Printable View
I was thinking up new build ideas and while A&M don't bleed as well as blades and exotics and aren't as fast I'm thinking the extra damage and natural armor penetration of axes plus the extra bleeding you will do with GV and BS might compensate. Anyone try that out yet or do any kind of comparison versus speed theatrics? Not too sure how well it would work with maces as I haven't used those in a long time.
I used to have a non-hol axe theatrics (maces did even less bleed) with 10 in GV + GS. The bleeds were very minimal (very rarely over 100 even at the end of 5+ rounds). It really struggled to do damage and the bleeds were too small to compensate. When I dropped the bleed skills and swapped him to CA style with rage skills, his performance in terms of overall damage improved a lot.
It is an interesting concept; a theatrics that can pump raw damage to win short fights (maybe with a CA burst) and has the bleeds necessary to take down tanks/defensive types.
Axes and maces hit harder though.
also, A&M theatrics lay down serious hurt when going swing for swing vs rage. If they had increased bleed that would feel rather OP to me.
Sure, increased bleed would help ragers somewhat, but I still dont like it. If it was just a boost to armor pen, then ~maybe~ that would be ok...
Apoc, I think Dain was suggesting a A+M build that invested heavily in the theatrics tree for GV + BS as opposed to the popular rage hybrid (Dev Power, Blood Drunk, Brute Force) rather than saying axes should get a boost to bleed rank. In the case he suggested, the A+M theatric would take a significant hit to raw damage in exchange for bleed so it probably wouldn't be too OP. I might be wrong though and axe bleeder will become the next bloody lady build :P
That build has been around for some time actually and there are maybe 2 or 3 such Theatrics gladiators right now. Their managers should tell how effective it really is - from a third person perspective a few extra points of bleeding don't seem to be worth skipping the offensive skills from the Rage tree which considerably boost the A&M damage.
In my experience, A+M don't really bleed well, it may help pushing the line against a glad with grim determination, but that's probably the only place it might help.