Super wraith build idea

Passive tree - minion attack speed, armour shred on minion hit and bleed chance from the lich side
skeleton archers - for attackspeed hits to shred armour
skeleton mages - for castspeed hits to AOE shred armour
Bone curse - for slow, armour shred and bleed
dread shade - for super buffing wraith attack speed and damage
sacrifice or summon wraith - for summoning wraiths or blood wraiths with lots of attack speed.

Items - doublet of onos tull for bleed, then lots of minion physical or minion damage over time on items.

Playstyle - summon wraith, hit it with dread shade, then bone curse enemy.

The net result should be psycho fast wraiths, but it’ll take me a while to test this, so if anyone has already, please let me know how it went!

Don’t forget the cull at 18% on Bone Curse. That’s a significant DPS increase due to not having to damage the boss down to 0%.

I also wondered how effective Bone Curse with Illusion of Pain (always crits, 150% more damage but only lasts 1 hit & has a 6s cooldown) and Cursed Ground (to reduce the pain of the cooldown) but then I realised that it’s “enemies that walk into the area are cursed”, not “enemies in the area are re-cursed”. :frowning:

But you should definitely take Brittle Bones for the cull.

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I always thought this was less important for DoT damage, which ramps up, since the last 18% of monsters life goes in a microsecond anyway.

If true, this would mean that the increased bleed duration from doublet of onos tull and the passive tree negate brittle bones even further…

Yes, that’s a fair point, though poison is the one that “ramps up”, bleed less so since it doesn’t have any “increased damage taken per stack” modifiers. Brittle Bones would still help since any hits from your minions that trigger the damage when the target is under 18% would kill it, though as you say, that’s going to be less of a benefit for a dot build (but not as much as you would think for bleed as it’s not poison).

Here’s a half-baked thought experiment:

Poisons scale exponentially for sure, but they drop off after 4 seconds. So poisons take 4 seconds to reach maximum damage, but that maximum damage is higher due to each poison adding ‘increased damage per stack’.

Bleeds scale a bit differently, as they have no ‘increased damage per stack’, but they do have armour shred applied for 4 seconds on each hit. (I have no idea really about armour shred: it seemed to be pretty weak in earlier patches, but may be better now if monsters have a new ratio of protections to life?)

So with 136% bleed duration, we expect bleeds to last about 9 seconds, meaning they take 9 seconds to reach maximum damage. The first 4 seconds get exponential growth from new bleeds as well as new armour shred. The last 5 seconds just get new bleeds.

(important question for DPS -If a minion hits a bone cursed enemy, does that count as player applying the bleed or minion applying the bleed?)

In gameplay, both poison and bleed have an extra factor for damage, which is the number of monsters your minions are attacking. Hoping that the number of enemies is decreasing (we are killing some), this would mean hits on a single target later in a fight increase over time. This may act as an environmental source of ‘ramping’.

So it seems bleeds take longer to ‘ramp up’ to max damage than poisons, which might mean that they get even less benefit from brittle bones.

Alternately, any time saved attacking an enemy with fully stacked bleeds will allow more time to start stacking bleed/armour shred on the next enemy, so maybe it’s not an 18% DPS increase on a single enemy, but it’s roughly an 18% increase on a fight vs many enemies?

on second thought - Any boss fight that lasts longer than 9 seconds would get full value from brittle bones, so it is fully effective where it counts!

Not quite. If you have a target with 100k life & you apply 1 stack of a DoT (with infinite duration 'cause it makes the maths easier) that does 100 damage each second. The hits that apply the DoT do no damage but can proc Bone Curse (also assuming it does no damage other than existing to apply the cull at ~18%).

The DoT with a 5% increased damage taken per stack will take 31 seconds to do 101,680 damage, but at 29 seconds it’s done 86,275 damage & therefore the next hit culls the boss.

The DoT without the 5% increased damage taken per stack will take 45 seconds to do 103,500 damage, but at 40 seconds it has done 82,000 damage so the next hit culls the boss. Therefore the slower ramping DoT spends more time in the “culling” region of the boss fight & therefore benefits more from it (taking 4-5s off the fight compared to 1-2s for the poison-like DoT).

Clearly that’s not an accurate model for how it works, but it’s directionally correct.

Armour shred would kinda have a similar affect as poison’s baked-in “increased damage taken per stack” & yes it would be more effective after they tweaked how much hp/protections mobs have.

For fights up to 4 seconds long for poison, and 9 seconds long for bleed, this assumption of infinite scaling seems a useful simplification.

For longer fights, both scenarios will start to have their DoT’s wear off, leading to linear damage being dealt to a boss after 4 seconds for poison, after 9 seconds for bleed.

So it seems for longer fights, we can simplify it even easier to just being linear DPS, therefore the scaling of DoT is irrelevant and it is the HP of the boss vs the max DPS that is the key factor as to how effective brittle bones is.

For example:
Take the 100K boss, and give both poison and bleed 1K max DPS.
(Poison takes 100 -104 seconds to kill it, Bleed takes 100-109 seconds to kill it)
Brittle bones wipes about 18 seconds off both fights (pretty exciting)

but if the max DPS of both builds goes to 10K,
(poison takes 10-14 seconds to kill it, bleed takes 10-19 seconds to kill it)
Brittle bones wipes about 1-2 seconds off the fight (less exciting)

Since bosses seem to have about a zillion HP, I’m still convinced brittle bones is a super node. Next question that occurs - how does Brittle bones compare to the 30% more from mark for death?

Yeah, cull is always good & it always take 18% off the duration of the fight, which is why the 18% cull is worth 22% more dps (100 / 82) & it has the benefit of reducing the impact of any enrage mechanics by artificially shortening the fight.

From the above, Brittle Bones is worth 22% more dps, Marked for Death gives 30% more. If you have any other way to proc Marked for Death (idols that give minions a chance to apply it or the passive node that gives a chance for Marked for Death on minion “death”) then I’d probably go that route. If you’re using Wraiths, them “dieing” from life decay counts for the passive node that applies Marked for Death & I don’t think there are many nodes that can give you 30% increased dps for 1-2 points (which is all you’ll need if you use Wraiths since they die/time out/etc so often). I tried the passive node & that was up pretty much the entire boss fight, there’ll only be a period at the beginning of the fight that it doesn’t proc Marked For Death, but once it procs the first time, you’ll have enough Wraiths dieing to keep it up for the rest of the fight.

3.10 update - I’m still confused about bone curse (testing thread here)
It seems to have no effect on the wraiths.

But the concept works OK - summon wraith then hit it with dread shade. I’m level 61 and doing 3.5K bleed damage per wraith, and 6K - 9K bleed damage with skeletons archers and mages.

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