Seven-Sided Strike: Pandemonium - opinions

[buralien]

The 7 second stun on this skill sounds like a huge deal. If my math is correct, the chance to stun at least X opponents is:

1	86,65%
2	36,35%
3	10,44%
4	2,70%
5	0,68%
6	0,17%
7	0,04%

Against a typical 4 man champion pack, you have a good chance to stun at least one and possibly more monsters for a long time, gaining breathing room to kill the others, or at least kite them away.

I want to test it this evening, but I'm looking for others opinions too.

[Ohlmann]

I want to test it this evening, but I'm looking for others opinions too.

My opinion is that usually Scorpion Sting or dashing strike with the rune that give 60% chance to stun will be more versatile and generally useful. Then again, I find SSS pretty useless on its own.

[buralien]

My opinion is that usually Scorpion Sting or dashing strike with the rune that give 60% chance to stun will be more versatile and generally useful. Then again, I find SSS pretty useless on its own.

I played with both of them, and my experience is that usually they are not worth it. Both are short in duration (compared to 7 seconds, anyway).
Dashing strike's stun is single target, which I found rarely helpful.
Scorpion is AoE, but I found it unreliable - it feels like half of the time, it fails to produce a single stun on a group of 4+ enemies. You can spam it, but at 30 Spirit a go, it's just too expensive.

[Ohlmann]

Scorpion is AoE, but I found it unreliable - it feels like half of the time, it fails to produce a single stun on a group of 4+ enemies. You can spam it, but at 30 Spirit a go, it's just too expensive.

Scorpion sting is mainly useful because it does burst damage and allow for quick spirit spending (meaning life with the good item). For crowd control, the knockback + snare is way more useful, but don't allow for burst.

Dashing strike is something alway extremely useful. The rune is more a question of taste between the stun, the 20% dodge, or the reduced cost.

SSS pandemonium seem to serve no real purpose except for the random stun. It make you invincible for a bit of time, but you can't move so it's a bit moot. It does not seem to do significantly more damage than a spirit generator, it's not targeted, and it has a cooldown. I am pretty meh on this skill.

[buralien]

After some testing in A1 Inferno, I found out that the 7 second stun works great on white mobs, but is reduced to what seems like less then 1 second on champion/rare packs. Therefore the only benefit of SSS seems to be the very short invulnerability. It's useful when a laser/frozen/molten dead enemy is about to hit you, but that's about it. Nothing to write home about.

[Hellpyre]

It's fairly good - remember that while all CC is reduced significantly on inferno, Pandemonium is one of the only skills to have a significant stun length after the reduction takes place. It can be quite significant against act bosses, or to create a wall of stunned white monsters to slow down an elite you are trying to kite. All in all, if you want to use SSS, it is a fairly strong rune choice. (SSS, unfortunately, is mostly valuable because of the invuln, so taking it at all is up to you).

[Dym]

I found SSS:Pandemonium only useful against Rakanoth to counter his Teleport attack (along with BF and Serenity). I choose Pandemonium because its stun allows me to run away from him before he hits me. I got rid of it for Diablo fight thou because you can dodge all of his attacks without cooldowns and Air Ally is much more useful in that fight (often Diablo hit it with his floor incinerating fireball allowing you to dps more).

[droppin]

SSS:the super massive aoe one ftw SOOOOOOO much damage in tight packs.