[2.6] CRIT HoWA BF/ST Raider [13k ES, 60k BF/265k GMP ST DPS, Stun-immune] [4 sec Chayula kill]

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renroval wrote:

Watching that video, you deleted a lot of the bosses quickly.

I'm still on the fence though whether or not to go scourge or HOWA. Scourge deletes stuff faster too but are there really any bosses that need that much damage to kill?

Also, how well does this build scale with gear? Can it reach the heights of the Scourge damage? Or close to?

Do you think wearing an Abyssus is a downside for Scourge builds?

Scourge builds probably average around 7-8k ES. HoWA builds with the same levels of ES on gear can probably hit 14-15k, and are cheaper to build to boot.

The thing about a crit BF inquisitor build is that the actual damage dealt is far more than the tooltip DPS itself.

For instance, I get a bonus 100% crit chance/45% crit multiplier depending on the presence of elemental status ailments on monsters, which isn't reflected on my tooltip DPS. By shocking mobs, I deal 50% more damage to them, which also isn't reflected on my tooltip DPS. By using assassin's mark, I have 9% additional chance to crit as well as 20% more damage, which, you guessed it, also isn't reflected on my tooltip DPS.

In terms of gear scaling, with proper crit mods on gear (I only have a ring and an ammy with crit mods), high int (my int on gear has room for improvement), I would say that my tooltip DPS can probably hit 30-35k at some point (if optimistic). I highly doubt that that will reach the heights of Scourge damage. That said, you will have twice the ES of that of a scourge build and being able to kill a boss, albeit slightly slower, is better than dying to a boss the moment he hits you and hence not being able to kill him, even if you know you could have killed that boss slightly faster than a HoWA build if the boss had not hit you (and let's face it, mobs will of course hit you.)

Abyssus is ofc a downside. Extra damage taken on top of an already pathetic ES pool makes you squishier than a bug.

I mean, that's just my own opinion, but I kinda prefer a well-balanced character rather than an ultimate DPS glass cannon.

Good points! Thanks for the answers!

Still debating whether to go Inquisitor or Raider for crit variant. Can't make up my mind. I know Inquisitors do more damage overall, even more if going to the 16% more damage taken node but makes me wonder...would I be whirling blades slower throughout the map for clearing or kill stuff faster?

How much faster do Inquisitor's kill mobs and bosses compared to the raider counterpart?

Do you by any chance also know how your Inquisitor is getting 8 attacks per second the same as a raider with faster attacks on both characters? I figured raider would get more attack speed out of the frenzy charges.

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renroval wrote:

Good points! Thanks for the answers!

Still debating whether to go Inquisitor or Raider for crit variant. Can't make up my mind. I know Inquisitors do more damage overall, even more if going to the 16% more damage taken node but makes me wonder...would I be whirling blades slower throughout the map for clearing or kill stuff faster?

How much faster do Inquisitor's kill mobs and bosses compared to the raider counterpart?

Do you by any chance also know how your Inquisitor is getting 8 attacks per second the same as a raider with faster attacks on both characters? I figured raider would get more attack speed out of the frenzy charges.

Np!

This is an example of the whirling blades speed that I'm at:
https://youtu.be/r4xqF9o-zwE
My latency is 200+ms coz my gateway (SG) is wonky so I'm using US atm, therefore things aren't as responsive.

Whirling blades is definitely slower on inquis than raider, but idk I still prefer inquis after playing the two, because even with the DPS shown here, my raider doesn't kill things as quickly or satisfyingly compared to inquis. The difference is really very noticeable. If you've been playing raider all the while you probably wouldn't notice it, but coming back to raider having leveled an inquis, it was rather obvious to me. In addition, running +elemental resistance and elemental equilibrium maps on raider was very tiring, whereas on inquis those maps didn't matter at all.

My inquis uses blood rage which gives an innate attack speed bonus and which also grants frenzy charges. it seemed a natural choice as the 4% degen from blood rage would be countered by the 4% ES regen from pious path.

thanks for the build im having fun with it in HC atm.
When do you suggest swapping to crit? when around lvl 90 and got a 6 link at least? im really inexperienced with crit but i liked the idea so i thought why not

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tiasim wrote:

thanks for the build im having fun with it in HC atm.
When do you suggest swapping to crit? when around lvl 90 and got a 6 link at least? im really inexperienced with crit but i liked the idea so i thought why not

You're welcome! You don't have to wait so long before switching to crit - 5L is enough as long as you've got at least 2 of the 3 main crit clusters: shadow cluster and disemboweling or heartseeker, if you've already got 5 frenzy charges in total (ascendancy + kraityn) and if you've got at least 240% or so crit multi.

I leveled both a non crit Raider and a crit Inqis, the non crit raider is better by far in almost every aspect (depending what you are trying to accomplish anyway). For mapping raider is way faster, Immunity to everything and have 10+ aps, as well as 500 more es than inquisitor variant.

For bosses because my aps is so high on raider I can face tank anything, My inquisitor gets 1 shot a decent amount compared to my raider, idk if this is because raider has so much extra dodge built in or if I am leeching much faster.

Same gear (except crit rings and ammy on Inquis) I have done deathless shaper and every t16 boss with non-crit raider, on Inquisitor I usually take 4-5 portals.

My DPS in town is much higher on my inquisitor and have close to 66% crit without any charges and around 430% crit multi, My raiders dps is about 8k in town no buffs and inquisitor was around 15k, raider has close to 1200 int and inquisitor had around 1050.

If you are just going for tooltip dps then yes Inquisitor is better, if you actually play the game and map/boss kill, just sticking with non crit is 10x easier to gear and in the end better IMO.

Maybe I just need better gear or something on my inquisitor to really make him shine, not sure yet. I did enjoy playing the crit version more, and used herald of ice/thunder for mapping. The shatter made things very fast; however when I got to the end game bosses I died a lot more and felt like my dps was actually less than my raider. I also hated using blood rage, it felt rushed and ended up getting me killed more than a few times. Trying to open inv and remove a gem just to stay alive pissed me off more than anything. I also never used it for shaper because 1 orb hit is about 8-9k es, if you are dodging other stuff and have blood rage up you are dead. Happened many times. IDK just my input, if I was going to make only 1 HOWA char i would most likely go non crit raider. It was just so easy with almost zero gearing requirements besides stacking int. All the attack speed is built in with gems and frenzys, then just capping resists and WED if you have it.

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Deathfly7 wrote:

I leveled both a non crit Raider and a crit Inqis, the non crit raider is better by far in almost every aspect (depending what you are trying to accomplish anyway). For mapping raider is way faster, Immunity to everything and have 10+ aps, as well as 500 more es than inquisitor variant.

For bosses because my aps is so high on raider I can face tank anything, My inquisitor gets 1 shot a decent amount compared to my raider, idk if this is because raider has so much extra dodge built in or if I am leeching much faster.

Same gear (except crit rings and ammy on Inquis) I have done deathless shaper and every t16 boss with non-crit raider, on Inquisitor I usually take 4-5 portals.

My DPS in town is much higher on my inquisitor and have close to 66% crit without any charges and around 430% crit multi, My raiders dps is about 8k in town no buffs and inquisitor was around 15k, raider has close to 1200 int and inquisitor had around 1050.

If you are just going for tooltip dps then yes Inquisitor is better, if you actually play the game and map/boss kill, just sticking with non crit is 10x easier to gear and in the end better IMO.

I agree with your opinion that raider is just that much more fun to play as compared to an inquis variant, simply because of the faster-paced action and because of the elemental status immunity that raider enjoys.

With regards to the one-shots, I'm not sure about that but I never did have an issue with those on inquisitor. On raider however, I have had some problems with some of the tougher map bosses with +elemental resistance and elemental equilibirum mods when I haven't been able to penetrate as much resistance as I would have liked.

Yup, inquisitor is definitely better for tooltip DPS. With regards to actual gameplay, ie mapping, inevitable judgement can be both an advantage as well as a detriment.

Having leveled a Crit BF Raider which was non-crit before I converted to crit, as well as having recently discovered Path of Building and making use of it, I'm inclined to believe that HoWA builds relying on penetration deal more damage to white mobs and bosses with 30% resists as compared to inquisitor builds relying on inevitable judgement. That said, inquisitor builds can run all elemental resist map mods with impunity as compared to a build relying on penetration, and its on maps with +30% elemental resistance mods where inquisitor's dps becomes higher.

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Deathfly7 wrote:

Maybe I just need better gear or something on my inquisitor to really make him shine, not sure yet. I did enjoy playing the crit version more, and used herald of ice/thunder for mapping. The shatter made things very fast; however when I got to the end game bosses I died a lot more and felt like my dps was actually less than my raider. I also hated using blood rage, it felt rushed and ended up getting me killed more than a few times. Trying to open inv and remove a gem just to stay alive pissed me off more than anything. I also never used it for shaper because 1 orb hit is about 8-9k es, if you are dodging other stuff and have blood rage up you are dead. Happened many times. IDK just my input, if I was going to make only 1 HOWA char i would most likely go non crit raider. It was just so easy with almost zero gearing requirements besides stacking int. All the attack speed is built in with gems and frenzys, then just capping resists and WED if you have it.

I'm glad you enjoyed playing the crit version more. That said, in this era of Vinkars (where you can rely on Vinktars to shock) and elemental focus (which far outdpses increased crit damage), there unfortunately isn't much point in using incr. crit dmg over elemental focus anymore aside from the fun factor.

I never did have any problems with blood rage. I think I did emphasise that you should only use blood rage if it is socketed on your weapon slot. I bound X (my weapon swap button) to one of the buttons on my mouse and it's very easy to deactivate blood rage as and when. I'm still using it on my raider at the moment primarily for the attack speed boost during boss fights. Maybe not for shaper, but for map bosses.

Non-crit raider is easy to build because you have fewer mods on gear to have to worry about, but that also means that you reach your dps output ceiling much earlier.

By going non-crit, you can only stack:
1. INT
2. Attack speed
3. %Damage

All of the above will start providing diminishing returns at some point.

For instance,
1. If you have 500 int, stacking another 100 int is effectively a 20% damage boost. If you already have 1000 int, stacking another 100 int is only a 10% damage boost.

2. Let's assume your average damage is 8000 and your attack speed modifier is 50%. As a dual-wielding HoWA, your APS would be 1.6 * 1.5 * 1.1 (DW) * 1.6 (BF) = 4.224 APS, which would translate to 4.224 * 8000 = 33,792 DPS. Stacking on another 50% attack speed would put your new APS at 5.632 and DPS at 45,056 which is a 33% damage boost. Were you to stack on another 50% attack speed however, your new APS would be at 7.04, DPS at 56,320 which is now only a 25% damage boost from before. Considering most raider builds have no problems stacking at least 150% attack speed modifier from gems/jewels/tree, you can therefore see that just focusing on stacking attack speed alone when your attack speed is already so high is also not going to be as rewarding.

3. Most non-crit builds will be hard-put trying to stack >100% lightning/elemental damage modifiers on the tree as compared to their crit counterparts. The significance of this 100% becomes less when you consider opal rings as well as the abundance of %WED mods on gear.

Also, by going non-crit and grabbing elemental overload, you render an entire set of mods (ie crit chance/crit multiplier) on gear/jewels largely irrelevant to yourself.

Crit builds have the above to stack up on but also have the additional crit chance/multi modifiers to build up once the above-mentioned (%damage, attack speed, INT) start providing non-optimum returns.

40% more modifier on your damage is great, but it actually provides marginally less extra %damage modifier as someone with 35% crit chance and only 220% (baseline is 150%) crit multiplier, which now that I put it this way, doesn't sound all that impressive does it? --> 0.35 * 2.2 + 0.65 = 1.42.

If you're the kind of player who likes investing in his character, I'd still advise you to go crit eventually, because even though its tougher to gear, its not tougher without being rewarding. By going non-crit permanently, you'll find it easier to gear not because its more powerful but because you're forced to ignore alot of other mods and its therefore easier because there're lesser things to consider when gearing your char!

For crit gearing requirements, you essentially only need crit multi on an ammy and on your jewels. Everything else remains the same as non-crit. The tree will of course be different, but because elemental overload is likely not going to be far from your path, you can still pick that during the leveling process and respec from it later on when you've got the right gear + enough crit nodes.

That's just my opinion of course, which was why I made this thread. Thanks for your input, its much appreciated!

I want to give this build a try to compare it directly with my non-crit howa raider but the ugly and silly looking (imo) templar model makes it very difficult for me to play ):

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MFJones wrote:

I want to give this build a try to compare it directly with my non-crit howa raider but the ugly and silly looking (imo) templar model makes it very difficult for me to play ):

haha i don't disagree :p i can't really make up my mind as to which is my favourite. Used to be inquisitor for a bit, but came back to raider and respecced abit to improve dps and penetration, and now raider's my favourite again.

you can always try a crit raider if you want to! You've probably already got most of the gear sorted except for crit multi on jewels.

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Invalesco wrote:

you can always try a crit raider if you want to! You've probably already got most of the gear sorted except for crit multi on jewels.

Good idea, i might give the crit raider one a try