I am not a fan of ancient items in their current implementation at all. Specifically why has to deal with what I expect out of legendaries and sets. What I think makes them special is that they give bonuses that you have to alter your build and gameplay style to maximize their benefits. One of the better examples I can think of right now is something like jade doc, where you shift constant damage in to a strategy to put your dots on everything, then group them up for a harvest. It requires a radical change from non-jade gameplay to take advantage of. Individual legendary affixes should still require some kind of gameplay change, but not as drastic as a 6 piece set (It is only 1/6 of the item investment after all). The gameplay change is what makes legendaries and such "legendary".
Ancient legendaries... don't do anything special over normal legendaries. They just have "Here have some more damage/hp" without changing the way you get to play the game at all. Not even a change in build that unlocks new items for use. Then there is the whole ugly scene of power creep and not doing it in any creative way... (Just +numbers, not something that relies on a new style that happens to be stronger).
Adding additional stat rolls is a bit more interesting than just ramping up numbers, but still doesn't do anything about the issue that ancient legendaries dont change anything compared to normal legendaries, other than "more numbers that buff you up". I honestly think they should just stick to adding properties to unused legendaries and making new ones with other cool properties.
Reflect scales, not sure why you dont see it unless you were perma smoke screening. Another interesting thing is your generators seem to do 400% more reflect than spenders. I fire a hungering arrow and its 1 shot but i can lfb them?
I am pretty sure reflect deals a set amount of damage that is modified based on difficulty and proc coefficients. That would be why at higher grifts you take more damage from reflect damage, and especially why hungering arrow will kill you more than cluster arrow. Most generators don't hit massive groups of mobs at once so they have a much higher proc coefficient, which means they reflect more damage.
But yeah as far as "passive" goes I see it as the playstyle of setting down some kind of skill that does its work over time, and then you just go off to some place where you won't die while whatever you summoned does all the work. Even if your pets and summons do a vast majority of your damage, if you have to fight with them (Or they leash) or have to do something to keep them alive and summoning them, it becomes more active. It's about continuous input for fighting in the same location (Moving spots requires resummons and such so everyone has to do something no matter what when moving).
As far as I know tasker and theo buffs all pets summoned by your class skills and passives, but not items. The exceptions are items that summon pets that link to your class skills in some way (Like how baleful remnant phalanx avatars inherit your phalanx runes). So stuff like sentries and hydras are buffed because they are summoned by skills, but something like maximus demon isn't.
Correct me if I am wrong, I haven't tested this personally but that is what I have picked up from various conversations.
CDR works a bit strangely really...If I remember right each piece of gear reduces the current cd by its listed %, compounding to create a total cdr%.
So the calculation looks like CD=CD*(1-CDR1)(1-CDR2)(1-CDR3) and so on.
What this means is that a single CDR rating of X % allows for 1/(1-X%) more uses of a skill, scaling asymptotically up to 100% which would give 0 cd and therefore infinite use (But no cdr is approaches that high, its usually 50% at most, and thats for single skills as a legendary affix, 10% is the highest general CDR rating)
However when compounding CDR ratings, each rating allows successively more uses creating an exponential scale, two separate 25% CDR boosts will reduce the CD to ~56% of what it was, allowing for 77% more use of the skill. This is consistent with math as each 25% CDR boost gives you 33% more use of the skill from the previous value, and 1.33^2 gives ~1.77.
So what the hell does this mean...
CDR scales differently when you are increasing a single rating (upgrading gear for instance) versus stacking different ratings across different pieces. These differences in scaling also make a smaller amount of higher CDR ratings more effective than a large amount of small CDR ratings (Using the former numbers as an example. 2 25% CDR boosts give 77% more uses, while a single 50% will give 100% more). However it still effectively stacks with itself, growing exponentially more powerful the more that is gathered.
The biggest reason people's dps begins to suffer after stacking so much CDR is because they have to give up other damage affixes that compound with so many other factors that they are more effective at their current levels than what the new CDR would give.
So here's a question, is the freeze effect done before the rimeheart checks to proc? In effect, can the same attack that freezes your target shatter them? It could be interesting with something like comet meteor (bar proc coefficients) which has a guaranteed freeze if you chill them first.
I think FC won't pull the mobs with you if it would deposit them on to an unpathable area. From my experience the pull works well in open areas because you can go anywhere, but charge towards a wall or a tree and the mobs usually wont follow because the area immediately in front of your ending position (the spot FC drops the mobs) is covered by a wall.
I'm pretty sure this is the deciding factor in the pull, but look out for that factor and maybe experiment with it.
I think attack speed is fine where it is, the issue is that most builds are limited by resources or cooldowns, limiting AS to builds that don't use heavy resource spenders or cooldowns for their damage, which limits them to generators/signatures, which seriously hurts damage (short of a couple legendaries that buff said skills).
Take for example my barbarian, who runs boulder build. Attack speed has almost zero benefit, because most of his skills aren't affected by attack speed, and the ones that are you are using only ~10-20% of the time.
Now switch classes to a velvet camaral/myken's build as a wizard and use electrocute as a powerhouse. Here, your primary attack benefits fully from attack speed and you don't have to worry much about resources and cooldowns. Here you would take attack speed because it benefits you far more from the other two. The only issue is that builds like this often don't have damage that is competitive with resource spender/cooldown builds (Moreso when these are buffed up with said stats).
AS might also work for a spending build that also generates from attacking only, but with spirit regen stat on monks, that leaves just barbarians, who use other skills most the time.
Also not only AS fell out of favor to other stats because most builds favor them, we have to factor in the diminishing of on hit effects around the board. Stuff like Critical Mass, Vanilla Thrive on Chaos, and Life on hit were really major back then and all benefited from attack speed making them score more hits and increasing their power. With most of these mechanics gone (I don't know anyone who stacks Life on hit, globes/life per kill/class skills regen now from what I see.) the boost that they receive from attack speed became irrelevant, effectively "nerfing" attack speed.
Although if I remember right their rationale behind nerfing AS was because of these bonuses in addition to the damage bonus, so if the bonuses from High AS outside of DPS really don't significantly exist anymore, that might be grounds for buffing it back up.
So, really I would say it depends on the influence of "on hit" effects, if they are much less powerful and widespread now it would be a good idea to buff it back up.
I would argue battle rage runes, considering both are buffs based on the damage you put out. It is really just a question of if you want to focus on clearing groups or single target damage. Bloodbath has no comparison against packed mobs while marauder's rage is better on single target (Bloodbath does nothing without other enemies to splash damage to/from).
From what I see your %elemental damage bonuses are all over the place (Split between lightning, fire, and physical), if you can focus them to a single type and build around it you should find yourself clearing faster. Right now the extra elemental affixes are more or less wasted. If you are running lightning build TF/Odyn son are good items to look for (both have amazing procs, odyn son gives %lightning damage), good luck finding either though, they are rarer than most legendaries.
Also holy max hp batman. At almost 700k health you will get a lot more out of allres than you will vitality. So switch the gems socketed in your gear to rubies/diamonds, no amethysts. This will give you more effective healing (There is less damage to heal), while maintaining your toughness or possibly increasing it.
Kind of as an addition, at 6.6 million toughness on the armory, you might be running ~10 million in game, which is enough to more than safely farm torment 3 without any unity tricks or call of the ancients. Just keep up your healing and don't get caught by frozen orbs.
If you are runnning bloodthirst, you have almost no use for primary healing stats. Just go straight for the health globe healing bonus on your gear and the life per fury spent translation means you can get values >2k life per fury spent (That leads to some REALLY nice healing). Healing primaries, again, pretty much wasted affixes.
Build up some sets! Set bonuses can provide incredibly powerful boosts that push you up tiers. Farming act 1 bounties to get a ring of royal grandeur first isnt the worst idea either, because it makes aquiring those bonuses easier and lets you pack on more (Less pieces for one bonus, more for another).
Good sets that you can set up almost immediately through crafting (given patterns) are Aughild's (7% reduced melee and ranged damage 2p, 15% increased damage to and reduced damage from elites), as well as Asheara's (2p gives allres, 3p gives %life, 4p gives you a proc that summons the scoundrel, templar, and enchantress all at once for some time). If you are cooldown reliant captain crimson's and born's also make decent sets.
Besides that are the rarer but far more powerful class sets, Might of the earth 4p plus lut socks lets you spawn earthquakes for days, and provides an easy source of damage. (Fire or cold builds are favored for this). Immortal King's makes call of the ancients permanent, allowing you to leverage their bonuses a lot more. Raekor's gives quite a gameplay change and is great for builds that spend a lot of fury in mobs. For these, its up to you.
This is mostly built on my experience and building as a physical barb, but I believe a lot of it is general gearing principles.
I can confirm that ancient spear does alternate. Equip weapons that have different element damage affixes (The ones that give bonus damage on your weapons dps number, one that gives +arcane and another with +holy damage for example).
You will notice some boulders will make the arcane damage effect (the explosion thing), while others will make the holy damage effect (vanishing corpses). This also means you can game the boulders to hit with a certain weapon if you can see your swing animations, which can make a noticeable damage difference depending on your weapons.
I would run with the 10% damage weapon unless you seriously need vitality, because as far as I know that multiplies with all other bonuses, while the 10% difference in ancient spear damage will stack additively with those from your boots/helm (not to mention the 10% bonus damage affects everything).
Well I don't think the chests were put in there to FARM gear, that's what monsters are for. They should be just a nice little bonus of free loot when you find them really.
Well for physical boulder toss, you can get by with just about damage buffing gear because the skills stand on their own pretty well. Just pick up stuff like 300th spear, physical damage boosters, and elite damage boosters.
With that, Raekor's set is extremely powerful with a physical build, because the charge runes give you incredible amounts of fury in groups, and on the bigger maps you can katamari around a mob of enemies until you want to drop a boulder on them (or hota them). Just take battle rage with bloodbath, its like area damage, but way better. Immortal King's is also an option because if you take ancient's fury, the ancients will feed you fury to spend and buff up your single target damage nicely. Hell with the right pieces and a ring of royal grandeur you can get both bonuses going at once.
Welp... Take a look at the blue tracker, blizz is going to buff both male and female to a pointfaster than the original female leap animation! Looks like that is going to be quite fun with the lut socks.
Ancient legendaries... don't do anything special over normal legendaries. They just have "Here have some more damage/hp" without changing the way you get to play the game at all. Not even a change in build that unlocks new items for use. Then there is the whole ugly scene of power creep and not doing it in any creative way... (Just +numbers, not something that relies on a new style that happens to be stronger).
Adding additional stat rolls is a bit more interesting than just ramping up numbers, but still doesn't do anything about the issue that ancient legendaries dont change anything compared to normal legendaries, other than "more numbers that buff you up". I honestly think they should just stick to adding properties to unused legendaries and making new ones with other cool properties.
But yeah as far as "passive" goes I see it as the playstyle of setting down some kind of skill that does its work over time, and then you just go off to some place where you won't die while whatever you summoned does all the work. Even if your pets and summons do a vast majority of your damage, if you have to fight with them (Or they leash) or have to do something to keep them alive and summoning them, it becomes more active. It's about continuous input for fighting in the same location (Moving spots requires resummons and such so everyone has to do something no matter what when moving).
Correct me if I am wrong, I haven't tested this personally but that is what I have picked up from various conversations.
So the calculation looks like CD=CD*(1-CDR1)(1-CDR2)(1-CDR3) and so on.
What this means is that a single CDR rating of X % allows for 1/(1-X%) more uses of a skill, scaling asymptotically up to 100% which would give 0 cd and therefore infinite use (But no cdr is approaches that high, its usually 50% at most, and thats for single skills as a legendary affix, 10% is the highest general CDR rating)
However when compounding CDR ratings, each rating allows successively more uses creating an exponential scale, two separate 25% CDR boosts will reduce the CD to ~56% of what it was, allowing for 77% more use of the skill. This is consistent with math as each 25% CDR boost gives you 33% more use of the skill from the previous value, and 1.33^2 gives ~1.77.
So what the hell does this mean...
CDR scales differently when you are increasing a single rating (upgrading gear for instance) versus stacking different ratings across different pieces. These differences in scaling also make a smaller amount of higher CDR ratings more effective than a large amount of small CDR ratings (Using the former numbers as an example. 2 25% CDR boosts give 77% more uses, while a single 50% will give 100% more). However it still effectively stacks with itself, growing exponentially more powerful the more that is gathered.
The biggest reason people's dps begins to suffer after stacking so much CDR is because they have to give up other damage affixes that compound with so many other factors that they are more effective at their current levels than what the new CDR would give.
I'm pretty sure this is the deciding factor in the pull, but look out for that factor and maybe experiment with it.
Take for example my barbarian, who runs boulder build. Attack speed has almost zero benefit, because most of his skills aren't affected by attack speed, and the ones that are you are using only ~10-20% of the time.
Now switch classes to a velvet camaral/myken's build as a wizard and use electrocute as a powerhouse. Here, your primary attack benefits fully from attack speed and you don't have to worry much about resources and cooldowns. Here you would take attack speed because it benefits you far more from the other two. The only issue is that builds like this often don't have damage that is competitive with resource spender/cooldown builds (Moreso when these are buffed up with said stats).
AS might also work for a spending build that also generates from attacking only, but with spirit regen stat on monks, that leaves just barbarians, who use other skills most the time.
Also not only AS fell out of favor to other stats because most builds favor them, we have to factor in the diminishing of on hit effects around the board. Stuff like Critical Mass, Vanilla Thrive on Chaos, and Life on hit were really major back then and all benefited from attack speed making them score more hits and increasing their power. With most of these mechanics gone (I don't know anyone who stacks Life on hit, globes/life per kill/class skills regen now from what I see.) the boost that they receive from attack speed became irrelevant, effectively "nerfing" attack speed.
Although if I remember right their rationale behind nerfing AS was because of these bonuses in addition to the damage bonus, so if the bonuses from High AS outside of DPS really don't significantly exist anymore, that might be grounds for buffing it back up.
So, really I would say it depends on the influence of "on hit" effects, if they are much less powerful and widespread now it would be a good idea to buff it back up.
First legendary source from Kadala.
Winter Flurry, <100 shards.
I then got a well rolled TF the day after, and the day after that I won the lottery. (that last part didn't really happen though)
But most of that is me liking to argue...
Also holy max hp batman. At almost 700k health you will get a lot more out of allres than you will vitality. So switch the gems socketed in your gear to rubies/diamonds, no amethysts. This will give you more effective healing (There is less damage to heal), while maintaining your toughness or possibly increasing it.
Kind of as an addition, at 6.6 million toughness on the armory, you might be running ~10 million in game, which is enough to more than safely farm torment 3 without any unity tricks or call of the ancients. Just keep up your healing and don't get caught by frozen orbs.
If you are runnning bloodthirst, you have almost no use for primary healing stats. Just go straight for the health globe healing bonus on your gear and the life per fury spent translation means you can get values >2k life per fury spent (That leads to some REALLY nice healing). Healing primaries, again, pretty much wasted affixes.
Build up some sets! Set bonuses can provide incredibly powerful boosts that push you up tiers. Farming act 1 bounties to get a ring of royal grandeur first isnt the worst idea either, because it makes aquiring those bonuses easier and lets you pack on more (Less pieces for one bonus, more for another).
Good sets that you can set up almost immediately through crafting (given patterns) are Aughild's (7% reduced melee and ranged damage 2p, 15% increased damage to and reduced damage from elites), as well as Asheara's (2p gives allres, 3p gives %life, 4p gives you a proc that summons the scoundrel, templar, and enchantress all at once for some time). If you are cooldown reliant captain crimson's and born's also make decent sets.
Besides that are the rarer but far more powerful class sets, Might of the earth 4p plus lut socks lets you spawn earthquakes for days, and provides an easy source of damage. (Fire or cold builds are favored for this). Immortal King's makes call of the ancients permanent, allowing you to leverage their bonuses a lot more. Raekor's gives quite a gameplay change and is great for builds that spend a lot of fury in mobs. For these, its up to you.
This is mostly built on my experience and building as a physical barb, but I believe a lot of it is general gearing principles.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Kalix-1356/hero/20313073 <-Profile Link if you want some examples.
You will notice some boulders will make the arcane damage effect (the explosion thing), while others will make the holy damage effect (vanishing corpses). This also means you can game the boulders to hit with a certain weapon if you can see your swing animations, which can make a noticeable damage difference depending on your weapons.
I would run with the 10% damage weapon unless you seriously need vitality, because as far as I know that multiplies with all other bonuses, while the 10% difference in ancient spear damage will stack additively with those from your boots/helm (not to mention the 10% bonus damage affects everything).
With that, Raekor's set is extremely powerful with a physical build, because the charge runes give you incredible amounts of fury in groups, and on the bigger maps you can katamari around a mob of enemies until you want to drop a boulder on them (or hota them). Just take battle rage with bloodbath, its like area damage, but way better. Immortal King's is also an option because if you take ancient's fury, the ancients will feed you fury to spend and buff up your single target damage nicely. Hell with the right pieces and a ring of royal grandeur you can get both bonuses going at once.