Barrage

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Vipermagi wrote:

Weapons are, as always, entirely separate. If you have one Wand with only Damage and one with only Crit Chance, you'll be seeing a lot of low-damage Crits and high-damage regular Hits.

So these 4 hits will be as follows: 1 main hand and 1 offhand and repeat, with the properties of the weapon? If so, I guess I will have to go with similar wands, too bad. Was thinking on using moonsorrow in offhand for blind, but oh well.

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Allnamestaken wrote:

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Vipermagi wrote:

Weapons are, as always, entirely separate. If you have one Wand with only Damage and one with only Crit Chance, you'll be seeing a lot of low-damage Crits and high-damage regular Hits.

So these 4 hits will be as follows: 1 main hand and 1 offhand and repeat, with the properties of the weapon? If so, I guess I will have to go with similar wands, too bad. Was thinking on using moonsorrow in offhand for blind, but oh well.

welcome to my lack of aoe for dw dagger+claw. Duel strike+splash is good but something lacks.

Edit: nothing is wrong but being half chances/effects feels sad usually.

Made two barrage characters in Ambush, a Dual Wander and a Ranger. The ranger has been put on the shelf due to mediocre results. The Wander is doing surprisingly well - I've only been able to devote about three points to offence so far, yet I'm maintaining reasonable clear-speeds/survivability. It'll be interesting to see how it handles going into merciless, especially considering that my build will get about 5 uniques to use in merciless. Been using lmp power siphon as some backup crowd control/a boss finisher.

The single target DPS is pretty solid with dual wands. My main concern is that my build's going to defensively suffer in merciless. I'd maybe suggest giving the attack speed nodes in the Gemini cluster some dual-wield block chance, since it'd make those mediocre speed nodes much more appealing, and dual-wanding much more viable. The block chance would help ensure that my build won't defensively fall apart. Using a shield would cut my DPS in half, so I don't really see it as an option at the moment.

I'll post an update in a few days with more detailed/accurate feedback.

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ComradBlack wrote:

Made two barrage characters in Ambush, a Dual Wander and a Ranger. The ranger has been put on the shelf due to mediocre results. The Wander is doing surprisingly well - I've only been able to devote about three points to offence so far, yet I'm maintaining reasonable clear-speeds/survivability. It'll be interesting to see how it handles going into merciless, especially considering that my build will get about 5 uniques to use in merciless. Been using lmp power siphon as some backup crowd control/a boss finisher.

The single target DPS is pretty solid with dual wands. My main concern is that my build's going to defensively suffer in merciless. I'd maybe suggest giving the attack speed nodes in the Gemini cluster some dual-wield block chance, since it'd make those mediocre speed nodes much more appealing, and dual-wanding much more viable. The block chance would help ensure that my build won't defensively fall apart. Using a shield would cut my DPS in half, so I don't really see it as an option at the moment.

I'll post an update in a few days with more detailed/accurate feedback.

Explain how it would cut your DPS in half?

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Autocthon wrote:

Explain how it would cut your DPS in half?

Actually, I misunderstood how barrage calculates DPS (dumb mistake backed up by bad testing), so it wouldn't be half. I do however intend to use moonsorrows, and each wand will up my damage pretty substantially (I deal a lot of lightning damage. Also, the implicit blind will be handy).

At 50, I'm feeling a bit more optimistic about being able to reach a reasonable blend of offence and defense - threw a ton of points into defense, and I'll be able to grab some really important offensive passives within the next few levels (added lightning damage, static blows, fusillade). I'll be using a 5l Cloak of Defiance pretty soon, so I should be able to get a much better idea of end-game viability over the next couple levels.

I'm really looking forward to getting bullying + some crit chance nodes, more power charges, and a Rats Nest I've got lined up. Bullying with barrage is going to be fun.

I'll throw another update in here once I've leveled some more.

I dont know of any dev checks this.
Also didnt check previous comments

But i strongly find Barrage needs strong buff

The 40% base dmg is too low, makes my dps really low (also compared to other skills) , that +3 additional arrows doesnt compensate it

Its not much different than split arrow (which add 5 arrows!) and it has 80% base dmg..

So easy comparison : 3arrows-40%dmg and 5arrows-80%dmg - only the direction of arrows differ. Split arrows is much more effective..

Also with Frenzy you can reach the speed of Barrage but with 110% base dmg

Barrae's damage should also be 80%

I have never seen any barrage build , only used for COC builds..

If any dev seen it pls reply, i'm currently using barrage but if there's no sign of buffing it i'll make total new build , it would be good to know what i should expect if you're happy with the way barrage works now or not..

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Moeeom123 wrote:

I dont know of any dev checks this.
Also didnt check previous comments

But i strongly find Barrage needs strong buff

The 40% base dmg is too low, makes my dps really low (also compared to other skills) , that +3 additional arrows doesnt compensate it

Its not much different than split arrow (which add 5 arrows!) and it has 80% base dmg..

So easy comparison : 3arrows-40%dmg and 5arrows-80%dmg - only the direction of arrows differ. Split arrows is much more effective..

Also with Frenzy you can reach the speed of Barrage but with 110% base dmg

Barrae's damage should also be 80%

I have never seen any barrage build , only used for COC builds..

If any dev seen it pls reply, i'm currently using barrage but if there's no sign of buffing it i'll make total new build , it would be good to know what i should expect if you're happy with the way barrage works now or not..

If you hit one target with barrage it's a 160% weapon damage skill.

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Moeeom123 wrote:

I have never seen any barrage build , only used for COC builds..

I might as well post a small update, since I got a lot of the uniques I was leveling towards, and I'm using it as a main skill (CoC is for, pardon the language, chumps).

It's doing fine, but it's fairly lackluster in a lot of scenarios. I've got a 5L barrage running w/ dual Moonsorrows, and it's completely outperformed by what's essentially a 3-link power siphon in 80%-90% of scenarios (lmp, chain, and item rarity). Granted, it really shines in those 15% of scenarios where it's needed, but as a primary attack skill it somewhat strangely lacks raw power (considering the damage efficiency), and the variety of situations where it's useful seems to be surprisingly limited.

The situations where it does really well are against single, high-priority targets. With projectile weakness and the bullying passive, you can really knock things around, which is pretty awesome, and I've only got something like 35% crit chance at the moment. It's also great with on-hit effects like the blind on the Moonsorrows.

It completely lags behind when dealing with groups of more than about 3 enemies. The LMP-chain-siphon combo can really chew through large groups, and it's barely supported. I find a big part of the problem is the targeting - you have to kill them essentially one by one, and barrage doesn't handle multi-target projectile supports (lmp, chain, etc) nearly as well as other skills.

It's a usable skill, and really fun, but a 5L barrage really should be able to outperform a 3L power siphon more than 15% of the time. I'll keep leveling and see how it handles with more passive support and crit.

It's effective damage effectiveness is only 160% in the rare times where all your shots hit.

How many times do you fire into a group and just see shots sailing harmlessly past enemies? If you can consistently hit a group of enemies with 3/4 of the shots, you're doing well. This would limit the effective damage effectiveness to 120%, which is really nothing to write home about since each shot hits only one enemy.

Compare to Lightning Arrow, which hits 3 more enemies (a 400% damage multiplier) or Power Siphon with its de facto 125% damage effectiveness, and you can see that Barrage isn't any better.

I believe that assuming Barrage hits 3/4 times was actually how they arrived at the .4 damage effectiveness value.

Let's look at the physical damage component. Because of the way that Physical damage interacts with armour, breaking physical damage into many smaller hits actually decreases the damage by substantially more than that because of the non-linear way physical damage reduction from armour operates. Now, monsters don't have much armour, but their supposed cap of 930 means that:

If your single attack was going to do 500 physical damage, a monster will take 432 damage after its armour.

Similarly, if you hit the monster with 200 physical damage, the monster will actually take 144 damage per hit.

All is well and good if you hit with 4/4 shots. You'd be doing 576 damage instead of the 432 for the single hit. But if you hit with 3/4, then you're doing 432 damage.

Again, due to non-linear scaling of damage reduction from armour, you won't get exact correspondence for anything except the values I chose (and I chose them arbitrarily, so I'm surprised they ended up like that...).

With high physical damage, using non-barrage attacks would be better (Lightning Arrow/Power Siphon). With low physical, high elemental, if you can assure that 3/4 or more of your shots hit, then Barrage should be as good, if not better, than another attack.

Of course, this doesn't take into consideration that Barrage gets Projectile Speed from quality, while other attacks, such as Power Siphon, get godly benefits like +0.75% increased Damage per quality.