was the trend with all the weapons I looked at. If eth, could be ok. If grief, was bis.
4. So do I like the ww changes? I like that they tried something, and I dont mind the changes UNTIL YOU GET FROZEN OR DECRIPPED. Oh my god this needs fixed. WW is not a godlike skill that you can just reduce your attack speed like that. If you are in a situation where you need leech to survive, you are hosed. Why? Because you can't freaking potion! So the decision to disallow potions and then have the ability for holy freeze, frozen, decrip to drop your hit rate to once every second or two. If you are decripped, chilled, and around holy freeze, the hit check rate is.....47 frames. If you have CBF, then you will get maybe 20 frames (10 for grief) depending on gear.
5. WW in general - While whirlwind is a very intuitive and fun skill, it fails in terms of impact because it is not an aoe skill. An aoe skill will do more damage the more monsters you have grouped up, in range, etc. WW does not do that. In fact, the damage is spread out in such a way that grouping up monsters actually decreases WW's effectiveness because you end up taking more damage than necessary. If blizzard really wanted to improve WW, the fix would require some multi target ability that increases the dps when you whirl through larger groups of enemies instead of staying constant.
6. Find Item - now has a synergy. Once you are geared, it makes sense to put all points into Find Potion first as your Find Item level will be above where it takes more than one skill point to increase your %. I haven't seen a whole lot of talk about this, does the idea now math out to /p1 trav runs with 76% Find Item. I guess most of the geared people are still in LoD for load times and I have not seen a lot of untwinked 99er barbs.
Future plans - Trav running and possibly Nilly running.
Thanks for reading!
Taking no damage and killing phys immune Rada so fast I had to slow down to get a screenshot.
Best Trav run so far, highest rune and most useful drop!
Normal/ NM:
Envy poison to level 24. And god leveling from there to 30 was terrible. All the good twinking items I have are 2h, so frenzy/double swing felt weak. I was left slowly hitting things with concentrate or bash or whatever. Once I hit level 30 and had access to whirlwind, I wanted to give insight a try, I had one in a bill so it should be good. Well, I was underwhelmed. 2x Bloodletter walked (whirled) circles around insight. I will say the lowe rmana cost and increased damage at low levels was very helpful. Now I kind of want to make a ww assassin as they will be buffed quite a bit too...
I breathed a sigh of relief once I hit level 34 and could equip upped Steeldriver. With that I was able to whirl to my next goal, Obedience.
Somehow I did not have a 5os non-eth thresher so I had to wait until level 59 for Obedience. No biggie, Steeldriver was still going strong.
Obedience
Cryptic Axe
HelKoThulEthFal
Two Hand Damage: 155 - 705
Required Level: 59
Required Strength: 132
Required Dexterity: 83
30% Chance to cast level 21 Enchant when you Kill an Enemy
+40% Faster Hit Recovery
370% Enhanced Damage
-25% Target Defense
Adds 3 - 14 Cold Damage Over 3 Secs (75 Frames)
-25% to Enemy Fire Resistance
40% Chance of Crushing Blow
+266 Defense
+10 to Strength
+10 to Dexterity
All Resistances +22
Requirements --20%
Cryptic Axe
HelKoThulEthFal
Two Hand Damage: 155 - 705
Required Level: 59
Required Strength: 132
Required Dexterity: 83
30% Chance to cast level 21 Enchant when you Kill an Enemy
+40% Faster Hit Recovery
370% Enhanced Damage
-25% Target Defense
Adds 3 - 14 Cold Damage Over 3 Secs (75 Frames)
-25% to Enemy Fire Resistance
40% Chance of Crushing Blow
+266 Defense
+10 to Strength
+10 to Dexterity
All Resistances +22
Requirements --20%
Hell:
I used nm terror zones to level to 76 or so before I decided on my endgame weapons. I had the runes for death, botd, oath, hustle, lawbringer, etc. After doing some calculations, I decided that I would go for Death. (didnt want to use my zod yet). I had 2 eth zerker axes, but both rolled 6 os in the cube. Sad. I would have preferred a colossus blade due to 75 ias being the 5 frame breakpoint versus the 89 ias a colossus sword requires, but I did not have one. So I made my death in a 5 os eth cs and got this roll:
Death
Colossus Sword
HelElVexOrtGul
One Hand Damage: 175 - 472
Two Hand Damage: 409 - 814
Durability: 26 of 26
Required Level: 60
Required Strength: 138
Required Dexterity: 68
100% Chance to cast level 44 Chain Lightning when you Die
25% Chance to cast level 18 Glacial Spike on attack
Indestructible
350% Enhanced Damage
20% Bonus to Attack Rating
+50 to Attack Rating
Adds 1 - 50 Lightning Damage
7% Mana stolen per hit
50% Chance of Crushing Blow
43% Deadly Strike (Based on Character Level)
+1 to Light Radius
Level 22 Blood Golem (15/15 Charges)
Requirements --20%
Ethereal
Colossus Sword
HelElVexOrtGul
One Hand Damage: 175 - 472
Two Hand Damage: 409 - 814
Durability: 26 of 26
Required Level: 60
Required Strength: 138
Required Dexterity: 68
100% Chance to cast level 44 Chain Lightning when you Die
25% Chance to cast level 18 Glacial Spike on attack
Indestructible
350% Enhanced Damage
20% Bonus to Attack Rating
+50 to Attack Rating
Adds 1 - 50 Lightning Damage
7% Mana stolen per hit
50% Chance of Crushing Blow
43% Deadly Strike (Based on Character Level)
+1 to Light Radius
Level 22 Blood Golem (15/15 Charges)
Requirements --20%
Ethereal
I did some more spreadsheet math and checked how a Hustle balrog blade would go with this weapon as fanaticism would greatly help with ias breakpoints. Sadly, the math shows that you lose too much damage going from 2h to 1h on the death and the attack speed increase isn't enough to overcome that. A higher level of fanaticism would be needed as lvl 1 only gives 50 ed and 25% ar. I did whirl around with death/hustle but it was slower. I dont think the new changes really affected how one incredible weapon is kind of nerfed when dual wielding with an inferior weapon. Obviously this only happens to 2h swords, but there are more weapon options to check now.
Hell went easy at players 3. I could have gone higher but was fine casually marching through. My companion was an act V frenzy merc. He was a nice tank, but decripify from lawbringer rarely went off. His main bonus was actually carrying around lawbringer for me, as whenever I cam across ghosts or undead I wanted to one-shot, I would just steel one of his weapons and use it in my offhand. It was actually quite convenient! I kept my hp in the 2k to 2.5k range and ran with 320 str and enough dex for phase blades. I didnt see a need for 3.5k life and preferred the extra damage.
Final gear at Hell Baal kill:
Arreats
Treachery Dusk
Death CS
Laying of the hands
Ravenfrost
Angellic ring/ammy
String of Ears
Goreriders (War Travs isnt a huge dropoff in damage, but this was my only source of open wounds. If my travs had better mf I would have worn them)
Inventory: AR GCs x 3, Gheeds, Anni, Necro Torch.
Finds: 3/18/14 sc, ohm, um(hellforge), Found an ohm while looking for 5os weapons for obedience, so now I can make a grief if I want.
Thoughts:
1. New ww calculations are nice and also not nice. They are not nice because old weapons (botd, ik maul, tomb reaver, ribcracker) are heavily nerfed. No more 4 frame 2h non-sword ww. As I understand it, 2h sword can still get to 4 frame, but it takes most weapons more ias now. Except grief, that is still untouched as the king of weapons.
2. Equipping two swords instead of one is a nerf to the damage if they are not equal in power. In my calcs, Death 2h did 37k damage at 5fpa, adding a grief only increased the damage to 41k. With the same gear, one grief did 28k and 2 did 56k. Upped steeldriver (not thundermaul) was around 10k, and my Obedience was 13k.
3. So while Obedience is a good endgame weapon and will beat hell, it gets passed over because it is not grief nor capable of being eth. And that was the trend with all the weapons I looked at. If eth, could be ok. If grief, was bis.
4. So do I like the ww changes? I like that they tried something, and I dont mind the changes UNTIL YOU GET FROZEN OR DECRIPPED. Oh my god this needs fixed. WW is not a godlike skill that you can just reduce your attack speed like that. If you are in a situation where you need leech to survive, you are hosed. Why? Because you can't freaking potion! So the decision to disallow potions and then have the ability for holy freeze, frozen, decrip to drop your hit rate to once every second or two. If you are decripped, chilled, and around holy freeze, the hit check rate is.....47 frames. If you have CBF, then you will get maybe 20 frames (10 for grief) depending on gear.
5. WW in general - While whirlwind is a very intuitive and fun skill, it fails in terms of impact because it is not an aoe skill. An aoe skill will do more damage the more monsters you have grouped up, in range, etc. WW does not do that. In fact, the damage is spread out in such a way that grouping up monsters actually decreases WW's effectiveness because you end up taking more damage than necessary. If blizzard really wanted to improve WW, the fix would require some multi target ability that increases the dps when you whirl through larger groups of enemies instead of staying constant.
6. Find Item - now has a synergy. Once you are geared, it makes sense to put all points into Find Potion first as your Find Item level will be above where it takes more than one skill point to increase your %. I haven't seen a whole lot of talk about this, does the idea now math out to /p1 trav runs with 76% Find Item. I guess most of the geared people are still in LoD for load times and I have not seen a lot of untwinked 99er barbs.
Future plans - Trav running and possibly Nilly running.
Thanks for reading!
Taking no damage and killing phys immune Rada so fast I had to slow down to get a screenshot.
Best Trav run so far, highest rune and most useful drop!
Last edited:
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