Underrated Itemization: Lycosidae

Problem is, it's niche. Most one hand or dual wield builds have a ton of dex that can be augmented by a few accuracy rolls on gear--which means you might as well accept 90% accuracy and use a much better shield/off hand.

To make the most of it, you'd need to be a right side of tree build with very low dex and limited access to accuracy. And even then you could take RT. The only advantage of of Lycosidae would be the abilty to crit and proc ele overload--assuming you're even using an elemental attack in the first place.

So, yeah. Kind of niche, but good shield.

It's a great leveling unique and a solid league starter choice but not really meant for end game.

correct me if I'm wrong here but I remember etup using it for a bit while leveling his HOWA.

Lycosidae is definitely a good shield for crit builds. That's not debatable. However, Lycosidae gets outclassed by a lot of other options. If you're going max or high block, then The Surrender or an Aegis will benefit you far more. If you're ES based, a high ES shield will be far better. If you want more damage, then dual wielding will give you more damage. I personally think that it's a good budget shield, but should be replaced with a better shield, like The Surrender, as soon as you can afford to get one.

One thing to note, is that 100% accuracy as melee isn't actually as insanely powerful as it sounds. Most of the time you'll be at around 90% accuracy with some decent gear, maybe 85% without accuracy on all your jewelry and without a shit load of dexterity. Going from 90% to 100% accuracy on your tool-tip will not affect your clear-speed really at all, maybe a little but barely enough to brag about. It will definitely improve your single target, but seeing as the majority of the community seems to care about clear-speed, I feel that's more important to mention.

If you're at like 80% accuracy or lower and can deal with not using a stronger unique shield, and don't care about losing some resistances and life, then Lycosidae is definitely for you. Otherwise, just use a Surrender.

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Shazamarang wrote:

One thing to note, is that 100% accuracy as melee isn't actually as insanely powerful as it sounds.

Wouldn't use Lycosidae as a melee shield (although 300 flat cold to counter attacks is pretty neat as well) but there are quite a few ranged attacks that benefit greatly (spooky toss, wand attacks), especially if you want to play classes that don't have easy access in the tree to dexterity/accuracy.

This shield is awesome. i use it to level CoC Discharge early in league when no vagan daggers are available.

The shield has a ton of flexibility.

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I find it amusing that it took you a whole 6 months to figure that out. It was the first item I wanted ever since I saw it.

I even now use it in my endgame Elemental damage MS build and it's great. Allows me to scale attack speed and damage and speccing into Elemental Overload without any increases in gear cost and point tradeoffs. Its Cold damage is great for my build since it scales only eDPS and keeps me at full health while also dealing decent damage.

Maybe you have seen me use it on my build. I made a video not long ago where I smack Minotaur with Brightbeak. I'm only waiting for my new mainboard so I can take on Shaper.

Almost same situation here.

Max block molten strike glad, mostly on right side of the tree. This shield lets me achieve very high dps while still being very tanky. Switching it for Surrender or Aegis might make me more tanky, but I lose more than half my damage.

Thought of a build this shield would be good for that I'm thinking about playing in 3.0.

Life based Wander cause of how much of a problem accuracy is for wander.

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I find it amusing that it took you a whole 6 months to figure that out. It was the first item I wanted ever since I saw it.

I even now use it in my endgame Elemental damage MS build and it's great. Allows me to scale attack speed and damage and speccing into Elemental Overload without any increases in gear cost and point tradeoffs. Its Cold damage is great for my build since it scales only eDPS and keeps me at full health while also dealing decent damage.

Maybe you have seen me use it on my build. I made a video not long ago where I smack Minotaur with Brightbeak. I'm only waiting for my new mainboard so I can take on Shaper.

It's not written "i discovered a new item today!?", the thread is about the potential of the shield itself, not about the moment the OP understood the power of this unique. It's not amusing.

The cold damage on lycosidae is interresting, but i never found a practical situation to use it it because it works with counters... so... with leech why not. Wont make much difference i guess, with thoses long cooldowns.


Anyway, brightbeak + flat damage is a powerfull weapon, the variant with added chaos damage + void heart legacy or poison gem is crazy too.

Thoo i think it's a bit sad to not use lyco in a critical strike build, it kinda gives twice the benefit in such cases. with 2 accuracy mod , a non crit build with EO can get 85% accuracy, so the shield gives 15% More damage -only-, however in a crit build it's far better, as explained before.

That's a bold statement..

Elemental overloads benefits more than crit? Nope, don't think so. Crit almost fully doubledips on the benefits. Whatever lacking accuracy you got, crit will be penalized twice by that.

Lets say you have a build with 10% crit chance, and 88% accuracy. Your Elemental overload chance to proc is also double penelized by accuracy, so from all your hits that do hit, 8.8% of those will crit, a reduction of 1.2% crit chance. The thing with that is tho that it is like 1-2 passives or something. For a real crit build if they are sitting on lets say 85% chance to crit, that 88% accuracy will mean they will have just 74.8% of attacks that hit crit and thereby effectively lose 10.2% crit. That is taken directly out of their overall damage scaling and as you can see 2% crit is worth a lot less than 10.2% crit especially when you then consider that elemental overload just needs to be active (just needs random low chance to crit), and it will work fully making accuracy actually just a little small thing in that regard, whereas for actual crit builds it will reduce their top scaling. It's almost all about initial hit miss chance and lost crits miss chance, since it's so easy and takes so little investment to get elemental overload rolling.

Doesn't mean that shield still isn't good for a non-crit and slighly better than non-crit for a elemental overload build.

With all due respect, it doesn't matter here what your experience is as this case is straightforwardly simple and is mathematically based on which way of scaling will result in the highest average output dps, there is no skill involved there is nothing it's raw math either you get the scaling or you don't. And i also have experience anyway.

The elemental overload benefits almost completely singularly from accuracy, the additional benefit is worth 1 passive point. Depending on your crit multiplier and crit chance, crit builds can reach upwards of double benefits from accuracy. It is not more complicated than that.

And that 1-2 passive point benefit in addition to normal single-dipping from accuracy, isn't always worth spending because you just need a minimum extremely low crit level and then you are fine and can't scale elemental overload on more than close to 100% uptime.

Another way to explain this is that.. the accuracy removal functions like a "more" multiplier to your amount of crits, in that it will take your amount of crits and multiplier it by a multiplier. If you are on 10% crit and the multiplier is 1.12 then you are on 11.2% crit, whereas if you were on 80% crit that same 1.12 multiplier will lead to 89.6% crit. When you are on 10% crit you gain additional 1.2%, whereas when you are on 80 you gain additional 9.6%.

In other words it cannot be argued that full crit builds use this shield worse, it's simply not true.

Dual-wielding has better endscaling potentential for certain build types, as it gives 10% more speed and 20% more phys scaling, which results in not only slightly better damage than the shield but also faster movement abilities. But practically it's maybe better to afford 1 greater weapon than 2 lesser and then use the shield until you get super rich. Not to mention that if you find 2-3 affixes for accuracy then the shield will start to look even worse.

Let's say you are on 90% accuracy and 10% crit. Getting the shield increases your crit rate by 10/9 * 10/9 * 10 - 10 = 2.34, so you get (10+2.34) / 10 - 1 = 23.4% more crits. So you get 23.4% greater rate of crits (notice this will be true regardless of your crit rate, at 90% acc, as 23.4% = (10/9)^2 -1, however you will only be able to reap any meaningful benefits so long as your rate of crits is so low you aren't seeing 100% uptime on elemental overload. You will easily see that, in addition to what you should have in any case in the build you can save 1-2 passives and thats the entire magnitude of the beyond normal dipping effect that acc has for elemental overload.

And any time where you would be around where you need to be so that your rate is where you want it after you apply the shield, you will most likely be at around 75% uptime on elemental overload already(now comparing the situation where you have super low crit(less than you should have), the only situation where there is some double dipping tendency to show that even there it's not really fully double dipping).

So the worse your build is, the worse planned it is, the less likely you are to invest the few points in crit chance it takes to get elemental overload, the more better the shield appears but in reality it's just 1-2 passives at best beyond that normal scaling from removed accuracy.