Yeah if I remember right in the 2.0.5 patch they will make kadala properly target gambling weapons to your class. No more mighty weapons as a monk or whatever you have to deal with!
I think it is, because strength is a flat % boost to your damage per point, increasing your strength by a certain % will increase your damage by that same % (Yo dawg...). But yeah, the more strength you get the less powerful it becomes compared to %damage, that's how any stat works when it stacks additively with itself but multiplicatively with other stats. It is just a matter of comparisons and a little math.
I have always found single target a bit sluggish with boulder toss builds because there aren't enough things either to hit or take damage from to make fury. One thing you could try is taking Call of the Ancients:Ancient's Fury for when you have a little time to prepare for a boss like when you are farming bounties.
t5-6 setup I want the Raekor's 5p bonus first, but with my current build I can do torment 4 so long as I don't get nailed by frozen. Furious Charge:stamina is easily one of the best skills for this build due to the fury generation.
If I am thinking of this the right way you can find out if its worth it simply by comparing the strength from the axe to your total strength.. Given 8% more strength is (just about) 8% more damage, you can compare those values, so that strength is better if it is more than 8% of your strength without the axe. Doing some of the math, the strength should be better than the %damage if your strength without the axe is less than 9250.
Rampage doesn't matter for this calculation because it increases both the strength from the axe and your overall strength, so they cancel out for comparison reasons.
tested on T5 rift boss and rift. with 60-70% Physical damage, three hundred spear & Doom bringer. 188 Fury 45% Crit chance + ( over power for 8% increased crit for a total of 52%) and 474% Crit damge increased. Ruthless, Rampage for dps. Slaughter for area damage. This build is not viable with my stats. Paragon 464, Area damage, Resource cost reduction maxed. Your average crits are 60-80 mil until 30% or lower health. I can spam HoTA for 40 mil Fire damage.
If someone has a better understanding of Boulder toss and the build please let me know. I have 127% Harrington ( Belt with increased damage) and 10% Anchient spear on my boots ( 4 peace IMK ) The nice thing about this build on T5 is you don't die. but trash clearing, and Elites die slow. Making Rampage not as useful. Maybe a lower torment?
reaker's Set works better with charging, but lacks single target fury generation.
I know I have managed 60-85m average crits on elites, sometimes going over 100m in a group with the gear on my profile right now. White mobs are 45m+, depending on rampage stacks. Stats are 44.5% crit chance, 394% crit damage, 40% elite damage, 52% physical damage, 67% ancient spear damage, and only ~130 max fury.
I actually believe resource cost reduction only affects the base 25 fury that boulder toss requires, and the rest of the fury it spends is not affected. Reason being is that when I find a channeling pylon, the boulder toss still consumes all the fury and doesn't gain a remarkable damage increase (If the 100% cost reduction from the pylon affected the extra fury, god knows what could happen).
I know I posted a guide that revolves around boulder toss (The Rocks fall one), the trick for fast clearing is rotating your cooldown skills that do enough damage to clear a mob so that you always have one ready. Avalanche:lahar works great because its cooldown can be reset in 2 boulders. If you still have any questions I can try answering them.
You don't need to refill your fury globe to benefit from Berserker Rage before the boulder lands. If you look on your character sheet you can see its dps increase as a bonus from skills, and when you use boulder toss, you keep the bonus till it lands and does its damage. I also tested it numerically at one point and it was consistently bumping ~50m crits to ~60m crits (I already had some 27% damage from skills, so it wasnt quite 25% relative increase).
Oh shit. I just read it properly for the first time. Yeah.... that's a rune to try out. Always read it as 20% weapon damage, not 20% of the damage done. Once I get to playing with it a little bit I'll update the OP.
As far as toughness goes, a lot of it is incidental because so much gear rolls vitality instead of allres, but I also just tank a lot and I am pretty sure I could lower it.
I haven't seen any boulder builds on the forums and I have had a ton of fun with them so I decided to put my own up there. This is just as much to show off the build as it is to pick up some feedback on my perceived issues with it.
Much of the build revolves around Ancient Spear: Boulder Toss and taking advantage of its ability to dump fury faster than any other spender in existence while putting out massive burst damage. It works with pretty much any gear level while being able to scale well with higher gear levels due to elemental and skill damage bonuses.
What I run: Ancient Spear (Boulder toss): The core of the build. Everything else must be built to generate enough fury to use it quickly and to simply buff its damage, which opens up several skill possibilities because there are more skills than slots to help out with this.
Bash (Punish): This is my favorite fury generator as it does physical damage (in line with boulder toss), and buffs your damage up to 12%. Also generates decent amounts of fury against single targets when you get to fight them.
Leap (Call of Arreat): Mobility to avoid death, and great for bunching up a group of units to hit them with a boulder toss.
Furious Charge (Stamina): More mobility, as well as the ability to refill your entire fury pool depending on the number of enemies hit, it is a good enough skill that I could call it required simply for the fury generation.
Battle Rage (Bloodshed): Yo dawg, I heard you like splash damage, because now your splash attacks make splash damage from each target they splash to splash more targets. The blood explosions are based on the damage their triggering attack does. All those 80 million overkill crits? They now help you out by murdering everything around them as well.
Avalanche (Lahar): This is a great secondary source of damage as your high rate of fury generation and dumping greatly reduces the cooldown of this skill, while it can cover a larger area than boulder toss, great for clearing out large groups of people.
This particular setup scales very well with cooldown reduction, as it reduces your big fury generation skill (Furious Charge) as well as Avalanche which is reduced further by the fury generation when you boulder toss. Double dipping stats anyone?
Other usable skills:
Overpower (Momentum): This is great with Leap (Call of Arreat) as it groups people around you to overpower and generate fury for everyone hit, but this skill becomes much weaker with single targets.
Rend (Bloodbath): Good secondary source of damage for single and multiple targets when you don't want to spend all of your fury on them.
Ground Stomp: Foot of the Mountain and Wrenching Smash are both good depending on what you want out of this skill, and the 4 second stun can get you some breathing room in melee.
Passives:
Bloodthirst: Pretty much a must-have if you want a lot of healing mid fight, as you spend a lot of fury to heal from this and it allows you to get life per fury spent from the secondary slots on your gear, completely eliminating the need for life per second and life per hit (Also, 100k+ life from globes total is great)
Superstition: A fantastic passive not only for the magic resistance but the fury generation is INSANE, combined with bloodthirst affixes that lay down ticking damage usually wind up healing you once you take in to account the fury generation and spending.
Animosity: More fury generation and cap. With boulder toss, this makes those big yellow numbers that much bigger.
Free slot!: I have jumped between Brawler, Berserker Rage, and Rampage for this one. Right now I use Rampage for farming and Berserker Rage for bosses where I can max my fury without overkill and rampage doesn't do much to the boss. Rampage is best for farming because you already have 27% damage from your skills and it gives some extra toughness from the strength boost. And a quick note about berserker rage: It DOES work on boulder toss if you used it while at full fury in spite of the delay. You will notice this by comparing numbers to without berserker rage.
Paragon:Here, just max out what stats you need more of on your gear. Particular stats to look out for are move speed (of course), cooldown reduction (depends on the build!), and all resistance.
Follower:I usually prefer the templar for a backup heal, but primarily for the increased resource generation from Inspire, I don't like followers that apply crowd control because it subtracts from my fury generation due to damage taken.
Gear:
Lots of stuff to go for here, but it should be intuitive. You will want Physical Damage, Ancient Spear Damage, Strength, Crit chance and Crit damage, and average damage for your offensive stats. After that you will want a comfortable level of toughness (10 million is enough to farm t3 safely in my experience, could possibly go higher if I play more careful), as much of it being resist all as possible. Equally important if you want to face tank is having life globe healing bonus on EVERY piece it can appear on! This gives you massive amounts of life per fury spent and gives you a lot of reliable healing as well as health refills from health globes (Which you should be able to burst some part of an elite pack quickly enough to spawn).
Some stats you don't really want or need are increased attack speed (It does next to nothing in this build), resource cost reduction (the extra fury that Boulder toss spends is NOT affected by this, so it doesn't do much), armor (So weak compared to resist all), and life on hit/life per second (You heal from life globes already, and your primary stat slot can roll better things).
Also, Dual wield is good but not required as a two handed weapon doesn't slow your fury generation too much against crowds and the average damage will balance out the loss of crit damage. If you have a three hundredth spear though, go dual wield. That bonus damage is too much to pass up.
Yeah I used diamonds, don't judge me. I like facetanking.
Some gearing quirks for the min/maxers out there: Helms and gloves roll higher stats than other slots, if you want to decide between resist all or vitality here, its best to go vitality so you can get resist all on more slots later (Unless you already have so much vitality you don't want more, that's your call). Some legendaries like the doombringer and 300th spear shown roll 5 and 6 primaries respectively, allowing a well rolled version of those to have some very powerful stats. Reroll whatever you don't need on these weapons.
Notable Legendaries/sets:
Immortal King's: All of the set bonuses on this are extremely powerful, filling in stats that greatly buff up your survivability (and damage from fury), while rolling great stats.
Blackthorne's: The 2 piece is strong, with 10% elite damage, although only the chest armor and pants are really worth taking. The other pieces don't roll enough of what you want to enchant them to something usable.
Aughild's: That 3 piece. Gives a huge edge against elites.
Ring of Royal Grandeur: It is possible to build 2 pieces of each of the 3 sets above without compromising legendary affixes that are extremely useful. This complements that by giving you 3(!) 3 piece set bonuses where you would only have 2 piece bonuses.
Raekor's set: Giving furious charge all runes means you get to combine stamina with merciless assault, giving you nigh unlimited fury on packs of 5 or more. Combining this with the dragging and stunning runes also create an incredible setup for bunching and stunlocking packs of enemies in to a max-fury boulder.
Krede's Flame: Not going to be used in the end game, but it deserves an honorable mention because the fury generation from taking fire damage is amazing.
Stone of Jordan: Seriously. Why would you NOT take this? One thing I need to play with if I get a perfectly rolled one is trying the primary stat against average damage. You want crit chance as the other stat by the way.
Ess of Johan: This triggers pretty often on other builds, but I need to actually test its usefulness once I get one. Depending how good it is it could replace leap with call of arreat.
The Three Hundredth Spear: An amazing weapon for any weapon throw/ancient spear build, dual wielding this will give you more attack speed for fury generation, and flexibility without compromising your burst damage, as well as that fancy second weapon emerald.
Doombringer/Andariels Visage: These are good for the physical damage boosts primarily.
Strongarm Bracers: I have actually found these kind of "Meh", with the knockback usually not affecting the big beefy targets that I actually need the bonus damage against. Going for Aughild's bracers in this slot.
With a complete set of gear that maxes your physical, ancient spear, and elite damage you can have up to 100% extra physical damage, 80% extra ancient spear damage, and 55% extra elite damage (SoJ+Aughild's+Blackthorne's). Pity the next blue skeleton that tries to walk up and slash you while you have full fury.
Tips on how to kill stuff:
With this you have to pay some attention to how much health the mob has left and whether or not you can nuke it with your remaining fury if you don't want to waste time, but other times you can just swim in fury in a big brawl and never die.
You want to take hits, not avoid them. Every time someone hits you, you get fury. Spending fury heals you, and you can never spend fury too slow with boulder toss, so really getting hit only heals you. Just don't die, that's bad.
Leap and furious charge work though jailer as well as letting you dodge those nasty frozen orbs! Keep these skills in mind defensively as well as offensively.
A fun trick is to boulder toss and then IMMEDIATELY use your furious charge or overpower before the boulder hits the ground. You spend your fury when the boulder flies in to the air, but it doesn't do damage till it lands. You can use this time to hit all the mobs to instantly refill your fury before they all explode.
Be careful with treasure goblins, Boulder toss doesn't lead them super well and if you target it on them while they are running you will miss 90% of the time. Wait for them to stop then crush them with it.
Avalanche tends to stagger the hell out of weaker enemies, giving it a bit of defensive utility as well as locking down huge mobs of white enemies in its effect.
And in a group, while you don't carry buffs, you wind up being very difficult to kill because the bigger the fights get, the more you heal, allowing you to wade in to the biggest fights and (hopefully) keep some attention away from your glass cannon friend.
Some difficulties and questions: This is one of the biggest reasons I am bringing this to Dfans actually, I want to know how to improve on these while maintaining the power of this build.
The damage is rather "Chunky", between avalanche and boulder toss, you either do a huge amount of damage at once or very little, which can be an issue when farming a flow of white mobs and you don't have much to do when your cooldowns run out (Granted that doesn't last long but it is disruptive)
How does area damage interact with skills that already affect an area, do they calculate whether or not to apply area damage for each monster hit? does it only splash to monster that aren't hit by the attack, does it even affect these attacks at all?
Changes:-Changed Battle rage (Marauder's Rage) to Battle Rage (Bloodshed) in What I run.
-Clarified Berserker Rage mechanics
-Added Raekor's set as a notable legendary/set
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t5-6 setup I want the Raekor's 5p bonus first, but with my current build I can do torment 4 so long as I don't get nailed by frozen. Furious Charge:stamina is easily one of the best skills for this build due to the fury generation.
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Rampage doesn't matter for this calculation because it increases both the strength from the axe and your overall strength, so they cancel out for comparison reasons.
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Kalix-1356/hero/20313073
I actually believe resource cost reduction only affects the base 25 fury that boulder toss requires, and the rest of the fury it spends is not affected. Reason being is that when I find a channeling pylon, the boulder toss still consumes all the fury and doesn't gain a remarkable damage increase (If the 100% cost reduction from the pylon affected the extra fury, god knows what could happen).
I know I posted a guide that revolves around boulder toss (The Rocks fall one), the trick for fast clearing is rotating your cooldown skills that do enough damage to clear a mob so that you always have one ready. Avalanche:lahar works great because its cooldown can be reset in 2 boulders. If you still have any questions I can try answering them.
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As far as toughness goes, a lot of it is incidental because so much gear rolls vitality instead of allres, but I also just tank a lot and I am pretty sure I could lower it.
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Much of the build revolves around Ancient Spear: Boulder Toss and taking advantage of its ability to dump fury faster than any other spender in existence while putting out massive burst damage. It works with pretty much any gear level while being able to scale well with higher gear levels due to elemental and skill damage bonuses.
What I run:
Ancient Spear (Boulder toss): The core of the build. Everything else must be built to generate enough fury to use it quickly and to simply buff its damage, which opens up several skill possibilities because there are more skills than slots to help out with this.
Bash (Punish): This is my favorite fury generator as it does physical damage (in line with boulder toss), and buffs your damage up to 12%. Also generates decent amounts of fury against single targets when you get to fight them.
Leap (Call of Arreat): Mobility to avoid death, and great for bunching up a group of units to hit them with a boulder toss.
Furious Charge (Stamina): More mobility, as well as the ability to refill your entire fury pool depending on the number of enemies hit, it is a good enough skill that I could call it required simply for the fury generation.
Battle Rage (Bloodshed): Yo dawg, I heard you like splash damage, because now your splash attacks make splash damage from each target they splash to splash more targets. The blood explosions are based on the damage their triggering attack does. All those 80 million overkill crits? They now help you out by murdering everything around them as well.
Avalanche (Lahar): This is a great secondary source of damage as your high rate of fury generation and dumping greatly reduces the cooldown of this skill, while it can cover a larger area than boulder toss, great for clearing out large groups of people.
This particular setup scales very well with cooldown reduction, as it reduces your big fury generation skill (Furious Charge) as well as Avalanche which is reduced further by the fury generation when you boulder toss. Double dipping stats anyone?
Other usable skills:
Overpower (Momentum): This is great with Leap (Call of Arreat) as it groups people around you to overpower and generate fury for everyone hit, but this skill becomes much weaker with single targets.
Rend (Bloodbath): Good secondary source of damage for single and multiple targets when you don't want to spend all of your fury on them.
Ground Stomp: Foot of the Mountain and Wrenching Smash are both good depending on what you want out of this skill, and the 4 second stun can get you some breathing room in melee.
Passives:
Bloodthirst: Pretty much a must-have if you want a lot of healing mid fight, as you spend a lot of fury to heal from this and it allows you to get life per fury spent from the secondary slots on your gear, completely eliminating the need for life per second and life per hit (Also, 100k+ life from globes total is great)
Superstition: A fantastic passive not only for the magic resistance but the fury generation is INSANE, combined with bloodthirst affixes that lay down ticking damage usually wind up healing you once you take in to account the fury generation and spending.
Animosity: More fury generation and cap. With boulder toss, this makes those big yellow numbers that much bigger.
Free slot!: I have jumped between Brawler, Berserker Rage, and Rampage for this one. Right now I use Rampage for farming and Berserker Rage for bosses where I can max my fury without overkill and rampage doesn't do much to the boss. Rampage is best for farming because you already have 27% damage from your skills and it gives some extra toughness from the strength boost. And a quick note about berserker rage: It DOES work on boulder toss if you used it while at full fury in spite of the delay. You will notice this by comparing numbers to without berserker rage.
Paragon:Here, just max out what stats you need more of on your gear. Particular stats to look out for are move speed (of course), cooldown reduction (depends on the build!), and all resistance.
Follower:I usually prefer the templar for a backup heal, but primarily for the increased resource generation from Inspire, I don't like followers that apply crowd control because it subtracts from my fury generation due to damage taken.
Gear:
Lots of stuff to go for here, but it should be intuitive. You will want Physical Damage, Ancient Spear Damage, Strength, Crit chance and Crit damage, and average damage for your offensive stats. After that you will want a comfortable level of toughness (10 million is enough to farm t3 safely in my experience, could possibly go higher if I play more careful), as much of it being resist all as possible. Equally important if you want to face tank is having life globe healing bonus on EVERY piece it can appear on! This gives you massive amounts of life per fury spent and gives you a lot of reliable healing as well as health refills from health globes (Which you should be able to burst some part of an elite pack quickly enough to spawn).
Some stats you don't really want or need are increased attack speed (It does next to nothing in this build), resource cost reduction (the extra fury that Boulder toss spends is NOT affected by this, so it doesn't do much), armor (So weak compared to resist all), and life on hit/life per second (You heal from life globes already, and your primary stat slot can roll better things).
Also, Dual wield is good but not required as a two handed weapon doesn't slow your fury generation too much against crowds and the average damage will balance out the loss of crit damage. If you have a three hundredth spear though, go dual wield. That bonus damage is too much to pass up.
Quick example with my profile:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Kalix-1356/hero/20313073
Yeah I used diamonds, don't judge me. I like facetanking.
Some gearing quirks for the min/maxers out there: Helms and gloves roll higher stats than other slots, if you want to decide between resist all or vitality here, its best to go vitality so you can get resist all on more slots later (Unless you already have so much vitality you don't want more, that's your call). Some legendaries like the doombringer and 300th spear shown roll 5 and 6 primaries respectively, allowing a well rolled version of those to have some very powerful stats. Reroll whatever you don't need on these weapons.
Notable Legendaries/sets:
Immortal King's: All of the set bonuses on this are extremely powerful, filling in stats that greatly buff up your survivability (and damage from fury), while rolling great stats.
Blackthorne's: The 2 piece is strong, with 10% elite damage, although only the chest armor and pants are really worth taking. The other pieces don't roll enough of what you want to enchant them to something usable.
Aughild's: That 3 piece. Gives a huge edge against elites.
Ring of Royal Grandeur: It is possible to build 2 pieces of each of the 3 sets above without compromising legendary affixes that are extremely useful. This complements that by giving you 3(!) 3 piece set bonuses where you would only have 2 piece bonuses.
Raekor's set: Giving furious charge all runes means you get to combine stamina with merciless assault, giving you nigh unlimited fury on packs of 5 or more. Combining this with the dragging and stunning runes also create an incredible setup for bunching and stunlocking packs of enemies in to a max-fury boulder.
Krede's Flame: Not going to be used in the end game, but it deserves an honorable mention because the fury generation from taking fire damage is amazing.
Stone of Jordan: Seriously. Why would you NOT take this? One thing I need to play with if I get a perfectly rolled one is trying the primary stat against average damage. You want crit chance as the other stat by the way.
Ess of Johan: This triggers pretty often on other builds, but I need to actually test its usefulness once I get one. Depending how good it is it could replace leap with call of arreat.
The Three Hundredth Spear: An amazing weapon for any weapon throw/ancient spear build, dual wielding this will give you more attack speed for fury generation, and flexibility without compromising your burst damage, as well as that fancy second weapon emerald.
Doombringer/Andariels Visage: These are good for the physical damage boosts primarily.
Strongarm Bracers: I have actually found these kind of "Meh", with the knockback usually not affecting the big beefy targets that I actually need the bonus damage against. Going for Aughild's bracers in this slot.
With a complete set of gear that maxes your physical, ancient spear, and elite damage you can have up to 100% extra physical damage, 80% extra ancient spear damage, and 55% extra elite damage (SoJ+Aughild's+Blackthorne's). Pity the next blue skeleton that tries to walk up and slash you while you have full fury.
Tips on how to kill stuff:
With this you have to pay some attention to how much health the mob has left and whether or not you can nuke it with your remaining fury if you don't want to waste time, but other times you can just swim in fury in a big brawl and never die.
You want to take hits, not avoid them. Every time someone hits you, you get fury. Spending fury heals you, and you can never spend fury too slow with boulder toss, so really getting hit only heals you. Just don't die, that's bad.
Leap and furious charge work though jailer as well as letting you dodge those nasty frozen orbs! Keep these skills in mind defensively as well as offensively.
A fun trick is to boulder toss and then IMMEDIATELY use your furious charge or overpower before the boulder hits the ground. You spend your fury when the boulder flies in to the air, but it doesn't do damage till it lands. You can use this time to hit all the mobs to instantly refill your fury before they all explode.
Be careful with treasure goblins, Boulder toss doesn't lead them super well and if you target it on them while they are running you will miss 90% of the time. Wait for them to stop then crush them with it.
Avalanche tends to stagger the hell out of weaker enemies, giving it a bit of defensive utility as well as locking down huge mobs of white enemies in its effect.
And in a group, while you don't carry buffs, you wind up being very difficult to kill because the bigger the fights get, the more you heal, allowing you to wade in to the biggest fights and (hopefully) keep some attention away from your glass cannon friend.
Some difficulties and questions: This is one of the biggest reasons I am bringing this to Dfans actually, I want to know how to improve on these while maintaining the power of this build.
The damage is rather "Chunky", between avalanche and boulder toss, you either do a huge amount of damage at once or very little, which can be an issue when farming a flow of white mobs and you don't have much to do when your cooldowns run out (Granted that doesn't last long but it is disruptive)
How does area damage interact with skills that already affect an area, do they calculate whether or not to apply area damage for each monster hit? does it only splash to monster that aren't hit by the attack, does it even affect these attacks at all?
Changes:-Changed Battle rage (Marauder's Rage) to Battle Rage (Bloodshed) in What I run.
-Clarified Berserker Rage mechanics
-Added Raekor's set as a notable legendary/set