Captcha wrote:In the first option, there was no place for overkill, but in the second there would be.
its correct, but point is you wont be able to kill tough bosses, by just throwing stampede at them with capped -enemy resist, thats not enough damage. Thats trash clearing values. You need really juice up the poison for single target it feels.
Anyway, after looking deeper into patch notes, I have some ideas.
SCREAMING EAGLE: enemies now take an additional 25 elemental and magic damage per Skill Level
BANISH: curse - renders target vulnerable to magic and elemental damageArea scaling is now 0.33 yards per level down from 0.67 yards per level, and now caps at 1 screen
Duration scaling is now 1 second per level, down from 4 seconds per level
Now increases elemental and magic damage by 25/lvl, down from 30
Spawning on Sorceress Body Armor: oSkill level increased to (8-12), up from (1-3)
also:
ELEMENTAL WEAPONS
NEW ITEM STAT: Innate Elemental Damage
Increases the innate elemental damage found on sacred elemental bases
Multiplicative effect, e.g. 50% Innate Elemental Damage would increase Battle Axe damage to 135% of strength as fire
Many charms which previously gave tri-elemental flat damage will now give Innate Elemental Damage instead
Throwing axes are now an elemental base (innate elemental damage does not apply while dual wielding)
What happens here is: we get 25 fire/cold/lightning/magic damage per soft level from screaming eagle buff (and same from banish oskill that stacks).
Untwinked level 115ish build can easily get s.eagle to slvl 50 = 1250 damage per element/magic so x4 = 5000 added damage.
And this unlike wolf companion curse WILL WORK with stormblast/iceburst, as long as you have any amount of respective damage values added to your final damage hit.
Reason why wolf companion curse doesn't work with for example stormblast is, it only works if you deal some form of phys damage. Stormblast converts 100% physical to lightning, which means wolf curse (or doom, same thing) will not be added. But other elements or magic damage are still added on top of lightning. And that means damage from screaming eagle will be added.
Now as you can see flat ele damage is removed from charms, so we no longer get triple ele damage from for example six angel bag, which would unlock that bonus damage for free.
But you still can get it from runewords or TU items. Flat magic damage is little harder to obtain, magic elemental rune comes to mind first (or gladiator's dominance if we play throw spec).
This is quite interesting, and could potentially solve single target problems.
While these changes are targeted towards throw specs, I think melee with skills such as iceburst/stormblast will benefit the most out of flat damage (very high multihit, and low wdm value which doesn't matter).
Now question is how to seamlessly implement this into our spec. Screaming eagle does require throwing axe.
Easiest would be just go with balanced axe, and use deathgaze+iceburst, with shield.
Offhanding throwing axe to unlock screaming eagle as main hand with sword doesn't work, you can throw it, but it has no effect, that was fixed long time ago.