With my Woh and very average gear, it goes up to 34M. I've tried it with a 3750 dps unsocketed Maximus (currently equipped on my profile), just to check whether it was worth a gift, and it only went up to 44M. I thought it would go way higher with a 2-hander, so I'm a little surprised.
How high does your FB dot tick? And do you think that Maximus is worth a gift?
Ok, I guess it's time for fucking awesome stories...
The FB DOT tick value depends greatly on the following:
Speed of your weapon. A 3800 DPS 2h mace will always result in much stronger FB DOT ticks than a 3800 DPS 2h sword, because sword's DPS is so high only because of the attack speed, but FB DOT doesn't scale with it.
Target type: elite or non-elite. Since most top wizards run the Furnace + Bane of the Powerful + SoJ + Unity, they deal 2x more damage vs elites or even more. And since people like to show off, they'll tell you they hit for zillions of damage without clarifying that it's only vs elites. So you should take their replies with a grain of salt.
Legendary gems. Lots of people use Zei's Stone of Vengeance and the numbers they tell you are most probably from 50+ yards away from a target (yet people rarely mention that when they tell you they deal zillions of damage per tick). This is another reason why you should take replies with a grain of salt.
Buffs/debuffs. FB DOT snapshots those when being applied. This means that with exactly the same gear your FB DOT can tick for 100M or for 1B depending on what buffs you had and what debuffs were applied to your target before your first fire attack landed on that target. People usually tell you the highest tick they got even if that was in a group with +200% damage buff and +200% incoming damage debuff.
Why I'm saying all this stuff? Because it's really easy to get upset and discouraged to play FB wizard after some guys on the forum tell you something about 1B+ ticks without specifying ANY details whatsoever, while you only deal 50M+ per tick. 50M per tick with a 1hander and a gear like yours is totally fine. The number will get much higher once you find a decent 1 APS 2hander (preferrably the Furnace).
Your SK looks much more promissing than this Maximus, but you have to understand that SK pretty much means you'll have to run a Meteor build (since Hydra is kinda meh in SK setups), which means Cindercoat is mandatory AND you'll probably need even more RCR to support both Meteor and Apocalypse spam. So think twice if you want to pigeonhole yourself into that.
I'd say stash your Gift and farm rifts some more. Maybe you'll get some cool Serpent's Sparker or even Furnace, who knows? Those are definitely worth using Ramalandi's gift on.
For boss farming Blazing Hydra with SS would be the top pick.
The funny thing is that with my current gear (20% IAS) Blazing is stronger than Mammoth literally in every situation, even when Mammoth Hydra has 100% DPS uptime, which is usually not the case in lvl 30+ GRifts due to constant kiting. More importantly, the difference will become even more significant once I max IAS via paragon points and get IAS on SS (which is another +16% IAS total).
So I'm pretty much in the exact same position as this fellow Wizard, and your saying the SS outperforms them both?
Not exactly. I only tested SS vs Maximus, since I don't have a decent Sunkeeper. Also, I was only talking about Blazing Hydra builds. For Mammoth Hydra results could be a bit different, since IAS would be pretty much irrelevant.
I could need some help deciding what items to use.
I don't have Tasker and Theo or Furnace. I am not sure what is best for a Mammoth + Apocalypse wizard. Even if Mammoth Hydra doesn't get IAS, is it worth taking Maxiums and lose: 22% fire, 23% elite / x2 Hydra + some int. etc.?
That's tricky. Did you test it on Ghom/Butcher? I can't say anything about Mammoth Hydra (imo, this spell is clunky and Blazing Hydra seems to be stronger vs bosses anyway). I only know that for Blazing Hydra SS outperforms Maximus hands down, unless you get the most out of the fire chain.
I wouldn't use ramalandi's gift on any of those. Just wait till you get some weapon with decent damage range roll or nearly perfect other rolls so that you could enchant the damage range.
That's all good for a typical DB of a small server app, which I'm pretty sure D3 (like any MMO game) has little in common with. Also, you seem to forget that a product of a scale of D3 usually has a specific debug process that any issue report passes through, which also adds some overhead. That's why most issues (non-'blockers') never get fixed immediately. So, like I said, get some patience.
They didn't say it's a bug, but they said that they plan to implement IAS scaling for all hydra runes.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/14058735980#9 "Correct! All runes of the Hydra skill take Critical Hit Damage and Critical Hit Chance into account, and most of them (except Blazing Hydra) can deal Critical Hits.
Blazing Hydra is the only rune where CHD and CHC are rolled into the attack itself. Instead of producing Critical Hits, Blazing Hydra calculates CHC and CHD as part of its regular attack damage. It’s also the only rune that incorporates Increased Attack Speed, which increases its damage per tick.
Although the other runes don’t currently benefit from Increased Attack Speed, it is something we want to implement in the future."
At the moment, it seems Hydra doesn't take into account your attack speed though. That's the reason why the top wizards in the leaderboard are using 2-handers (The Furnace) instead of Serpent Sparker.
There was a blue post confirming that only Blazing hydra benefits from IAS.
On SS vs 2handers: with gear that I have SS (w/o Ramalandi) + Blazing hydra does more DOT damage than a nearly perfect Maximus (with Ramalandi), and that's with no TnT and without +hydra damage on my FB source. I guess, with TnT, full +hydra damage and Ramalandi on SS (hence +7% IAS) the difference would be even more significant in favor of SS. +Elite damage on Furnace probably makes up for that when fighting elites and bosses though.
Or just stash it and keep farming and gambling for another SoJ. Rerolling an elemental bonus to something else kinda kills the purpose of a SoJ. If you want socket so badly, just use some other ring temporarily (I'd use one of those with 5 primary stats), until you get a proper SoJ.
The FB DOT tick value depends greatly on the following:
- Speed of your weapon. A 3800 DPS 2h mace will always result in much stronger FB DOT ticks than a 3800 DPS 2h sword, because sword's DPS is so high only because of the attack speed, but FB DOT doesn't scale with it.
- Target type: elite or non-elite. Since most top wizards run the Furnace + Bane of the Powerful + SoJ + Unity, they deal 2x more damage vs elites or even more. And since people like to show off, they'll tell you they hit for zillions of damage without clarifying that it's only vs elites. So you should take their replies with a grain of salt.
- Legendary gems. Lots of people use Zei's Stone of Vengeance and the numbers they tell you are most probably from 50+ yards away from a target (yet people rarely mention that when they tell you they deal zillions of damage per tick). This is another reason why you should take replies with a grain of salt.
- Buffs/debuffs. FB DOT snapshots those when being applied. This means that with exactly the same gear your FB DOT can tick for 100M or for 1B depending on what buffs you had and what debuffs were applied to your target before your first fire attack landed on that target. People usually tell you the highest tick they got even if that was in a group with +200% damage buff and +200% incoming damage debuff.
Why I'm saying all this stuff? Because it's really easy to get upset and discouraged to play FB wizard after some guys on the forum tell you something about 1B+ ticks without specifying ANY details whatsoever, while you only deal 50M+ per tick. 50M per tick with a 1hander and a gear like yours is totally fine. The number will get much higher once you find a decent 1 APS 2hander (preferrably the Furnace).Your SK looks much more promissing than this Maximus, but you have to understand that SK pretty much means you'll have to run a Meteor build (since Hydra is kinda meh in SK setups), which means Cindercoat is mandatory AND you'll probably need even more RCR to support both Meteor and Apocalypse spam. So think twice if you want to pigeonhole yourself into that.
I'd say stash your Gift and farm rifts some more. Maybe you'll get some cool Serpent's Sparker or even Furnace, who knows? Those are definitely worth using Ramalandi's gift on.
Just calm down and stop the hysteria. Blizzard will fix that eventually.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/14058735980#9
"Correct! All runes of the Hydra skill take Critical Hit Damage and Critical Hit Chance into account, and most of them (except Blazing Hydra) can deal Critical Hits.
Blazing Hydra is the only rune where CHD and CHC are rolled into the attack itself. Instead of producing Critical Hits, Blazing Hydra calculates CHC and CHD as part of its regular attack damage. It’s also the only rune that incorporates Increased Attack Speed, which increases its damage per tick.
Although the other runes don’t currently benefit from Increased Attack Speed, it is something we want to implement in the future."
On SS vs 2handers: with gear that I have SS (w/o Ramalandi) + Blazing hydra does more DOT damage than a nearly perfect Maximus (with Ramalandi), and that's with no TnT and without +hydra damage on my FB source. I guess, with TnT, full +hydra damage and Ramalandi on SS (hence +7% IAS) the difference would be even more significant in favor of SS. +Elite damage on Furnace probably makes up for that when fighting elites and bosses though.