[1.1.0] Facebreaker Cyclone in Endgame

Granted last night when i put together my post and thoughts on the build, i was pretty tired and high-im sure it isnt very ogranized. Despite that I think I put a lot of analysis into the caracass, links, blood rage, etc etc, Acrosis, you just don't get it. Anyways have fun being bad. When you find a map you cant do with your 6L, let me know and il come smash it with a 5L for you.

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pure_jalexander wrote:

Granted last night when i put together my post and thoughts on the build, i was pretty tired and high-im sure it isnt very ogranized. Despite that I think I put a lot of analysis into the caracass, links, blood rage, etc etc, Acrosis, you just don't get it. Anyways have fun being bad. When you find a map you cant do with your 6L, let me know and il come smash it with a 5L for you.

Well to be fair, I'm not sure how Carcass makes you worse. HP is probably a wash, and you may get 10 more resist all (which isn't really that big a deal if you have capped resists anyway). The main thing would be the high chaos resistance?

Besides making chaos damage hit for less, I actually consider the main benefit of high chaos resistance to be Blood Rage because of the high leech it gives you. It is not the only way to get high leech though. You can obviously gear like I have and still get high leech without using blood rage (and keep the AoE/dmg benefits of Carcass. ok i'm greedy ^^) Heck, if I could get high chaos resist on top of everything else, I'd run blood rage too. But unfortunately I can't have everything.

Chaos damage in itself isn't that big a deal for me, even at negative 33 chaos resist (at least nowhere near as dangerous as reflect at high dps levels). Resistance is not the only way to deal with it. I use high movement speed to compensate. Even though it sounds a bit weird, mobs have trouble aiming at me. The attacks still land, but it's manageable with life flasks. I haven't met anything that would force me to break out the chaos resist flask yet.

I do acknowledge that if I lowered my own dps, say for example by removing a support gem, my survivability will go way up. But for me the whole point of the build is to try to push dps as high as possible while maintaining a reasonable amount of survivability. I don't mind zero regen mods or chaos degen map mods; indeed I can't think of a map mod that I cannot do. The worst ones for me are probably lowered elemental resist cap and lowered resists, but I suspect that applies to most everyone else as well. (I need to find a sash for that later since the patch killed my overcap buffer)

It comes down to slot efficency, character effecency. Read what i write in my first post about freeing up slots. That blood rage is damn good and no matter how many links your working with losing a life leech gem for bloodrage buff is going to be nice. Caracass' fairly low armor average hp, and trash resists, dont make it more than a peice for possibly a build with a rustic sash and damn near perfectly tuned jewlery. The most impressive thing ive seen so far this thread was that evasion sheild. I didnt think anything would replace my unique sheild and now im considering that sheild shopping might be viable. Before I thought that the only way to replace it was with an insane armor chest and a few armor rolls on jewelry (or newely considered belt)

My point is that the dps display needs to be ignored, play for how fast your really kill, how fast you really clear. HP pool determens leech cap, mitigation determines incoming damage, and you'll always do enough damage to hit the leech cap.

Most of the damage the character takes is due to its own bloodmagic gem.

One other underlying assumption people are making is that their armor reduction of reflect is based off of their display in the character screen. I'll run long calculations on real damage and possibly try to set up an excel spreadsheet for real #'s.

I think most of us who made it to 80+ really love our characters, i like the idea of this thread and i think were all going to come off as hostile. Id like the chance to talk with you guys and try to come up with some kindof of perfect cyclone facebreaker build/gearset of level 90 or something.

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pure_jalexander wrote:

It comes down to slot efficency, character effecency. Read what i write in my first post about freeing up slots. That blood rage is damn good and no matter how many links your working with losing a life leech gem for bloodrage buff is going to be nice.

I'm sorry but I don't use Life leech support :D

DPS gems all the way (cept for Blood magic)
BM - AddedFire - FasterAttacks - ConcEffect - MeleePhys - Cyclone

zero sustain problems cycloning without leech (i.e., through air).

I would love to have frenzy charges though... lucky you.

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pure_jalexander wrote:

My point is that the dps display needs to be ignored, play for how fast your really kill, how fast you really clear.

My defense is not holding me back if that's what you're implying. Admittedly not as tanky as you probably, but it's enough ^^. I deal dps as fast as I can and almost never back off unless it's some stupid combo involving reflect/thorns. Granted it took a while to get used to, but I can recognize most of the really problematic combos quick enough now to slow down if I have to. Kill efficiency is also part of the reason I only have 3 endurance charges... I don't cast these unless I absolutely have to, and then only once.

I try to tune my defense to a level where I can charge in blindly to most any pack and still can withdraw alive if something goes wrong. Most of the time I don't need to as mobs mostly just wilt. Kill speed is hardly an issue. I quicksilver almost permanently before and DURING cyclone. That's capped move speed. You're not going to move much faster than I do regardless of what build you have.

For my particular approach, I consider Carcass to be quite essential to what I want to do. I just wanted to make a point that it is a viable alternative to Blood Rage/Chaos Resistance and not mutually exclusive. You can get both if you have enough chaos resists from your non-armour slots.

Was pretty comfortable before the patch, but after the patch I'm not so sure (partly because I'm playing less). I probably need to get leech on my rings if I can, and find more resists on a belt.

Not sure if you've tested your own 'slot efficiency' gearing strategy, since I have proven that for my own gearset, Meginord's will trump a Rustic in everything besides flexible survivability stats. But since I already am comfortable with my survivability (so much so that I even got rid of hp and armor for more dps), I think I'm fine. Carcass is by far the best option based on dps and utility, simply because it takes more than 7 passive points to gain the exact same bonus.

The main reason I don't use blood rage is because I don't have enough sockets to even link it in, and personally, quality life leech feels right for me since the life leech nerf has dented personal survivability. I don't know about you, but an extra 200 leech cap sits pretty high on my list of things I want my character to have.

Also, I'm not sure about your setup, but I can do basically every map mod, including Blood Magic, and still never dip below 3k hp.

You talk about slot efficiency but you knowingly use an Increased AoE Gem in your 5L, which can easily be swapped out for a 5L Carcass for a gain of a gem slot.

It's pretty hilarious when you talk about doing a map that I wouldn't be able to do, I have more HP, more armor, more DPS, more movement speed, more leech per second, but less chaos resist. Oh well, can't kill those low HP chaos damage mobs. Oh wait.

In regards to Blood Rage + Gearing for Chaos Res vs. Carcass Jack, I would say Carcass wins because it means you do not need to take Increased AoE gem, and it will mitigate the penalty of Concentrated Effect, allowing you to have net area gain using quality and other blast radius nodes. You say Carcass gives bad survivability? Wrong, 750 Evasion is just as good, if not better than 850 armour since we are taking Iron Reflexes, plus some solid resists and hp, albeit not as good as an endgame set of armor, but the free 7 points worth of passive bonus makes it worthwhile.
Gearing for chaos resistance is very expensive, and even at negative resistance I do not find chaos damage to be a problem. If you so wish to gear for it, so be it, but that is a personal decision. Using Blood Rage with a Carcass is also a suitable idea, I experimented with it myself a few weeks ago, but I found that it was too annoying having lowered regen, and quality life leech is far superior in terms of survivability.

I think physical reflect, - max resist, vuln against big bosses, multiple projectiles peity, 50% regen, and a couple of other similar mods are by far the biggest problems any of us face. Combinations/groups of them excetera. We all appear to be about the same level and feel powerful but were all dying occationally. Were to the point where getting/or knowning what a perfect setup would be/could look like.

The life leech cap is certainly very tempting. At earlier levels i tested life on hit and wasnt impressed, at this point though i wonder if enough attacks are being made, and how this would be effected by a multistrike.

The caracass and the chaos resist/bloodrage debate is interesting, until recently i would have assumed that they are mutually exclusive but at insane gear levels i dont think that this is the case.

Lowering physical damage per hit w/ multstrike and hitting faster lowers overall bloodmagic cost and helps against physical reflect.

I'm mulling over a 6L caraccass vs well rolled astral, using multstrike, going for reduced mana gems, saving slots etc.

There are many ways to be powerful in maps, but at this point I think its to being honest with ourself about what does pose challenges, what creates the oh shit moments, and what realisticly high level map play in large parties is like.

By the way, Multistrike doesn't work with Facebreakers unless you want to mutilate your DPS because of how weapon physical is calculated. The only real exception to the use of that specific phrase is the Melee Physical Damage gem. In terms of pure endgame goal, loading up on Chaos res in Shield and Jewellery, and possibly using a Rustic to make up for the loss of resists, I'm sure Blood Rage Carcass can be achieved.

Physical reflect isn't all too bad, but I did encounter a triple physical reflect mob pack before (two mobs with auras + phys reflect map mod), was kind of annoying. Max resist is always dangerous, you just have to dealwith it, the rest is manageable.

Have not tried this spec in parties before since the mobs won't agro to you nullifying the greatest strength of cyclone. Plus all the complaints about no IIQ/IIR and high DPS.

dont think the patch changed much for me. in my 6L carcass i have cyclone-faster attks-conc effect-life leech-melee phy-blood magic.

regarding blood rage it's good no doubt, but since a facebreaker build has :

1) limited gear slots for chaos res + other useful mods, considering we already have to use uniques on gloves, belt and helm (and armor if u use carcass jack). so baiscally we only have jewellery to get chaos res from, and getting rings/neck with high flat phy dmg+hp+chaos res and other good mods is extremely difficult. cost isnt an issue, but i cant even find anyone selling the above mentioned.
2) low hp since we cant use kaoms since we need the slots from a 6l armor

i simply find a quality life leech gem to be easier and safer. or sufficient life leech from gear. blood drinker's 2% is a waste of skill points to get imo, since lava lash is useless to us.

and as for dmg support gem vs life leech, it's basically more dps vs more survivability, so whichever floats your boat.

One of the benefits of dialogue is that you can get ideas from others.

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Acrosis wrote:

... the Blast Radius witch node ... the 7 point investment is pretty heavy for only about as much boost as Haste aura

This line made me realize Blast Radius was very inefficient and the points could be better spent elsewhere while maintaining dps.

I just gained 78hp, 40hp/s, 8% movespeed, 2880 armor (3% extra reduction) while maintaining the same dps by respeccing those 7 points.

It's also comforting to know that there's still room to grow. If I ever save up 7 skill points, that's another 1k dps right there.

I find that amusing because I lost almost the same, but more HP, to get the Blast Radius node. Planning on keeping it too unless I encounter problems with mapping due to survivability. Guess not all of us are DPS-addicts.