Question on avengers.. (Zeal/Avenger hybrid. WTH)

[ogot]

1: When I use Vengeance, does it use the same attack speed compared to a normal attack? (Also on other skills that can be related to this question...)

2: Would it be possible for a Zeal/Avenger Hybrid?

20 Conviction
20 Zeal
20 Sacrifice (for Zeal)
... Others... Max Holy Shield and Defiance for tanking?

Then use a strong elemental damage weapon like Baranar's Star or Azurewrath... The Zeal would make you hit fast, plus the Conviction could possibly add to the elemental damage of the weapon... Could it be compared to other Zealdins (with the bonus of Conviction allowing your party members, especially Sorceresses to shred packs of monsters...)

Can this build be thought upon?

[gekko]

1) yes, vengeance uses the same attack speed as standard attack.

2) the zeal + conviction + lots of elemental damage build is very doable. It's also a very easy build to use, particularly from an item point of view. Virtually no need for mana leech, virtually no need for AR (combine with holy shield to free up many points from dexterity) means all you really need is a fast weapon and as many sources of elemental damage as possible. Those little "garbage" charms with tidbits of fire, light and cold damage have quite a lot of bite once the insane -resistance from conviction kicks in.

Final thoughts -- personally, I'd say it's more party friendly than the usual fanat zealot. Fanat is a nice skill, but the teeny range and penalty to the damage boost lowers the true usefulness to teamates. Conviction, on the other hand, makes it nearly impossible to miss even the highest defence enemy, makes every elemental damage character in your party wet their pants with joy, and breaks most immunities you'll encounter. Pretty good trade, if you ask me.

gekko

[ogot]

Question 3: <Conviction reduces all elemental resistances right? Including poison?

20 Zeal
20 Conviction
20 Holy Shield
20 Defiance (for Holy Shield synergy)

________ 20 Sacrifice for Zeal synergy? Or would it be a waste of skill points?


Possible items:

Guardian Angel
HoZ / SS (depends on price range, since I already have SS, although socketed with a perfect diamond... :()
Lightsabre / Baranar's Star / Azurewrath / BotD sword <question above> (price range once again... what other weapons could be used?)
Vampire Gaze (not sure about this... any ideas?)
Gore Rider (for Crushing Blow)
Venom Grip (for Crushing Blow... maybe a Crafted pair of gloves? suggestions...)
TGod (no need to explain, I think...)
Raven Frost (same as above...)
______ (Bul Kathos? SOJ? Ring of choice...)
Mara ammy

lots of elemental damage charms... easy to get...

This is a pure combat item set, I'm not thinking in terms of Magic Find here... Just replace a few items with War Travelers, Skullder's, Nagels, Topazed stuff....

I just created this one... Right now he's clvl 9, already rushed through Normal until Ancients, looking for Act 1 or 2 level up games... Charms fill up about 3/4 of my inventory already (none transferred, all found...)...

Tips / Tricks / Comments anyone?

[devzero]

Question 3 : nop, it only lowers fire, light and cold (and defense)

Sacrifice 20 yep. You should strive for as high physical dammage as possible without loosing any elemental dammage. Get some life leech to take advantage of it. A melee char without deecent ll is no good imho.

Weapon: the best and actually quite cheap is probably glimmershred. (throwing axe with huge elemental dammage bonus)
Shield you might consider tiamats also (nice added elemental dammage) A 4 pdiamond paladin with base 40% res is also good (110+ all res)

You should probably use string of ears instead of tgods. Bul katos is a good ring, a rare ll ring with life/res is also nice.


Zeal : make sure you shift + click to avoid desyncing too much.

[IKKE]

Question from me
IIRC its like this
lets say ur weapon does 99-100 damage
(for easy calculating i use this: lvl 6 avenger, lvl 5 conviction)
and ur STR = 100
so that would be
99-100 * 100% (198-200)
lvl 6 avenger adds 100%cold/fireghtning
so 99-100 * 300% (197-300) + lvl 5 convition (-50%) that would be 248-450
so 198-200 + 248-450 = 450-650 (average) if im correct ?

so where does the elemental charms calculate in? does vengeance heavy any effect on it ?


Im thinking im gonna make a build like this,
5 zeal
20 vengeance
20 salvation
20 holy shield
20 conviction
rest defiance
guess it will work quite nice

[Olon97]

2:&nbsp; Would it be possible for a Zeal/Avenger Hybrid?&nbsp;

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 20 Conviction
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 20 Zeal
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 20 Sacrifice (for Zeal)
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; ... Others... Max Holy Shield and Defiance for tanking?

I just refreshed my only 1.10 paladin build with those three skills. He was a late build in my 1.10 play so fairly twinked up - death cleaver (I think that's it, unique bezerker axe) and a bunch of elemental damage charms.

The beauty of Conviction/Zeal is that you hit so darn consistently (assuming reasonable mlevel/clevel breakdown). Actually, I don't think maxing zeal was necessary - I believe I put in enough points to get the max # of hits and left it there. Maxed conviction (or technically, enough conviction after +skills to hit the -150% resists cap) is just an amazing solution to the AR problem faced by so many other melee paladin builds.

Additional twink luxuries include a demon limb (for the fire damage and AR), a couple 4 socket paladin shields with high % resist all automods (around ~%110 resist all after socketing - leaving gear flexibility elsewhere), and glimmershred on switch (or whatever those throwing axes with 33% amp damage were - for breaking phys immunes).

Although the build works great twinked up the wazoo, I believe it is also an excellent moderate twink / no twink (but lucky in weapon creation/finding) build with a complimentary party. Even pretty well built melee party members will often notice the benefit of conviciton, and of course elemental based attackers always love a good conviction.

[gekko]

[...]
5 zeal
20 vengeance
20 salvation
20 holy shield
20 conviction
rest defiance
guess it will work quite nice

Why salvation?

gekko

[Fragbait]

Hi,

I guess he has it for the synergy to Vengeance. But since that's only 2% per level, while fireghtning/cold resist aura each give 10 % per level and grant a hidden bonus to the max resistance (I think about 0.5% per skill level), there's really not much sense to use salvation - apart from that you want a real resist-all aura just in case and have the rest of your equipment adapt so that it doesn't give resists at all but instead other mods.
In any other case, I'd go with 10 in fire resist and 10 in lightning resist probably. That would be a 200% instead of a 40% bonus to vengeance.

Greetings, Fragbait

[devzero]

Your calculation also assumes the monster in question have 0% resistance. At -150% resist witch is abslute max (at lvl 25 or somthing) most monsters will be brought down to -100% res (witch is the lower cap on resist) In effect this means that all elemental dammage (including the dammage from charms) will be doubled. A shocking small charm with f.ex 1 - 50 dammage will then deal 2 - 100 dammage per hit. An inventory full (40 sc's) would deal a HUGE amount of dammage (if all where 1-50 it would give 80 - 4000 dammage per hit or avg 2040 per hit)

at lvl 20 with +2 all skills and 7 in all the 3 resist skills you get +266% per element. At 100 avg dammage this gives 798 avg elemental dammage from venegance or about 1596 per hit (assuming no resists above 50% )

The ammount of elemental dammage you can get from items is so high imo that its better to go for zeal / conv instead (with double the attack speed). Venegance is much better tho, if you could go two handed or get some 1 hander with an extreme avg dammage.

Zeal : Faster ( 4 frames max), more phys dammage (more leech = live longer), harder to interupt (only interuptable between each 5 hit cycle) and costs a lot less mana per hit.

Venegance : hits harder, speciacly with huge dammage weapons and guaranted 3x elemental types (no immunity problems)

[ogot]

Weapon: the best and actually quite cheap is probably glimmershred. (throwing axe with huge elemental dammage bonus)
Shield you might consider tiamats also (nice added elemental dammage) A 4 pdiamond paladin with base 40% res is also good (110+ all res)

You should probably use string of ears instead of tgods. Bul katos is a good ring, a rare ll ring with life/res is also nice.


Zeal : make sure you shift + click to avoid desyncing too much.

I'd prefer using Baranar's Star+Zeal, and only Glimmershred on switch... Tiamat's is good too... But why String of Ears instead of TGod? (I kinda liked the idea of standing in the middle of a gloam pack and shredding them with BStar+Zeal... Maybe Vampire Gaze could do the Life Steal and damage reduction for me?


And what is desyncing?

Thanks!

[devzero]

And what is desyncing?

You will notice it fast enough if you use zeal. Sometimes when you zeal you will miss with all 5 attacks, even tho you have 95% chance to hit. The reason for this is that the monster(or you) is not lockated where your screen shows you that it is. So instead of the range between you and monster beeing 1 yard (the reach of bstar) its located 2 yards away (outside your reach). This happens quite often to me, if you have better ping, the problem should appear less often (i've been playing with ~150 ping) but it will happen from time to time.

If you shift + click, any monster within your reach will be attacked. This will reduced the effect of the desync, any monster within your reach will be attack, regardless of what is shown on your screen.

Desync : the data shown on your screen is not the same as the data on the server. (ie not syncronized)

Desync is a powerfull argumen against using both bstar and glimmershred btw. Both have reach 1, getting a weapon with higher reach is much preferable, since with a reach 3 weapon, a desync of up to 2 yards will not be noticed (in my experience most desync is 1-2 yards.)

a nice unique weapon might then be Stormlash, its got 1 - 473 lightning, -10 weapon speed, cb/ias and a very nice reach of 3 yard! (witch is max for a 1 hander i belive) In the worst cases this means 100% more hits

EDIT: about the string of ears. You allready have increased your light res to 90, if you have many points in light res aura i belive this will also increase your max light res. The MDR from string of ears will probably be better than the light absorb from tgods for your build. And you will need both the DR and the LL. Therefore i belive string is a better belt for this particular build.

this is just imo tho, feel free to experiment and report back :D

[pharaoh]

5 zeal
20 vengeance
20 salvation
20 holy shield
20 conviction
rest defiance
guess it will work quite nice

I wouldn't go with maxed Salvation. Try 10 each in Resist Fire/Cold/Lightning. These will give a much better synergy than Salvation, and they have the passive resist cap bonus, too. For every two 'hard' points (ie, not from items/shrines/Battle Command) in these, you get +1 to your maximum resist of that type. Combined with Guardian Angel armor, this makes it relatively easy to hit 95/95/95/90 resists (95 in poison res, too, if you slap on Venom Grips or something).

You still might want to stick a single point into Salvation as a utility aura. You can use it to help out party members in tight spots, as well as using it to bolster your resists when you're affected by Lower Resist and/or Conviction. It's only worth a single point though; the synergy kind of sucks (one point each in Resist Fire/Cold/Lightning is worth more than three in Salvation), and the diminishing returns hit pretty early. With some +skills, it will be plenty good enough to serve you in the times you need it.

A skill plan you might try is

20 Conviction
10 Resist Fire
10 Resist Cold
10 Resist Lightning
5+ Holy Shield
1+ Vengeance
1 in all prerequisites

The reason I say 1+ in Vengeance is that you get a good damage boost from the synergies, and exactly how much you want to pump Vengeance depends a lot on how much mana leech and +mana/kill gear you've got. There's nothing worse than having your main attack rendered unusable for lack of mana, and vengeance has a pretty steep mana cost as melee skills go, and it goes up every level. After you have maxed Conviction, got 10 in each of the resist auras, and got 5 in Holy Shield, you can choose whether to pump Holy Shield or Vengeance.

I also really agree with whoever suggested using Gimmershred. They are reasonably (albeit not super) fast, decent damage, loads of elemental damage, and you can throw them. This last is a real lifesaver in certain areas, such as the Chaos Sanctuary and Worldstone Keep where you're often cursed with Iron Maiden. Still, for most areas of the game, you'll probably do well with a good Paladin sceptre (Heaven's Light comes to mind; it's got solid damage, good Crushing Blow, +skills, it's fast, and it's got a socket or two).

[pharaoh]

I'd prefer using Baranar's Star+Zeal, and only Glimmershred on switch... Tiamat's is good too... But why String of Ears instead of TGod? (I kinda liked the idea of standing in the middle of a gloam pack and shredding them with BStar+Zeal... Maybe Vampire Gaze could do the Life Steal and damage reduction for me?


And what is desyncing?

Your question on desynching (often referred to as 'lag') was answered by devzero, but note it only matters if you're playing on b.net or in a TCP/IP game (even if you are hosting). In plain SP, desynch won't happen; the worst you'll get is choppiness and lag from a slow CPU and/or low RAM.

What he said about String of Ears over T-God's is valid too, but remember, in some cases it's more for the damage reduction than for the life leech. The main point for having T-God's is to handle Gloams; with maxed (90+ if you have Guardian Angel) Lightning Resist, most other lightning attacks can be safely ignored. However, Gloam lightning damage is bugged in v1.10 (along with the damage on many other ranged attackers), and they (reportedly) deal their regular physical damage along with the lightning damage, and each bolt can 'hit' several times. This means that the physical and magical damage reduction on String of Ears and Vampire Gaze can really help out, not to mention the fact that having 25-35% physical damage reduction is very helpful for all stages of the game.

If you're playing an avenger, note that you really do need strong defenses. Max block, max resists, huge defense, faster hit recovery, and at least some damage reduction are pretty much mandatory to survive in Hell. Remember that Vengeance can only kill one target per use at the most, unlike many other attacks which can damage or kill multiple foes. This means you'll be subjected to a lot of attacks, and in Hell, monsters hit hard.

[Minionman]

I guess he has it for the synergy to Vengeance. But since that's only 2% per level, while fireghtning/cold resist aura each give 10 % per level and grant a hidden bonus to the max resistance (I think about 0.5% per skill level), there's really not much sense to use salvation - apart from that you want a real resist-all aura just in case and have the rest of your equipment adapt so that it doesn't give resists at all but instead other mods.
In any other case, I'd go with 10 in fire resist and 10 in lightning resist probably. That would be a 200% instead of a 40% bonus to vengeance.

one point each in Resist Fire/Cold/Lightning is worth more than three in Salvation

A litte nitpicking on these quotes: from what it seems from looking at the description salvation adds 2% damage to each element, while the resist auras add 10% to only their own element. so in total salvation adds 6% damage and resist auras add 10% damage. On average resist auras add 3.33% damage to each element to salvation's 2%. Your points about using resist auras are still good in general since resist auras still add more damage than salvation, but it's not that big of an advantage.

[adeyke]

For total damage, 1 point in each single-resist aura (i.e. 3 total) is worth 5 points in salvation. That means that, if you planned to have 20 points in salvation, you could instead put 4 points each in the single-resist auras to get the same vengeance benefit, and get +2% max resist fireghtning/cold, and have 8 skill points left over.

It's very significant.

[Minionman]

What I was saying is if you put 1 point in 1 particular resist aura if is only worth 5/3's as much as salvation, not 5 times. That's what some of the other people seemed to be saying. I didn't say that salvation was better.

The pharaoh quote was fine, but the fragbait quote at the end should say "200% rather than 120%." like I said before, It's just nitpicking.

[adeyke]

Quite true, then, and a good point. I was just meaning that you shouldn't down play it, too much, as 5/3 is still quite a lot.

[Minionman]

No Problem.

I won't try this, but how would a zeal build work with both elemental damage/conversion and physical damage/fanaticism work on different weapon switches?

[Ajax]

I'm actually building a zeal/vengence paly right now. I've got a few well-off friends so gear isn't really a problem--but what I have trouble with is determining stat points.

I figure, you need enough strength to wear your armor; no points in energy. So that's pretty simple. But how do you determine how much DEX you need, versus VIT? They both work towards keeping your character alive, but in different ways. VIT provides a pool of HP to soak up damage. DEX prevents damage from happening via bonus to shield block and (to a lesser extent) defense rating.

Is there a calculator (or equation) out there which would help me figure out a goal for DEX so I could know how much to pump VIT?

Thanks

[adeyke]

The block chance is given by this formula:
(total block) = (dexterity - 15) * (shield block) / (clvl * 2)

If we solve for dexterity, we get:
dexterity = (total block * clvl * 2) / (shield block) + 15

If you're aiming for max block, substitute 75% for total block to get:
dexterity = (150 * clvl) / (shield block) + 15

So that's the amount of dexterity you need for max block, based on your clvl and your shield block chance.

(There may also be rounding issues, so the result could be off by a little bit).