Which weapon is better?

[u/pathofnut]

I recently started playing and Im trying to get good at selecting equipment. I was wondering which of these weapons is better and why. Im playing a Shaloren Doombringer.

[u/ChickadeeVivi]

Probably the truestriking voratun battleaxe of shearing, especially if your phys pen isnt high.

[u/pathofnut → u/ChickadeeVivi]

So Im guessing more damage is better than everything else? Sure the battleaxe probably pulls the highest numbers but it lacks other interesting passives like the on-weapon-hits.

Also how high would my phys pen need to be for the battleaxe not to be as good?

[u/ChickadeeVivi → u/pathofnut]

Id say if your phys pen was already at 60% or higher then maybe it's not the best choice.

What difficulty are you playing on?

[u/pathofnut → u/ChickadeeVivi]

Nightmare difficulty rn but Id rather learn how to play for Insane.

My phys resistance pen is currently 33% from items but destroyer form gives me another 50%. So Im guessing thats 83% total.

[u/ChickadeeVivi → u/pathofnut]

Oh i forgot destroyer even does all that. Shit idk then lol

[u/pathofnut → u/ChickadeeVivi]

So would you say all these weapons are approximately equal or are some of them at least clearly worse than others?

Out of curiosity have you beaten the game on insane? Is a minimum of 60% pen required there?

[u/ChickadeeVivi → u/pathofnut]

Oh, well, no, latafayn and stormbringer sword were an easy no for me. Stormbringer has too many stats that arent of interest to you (cold and lightning damage procs and respen, movement speed isnt really needed), and splitting your damage types is never really as good as it sounds since it makes you need to build dammod and respen for two types. Although, you could get away with it if you took meteoric crash as a prodigy in that instance, since itd let you just build the phys stuff and fire would match. Ultimately on Nightmare you could def win using that weapon if you built right.

Honestly the pink one also has some meh stats outside of the on weapon hit stuff. So id probably still take the truestriking? That could free up whatever equipment was already giving you phys pen for potential replacement.

Ive won i think 7 times on insane. And yes, respen of your preferred damage type is a contender for the most important stat by late game, but, its not like the game works in a way where you can win without a full combination of the important damage stats (respen, crit chance, crit mod, dam mod, armor pen and accuracy on phys weapons)

[u/pathofnut → u/ChickadeeVivi]

I'll explain my reasoning a bit, correct me if Im wrong about anything.

I value on-hits a lot for doombringer since many of the skills are multi hit and you are also incentivized to take the flexible combat prodigy.

So on one hand I completely agree that the stats those weapons give arent very good, but on the other hand the on-hits I guessed have the potential to be game-breaking.

I mean 50% to put enemy talents on cooldown seems like a great way to prevent enemies from using too many skills, while the pink weapon seems to have quad on hit. Do those stack? Are the gain 10% of a turn limited to 3 per turn globally or is it 6 in this case since the mod is on melee hit but also on weapon hit? But yeah so far Ive been using the on-hit slow weapon since it seems more consistent and helps me survive more turns.

As for Latafayn unique, Im already doing a lot of fire damage anyway due to doombringer talents. I guessed if I went that route I could prioritize fire mods over phys mods but destroyer form gives 50% global pen as we said so maybe its not that big an issue? Do you think Latafayn is a bad weapon in general or are there other builds that use it better?

[u/ChickadeeVivi → u/pathofnut]

As far as the on hits go, i think it also helps to look at what actual percentage of your damage theyre doing. If youre doing 1.8k phys per hit and 200 in on-hit elemental damage instance procs, that's 10% of your damage. And thats not factoring in you probably having higher phys pen than those elements (though i guess DB isn't worrying about that a lot). At the same time, adding another 15% phys mod is gonna affect a higher portion of your damage than if you get a similar boost to a proc element instance. Still, go and do some damage number testing on the training dummies in the shertul fortress thingy im blanking on the name of rn

As for the enemy talent thing, well. Enemies have a lot of talents, and the best way to prevent them from using those talents is to disarm/silence them. Or just. Kill them in 1-3 turns. The more you rely on "good rng" (disabling the right talent rather than just disabling all of them at once, or rather than just killing them ASAP so they can't use any talents ever again), the less reliable your build is. Especially when you're rinse repeating the whole setup 10000 times, youre basically just asking to get the worlds worst rng roll eventually through brute force and die.

Working out the specifics on using or not using latafayn is above my abilities.

[u/pathofnut → u/ChickadeeVivi]

Makes a lot of sense. So its either the physpen axe or the slowing sword.

Another user is saying that phys pen caps at 70% though so I guess the sword takes it.

[u/Avloren → u/pathofnut]

Doombringer is about hitting things super hard with a melee weapon and also getting a tiny bit of bonus fire damage because why not. You really can't focus two damage types, and typically the vast majority of your damage is going to be physical. So you want to focus on +X% physical damage, +X% physical resistance pen, and the talents that do physical damage or improve your physical damage. Not to mention crit damage, crit mult, etc., but everyone wants those things regardless of damage type. It's a bad thing that some of your extra damage is fire type instead, and thus missing out on your physical bonuses. Equipping a weapon that converts half your physical damage to fire is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Also: you're a melee glass cannon. You ideally want to oneshot things before they get a chance to hurt you, tough guys you want to kill in 2-3 turns at most. Any more than that and they're likely to load you up with some nasty debuff or just outright kill you. Cutting your immediate burst damage in half, turning that extra damage into a dot that will make you slower to delete dangerous enemies, that's also like shooting yourself in the foot.

So equipping Latafayn is like shooting yourself in both feet. It's BAD.

Likewise, be wary of anything else that applies a debuff or a dot or slowly wears your enemies down. You're not a tank, you're a burst damage assassin that ideally wants to oneshot things. Of the things on those weapons: crit chance is good, physical respen is good, accuracy is possibly good if you need it (it really depends on your current accuracy, too little is crippling, but there are severe diminishing returns to stacking it too much). The big global speed slows on your enemies are okay, because again ideally you're oneshotting things before that even has a chance to make a difference, but sometimes you fight a boss that takes like 5 turns to kill and that can be a gamechanger. But most of the time it won't help. Gobal speed is always good, but 20% chance to get 10% of a turn is.. like 2% global speed on average. A bit more with multihit attacks, but still not much. Most of the other stats and on-hits those weapons have are junk.

Generally, as a Doombringer, you want to ask yourself: will this help me crit some dangerous rare enemy for 4k damage and instantly kill him before he has a chance to unload his arsenal of run-ending unpleasantness on my squishy melee glass cannon butt? No? Then it's probably not what you want.

[u/pathofnut → u/Avloren]

The thing is Im not sure I agree Doombringer is a glasscannon. It gets a bunch of defensive tools such as bonus armor+defense and a bunch of healing as well. Shalore + Cauterize Spirit can also get rid of quite a few debuffs.

So far the hardest bosses Ive killed have been the master, the grand corruptor and the mummy lord and Ive been able to tank them for a couple of turns with no issues. Regular enemies dont even do damage and they die in 1 hit no matter what. The biggest issue has been running out of vim or out of cooldowns not really getting oneshot.

Im not sure if its a matter of nightmare difficulty being too easy though, Ive played no other classes and this is only my third run so I have nothing else to compare with.

PS: But yeah when you put it in terms of global speed I could see why pink weapon isnt very good. And the weapon which puts enemy talents on cooldown is too rng. So the two best weapons here seem to be the one Im using with the slows and the axe with 30% pen. But Im not sure the extra damage from the axe would be enough to compensate losing a 50% slow on enemy speed, thats double turns for me essentially which is a larger increase in DPS at the end of the day.

[u/Vandelier]

The Latafayn could be very strong if you want to shift your play style to be focused on spreading and consuming burns and Fire damage. I haven't messed with it much, but my understanding of Fire Burn damage is that it applies burning (and causes the first tick) rather than dealing direct damage. I could be wrong about how it works, but if so, it would fundamentally change how Doombringer plays by lowering its burst damage and shifting focus to building burn on nearby targets and then consuming them with the weapon's action. This has some synergy with the burn related talents of the class, but lowering Doombringer's burst feels...wrong.

But again, I'm not even certain Fire Burn works quite like I described. If it works more like Physical Bleed (Steamsaws) where you'd deal full damage and get half of that as a DoT as well, then that could be extremely strong.

The other weapons...

As a general rule, I hardly even look at the Power percentage on weapons unless nothing else about them stands out.

And one does. That first weapon in the image has two extremely good hit procs that have strong interplay. The action and global speed debuff procs are phenomenal, especially when taken together. The effective damage increase and damage taken decrease from controlling the enemy action economy through those slows will be stronger than just about any possible difference in Power percentage on the weapons. And you're in a class with pretty good crit chance and with a passive which can force crits, so that on-crit proc will be very easy to get up quickly. Although the 20% global speed proc tends to do better on classes with multi hit attacks, it lasts a few turns, so it'll tend to have good uptime on strong single targets. These slows also play well with stacking the Horrifying Blows debuff, making it easy to lower the damage of strong enemies, slow them even further, and crowd control them with Hope Wanes. The slows also interact well with your global speed from Flame of Urh'Rok. And wait, it even gives +15% crit chance?

This weapon has a LOT going for it. Of the selection, I'd absolutely use the first one.

The second weapon would be very good if your class didn't already give you ways of handling what the stats offer you. Reckless Strike and Obliterating Smash already help against high armor or defense foes, and Destroyer all but covers your physical pen (caps at 70%, btw). Plus, by the amount of Accuracy you'd get from equipping that weapon, your current accuracy looks fine for most enemies. You also have damage sources that don't rely on accuracy. Ultimately, this weapon does little for Doombringer.

The third weapon just has some of the weaker procs. Not really even worth consideration. I'd even take the previous weapon over this one.

The final weapon is interesting. Putting talents on cool down with such a high chance is always strong. But...it just doesn't stack up to the slows and crit on your first weapon.

There's my two cents.

[u/pathofnut → u/Vandelier]

Oh I didnt know phys pen caps at 70%. That makes the axe worse than I thought. So Im guessing the slowing weapon I had equipped was the correct one huh.

Im still intrigued by the Layafayn though so I may do some testing with the dummies in the base. Im surprised that you are praising it, some other commenters are claiming that its a weak weapon here because Id have to stack both phys and fire modifiers. Plus Id lose the ability to oneshot. But so far my doombringer is tanking quite a bit and bosses cant be oneshotted either way so it doesnt seem that big of a deal.

[u/Vandelier → u/pathofnut]

Yeah, penetrations cap at 70%.

Generally speaking, Latafayn is a weak weapon for exactly that reason. It's the sort of artifact that utterly changes the way you play and build your class. You really have to build into it to make the most of it. But Doombringer already deals a mix of fire and physical damage to begin with, so it's not as though fire damage and penetration aren't already useful to you. It kind of meshes with what the class already likes and has available.

You already get significant amounts of physical and fire pen from Destroyer-buffed Reckless Strike, and you have a way to lower fire resistance through Fiery Torment (which can lower their fire resistance into the negatives for a multiplicative damage bonus, by the way), which is also your hardest hitting ability for enemies that survive long enough and benefits greatly from fire damage bonuses even without the Latafayn.

Fiery Grasp, Fearscape Shift, Infernal Breath, Maw of Urh'Rok, Burning Sacrifice, Fiery Aegis, Fearscape, Incinerating Blows, Fiery Torment, Detonating Charge, Destroyer (through the bonus to Incinerating Blows), and Burning Hex all do meaningful amounts of fire damage to begin with. You don't want to ignore fire damage bonus as a Doombringer. If anything, using Latafayn would mean wanting to prioritize fire damage bonus over physical.

Eternal Suffering can even be procced, with some luck, to increase the duration of Burning on the enemy before you use the weapon's active talent. Assuming your burning is applied for three turns, this would effectively more than double the damage Latafayn's on-use effect would cause.

All this can cascade in a really interesting way. Imagine killing a trash enemy during a boss fight with Fearscape Shift or some other AoE and triggering Burning Sacrifice with that, which then hits the boss to trigger Incinerating Blows' bonus damage at double the normal damage. Imagine then using Fiery Torment and proccing Eternal Suffering, with it more than doubling the Burning duration on the boss target. Then you use Latafayn's on-use effect to deal that six-turn double-damage burn with a 25% damage bonus before then also being boosted by your fire damage bonus, all that stacking multiplicatively with the enemy's negative fire resistance caused by Fiery Torment. Then, as if that's not enough, turns later, your Fiery Torment explodes, boosted by 30% of all that damage and all the other damage you did during its duration, and then further by your fire damage bonus...

You can imagine, right? Lots of potential damage.

It's not exactly better than just building a Doombringer with a normal weapon, but it's definitely an interesting alternative way to do it. Just how effective it is depends on exactly how Fire Burn damage works, and if it lowers your up-front damage or not.

Haha. Talking about this almost makes me want to try building a caster Doombringer focused on fire damage and Staff Combat.

[u/pathofnut → u/Vandelier]

The issue is Fiery Torment and Incinerating Blows are dogshit talents that you wont catch me dead leveling past 1 lol

Someone else suggested using the training dummies and it was a very good advice. I did just that, I tested my current sword back to back with Latafayn and I found that they did around the same DPS. The active was like a guaranteed crit sort of, nothing more. Sure Im already built for physical while my fire bonuses may not be as great, but ultimately I dont think its worth it to build around a single late game random drop if the benefits arent massive.

And when you consider that for that bit of extra damage youd be losing a bunch of slowing effects as well as burst yeah I dont think this unique is specially good for doombringer.

PS: A potentially big factor is that I havent even learnt Eternal Suffering, that can surely ramp up the damage quite a bit, but as I said its a lot of investment for a weapon that isnt all that great. But its not like its terrible either, Id probably use it if I didnt get other good weapons.

PPS: Fire staff doombringer does sound interesting. You probably want to max fearscape and the entire fearscape shift tree for max damage and healing. Its weakpoint though would be lacking single target for which youd kinda want Latafayn I guess?

[u/Vandelier → u/pathofnut]

Yeah, although I wrote all that up, I ultimately agree on Latafayn. Unless you were already going hard on fire damage, I'm not sure why you'd ever actually use it. Honestly, though, it feels like it's a weapon practically made for messing around with using the item vault - the potential of the weapon is interesting, just impractical to build in mind of for the entire game until you get it otherwise.

But, hey, don't you dare go shitting on my precious Fiery Torment. :P

I just wish it were AoE damage like Corruptor's Corrosive Worm...

PPS: Fire staff doombringer does sound interesting. You probably want to max fearscape and the entire fearscape shift tree for max damage and healing. Its weakpoint though would be lacking single target for which youd kinda want Latafayn I guess?

I think even as a Staff Doombringer you'd still be doing most of your work in melee range. The focus would just shift almost entirely to fire damage, and your melee burst damage would be lowered a chunk. In turn, your fire AoE damage will increase pretty significantly due to being able to stack purely fire damage bonus.

Could use Latafayn. But since you can cause just about any Staff to do purely Fire melee damage by changing its aspect to fire, although its stat scaling would usually be kind of bad using it to attack (most staffs scale off magic at lower percentages than 2h weapons do with strength), you could probably make up for it by having a full focus into fire damage and utilizing Fiery Torment to boost single target burst.

Unless you happen to find a 2-handed weapon with fire damage type, you're probably best off with one of those two things.

I guess you could forego worrying about actual melee damage at all and focus on the staff accuracy bonus to procs kind of like a staff Reaver does. I'm fairly sure Incinerating Blows is considered a proc, like Reaver's Ruin talent, so... Plus Incinerating Blows can proc On Spell Hit stuff. The hard part with this would be min-maxing for this by NOT taking any Strength despite needing it for many talents...

[u/pathofnut → u/Vandelier]

If you go full fire spell route you could easily forego all skill trees that rely on STR early, since they work with melee hits anyway. Mid-late game you can get any good stuff you may want like blinding speed or demonic blood by hoarding STR equipment.

Strategy would be to max wraithform (there would be a lot of spare points), enter a room from a side wall, nuke someone with a rotation and leave the way you came with a movement infusion.

Youd probably want to mess with hexes as well, which a melee build doesnt have the time nor the points to do. Same applies to survival tree which is also useful for the ghost flanking.

My biggest concern would be sustaining vim without draining assault. Other spells can be paid with life no problem, but you need to be able to sustain fearscape and maw for a while to kill bosses. As I said the build would struggle with single target damage.

[u/Meraxes_7]

I personally would lean towards the first one for the cripple and global slow since the damage seems similar across them all. But i also have yet to beat nightmare with a melee class :P

[u/Electronic-Scar-5053]

I'm leaning to the voratun greatsword or lotafyn, i'm curious how lotafyn would work in the hellscape move doombringer has

[u/dude123nice]

It would be easier if you posted the other weapon damage representation, IMO

[u/pathofnut → u/dude123nice]

How so? This seemed simpler to compare.

[u/dude123nice → u/pathofnut]

I guess it's just oersonal preference, but I've never used this mode. I don't even understand how the dmg is calculated. Like "Power 176%" of what

[u/pathofnut → u/dude123nice]

Of the relevant stats such as physical power Im guessing? But I dont find that as important as its purely relative. If weapon A does 100% and weapon B does 120% you know that weapon B hits 20% higher on average.

[u/dude123nice → u/pathofnut]

Except thatnot how it works. Weapons have a bade damage that gets later multiplied by physhical power. Apparently the damage conversion is this: power = (sqrt(base_dmg / 10) + 1) / 2

I just think seing the raw numbers is more usefull.

[u/EatThisShoe → u/dude123nice]

It's literally a percentage multiplier. That whole equation you posted, it's the result of that. See the last line under Step 2, and how it is used in Step 5: https://te4.org/wiki/Combat_Damage