There seems to be a woeful lack of discussion of 2-hander builds on this board so here goes:
Pros
-Far greater arcane power efficiency with channeled spells
-Larger hits/more staggering effects
-Potential for higher Primary Stat rolls
-Gear is far cheaper to acquire at the moment, needs little to no Arcane Power on Crit
-Life steal rolls up to %6 making it a viable source of healing at a lower gear level than 1h+oh
Cons
-Slow attack rate means less chances to proc Critical Mass or Arcane Power on Crit effects (and everything else)
-Less potent Life on Hit for the reason mentioned above
-Less mobility due to longer cast time
-Loss of potential offensive/defensive stats of a shield or source
Focuses heavily on crit, crit hit dmg, and intel. If the elites live through archon, hydra is dropped and they are kited while their health is taken down in single large chunks in guerrilla-like attacks. The goal is to do as much dmg as possible in a single attack and then continue to move until you have time to cast another orb. Hit and run. Reflect dmg Annihilates me still. (but those 2.8iml arcane destruction crits are tasty)
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-Disintegrate, When farming act 1 with a slow 2 hander can be case for long periods of time
Once you reach the ~40k dps threshold fully buffed you can start farming act 1 with a 2hander as easy as if you were leveling up again in normal mode.
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Once you have farily high dps, armor, and all resist staying in archon mode with its %40 buff to both and very high damage becomes very attractive. With some life steal (~% or more dmg_>life conversion on a weapon) along with high weapon dmg, crit chance, and boat loads of crit hit damage it starts to become possible to tank things to death even in the later acts.
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A kiting build that uses Arcane Mines to both slow and do damage to enemies. While slowed and traveling over mines Star Pack Meteor is used to deal the damage. Star Pack itself is a great move for proc'ing critical mass as well so in addition to this build relying on Crit Hit dmg and Crit Hit Chance for burst damage, the crit hit chance also provides added survivability by finishing the cooldown on diamond skin and teleport.
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Discussion:
What kind of success have you had in inferno in acts 3 and 4 using a 2hander? What build do/did you use? What kind of gear was needed to support it?
*Disclaimer* - No one is claiming 2handers have more damage throughput, nor are we ignorant of how arcane power on crit can keep 1h+oh builds going. This is purely for the sake of wanting to use a 2 handed play style.
It's quite funny that you've posted this question now as well as the people replying to it, right at this moment in this forum the second thread to it is a build that uses a slow 2 hander with vids of the boss kills http://www.diablofans.com/topic/62429-video-inferno-bosses-crit-spec/
The 2 handers are not really less viable, it depends on the build. If you are skilled / practiced enough to use meteor a slow 2 hander with 1200-1600 damage (not DPS) is going to produce insane crits as compared to a 400-800 damage wand when doing 300%ish of weapon damage.
Surely if you are going for CM build - you would benefit from speed, if you are going for a kite build and you have enough slows to keep stuff off you, or you can simply take the hits you can go disintegrate or frost beam and melt stuff.
Personally i wouldn't suggest using archon with anything below 50k ish dps and life steal of your weapon.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Also, one thing i forgot to mention, before this patch using a 2 hander was a trade-off of up to 10% CC and up to 10 APoC for nothing, now, it's a trade off for extra 3% LS and 100% Crit Damage.
So basically with a 2 hander build you have to be less reliant on APoC, but rather on much larger single hits. Additionally, if you have enough resists / armor you can just stand there and tank absolutely anything with archon and 6% life steal
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I used a 2h spec to farm Act 3 back around or before 1.0.3 with a similar spec, except I used Piercing Orb or Lightning Blast over Archon to have something to cast when I ran out of AP. I also used Celestial Orb over Obliteration because I just really like the rune.
In my opinion, 2h spec was viable before the patch. The main reason people moved away from 2h spec was because you could very easily achieve higher dps values with 1h+OH at moderate or higher gear levels. After the patch, 2h stats make them much more appealing and more competetive with 1h+OH and I'm tempted to try to find a good 2h to switch back to my old spec (same as current spec but I'd drop magic weapon for a sig spell).
It works quite well in Act 2 & 3. You don't need APOC for a AO build.
Have you tried Arcane Torrent (Disruption) or Arcane Torrent (Cascade) in place of Arcane Orb? Compared to tap the source Arcane Torrent is now a similar radius, less arcane power, more damage, and slightly more accurate than Arcane Orb. It doesn't work as well with stutter step kiting as Arcane Orb but the extra damage potential should mean you spend less time kiting and more time nuking anyway.
It works quite well in Act 2 & 3. You don't need APOC for a AO build.
Have you tried Arcane Torrent (Disruption) or Arcane Torrent (Cascade) in place of Arcane Orb? Compared to tap the source Arcane Torrent is now a similar radius, less arcane power, more damage, and slightly more accurate than Arcane Orb. It doesn't work as well with stutter step kiting as Arcane Orb but the extra damage potential should mean you spend less time kiting and more time nuking anyway.
No I have not. I have not tried AT after 1.04. Good tip. I certainly will check it out.
Does anyone know how Life on Hit works with disintegrate or Ray of Frost? Becuase I'm seeing some high dmg, affordable 2-handers that have a large chunk of both. I was wondering if I had enough if I'd be able to just stand in place and face tank everything while beam spamming with Force Armor up.
Does anyone know how Life on Hit works with disintegrate or Ray of Frost? Becuase I'm seeing some high dmg, affordable 2-handers that have a large chunk of both. I was wondering if I had enough if I'd be able to just stand in place and face tank everything while beam spamming with Force Armor up.
Based on the information in the LoH coefficient thread on the official forums, found here, disintegrate and RoF tic twice a second. The coefficients per tic are approximately 33% for most RoF runes and 22% for disintegrate - Convergence or Chaos Nexus. Coefficients for other runes are posted above.
That means you should gain approximately 66% of your LoH each second from RoF and about 44% of your LoH from Disintegrate, per target. You can probably get away with face tanking in Act 1 with such a set up. Act 3 I'm pretty sure you'd die in a couple seconds since 3 hits kills you with Force Armor. I can't speak for Act 2 because I haven't spent any time there farming.
Also, I'd recommend testing the LoH with those spells just to be sure. To do that, remove any life regen from gear, get some amount of LoH, like 100, load up act 1 and take some damage from something. Then hold down your RoF or Disintegrate button and blast away. Best done against single target for Disintegrate. The health gained should pop up every 0.5s which is every tic. It might help to remove some dps gear so you don't kill the mob in 1 shot.
Hey loroese, pretty nice gear, can you say how much dps you got?
55k with magic weapon, though I use the blood magic rune. It'd only give like 2k more dps if I switched to Force Weapon and I like the extra life gains for Act 3 farming. I guess the dps on my char profile is without MW.
I bought a 2-hander that i am using right now for 3 mil and using the archon spec http://us.battle.net...9/hero/18485873
That was probably the easiest, least clicking clear of A3 i've ever had, and it was pretty damn fast as well. The best part about this kind of build is you do not need APoC or LoH, just gear for stats and crit, get a fat 2 hander with 5-6% LS and you're golden to stand face-tank champs while beaming away.
What i did with this build is basically try to maximize the archon up-time. Surely you can find videos of where archon goes on forever, surely you will have a couple of those situations, but you are also going to have situations where you archon runs out because you have to make a u-turn and run thru a cleared area, the next unexplored room has a champ and you've got 1 min+++ on archon CD, which happens more often than you think.
So i took both true power on archon and evocation to reduce the CD, piercing orb has a decent proc coefficient to make it reasonably usefull to reduce the archon cd via CM another 5-10 seconds easy. If you are soloing, the key is to get a cold damage bow/xbow and give it to your scoundrel, that gives you a perma slow, so you do not need to get a slow skill of any sort yourself.
With my DPS, piercing orb oftenly one-shots white trash mobs, as for the rest after being slowed, they stumble a lot because of my big hits / crits, all in all, it's rather difficult to get any mob to actually catch up with you, unless it's a teleporter / phase beast.
One big improvement i think might be worth making to it is getting more movement speed, because, simply put it will increase your archon uptime via less time spent running around looking for stuff to kill.
I needa properly try this in a group play as well to see how well it does there, but in solo i melted any champ within a few seconds easily, came close to death a couple of times simply because my EHP is rather... wdf
P.S. Loroese, if you got a moment, could you add the paragon level to your calculators, i was wondering today why my INT / VIT do not match the calculator... rofl
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
P.S. Loroese, if you got a moment, could you add the paragon level to your calculators, i was wondering today why my INT / VIT do not match the calculator... rofl
Glad to hear that demonkin, I can't wait to snag up a weapon with a nice chunk of life steal and crit hit dmg.
I tried act 3 with the gear I have now and that spec, but without the life steal I just couldn't keep myself up. Might also have something to do with me having significantly less armor.
BTW did you choose prismatic armor rune because of the addition increase you'd get from being in archon form so often? and finally I think that I've read that crits done while in archon form have a chance to proc critical mass to lower its cooldown before it even wears off....can you confirm this?
Two-handers are an excellent option if you don't have a high crit. chance or Attack Speed increase from gear. Because they use up Arcane Power less slowly for roughly the same amount of damage, Astral Presence and +Max Arcane Power become incredibly good.
Glad to hear that demonkin, I can't wait to snag up a weapon with a nice chunk of life steal and crit hit dmg.
I tried act 3 with the gear I have now and that spec, but without the life steal I just couldn't keep myself up. Might also have something to do with me having significantly less armor.
BTW did you choose prismatic armor rune because of the addition increase you'd get from being in archon form so often? and finally I think that I've read that crits done while in archon form have a chance to proc critical mass to lower its cooldown before it even wears off....can you confirm this?
The resistance bonus from Archon applies to your base resistance. Basically all bonuses stack that way for armor and resistances. What that means is you gain the same amount of resistances from Archon form whether you have prismatic armor or not.
Glad to hear that demonkin, I can't wait to snag up a weapon with a nice chunk of life steal and crit hit dmg.
I tried act 3 with the gear I have now and that spec, but without the life steal I just couldn't keep myself up. Might also have something to do with me having significantly less armor.
BTW did you choose prismatic armor rune because of the addition increase you'd get from being in archon form so often? and finally I think that I've read that crits done while in archon form have a chance to proc critical mass to lower its cooldown before it even wears off....can you confirm this?
The resistance bonus from Archon applies to your base resistance. Basically all bonuses stack that way for armor and resistances. What that means is you gain the same amount of resistances from Archon form whether you have prismatic armor or not.
This sounded weird to me, so i did some quick gear swapping and I think I understand it now.
All % modifiers are additive, so if your base resist was 100, and you had -%10 from glass cannon, +%40 from archon, and +%40 from prismatic the formula would be the following:
Total Resist = Base Resist - .1*Base Resist + .4*Base Resist + .4 Base Resist
170 = 100 - .1*100 +.4*100+.4*100
I've read that crits done while in archon form have a chance to proc critical mass to lower its cooldown before it even wears off....can you confirm this?
Actually i cannot confirm or deny this, what i can confirm is that CM still functions while in archon, for example the archon skills can off CD faster when CM procs, that is quite visible, whether it affects the CD of the actual archon itself, that i have no idea, gotta time that up a fair bit to test it.
Two-handers are an excellent option if you don't have a high crit. chance or Attack Speed increase from gear. Because they use up Arcane Power less slowly for roughly the same amount of damage, Astral Presence and +Max Arcane Power become incredibly good.
With a wand and a OH i have nearly 50% crit and 26 APoC, that's nowhere near low, it is simply a different playstyle that is alternative to the very common and abused CM build, simply because APoC is stupid expensive. For example if you do a search for a helm with 4% CC, socket 100+ int, and 8 APoC you will be amazed to see the results, may be a dozen helms are up, 1 was for 155 mil, the other 11 were 1 billion. That was the picture yesterday. A price of a helm with 6% CC 180 int, vit and all resist is starting from 10 mil... for a very strong helm, the only difference is APoC.
As a matter of fact, 2 handers with high crit dmg RELY on high crit to do big fat numbers, so it is quite logically exactly opposite to what you just said.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
P.S. Loroese, if you got a moment, could you add the paragon level to your calculators, i was wondering today why my INT / VIT do not match the calculator... rofl
Added, with a couple other minor changes.
<3 thanks
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Added TheDemonKin's archon build to the op as well as changed a little bit of the wording of the pros/cons
On a side note, it seems that all the amazing 2handers have recently disappeared from the AH lately. Even the super expensive ones.
Edit: Just grabbed a 2hander with some life steal at a small dps loss, but holy hell did it make a difference. Face tanking act 3 elites to death in archon, and ponyland is a laugh.
and now for the loooong loooong grind until I can get me one of them socketed, %200 crit dmg, 1500dps, %6 life steal, 400intel Skorns
Pros
-Far greater arcane power efficiency with channeled spells
-Larger hits/more staggering effects
-Potential for higher Primary Stat rolls
-Gear is far cheaper to acquire at the moment, needs little to no Arcane Power on Crit
-Life steal rolls up to %6 making it a viable source of healing at a lower gear level than 1h+oh
Cons
-Slow attack rate means less chances to proc Critical Mass or Arcane Power on Crit effects (and everything else)
-Less potent Life on Hit for the reason mentioned above
-Less mobility due to longer cast time
-Loss of potential offensive/defensive stats of a shield or source
Builds:
-Arcane Orb, hit and run:
http://us.battle.net...QmSO!XYU!aaYcZY
Focuses heavily on crit, crit hit dmg, and intel. If the elites live through archon, hydra is dropped and they are kited while their health is taken down in single large chunks in guerrilla-like attacks. The goal is to do as much dmg as possible in a single attack and then continue to move until you have time to cast another orb. Hit and run. Reflect dmg Annihilates me still. (but those 2.8iml arcane destruction crits are tasty)
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-Disintegrate, When farming act 1 with a slow 2 hander can be case for long periods of time
http://us.battle.net...QmSO!XYf!aZYcZY
Once you reach the ~40k dps threshold fully buffed you can start farming act 1 with a 2hander as easy as if you were leveling up again in normal mode.
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Archon Build (courtesy of TheDemonKin):
http://us.battle.net...jSOm!gbY!bYaZcb
Once you have farily high dps, armor, and all resist staying in archon mode with its %40 buff to both and very high damage becomes very attractive. With some life steal (~% or more dmg_>life conversion on a weapon) along with high weapon dmg, crit chance, and boat loads of crit hit damage it starts to become possible to tank things to death even in the later acts.
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Arcane Mines (courtesy of Lunasky)(original thread/video below)
http://www.diablofan...-bulid-w-video/
youtube.com/watch?v=rbuQWXSufXQ
http://us.battle.net...QXiO!Xgb!bZYaac
A kiting build that uses Arcane Mines to both slow and do damage to enemies. While slowed and traveling over mines Star Pack Meteor is used to deal the damage. Star Pack itself is a great move for proc'ing critical mass as well so in addition to this build relying on Crit Hit dmg and Crit Hit Chance for burst damage, the crit hit chance also provides added survivability by finishing the cooldown on diamond skin and teleport.
______________________________________________
Discussion:
What kind of success have you had in inferno in acts 3 and 4 using a 2hander? What build do/did you use? What kind of gear was needed to support it?
*Disclaimer* - No one is claiming 2handers have more damage throughput, nor are we ignorant of how arcane power on crit can keep 1h+oh builds going. This is purely for the sake of wanting to use a 2 handed play style.
The 2 handers are not really less viable, it depends on the build. If you are skilled / practiced enough to use meteor a slow 2 hander with 1200-1600 damage (not DPS) is going to produce insane crits as compared to a 400-800 damage wand when doing 300%ish of weapon damage.
Surely if you are going for CM build - you would benefit from speed, if you are going for a kite build and you have enough slows to keep stuff off you, or you can simply take the hits you can go disintegrate or frost beam and melt stuff.
Personally i wouldn't suggest using archon with anything below 50k ish dps and life steal of your weapon.
So basically with a 2 hander build you have to be less reliant on APoC, but rather on much larger single hits. Additionally, if you have enough resists / armor you can just stand there and tank absolutely anything with archon and 6% life steal
In my opinion, 2h spec was viable before the patch. The main reason people moved away from 2h spec was because you could very easily achieve higher dps values with 1h+OH at moderate or higher gear levels. After the patch, 2h stats make them much more appealing and more competetive with 1h+OH and I'm tempted to try to find a good 2h to switch back to my old spec (same as current spec but I'd drop magic weapon for a sig spell).
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#lcXQOS!XWf!bYaYcZ
It works quite well in Act 2 & 3. You don't need APOC for a AO build.
No I have not. I have not tried AT after 1.04. Good tip. I certainly will check it out.
Based on the information in the LoH coefficient thread on the official forums, found here, disintegrate and RoF tic twice a second. The coefficients per tic are approximately 33% for most RoF runes and 22% for disintegrate - Convergence or Chaos Nexus. Coefficients for other runes are posted above.
That means you should gain approximately 66% of your LoH each second from RoF and about 44% of your LoH from Disintegrate, per target. You can probably get away with face tanking in Act 1 with such a set up. Act 3 I'm pretty sure you'd die in a couple seconds since 3 hits kills you with Force Armor. I can't speak for Act 2 because I haven't spent any time there farming.
Also, I'd recommend testing the LoH with those spells just to be sure. To do that, remove any life regen from gear, get some amount of LoH, like 100, load up act 1 and take some damage from something. Then hold down your RoF or Disintegrate button and blast away. Best done against single target for Disintegrate. The health gained should pop up every 0.5s which is every tic. It might help to remove some dps gear so you don't kill the mob in 1 shot.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
55k with magic weapon, though I use the blood magic rune. It'd only give like 2k more dps if I switched to Force Weapon and I like the extra life gains for Act 3 farming. I guess the dps on my char profile is without MW.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
That was probably the easiest, least clicking clear of A3 i've ever had, and it was pretty damn fast as well. The best part about this kind of build is you do not need APoC or LoH, just gear for stats and crit, get a fat 2 hander with 5-6% LS and you're golden to stand face-tank champs while beaming away.
What i did with this build is basically try to maximize the archon up-time. Surely you can find videos of where archon goes on forever, surely you will have a couple of those situations, but you are also going to have situations where you archon runs out because you have to make a u-turn and run thru a cleared area, the next unexplored room has a champ and you've got 1 min+++ on archon CD, which happens more often than you think.
So i took both true power on archon and evocation to reduce the CD, piercing orb has a decent proc coefficient to make it reasonably usefull to reduce the archon cd via CM another 5-10 seconds easy. If you are soloing, the key is to get a cold damage bow/xbow and give it to your scoundrel, that gives you a perma slow, so you do not need to get a slow skill of any sort yourself.
With my DPS, piercing orb oftenly one-shots white trash mobs, as for the rest after being slowed, they stumble a lot because of my big hits / crits, all in all, it's rather difficult to get any mob to actually catch up with you, unless it's a teleporter / phase beast.
One big improvement i think might be worth making to it is getting more movement speed, because, simply put it will increase your archon uptime via less time spent running around looking for stuff to kill.
I needa properly try this in a group play as well to see how well it does there, but in solo i melted any champ within a few seconds easily, came close to death a couple of times simply because my EHP is rather... wdf
P.S. Loroese, if you got a moment, could you add the paragon level to your calculators, i was wondering today why my INT / VIT do not match the calculator... rofl
Added, with a couple other minor changes.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
I tried act 3 with the gear I have now and that spec, but without the life steal I just couldn't keep myself up. Might also have something to do with me having significantly less armor.
BTW did you choose prismatic armor rune because of the addition increase you'd get from being in archon form so often? and finally I think that I've read that crits done while in archon form have a chance to proc critical mass to lower its cooldown before it even wears off....can you confirm this?
Here's a theoretical Ice Mage build.
The resistance bonus from Archon applies to your base resistance. Basically all bonuses stack that way for armor and resistances. What that means is you gain the same amount of resistances from Archon form whether you have prismatic armor or not.
Crusader DPS and EHP Spreadsheet, meant for Crusaders
My Wizard
This sounded weird to me, so i did some quick gear swapping and I think I understand it now.
All % modifiers are additive, so if your base resist was 100, and you had -%10 from glass cannon, +%40 from archon, and +%40 from prismatic the formula would be the following:
Total Resist = Base Resist - .1*Base Resist + .4*Base Resist + .4 Base Resist
170 = 100 - .1*100 +.4*100+.4*100
Weird stuff
With a wand and a OH i have nearly 50% crit and 26 APoC, that's nowhere near low, it is simply a different playstyle that is alternative to the very common and abused CM build, simply because APoC is stupid expensive. For example if you do a search for a helm with 4% CC, socket 100+ int, and 8 APoC you will be amazed to see the results, may be a dozen helms are up, 1 was for 155 mil, the other 11 were 1 billion. That was the picture yesterday. A price of a helm with 6% CC 180 int, vit and all resist is starting from 10 mil... for a very strong helm, the only difference is APoC.
As a matter of fact, 2 handers with high crit dmg RELY on high crit to do big fat numbers, so it is quite logically exactly opposite to what you just said.
<3 thanks
On a side note, it seems that all the amazing 2handers have recently disappeared from the AH lately. Even the super expensive ones.
Edit: Just grabbed a 2hander with some life steal at a small dps loss, but holy hell did it make a difference. Face tanking act 3 elites to death in archon, and ponyland is a laugh.
and now for the loooong loooong grind until I can get me one of them socketed, %200 crit dmg, 1500dps, %6 life steal, 400intel Skorns