It does sound good on paper, but I think you’d have trouble as the difficulty increased. Mage does not have passives that help life leeching - other characters have that - we have ward to protect us, not leech.
I have 30% AS from passives, 13% on gloves and 15% on ammy. Also 75% node in shatter strike.
Alluvion gives me attack speed increase of 66% which goes to 118% with Enchanted Weapon. And I can’t get above 118% when I use shatter strike because it is 2-h.
Eye of Reen gives me attack speed increase of 97% which goes to 160% with enchanted weapon. And then I get another 75% on top with shatter strike and 1-h weapon node = 235%.
For my build - my shatter strikes with 1-h hit twice as fast as 2-h. So Alluvion doesn’t really work for me.
I have tried weaving Firebrand in between shatter strikes for more damage, but for my build and playstyle it is too clumsy. That is using any weapon, not just Alluvion.
Also, one thing to bear in mind is the more uniques/sets you have then the less items you have to play with for affixes that may matter more, so trying to pair it with other uniques while not gimping your other affix options too much may be difficult.
Boneclamor Barbute is probably one of the best uniques for a spellblade as every stat is useful with no negatives to deal with by adding affixes to other items.
Oceareon would be interesting to try with Alluvion, maybe?
I think Alluvion would better suit a char that has 2-h weapon passives/skills that can compensate for the slow attack speed.
I would say it should apply to any Shaman elemental damage skills. I heavily invest into attunement to boost my fire Shaman damage for swipe, tornado and earthquake.
P.S: I wish we had fire penetration in Shaman skills tree as well.
Damn. and here I thought we might have been on the right track… This weapon seems so good on paper that there has to be a build it is the BIS for… There are so few uniques that are BIS especially weapons.
Oh well, I’m still leveling up SpellBlade & Shaman alts to be able to play around with these, maybe something/someone will find the trick to using Alluvion.
I`m still saying, it being a 2hand, it being a Sword, shatter strike granting +200% crit Multi, shatter strike benefiting from fire Brands “multiplicative dmg” and “guaranted crit”, shatter strike benefiting from extra dmg and multiplicative dmg from Spellblades upper skill tree after 10 hits with a “under 10 mana cost melee attack”, and it being a “over 10 mana cost skill”…
Makes it the perfect Sword for a build using shatter strike as the “giant hitter”, and fire brand converted to Lightning as the “Primary hitter”.
Because this scales with the initial Damage, which is high. And its adaptive spell dmg allows for passive spells (enchant weapons Lightning, static/Lightning blast, fire aura/the elemental burst Retaliation from passives?) to scale too.
You might want to check that Cold Steel works with 2-h swords before getting all gooey about it.
Edit: You might also want to think about how to get the most damage out of a given number of attacks/skill-uses, because I don’t think Blade Weaver is necessarily it.
For example, in my Spellblade build I use 3 hits from Firebrand to reach the 6 stack cap, then consume them with Flame Reave then use 1 (possibly 2) Mana Strike to regen my mana. That’s 5-6 hits. If I’d gone with Blade Weaver I’d have gained 45% (3*15%) more damage from 3 stacks of Blade Weaver. But I’d have had to given up 72% more damage from Charring (12% more per stack x 6 stacks).
If I wanted to maximise my damage bonus from Blade Weaver I’d not take Conflagrate & use 6 hits to get the 6 stacks of Firebrand which would give me 90% more from Blade Weaver but a total of 6 Firebrand hits + 1 Flame Reave + 1 Mana Strike (maybe) for a total of 8 hits all for an additional 18% more damage.
The most efficient way was Charring, for +72% more damage & a total of 5-6 hits per cycle (14.4% - 12% more over the 5-6 hits), compared to 90% from Blade Weaver & a total of 8 hits per cycle (11.25% more over the 8 hits).
while i can’t argue with the numbers here, i chose not to go this route on my variation of your flame reave build and it has been working very well.
i chose to spec firebrand in a way that kept it free to use, and put 7 points into blade weaver (was going to go for 10 but decided i was getting enough damage from it… will probably respec one point into something else to get rid of that 7th stack that i rarely use)
this keeps mana management very simple and removes the need for mana strike entirely, allowing me to use flame ward for extra defense and a bit of extra offense. while the numbers may not be as high, i find it much less tedious to play this way. switching between two attacks just flows much smoother than trying to work in a third, and i never run out of mana. the damage was high enough that i easily made it through the level 100 timeline for the first time, so for people who want to build more defensively or prefer less rota/mana management, i think it’s a good option.
i think this setup would also work well with an alluvion variation on the build, but i would go the lightning damage route and include fire aura (converted to lightning) to take advantage of the spell damage. i think the extra damage from stacking fire aura would help make up for the lack of attack speed but i haven’t actually tried it out yet to be sure.
It’s all a bit of a moot point now since they’ve changed Charring so it no longer gets inherited by whatever skill you use to consume all of the Firebrand stacks.
Hey… Got a Spellblade to level 72… very disappointed when I swapped to Alluvion… No matter which way I try and use it, I just cannot get it to work better than the alternatives available.
A deicide sword / flanged mace or divine scepter with T5 added cold melee + lightning melee + frailty beat it hands down in the damage department when considering multiple hits and the sword with its speed for generating ward on melee is hands down better. Sure a single hit from Alluvion can be greater depending on the skill used but overal over a mono run it really doesnt make sense.
My gut is telling me that its a factor of attack speed more than anything else but even at 90% increased (with Enchant Weapon)… Alluvion still feels inadequate and it would be troublesome to stack attack speed so much.
Yes I know its silly to “make” a weapon with these two damages but I built the passive tree & skills to use cold and lightning especially in anticipation for Alluvion… unfortunately a crafted weapon - in my instance - outperforms the unique very obviously and then you have the off-hand gear slot for even more benefit.
So… Spellblade is a great class, really kicks arse and is surpisingly tanky (lvl 72 deathless so far in lvl80 mono) but as a pairing for Alluvion… not in my opinion.
Next to try is a shaman… got it to lvl 27 so I have a way to go before I can test Alluvion again…
I just hit 72 on my Tempest Strike shaman, and while the dps of TS and its spell effects has gone up, I’m not sure it’s really worth using Alluvion. I think I could get more out of a crafted weapon.
But it’s mostly because the proc deals such low damage. The tooltip doesn’t say if it’s a spell or a melee attack, but it only deals roughly 50-80 damage, which is pretty horrible on a level 72 weapon.
On another note, I’ve been using Ocenui’s Sphere, and the damage on the balls is also abysmally low; unnoticeable. It could use another buff. A BIG buff. On both of them.
Oh dear… I was thinking Tempest Strike too… Really is a shame a weapon that sounds so great is proving to be hard to actually have a place in endgame.
I gave up on the Sphere a while ago…I couldnt see any boost to anything even with 3 orbs… Its like a drunk wizzie enchanted a miss-matched bundle of wires and instead of throwing it into the dud bin, threw it into the loot pool… Not sure which build uses cold/lightning with Int = attunement… Spellblade is int/dex and shaman is str/att… no idea on that one really…
Yeah, I put some int on my rings, to match my att, which I purposely kept low in order to make them equal, easier. Probably what’s hurting my damage?
With 12 orbs firing over the 12 second period, you should see 360% damage increase to cold and lightning, which is all I’m using, and it doesn’t appear to be increasing at all. It could be bugged too.
On paper the two look meant for each other, but they just aren’t powerful enough.
I gave up on alluvion. my firebrand-shatterstrike spellblade is definetly better off with a 1hand+shield/offhand. Or any other 2hand…
Since shatter strike has immense damage anyway, I’m thinking about investing into “adaptive spell instead of Melee fire dmg” and spell Crit per stack on fire brand to have passive cold lightning blast (static+idols chance when lightning aegis is active) and focus on cold damage / chill / freeze, since fire brand does no damage in comparison anyway when used for boosting shatter strike
But then again, any 1hander is faster, with same adaptive spell dmg boost, and additionally has an offhand with base spell Crit and affixes.
Welcome to the ex-Alluvion fan club… membership is free…
I have gotten to mof lvl90 on my 79 spellblade using a crafted 2h lightning sword instead. I am using lightning converted firebrand/flame reave combination and although a 1h is faster, the 2h clears screens every 4th shot (6th stack shot for bosses)… and I have managed 80% increased melee attack speed (without Enchant Weapon) so its by no means slow and does great damage…
We all tried Alluvion… but hey… time to put it up on the mantle piece above the fire and regale stories of the mighty monster that dropped it…
Alluvion is definitely not “bad”, it’s a end-game worthy Unique.
The raw weapon stats are ok-ish, but the only way to really utilize the weapon is having a significant amount of “Spell” damage in your build, while still using melee.
This weapon boosted my Tempest Striker Shaman to infinity, like really, my dmg exploded, because i basically just used tempest strike as melee and everything else i had was a spell.
That’s the problem with hybrid weapons, a “pure” caster weapon (either staff for the flat damage or wand + catalyst for the crit) would do better with spells & a “pure” melee weapon would do better for the melee.
Until we have really good tooltips and dps calculations(if we have get that as detailed as it would possible to calculate exact dps) people should just go what “feels” the best for them.
For my Tempest Striking Shaman Alluvion just feels very good, everything is doing very good damage.
With a staff Staff or Wand my spells would deal alot more dmg and with some proper melee weapon my Tempest Strike direct dmg would do more dmg.
With Alluvion everything does hits very good. I am not sure if it is i slight dps loss or not, but it’s not HUGE i can tell that.
I just really liked the way it feels + the wave actually is ok for long range clear(it kills normal and magic mobs pretty good)
especially weapons.
