Smith of Kitava: Perfect Strike vs Hammer of the Gods; dual wielding vs. shield
I recently re-specced from artillery ballista smith to a full melee build smith. The leap slam/boneshatter clear is amazing and I have few questions about that part of the build.
Single target, however, is confusing me. On the one hand we have cArn_ and others who suggest using earthshatter to build up stun for HOTG (and also incorporate perfect strike during stun phases). And on the other hand., we have carnarius and others who claim HOTG has been nerfed into the ground and rely solely on perfect strike spam.
What are people’s thoughts on this? In particular, the perfect strike camp believes that HOTG really falls off on high-tier pinnacle bosses.
My other question is dual wield vs. shield. Is dual wield the way to go as single target? I’m hesitant because PoB doesn’t back up carnarius claims about double or triple damage. Has anybody tested this? Can you verify?
And use dual wield ok for clear as well? It’s not too squishy?
Comments
If you can solve accuracy, I've found that bleed sunder works great for single target. You use default attacks + armour breaker totems to shred armor (it usually only takes a few hits to break bosses) and then sunder for the guaranteed crit with huge bleed. If you really wanna commit to it, you can have a weapon swap of 2 greathammers with crit damage bonus just for the sunder, then use a shield setup for mapping.
You can use weaponset points to do both. Dual wield does more damage IF you have two strong 2H hammers. Shield does more damage if you're on a budget, and with max block you can get +150% increased damage with offensive stance + lay siege.
If you're not on a budget, or later when they give us the weapon lock feature, you can build for area and speed on WS1 for better clear, and then build for single target on WS2 with dual wielding.
From my understanding this patch Perfect Strike has a higher ceiling and outscales Hammer at high budget, but high dmg maces with gemlvl are expensive so Hammer still has its uses until you get to the really good weapons.
At gem lvl20 Hammer has 1529% dmg vs Perfect Strike's 1310%. At gem lvl40 Hammer has 2938% dmg vs Perfect Strike's 3476%.
Sunder. (With shield and armour break)
I know it’s not one of the options you gave, but in my opinion it is far superior to both.
If you want an example: https://mobalytics.gg/poe-2/builds/skadoosh-fire-armour-break-smith
I use both. Some monsters I cant get to sit still long enough for Perfect Strike, so I HoTG them. I dual weild for them because idk why, tooltip says its more damage with just 1 hammer, so go figure. I used two weapon sets so I get more passive points, investing into block and AoE on my 1mace setup and ignition + fire damage on my 2h setup.
I have no idea if this is good, or ideal, but its going okay and im level 75 atm but havent got enough waystones to push past t6s yet (will try tonight).
Like others have said, sunder. Ive got my sunder build to about 8 mill damage per hit+bleed. It could definitely go higher, towards 15 mill if I used the lowlife helmet, weapon swap aggravate, and some more crit scaling.
Rolling Slam totems is superior to both. Why people not use Rolling Slam totems, I am not sure.
pob with dual wield isn't working properly, afaik it's calculating as if the weapons are alternating for hits instead of combined
from what i've been told, in order to calculate a more accurate damage value for perfect strike you can make a new mace in pob using the damage values from both weapons and the main hands attack speed and add a line to the weapon for the 30% less damage tag on perfect strike. make sure only that custom weapon is equipped in your dw setup on pob or it will go back to trying to alternate it and average the damage out
personally i prefer to use 1h+shield and boneshatter for clear with leap slam to generate stun instead of using just leap slam for clear(similar to carn's setup). i swap to 2x2h maces and perfect strike for single target. the weapon passives are setup so set 1 is aoe+stun, set 2 is damage+ignite. it's tankier for clearing but the budget is also somewhat higher than it would be with a pure dw leap slam setup due to the fact that it requires at least 2 different weapons and a shield (in my case, 3 weapons because i'm lazy and don't like to drag weapons to set 2 when weapon swapping)
i still use HotG situationally while mapping but its much less effort to just dual wield perfect strike for pinnacles and ignore trying to setup any form of stun