krischan said:
IMO that weapon is not worth upgrading. Only barbs can make use of it because it's two-handed and it will have high dex reqs which e.g. a druid won't be willing to meet. Because it has no IAS, it's useless for WW barbs. Concentration barbs might use it, but they would have to wear more IAS items than necessary.
The Oath runeword adds more IAS and more %ed and that runeword costs Mal, Pul and an ethereal weapon with 4 sockets or the potential to get 4 from Larzuk. IMO rare weapons must be better than that runeword in order to be worth upgrading. Leech isn't that important, as there are lots of items that will provide enough of it.
Oath runeword.
30% Chance To Cast Level 20 Bone Spirit On Striking
Indestructible
+50% Increased Attack Speed
+210-340% Enhanced Damage (varies)
+75% Damage To Demons
+100 To Attack Rating Against Demons
Prevent Monster Heal
+10 To Energy
+10-15 Magic Absorb (varies)
Level 16 Heart Of Wolverine (20 Charges)
Level 17 Iron Golem (14 Charges)
You're right about the IAS. As far as pure damage goes no way is Oath doing more damage. First off, the chances of getting a higher (than 300) ED% with Oath is only 31%. Even assuming a perfect Oath (340% ED), this weapon will be very competative. There are two reasons:
1. The +Max damage from the Fool's prefix will increase you damage on par with the extra 40% on-weapon ED. Let's assume a Conc Barb can get 1100% in off-weapon ED (i.e. skill, synergies, Might merc, & str boosts). At clvl 90, Fool's will add +45 to max damage, which translates to 540 more damage (45 * 12). Given the base average damage for an Ethereal Champion sword is 115.5, then 40% more on-weapon ED will translate to 46.2 more damage (before the off-weapon ED multiplier). That's 554.4 more final damage. At higher clvl the rare weapon will actually do more damage.
2. This weapon will also add a ton of AR. This means that it'll connect a hell of a lot more than an Oath sword. At the very least, it'll free up the Angelic set slots, allowing the use of HighLord's for 35+% chance of DS (again translating to more damage). That's 35% more total physical damage. So a weapon doing 6K average damage will now be doing 8.2K average damage.
Besides not everybody plays Ladder on Bnet.
this doesn't seem like the build for a melee sorceress or necromancer...Maybe a frenzy barb... Even if it is kind of slow you could get enough IAS to reach a decent attack rate, and the sword does good damage and has a nice Attack rating bonus... that said if you get a Zod runes the most rare item in the game you can do better than this sword.. still nice though...
