GWF Build Idea / Theory - Testing now, want feedback

kinamonk

To preface, my gear stats sits as follows (unbuffed)
21k power
11k crit
63% armor pen
100% crit severity
55%-60% crit (dont' remember)

I use a rank 9 vorpal
3 rank 9 bonding stones
IL is just over 3k
legendary twisted main
Lostmouth set

Here is a build theory I've started playing with that goes from the norm:

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/gwf?b=28et:uwjckr:dmno:a0dxj,1x0iu1i:1000000:1uu0xtp:1uo0000&h=0&p=ivn&o=0

There are some major differences and a lot of similarities from most builds.

The goal is power, lots of it, and damage, lots of it.

The normal rotation for a GWF is mark, daggers, weapons, ibs, unstoppable, repeat. This build, however, removes mark and replaces with battle fury. It removes weapons and adds in threatening rush. it also uses slam as your daily for the buff. Here is my theoretical breakdown of the two rotations:

Normal Rotation:
daring shout- 15% dmg bonus to target, you only
daggers - 40% dmg bonus to all targets, you only
weapons - reduce dmg resistance to at wills by 10%, reduce dmg resistance to your at wills by xx amount (unsure on amount)
At Will's: Destroyer which will max out at 26% dmg bonus.
Wrathful Determination - 25% dmg bonus when full unstoppable

so, with the rotation get 106% dmg bonus and a 10+% dmg resistance debuff. This isn't exact, but rough numbers. There are no power / crit increase feats, so power gets to around 30-35k with gear.

Then, nothing special after that, IBS, crescendo, unstoppable, rinse and repeat.

My rotation I'm playing around with.
Battle Fury: 20% dmg buff, 5% to teammates
threatening rush: 12% dmg bonus to target you only
slam: 20% power buff - at 35k power from above, we now get an additional 8.5k or so, making power 43.5k
daggers - 40% dmg bonus to all targets, you only
At Will's: Destroyer which will max out at 26% dmg bonus.
Wrathful Determination - 25% dmg bonus when full unstoppable

so, with the rotation get 123% dmg bonus This isn't exact, but rough numbers. When everything's cooking, power jumps to around 43k+ plus or so.

Now, what this build lacks is any AE for clearing trash. What you'd have to do is swap out threatening rush for wicked strike and lose at 12% dmg bonus.

I've only ran 3 Throne's to test this out, and results are too soon to tell. I was top of leaderboard on dps, but not sure if I was crushing it or not - lst night was weird as I was matched with over 3k+ dps on every instance, so hard to get a real judge from that (usually get matched with bunch of lower IL people and do 26-30 mil dmg with everyone else at like 6, last night was down to 16, but 2 other people were at like 12-14.) What I noticed is determination is always full. Stamina is always full. But, because I was always sprinting, I seemed to run past a lot of mobs and back track. AE damage was nothing (was running threatening rush mainly over wicked strike). Battle fury was up for the most part, and so was slam, but I forgot to use it a lot.

Overall, it felt a lot more "button smashy" and a lot less rotation. I felt like a chicken with my head cut off running around and smashing buttons, but that may settle down to a rotation in a bit.

So, overall, do you think this build is more dps than the normal DPS build, aka, Lia's build, or, am I overlooking something that is broken or just not adding something up right? Does anyone else run something similar to this build and can give their experience?

kinamonk

One other thing this build does is removes the slow animation of the normal routine. Daring shout is slow and does no damage. Weapons is slow and does minimal damage on single targets. Battle fury can be cast during combat and doesn't 'stop you, you can even be running and cast it and it doesn't stop your run. threatening rush is an instant mark, no animation really, and can get you to a crowd of mobs faster.

Basically, you are doing constant sure strike damage, like all the time, with an IBS every now and then.

rinat114

I'll fix some things for you so you can get a better understanding of how things work. First and for all, DS and how mark functions.

Mark - 20% damage to the caster, 8% damage to allies. Generates Combat Advantage (so 15% extra damage per toon + 8 - 10% average depending on their CA damage and how much they invested in it.) While DS's active you get a -2% debuff so that's 2% more and finally the 15% feat. What do we have? Personal - 20% + 15% + 15% + 10% + 2% = 62%.

For allies that's - 8% + 15% + whatever CA bonus they have which ~30%. Both of course assuming that nobody else is generating guaranteed CA for you and the party members.

Dropping DS for BF is a terrible idea unless you hire another GF or GWF to follow you around all day and mark for you.

What you're missing is the edge IV really has over SM which is the double mark feature, however IV will lose all trash damage. Potentially, IV can do near identical if not a little more than SM single target wise, but will absolutely fail at trash given the lack of WMS.

Battle Awareness is viable only when - you have an extremely high AP gain / you have a snail / you're still using the DC sigil Which means you're -
a. not running Wheel of Elements, so that's 30% extra fire buff damage with a decent uptime lost.
b. 4k power lost given you have to equip the snail and not the Black Ice Warhorse. (BIS speaking of course.)
c. less stamina gain/possibly other stats to invest into AP gain instead.

At this point of the game for a GWF dailies are useless and serve nothing but a waste of time, if you choose to spec into Slam you're going to need to take into account the uptime and the downtime. The downtime will be of course greater and you're wasting points in other useful feats for 9k more power with an uptime of 50 - 60% (assuming you never ever use Crescendo). Battle Fury is nothing but an illusion for cheese mechanics such as running ahead of everybody and killing everything by yourself, thus giving yourself the feeling your DPS is increasing, it's not. BF is great to utilize only in very certain conditions and when you communicate them beforehand (aka, personally a GF mark is not enough of an excuse for me to run BF as I deprive the rest of the party of my mark, which stacks with the GF's, that's being selfish. I will only run BF if another GWF is in the party and will run DS instead, my mark does not stack with theirs, there's very little use in both using DS, moreso if there's also a GF in the party).

Just my 2 cents, best of luck in figuring things out and thinking outside the box

kinamonk

The main thing you mentioned that was lost to me was Daring Shout does all that other stuff, and Threatening Rush does not. I thought all the "stuff" the mark did was the mark itself, not the spell. Also, I was always unstoppable, which meant I was getting a 25% increase in AP from a feat. To get this 25% bonus I was losing HP gain (ok to lose) and 1% crit. Honestly, I felt the uptime of slam was about 60% like you said, which was a little underwhelming to focus a build around, but a nice boost as a "bonus".

You mention dailies are a waste of time, I agree, which is why I was trying to use Slam. In your opinion, would it be more beneficial to use slam instead of crescendo? Crescendo does huge burst dps, slam, when spec'd this way, would give better overall sustained dmg for like 10 seconds, but I don't know which would win in the long run.

so, what I'm thinking now is moving the points from battle fury and leave them into slam.

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/gwf?b=28es:qwcfwp:9jez:9g37z,1r0iu2i:1000000:1uuu55v:1uu0000&h=0&p=smr&o=0

What i'm wondering is if the power bonus from slam will be enough to not use crescendo

rinat114

kinamonk said:

The main thing you mentioned that was lost to me was Daring Shout does all that other stuff, and Threatening Rush does not. I thought all the "stuff" the mark did was the mark itself, not the spell. Also, I was always unstoppable, which meant I was getting a 25% increase in AP from a feat. To get this 25% bonus I was losing HP gain (ok to lose) and 1% crit. Honestly, I felt the uptime of slam was about 60% like you said, which was a little underwhelming to focus a build around, but a nice boost as a "bonus".

You mention dailies are a waste of time, I agree, which is why I was trying to use Slam. In your opinion, would it be more beneficial to use slam instead of crescendo? Crescendo does huge burst dps, slam, when spec'd this way, would give better overall sustained dmg for like 10 seconds, but I don't know which would win in the long run.

so, what I'm thinking now is moving the points from battle fury and leave them into slam.

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/gwf?b=28es:qwcfwp:9jez:9g37z,1r0iu2i:1000000:1uuu55v:1uu0000&h=0&p=smr&o=0

What i'm wondering is if the power bonus from slam will be enough to not use crescendo

Threatning Rush is a different mark feature animal and I don't remember when and how they reworked it, if you go IV regardless, you gotta double mark and use DS anyways to squeeze the lemon as much as you can and get as much DPS as possible. It will for the most part almost never serve as a DS replacement in PVE given how IV's damage is lackluster, double mark is their only shiny star.

My daily policy is simple - Slam for trash, Crescendo on bosses. For the most part you won't ever see me using Slam on bosses as I utilize Crescendo to complement WD, save me Determination offtime and cooldown offtime, etc. Speccing into Slam is commiting yourself and binding yourself into pretty much one daily to make a good argument as to why you put points in there to begin with. I'm a versatile player and for me it doesn't work and proved to be a lot more of a disappointment than a good investment.

kinamonk

Great info, thanks for the replies. It sounds like adding 25% power to your build about 50% of the time is not worth losing 5% debuff to mobs and the use of Crescendo.

Also, I utilize spinning strike now on trash, only when I am not unstoppable. Pop that in the middle of a crowd and you have instant full determination.

http://nwcalc.com/index.html#/gwf?b=28es:qwcfwp:9jez:9g37z,1l0iu3i:1u00000:1uuu551:1uu0000&h=0&p=smr&o=0

The new build, which is pretty much your build hahaha, if not exact!

kinamonk

Oh, and I am rocking the DC sigil now, only because I didn't have 2 power feeders (I used my one to get the lantern to legendary instead). So, wheel will have to wait until next round! It looks like the event happening now offers a power artifact, guess I'll be grinding that to feed