Blood Magic Shockwave Shadow

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Fri3dchick3m wrote:

Hehe, cool. You just refuted yourself :)

I'll not get into more banter with you over why shadow has a life cluster to compensate for the lack of life everywhere eles compared to every other class.

Let me break this down for you.

The best you can do is double any dps you gain. In this way, adding a second totem is a 1 + 1 = 2 scenario. Its linear and flat.

But when you take your single target dps and multiply it by 3 (LMP) and then by 2 (double-down on the totems) DPS x 3 x 2 = holyshitdps

The reason why I reference mapping, is because there is a crossover point where your linear DPS no longer can sustain a decent clearspeed, or take out bosses without incurring great risk.

I think we are all going to be waiting for a Temple Piety map video for quite some time.

If you don't have the brass to connect with me in-game, I am sure there is someone else here that could FRAPs it.

Looking at your post I can see you have not used shockwave totem and you have no idea what you are talking about other than ideas that pops up in your head without actual gameplay justification.

Yes it is true the "theoretical" dps of flame totem is higher with LMP/GMP. In reality the mobs need to be almost point blank for it to shotgun and the cone of fire is about 100 degrees. The totem often gets mobbed from all sides by mobs and quickly die


On the other hand, shockwave totem have maybe less tooltip (added up) but with 2 totems you're pretty much covering the entire screen 360 degrees no scope. Further more it pushes melee mobs back which in itself makes the totems more survivable


There's no point referencing Temple Piety to try justify your point, piety poses problems for many builds and not specifically just totem builds

Is life from tree/str actually seperate from life from gear this way?
I thought life from gear would be added to the base life amount THEN that value would be multiplied by % increased life from tree/gear.
So wouldn't your examples for 400 life from gear and 720 life from gear actually yield 3983 total life and 4527 total life respectively? Or am I just imagining all of this?

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JoshTheCat wrote:

Is life from tree/str actually seperate from life from gear this way?
I thought life from gear would be added to the base life amount THEN that value would be multiplied by % increased life from tree/gear.
So wouldn't your examples for 400 life from gear and 720 life from gear actually yield 3983 total life and 4527 total life respectively? Or am I just imagining all of this?

The way life is added up is by collecting all base life, before modifiers, from levels, flat life from tree, strength, and life on gear. Collect that all together then apply the increased life from the tree.

If you have 170% increased life from the tree, it's a total 2.7x multiplier to base life.


If you didn't add up that life beforehand though, it's not a problem, any extra life can be tacked onto the full amount by applying the increase, then adding it to total life, instead of adding it to base life, then applying the increase.

Ex: 1000 + 450 * 2.7 = 3915 = (1000 * 2.7) + (450 * 2.7)

I connected with Fri3dchick3m in-game and we ran a map together, twinned tropical island I believe. It seemed like I held up pretty well compared to Flame Totem. They were definitely killing monsters faster, but I had more coverage, so it balances out.

This looks really interesting and you have a very nice writeup. Do you expect any troubles at higher levels considering you don't have much defense except life and life regen?

thank you for a nice build i guess it needs some kind of mitigation
i dont know if you can do something like blocking

interesting build

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This looks really interesting and you have a very nice writeup. Do you expect any troubles at higher levels considering you don't have much defense except life and life regen?

As an update, I'm currently level 75 and I'm pretty much stomping any map I come across. Level 70 is the highest map I've experienced, but I ran it with Elemental Weakness and enemy damage bonus as cold, and didn't have too much of an issue.

Really, when it comes down to it, dual totems and the defense they provide, not to mention being Shockwave totems that can push enemies away from you, you won't have much trouble at all defensively.

I haven't even had access to a CwDT and I've been running around maps while people at higher levels than me are getting killed left and right.

Scariest fights I've had so far are against Xandro Blooddrinker. Mainly because he's fast as fuck with that leap slam, but he has yet to kill me.

In fact, even without CwDT, I don't believe I've ever died in a situation that wasn't riddled with desync, such as a Kole smacking my face with a crit, then teleporting across a room for a second hard slap.

With CwDT, Enduring Cry, IC and Inc Duration, I should gain much more defense than even that.

The life regeneration is also a lot better then people expect. DoT effects like Burning/Desecrated ground, Viper strike, poison clouds, etc, don't really affect me since they do less damage than what I restore.

Let's say a DoT does 250 damage/second. To a normal player with low life regen, it could be 150+ damage per second to their life, but for me, I still have 20+ life/second coming back to me.

Thanks for the run. Even if we are low level rolling through that starter map, it was an interesting experience. From my perspective, the SW totems were doing great with the white trash. Seemed pretty safe and quick.

I am interested to see where the damage cap is on this build, because that will define how high your mapping will go, or how many mods you can survive. You should know by about level 85 what the cap is. Once you pick up your major DPS nodes and level your gems, there is a sharp drop-off of DPS scaling, and the content eventually out powers you.

When you get to level 80, give Temple Piety a go. I have a video of mine in the link in my sig. It's Dual Flame totems, but the strategy should be the same.

On the downside of teaming with a SW totem, my dps dropped like a stone because I would drop a shotgun on a mob and the SW totems would move it out of range. I suspect anyone that fires any type of projectile will have similar issues (unless you have auto-targeting). It took tight packs and pushed them out, in some cases stragglers were missed and eventually have to be picked off one at a time.

You mentioned that you could overcome some of these challenges with strategic positioning on your totems, but I didn't see it. Maybe you were trying to show your clearing speed, rather than how you can improve team play. Could you could write-up a strategy guide on how you would help team play - one of the big detractions of this skill.

You forgot to mention the sweet belt you got during our run :D

Oh yes! I did find a sunblast, that was nice.

For damage, Pohx was able to get something like 12K Per totem before he ripped. If 24K damage combined isn't decent I don't know what is.

I'm currently lvl 79 hanging out with 6.6K damage on a lvl 17 Gem (Buffed by 1 level, and about to reach 18).

I'm not really concerned with the damage output because it only took about 1 minute to kill Maze Vaal. Speaking of which, That was my first time fighting him, Temple Piety, and Collonade Carnage the other night, all of which I wrecked, except for Carnage who Teleported over to me and gave me a big mushroom slap of 3K+ (Likely a crit). Dat fucker's scary.

I'm able to get through 71 maps pretty easily and ran some the other night. Unfortunately I suffered some disconnects and ended up losing a Mightflay to the great ever-taking rollback.

So far I have around 3400 usable life, 4600 total. Good against stuns and status ailm,ents, even those Arc witches are only mildly annoying because their skills chain and hit both my totems and myself, but shocks only last about 1 second usually.

I'd show a VoD but I only just realized Twitch doesn't save them by default, which is a bit silly, so I'll upload a VoD next time I stream. Likely 24-48 hours from this point.