Rending slash question (dmg bonus on bom, viscera, cleaver…)

[Kardinaal]

There are a few pieces of gear that boost rending slash damage. There’s a bom and viscera set sword that boost rs damage specifically, and the cleaver that boosts any primary attack.

But do those boosts apply only to the main target, or do they also boost the damage to all enemies around and/or the bleed damage?

and does a jump bom boost the bleed part?

[Nhat]

hmm, was waiting for other test experts to check... since no one answered yet, here's what I got from brief Training Gounds tests:
- No BoM, so can't check that...

Viscera boost the bleed damage only, as expected.

Cleaver's damage boost ONLY apply to the normal damage on the primary target, those around gets the normal 75%, and the bleed remains the same.

An interesting thing about the Bleed stacking, due to how a single hit "refreshes" the timer on the whole stack, whatever damage was initially done to trigger the bleed continues. This could be both a positive or negative, depending on the circumstances:
- PRO: initial bleed stack got added when you had ALL your damage boosts active, things like Power Infusion, Talisman of Power, etc - this higher bleed continue as long as you do not let the stack expired.
- CON: initial bleed stack got added when you had NONE of your damage boosts... lower damage persists until the stack expired.


I should add, that Cleaver's damage boost apply to all targets hit by Cleave, which I suppose is another reason why Cleave is used in favour of Rending Slash nowadays... not enough boost...

[Kardinaal]

Thanks for the info. The bleed stacking thing is probably the reason why my shockwave damage is all over the place (can be anywhere from 5-15% of my damage on trial runs). So getting bleed to do high damage would need very high crit rating cause you need to crit the first hit on the boss. And since you dont do that many shockwaves, high crit rate would also help in double crits.

Gonna be hell balancing out crit, block, enough ar,… for a shockwave shield warrior. So many stats needed on gear. Those top 100 finishes are gonna take a while lol.

[Kardinaal]

I kept getting mixed results in my trial shockwave damage, even with fire Lilly, so I ran some test runs of shockwave with or without rs. It’s definately rs that’s making shockwave damage erratic, so further testing had to be done.

I ran tests against a single enemy, each 10 runs. I used the power boost from shield block to change my weapon damage, got rid of all haste so I hit nice and slow, and tested how changing power by running away, then using shield block at certain times during (and after) the buildup of the stack, affects things. The variation in the 10 runs was what was expected: slight changes from weapon damage roll, but nothing that would disrupt the big picture change of roughly doubling power with Sb.

I used my fire Lilly Shieldshocker for testing. The 10 run averages:

No activation of SB: 253k dps
activation for 2 hits: 304k dps
activation for 5 hits: 345k dps
activation for 8 hits: 401k dps
activation for 10 hits: 503k dps



So in building up the bleed component of RS, every hit counts towards the stack, and each can (needs to ) individually crit for optimal damage (probably, the crit thing is an untested hypothesis). Once the 10 attack stack is built, the damage can no longer be changed, further attacks just reset the timer.

Since I would need a short reliable infusion of crit rating before applying RS, maybe belt of the Templar and ITZ could add to crit rating. Do a start sequence like:

• Attack with frenzy
• 2x shield block (10s power boost)
• Itz
• (wait for stalwart defender proc)
• switch attack to RS
• (wait for 10 stacks)
• 2x shockwave (profiting fully from the boosts)

This would get optimal damage in the rs stack, resulting in higher shockwave damage for the rest of the fight.

But loosing a skill slot… SB and SW get a spot, so I’d loose DT. That’s a decent amount of boss damage gone, no idea if the sum of itz and sb feeding into rs, with high crit can weigh up to loosing DT. But then again, it would be super cool and totally fit the theme of the mighty ironclad barbarian: blood, slamming and throwing shields, and smiting with shockwave

[Kardinaal]

Since osmosis would factor into RS damage, it might also be worth it to let the stack run out and restart throughout the boss fight.

[Kardinaal]

To further test “building a stack”, I went back to the training grounds, attacked with frenzy till I procced talisman of power, then popped shield block and quickly switched to rs to build the stack. Timing wasn’t great but the result was there: upped the stack to 783k dps.



So there are ways to add to the stack on a fire Lilly build too: Talisman of power and power infusion (allthough I think endurance as a passive adding to life and thus to the SW heal is better in general).