Combat Enchantment
Last updated
Last updated
Deciding factor: Item Bonuses
The Combat Enchantments are used to raise the Item Level and provide powerful bonuses. Its main drawback - which already created many forum posts - is the absence of Combined Rating on it. Thus a Celestial Combat Enchantment reduces every single stat by 6% (-6%*15=-90% stats)! Nonetheless, most Combat Enchantments have a good enough bonus effects to consider them.
There is 1 Combat Enchantment slot available. With mod 28, 5 offensive oriented, 4 defensive oriented and 2 heal oriented Combat Enchantment exist, each can have a quality of “Uncommon” (Rank 1) to “Celestial” (Rank 6) (each upgrade provides 1000 Item Level, 0 Combined Rating, 2% outgoing damage or -2% incoming damage and a bonus). Only Celestial Enchantments are shown here. Lower ranks can be taken as starter Enchantments.
For tanks, only the defensive focused Combat Enchantments are interesting. However, since I have the data for the other Enchantments, all will be presented.
For most endgame builds, Flash Freeze is the best choice as the three important stats (Defense, Awareness, Critical Avoidance) are close to the cap! The latest content also added more frequently attacking bosses and has thus increased the uptime of the -6% to -18% reduced outgoing damage debuff on enmies abit. 1 or 2 stacks are now more reliably seen! The advantages of this enchantment:
It is a strong support debuff to the enemy: Any incoming damage inflicted by the enemy on the allies gets reduced by the debuff!
3 stacks would result in a reduction of incoming damage by close to 17% (0.94*0.94*0.94~0.8305)!
It is independent of the stat caps: Thus Awareness and Defense can be capped regardless for even more reduction of incoming damage!
Flash Freeze does not work well against Halasters Annihilation, because its animation is 10 seconds and the debuff disappears before the damage is inflicted. However, this is true for Fortified Nature too!
The -12% incoming damage bonus on all defensive oriented Combat Enchantments work the same as all other damage mitigation buffs. They are multiplicative with each other and are represented by the coefficient 0.88 (100%-12% incoming damage).
Fortified Nature is the best option for deflect builds or when stats are not close to the cap! It provides up to 54% stats, however these are provided very unreliable:
It builds up its potential slow: Each stack can be applied only once per second. It then increases Defense, Awareness and Deflect by 3.6%.
If no attack is incoming between seconds [1,3] after the last stack was applied, all stacks are lost! Fortunately, many bosses attack fast enough.
It needs to build up again and again: After the 5 stacks are reached it creates a tiny heal of 6% maximum Hit Points. Afterwards - for some reason- it then sometimes stops stacking and thus resets to 0. Thus its maximum potential is only shortly up!
Furthermore, it is stat dependent: If Defense, Awareness or Deflect are capped (90%), then it does not provide anything!
Soul Shield is not a great option to consider for any tank : A tank barely dies and then a Scroll of Life could simply help! Repeatedly dying can only happen if a wipe is already forecast!
Let's take a look at the mechanics of the Enchantment.
When you die and the effect is triggered, a revive sickness death skull is added as a normal revive does. Thus you still die after 5 stacks!
Additionally it is bugged for good and bad:
Bug: When in air, the effect can not trigger and you must be revived as usual.
Bug: Sometimes, 2 death sickness stacks are added!
However there is a reason why Soul Shield can still be considered for Reaper's Challenges:
Bug: Soul Shield ignores the "No revives" restriction. Thus one is raised to 100% even after a death!
Living Hex is an option to consider for gaining a bit of threat:
The reflection appears on the first incoming hit each 15 seconds. The pre mitigated incoming damage is taken and multiplied with Power, Outgoing Damage Boost and Physical Damage Boost. However it is reduced by Defense and Deflect too. The Maximum of 50 000 is reached when an incoming hit is higher than 2 777 777 damage. This happens very rarely! Damage wise it is very underwhelming.
TODO: I have not conducted any threat tests.
The currently best offensive Combat Enchantment for damage dealers: Lightning Flash. The 12% increase to damage is an independent multiplier next to the Outgoing Damage multiplier mentioned in Hidden Boosts. It is not additive and thus provides a close to 12 % damage increase! This holds true for the other offensive Combat Enchantments too. The 3 stacks of 3.6% (no tooltip rounding errors) Accuracy and Critical Strike can be kept up easily. With +21.6% stats, Lightning Flash outshines the other three offensive alternatives significantly. The 15 additional magnitude is the cherry on the cake! The 15 Magnitude Damage is not multiplied with any stats and boosts from the damage formula.
Wild Card is an inferior offensive enchantment for AoE fights. With up to 6% additional Damage Boost, it provides less than the 21.6% stats and is less reliable.
Poisoned Thorn. Inferior choice. The 30 Magnitude Damage that is dealt 4 seconds later is multiplied with all stats and boosts from the damage formula (including the Physical Damage Boost). However, this 30 Magnitude hit has a bug which makes it barely crit from additional procs like from the Mythallar set.
Cursed Burn (Inferior choice) deals damage similar to Poisoned Thorn (9*3=27 Magnitude Damage + a chance of dealing 18 Magnitude Damage once in 10 seconds, both forms of damage are multiplicated with Power, Combat Advantage and so on.). It has a chance to outpace Poisoned Thorns in situations with many mobs. However it also has two flaws:
It does not trigger stacks for Demogorgon’s set!
It is multiplicated with the Magical Damage Boost instead of the Physical Damage Boost for Vanguard Fighters.
Battle Tempered is even after buff in Mod 29 unviable. It looks like a good hybrid Enchantment for defensive oriented damage dealers, but the provided shield is not big enough to mitigate enough damage! 1 stack of shields generate the amount of 0.09*Damage (Stat). For a Tank of 100k Item Level this is a value of 9000 (the value is not buffed by any other source!). 20 stacks would thus only provide a shield worth of 180 000 Hit Points. That is nothing for any endgame content! See the image below for a maximized shield of 20 stacks:
For defensive / supportive oriented tanks none of the offensive Combat Enchantments are the way to go. Take a look at the defensive oriented Combat Enchantments.
Divine Aegis provides 9% Outgoing Healing and a small shield . The shield suffers from the same problem as Battle Tempered. At 20 Stacks it provides on a 100k IL healer shields worth of 198 000 Hit Points. That is not too!
Refulgent Fortification provides 12% damage reduction and is especially a good choice on the Paladin healer. Paladin's tab can reliable trigger the bonus of 18% Movement Speed and -6% damage reduction for the tank! Its downside is the 4s uptime. Great to get it as a tank before a tankbuster hits! (Don't worry, I could not reproduce the bug, where its effect get dodged by the Fighter's 'Dig In' control immunity!)
None of the healer focused Combat Enchantments are worth to take on a tank!
