When removing Feeding Frenzy, does it make Skeleton somewhat passive? Wouldn't it reduce the clear speed significantly?
Not that I've noticed. I just drop the skellies in packs as I charge through. They clean up pretty well for me.
If you don't like how they behave without Feeding Frenzy though, you can always run with it. It's a drop off of raw DPS, but if you like the feel of it better then that's the better choice for you.
I have finished to assemble my new setup with 2x6L weapons, see below:
Spoiler
https://pastebin.com/E210Mzcq
1.5m dps per skeleton on my staff, 430k on the sword in clear mode. Interestingly, with this setup when I press 'X' I still retain my skeletons (no need to resummon them) and I keep the same state of my Vaal skill in terms of souls and stuff, even though it's technically two different gems, not even of the same level.
That seems VERY interesting. Didn't think it was possible to maintain such a high damage without wands. How does cyclone feel like? Is Spirit offering up all the time? Switching between boss and map clear must be nice! And stun immunity with Cyclone too. I see some insane minion speed on the Sword - does that make a difference on map clear? Also, all your gems are not even max, so there can be further improvements.
I mean one staff isn't far behind 2 wands in terms of minions/gems bonuses. Unless you want 2x +2 wands, but to me that's just overkill, I'd rather have 1 +2 wand then and a shield.
Cyclone... I have mixed feelings about it after testing it a bit. Yes on bosses you have the stun immunity + perma ES, but if for example it's a very deadly boss you still need to stop cyclon'ing to resummon your dying skeletons, and more importantly on regular mobs I had quite a few times where I was running into a bunch of deadly mobs and if I wasn't already cyclon'ing they would get me quite low. And I'm not using cyclone all the time when map clearing cause I want to go fast. So I had actually more survivability issues with cyclone than CWDT. With CWDT the uptime of Spirit Offering is actually quite good if you follow the guid and keep the CWDT gem to lvl 1. Manually desecrate the boss area to (re)spawn bodies when necessary. Also even when going fast to clear a map normally I would just zerg the place and summon skeleton on top of mobs (they despawn anyway as you move away from them, in my experience even with crazy movement speed they still stay behind scouting instead of following you). If I cyclone I need to stop, cyclone a bit to get my ES, summon skellies, go back to cycloning... It's not flowing as smoothly.
So on paper Cyclone is better, in practice I switched back to manual desecrate and CWDT+Spirit Offering+Enfeeble.
Despite this I still kept my 2 6L setup. Ok I don't need no-wands anymore since I'm not cycloning, but just press 'X' to switch melee splash to multistrike and feeding frenzy to ruthless is great. Once again keeping souls for vaal and without resummoning. If I forget to switch weapons on a juicy metamorph I see it's life going down a bit slowly, I press 'X' and it just melts (adding roughly 1m dps per skeleton). :D
For me right now that's worth losing the small added dps of wands and the protection/mobility of the shield.
For the sword the insane minion speed (as you can see on my PoB I couldn't fit it on my rings/amulet)+ feeding frenzy means that I summon them on top of mobs, they wreck them and rush instantly to all other mobs in the area while I'm already running further to find more mobs. It's nice.
The massive increase to skelly duration is another case of nice on paper but in practice you outrun them and they despawn. Although it helped on a blighted map where I was just afk'ing near the pump while going to the fridge and stuff, came back and skellies were still up (77s duration despite one To Dust jewel). ^^
Yeah as you say gems are not even maxed and not many awakened yet. With current gear I can get to 1.73m dps per skelly according to PoB by just putting all gems to max. Once again from 1.5 to 1.7 for me it's not a huge difference, considering more QoL and survivability at this point.
Too bad about cycloning but the most important thing for me would be the X-switching. So when I get some more exa I will definitely try it out :)
Have you tried manually triggering Spirit offering? I remember you contemplating getting rid of the CWDT at some point. I really like not relying of taking damage to have my shield up. Also, I believe I read somewhere that it is not triggered by all kinds of damage. Being able to put up the shield when I sense shit is about to go down is really convenient. Of course you loose enfeeble, but gain two sockets.
Any reason you run Feeding frenzy on the sword instead of Brutality (I am using Ruthless instead of Brutality to gain the extra minion chaos damage from Spirit offering, since that is up most of the time - thx UBill - but most are using brutality it seems), when skellies get that from golems?
Final question, how many vaals did you use to get "Corrupted blood cannot be inflicted on you" on your To Dust?
Last edited by varmemester on Jan 6, 2020, 3:47:32 AM
Too bad about cycloning but the most important thing for me would be the X-switching. So when I get some more exa I will definitely try it out :)
Have you tried manually triggering Spirit offering? I remember you contemplating getting rid of the CWDT at some point. I really like not relying of taking damage to have my shield up. Also, I believe I read somewhere that it is not triggered by all kinds of damage. Being able to put up the shield when I sense shit is about to go down is really convenient. Of course you loose enfeeble, but gain two sockets.
Any reason you run Feeding frenzy on the sword instead of Brutality (I am using Ruthless instead of Brutality to gain the extra minion chaos damage from Spirit offering, since that is up most of the time - thx UBill - but most are using brutality it seems), when skellies get that from golems?
Final question, how many vaals did you use to get "Corrupted blood cannot be inflicted on you" on your To Dust?
So, manually getting spirit offering, or getting it through cyclone, for me ends up being the same problem: assuming you "sense shit" as you say, you need to quickly desecrate if need be and then Spirit Offering. For me that's nowhere near as reactive as a CWDT setup. If found myself dying when I would never die in a low lvl CWDT setup, as this is super reactive in my experience and triggers straight as I start to take damage, whether I sense it clming or not lol. Also uptime is 100% so I don't need to cast it manually to ensure it's up for the dxtra chaos damage or as preventive ES buffer.
The enfeeble is not that useful I think, feel free to use that socket otherwise.
On the sword I use feeding frenzy purely to give the skeletons an aggressive AI. The sword is the fast easy clearing setup. Having crazy angry super fast running skeletons from the second I summon them is cool. Ruthless and no Brutality cause of the extra chaos damage from Spirit Offering. There could be an argument that brutality raises dps from the first strike though, while ruthless would take 3 strike on the same target to be great, not necessarily ideal for the clearing setup.
To get the corrupted blood implicit on To Dust I just bought it as is.
