So… I have found a legendary pair of gloves called rule of the simoon.
These give +%fire damage and also inflict a stationary fire tornado on targets, which also shreds fire resistance.
I’d be swapping them out for a rare pair of gloves with +19 throwing damage and 25% increase crit strike chance.
The sheet DPS for shield throw goes down from 40500 to 39000 when I swap to the legendary gloves, but I have no idea what damage tornado (from the legendary gloves) does, how can I evaluate whether or not these are worth swapping to ? And if there are even an upgrade (or not) ?
The only way to truly compare apples to oranges is to do some specific, repeatable test. For single target tests, T4 Julra is common. For mono clearing, they vary in length a ton, but you could time yourself doing 10 or 20 of them on each setup and compare.
There’s a place called Champion’s Gate in Divine Era, northern part of the map. You go there, and there are Target Dummies you can attack. The tornado is cast on hit, so you can hit them with any basic attack and check the tornado numbers.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, if you deal damage with Shield Throw, then +Throwing damage is pretty important. However if you deal damage with things procced by Shield Throw - like Smite - then the +Throwing damage isn’t important at all, instead spell damage is.
As for evaluating crit, 25% increase won’t help you very much on its own. You’d have to specialize in crits, taking the respective nodes in Shield Throw or Smite or both, and the respective Holy Precision passive in Paladin. If you go crits, 100% crit chance is the cap, and you want to reach as close to it as you can.
So I’ve split my damage types. I’m using a wand and alot of +% fire damage and +elemental damage which really boosts lava burst and smite (I have idols giving me 66% chance to cast smite on hit which is amazing). But I also have alot of shield throw +flat damage and shield throw speed and (some) increased crit chance.
Given both the spells and the shield throw scale off fire damage, do you see any problem with this approach, or is it better to go ‘all in’ on shield throw damage itself, or use it purely as a delivery mechanism for other spells ?
It’s always better to focus on one or the other.
Yes, all of them will scale if you use “% increased damage” or even “% increased fire damage”, but you have no way to add flat damage to the base of both with the same affix. so you have a higher value to scale from.
You’d have to spread yourself thing adding “+ throwing damage” (not %) and “+ spell damage”.
So it would be better if you either wet all in on smite/lava burst and shield throw would be a mechanism for both spell procs and buffs/debuffs, or if you went all in on shield throw, in which case you’d only keep smite/lava burst if they could provide you with buff/debuffs/healing.
My 2c, anyway. Others might have a different idea, so let’s wait for them to chime in and tell me I’m wrong.
I haven’t tried going purely for the spell version, but I believe it would be inferior to throwing damage stacking, simply from the fact that Sigeon’s Reprisal exists, you can get up to around 300 bonus damage, which is something the spell variant cannot do.
You are right that stacking %increases to Fire will boost both the throw and the lava burst/smite, so that is the correct way to go, but for example I would rather take a Firestarter’s Torch over a high spelldmg wand or scepter.
We also discussed various tech regarding Shield Throw here if you’re interested:
Funnily enough, Volca just released a maxroll guide for Shield Throw, so I can show you that there are some “issues” the skill currently has - the projectile sometimes doesn’t hit the target, depending the angle or position. It can be seen here https://youtu.be/z_j2OgTnbts?t=33
The chestpiece is useless for this build. It raises reflected damage to bosses, not your reflect stat, which is the stat that’s converted to damage for Shield Throw.
Yeah, that is a known issue with many projectile type skills/spells. And it’s really annoying.
What I’ve had happen recently, which was kinda hilarious, was leveling as hammer throw, and with hammers orbiting, in the new rift zones there are some sort of really small dinos that attack in packs, and the hammer would always go above them and never hit them.
I had to rely on the hunter NPC killing them.
I had never noticed the description that specifies that. I was assuming it worked like Thornshell. That sucks, then. It would make shield throw a pretty good build if it did.
Maybe if EHG lets us play with 2 actual shields, rather than just a weapon that looks like one, you could pair it with Thornshell and that would skyrocket your damage. Probably too much, though.
Wouldn’t the bonus damage Sigeon’s Reprisal gives only be based on the character sheet thorns stat rather than any conditional gubbins? That’s usually how this kind of thing works (which is a pity).
I’ve seen fire starters torch in many end game builds, including shield throw, but at first glance, the stats look pretty bad. Is spreading flames that good ? Is this why ppl are taking it ?
Spreading Flames is decent if you stack fire dots damage, but the main reason is the % more damage affix: (26 to 42)% More Fire Damage to enemies afflicted by Spreading Flames
In theory, Spreading Flames is a beefed up Ignite. They do the exact same thing, except that Spreading Flames lasts 4 seconds vs 2.5 for ignite and does 200 base damage vs 40 from ignite.
However, Spreading Flames can’t have more than 1 stack. So any ignite build will outperform it. It’s very good for leveling, though, which is why many will run one while leveling.
The reason for using it in endgame, however, as Psojed pointed out, is simply for the multiplicative damage to any affected by it.
With a high enough cast/attack speed you can pretty much guarantee that a boss will always have spreading flames on and you’ll always do 40% more damage (multiplicative) with whatever skill you’re using for DPS.
So, while it isn’t the best option in most builds, it’s a good option for any build that is fast hitting and that doesn’t have any weapon that is naturally enhancing your skill (and that is a throwing skill, otherwise the flat damage to spell/melee is a better option). which is the case for shield throw.
I’m sure with the right gearing, the firestarters torch is very compelling.
Right now, I’m using a wand with a total of 100% fire damage, 15% fire pen, and 60% elemental damage, which is substantially out performing the torch in real world tests. I think a torch with the right LPs on it would be a very different story.
Yeah, it depends how much % increased damage you have. Assuming you have no other sources of fire pen for simplicity, the wand is equivalent to 160% increased damage (complicated by the fact that the fire pen is multiplicative), so if you have more than ~750% total relevant increased damage (ie, fire/elemental & either spell for Smite/lava proc or throwing for shield throw) the 40% more damage from Firestarter’s Torch would be more effective, if you had less than roughly that amount then your current wand would be more effective.
