And the game is just littered with cheap barb spiritist hammers that come up for sale every few hours at prices any leveling shaman can afford, right? Regen becomes significantly less valuable, in fact almost irrelevant, once you have Torpor, so it's only really an asset while leveling. Barbarians is a terrible race unless you have that one item, and it isn't even that amazing now that they've reduced proc rates across the board and introduced shields with awesome stats that are accessible to anyone. Frontal stun immunity is always useful, often great, and you strongly exaggerate how inconsequential bash is for a caster that often has to tank things. There are many scenarios where it'll save your life, the whole group's life, or just make leveling more efficient because you didn't have to take two extra rounds of melee damage from being stunned while trying to get off a spell. Mobs have the same cooldown on bash as players do, and it isn't 20 seconds when slowed. Being immune to it is a huge benefit, moreso while leveling, and when you're 60 and soloing dragons, regen won't help you very much anyway. It's also just as likely that the occasional bash (or having to maneuver your casts around bash) will cost you as much DPS from JBB-spam as you would have gained from the hammer's base PPM of 1, which is less than 5 DPS and assumes that you're constantly auto-attacking, so more like... 2 DPS or something if you're just swinging once between each spellcast? Add the raw melee damage of your swings and the slight increase in PPM from dex and I'm guessing the ability to swing your barb hammer once between each cast adds maybe 5 DPS at the very most, and less in the lower levels when you can't buff your stats a bunch.
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07-30-2011, 09:05 PM
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