Actually, if the rest of your gear isn’t GG yet, even a simple T10 obsidian is a lot closer than you make it out to be. Once you have 40%+ multishot damage per arrow, yeah Drelkor’s Compass does way more damage, but let’s look at someone a little further back in the gearing process.
For starters, let’s look at the base damage: You said 110 vs 64 is the comparison to make, but don’t forget you get a lot of other flat physical from other sources. In total, you should be getting +60 (30 from Sniper’s Gambit, 5 from Assassin’s Quiver, 8 from Swift Assassin, 11 from T5 on quiver, 6 base from Multishot), and the correct comparison is 170 vs 124. So the Obsidian is doing 27% less damage, based on only the base damage.
For the Obsidian bow, I’m going to assume a roll of T5 bow damage and T5 added phys. This gives the Obsidian ~175% increased physical damage after accounting for the affix and the implicit. We’ve covered the base damage in the previous section, so let’s look at other dps factors. As noted above, I’m going to assume a character that is not fully geared yet, as many people may be in the process of trying to hunt down those idols and craft a multishot chest/helmet. Looking at my own character, I’m at roughly 600% increased damage before accounting for multishot damage per arrow (I have 22% multishot atm). So the Compass ends up with 974% and the Obsidian is at 1,083% (assuming that total 175% physical/bow damage noted above). Add on the attack speed difference and you find that the Obsidian does 33% more damage, looking at only “increased damage” stats and attack speed.
Combine the two analyses and this still puts the compass slightly ahead (the Obsidian does 3% less damage than the Compass). Now let’s look at the two bows as a complete package:
Compass
- Higher base damage: We examined this above. Overall, how much more damage your Compass does is related to what stage of gearing you’re in and how much increased damage you have. If you’re very early and only have 10 or 12% Multishot damage per arrow, then the Compass might actually do less dps despite having the higher base damage.
- Reduced Channel cost: Very useful before getting the +mana blessing, but once you have it, and you’ve gotten down the play pattern of weaving in regular Punctures to regen a bit of mana and to keep up stacked buffs/debuffs, the channel cost isn’t an issue.
- Extra arrows are more stylish: Can’t argue there
Obsidian
- Faster attack speed: You stack buffs/debuffs faster and overall play feels much more smooth while running Echos.
- Higher base crit: In a boss fight, this won’t matter, since you’ll stack crit vuln on the boss very quickly and have near 100% crit regardless. This does help a lot when doing Echos though since stuff will die before you can get more than 1 or 2 stacks of crit vuln, so more base crit will actually count and result in more dps.
- Two open suffixes: You can throw whatever you want onto here. It’s not a big deal, but more slow chance could help you get your extra damage on slowed targets sooner, or chill could keep enemies from hitting you. Again, not really going to matter a ton on bosses, but helps out a bit while running Echos.
So overall, it’s a lot more of a give-and-take than you make it out to be when comparing Compass, even against a simple T10 Obsidian Bow. It seems the Obsidian could actually be better damage-wise until you’ve had a chance to get decent gear, fill out all your passives and get 4 multishot idols. Even then, this build does so much damage, it might be optimal to use the Obsidian Bow for clearing Echos, where the faster speed/extra crit will make things smoother against trash mobs, then switch to the Compass for Monolith bosses.
