Whirlwind sprint which offhand is better, stat stick or dpsder=0>

[Raistlinorb]

Hi i have a build with Whirlwind and sprint tornadoes and the usual truckload of LOH, but i cant figure out which offhand is better please advice which you think is better for the sprint WW build.

Heres my profile - http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/T.../hero/16797365

heres the offhands linked as pictures. My dilemma seems to be how much of a stat stick the offhand really is, should i just plainly go for the best stats and disregard a 180 dps level

Indeed all comments about gear, such as where you might upgrade is also welcomed as im trying to improve my barbarian i am however poor, sitting at 300k right now.

The reason im going for offhands with less life on hit is to try and gain more damage from the +crit damage on the new items.

[VagrantKing]

Since you have sufficient LOH on your mainhand and ring. I would go for the Vexing Spine or Shudder Spur. I am leaning toward Shudder Spur because it has better stats.

Sprint Tornados will factor in all your offhand stats and will ignore its DPS. Sprint Tornados are the majority of the damage of any WW/Nado build. The offhand DPS is only factored when you Bash and Whirlwind which it then alternates mainhand and offhand damage.

[EoB]

Well, I think it really depends on your style of play. You have Bash/Punish which leads me to believe you make use of it from time to time. Having a low dps offhand will hurt more the more you use it and WW. But, if you are mostly sprinting around enemies and letting your tornadoes do the work, and using WW and Bash for escape and emergency fury regen, then the low dps wont matter.

Are you having lots of trouble in Act 3? if survivability is hurting then you may want to find a helm you can put a pink gem in for more life. Also, upgrading your gems is always advised whenever you can. But, with only 300K left in the bank, you might just want to farm some more wherever you comfortably can and generate some more cash for an upgrade or two.

Oh, and lastly, best way to pick amongst the three is to try them all out for a run and see which feels better. You will know right away which will be most effective, I promise.

[Raistlinorb]

Hey guys thanks for the feedback !

Love these forums people are real damn helpful, good people.

Anywho yeah i tried shudder spur out now and im really loving it. My tornadoes used to crit out at a max of 8k now they are doing upto 10-11k which i consider massive.

Survivability did take a bit of a hit, but with this build usually you can use the massive movement speed to get out of icky situations and survive just through care.

Have a nice day

[SirAdis]

Personally I took a dps weapon over a statstick, maybe cause the dps difference was 2 high but when I swapped a 950 dps spear ( with 0 crit damage, just 800ish LoH ) with a 180% crit dagger that had 120 str ( but only 300ish dps ) I noticed my tornados damage went up by 3k, but whirlwind went down to 10k offhand crits, and with my spear it does 40-50k, no idea if the 3k per crittick is worth more dps overall than 30-40k difference in whirlwind offhand crits but I'd rather see bigger numbers anyway ;p so IMHO, go for dps as long as the difference is bigger than 100dps.

[Raistlinorb]

Yeah good point i have been wondering how much Whirlwind DPS contributes to overall dps cause then offhand dps may increase damage somewhat

[Karth]

Yeah good point i have been wondering how much Whirlwind DPS contributes to overall dps cause then offhand dps may increase damage somewhat

It seems to be ~ 1/3 of your damage (assuming you always have 5 tornados spawn and not 4) post 1.04. In testing I got 432 damage/tornado tick and 1045 damage/whirlwind tick with gear that caused min damage to be equal to maximum damage.

[galzohar]

So for spinning around a target non-stop spawning on average 4.5 tornadoes every 3 seconds (and keeping 4.5 tornadoes up as sprint lasts 3 seconds as well) then whirlwind would do 1045/(1045+432*4.5)=0.35 of our damage.

However, when running away from stuff we could get 1-2 tornadoes hitting them for 2-3 seconds while whirlwind would only hit for <1 second, so I'm not too sure how that would factor in or if it even needs to be factored in.

In any case, when I used the "whirlwind is 1/3" estimation, it seemed like stat sticks on the AH are way way more cost efficient than weapons that actually have some DPS too. Of course keeping in mind that the offhand only affects 1/2 of the whirlwind damage (which again is probably a rough estimation as a faster weapon would also swing faster and be active less often, but that correction should be rather small compared to the huge price difference).