I picked up a few of these idols the other night, and actually read them for the first time. And, my first thought was, “oh cool, time to make a Thor-hammer build”. However, looking around the Sentinel skills/passives and available items, it seems more like a sick joke than a useful mod on the idol.
Has anyone theory crafted a lightning-based hammer Sentinel (Forge Guard seems the best choice for one)? Just tossing things together in the planner, it seems like just a weaker form of a physical hammer thrower… Am I missing something?
The hammer build I have is paired with Smite and Devotion. So conceivably it could work in tandem with that, though the main dmg is really the Smite proc with throwing attacks. I haven’t tried it but maybe I’ll see if I can muck around, see if it’s worth giving up a couple of smite proc relics for more hammer damage.
Not trying to be dense here but that’s what I was trying to say. Right now, my hammers aren’t in anyway converted, so unless I try to test it I have no idea. The only way I can see it being better is maybe some synergy with smite, lightning and maybe javelin.
Well remember, before there wasnt adaptive damage, so you had physical throwing affixes, and fire throwing affixes, and they were only on rings iirc. So your choices for throwing damage were extremely limited/low.
The lightning hammer throw idols perfectly rolled could get you 24 flat lightning throwing, which at the time was decent all things considered. if you scaled generic damage(Str/throwing% damage etc) then the flat 24 was still something like 30% more damage baseline to think about.
Now that there is so much access to throwing stuff, and they never revamped/buffed/changed these idols like they did the shuriken ones, they are a product of a different time.
Not saying they were great in the past, but they atleast had some potential, now they are laughably weak with no real support.
All they really have to do is add % of hammer throw converted per idol, say 15-25% as well as the flat 3-8, then with 4 perfectly rolled conversion idols we have access to a new hammer build. But they probably wont do that since paladin has a disgusting 200% crit multiplier for lightning skills so making hammer throw even better then it is by going lightning would probably be too much power or something.
Think it’s only 100% 10x10% per point. And that’s not that out of line, considering Forge Guard can get 60% crit multi for throwing skills. So yeah, not really sure why they don’t improve those idols, or give Sentinel some better lightning hammer support :\
Edit: and hammer wouldn’t even benefit from the +crit multi from paladin, since it doesn’t have the lightning tag. They’d have to include some kind of conversion for the skill somewhere as well. So boo to you, EHG. Making a throwing hammer skill without ANY lightning support for it. BOO!!!
We have the Void conversion Shield Throw idols to 100% void. That would be an easy, and established precedent to convert Hammer to Lightning.
Or is it also possible this was one of the things they missed when the whole damage fix came to change things to ‘general’ damage rather than all the specific types? My memory is fuzzy so I don’t recall how long these lightning hammer idols have been in game.
lastepochtools keeps a change log for everything in the game (usually at the very end of the item detail page) - the idol affix has been in the game since Beta 0.7.6 and hasnt changed since.
Yeah, so it just means it might not have gotten adjusted with the damage shift to most things being adaptive, which could mean they don’t even need to be lightning. They could just drop the type so it’s added flat damage rather than a type, like I was trying to suggest.
Or maybe they have plans to add something, like another idol to convert it to lightning or some tweaks to the skill itself.
Or they’ve got something else up their sleeve and haven’t gotten it.
Or they’re not going to change it.
We should start a hashtag and spam it at Mike during all of his streams #savelightninghammers!!!
I’d vote for something along the lines of they have forgotten about it.
Its so old now that it probably suffers the same “from another era” issues that some of the other older things still have - designed in a time when the game was vastly different.
if it got a convert through an idol buff it would, which is probably why they wont.
paladin is 10x better then forge guard, so having even more multi by going lightning and getting to be a paladin instead of a stinky forge guard is just a win win.
