hello everybody. Uh, you remember that 3,000 DPS weapon that I crafted not too long ago? Here are all of the builds that I've tried with it so far. My initial idea was to run Rage Vortex of Berserking. Not a great idea, and I knew that full well going into it due to the skill barely receiving a buff in the Settler's patch. Like, come on, what the heck even is this? But I really wanted to try out the new unique gloves, Admiral's Arrogance, which essentially give you infinite rage generation provided that you're constantly hitting stuff. And well, the build worked. It was a bit janky due to Rage Vortex needing 10 rage before you know actually becomes a skill again. I know, not the greatest idea, but when it did start, it stayed on for as long as I was in combat. However, for a 3,000 DPS sword, the overall damage of the build was uh, uh, not the best. I chose Warden as my ascendancy as I wanted to see how the

new tinctures felt with tons of effect on the tree and the warden, enabling the use of two at a time. But again, there was a bit of Jank, namely that you have to manually activate the tinctures. Now, I don't know why the tincture ascendency does not give you automated tinctures. When, if you accidentally deactivate them for any reason, you then have to wait for their entire cool-down period before you can use them again. But hey, I mean, at least the Buffs that they provide you are numerically very strong, right? But seriously, GGG, can we just change this note to your tinctures are always active and 30% less effect of tinctures or something? Is that really too much to ask for, guys? Come on, it's the tincture ascendancy. Anyway, the whole point here is that while Rage Vortex of Berserking worked, it wasn't anything to write home about, and it definitely was not worth using a 3,000 DPS sword on. So, on to the

next idea, which was to simply replace rage Vortex with Cyclone. Pretty a big brain idea there. No, the thought process here was that Cyclone is basically the same exact play style, just without the rage generation junk to actually function. And that's exactly how this build turned out. All I had to do was swap back to regular old rare gloves, dropping the Admiral's arrogance as they're no longer necessary, which then gave me the necessary stats on my character to swap boots over to the Stampede. Now, if you're playing hit-based Cyclone, you are almost definitely going to want to run Cyclone of Tumult, which has higher overall damage and area of effect, but requires you to constantly channel it to gain stages, with each stage also giving you significantly less movement speed, 60% less at max stages. So, the Stampede boots are pretty much required with Tumult to not feel like you're trudging through a swamp 24/7. So, yeah, I mean, Cyclone is literally just rage Vortex but with more damage and no

rage generation required. The only downside is the slightly less area of effect. That's it, unfortunately. And again, while it worked, it just wasn't worth it. You're going to hear that a couple more times in this video. I don't know, man. There are just far, far better skills out there to play other than the spin-to-win stuff. Don't get me wrong. I am a Garen enthusiast myself, boys. But why go through all of this extra investment into speed and area when you just play a slam build for half of the price and get double the results? So it was off to the next idea, which I want to take a moment here to thank my wonderful stream chat at twitch.tv/woodygaming, because without them, I would have spent far longer looking for something to play. Out of all of the ideas that were thrown out, the dankest one was cast-on-crit battle mage. Cast-on-crit, say hello to The Inquisitor, boys. This guy gives you a ton of crit, allows you to completely ignore

enemy resistances, no penetration required, and most importantly, gives your spells flat damage equal to the damage on your weapon. H. So, the idea was to just slap in Lancing steel of spraying, which hits a metric booty butt ton of times on a single cast, which would then go to town with whatever spell had good single Target and good clear. I started with ice spear, as its damage Effectiveness is already pretty high, and I thought that shotgunning it with turning projectiles would make it even better, heck, even maybe great, and it was all right. Now, something important that I haven't mentioned here quite yet is that yes, obviously, I could spend more time and more currency investing into these characters to make them better, but that wasn't my goal. I wanted to first test the Bare Bones concepts of these builds and then plug them into path of building to look at numbers like their single Target damage, their maximum physical damage taken, etc., to then decide if it's worth investing even more into the character. Then, after all of that, both if

the play style felt good, and the PO looked pretty decent. I would then choose to move forth and give it the seal of approval for the 3,000 DPS sword. Simply put, both of the warden builds and The Inquisitor build just weren't worth it. Now, it's not because Caston crit is bad; it's just not worthy of a 3K DPS sword, which kind of makes sense, right? Normal Caston crit builds don't actually use two-handed weapons with attack-based stats; they use one-handed weapons with shields and use spell-based stats. The difference here is that Inquisitor gives you battle mage, which effectively turns all the attack-based stats on the weapon into spell ones, which would, in the case of the 3K DPS sword, give us gargantuan flat elemental damage added to the spells. Sadly, this concept, like the other ones that came before, simply was not good enough to keep iterating upon PA. Why would I sacrifice a normal Caston crit setup, giving away their significant defense and utility benefits?

for just higher flat damage of a two-handed weapon when that higher flat damage doesn't even equate to higher overall damage due to the loss of mods like percent spell damage, spell crit, and most importantly, plus level of gems. The answer is, uh, I wouldn't. A normal Caston crit setup would just straight up be better, but hey, I mean, at least it looked cool. However, there is one build left to discuss, a build that I've barely scratched the surface of and yet know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is worthy of the 3000 DPS sword. A build that is carefully whispered amongst the lips of those who have played it as The Escape of its knowledge would mean complete Annihilation. It's lightning strike Slayer, boom baby, let's go. I freaking love meta skills. No, but seriously, I knew full well going into all of these build shenanigans that if I just chose the meta of lightning strike and molten strike of the Zenith, the build would be way better. That's kind of

why they're called meta skills. So yes, I cave, but we're doing things a tad bit different over here, okay? And if you're interested to find out exactly how we're doing things different, well then, you're going to have to wait for the next video, or you can just, you know, stop by the stream, twitch.gaming yet again. I would love to see you there. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Anyway, thank you all for watching. Hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you all in the next video where we truly dive deep into what the sword is capable of.

Here are all the builds I've tried with the 3k DPS sword (PoE 3.25)

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