Try high "Life After Kill" stats. An amulet would be a good choice here. I run Archon without life steal or LOH, relying on picking off weak mobs with LAK to counter Reflect mobs.
I was at one point thinking abouting purchasing a 1500 dps scorn with no lifesteal and even one with lifesteal, but then I took into consideration a 10% critical hit loss. It would have been a significant dps increase but I tested the build with a different two hander and realized just how much that extra 10% critical came in handy for Critical Mass proccing. Granted Energy Twister with Storm Chaser is OP for proccing CM but I'm sure its bound to get nerfed eventually so I tested the critical chance vs 2H build on other skills. I personally wouldn't give up that extra critical chance cause it is helpful. Even for other skills.
But the main purpose of an Archon build is to be able to keep archon up as much as possible. Of course that is also determined by how many mobs are in each zone at the time, if you could keep archon active long enough then critical chance wouldn't really matter, I think the longest I've kept arching up was about 15 to 20 mins straight. Though even your archon abilities proc CM so that's another reason why I feel losing that potential critical chance is a bad idea. Even if you can keep archon up for 4-5 mins by the time it wears off its already cooled down and you can use it again..
Sorry if I went off topic a bit, this topic is mostly concerned with is whether you really need life steal on your weapon or not. I do not run with lifesteal on my weapon as you can see, and I can tell you that if I'm not careful Reflect Damage mobs can eat me alive. But I have found a way to counter it. Not too many people like to run with Archon + Teleport, but I love it. I use it to speed up my runs also by constantly teleporting. Most run with Improved Dmg or reduced cooldown, but I can tell you Teleport + having some pickup radius gear is all you need, you don't even need pickup radius gear honestly. By the time you need to heal while fighting reflect dmg elites you've probably killed or done enough damage to one of them for a health globe to drop. Just teleport in and get it... =)
There. 10 posts. Finally can link things. My profile is also in my sig.
I use life on kill on my amulet as the way to cope, just as an example. IMO, life on hit/leech get really pricey. <Might shop around for a trifecta amulet with LAK. Those are hard to find, though...
Generally you need some form of healing for reflect dmg mobs. With high dps Life Steal is a great source of that. But with no life steal or life on hit you'll be walking a fine line.
In general I would recommend against it.....becuase extra health reflect dmg hulking phase beasts are no joke.
If you get a Skorn, do you gain or loose life in archon form when fighting reflect?
Depends entirely on how high your resists/armor are.
If they're too low then you'll be dealing more damage to yourself than is healed through life steal.
And then after that your resistances need to be high enough so that you can heal through both the reflect damage AND the attacks of the elites in question.
If you get a Skorn, do you gain or loose life in archon form when fighting reflect?
Depends entirely on how high your resists/armor are.
If they're too low then you'll be dealing more damage to yourself than is healed through life steal.
And then after that your resistances need to be high enough so that you can heal through both the reflect damage AND the attacks of the elites in question.
This is it exactly. Reportedly the reflect damage is reduced by physical resistance so as you raise that stat you take less and less damage. Similarly, gaining dps means you gain more life so you can eventually break even, or even gain life over reflect mobs at high dps and resists. I imagine armor also affects the reflected damage.
But isnt the amount the mobs reflect % based? Then it dont matter how much you damage?
Yes it is, but imagine this scenario. You have two wizards one with 100k dps and one with 50k dps. Both have %95 mitigation and %10 life steal are their full damage gets reflected back at them.
The one doing 50k dps will take 50k*.05 = 2.5k damage per second from reflect
The one doing 100k dps will take 100k*.05 = 5k damage per second from reflect
The one doing 50k dps will gain 50k*.1 = 5k health per second from reflect
The one doing 50k dps will gain 100k*.1 = 10k health per second from reflect
So if you find the net healing of both wizards you will find that even though the reflect dmg scales as a %, so too does the healing you get from life steal. But as the healing scales up the attacks from whatever mob is also hitting you stays static. So the wiz doing 100k dps had 5k hps and the wiz doing 50k dps had 2.5k hps, thus giving the higher dps wizard more room to take additional damage from other sources.
TL:DR %Healing from a higher dps is a higher absolute value than % healing from lower dps.
But isnt the amount the mobs reflect % based? Then it dont matter how much you damage?
I believe it is % based but also affected by damage reduction. If you have 90% damage reduction you'll take twice as much from reflect mobs as someone with 95% damage reduction if you both have the same dps.
When I first tried Archon, I was slowly getting drained in life because I had resists on like 1 item. Now that I have more resists, my life stays steady.
Generally, skorn is overpriced for the damage that it does. A good 1h rare + triumvirate combo, at the same price of a skorn, will end up doing roughly the same damage but *with* life steal.
With a 1h though, unless you have absolutely godly resists, you'll almost always still be losing hp against reflect packs, just not that much.
Don't worry too much about getting back into archon once out of it though, you can easily swap to a 1h/oh combo and fire off energy twisters for 5 sec before swapping back into your main weapon. It's tremendously cheaper than trying to get static apoc on your gear that is never used when you're in archon.
I was at one point thinking abouting purchasing a 1500 dps scorn with no lifesteal and even one with lifesteal, but then I took into consideration a 10% critical hit loss. It would have been a significant dps increase but I tested the build with a different two hander and realized just how much that extra 10% critical came in handy for Critical Mass proccing. Granted Energy Twister with Storm Chaser is OP for proccing CM but I'm sure its bound to get nerfed eventually so I tested the critical chance vs 2H build on other skills. I personally wouldn't give up that extra critical chance cause it is helpful. Even for other skills.
But the main purpose of an Archon build is to be able to keep archon up as much as possible. Of course that is also determined by how many mobs are in each zone at the time, if you could keep archon active long enough then critical chance wouldn't really matter, I think the longest I've kept arching up was about 15 to 20 mins straight. Though even your archon abilities proc CM so that's another reason why I feel losing that potential critical chance is a bad idea. Even if you can keep archon up for 4-5 mins by the time it wears off its already cooled down and you can use it again..
Sorry if I went off topic a bit, this topic is mostly concerned with is whether you really need life steal on your weapon or not. I do not run with lifesteal on my weapon as you can see, and I can tell you that if I'm not careful Reflect Damage mobs can eat me alive. But I have found a way to counter it. Not too many people like to run with Archon + Teleport, but I love it. I use it to speed up my runs also by constantly teleporting. Most run with Improved Dmg or reduced cooldown, but I can tell you Teleport + having some pickup radius gear is all you need, you don't even need pickup radius gear honestly. By the time you need to heal while fighting reflect dmg elites you've probably killed or done enough damage to one of them for a health globe to drop. Just teleport in and get it... =)
Exactly this ! Dont play Skorn with Archon as you will lose sooo much archon time without an offhand.
If Archon time is a problem, you can just swap to a cheap 1h+OH, both with AP on crit, to make it easier to refresh the CD on Archon. That's what I do and it works very well. Just remember to refresh Magic Weapon before popping Archon since weapon swapping makes it fall off.
Archon downtime shouldn't be a deciding factor in your choice of 1h vs 2h, it really just boils down to DPS vs Life Steal and which you need more (with cost thrown in there somewhere).
I'm using skorn with LS, quite honestly it simplifies the game a fair bit. Archon being an easy mode is made an even easier mode with LS. If you look at the monster power in coming patch - i think that LS will play out much better than LAK if you go for higher monster powers. I have no issues at all with reflect mobs, just right click on them and give it a couple of seconds to die.
Do not forget that blizzard acknowledges the problem with the blood magic rune on the force weapon - they are admitting it is a bug that it doesn't work for DoT based damage skills which includes archon. If they do fix it - it basically means you no longer need to worry about healing as it would be covered by that. Surely 1.5% is low, however if your DPS is above 200k - then 1.5% would be more than enough at that gear level to keep yourself healed.
I do not agree with the pricing though - for example my skorn (in my sig on my wizard) is a relatively good skorn, i got that for 100m. Right now, using the calculators - if i wish to beat the DPS from this skorn i need to buy at a very least a 900 DPS 1 hander with crit + OS + 150ish INT, looking at AH that will cost me about 40m min. To really add the total DPS back to where it is for me now i will also need chantodo's offhand with at least 100-400 dmg on it, that costs at least 120m. Hence i do not see how can a 1 hander + OH be on par in terms of pricing for the same level of DPS attainable. A skorn with my stats without LS will cost nearly half the price i paid for it, probably around 50m.
So this, like i mentioned in my archon guide - really depends on the amount of gold you have available. If you have a couple hundred mil to spare - you can get 1h+OH, if you have 100m to spare get a good skorn with LS, if you have 50m or less get a skorn without LS. Of course you can get a much lower 1h+OH but you'll lose out on anything from 30-60k DPS based on the rest of your gear.
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I'm using skorn with LS, quite honestly it simplifies the game a fair bit. Archon being an easy mode is made an even easier mode with LS. If you look at the monster power in coming patch - i think that LS will play out much better than LAK if you go for higher monster powers. I have no issues at all with reflect mobs, just right click on them and give it a couple of seconds to die.
Do not forget that blizzard acknowledges the problem with the blood magic rune on the force weapon - they are admitting it is a bug that it doesn't work for DoT based damage skills which includes archon. If they do fix it - it basically means you no longer need to worry about healing as it would be covered by that. Surely 1.5% is low, however if your DPS is above 200k - then 1.5% would be more than enough at that gear level to keep yourself healed.
I do not agree with the pricing though - for example my skorn (in my sig on my wizard) is a relatively good skorn, i got that for 100m. Right now, using the calculators - if i wish to beat the DPS from this skorn i need to buy at a very least a 900 DPS 1 hander with crit + OS + 150ish INT, looking at AH that will cost me about 40m min. To really add the total DPS back to where it is for me now i will also need chantodo's offhand with at least 100-400 dmg on it, that costs at least 120m. Hence i do not see how can a 1 hander + OH be on par in terms of pricing for the same level of DPS attainable. A skorn with my stats without LS will cost nearly half the price i paid for it, probably around 50m.
So this, like i mentioned in my archon guide - really depends on the amount of gold you have available. If you have a couple hundred mil to spare - you can get 1h+OH, if you have 100m to spare get a good skorn with LS, if you have 50m or less get a skorn without LS. Of course you can get a much lower 1h+OH but you'll lose out on anything from 30-60k DPS based on the rest of your gear.
I mostly agree with your post but I'd just like to add to not underestimate the Triumvirate with an all physical damage weapon, especially since they're fixing the damage of the +elemental damage % affix in the next patch to include max weapon damage and not just min damage. Not only are they cheaper but they can outperform a lot of the Chantodo's OHs at low to mid level. I'm not sure how they compare at top levels of each, either in price or dps, but I suspect it's fairly close.
My OH is equivalent to a 200 Int, 100-300 damage, 10% crit, 9% attack speed Chantodo's Force, for example, and I only paid 1.5 mil for mine whereas the cheapest Forces are easily over 10 mil, and I have no idea how much one with those stats would cost. My setup with 1h+OH is equivalent to a 1250 dps skorn with 240 crit damage including 100 crit in socket (that would cost me another 16-20 mil), and 300 Int. My 1h+OH cost me under 10 mil while a skorn would cost at least 30-40 mil, not counting the gem cost. Also, 100 mil for your skorn would be a steal now. The only 1350 dps skorns with Int and Life Steal I see on the AH are 250 mil+, though they have more crit damage. It's actually somewhat hard to price Skorns because there's only 2 pages of them with Int and Life steal and the dps range is quite large.
Or % life steal would be mandatory?
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But you can look up "Jaetch#1861" on diabloprogress and go from there.
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I was at one point thinking abouting purchasing a 1500 dps scorn with no lifesteal and even one with lifesteal, but then I took into consideration a 10% critical hit loss. It would have been a significant dps increase but I tested the build with a different two hander and realized just how much that extra 10% critical came in handy for Critical Mass proccing. Granted Energy Twister with Storm Chaser is OP for proccing CM but I'm sure its bound to get nerfed eventually so I tested the critical chance vs 2H build on other skills. I personally wouldn't give up that extra critical chance cause it is helpful. Even for other skills.
But the main purpose of an Archon build is to be able to keep archon up as much as possible. Of course that is also determined by how many mobs are in each zone at the time, if you could keep archon active long enough then critical chance wouldn't really matter, I think the longest I've kept arching up was about 15 to 20 mins straight. Though even your archon abilities proc CM so that's another reason why I feel losing that potential critical chance is a bad idea. Even if you can keep archon up for 4-5 mins by the time it wears off its already cooled down and you can use it again..
Sorry if I went off topic a bit, this topic is mostly concerned with is whether you really need life steal on your weapon or not. I do not run with lifesteal on my weapon as you can see, and I can tell you that if I'm not careful Reflect Damage mobs can eat me alive. But I have found a way to counter it. Not too many people like to run with Archon + Teleport, but I love it. I use it to speed up my runs also by constantly teleporting. Most run with Improved Dmg or reduced cooldown, but I can tell you Teleport + having some pickup radius gear is all you need, you don't even need pickup radius gear honestly. By the time you need to heal while fighting reflect dmg elites you've probably killed or done enough damage to one of them for a health globe to drop. Just teleport in and get it... =)
There. 10 posts. Finally can link things. My profile is also in my sig.
I use life on kill on my amulet as the way to cope, just as an example. IMO, life on hit/leech get really pricey. <Might shop around for a trifecta amulet with LAK. Those are hard to find, though...
Armory | YouTube | Twitter | Clan Site
In general I would recommend against it.....becuase extra health reflect dmg hulking phase beasts are no joke.
Depends entirely on how high your resists/armor are.
If they're too low then you'll be dealing more damage to yourself than is healed through life steal.
And then after that your resistances need to be high enough so that you can heal through both the reflect damage AND the attacks of the elites in question.
This is it exactly. Reportedly the reflect damage is reduced by physical resistance so as you raise that stat you take less and less damage. Similarly, gaining dps means you gain more life so you can eventually break even, or even gain life over reflect mobs at high dps and resists. I imagine armor also affects the reflected damage.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
Yes it is, but imagine this scenario. You have two wizards one with 100k dps and one with 50k dps. Both have %95 mitigation and %10 life steal are their full damage gets reflected back at them.
The one doing 50k dps will take 50k*.05 = 2.5k damage per second from reflect
The one doing 100k dps will take 100k*.05 = 5k damage per second from reflect
The one doing 50k dps will gain 50k*.1 = 5k health per second from reflect
The one doing 50k dps will gain 100k*.1 = 10k health per second from reflect
So if you find the net healing of both wizards you will find that even though the reflect dmg scales as a %, so too does the healing you get from life steal. But as the healing scales up the attacks from whatever mob is also hitting you stays static. So the wiz doing 100k dps had 5k hps and the wiz doing 50k dps had 2.5k hps, thus giving the higher dps wizard more room to take additional damage from other sources.
TL:DR %Healing from a higher dps is a higher absolute value than % healing from lower dps.
I believe it is % based but also affected by damage reduction. If you have 90% damage reduction you'll take twice as much from reflect mobs as someone with 95% damage reduction if you both have the same dps.
When I first tried Archon, I was slowly getting drained in life because I had resists on like 1 item. Now that I have more resists, my life stays steady.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
With a 1h though, unless you have absolutely godly resists, you'll almost always still be losing hp against reflect packs, just not that much.
Don't worry too much about getting back into archon once out of it though, you can easily swap to a 1h/oh combo and fire off energy twisters for 5 sec before swapping back into your main weapon. It's tremendously cheaper than trying to get static apoc on your gear that is never used when you're in archon.
If Archon time is a problem, you can just swap to a cheap 1h+OH, both with AP on crit, to make it easier to refresh the CD on Archon. That's what I do and it works very well. Just remember to refresh Magic Weapon before popping Archon since weapon swapping makes it fall off.
Archon downtime shouldn't be a deciding factor in your choice of 1h vs 2h, it really just boils down to DPS vs Life Steal and which you need more (with cost thrown in there somewhere).
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
Do not forget that blizzard acknowledges the problem with the blood magic rune on the force weapon - they are admitting it is a bug that it doesn't work for DoT based damage skills which includes archon. If they do fix it - it basically means you no longer need to worry about healing as it would be covered by that. Surely 1.5% is low, however if your DPS is above 200k - then 1.5% would be more than enough at that gear level to keep yourself healed.
I do not agree with the pricing though - for example my skorn (in my sig on my wizard) is a relatively good skorn, i got that for 100m. Right now, using the calculators - if i wish to beat the DPS from this skorn i need to buy at a very least a 900 DPS 1 hander with crit + OS + 150ish INT, looking at AH that will cost me about 40m min. To really add the total DPS back to where it is for me now i will also need chantodo's offhand with at least 100-400 dmg on it, that costs at least 120m. Hence i do not see how can a 1 hander + OH be on par in terms of pricing for the same level of DPS attainable. A skorn with my stats without LS will cost nearly half the price i paid for it, probably around 50m.
So this, like i mentioned in my archon guide - really depends on the amount of gold you have available. If you have a couple hundred mil to spare - you can get 1h+OH, if you have 100m to spare get a good skorn with LS, if you have 50m or less get a skorn without LS. Of course you can get a much lower 1h+OH but you'll lose out on anything from 30-60k DPS based on the rest of your gear.
I mostly agree with your post but I'd just like to add to not underestimate the Triumvirate with an all physical damage weapon, especially since they're fixing the damage of the +elemental damage % affix in the next patch to include max weapon damage and not just min damage. Not only are they cheaper but they can outperform a lot of the Chantodo's OHs at low to mid level. I'm not sure how they compare at top levels of each, either in price or dps, but I suspect it's fairly close.
My OH is equivalent to a 200 Int, 100-300 damage, 10% crit, 9% attack speed Chantodo's Force, for example, and I only paid 1.5 mil for mine whereas the cheapest Forces are easily over 10 mil, and I have no idea how much one with those stats would cost. My setup with 1h+OH is equivalent to a 1250 dps skorn with 240 crit damage including 100 crit in socket (that would cost me another 16-20 mil), and 300 Int. My 1h+OH cost me under 10 mil while a skorn would cost at least 30-40 mil, not counting the gem cost. Also, 100 mil for your skorn would be a steal now. The only 1350 dps skorns with Int and Life Steal I see on the AH are 250 mil+, though they have more crit damage. It's actually somewhat hard to price Skorns because there's only 2 pages of them with Int and Life steal and the dps range is quite large.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard