I wanted to add in something interesting that I noticed when testing Mirror Image and it's interaction with other spells.
It's pretty obvious that Mirror Image is going to be a main staple skill in PvP, just like Teleport and the Illusionist passive. I wanted to incorporate Wave of Force into a PvP build that also uses MI and Tele. I found that the Images created by MI had a very limited number of spells they could cast, but thankfully WoF was one of them.
All Images created by any runs of MI could cast WoF, but for the most part, the waves did nothing unless you used Mirror Mimics, in which case the Waves behaved exactly as it does when you cast WoF, using the same rune effect you have on yours. This was pretty cool, and I enjoyed watching my Images cause significant knockback and stun with WoF: Impactful Waves. The WoF runes Force Affinity and Forceful Waves are lackluster when an Image casts them, while Exploding Wave seemed like it could be alright but very situational because the secondary waves don't hit the enemy who releases them, only other nearby enemies (if any).
Then I went on to testing Teleporting Wave, and it was fun too. It's not too useful on mobs bc they still track right to you the instant they're teleported, but I could see this being very fun vs players. But here's the kicker, and the whole point of this post-
- When an Image created by MI casts WoF: Teleporting Wave, it will randomly teleport any enemies hit, REGARDLESS of the rune used on MI. In addition, the images created by Teleport: Fracture can also cast WoF: Teleporting Wave, and those waves will cause effected enemies to be randomly teleported. These waves do no damage unless the images casting WoF were created with MI: Mirror Mimics, but they still all cause teleporting. -
All the sudden I could see 5 images casting Teleporting Wave, wreaking havoc on players as they are randomly teleported again and again. Or use Mocking Demise: if the enemy leaves them alive, they could get teleported. If the enemy kills your image, they could get stunned.
Maybe this is just a gimmicky trick and has no real value in PvP. I don't know, but it sure sounds like fun. On another note, Mirror Mimics can cast Frost Nova that does stun enemies, so combined with WoF they could provide a ton of CC (albeit a bit random/unreliable). Plus don't forget that you'd have WoF and maybe Frost Nova to cast as well. Just an idea.
I thoroughly believe that 18 APoC is NOT the minimum necessary value to maintain acceptable results with the CMWW build.
I've ran CMWW for a long time now, at many different values of APoC. I started at 28, and even with barely having 2 APS and 40% crit, I just couldn't run out of AP. I went to 23 and had the same results. Dropped to 2 APoC items for a total of 19, but got up to 2.3 APS and still just 48% crit, couldn't run out. Now I run 15 APoC and I can perma-freeze Ubers with no problems. If I was at the 3APS mark they'd never move. If you're going to look for an APoC Chant's and you will be at 50%CC and the 2.73APS breakpoint with it, you're fine with 15APoC and up. You can get considerably more damage on a 6 APoC Chant's Force than you would on a 9-10 APoC Force for the same price.
Gear:
First, don't go for a Tal's amulet with Cold damage just because it has cold damage. When something adds "X% Damage as (insert element here)", that doesn't mean it boosts skills or weapons that also have that elemental property. What it does is it increases your total damage by X% of your "black damage", in the form of the specified element. Your "black damage" is the non-elemental damage of your weapon (base weapon damage plus non-elemental bonuses if any) plus any min/max damage on jewelry, plus the damage from your offhand. This affix on some legendary/set items (Tal's amulet, Zuni boots, Triumvirate, etc.) has no impact on what skills you use or what element those skills are. Tal's amulet is still an option, but it doesn't have to have "cold" damage to be good.
That being said, the only items that would specifically play into this sort of build are Frostburn Gauntlets and the Fragment of Destiny wand. We all know how sub-par these items are, and even with a build like yours these two items can be easily out-classed by the basic gear everyone wants: trifecta gloves and high dps+socket weapons. Tal's 4-peice also plays into your build, and could actually be pretty good with the AP regen. The problem is, you lose Witching hour, your 12% Ray crit helm, a shot at an amazing Mara's, and it's likely Zuni Marrow is a better armor for you than Tal's (see below). Overall, it seems like a loss (as usual for Tal's set bonuses).
On the other hand, Mara's and/or Skull Grasp with Ray bonus could do well for you, but if you're intent on no IAS, you might want to forego the Skull Grasp. Another suggestion for you is Zuni's Marrow. Tal's Armor is great but it has IAS, and with your Zuni boots the Marrow would give about the same dps because of the +130 more INT, plus better survivability from the AR.
You look like you could use more AR and armor overall, actually. Look for INT, Crit, AR, Armor, vit rare bracers (INT, crit and 1 other of those stats will beat what you have now) and possibly AR or armor on your boots, gloves and even helm (or APoC). A Mara's plays well into this too with its natural Vit and AR. Your amulet is good, but as you've already stated you can get up to 17% Ray crit on a Mara's, plus INT, Vit, AR, STR (armor) and 2 more random rolls. Finally, a Zuni Pox with CC would be just awesome if you also got the Marrow- INT, CC, CD and double rolls of AR? Awesome. (Your rare ring is pretty awesome too. Might save this one for last.)
Skills:
Do you really have Frost Nova "always up"? Seems a little too good to be true even with your very high crit chance on Ray, mostly due to your low APS (there's that IAS deficiency again). I don't know how well you take hits with this setup, but you could consider the Prism rune for Diamond Skin, and adding EB in the place of Frost Nova.
The biggest gain here is that EB doesn't force a casting animation and Frost Nova does, so you would no longer be interrupting your Ray channeling. Re-casting Ray costs more AP than channeling it, so even though you're spending AP on EB, you're netting some back from a lessened cost of Ray and switching to the Prism rune. Plus EB has a decent coefficient and should trigger some CM and APoC procs too. (This could get even better if you found a helm with APoC. Another thing this can do is give you more options for a good Mara's in that you can consider EB Mara's as well as RoF.)
You could argue that Frost Nova adds damage too through Bone Chill, but that's only during Nova's duration. If you get some pretty decent up-time on Nova then the damage comparison to EB may come out as a draw, but still, EB doesn't interrupt Ray, and Nova does. This is highly dependent on your up-time of Nova though, and whether you can still survive without that CC.
You could try getting Evocation over Glass Cannon. You'd get some additional up-time on DS-Prism so your spells stay low and you'd get more EB casts for additional damage, plus the survivability "boost" of not taking a 10% penalty to damage reduction. It'd be a net dps loss though.
All of this is just my thoughts and suggestions of course. I've considered a build almost identical to this myself (with all the variations I've talked about here) but never got around to trying it out. In the end, just go with whatever is the most fun. This is a game after all.
Looking at your plots, the simulated loss of DPS as APS increases is troubling to me.
The only thing I can think of that would be causing that is your order of priorities of what spell to cast next for your simulation, or your simulated reaction time, or both. Could it be possible that as your APS increases that you're resetting DS and FN very, very fast, and so your simulation is casting them so often you're actually casting WW and CR less often?
On another note, wow you've changed a lot since you first posted this! The last I remember, this post was about comparing WW to Mistral Breeze and Meteor runes. I'm glad I took the time to re-read this. Very nice work.
Thanks, I'll go check out that post again. I do remember your results you posted on that as far as damage comparisons when using different CM proc spells, but I must have missed the LoH returns part. TBH since I don't have MATLAB, I've avoided that thread since my first read.
Blood Magic, if it doesn't work with shocking aspect (SA), would only give about 50-70% of that since SA+Storm Armor = 30-50% of your dps. I'm still not sure that BM works with SA.
I tried to test this too. I used Magic Missle/Seeker as my attack. I cast BM then SA or SA then BM (got same results), then go shoot a zombie with MM at point-blank and look for an SA proc. The lightning strikes from SA don't trigger LS but of course MM does, so what I do is check the damage of a crit MM, check to make sure it proc'd SA, and weigh the life return I see from that same shot against the damage of the MM. This was much more tedious than the last testing I did (and cost me a few deaths standing point-blank with mobs in MP7), but as far as I could tell I was only getting life equal to .015 * .2 * (MM damage).
It's pretty hard to say though. The SA procs aren't a whole lot of damage and I'm not recording them as they happen, I'm only checking to see if they proc or not. Since I'm just reading the screen and not capturing frames or anything I'm dropping digits too (i.e. 101564 MM damage might have shown, but I only remember and record 101k because I'm also watching for an SA proc and the life gain at the same time). So it's possible my margin of error could actually be hiding some small amount of life return from SA, but I really doubt it. The procs will still do anywhere from 3-7k damage if they don't crit and around 3x that if they do, so I think I would have noticed the difference at least once in a while.
Loroese, where do you get your data for those LoH multipliers at the APS breakpoints when running SNS? That'd be a useful table. I'd even suggest you add it to your CMWW Guide, under the Advanced section. I didn't think running a LS weapon with full SNS would even do as well as you state above, but I know you do your homework. I just want to see the table .
I also think it would be quite hard to hit 200K dps, 2.73APS and have LS on your weapon; you'd need VERY good gear since you're either running 8 armor slots with IAS and a LS Chant's Will, or 10 armor slots with IAS AND an IAS+LS wand/sword/EF. I can't speak for the second scenario (which seems very expensive), but I run 200K CMWW with a 1166 Chant's Will, and if I dropped the 88% CD for LS I'd lose 40k dps. Not easy to make that up somewhere else and still maintain 2.73APS (I have 2.80). Even if I could make it up, my LS Chant's Will would be kinda sub-par compared to the rest of my gear .
Oh and also, just for clarity, using the Blood Magic rune would give you the equivalent of 25-35% of the LoH values you state above, because you lose the dps from Storm Armor (which does not trigger LS from Blood Magic), and Blood Magic is only 1.5% LS instead of 3% LS. This is why Blood Magic alone is rarely good enough to run SNS against Reflect Damage/Electrified/Ghom/etc.
Loroese is right in that when comparing LS to LoH, LS gains value while LoH loses value as dps increases. But for CMWW, it would take an incredible amount of dps for LS to out-perform LoH. This is where itemization can determine the clear winner, as LS can only be found on a Wizard's weapon.
On my wizard in my current "testing" gear with 170K dps, I do around 175k damage per full duration of one WW on one target. 3% LS would return about 1050 life (175K * .03 * .2 = 1050). To know what this is equivalent to in LoH, I have to know how many ticks I get per cast of WW. Referencing Loroese's CMWW guide, my 2.64 APS would produce 33 ticks for one full-duration cast. WW has a proc rate of 12.5% (1.0.5 patch notes) or maybe 10% (quoted from Loroese's DPS/EHP spreadsheet, which he references to player testers posting results on the forums), and this equals only 250-323 LoH to get the same return per cast of WW.
So even if I wanted to sacrifice CD/socket/IAS on my weapon for LS, I'd still lose to the potential of getting a LoH weapon instead. If my WW did three times the damage it does now (if that's even possible) it would only break even between max LS (3%) return and max LoH return (959). Another way LS could catch up to LoH would be to maintain dps but have a less APS, but this is counter-productive to CMWW, and to increasing dps in general.
The real value in the discovery that Storm Armor snap-shots your weapon's LS when cast is showing you can swap to LS for the cast and then back to your real weapon to add some life return from Storm Armor's damage. I seriously doubt that the LS return from Storm Armor with Shocking Aspect (which provides no life via LoH) in addition to the LS from all your other sources would out-perform LoH, if you had to choose between the two.
SorrowsWind, your BNet friend's list is full, and I cannot accept your request. I'd imagine any other new sellers you've tried to contact recently would encounter the same.
The Skorn has nothing special about it besides its DPS. It's value is equivalent to the value of the lowest-priced 1450dps Skorn currently on the market, +/-5%.
The gloves have little value beyond the perfect crit roll. With no IAS, low CD and mid INT, while also having no EHP stat, I doubt they're worth even 1m.
The bracers are probably the best of your 3 items. Perfect crit, great vitality and primary rolls and pick-up radius all add decent value, and the lightning resist would be a selling point to LS Monks (though it rarely adds AH value). Try seeing what other 6 crit bracers with 150 DEX/VITare going for, and use that as a starting point. Don't underestimate the value of the pick-up radius, but at the same time don't think it will bring you BiS prices (this isn't a Lacuni).
I'll give you 100m for it . But I'd feel guilty for ripping you off.
Even with relatively low average damage and STR, the ring is still a quintifecta barb ring with very good IAS and CD, and it has VIT. It'll pull a bit more than 100m, IMO.
You're right. I'm redoing the first testing now and cannot reproduce my results I thought I had seen yesterday. I shouldn't have tried this while also forcing sleep deprivation upon myself... I think what I was seeing was just the last couple ticks of life gain from the Shocking Aspect procs while I was standing still casting the 3-4 WW's, before I teleported. They can take a second to show up as a tick on your screen. In any case, I'm going to edit out my first scenario entirely as it is false information. Thanks for pointing that out.
What I CAN reproduce is the remaining scenario (the "less scientific one"), where I cast Storm Armor/Shocking Aspect with a LS weapon equipped and then swap to a non-LS, spam WW into a group of mobs, and see very high life gain with no LS, regen or LoH equipped. I'm doing this on MP8 so things live long enough to see a constant gain in life.
This is actually pretty simple to test, and I want to explain it more right now as I'm doing it instead of as a false recollection later on as I did last time.
- I first kite/circle mobs as my lightning strikes hit them, and jot down the life gain numbers I see. The highest I saw of 20 or so crits was a hit for ~97k that healed me for 505, while most non-crits healed for 120-170 and most crits healed for 360-500. I had used a weapon with 2.6% LS when I cast Storm Armor.
- Then, still within the duration of the Storm Armor, I froze the group of mobs I was circling and spammed WW/Frost Nova into them.
I was seeing life gain numbers at the lowest of just over 800 and up to 1900-2100 steadily ticking until I was at full life. Note that I was now seeing life gain ticks twice a second, whereas most of the time the lightning strikes (and subsequent life gain) had been hitting 1/sec.This was all done with 2.51APS, 40% crit chance and 150K dps.
I decided I wanted to see more telling results, so I equipped a few more pieces and tested again, at 2.80APS, 55.5%CC and 167K dps. I also gained 362hp/sec regen from this gear, but no LoH or LS. My lightning strikes were rarely breaking 130K on crits with this new setup and hit about once a second. I used a 6% LS 2hand weapon for the casting of Storm Armor, then switched back to my non-LS weapon.
While using this setup, I was able to get life gain ticks of over 5k/tick while spamming WW. This is equivalent life gain to how much I would receive from a single hit for around 400k (400k x (6% / 5) = 4800), plus my life regen. Since again the damage from the WW's cannot proc life gain, the additional life gain seen in my two tests must be from Shocking Aspect procs.
While I am certain Life Steal will work with Storm Armor's lightning strikes AND Shocking Aspect's additional damage when cast with a Life Steal weapon equipped and then weapon-swapping to non-LS, I would appreciate someone else trying this out as well or sharing another method that could work better. The main problem I was trying to overcome was that as Loroese has already proven, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor return life through Life Steal, and this means you have to know relatively how much life gain you're getting from the lightning strikes and then subtract that from whatever life gain you get while trying to proc Shocking Aspect to see how much Shocking Aspect is actually producing. This consideration is in addition to having no LoH and swapping LS out after casting Storm Armor of course, so that no other sources of damage can be considered for life gain procs.
I removed all LoH and regen gear I had on. I intentionally took some hits to get down to ~15% life. I equipped a life steal weapon and cast Storm Armor with Shocking Aspect, then swapped my weapon back to a non-life steal weapon.
(* Edited out my first attempt to test this as it was invalid. Thanks BSF2000.)
The method I used to check was by casting Storm Armor with a LS weapon equipped and weapon-swapping to a non-LS weapon, and stun-locking a bunch of mobs while spamming WW (no EB, and of course no regen or LoH). As you know, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor hit only about 1/sec and I knew from doing this experiment for some time how much life I'd gain per crit strike, and as I spammed WW my life gain per second was easily and consistently 2-3 times my highest return from a crit lightning strike. Again, since I had no LS, regen or LoH equipped the difference in life gain could not be attributed to WW and so it must come from the damage dealt by Shocking Aspect.
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It's pretty obvious that Mirror Image is going to be a main staple skill in PvP, just like Teleport and the Illusionist passive. I wanted to incorporate Wave of Force into a PvP build that also uses MI and Tele. I found that the Images created by MI had a very limited number of spells they could cast, but thankfully WoF was one of them.
All Images created by any runs of MI could cast WoF, but for the most part, the waves did nothing unless you used Mirror Mimics, in which case the Waves behaved exactly as it does when you cast WoF, using the same rune effect you have on yours. This was pretty cool, and I enjoyed watching my Images cause significant knockback and stun with WoF: Impactful Waves. The WoF runes Force Affinity and Forceful Waves are lackluster when an Image casts them, while Exploding Wave seemed like it could be alright but very situational because the secondary waves don't hit the enemy who releases them, only other nearby enemies (if any).
Then I went on to testing Teleporting Wave, and it was fun too. It's not too useful on mobs bc they still track right to you the instant they're teleported, but I could see this being very fun vs players. But here's the kicker, and the whole point of this post-
- When an Image created by MI casts WoF: Teleporting Wave, it will randomly teleport any enemies hit, REGARDLESS of the rune used on MI. In addition, the images created by Teleport: Fracture can also cast WoF: Teleporting Wave, and those waves will cause effected enemies to be randomly teleported. These waves do no damage unless the images casting WoF were created with MI: Mirror Mimics, but they still all cause teleporting. -
All the sudden I could see 5 images casting Teleporting Wave, wreaking havoc on players as they are randomly teleported again and again. Or use Mocking Demise: if the enemy leaves them alive, they could get teleported. If the enemy kills your image, they could get stunned.
Maybe this is just a gimmicky trick and has no real value in PvP. I don't know, but it sure sounds like fun. On another note, Mirror Mimics can cast Frost Nova that does stun enemies, so combined with WoF they could provide a ton of CC (albeit a bit random/unreliable). Plus don't forget that you'd have WoF and maybe Frost Nova to cast as well. Just an idea.
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I've ran CMWW for a long time now, at many different values of APoC. I started at 28, and even with barely having 2 APS and 40% crit, I just couldn't run out of AP. I went to 23 and had the same results. Dropped to 2 APoC items for a total of 19, but got up to 2.3 APS and still just 48% crit, couldn't run out. Now I run 15 APoC and I can perma-freeze Ubers with no problems. If I was at the 3APS mark they'd never move. If you're going to look for an APoC Chant's and you will be at 50%CC and the 2.73APS breakpoint with it, you're fine with 15APoC and up. You can get considerably more damage on a 6 APoC Chant's Force than you would on a 9-10 APoC Force for the same price.
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Gear:
First, don't go for a Tal's amulet with Cold damage just because it has cold damage. When something adds "X% Damage as (insert element here)", that doesn't mean it boosts skills or weapons that also have that elemental property. What it does is it increases your total damage by X% of your "black damage", in the form of the specified element. Your "black damage" is the non-elemental damage of your weapon (base weapon damage plus non-elemental bonuses if any) plus any min/max damage on jewelry, plus the damage from your offhand. This affix on some legendary/set items (Tal's amulet, Zuni boots, Triumvirate, etc.) has no impact on what skills you use or what element those skills are. Tal's amulet is still an option, but it doesn't have to have "cold" damage to be good.
That being said, the only items that would specifically play into this sort of build are Frostburn Gauntlets and the Fragment of Destiny wand. We all know how sub-par these items are, and even with a build like yours these two items can be easily out-classed by the basic gear everyone wants: trifecta gloves and high dps+socket weapons. Tal's 4-peice also plays into your build, and could actually be pretty good with the AP regen. The problem is, you lose Witching hour, your 12% Ray crit helm, a shot at an amazing Mara's, and it's likely Zuni Marrow is a better armor for you than Tal's (see below). Overall, it seems like a loss (as usual for Tal's set bonuses).
On the other hand, Mara's and/or Skull Grasp with Ray bonus could do well for you, but if you're intent on no IAS, you might want to forego the Skull Grasp. Another suggestion for you is Zuni's Marrow. Tal's Armor is great but it has IAS, and with your Zuni boots the Marrow would give about the same dps because of the +130 more INT, plus better survivability from the AR.
You look like you could use more AR and armor overall, actually. Look for INT, Crit, AR, Armor, vit rare bracers (INT, crit and 1 other of those stats will beat what you have now) and possibly AR or armor on your boots, gloves and even helm (or APoC). A Mara's plays well into this too with its natural Vit and AR. Your amulet is good, but as you've already stated you can get up to 17% Ray crit on a Mara's, plus INT, Vit, AR, STR (armor) and 2 more random rolls. Finally, a Zuni Pox with CC would be just awesome if you also got the Marrow- INT, CC, CD and double rolls of AR? Awesome. (Your rare ring is pretty awesome too. Might save this one for last.)
Skills:
Do you really have Frost Nova "always up"? Seems a little too good to be true even with your very high crit chance on Ray, mostly due to your low APS (there's that IAS deficiency again). I don't know how well you take hits with this setup, but you could consider the Prism rune for Diamond Skin, and adding EB in the place of Frost Nova.
The biggest gain here is that EB doesn't force a casting animation and Frost Nova does, so you would no longer be interrupting your Ray channeling. Re-casting Ray costs more AP than channeling it, so even though you're spending AP on EB, you're netting some back from a lessened cost of Ray and switching to the Prism rune. Plus EB has a decent coefficient and should trigger some CM and APoC procs too. (This could get even better if you found a helm with APoC. Another thing this can do is give you more options for a good Mara's in that you can consider EB Mara's as well as RoF.)
You could argue that Frost Nova adds damage too through Bone Chill, but that's only during Nova's duration. If you get some pretty decent up-time on Nova then the damage comparison to EB may come out as a draw, but still, EB doesn't interrupt Ray, and Nova does. This is highly dependent on your up-time of Nova though, and whether you can still survive without that CC.
You could try getting Evocation over Glass Cannon. You'd get some additional up-time on DS-Prism so your spells stay low and you'd get more EB casts for additional damage, plus the survivability "boost" of not taking a 10% penalty to damage reduction. It'd be a net dps loss though.
All of this is just my thoughts and suggestions of course. I've considered a build almost identical to this myself (with all the variations I've talked about here) but never got around to trying it out. In the end, just go with whatever is the most fun. This is a game after all.
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Ugh, nvm. I see it on the AH, and although your price is fair, the dps loss just isn't worth the cost for me even if I could afford it.
Have a good one, Jaetch. Hope to see you around come the Expansion.
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The only thing I can think of that would be causing that is your order of priorities of what spell to cast next for your simulation, or your simulated reaction time, or both. Could it be possible that as your APS increases that you're resetting DS and FN very, very fast, and so your simulation is casting them so often you're actually casting WW and CR less often?
On another note, wow you've changed a lot since you first posted this! The last I remember, this post was about comparing WW to Mistral Breeze and Meteor runes. I'm glad I took the time to re-read this. Very nice work.
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I tried to test this too. I used Magic Missle/Seeker as my attack. I cast BM then SA or SA then BM (got same results), then go shoot a zombie with MM at point-blank and look for an SA proc. The lightning strikes from SA don't trigger LS but of course MM does, so what I do is check the damage of a crit MM, check to make sure it proc'd SA, and weigh the life return I see from that same shot against the damage of the MM. This was much more tedious than the last testing I did (and cost me a few deaths standing point-blank with mobs in MP7), but as far as I could tell I was only getting life equal to .015 * .2 * (MM damage).
It's pretty hard to say though. The SA procs aren't a whole lot of damage and I'm not recording them as they happen, I'm only checking to see if they proc or not. Since I'm just reading the screen and not capturing frames or anything I'm dropping digits too (i.e. 101564 MM damage might have shown, but I only remember and record 101k because I'm also watching for an SA proc and the life gain at the same time). So it's possible my margin of error could actually be hiding some small amount of life return from SA, but I really doubt it. The procs will still do anywhere from 3-7k damage if they don't crit and around 3x that if they do, so I think I would have noticed the difference at least once in a while.
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I also think it would be quite hard to hit 200K dps, 2.73APS and have LS on your weapon; you'd need VERY good gear since you're either running 8 armor slots with IAS and a LS Chant's Will, or 10 armor slots with IAS AND an IAS+LS wand/sword/EF. I can't speak for the second scenario (which seems very expensive), but I run 200K CMWW with a 1166 Chant's Will, and if I dropped the 88% CD for LS I'd lose 40k dps. Not easy to make that up somewhere else and still maintain 2.73APS (I have 2.80). Even if I could make it up, my LS Chant's Will would be kinda sub-par compared to the rest of my gear
Oh and also, just for clarity, using the Blood Magic rune would give you the equivalent of 25-35% of the LoH values you state above, because you lose the dps from Storm Armor (which does not trigger LS from Blood Magic), and Blood Magic is only 1.5% LS instead of 3% LS. This is why Blood Magic alone is rarely good enough to run SNS against Reflect Damage/Electrified/Ghom/etc.
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On my wizard in my current "testing" gear with 170K dps, I do around 175k damage per full duration of one WW on one target. 3% LS would return about 1050 life (175K * .03 * .2 = 1050). To know what this is equivalent to in LoH, I have to know how many ticks I get per cast of WW. Referencing Loroese's CMWW guide, my 2.64 APS would produce 33 ticks for one full-duration cast. WW has a proc rate of 12.5% (1.0.5 patch notes) or maybe 10% (quoted from Loroese's DPS/EHP spreadsheet, which he references to player testers posting results on the forums), and this equals only 250-323 LoH to get the same return per cast of WW.
So even if I wanted to sacrifice CD/socket/IAS on my weapon for LS, I'd still lose to the potential of getting a LoH weapon instead. If my WW did three times the damage it does now (if that's even possible) it would only break even between max LS (3%) return and max LoH return (959). Another way LS could catch up to LoH would be to maintain dps but have a less APS, but this is counter-productive to CMWW, and to increasing dps in general.
The real value in the discovery that Storm Armor snap-shots your weapon's LS when cast is showing you can swap to LS for the cast and then back to your real weapon to add some life return from Storm Armor's damage. I seriously doubt that the LS return from Storm Armor with Shocking Aspect (which provides no life via LoH) in addition to the LS from all your other sources would out-perform LoH, if you had to choose between the two.
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The gloves have little value beyond the perfect crit roll. With no IAS, low CD and mid INT, while also having no EHP stat, I doubt they're worth even 1m.
The bracers are probably the best of your 3 items. Perfect crit, great vitality and primary rolls and pick-up radius all add decent value, and the lightning resist would be a selling point to LS Monks (though it rarely adds AH value). Try seeing what other 6 crit bracers with 150 DEX/VITare going for, and use that as a starting point. Don't underestimate the value of the pick-up radius, but at the same time don't think it will bring you BiS prices (this isn't a Lacuni).
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Even with relatively low average damage and STR, the ring is still a quintifecta barb ring with very good IAS and CD, and it has VIT. It'll pull a bit more than 100m, IMO.
Good luck.
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Maelstrom#1420
Thanks.
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What I CAN reproduce is the remaining scenario (the "less scientific one"), where I cast Storm Armor/Shocking Aspect with a LS weapon equipped and then swap to a non-LS, spam WW into a group of mobs, and see very high life gain with no LS, regen or LoH equipped. I'm doing this on MP8 so things live long enough to see a constant gain in life.
This is actually pretty simple to test, and I want to explain it more right now as I'm doing it instead of as a false recollection later on as I did last time.
- I first kite/circle mobs as my lightning strikes hit them, and jot down the life gain numbers I see. The highest I saw of 20 or so crits was a hit for ~97k that healed me for 505, while most non-crits healed for 120-170 and most crits healed for 360-500. I had used a weapon with 2.6% LS when I cast Storm Armor.
- Then, still within the duration of the Storm Armor, I froze the group of mobs I was circling and spammed WW/Frost Nova into them.
I was seeing life gain numbers at the lowest of just over 800 and up to 1900-2100 steadily ticking until I was at full life. Note that I was now seeing life gain ticks twice a second, whereas most of the time the lightning strikes (and subsequent life gain) had been hitting 1/sec.This was all done with 2.51APS, 40% crit chance and 150K dps.
I decided I wanted to see more telling results, so I equipped a few more pieces and tested again, at 2.80APS, 55.5%CC and 167K dps. I also gained 362hp/sec regen from this gear, but no LoH or LS. My lightning strikes were rarely breaking 130K on crits with this new setup and hit about once a second. I used a 6% LS 2hand weapon for the casting of Storm Armor, then switched back to my non-LS weapon.
While using this setup, I was able to get life gain ticks of over 5k/tick while spamming WW. This is equivalent life gain to how much I would receive from a single hit for around 400k (400k x (6% / 5) = 4800), plus my life regen. Since again the damage from the WW's cannot proc life gain, the additional life gain seen in my two tests must be from Shocking Aspect procs.
While I am certain Life Steal will work with Storm Armor's lightning strikes AND Shocking Aspect's additional damage when cast with a Life Steal weapon equipped and then weapon-swapping to non-LS, I would appreciate someone else trying this out as well or sharing another method that could work better. The main problem I was trying to overcome was that as Loroese has already proven, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor return life through Life Steal, and this means you have to know relatively how much life gain you're getting from the lightning strikes and then subtract that from whatever life gain you get while trying to proc Shocking Aspect to see how much Shocking Aspect is actually producing. This consideration is in addition to having no LoH and swapping LS out after casting Storm Armor of course, so that no other sources of damage can be considered for life gain procs.
I hope this is more accurate, and helpful.
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(* Edited out my first attempt to test this as it was invalid. Thanks BSF2000.)
The method I used to check was by casting Storm Armor with a LS weapon equipped and weapon-swapping to a non-LS weapon, and stun-locking a bunch of mobs while spamming WW (no EB, and of course no regen or LoH). As you know, the lightning strikes from Storm Armor hit only about 1/sec and I knew from doing this experiment for some time how much life I'd gain per crit strike, and as I spammed WW my life gain per second was easily and consistently 2-3 times my highest return from a crit lightning strike. Again, since I had no LS, regen or LoH equipped the difference in life gain could not be attributed to WW and so it must come from the damage dealt by Shocking Aspect.