Blood Magic Cyclone Options

Currently I can't decide which will be the best for me

I have:



With "Added Fire" I reach 27k tooltip DPS with Cyclone
With "Increased Area of Effect" I have 21k

Which would be the best?

Fortify?

"

zSavage wrote:

Fortify?

Fortify is terrible I have just spec'd out of it after realising how bad it actually is

My post from another thread:

To put Fortify into perspective I'm currently level 88

I have got the 4 Fortify nodes in the tree currently, I won't have soon.

Melee damage while fortified x2
Fortify effect & Duration
Rampart

This gives me:

2% extra armor
3k extra damage

While Fortify is active which is 6s and stays up during combat

For 4 nodes and the price of a socket on my 5L Cyclone setup it is not really a viable option

Well you don't need to take the fortify nodes IMHO.

I've found it has added substantion durability without any investment in the tree.

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Dodgydave wrote:

Well you don't need to take the fortify nodes IMHO.

I've found it has added substantion durability without any investment in the tree.

Dave is right on the money.

This game isn't all about DPS (you probably know that), and fortify is a key to surviving in this state of the game, especially as melee.

"

zSavage wrote:

"

Dodgydave wrote:

Well you don't need to take the fortify nodes IMHO.

I've found it has added substantion durability without any investment in the tree.

Dave is right on the money.

This game isn't all about DPS (you probably know that), and fortify is a key to surviving in this state of the game, especially as melee.

To expand a little, I have a toon who does about 56k damage with fortify in one of his five links. I can drop it for added fire and bump DPS up to 66k (and still use fortify in whirling blades to keep it active most of the time) but prefer the 56k as the added survivability just makes everything smoother to me.

Fortify makes it so you take less damage. It doesn't show up on your stats screen though so you kind of have to take it with faith.

An easy way to measure how much it helps is to just multiply your maximum life by 1.2. So if you have 6,000 life, with fortify active you have an effective HP of 7,200. This works for all damage types except DoT effects, so the only thing you really have to be careful of is Corrupting Blood.

Anyway, this is my setup:



I have the blood magic keystone because the life nodes behind it are tasty indeed, and I would prefer to increase my physical damage over adding elemental damage to my attacks (better life leech potential), and the only defensive auras I would really consider is running triple purity for 18% less elemental damage, which I think 35% increased life and using a link for the BM gem is a pretty high cost for that.

If you want to increase your DPS outside of your link, here's a little trick I use:



Replace Enfeeble with Vulnerability (or don't! this is pretty good defense too!). I picked up the Skittering Runes cluster by the Scion start for 20% increased curse effectiveness, it makes my curses actually do something against bosses which is nice, and rogue exiles are now a joke. I have a dual-curse setup with Vulnerability on hit corrupted on my gloves so I get both.

With all that combined, I'm plenty capable of melting 76 mobs even with my really, really crappy 360pdps axe.

last time i checked the rampart cluster gave +20% to armor, +25% melee dmg, +15% fortify effect

adding the fortify support gem specs on lvl 20, +44% melee dmg

and the fortify buff spec, +20% dmg redution

together for one gem and the 4 part cluster you get
+20% armor and +23% dmg reduction (so the cluster basically ads a chaos golem bonus to you when it goe to dmg reduction)
+69% melee dmg - thats also great imho

but the best thing is you get it all at the same time


the duration is irrelevant as on a tank i usually link it to one of the main attacks so it refreshes constantly cos it fires upon hit