2H DPS Builds: Post R208

Well, here we go. As I also said, "I'm fair when I do my math," so lets see where the numbers lead me. This is primarily going to be from a DK's perspective (big shock... I'm a DK), but lessons learned here can be applied to other classes.

There are Three primary DPS builds that I'm considering for Post R208 (sorry Phyrix, I'm not sold on the Bear set yet.)
Witch: 3/3 Bellicose, 2/4 Twin Queen, 2/2 Herald, Agathon Lost Ring, Medusa Amulet, 3/4 Witch Seeker
Darkness: 3/3 Bellicose, 2/4 Twin Queen, 2/2 Herald, Agathon Lost Ring, Medusa Amulet, 2/5 Darkness, Bear Belt.
Hybrid: 3/3 Bellicose, 2/4 Twin Queen, 2/2 Herald, Agathon Lost Ring, Medusa Amulet, 2/4 Witch Seeker, Darkness Torso (based on lots of playing around with items and stats)

For the Darkness setup, I'm aiming for the max Damage Per Hit (DPH) build, with secondary consideration given to attack speed and thus Damage Per Second (DPS).

For the Witch Seeker set, I'm considering two setups. One will have as close to 22k crit as I can get and then maxing out everything else (Here's looking at you, Genius!). The other will follow similar criterion as the darkness setup with as much DPH as possible with the secondary consideration again being the attack speed.

The hybrid set was based on me playing around after making the other three builds and I was curious if I could build any build that could out DPS the leading setup.

If you remember my other post,

An extension of that philosophy is that you should build towards the INF3 boss, and if your builds can kill the boss, you can clear the map leading to the boss with ease. Most of the time when you are running against INF3 bosses, you will be doing so with essence (likely purple/red) For that reason, I'll include essence as on of the variables. All comparisons between the builds will be relative to the build in question. Also, the Herald buff is highly relevant to these build's damage output, so I've included that too.

A couple of observations:
First, being able to get 24% crit damage from wisdom (assuming you go for the full 75% Damage) makes reaching x5.00 Crit Damage easier than ever. Because 24% Crit is coupled with this % Crit Damage, this drives the allocation of crit gems, speed gems, speed runes, and crit damage runes.
Second, some builds are better at lower essences, but worse with higher essences. This is consistent with previous observations dealing with the effectiveness of essence in builds with high %Damage.
Third, Both of the "best" builds have 80% crit rate and are "best" despite having some overflow. This indicates that when INF4 comes out, these builds will already be prepared to work towards adjusting their builds, likely by adjusting speed/crit gem ratios, but looking into Infernal 4 is beyond the scope of this analysis.
Fourth, because the absolute Unique Values, namely crit, don't increase with tier, there will come a time when the base values will outstrip those unique values and unique values dealing with %s (such as %Crit on Medusa Amulet) will be better every time.

So, here we go... for real this time.

First build up: The 22k Crit Witch Seeker build:
Eat your heart out, Paavelsons. I dedicate this build to you:

This spreadsheet is a little busy, so let me direct you to what is important. To the right of the min/max damage ranges for this build (bottom middle), you see the crit for this build, and if you keep moving left, you see the crit damage and attack speed that would be displayed on the character page. Paavelsons build would have 70.6% crit, which is "enough." Meanwhile, we've been able to max out the crit damage and get a rather impressive attack speed that puts us in the bracket for the 2.353 sped break for smash. I will say this for Paavelsons' build... it does indeed have the highest max damage of any of the builds, toping out at over 70k with reds beating out the next closest build by over 1k max damage and 2k-3k for the other builds. Also, with the high attack speed, it would be in the 2.6667 attack speed break point for smash when the Herald buff is triggered. It is not a bad build, by any stretch of the imagination, but is it really better than my ideal build? We'll see.

Next up: The "Smarter" Witch Seeker build:
Instead of limiting ourselves to 22k crit because 22k is "enough," lets be smart about it. What if we sacrifice some of that precious damage for some crit? In this case, I'm only trading one 9.90% damage line for a 13.7% Crit line.

How about that? Despite losing 1k damage with reds, this build's DPH and DPS went up in every category. This may come as a surprise to some, but it demonstrates the power of crit. That 5.00 crit multiplier is truly significant and it turns out that even as little as 5% more overall crit rate outperforms a 1k damage loss. If this trend continues, then a build with even more crit, but less damage should do even better... and that is exactly what I did next.

Bonus Build: The "Low Damage" Witch Seeker build:
You have a total of 80 points you can spend in the "Attack" category on wisdom. Conventional thinking would say that 1.5% of damage per point is superior to 0.8% Crit/Crit Damage. I turn that logic on it's head. Instead of doing 75% Damage (50/50 points) and 24% Crit/Crit Damage (30/50 points), I went with a 40/50 to 40/50 split. This ends up overflowing the Crit Damage by more than I'd like, but then again, I'm not planning on using this build. Despite that Crit Damage overflow, the overall DPH and DPS improves the previous build and is much better than the 22k crit build. This build has the lowest minimum damage and middle of the pack upper damage, but that doesn't seem to hurt it.
The 3% improvement to the crit rate overcame the loss of 15% damage. As you can clearly see, the previous build outperforms this build with green and blue essences, but with purple and red, the scale tips in favor of this build. The reason for this is because removing 15% damage means that the % essence is less diluted, enhancing the power of the purples and reds.

Dealer's Choice: Darkness build:
This build has a bunch of key differences from the last three builds. This isn't a surprise since the last three were all built around 3/4 Witch Seeker. The key difference of this build is how easy it is to reach 80% crit rate. With 2x899 crit lines, a 599 crit line, and another 10% crit from the 2/5 set bonus, I was able to use one less onyx on the decoration. That means one more speed gem to compensate for the loss of the 11.1% speed set bonus from the Witch Seeker, and the build needs less crit from the helmet, which translates to more damage to compensate for not having the 22.2% max damage bonus or the 15% damage from the Witch Seeker Pauldrons.

You can see this build reaches 80% with about 480 overflow. I tried tweaking the build further to reduce the overflow, but any changes lost DPH/DPH. You can also see that this build has the best Purple/Red DPH/DPS yet, and the NoEss/Green/Blue DPH/DPS is close behind the "Smarter" Witch Seeker build. Another advantage of this build can be found in the attack speed. Because I used another 14% Royal Speed gem in place of an Onyx, I was able to spend a few less wisdom points from attack speed to reach the 2.353 speedbreak, leaving more points for Cooldown Reduction wisdom skill. This falls into the more subjective relm of build development, but coupled with the objective strength of the build, I'd call it pure gains.

Last But Not Least: Hybrid build:
After confirming that my gut feelings are pretty good at math, I wanted to experiment to see if there were any 2/2 Herald builds that might not be as obvious, but better... And I found one.
The biggest draw of the Witch Seeker set to me isn't the 22.2% max damage (I like smaller damage gaps for greater predictability), but the 15% damage on the pauldrons. So I put them in, and played around with crit gems, speed gems, belt choice and torso choice and found a happy middle ground.

This hybrid build has the best performance in all categories... no essence all the way to reds, with and without the Herald buff, in DPS and DPH. I'll keep playing around to see if there is a slightly better Herald build out there, but I think this is about as good as a Herald based build is going to get, plus or minus a small margin. The only down sides to this build compared to the Darkness build is that you lose the lightning resistance that comes from the Bear belt since the Witch Seeker items don't have unique lines, and you will lose over all resistance due to using the Witch Seeker pauldrons end being unable to craft them with a %Armor/%Resistance legendary without losing the only thing that makes them special. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself it a small (0.5%-1.7%) offensive improvement over the Darkness set is worth taking a potentially significant hit to your resistance. Since they introduced % Resistance from wisdom, this may not be that significant, but it is something to think about.

 

You know I love to argue with you, but not when it comes to math. Your analysis is as awesome as ever.

Just for giggles, how close would this Bear/darkness set come to your darkness build?

3/3 Bellicose, 2/4 Twin Queen, 2/2 Bear set, Agathon Lost Ring, ROD, Medusa Amulet, 2/5 Darkness.

 

I'm planning on doing that look (Phyrix will go nuts if I don't). It is just that the above post was so long that I had to call it quits.

By my gut:
It will have x5.0 crit damage, 80% crit rate, 2.353 speed (or maybe even 2.6667, but I'm not so sure), along with higher damage than the builds seen here. That said, I'm not so sure about it's overall DPS output because of the set bonus effects... the analysis will be more than just raw stats.

I'll also trade RoD for the Dragan Signet Ring and plug in 3/5 Darkness for kicks and giggles.

 

Ummm...WOW....
Don't know what else to say. Have read numerous posts previously where you have come up with the maths but this is the first time I have actually seen the calculations and able to understand where the figures come from. Very impressive and causing me to change my thoughts on building my DK.
Have always "followed my gut" which I know you hate Will look closer at the maths in future and storing this as a best case build for me to work too
Zolty (Tegan)

 

Very impressive Sir _Baragain_



The best part is that is also fits for RAs.
Maybe with a few twicks here and there.



I have already asked a few DK friends to come and take a few notes

Well done.

 

I don't hate it when people follow their guts. Most who do simply don't know the things I know and can't do the math I can do. Instead, they mimic some build they saw on YouTube, Facebook, or the forums because it was a build that was much better than their own and then defend that choice to the grave because they don't want to entertain the thought that they made a mistake. The only time other people's guts bug me is when someone argues with cold, hard math with nothing but their gut to back them up. To quote one of my favorite fantasy series, "Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self."

 

very very good work!
i wish to see more thread like this....
applause!

 

good post

 

Calculate this
BARMAN PVE SET :
Helm/boots/ring dragan (4x dmg/4xspeed/hp/4x critical dmg )
torso shoulders dark set (4xdmg / 3xarmor/1xres )
belt premium day (4x dmg)
andorment DTU (4x crit rate)
2 ring Bloodtooth (4x critical dmg)
amulet medusa (4x critical dmg)
weapon gloves herald ( 4xdoti / 4x speed )

and you can use 100% buff from belt ( 20% dmg 10% att speed ) and andorment (20% critical dmg / 10% crit rate ) all the time at pve because i dont die

As for 2h pvp i already have maxed out set :



ive completed 1h pvp set also but no screen because i dont want to play with stones

P.S Yes i know the pve set concept is very expensive but i want to have the best possible option for everything otherwise why play this game ?

 

I'll get to it, but right off the bat, I can tell you the DTU decoration is worthless. Between the ramp up time and the ease of obtaining crit/crit damage from wisdom, that decorations unique values are not as beneficial as say the 5% damage from the Black Spider Adornment. The only thing the DTU adornment will do for you is reduce the nimber of Crit Damage runes you'll need and allow your build a little more speed.

My second observation is that you have almost too much % crit. The only way to avoid serious overflow will be to reduce the number of onyxes and replace them with sapphires. Just like the potential for crit damage overflow, this means more speed.

 

Thats my Concept i dont want to put any points into crit/ crit dmg and have them full 400% of course the concept may change with higher tiers of wisdom but Thats another subject and in my opinion the dtu andorment is right now the best 2H dk pve andorment but you have to have the right equipment to use it

EDIT
In my mind There will be a set from destructor ( amulet + torso) and mortis ( amulet + hełm ) but im already crafted for Them too

 

Here goes. I'm doing yours before the Q4/Darkness build before that will be much more analysis, but I hope you like what you see.

Since this is a thread looking at Post R208 (209 now I guess), I'll be looking at the set up from that perspective and assuming full wisdom (or at least enough to get all the offensive perks). I don't know how much you've been following the changes to the wisdom tree, but there are catagories of related skills grouped together on the wisdom tree. You can only spend so many points on perks in that category, and at full wisdom, you have enough points to max out every category. You say you don't want to use points on crit/crit damage, but that is in the same category with %Damage (which I'll assume you'd max) and a small amount of HP Regen per kill. Since, as you said, you don't die, I doubt this will be very useful for you... in fact, most 2H DKs won't find it useful since they get most of their HP Regen from MWS and DH. If you've maxed out the %Damage (50 points for 75% damage), you have 30 more points in that category to spend. If you don't need the HP regen, that only leaves Crit/Crit Damage to spend those last 30 points on. You see now why I assume that most people will get 24% Crit and 24% Crit Damage from Knowledge?

First of all, I'll fix what I assume is a typo and make some assumptions of my own.
Fixed: You are not using 2x Bloodtooth rings if you have 1x Dragan's Signet Ring.
Assumed: Based on your PvP screenshot, I assume you are using the White Queen cape. I'll also assume you have 3x of the Christmas runes that offer 4%Crit/4%HP/4%IceResist. I'll also assume the +55 Damage/10% HP pet (I feel it has the best bang for your buck) and assume you have all three of the 2% Damage perks for a total of 6% damage too.

From here, I'll show you my estimate of your build based on tweaking of gems and runes while keeping the items the same. Then, I'll show you any variants that I can come up with that have higher DPS.

DJBarman: "As Is":

Good instincts.
It does reach the highest DPS and DPH numbers yet, but it isn't without cost. You say that you don't die, so the buff can be kept at 100%, but the ramp up means that you need to "pregame" if you are going to go do direct boss runs. Also, unless you play fast and furious, you have to teleport, sell/melt incredibly fast, and get back into the map to get another kill to keep the buff going. If you have tons of free inventory space, you can keep this up for a couple runs, but eventually you need to clear inventory. That said, there is another Wisdom skill coming in this same release that will actually really help a build like this, and it isn't even an offensive one... It is the portable shop. Being able to sell on the go (especially if you sell almost everything except uniques, legendaries, and items with gold lines) means that you can kill a monster, take 20-30 seconds to do a little bit of selling, and easily get to and kill the next monster. If it were not for this, this build would be a lot less practical. I hadn't considered this in my initial assessment of the temporary buff items, and it does change my opinion greatly. Still, until the buff is built up, this build is mediocre at best (meaning worse than all but Paavelsons' 22k build above). That brings us back to the importance of building the buff up before doing any direct boss runs and if doing so in a group, everyone needs to be on their game and really moving fast between rounds... But for a dungeon clearing, full runs kind of build, it is very nice... but the question remains, using your starting point, can I make it better?

DJBarman, Mod 1:
Well, the answer is "yes," I can use math to make the build even better.

The first thing I did was to try playing with the Damage : Crit/Crit Damage ratio in the "Attack" category of Wisdom. Instead of 50 points in damage and the other 30 in crit, I adjusted the crit up until it reached as close to 80% without going over. In this case, it was a 44:36 split for 66% Damage and 28.8% Crit Damage. This ends up with even more overflow crit damage, but it doesn't furt the build. Because of the overflow crit damage, I tried exchanging a crit damage rune for a speed rune, but it wasn't enough to get either the main speed or Herald speed to the next break point, so I left it as is. The NoEss and Greens builds are slightly lower DPH/DPS in the previous build. Blue essence is so close that it is negligible (0.16%), but Purples and Reds are significantly better in this build than the last one. The best news for you is that this is the same build with only the wisdom distribution changed. That means that if you are farming normally, you can go with the first wisdom set up, but when you go into the boss, you can select the second Wisdom break down for better performance against bosses when using purples/reds. All the same caveats from the first build apply here too.

DJBarman: Mod2:
I've already expressed my dislike for the temporary buffs, but that was tempered by the addition of the mobile shop that makes it significantly easier to maintain the buff. Now that I recognize the buff as viable, I considered it (the belt) in a Twin Queen (adornment/cape) based build.

Because of the overflow crit damage, I reasoned that I could trade the 20% Crit Damage from the DtU adornment for a 16% Crit Damage rune, and drop one 8% speed rune, followed by making up this speed loss by spending a couple points on attack speed for 2H weapons (in the separate offensive 2H specific category of Wisdom). Also, the loss of 10% crit from trading the DtU adornment for the spider adornment is offset by picking up 10% crit from the 2/4 Twin Queen bonus. This allows for the build to maintain the maxed out crit damage, maintain the near maxed out crit rate, and maintain the speed break while also picking up the 5% damage from the Spider Adornment's unique value. You can see that this build outperforms all the previous builds, in all categories. The other advantage offered by this build is that it is much better than the DtU adornment based builds due to only having to ramp up the %Damage on the belt and not wait for the maxed out the crit/crit damage bonus. In fact, the build, even before the buff builds up, is arguably better than all the setups I looked at in my opening post (but this is due to the use of Bloodtooth vs the Agathon Lost Ring).

Prebuff:


Also, just like the difference between the first and second builds in this post, you can raise the damage and lower the crit for marginally better performance with no essence and greens, seen here:



My verdict: Ditch the DtU Adornment and start working on a Black Spider Adornment. The % Damage from the Belt of Zeal, even though it is locked behind a kill based ramp up, is useful because it applies to the one offensive stat with no cap. On the other hand, with how easy it is to get crit and crit damage from the new wisdom system, the DtU adornment simply doesn't give enough to justify it being dependent on 100 kills or in the place where you might get a more useful unique value. I think that I'll have to buy it the next time we get a premium day, but the Adornment of the Vanquisher is still not good enough to earn a spot in my build.

 

This is an interesting build. Not sure if it is significantly better than the others enough to go that route, but it does prove that it can be an option with the addition of selling during a run.

 

And there we go xD
Yes I will go nuts if you dont calc mine:
darkness 3/5
dragan 3/4
twin queen 2/4
agathons lost ring
Q9 amulet
bearach 2/2
belt, torso full damage, and 1 crit line in helm, the rest all damage
And yes speed wise close to that yes, or as close as possible.

 

True, but the important part (the part that sparked all of this) is that these builds provide further definitive proof that Paavelsons has no clue what he is talking about when he tries to critique my build choices. Notice that the top four builds all need at least one piece of the Darkness set, if not two, and none of the top three builds I've calculated this far use 3/4 Witch Seeker with only one even using any pieces from the set and even those are limited to the belt/pauldrons. If I did another build with the Belt of Zeal, Witch Seeker Pauldrons, and Darkness torso, we might even see another build that out performs a Witch Seeker centric build.

Patience. These analyses each take 1-2 hours, and that is time not spent playing the game. And I still need some serious farming if I'm going to get Gold in all the solo LBs.

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that your build (as it is very close to mine) will suffer from the same problem when compared to @_Baragain_ darkness build, in the fact that for the most part the big difference will be the Q7 bonus.

Now whether or not that difference is significant enough to use the Q7 over the Q4 remains to be seen. If it turns out that the Q7 only gives a few seconds in boss kills, to me that would not be enough to go that route considering I would need to farm a ton of materi frags, cores and crafting items again just to switch.

If it turns out that the Q7 darkness build cuts the farming/boss time in half, that would encourage me to make the switch.

 

I can confirm that Q7 is super fast, so fast even that older Q4 builds can do inf3 bosses 35 seconds and Q7 builds can do it in 20 seconds.
The top advantage of Q7 being the 50% smash speed.
To counter this however it will take a ton of effort, firstly in base damage you will have to out damage it, therefore max damage in all items, possibly 1 crit in helm but preferably full damage plus the damage bonus from 3 darkness pieces, next like @_Baragain_ said one will have to reach max speed and critical damage, to surpass Q7.
But here is some hidden advantages, firstly smash deals 25% extra damage to currently bleeding foes, as does rageful swing.
This interpreted let me make an example, on 22,5k damage my non crits reach 15 - 16k, now imagine 35k damage for example.
It is like Baragain said DPH aka damage per hit will be insane.
Even if I don't reach Q7 times, it will be the build that gets closest to it, even if it is by 2 seconds or even 5, to me that is perfect because almost anything else will be a 1 hit scenario.
Firstly the cd, it depends on what is needed I might need to sacrifice crit bonuses from sets like twin queen, but get cd for 3 cube pieces, that is only 1 possibility, however depending on how much crit I can put out with the darkness set, with helm (1 crit line) it was calculated at about 25900 that said I might sacrifice 1 ichroti line on my adornment for 15 to 18% cd, or speed but to me 6% speed is quite insignificant

 

Nice job Doc

 

Ty sorry for the delay Had to do a lot of work and sorry for typing errors im writing from a phone and Polish autocorrect sucks heh ty very much for calculations theyre great indeed. Nad answering some issues i play only solo except for rankings so i dont mind group gameplay options and dont have to work on magotinas andorment i already have it in pvp set shown above and i have 2 winter stones i had 1 year off just like you Ty again for calculations

 

What about the potions? One could opt. in to use critical hit rate potions(as an example) for inf3(ang higher) then it would be possible to have more dmg% on helmet/or use kara shoulders instead of dark and build would be ready for inf2/1 from the start. (personally as a mage I'm more likely to opt for mana buff on potions)

And awesome work here doc. Hats off for respect