"It's Hammer Time!" The strange tale of physical blessed hammers! in v1.00-v1.06

[TWolfMech]

Blessed Hammers do physical damage?
Did sound crazy to me, but I can't deny it anymore.

I have noticed it before that physical resistant monsters and stone skin uniques tend to take forever for my Paladin to kill on hell difficulty.
I needed more time killing a stone skine Warped One(Fallen type enemy) than killing Mephisto.
This would explain why Concentration increased the damage of Hammers in the first place.

You guys must probably now all this by now, but this is a bit mindblowing moment for me.

Edit:
So, it seems that when they turned Blessed Hammer's physical damage into magical and made it work with Concentration again, they ended up creating the infamous and arguably most unbalanced build in the game.

 

[fearedbliss]

Lol yea, I had a Pally in 1.05b before and hammers did physical damage. Definitely slower when it comes to monsters with high physical resistance. One thing that I noticed later on was that I should have put more points into redemption as soon as I got it. Given the mana pot drop rate, and the high mana usage of hammers, redemption is the fastest way for me to quickly regenerate mana and continuing to kill monsters. So the loop is hammers to kill monsters, switch to redemption and wait a few seconds to gather the mana from the nearby corpses, and then continue. One point in redemption helps a lot but putting a few more points I believe can help with the frequency rate at which you can redeem IIRC.

 

[TWolfMech]

True! Redemption is so good! Unlike Meditation, where one has to wait for the mana to fill up again, Redemption usually fills most of the mana AND life with one pulse.

I tried to play a melee Paladin before, bad had to switch into hammers eventually, since doing it on hardcore is quite the challenge. But I still want to give the melee Paladin a shot. Maybe try a two handed weapon high IAS for fun?

I still have this nice Divine Scepter from Charsi:

I think Concentration is the way to go, since Fanaticism doesn't increase my damage.
So the fact that it has +2 Zeal and +1 Conc already, is quite nice!

 

[fearedbliss]

Lol yea.. I've tried putting a lot points into Zeal, and I decided it's better to prolly self-cap yourself at 5 (similar to how they capped it in 1.07). Cause 1 point = 1 hit, so level 20 zeal is basically 20 hits in a row. Problem is if you get interrupted or you miss, it seems all of your hits miss, so now you are locked into the animation.. meanwhile monsters can still hit you. IIRC Zeal also doesnt increase your damage, just your # of hits + attack rating..

 

[TWolfMech]

Yea, it only increases the AR. So the idea is to use it as on a low level with fewer attacks.
However, this will keep my percentual increase of AR pretty low. I might need some good AR on my weapon and rings to work around that.
So, Zeal shouldn't get too many points itself. Maybe keep it at level 1 and add an Eye of Etlich to the build?
The cold damage, life leech and additional skill point should help a lot.
The damage should be fine with just the Concentration aura.
Zeal seems to be the best melee skill for the Paladin because of it's high attack speed.
If the total amount of ED% is high enough, of course.

Edit:
Thinking about it, Eye of Etlich can be huge with Iceblink! It will increase the freeze duration by quite a lot.

Edit 2:
Btw, a miss does not result in all following attacks missing. Just tested it. Running on 1.05.
Still unable to stop attacking as long as a monster is in range. So you keep attacking until there are no targets and then execute one last attack to miss. Somewhat similar to strafe.

 

[fearedbliss]

Maybe it was if you miss the first time then they all miss.. but I remember there was a situation where all my subsequent attacks wouldn’t hit anymore.

And yea maybe keeping at level 1 and using some gear to increase the skill would be better. There isn’t too much gear I can think of that increases the skills but you could get +4/+5 depending on the pieces.

 

[TWolfMech]

Maybe it was if you miss the first time then they all miss.. but I remember there was a situation where all my subsequent attacks wouldn’t hit anymore.

I have heard about this being a thing before. But so far there has been no occasion where I missed with all attacks, even after missing the first one.
Unless I get stuck in hit recovery. That breaks up the entire animation, though, and allows me to move away or start attacking again.

Edit:
Just tried it in 1.00, too. Seems to be the same there.

 

[thrasher_565]

the 3 holy shield + redemption is a goat as it save alot of skills to get to redemption. think there a + skills rune word for lower level build and of course cta.