Glacial Hammer vs. Galcial Hammer of Shattering

Hello together,

short question. I am planning to do a Glacial Hammer Jugger for 3.25.

My Buildguide says normal Glacial Hammer Gem.

On poe.ninja I am seeing some people play Glacial Hammer of Shattering with nearly the same gear.

I was researching a lot and read both descriptions of the gems. There is a diffrence in "every third hit". One is doing 500% damage, shattering does a crit.

So far so good. At my point, at the moment, I would say:

Glacial Hammer: Need to build crit for heavy hitting every third hit.

...of Shattering: Need to build a lot of PhysDmg + Ele DMG to have a good dmg output because of the guaranteed crit every third hit. Does not need to focus on Critchance and Critmulti.

Can you maybe help me and explain to me when to use which skill gem in which situation?

Just want to make it right.

Thanks a lot to you.

In addition:

Which Gem should I use when I do Strength Stacking with Replica Alberons Warpath?

Thanks a lot!

If those builds on POE ninja really had nearly the same gear then they are probably bad. Regular GC and GCoS are vastly different gems and require different builds.

Regular GC has the freezing component so you want to utilize that with stuff like Heatshiver and the masteries that increase damage based on freezes. Other than that you should use regular damage scaling i.e crit, AS, increases and so on.

GCoS wants to scale crit multi as high as possible while not needing any crit chance. Items you wanna use there are for example marylenes fallacy and abyssus so that your third hit get's really big.

If you want to go str stacking you shouldn't use either of them because you won't have any room to utilize the gems selling points. Ice Crash would be a better choice there, high base damage and no special effects that require investment/specific gear to utilize. Regular GC is completely out of the question unless you find a way to reliably freeze stuff when 99% of your damage is chaos damage.

/edit just noticed and not sure if i just misinterpred you there, but regular GC isn't doing 500% damage on third hit, it only freezes as if it does 500% more damage. That's a big difference. Basically GC is more reliable at freezing stuff than other gems but it doesn't get any damage buffs by itself.

Thanks a lot!

Now its clear for me.

So I will start with normal gem and later on I will take a look on ice crash or maybe boneshatter with strength stacking.

Thanks! :-)

No offense man, but if you have a GC build guide you like, you should just follow it, to the letter. If you want to go str stacking, pick a str stacker from POE ninja and copy that to the letter. You clearly lack the level of understanding needed to make changes on your own. Boneshatter with str stacking is almost as pointless as GC with str stacking. There are reasons why str stackers always use a specific set of gems and you won't find GC or BS among them.

Hey,

thats no problem - thanks for your advice.

At the moment i try to learn doing a bit on my own.

Most of the time its try and failure.

But you are right Boneshatter makes no sense at all.

I was think of dual strike of ambi but the sounds ingame are rly annoying.

Will start by using the guide like it is and later try to copy smth from poe ninja. Maybe the news on thursday will give smth new for melee.

thats the guide for starting - i think its a lot to to for the first two weeks until i farmed the boots in heist.

[Removed by Support]
Oh it got removed. my bad. if you search for "3.24 glacial hammer juggernaut league starter" you will find the guide.

@ support - sorry :-)

Nothing wrong with experimenting if you want to learn, you'll never get better if you just blindly follow guides so i'd actually encourage you to do so normally.

But you shouldn't leaguestart with an "experiment". If it ends up failing it's going to be a massive setback and will likely cause a lot of frustration. Pick a reliable league starter you like, farm up currency with it and then make your endgame farmer using that currency. Once you are set on those 2 fronts you can start making new chars for experiments. You already have what you need so if they end up failing it's no big deal.

Just skimmed through the guide and don't see anything blatantly wrong with the build itself and i agree it's a decent league starter. But be aware that Joke of Suffering got changed in 3.24 as it now only drops from t17 maps while before it was a fairly common global drop. Not a problem for an endgame char but you shouldn't plan with this amulet in mind for a league starter. Those things will be quite expensive early on.

Just a general advice, you've got to be careful with guides for this game. There is an unholy amount of "content creators" who write a guide for a certain patch and then just change the patch number in the guide title once a new patch is released without actually updating the guide. This seems to be one of those cases.
There are also a lot of outright bad guides showcasing builds that literally won't work unless you invest hundreds of divines into it. Always check if the gear the guide recommends is something you can afford, if you can't you might want to look for other guides because the "it's not necessary" statement you'll usually find is kinda iffy.
Yes, gear pieces can usually be replaced but if you have to replace all of it with significantly worse stuff you'll only have like 1% of the damage and defense of what the guide is showing you leading to a bad time. Scaling in this game is exponential, not linear, only having 30% of the gear doesn't result in 30% of the damage but more like 3% if that.

Hey,

my backup plan is transition to boneshatter if smth does not feel right.

Was running boneshatter second time and played one boneshatter to 93 in ssf with mediocore - good gear (in my opinion for selfcrafting first time).

Thanks for all that advices. You are right - youtube for example is full of "never die again"-, "oneshot all bosses"- builds with wrong clarification on how expensive these builds are or even the damage output is a lie.

I hope I can afford joke with some early lucky harvest crafts, flask crafting or with essence grinding.

Last three leagues it was possible for me to farm around 50 div in lets say five sessions, after I reached the "endgame" point - but I just want to get faster and more efficient.

This time I will try harvest, essence and heist for generating currency early on. Maybe I will farm lab for some gems on day two if I got enough spare time to play.
Thats the early plan for 3.25. After that? I dont know. Seems like a lot of changes will come.

Lets see how it works.

But im happy to know the diffrence between gh and ghos now. If they change something on thursday significantly I can now better react. :-)

Thanks!

Hey Baharoth,

what do you think after patchnotes?

I think the damage changes to melee skills, the change of automation and the change to rage should be really good, arent they?

With new numbers, would there be a change to your opinion due to str. stacking with glacial hammer? maybe i again have some lag of knowledge but if i read the notes right, glacial hammer has now a higher base damage. We are loosing the added cold damage but have, in the end, 622% added damage. Need to calculate where this ends. They say "its a buff".

"Glacial Hammer: No longer has Cold Damage added against Chilled Enemies at all gem levels. It now has 218% Effectiveness of Base and Added Damage at gem level 1 (previously 165%), scaling up to 622% at gem level 20 (previously 269%). Now has a Mana cost of 6 at gem level 1, scaling up to 10 at gem level 20 (previously 5 at all gem levels). No longer has +0.2 metres to Melee Strike Range. This is a buff."

The mana "problem" can be solved by pathing to the new mana leech notes.

We have now three gem slots to free because totems are gone. Maybe two because we can chain warcrys.

Mana reservationEff. can be interesting because chanined warcrys will reservate mana. Maybe 0/0 because big auras like determination are now have less reservation.

With the more +all res notes in our marauder starting zone we maybe win a good amount of passivepoints because we dont need to path to the resistance wheel for all res stuff.

Thanks in advance for your time.

By the way: I just want to tell you, that I know that GH is a niche skill - but thats the interesting part for me and i want to see how far i can take it.

have a great weakend and big fun by planning ur build.

3.24 GH
Phys dmg example: 100

added cold damage: 113
added damage Eff.%: 269%

Damage at lvl20: 572,97


3.25 GH
Phys dmg example: 100

added cold damage: 0
added damage Eff.%: 622%

Damage at lvl20: 622




All in all that wont be completly right but under the line this calculates like a buff pretty well.

Of course we have to take a closer look because there is the ailment part on normal GC but glacial hammer of shattering seems like the real winner here because the focus on crit has now more empowered by the fact that we have a higher base damage effectivness. We have even more benefit from the quality changes to weapons.