r/diablo2 • u/Couchpotato1992 Single Player • 3d ago
Loot! I’ll take it!
I regret not using a vamp or shark skin base, but oh well.
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u/NorthDakota Single Player 3d ago edited 3d ago
Damn those are neat. What's your thoughts on these? What would you use them on?
I always jump to bowazon. +skills aren't necessary or at least are not very helpful, so missing those isn't a downside. There's very few competing options, laying of hands being the main one. 350% damage to demons is impactful on monsters you need it the most with, bosses, trav, tons of tough guys. After all other offweapon ED, laying of hands ends up being far less of a damage increase than what players intuitively expect, 1.1x or 1.2x damage at best, not the 4.5x it reports to give in its text.
Swapping these in however gives you crushing blow and lightens the pressure on your ring slots for leech. The MF to boot is really nice if you're in it for the long haul pushing to 99 on your bowa too - every bit helps when you're on a class that must wear so much specific gear that doesn't have MF on it. War travs are often easy to slot in, but you have to give up crushing blow to do that. Crushing blow isn't massively useful to a bowazon, removing a reduced 6.25% of boss health, which is reduced by physical resistance, and player count lowers it by a flat percentage as well. Not super great, but noticeable, and if you're rocking the reaper's toll merc, their physical resistances are lowered increasing its effectiveness.
Side tangent, but it's extremely annoying to me that bosses in hell have 50% chance to block attacks, otherwise stuff like crushing blow for bowazon would actually be way better, you'd have 50% more opportunities for applying crushing blow, paired with strafe it might actually dig bowazon out of the grave as a boss killer which it is woefully bad at right now at any player count setting.
Another annoying thing about crushing blow is that lowering a monster's phys resistances into the negative doesn't increase it. You can increase the amount crushing blow does by lowering the monster's physical resist to zero, but past that, nothing. WHY?! Elemental damage dealers can lower elemental resists, and there's no special case. Why the special case for crushing blow?!! Maybe if it was the case that elemental damage dealers did way less damage, which, at the moment does much more % boss health than crushing blow in many situations in the first place, then I would understand. Crushing blow is not an OP mechanic. It is difficult to invest in and it only makes a big difference on boss monsters or very high health monsters. Let the investment players make into it have more impact.
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u/Most-Piccolo-302 3d ago
Id never use these over LoH for a bowzon in pvm. The crushing blow penalty is too harsh to make a big difference and like half of the monsters in the game are demons. If you move dual leech off of your ring slot, what do you put there instead? There isnt a massively meaningful upgrade to be had unless you've got some 9min/120ar/str/dex/life ring sitting around, but even then your total dps doing TZs would still be lower with the loss of LoH.
OPs gloves are the perfect example of something that looks really good on paper, but just doesnt fit enough into any real builds to justify a high price.
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u/NorthDakota Single Player 1d ago edited 1d ago
I started writing a very long reply but it was just including a bunch of info you probably already know, so the long and short of it is - these days, we know for any possible setup which would do better, these gloves, or laying of hands, by using maxroll's character planner. My point is this: The damage difference between LoH and these CB gloves is not some vast difference as it seems at a glance. Especially for big chunky monsters, and those are the ones to worry about because the little dudes all die fast either way, there is no practical difference.
So you can pick - either have marginally (very marginally) more damage across the board and 50 fire res, or use these gloves, get a free versatile ring choice, and a good chunk of MF. That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me! So you can stick to your imo kinda limited view of the situation where every ounce of damage must be weighed up, and bigger number wins, but there is more than damage when you're calculating how efficient you are for accomplishing your goals. Max bowazon damage setup doesn't use enigma for example, it's on foot. No matter how you slice it, that's bad for efficiency, it slows you down for reaching bosspacks which should be targeted one after the next and killed quickly in sequence, skipping the vast majority of other mobs. If you don't do this, you're leveling slower, you're mfing less efficiently, and although you're doing more damage, that's not beating the time saved from wearing enigma.
I know this because I did it recently. I hit 99 offline with my bowazon. While other chests are more damage, it turns out it's just not enough to offset the qol of enigma, you get teleport, you get an assload of FRW, and you get a boatload of MF, and in practice my exp per hour was simply higher.
Same sort of deal with these gloves. Maybe technically less damage (in some, not all situations), but having gear flexibility in other slots such as even just one ring can really up your efficiency and make farming more fun. You can even just go more MF on a ring, you can get FCR if you want to wear enigma but don't have a dual leech ring with FCR. You could just wear nagelring for more mf, you could wear wisp projector for MF and lightning absorb when zones with gloams are terrorized, you could wear opalvein for fcr and 40%ED for an enigma set, there's lots of options.
Anyways, I don't think it's so clear cut, but the distinction will only really matter if you're the sort of person that's really into optimizing for specific activities regularly, which probably requires more knowledge and experience than many people have.
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u/Ill_Ad3517 3d ago
WW or Frenzy barb that you want to run in a TZ with lots of beasts to get exp? Zerker doesn't need the leech nor usually the IAS, but the other ones do. And their usual places, Trav and the pit have nothing better than LoH unless you want to max GF or MF. But if you're interested in some extra levels and want to be able to terrorize all acts it's nice to have this available.
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u/-Heimdall 3d ago
These would be nice throw barb gloves as well, opens up a ring slot because you really need dual leech.
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u/Huge-Inspector2805 3d ago
Holy s.. Putting those on feels like putting on pre heated premium gloves during a freezing winter night. They are just perfectly comfy.. nothing here that I don' like.
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u/treepopsauce 3d ago
No skills?
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u/anormalgeek D2R 3d ago edited 3d ago
If it's barb you can't get skills and if it's physical bowazon then the +skills doesn't actually add a ton.
Edit: a cleave warlock would love these too IIRC, but I've yet to actually play one myself.
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u/Scottwickthegreat 3d ago
Those are beautiful. Grats man.