After testing it some (mostly T4) I don't think holy gryf+jek is that great at all, and am not that big a fan of 6pc holy or fire. The set bonus is great for 2h builds, but I think we're wasting a lot of it while losing a ton of potential fire damage that is just stronger than the small window that we have AC down and 6pc doesn't. I've tried 2h with the same gear and honestly flinging endless shields is way more fun to me. So back to % gear.
Now using 2pc Akkhan + 2(3)pc aug + 2(3)pc crimson with magefist cinder, rorg+soj or unity. I'd like to be able to ditch the crimson set and shuffle things around for an andarial's, but rng is rng and all that, and I'm already down to 36% cdr which makes me sad. Overall though I feel a lot more effective with this setup using gryf+jek fire.
Whether the shield is actually necessary for fire is another story. I think it does more damage on groups, but you already do insane damage on groups and the shield doesn't return ping the way Shattered does. I'd probably swap it out for an Akarat's if I had one, while keeping the Gryf because endless shields are fun.
Does Holy Cause have an internal cooldown? It seems okay with just HF, but I didn't notice a big improvement when I was using Shattering as well. Maybe it's just how healing works compared to the damage of T4, but it wasn't exactly life changing and I got much more out of making the effort to walk to a health globe :/
In 2.0.5, when you use Shattering, you're splitting your 1 big shield into 3 smaller shields that ping around. With Combust, your shield hits the first target and then remains as a big strong shield that smashes into many more targets after that, each one with a chance at a decent aoe explosion (that does more aoe damage than shatters do single target.) I think that Shattering is funny, but I can't find any situation in which it is actually better than Combust. You don't get the screen filling madness because everything has already exploded.
Other benefits include fantastic AC synergy with Fire Starter, fast horsey becoming a surprisingly damaging attack (as well as transport and ohsht button.) You even get great synergy with Punish:Roar if you're a masochist and want to melee things instead of flinging shields (to be fair I do still wind up in melee a lot because it's just faster so someone might like the counterattack.)
The only thing fire doesn't really have is a good secondary single target spell. I've been bouncing between the holy beam of death + cause and bowmen (phys but 20% dmg with short mount speed) but it would be even better with fire archers (why are there no fire archers?) Obviously holy has really really good synergies too, but fire isn't lacking right now.
Also there is way more fire gear available than holy (although this becomes a bit moot if you switch to 6pc, since it kills 2-3 20% fire slots.) (Thank you Blizzard design team for not understanding how your own itemisation works -.-) Obviously it depends on what gear you have, but if you have a ton of fire gear, Combust is in no way "bad".
I thought that was what was meant to happen with Combust, but even if stuff was still alive I did not get the same amount of bounces when using combust even with a +6 Jek, whereas shattering was far more ready to ricochet and improved my clearing times in those situations even though I was using far more +fire than +holy gear. I'm not saying combust is bad by any stretch of the imagination, it is a clearly superior rune under normal circumstances, but I just don't think it takes full advantage of a Jek.
As far as Phalanx not having a fire option, it doesn't have any elemental damage, it might just be the case that blizzard didn't want people to feel forced into using a particular one depending on their choice of element. A more reasonable complaint might be HF not having different elemental options, but if you are looking for a fire attack, having you considered falling sword as it has a fire rune, gives you another mobility option and had a decent damage buff in the last patch.
As far as having to give up fire gear if you want to use the 6pc bonus, this is not a case of blizzard not understanding itemisation so much as you having to make choices between the two gearing styles and not be able to expect everything to slot together exactly as you'd like as otherwise the eventual endgame gearing of every crusader would end up being the same for everyone which is something they have said they wanted to avoid in the past.
One under-rated bonus to going holy despite less +holy gear would be all the extra healing you get from holy cause.
I use holy cause with HF, figuring that the ticking of that will be enough to proc the heal continuously (since it doesn't matter how much holy damage you do, just how often. Obviously I imagine it heals a lot more with shattering.
Just got my 5pc bonus, so I'll start testing holy since I can't use my cindercoat or magefists right now anyway. I can't give up 95% uptime on AC, if only for the CC immunity.
Also my issue isn't not being able to combine fire and sets (that's fine) my issue is that there is no alternative to the Cindercoat for other elements and they said it's just flavour stats when it's clearly so build changing, but only ever for fire. Stick 10% cost reduction to holy on a belt, 15^ lightning on gloves, whatever, and it would open up many more builds for all classes.
I've tried falling sword, and while it's great for repositioning/shortcuts, I feel that you need harringtons + a big 2h to make any real use of it. Our builds are using fast 1h so falling sword damage becomes mediocore, and in the time it's in the air I can easily do as much with shields. For fire, your best options seem to be bows+horsey passive, or HF+cause for the heal. At least you get some sort of synergies going that way.
I'm using the Gryf/Jek combo (~2200dps version, 4rico shield) with a pure fire build (all fire items sans helm + aug) thinking about swapping to holy once I have 6pc, but so far holy has looked really underwhelming compared to combust's aoe.
I find that you just don't get the screen-filling madness of the holy rune when you switch to combust and I think that using that rune would be a waste of that shield.
In 2.0.5, when you use Shattering, you're splitting your 1 big shield into 3 smaller shields that ping around. With Combust, your shield hits the first target and then remains as a big strong shield that smashes into many more targets after that, each one with a chance at a decent aoe explosion (that does more aoe damage than shatters do single target.) I think that Shattering is funny, but I can't find any situation in which it is actually better than Combust. You don't get the screen filling madness because everything has already exploded.
Other benefits include fantastic AC synergy with Fire Starter, fast horsey becoming a surprisingly damaging attack (as well as transport and ohsht button.) You even get great synergy with Punish:Roar if you're a masochist and want to melee things instead of flinging shields (to be fair I do still wind up in melee a lot because it's just faster so someone might like the counterattack.)
The only thing fire doesn't really have is a good secondary single target spell. I've been bouncing between the holy beam of death + cause and bowmen (phys but 20% dmg with short mount speed) but it would be even better with fire archers (why are there no fire archers?) Obviously holy has really really good synergies too, but fire isn't lacking right now.
Also there is way more fire gear available than holy (although this becomes a bit moot if you switch to 6pc, since it kills 2-3 20% fire slots.) (Thank you Blizzard design team for not understanding how your own itemisation works -.-) Obviously it depends on what gear you have, but if you have a ton of fire gear, Combust is in no way "bad".
I don't have them but from reading it my impression was that you actually have to spend some resource to get the effect. I'd be interested to know if that's not the case.
I'm using the Gryf/Jek combo (~2200dps version, 4rico shield) with a pure fire build (all fire items sans helm + aug) thinking about swapping to holy once I have 6pc, but so far holy has looked really underwhelming compared to combust's aoe. I clear T4 rifts in around 10-15 minutes, T5-6 are doable but in my gear very slow and too risky to bother with (with an andarials and a cindercoat without int on it I could probably do 5 okay.)
I've tried it with an average Maximus and it felt about the same in overall damage, but having to be careful with positioning and wrath compared to flinging a hundred billion burning shields isn't really my style. Also you can play pure range if it gets hairy since you have unlimited shields.
Heaven's Fury is for holy cause healing and because I still can't find anything better for additional single target damage that doesn't make me stop flinging shields.
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Now using 2pc Akkhan + 2(3)pc aug + 2(3)pc crimson with magefist cinder, rorg+soj or unity. I'd like to be able to ditch the crimson set and shuffle things around for an andarial's, but rng is rng and all that, and I'm already down to 36% cdr which makes me sad. Overall though I feel a lot more effective with this setup using gryf+jek fire.
Whether the shield is actually necessary for fire is another story. I think it does more damage on groups, but you already do insane damage on groups and the shield doesn't return ping the way Shattered does. I'd probably swap it out for an Akarat's if I had one, while keeping the Gryf because endless shields are fun.
Does Holy Cause have an internal cooldown? It seems okay with just HF, but I didn't notice a big improvement when I was using Shattering as well. Maybe it's just how healing works compared to the damage of T4, but it wasn't exactly life changing and I got much more out of making the effort to walk to a health globe :/
Just got my 5pc bonus, so I'll start testing holy since I can't use my cindercoat or magefists right now anyway. I can't give up 95% uptime on AC, if only for the CC immunity.
Also my issue isn't not being able to combine fire and sets (that's fine) my issue is that there is no alternative to the Cindercoat for other elements and they said it's just flavour stats when it's clearly so build changing, but only ever for fire. Stick 10% cost reduction to holy on a belt, 15^ lightning on gloves, whatever, and it would open up many more builds for all classes.
I've tried falling sword, and while it's great for repositioning/shortcuts, I feel that you need harringtons + a big 2h to make any real use of it. Our builds are using fast 1h so falling sword damage becomes mediocore, and in the time it's in the air I can easily do as much with shields. For fire, your best options seem to be bows+horsey passive, or HF+cause for the heal. At least you get some sort of synergies going that way.
Other benefits include fantastic AC synergy with Fire Starter, fast horsey becoming a surprisingly damaging attack (as well as transport and ohsht button.) You even get great synergy with Punish:Roar if you're a masochist and want to melee things instead of flinging shields (to be fair I do still wind up in melee a lot because it's just faster so someone might like the counterattack.)
The only thing fire doesn't really have is a good secondary single target spell. I've been bouncing between the holy beam of death + cause and bowmen (phys but 20% dmg with short mount speed) but it would be even better with fire archers (why are there no fire archers?) Obviously holy has really really good synergies too, but fire isn't lacking right now.
Also there is way more fire gear available than holy (although this becomes a bit moot if you switch to 6pc, since it kills 2-3 20% fire slots.) (Thank you Blizzard design team for not understanding how your own itemisation works -.-) Obviously it depends on what gear you have, but if you have a ton of fire gear, Combust is in no way "bad".
I've tried it with an average Maximus and it felt about the same in overall damage, but having to be careful with positioning and wrath compared to flinging a hundred billion burning shields isn't really my style. Also you can play pure range if it gets hairy since you have unlimited shields.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/crusader#SlYVfQ!ZWSR!ZZaZba
Heaven's Fury is for holy cause healing and because I still can't find anything better for additional single target damage that doesn't make me stop flinging shields.