The TLDR 2H Barb

Do you mean that +%psn spell damage works for direct hit attack? Does energy factor determine the damage of that as well?

If yes, then character mada by smaxing poison skills + caster gear would indeed be incredibly strong for bossing.

Ene factor won't work, only spell damage for melee hit and mostly direct ones.
https://docs.median-xl.com/doc/wiki/poison I don't know what is outdated in this topic but most of info should be overall correct.

Yeah thats the way to boost single target on weapon poison builds. If you melee hit (or via whirlwind clone), spell damage works.

Same way if you take assassin with maxed ways, load her with spell power, its all boosted via direct attack.
Since lot of bosses now is vulnerable to poison, it can be quite interesting, poison should be viable single target option.
There is just this problem that all that will not apply to your aoe, so if you use same build for area farming, your poison spell damage gear is partially wasted. For any ranged ability, or AOE from crystal swords, whatever thats not single target hit, that is only affected by level of snake stance and amount of poison pierce you have.

Reading all this I'm wondering if whirlwind + spell damage gear will work for bosses (ubers) - if it has enough damage - and snake + stampede for farming (in different gear).

Or... if the gear has -%EPR instead of spell damage, won't that work for both melee and ranged skills?

In the first option, there was no place for overkill, but in the second there would be.

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 damage
Area 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.

aerial wrote: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).

Very interesting piece of theorycrafting. Perhaps the downside for some is that it's become a melee barb not a throw barb - and some like the ranged/throwing style.

Just to clarify re my previous post, I wasn't really suggesting stampede with -epr gear for bosses, more that overkill (or another single target skill) could be used in the same gear. If it still doesn't have enough boss damage it might come down to how much +psn dmg we can get without having to swap out of the farming gear - or at least some of it. Lots of gear with -epr also has poison damage though?

If it works how i think it works, seems quite op tbh.
Lets take few examples.
A level 125 barb, spec from guide, so maxe spirit guide (200 ewd), maxed wolf stance (600), perfect 1h weapon craft (200-480 damage).
You get d2stats 1:1 damage physical 2.5-6k (average 4k).
Now that damage will be affected by weapon damage mod on skill. So if you use it via stormblast that is 30% wdm, 0.3 x that average value. 0.3x4000=1200
Screaming eagle with all damage types active would increase this by 5k (if it was slvl50). You could additionally curse by lets say level 20 banish, for another 2k.. and thats ONLY via this added damage.
Lets take another example, what if we max strength and nephalem spirit? on test char with this level of gear, im getting averag 1100 tri ele damage per element added to weapon (total 3300). And that again is affected by skill modifier, unlike screaming eagle curse. So via stormblast we only get 1/3 of it, whole uberskill adds 1000 total average damage to stormblast. While screaming eagle is 5k..

it almost feels like this build should ignore every other source of damage, because it is so inefficient in comparison. You get pierce, utility, and only get damage from screaming eagle + banish. Pierce to all elements, incresing skill level, defenses.

Question is: what weapon? elemental or physical? Let's say 1h elemental throwing axe will have same bonus as crystal sword (as being 1h). 60% stat converted to single element. Even if that is doubled via that innate damage modifier thats new, lets say 120%. Let's say it scales off strength, since axes are str based, we get 3000 strenth that would be +3600 elemental damage. Nice but again, affected by skill mod, if you use it with storm blast, or even worse, iceburst since its axe, that value is reduced by 75%.
Similarly physical damage, we would need go to big lengths to increase physical damage, since then we need skills, like ewd from stance, spirit guide, and that also ends up being low number after skill reduciton.
Feels like whatever has better utility wins here. Phys can leech, but if phys part of damage is low, that leech will be weak. Crushing blow is decent tho, because we need to deal any small amount of phys and it already gonna trigger cb at its full power.
Ele weapons have some interesting procs. Life spark on striking for heals? (3% max life healed per proc).
Getting automated banish also seems nice:
1% Chance to cast level 25 Banish on Striking
12% Chance to cast level 40 Banish on Melee Attack

that is 2500 or 4000 ele/magic to each tick of attack, regardless of what wdm on it is. And that is before factoring in pierce.

trash monsters have 35 resists. If you get -65 enemy resists (putting them at -30%) that doubles entire elemental damage. If it is boss with higher base resist, pierce is even more effective. A 70 resistance boss, if you apply same 65 pierce on it goes to 5% resist, and damage taken increased over 3x.

Yes if it works that would be OP - I sense another hotfix in the pipeline! That build could be more op than when cata trap was hotfixed after a couple of weeks (and half the population quit the game lol).

I agree with the point of "no other damage source matters". Since Nephalim Weapons is useless then, I would go with a full dex variant and take Gladiators Dominance for block. For weapon use a throwing axe with banish proc and low str requirement (T1 rare would be great lol). Get a dex based shield with 2% ctb. Whirlpool would make a great AoE multi-hitting melee skill, and still use ice burst for Single target.

Block for endgame sure, but for earlier stage I'm not so sure.
Runemaster + bear stance = shitton of defense + 50% dr from skills. You socket xar for -2enemy ele res per rune. Perfect synergy.
You can dump most stats into vitality.
If you go dex, you have less life. Also bonus magic damage from gladiator dominance will not unlock magic component of screaming eagle for melee skills I think, it adds magic only to throwing skills.
Deadly strike also shouldn't work. It doubles phys damage or phys converted to element. But damage added via curse I don't think gets doubled through deadly strike. So it is another dead mod on this skill.

As for using this combo with throwing skills. Most multihitting ability is overkill. Problem with that is, it multihits still way less than iceburst/stormblast and being wdm of 120% it isnt anywhere as efficient with added flat damage. With skill such as overkill it is actually worth to scale weapon damage, or ele from weapon, neph weapons and so on. It actually gains value via 120% wdm, opposed to losing like for low wdm skills.

Thers also 3rd approach. Dual wielding for statstick. There are some high elemental pierce offhands, and your attack speed goes up from 7 to 6 frames, which is 16% dps boost.

Note that if we are talking about uber boss spec, you don't even need to have throwing axe in your main setup. Long duration s.eagle, curse for like 30s or whatever it lasts, then swap to something else.
Imagine Thunder King of Sescheron, 2 stormblasts per swing?

In this setup fact that this weapon deals trash damage doesn't matter.