The Brass Dome Question on Crit Damage.

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Natharias wrote:

Aegis is if you have perfect gear in all other slots. We are talking CI, and we all know that is expensive as fuck.

Anyways, it's not hard to get 350% base ES in raw passives, and another 100% from intelligence.

I'm not sure how you get 350% ES in raw passives minus Intelligence...but the point Ivkoto was making is that you could have 1000% increased ES and with both your chestpiece and your shield - the two major giant sources of base ES for that number to scale up - providing effectively zero ES, you're not going to see a huge ES number kinda no matter what. Especially with all your jewel sockets crammed full of Reckless Defense jewels, to boot.

I imagine you'd be better off with just scaling life. You'd have an easier time of it, probably end up with similar EHP levels, and be able to use flasks again to boot. The shock/freeze issue could theoretically be solved by starting Ranger and using either Pathfinder or Raider to be immune to elemental status effects whilst flasking/phasing. Sort of an awkward start for a Brass Dome character, but that's the world we live in now. Elsewise Juggernaut allows you to mostly ignore being frozen with its Unstoppable node, leaves you with just a shock dispel flask to be viable with this plan. Provided you find some source of base block in the first place.

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1453R wrote:

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Natharias wrote:

Aegis is if you have perfect gear in all other slots. We are talking CI, and we all know that is expensive as fuck.

Anyways, it's not hard to get 350% base ES in raw passives, and another 100% from intelligence.

I'm not sure how you get 350% ES in raw passives minus Intelligence...but the point Ivkoto was making is that you could have 1000% increased ES and with both your chestpiece and your shield - the two major giant sources of base ES for that number to scale up - providing effectively zero ES, you're not going to see a huge ES number kinda no matter what. Especially with all your jewel sockets crammed full of Reckless Defense jewels, to boot.

I imagine you'd be better off with just scaling life. You'd have an easier time of it, probably end up with similar EHP levels, and be able to use flasks again to boot. The shock/freeze issue could theoretically be solved by starting Ranger and using either Pathfinder or Raider to be immune to elemental status effects whilst flasking/phasing. Sort of an awkward start for a Brass Dome character, but that's the world we live in now. Elsewise Juggernaut allows you to mostly ignore being frozen with its Unstoppable node, leaves you with just a shock dispel flask to be viable with this plan. Provided you find some source of base block in the first place.

Here. As it stands, it's 294% but it is allocating aura nodes. Take away aura nodes and you can get 344%.

As for the hit point issue, that depends on whether you use other uniques. As I mentioned, a good rare ES shield would be used. Aegis Aurora would be for rich people.

Pathfinder would be ineffective for a life based version. You wouldn't break 250% life. A Marauder can get 330% along with 35% from five jewels. You'd reach some 15k life.

Yeah, not sure how familiar Natharias is with CI builds, but at infinite budget, the chest piece has a massive opportunity cost. Mirror-grade rares tend to hit the 1,000 base ES range, and I'm fairly certain "usable" chests are at least 600 ES, and a "minimum" would probably be around 400 base ES (i.e. Shavronne's Wrappings).

At 300% increased ES, losing 400 base ES would take out 1,600 (!!!!) final ES. It could still be worth it, because I ended up sacrificing 1,800 final ES on my hybrid Life/ES melee Poison character for Cospri's Will, and he ends up dying even less (because Temporal Chains + penetrate Hexproof is frickin' OP, man). Arguable.

At 300% increased ES, losing 600 base ES would take out 2,400 (!!!!!) final ES. This is... this is a scary hit to take.

At 300% increased ES, losing 1,000 base ES would take out 4,000 (!!!!!!!!!) final ES. That sounds like a build-killer for most CI builds, to me, where I hear the end-goal ES is about 12,000 or so.

However there's a thread, I think in GD right now, about "30k ES Support Guardian," - in which case even losing 10k ES would be acceptable, as far as I can tell. So Brass Dome might be an acceptable substitute there.

In the end, I tend to take more of an empirical stance with PoE. You can theorycraft all you want, but until you play it out in game, you can't say for sure how strong it is. I've seen this happen just about twice now - People said Wild Strike is trash, and Oro's is a trash weapon. Oro's Wild Strike became my strongest character yet and still has insane single-target DPS. People said melee Poison doesn't work, period, because of lack of double dip. My melee Poison character is my other strongest-out-of-all-my-characters.

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adghar wrote:

In the end, I tend to take more of an empirical stance with PoE. You can theorycraft all you want, but until you play it out in game, you can't say for sure how strong it is. I've seen this happen just about twice now - People said Wild Strike is trash, and Oro's is a trash weapon. Oro's Wild Strike became my strongest character yet and still has insane single-target DPS. People said melee Poison doesn't work, period, because of lack of double dip. My melee Poison character is my other strongest-out-of-all-my-characters.

Far and away my best character, as of right now, is my Frost Blades Raider. Frost Blades.

Frost Blades.

I totally get the empirical stance idea and tend to agree. That said, there's still some value in taking a look at the raw numbers of a thing and comparing it to an aggregate whole of the playerbase's experience to see if there's some holes to be poked.

CI/Low Life Brass Dome, for example, is...weird. For one, Brass Dome is supposed to be the capper on a crazy high Armor total, but on a CI build scraping for every last point of ES it can get, with 'theoretically perfect/infinite budget' ES gear around it, you won't really have any other sources of armor rating. That 4k armor by itself does essentially nada and is a waste of what is arguably Brass Dome's best attribute. If you go with nothing but armor/ES hybrid gear to try and fill out the AR, you lose even more base ES on a build desperate for every last point of base ES you can get.

You're also obligated to either use questionable uniques (further cutting into your ES) or a lot of status mitigation flasks to deal with the fact that numerous Reckless Defense jewels means you'll be taking elemental status-inducing crits all the time, or you take an Ascendancy that doesn't do anything for your already-sketchy ES counts to mitigate those issues, instead. Trickster or Occultist might be able to patch up Brass Dome's base ES loss issues, but neither of them has any way of dealing with freeze or shock outside flasks.

The whole thing reeks of too much investment for too little return, especially since Nath's prototype "This would totally work!" tree is a level 83* build with absolutely nothing in it except jewel slots and ES. No damage, no speed/acceleration, no other mitigation, no charges, no anything except MOAR ES, jewels, and a handful of aura buffs. No base block to scale the Reckless Defense jewels off of, either, so that has to come out of your gear as well. Considering that the build's jewel slots are spoken for and that it would be extremely gear-constrained, I get the distinct feeling the build would deal about as much damage as a basket of sleepy kittens.

Too many problems to solve, and the 'return' on those solutions is "I don't take much damage." There are vastly easier ways to not take much damage, including life-based Brass Dome builds with 50k armor and room in the tree/gearing for damage and utility as well as just EHP.

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adghar wrote:

Yeah, not sure how familiar Natharias is with CI builds, but at infinite budget, the chest piece has a massive opportunity cost. Mirror-grade rares tend to hit the 1,000 base ES range, and I'm fairly certain "usable" chests are at least 600 ES, and a "minimum" would probably be around 400 base ES (i.e. Shavronne's Wrappings).

At 300% increased ES, losing 400 base ES would take out 1,600 (!!!!) final ES. It could still be worth it, because I ended up sacrificing 1,800 final ES on my hybrid Life/ES melee Poison character for Cospri's Will, and he ends up dying even less (because Temporal Chains + penetrate Hexproof is frickin' OP, man). Arguable.

At 300% increased ES, losing 600 base ES would take out 2,400 (!!!!!) final ES. This is... this is a scary hit to take.

At 300% increased ES, losing 1,000 base ES would take out 4,000 (!!!!!!!!!) final ES. That sounds like a build-killer for most CI builds, to me, where I hear the end-goal ES is about 12,000 or so.

However there's a thread, I think in GD right now, about "30k ES Support Guardian," - in which case even losing 10k ES would be acceptable, as far as I can tell. So Brass Dome might be an acceptable substitute there.

In the end, I tend to take more of an empirical stance with PoE. You can theorycraft all you want, but until you play it out in game, you can't say for sure how strong it is. I've seen this happen just about twice now - People said Wild Strike is trash, and Oro's is a trash weapon. Oro's Wild Strike became my strongest character yet and still has insane single-target DPS. People said melee Poison doesn't work, period, because of lack of double dip. My melee Poison character is my other strongest-out-of-all-my-characters.

Oh I'm quite familiar with them. Hence why I'm talking about them. I don't talk about what I don't know about.

As to theorycrafting, it isn't theorycrafting if you know what it is. I know what a rare ES chest can give, so I know what you're losing if you take a Brass Dome. I also know Brass Dome acts as a multiplier for the other ES as it negates crits. Crit is the best method to counter high hit point builds. Hence the idea of a high hit point, max block build using Brass Dome.

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1453R wrote:

CI/Low Life Brass Dome, for example, is...weird. For one, Brass Dome is supposed to be the capper on a crazy high Armor total, but on a CI build scraping for every last point of ES it can get, with 'theoretically perfect/infinite budget' ES gear around it, you won't really have any other sources of armor rating. That 4k armor by itself does essentially nada and is a waste of what is arguably Brass Dome's best attribute. If you go with nothing but armor/ES hybrid gear to try and fill out the AR, you lose even more base ES on a build desperate for every last point of base ES you can get.

Brass Dome's armor is ignored when you're maximizing your ES. No other items are going to have armor on them. You're using Brass Dome for the crit multiplier mod, not its armor.

You thinking 3k armor is better than removing enemy critical strike damage goes to show how much you know. Armor is only effective against physical damage; crits can use any and multiple types of damage.

I'd rather have an item that sets my armor to zero but removes enemy crit multiplier, rather than an item that grants immunity to any one type of damage. Four other types of damage are still going to crit me, and crits can be what kills you. Instead of facetanking a vaal slam that does 5k of your 8k life, you get crit and die. I'd rather not.

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1453R wrote:

You're also obligated to either use questionable uniques (further cutting into your ES) or a lot of status mitigation flasks to deal with the fact that numerous Reckless Defense jewels means you'll be taking elemental status-inducing crits all the time, or you take an Ascendancy that doesn't do anything for your already-sketchy ES counts to mitigate those issues, instead. Trickster or Occultist might be able to patch up Brass Dome's base ES loss issues, but neither of them has any way of dealing with freeze or shock outside flasks.

At this point it's obvious you're either twisting what was said or somehow really misunderstood it.

Brass Dome is used solely to counter crit damage. This means more hit points is immune to one shots and most two shots combinations (like Atziri's Flameblast) due to sheer hit points. It's also immune to the very rare "a bunch of mobs get enough crits to kill you" bullshit. In essence, we are only ever talking about regular damage.

EVERY OTHER ITEM SLOT that can be ES is pure ES. As is the point, you pump up hit points. Not armor, not status effect mitigation, nothing. You pump ES.

Reckless Defense is used to maximize block chance and spell block chance. This helps prevent numerous enemies from bursting you down from sheer numbers. Even with regular damage numerous enemies can kill you quickly. Max block stops that.

Now all the build has to worry about is a bunch of enemies getting the stray chance of most of them bypassing block chance, and even then all of those hits are doing regular damage-at best-against a massive hit point pool. 12k ES would be more massive than 18k ES because the 18k is vulnerable to crits.

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1453R wrote:

The whole thing reeks of too much investment for too little return, especially since Nath's prototype "This would totally work!" tree is a level 83* build with absolutely nothing in it except jewel slots and ES. No damage, no speed/acceleration, no other mitigation, no charges, no anything except MOAR ES, jewels, and a handful of aura buffs. No base block to scale the Reckless Defense jewels off of, either, so that has to come out of your gear as well. Considering that the build's jewel slots are spoken for and that it would be extremely gear-constrained, I get the distinct feeling the build would deal about as much damage as a basket of sleepy kittens.

You do realize weapons and support gems can provide adequate damage, yes?

Perhaps you should try it. It does work.

Oh, it may not be to your liking. But just because you don't like it doesn't affect its viability. I've been doing nothing but avoiding damage with my passives.

It also only happened to be 83 because that's the bare minimum. Everything else would be what you would like to invest into.

Yet here's something interesting:

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1453R wrote:

handful of aura buffs. No base block to scale the Reckless Defense jewels off of, either, so that has to come out of your gear as well.

You do realize that base block comes from your shield, not passives, right?

Burnt.

I suggest you cut the attacks, 1453R. It doesn't do you any good to get burnt.

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1453R wrote:

Too many problems to solve, and the 'return' on those solutions is "I don't take much damage." There are vastly easier ways to not take much damage, including life-based Brass Dome builds with 50k armor and room in the tree/gearing for damage and utility as well as just EHP.

Have fun with your 8-9k HP. I'll enjoy 15k+.

Only difference will be the damage. Clear speeds will be about the same overall.

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Vipermagi wrote:

We take 23% Less Damage from all Crits due to the Brass Dome, which is nice because there's a 54% or higher chance to be Crit.

Wouldn't this depend on the type of content you tend to run? Map mod can bring the multi up to +80% total, I believe, which would mean Dome mitigates 44.4% of damage in case of a crit there.

And for some reason nobody around here likes to convert less damage taken to more eHP. 23% less damage taken is 29.9% more eHP, meaning that solely against one-shots, brass dome CI 14k would beat out non dome CI 18k by just a touch.

The tankiness is there if your main worry is crits, the main issue IMO is lack of damage (but that's mainly because I'm a dps addict).

And I'm probably biased because I've finally experienced a high Armour build now, but if we assume such "perfect items" in every slot, don't we run into issues with high enemy DPS (not one-shot) and Stun? If I understand it correctly, most CI builds handle the DPS part with insane recovery, either through VP + tons of DPS + Leech, or Occultist/Xirgil's/Soul Strike shenanigans. But any of those options would cut into the defense part as far as I can tell.

It'd be interesting to see a video of a rich dude playing Brass Dome CI.

Like I said, Nath...too much investment for too little return.

The idea of combining Brass Dome with Reckless Defense has some intriguing possibilities, but trying to force it onto ES on top of that is...well, Viper just did a ver nice job with the math.

Yes yes, I know, life sucks, yarr yarr yarr - but let's examine, shall we?:

Brass Dome - Life-based Juggernaut

Assuming we're primarily concerned with defense and tank-facing and willing to accept sub-optimal DPS to accomplish this (i.e. the same assumption made in Nath's prototype tree). Level 90 build, so the usual limit thingus, but this one is actually a level 90 build, instead of 83-and-three-bandit-passives.

260% increased life - which is further boosted by (8.9+[0.2*8]+1.5) 12% life regenerated per second and 252% increased armor. Which goes to 352% increased armor for the Brass Dome itself due to Unbreakable. Build gets eight endurance charges and buffed Fortify to further augment armor, and of course it ignores enemy crit multi because of Brass Dome. The same four jewel sockets for the same four Reckless Defense, but also 8% extra block in the tree, which should get us much closer to block/spellblock cap. Unstoppable prevents issues from freezing - you can still be frozen but being frozen doesn't actually stop you from moving, so hey. Shock is still a problem, but one that can be dealt with via a Grounding flask. Preferably an Experimenter's Stibnite or some other long-lasting cheapee flask you can pop all the damn time.

Build still hits like a basket of kittens, but it does pick up a bit of damage here and there, and more importantly it has access to further damage if you get to the point where you can slice off some other bits for phat deepz if you want. Drop the shield nodes and go for a two-handed weapon if you like, use Rumi's for base block when you need it. Four perfect RD jewels is 16% block anyways, that's a semi-reasonable start.

One of these two is going to live better than the other. I would be surprised if it was the CI build. Even 'just' ~7k life...backed by massed Endurance charges, buffed Fortify, 12% regen on top of any leech you can fit into the build, 252+% armor, and stacked Block...seems like it'd do better than ~11k ES with none of those things except the block.