War Banner or Dread Banner......

Hard decision.

War Banner seems like a stronger effect, but only Dread Banner can be built back up on a single target boss.

What do people usually decide on?

(Currently I have a 50% Impale chance with 20% increased effect, entirely from the tree. No gem.)

most people dont use the banners as an active skill. they use it as a 10% reserve passive.

war banner gives you accuracy and 'nearby enemies take % increased phys damage". which is fairly strong.

dread banner gives you a minimal defensive 'nearby enemies have less accuracy', but VERY important 20% chance to impale.


IF you're using impale, you
A) WANT THE GEM
B) WANT EXACTLY 100% TO IMPALE (anything above this is wasted, anything below is bad)

So i would suggest you A) get the impale gem, and B) get to 100%. just the gem will get you to 90, where you get that last 10% is up to you.

:/

Well my current issue in that regard is that my 6-link is a corrupted Carcass Jack. It has 1 green 1 blue 4 red. (I'm playing Cyclone.)

Can't recolor it :(

(Does that show gems?)



What support gem do you think I should take out for Impale Support?

(Currently working on seeing if anyone would trade my Jack for theirs, with me adding in 20c to make it worth their time.)

As for Impale, I'm seeing no mechanical reason why having below 100% Impale is bad. And beyond a mechanical reason, the math checks out normally.

An Impale that is increased to the point of doing 94% of a hit's damage in total, with a 100% Impale chance, is a multiplier of 1.94.

But that same Impale with a 90% chance is still a 1.846 multiplier.

It's not particularly bad to have less than 100% Impale chance.




For example, both of these Impales are exactly the same DPS increase:

- 50% Impale chance with 100% increased effect.
- 100% Impale chance with regular/default effect.

Both increase your total DPS by 50%, or a 1.5 multiplier.



Impale chance has weighting just like most other stats!

Unless, indeed, there's some mechanical reason that I'm not seeing? Something along the lines of, "Hits that proc Impale do X extra effect," or whatnot.

There is no bonus for impaling hits (yet), but Impale Support makes hits that Impale overwhelms Physical Resistance. this can further help reducing damage reduction against high-armour enemies like bosses and Sirus (which differs from Shaper and other Uber Bosses by having a higher than usual Armour rating). Perhaps the same bonus might be around in Impale nodes - didn't check it out yet

Most probably is just a matter of consistency, though. As a physical user, you want your enemies to be as much impaled as possible. Maybe this changes with the use of The Impaler keystone, but I still haven't seen it in use

The "little defensive" less accuracy from nearby enemies can become quite powerful in an Evasion build that already uses Blind and Flesh and Stonen. I don't know if your build goes about it, but it's something to consider. But yeah, it's very rare that Banner are used as actual skill and more like proximity auras

As for your carcass, you can indeed recolour it - corruption is not the end when it comes to colors. You can use your bench to force a recolor by using the Color crafts. Be warned, though, that it will cost you an equal amount of Vaal Orbs in order to apply it.
I don't think the problem will be getting the 300 Chromatics for make a 3-Reds and pray the next ones will be GGB (unlikely since carcass has more int than dex requirement, which means more probability of Blue over Green). It's the 300 Vaal Orbs it implies

Wow, I didn't know that about recoloring corrupted. :O

I can't afford it for my Jack, though, that's for sure.

"

ShadyC wrote:

As for Impale, I'm seeing no mechanical reason why having below 100% Impale is bad. And beyond a mechanical reason, the math checks out normally.

An Impale that is increased to the point of doing 94% of a hit's damage in total, with a 100% Impale chance, is a multiplier of 1.94.

But that same Impale with a 90% chance is still a 1.846 multiplier.

It's not particularly bad to have less than 100% Impale chance.




For example, both of these Impales are exactly the same DPS increase:

- 50% Impale chance with 100% increased effect.
- 100% Impale chance with regular/default effect.

Both increase your total DPS by 50%, or a 1.5 multiplier.



Impale chance has weighting just like most other stats!

Unless, indeed, there's some mechanical reason that I'm not seeing? Something along the lines of, "Hits that proc Impale do X extra effect," or whatnot.

The reason why it's bad is because you are wasting points on your tree to support a mechanic without fully utilizing it. Half assed investments are generally a bad idea in this game. It's for that very reason that most builds only invest in one main skill and don't try to use 2 or more skills. If you go for impale then max it out. Otherwise you just waste points.

Yes, but it's about when you have choices to make.

For example, if I had to choose between going from 90% to 100% Impale chance, OR something like 15% more damage... The latter is going to be stronger every time (unless you had some inhuman amount of "increased Impale effect" that probably can't actually happen within the game).

From a theoretical point of view you are right, if you can get 15% more damage instead of 10% impale chance for the same investment then the former will usually be better. Thing is, in practice that won't happen. Impale is as strong as it is because it is a more multiplier, which are rather rare aside from support gems and it's really easy and cheap to get. I doubt you will ever get a situation where not maxing out impale gets you the best bang for your buck. The mechanic wouldn't be so drastically overused on all physical builds if that was the case.