2.4 A5 Frenzy Barb Merc

Sherloc09 wrote: 1 year ago

undertow wrote: 1 year ago

Sherloc09 wrote: 1 year ago

The

Tiara with the life leech and 1% bonus attack rating per char level is the must have item, this makes him op.

He sounds like a monster I really want to try this when I'm rich enough for the swords. I feel like it may take years to find such a Tiara...

So, just tested

Amplify Damage Eldritch, took 12.31 seconds on p8. I made a swap and found that you're fine just using

Perfect Amethyst in the Swords. He's a wrecking crew. Only issue is having to keep the

Iron Golem alive if you're a necro, so you'll need

Raise Skeleton or

Revive to escort the

Iron Golem around while the merc wrecks everything else.

Also attempted a run with 1 Ethereal

Headstriker and 1

Azurewrath. Both using a

Perfect Amethyst in the socket. Eldritch p8 took 19.89 seconds using

Amplify Damage. I didn't check, but I think Eldritch was Stone Skin based on how many hits it took to kill him.

Just for shits and giggles and stemming from my current boredom:

Eldritch makes for a bit of a fun (=disturbingly weak) target when theorycrafting this out (well, maxrolling it out - too lazy for my own math atm).
Went ahead and put in your gear just for the hell of it. Except the jewel has 15ias instead of 7fhr as that gives you another frame with headstrikers.

P8 Eldritch should fall in on average 0.83 seconds with that. Not counting the adds.
Though as stupidly quick as that is, it is still significantly slower than dual Grief at 0.68s. Which makes sense..true, you don't get the doubling on the flat dmg but even without that it is barely lower on max and still worlds ahead on min.
That's with amp dmg up btw which sadly isn't guaranteed with a

Frenzy merc, due to the stupid

Taunt they gave him.

Grief tends to pull ahead mainly due to the inherently faster attack speed (=max

Frenzy speed) and the slightly higher hit chance as -target def outweighs the ar from a

Gul. Depending on target, it also gets the added +%dmg vs. demons which is a noteworthy extra buff.
Becomes more obvious on beefier targets like dclone which puts dual Grief at 110.71s and dual

Headstriker at 163.35s.

The difference is a lot less significant (especially on every-day targets) when you add extra buffage to your merc though. Say you use a Beast to add some fana goodness to him and suddenly you're eliminating the difference in attack speed, you're lowering the difference in hit chance (which is already fairly small to begin with) and you're lowering the overall impact of +%dmg vs. demons. On Eldritch, that actually puts them head to head at 0.62s each. On Dclone, it puts them at 99.42 (Grief) and 118.44 (HS) respectively which is significantly less of a difference.

Amy actually minimally outperforms

Gul in that scenario btw (on high-def targets), dropping the 118.44 to 118.12. You get even more performance out of adding an

Ohm though, dropping it to 107.09. The impact of AR for those kinds of targets actually isn't that big in the end. 40/15 ED/Max drops it to 103.02, getting you even closer to Grief. Switching the AR in the head jewel for 40ED drops you to 100.08. And replacing the run speed in that imaginary insane

Tiara with 30 str drops you to 97.49 so sub-100 with HS as well. Though the head changes can also be applied to the Grief loadout, meaning those don't get you much closer as they'd equally improve Grief.
But even without them, the ed/max in HS alone gets you too close to realistically tell a difference.

Now, let's optimize this and change the head to:
30 ED, 9 min, 8 max, 98% AR (lvl), 8 life stolen and 2 sockets with an ed/max and an ed/ias for headstrikers.
And the same thing with 2x ed/max for Grief (don't need the extra IAS to hit max with Beast).

The HS both get an ed/max.

And what you then get on P8 dclone is:
Grief at 85.11 seconds

Headstriker at 88.14 seconds

So hardly a difference left. And that's assuming you actually manage to get 2 perfect Griefs.

Now, if you read this far and managed to not go "WTF IS HE ON ABOUT, THAT'S WAY OFF", here's the kicker:
All of that is based on the loadout described in the preceding posts which is missing one critical piece of information that should admittedly be obvious but some may not know or think about it...

Headstriker can be upgraded!

Yup...the damn near equal performance is with base

Eth headstrikers.
Upping those drops your 88.14s to 62.48s, basically meaning you found the one thing in this game that stomps Grief by a clear margin in flat damage output. Huzzah!

Side note:
If you do look at beefy targets like dclone, either loadout obviously still pales in comparison to adding a Last Wish or similar into the mix (<25s) as neither has crushing blow which far exceeds raw dmg on those targets..but on normal non-boss mobs, that won't make much of a difference.

Side note #2:
If you scale it back down to P1, with dual HS, your merc could actually take out dclone faster than a budget smiter.
(assuming you apply open wounds for him and manage to keep up amp through his taunting - adding Last Wish ruins that, due to

Life Tap overriding your amp all the time)

Though dual Death performs even better in that scenario, due to massive CB without costing you amp. The theoretical kill time with that actually rivals a high end smiter. Now ditch the impossible-to-find

Tiara for a simple gully with an ed/max and you beat the kill time of even the best geared smiter. Though again, that is all giving your merc the amp Edge while leaving the smiter life-tapping. If you drop the

Life Tap approach for more damage and give your smiter amp (e.g. gavel on switch), they'll once again destroy said merc but hey ... it would be kinda sad if they didn't.

Yes, the headstrikers are upped. Mercs deal 20% dmg to bosses, so they suck at boss killing unless using high level crushing blow. Maxroll doesn’t take chance to hit correctly from what I’ve heard. Someone was saying it had gg act 2 merc listed as able to kill p1 Diablo in less than three seconds. When tested in game it is like 7-10 seconds because Diablo has 55% block chance.