I believe that the Monster XP can be replaced with a socket. If not, then the Attack Speed stat.
Monster XP is a secondary stat and sockets are a primary stat, therefore it's not possible to replace monster XP with a socket.
Without knowing your crit chance/crit damage, I think it's still safe to say that you should leave the crit damage alone. EDIT: Actually, crit damage may be the weakest stat if you already have a lot of crit damage and/or a low crit %. Sorry, I can't check your gear right now.
I would pick attack speed to re-roll if you are comfortable with your proc rates and aren't near a channeled spell breakpoint (for disintegrate, twister, etc).
If you want 6% more life on hit or procs, or you are near to an attack speed break point, I would re-roll the 7% damage and keep the attack speed. You will lose a small bit more damage than if you kept the 7% damage and lost the attack speed, though.
600 Intelligence is too important to lose, it probably accounts for ~10% of your damage.
First off, Strength and Dexterity do next to nothing for wizards (just a small amount of bonus armor and dodge, respectively). Intelligence and Vitality are the only primary stats that matter for wizards.
If the game shows your pants as green upgrades in damage, toughness, and healing, they're probably worth using. 2 sockets in leg armor are generally sought-after (as are 3 sockets in chest armor). The pants must have a lot of Intelligence to make up for the loss of 1% crit and attack speed, or your critical damage must be low, causing critical chance to be relatively ineffective for raising your damage.
As a quick rule, try to balance your critical hit damage to be approximately 10x your critical hit chance. So if you have 30% crit chance, you can get up to 300% total crit damage before you should consider focusing on more crit chance.
Attack speed is independent of your crit chance or damage, and generally is an effective way to increase your DPS if crit dmg/chance are in balance. The only time attack speed won't help your real damage output is if you're using mostly spells on a cooldown instead of spells you can repeatedly cast in sequence.
The only stats on gear that won't factor into the green and red numbers are those with an orange diamond bullet point on the tooltip- for example: +10% lightning skill damage, +25% damage versus elites, chance to shoot a fireball on attack, etc.
As long as the damage and toughness numbers are green on an upgrade, it's probably better for you. Depending on your build, this may change, but in general, green numbers mean better.
The main damage stats for a wizard are: Intelligence, attack speed, critical hit chance, critical hit damage (and thus socketed weapons). Additional stats are: +% damage to element (fire, cold, etc), +% damage to skill (disintegrate, meteor, etc), +min-max damage (often on rings, such as +30-60 damage). +% damage to elites is very helpful for farming bosses or champion/named monsters. +% damage to demons can be useful depending on the act in which you play.
I did Master rifts with little-no problem at 350k dps and 5mil toughness (barb). Torment 1 rifts were also doable with a friend, but some elite packs were challenging solo.
(edit: I also had some elemental skill bonus damage, though- about 35%)
This means the second build does about 20% more damage without procs. Thunderfury's proc does about 62% of the damage of a HotA, or 52% of the damage of a Smash.
Assume you use Smash (which has a 66.7% chance to trigger procs like Thunderfury), so a Thunderfury proc is basically an extra 50% HotA.
Thunderfury needs about a 60% chance to trigger per HotA in order to surpass the damage from the second build. I've heard anecdotal evidence that the proc rate is much higher.
Thus, I would guess that Thunderfury makes up the difference in damage.
Threatening Shout - Grim Harvest has a 15% chance the first time you affect a monster with Shout to cause it to immediately "drop treasure or health globes."
This is the same as what happens when you kill a monster and it leaves treasure or a health globe. In this case, treasure can mean gold or items of any quality (grey to legendary).
Essentially, the rune gives you 15% more "drops" from every monster you hit with your shout. The drops occur immediately, though, not when the monster is killed.
This means that, statistically, a Barbarian can find 15% more legendary items from "drops." However, not all of a character's legendary items come from regular monster drops upon killing something. Grim Harvest won't increase the chances to find legendary items from chests, breakable objects, or the pre-set loot granted from quests or killing a boss for the first time.
I was concerned about this too when I started my monk.
In my experience, as far as the primary skills go (spirit generators: fists of thunder, deadly reach, crippling wave, way of the thousand fists), the two skills with "fist" in the name are always punches/unarmed strikes without weapons.
However, Crippling Wave always uses your equipped weapon.
Deadly Reach uses your weapon in one special case: the daibo. From my testing, most weapons, 1 and 2-handed, will be slung for Deadly Reach and the monk (or at least female monk) will do knee/shoulder/kick or something similar. However, with a daibo, the animation changes to staff strike, other end of staff, then a big staff strike.
One more thing to note is that Deadly Reach - Scattered Blows has an alternative third hit animation where the monk slams the ground instead of attacking in front.
Tempest Rush may draw your weapon or not, including with a daibo. I honestly can't recall.
Pretty much all other monk skills are described as punches, kicks, or mystic attacks and thus don't use weapons.
If you're talking about Electrified monsters, they are a big problem for most Barbarians. Especially if you use Whirlwind or Leap, because you can stand "inside" the monster and get damaged by all of the lightning bolts at once. My Barb has a lot of problems with Electrified, but Thunderstorm and Orbiter are easy.
Similar to Diablo 2, just Lightning Resistance doesn't solve the problem because of the huge number of charged bolts.
1. Superstition and Lightning Resistance can help, but you will still die if you stand too close to the monster for a long time. Superstition is a pretty good idea, though, because of the bonus fury.
2. Missile (Ranged) Damage Reduced by % helps versus Electrified (not Orbiter or Thunderstorm, though). So does Reduced % Damage from Elites.
(3. You may be able to dodge the bolts if you use a rune that gives +% Dodge, or you have Dexterity for some reason. You may be able to block them with a shield, too, but I'm not sure.)
If Lightning damage (only) is your biggest problem, you could try to find aXephirian Amulet.
Devil's anvil rune has an higher proc chance than the others. That combined whit overpower: momentun and a decent crit chance makes using fury generators not necesary, at least in aoe.
As it stands in 2.0.3, Devils' Anvil doesn't have a higher proc chance per hit than most other Hammer of the Ancients runes. Also, I believe they patched the bug from several patches ago where Devil's Anvil was triggering procs when it slowed mobs for 2 seconds. Therefore, correct me if you know otherwise, but I don't think Devil's Anvil is particularly useful for sustaining Hammer. Additionally, without Into the Fray restoring fury on crit, and Mighty Weapon Master only restoring 1 fury per hit, it's pretty much impossible to make Hammer pay for itself anymore.
I'd say that Smash plus a Cindercoat is probably one of the best ways to make Hammer cheaper. Unforgiving + Immortal King's set (3 piece bonus) will give you 4 fury a second at all times, which technically isn't going to offset the cost of Hammer, but may make it easier at the start of a fight.
You could try to finesse a build that used the Relentless passive to make Hammer cost 5 fury an attack (base). Further modified by Cindercoat or other cost reduction items, you could probably get it to ~3 fury. I don't think anyone's managed to make it reasonable to stay < 35% health most of the time, though.
I currently dual wield, although I have swapped back and forth between the two.
Legacy Skorn is good right now because 1) it can roll high weapon damage 2) it has automatic crit damage 3) it has a socket. This doesn't make it the best weapon, but it makes pretty much every legacy Skorn very powerful.
In contrast, Legacy Echoing Fury is very good for dual wield builds when held in the off-hand.
2-handers work well with Earthquake, Rend, Revenge, Leap, Furious Charge, etc. This is because these skills don't benefit from increased attack speed. It also works slightly better with Whirlwind when using runes other than Wind Shear or Blood Funnel.
Dual wield works well with Whirlwind - Wind Shear and Blood Funnel because it triggers the runes' effects more rapidly. It's also better for any rune that has an on-hit ability, like Frenzy - Smite, Hammer of the Ancients - Birthright, or Bash - Clobber.
As a quick rule, pretty much every other skill is a toss-up between the two. Even Overpower is reasonably balanced between 2-handers and dual wield. 2-handers hit harder with Overpower, but dual wield gives more crits to lower the cooldown more quickly.
So:
Any build that doesn't rely on Rend or Furious Charge for damage should be fine with dual wield. Using Hammer of the Ancients or Whirlwind (or both) is perfectly acceptable with two weapons. A lot of people really like Rend, though, so they use a Skorn.
My current (2.0.3 dual wield) build, for example - No legacy gear, lightning damage theme
Frenzy - Smite (not really necessary, but it feels better to have a builder sometimes- can be replaced with Leap, Charge, Rend, etc)
Whirlwind - Wind Shear (dual wield works well to generate extra fury on hit)
Overpower - Killing Spree (lightning damage, resets reasonably quickly due to dual wield)
Battle Rage - Marauder's Rage (rune doesn't really matter)
Threatening Shout - Grim Harvest (currently bugged, it seems, but this skill slot can be replaced with anything)
Earthquake - Mountain's Call (lightning damage, not optimal with dual wield but still melts elite packs)
For weapons, I use an Odyn Son and Solanium, but any high-damage one handers would work. It's helpful to use two of the same weapon speed though for whirlwind.
Magic Missile - Conflagrate specifically mentions refreshing stacks, while Way of the Thousand Fists - Fists of Fury does not. Thus, I would not have expected fists to refresh and instead work exactly as described by tadrinth.
I was mistaken about Fists of Fury only applying on the second hit, but on a tangent the second hit is really what makes the rune work because:
1. It applies the DoT 7 times.
2. It has twice the proc rate of other Way of the Thousand Fist runes. This is why Xdmini probably observed a lot more cyclones with this rune (the cyclones are twice as likely to appear off each of the 7 hits in the second strike).
3. It may or may not also cause things like cyclones to trigger off of the DoT ticks, but I wouldn't be surprised if the DoT no longer triggers any procs. I believe this was fixed to prevent the "infinite spirit" gameplay using Faith in the Light.
As far as Conflagrate goes, my interpretation of the skill is that the "burn damage" refers to the Conflagrate burn itself - i.e.: as long as you continue to hit the target with missiles, the DoT will keep stacking higher and higher. This seems to follow the skill description and the common connotation of the word "conflagration" as a fire that continues to burn and get stronger. I really did want to test this one but haven't been able to do so yet.
Edit: Here's a link to the official site where people test Conflagrate:
Basically, it appears to work the way I described above. However, note that no other skill in the game, Fists of Fury included, mentions refreshing DoTs. Only conflagrate functions like this presently.
Caveat: I have not tested Fists of Fury or Conflagrate recently (but I've been planning to do so).
The conflagrate rune explicitly says that it both stacks and resets the durations of stacks upon hit, so I imagine it works a little differently than Fists of Fury.
Fists of Fury should add the 60% holy damage or whatever each time you hit with the second strike. The stacking mechanic basically just ensures that you don't "waste damage" by DoTing a guy who is already DoTed. You can think of it as just doing +60% weapon damage (or whatever the number is) on every second strike, but it occurs slowly rather than instantly. There should be -no- stack limit other than the number of times you can hit in 3 seconds.
Historically, the main benefit of this was the fact that the second strike has a high proc coefficient compared to other runes of the same skill. This was key in the so-called "Nirvana" builds that used Infused with Light plus Fists of Fury for 3ish seconds of massive spirit generation. I believe this no longer works, though.
0
Without knowing your crit chance/crit damage, I think it's still safe to say that you should leave the crit damage alone.
EDIT: Actually, crit damage may be the weakest stat if you already have a lot of crit damage and/or a low crit %. Sorry, I can't check your gear right now.
I would pick attack speed to re-roll if you are comfortable with your proc rates and aren't near a channeled spell breakpoint (for disintegrate, twister, etc).
If you want 6% more life on hit or procs, or you are near to an attack speed break point, I would re-roll the 7% damage and keep the attack speed. You will lose a small bit more damage than if you kept the 7% damage and lost the attack speed, though.
600 Intelligence is too important to lose, it probably accounts for ~10% of your damage.
1
If the game shows your pants as green upgrades in damage, toughness, and healing, they're probably worth using. 2 sockets in leg armor are generally sought-after (as are 3 sockets in chest armor). The pants must have a lot of Intelligence to make up for the loss of 1% crit and attack speed, or your critical damage must be low, causing critical chance to be relatively ineffective for raising your damage.
As a quick rule, try to balance your critical hit damage to be approximately 10x your critical hit chance. So if you have 30% crit chance, you can get up to 300% total crit damage before you should consider focusing on more crit chance.
Attack speed is independent of your crit chance or damage, and generally is an effective way to increase your DPS if crit dmg/chance are in balance. The only time attack speed won't help your real damage output is if you're using mostly spells on a cooldown instead of spells you can repeatedly cast in sequence.
The only stats on gear that won't factor into the green and red numbers are those with an orange diamond bullet point on the tooltip- for example: +10% lightning skill damage, +25% damage versus elites, chance to shoot a fireball on attack, etc.
As long as the damage and toughness numbers are green on an upgrade, it's probably better for you. Depending on your build, this may change, but in general, green numbers mean better.
The main damage stats for a wizard are: Intelligence, attack speed, critical hit chance, critical hit damage (and thus socketed weapons). Additional stats are: +% damage to element (fire, cold, etc), +% damage to skill (disintegrate, meteor, etc), +min-max damage (often on rings, such as +30-60 damage). +% damage to elites is very helpful for farming bosses or champion/named monsters. +% damage to demons can be useful depending on the act in which you play.
0
(edit: I also had some elemental skill bonus damage, though- about 35%)
0
570k dps * 1.027 (extra HoTA damage) * 1.0979 (bonus to elites) = 642.7k DPS (without Thunderfury)
This means the second build does about 20% more damage without procs. Thunderfury's proc does about 62% of the damage of a HotA, or 52% of the damage of a Smash.
Assume you use Smash (which has a 66.7% chance to trigger procs like Thunderfury), so a Thunderfury proc is basically an extra 50% HotA.
Thunderfury needs about a 60% chance to trigger per HotA in order to surpass the damage from the second build. I've heard anecdotal evidence that the proc rate is much higher.
Thus, I would guess that Thunderfury makes up the difference in damage.
0
Crafted items don't scale up, but IK is not crafted.
0
This is the same as what happens when you kill a monster and it leaves treasure or a health globe. In this case, treasure can mean gold or items of any quality (grey to legendary).
Essentially, the rune gives you 15% more "drops" from every monster you hit with your shout. The drops occur immediately, though, not when the monster is killed.
This means that, statistically, a Barbarian can find 15% more legendary items from "drops." However, not all of a character's legendary items come from regular monster drops upon killing something. Grim Harvest won't increase the chances to find legendary items from chests, breakable objects, or the pre-set loot granted from quests or killing a boss for the first time.
0
In my experience, as far as the primary skills go (spirit generators: fists of thunder, deadly reach, crippling wave, way of the thousand fists), the two skills with "fist" in the name are always punches/unarmed strikes without weapons.
However, Crippling Wave always uses your equipped weapon.
Deadly Reach uses your weapon in one special case: the daibo. From my testing, most weapons, 1 and 2-handed, will be slung for Deadly Reach and the monk (or at least female monk) will do knee/shoulder/kick or something similar. However, with a daibo, the animation changes to staff strike, other end of staff, then a big staff strike.
One more thing to note is that Deadly Reach - Scattered Blows has an alternative third hit animation where the monk slams the ground instead of attacking in front.
Tempest Rush may draw your weapon or not, including with a daibo. I honestly can't recall.
Pretty much all other monk skills are described as punches, kicks, or mystic attacks and thus don't use weapons.
0
Similar to Diablo 2, just Lightning Resistance doesn't solve the problem because of the huge number of charged bolts.
1. Superstition and Lightning Resistance can help, but you will still die if you stand too close to the monster for a long time. Superstition is a pretty good idea, though, because of the bonus fury.
2. Missile (Ranged) Damage Reduced by % helps versus Electrified (not Orbiter or Thunderstorm, though). So does Reduced % Damage from Elites.
(3. You may be able to dodge the bolts if you use a rune that gives +% Dodge, or you have Dexterity for some reason. You may be able to block them with a shield, too, but I'm not sure.)
If Lightning damage (only) is your biggest problem, you could try to find aXephirian Amulet.
0
I'd say that Smash plus a Cindercoat is probably one of the best ways to make Hammer cheaper. Unforgiving + Immortal King's set (3 piece bonus) will give you 4 fury a second at all times, which technically isn't going to offset the cost of Hammer, but may make it easier at the start of a fight.
You could try to finesse a build that used the Relentless passive to make Hammer cost 5 fury an attack (base). Further modified by Cindercoat or other cost reduction items, you could probably get it to ~3 fury. I don't think anyone's managed to make it reasonable to stay < 35% health most of the time, though.
0
Legacy Skorn is good right now because 1) it can roll high weapon damage 2) it has automatic crit damage 3) it has a socket. This doesn't make it the best weapon, but it makes pretty much every legacy Skorn very powerful.
In contrast, Legacy Echoing Fury is very good for dual wield builds when held in the off-hand.
2-handers work well with Earthquake, Rend, Revenge, Leap, Furious Charge, etc. This is because these skills don't benefit from increased attack speed. It also works slightly better with Whirlwind when using runes other than Wind Shear or Blood Funnel.
Dual wield works well with Whirlwind - Wind Shear and Blood Funnel because it triggers the runes' effects more rapidly. It's also better for any rune that has an on-hit ability, like Frenzy - Smite, Hammer of the Ancients - Birthright, or Bash - Clobber.
As a quick rule, pretty much every other skill is a toss-up between the two. Even Overpower is reasonably balanced between 2-handers and dual wield. 2-handers hit harder with Overpower, but dual wield gives more crits to lower the cooldown more quickly.
So:
Any build that doesn't rely on Rend or Furious Charge for damage should be fine with dual wield. Using Hammer of the Ancients or Whirlwind (or both) is perfectly acceptable with two weapons. A lot of people really like Rend, though, so they use a Skorn.
My current (2.0.3 dual wield) build, for example - No legacy gear, lightning damage theme
Frenzy - Smite (not really necessary, but it feels better to have a builder sometimes- can be replaced with Leap, Charge, Rend, etc)
Whirlwind - Wind Shear (dual wield works well to generate extra fury on hit)
Overpower - Killing Spree (lightning damage, resets reasonably quickly due to dual wield)
Battle Rage - Marauder's Rage (rune doesn't really matter)
Threatening Shout - Grim Harvest (currently bugged, it seems, but this skill slot can be replaced with anything)
Earthquake - Mountain's Call (lightning damage, not optimal with dual wield but still melts elite packs)
For weapons, I use an Odyn Son and Solanium, but any high-damage one handers would work. It's helpful to use two of the same weapon speed though for whirlwind.
0
I was mistaken about Fists of Fury only applying on the second hit, but on a tangent the second hit is really what makes the rune work because:
1. It applies the DoT 7 times.
2. It has twice the proc rate of other Way of the Thousand Fist runes. This is why Xdmini probably observed a lot more cyclones with this rune (the cyclones are twice as likely to appear off each of the 7 hits in the second strike).
3. It may or may not also cause things like cyclones to trigger off of the DoT ticks, but I wouldn't be surprised if the DoT no longer triggers any procs. I believe this was fixed to prevent the "infinite spirit" gameplay using Faith in the Light.
As far as Conflagrate goes, my interpretation of the skill is that the "burn damage" refers to the Conflagrate burn itself - i.e.: as long as you continue to hit the target with missiles, the DoT will keep stacking higher and higher. This seems to follow the skill description and the common connotation of the word "conflagration" as a fire that continues to burn and get stronger. I really did want to test this one but haven't been able to do so yet.
Edit: Here's a link to the official site where people test Conflagrate:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/11915702287
Basically, it appears to work the way I described above. However, note that no other skill in the game, Fists of Fury included, mentions refreshing DoTs. Only conflagrate functions like this presently.
0
The conflagrate rune explicitly says that it both stacks and resets the durations of stacks upon hit, so I imagine it works a little differently than Fists of Fury.
Fists of Fury should add the 60% holy damage or whatever each time you hit with the second strike. The stacking mechanic basically just ensures that you don't "waste damage" by DoTing a guy who is already DoTed. You can think of it as just doing +60% weapon damage (or whatever the number is) on every second strike, but it occurs slowly rather than instantly. There should be -no- stack limit other than the number of times you can hit in 3 seconds.
Historically, the main benefit of this was the fact that the second strike has a high proc coefficient compared to other runes of the same skill. This was key in the so-called "Nirvana" builds that used Infused with Light plus Fists of Fury for 3ish seconds of massive spirit generation. I believe this no longer works, though.