Nice pelt.

I like that lld jewel too.

i know i ruined it felt bad lol

Alright let's bring some math and sanity to this entirely far too long opinion war.

First, I will agree that you aren't killing anyone with 4k HP in two hits. But remember fury is fast as fuck and you can land 5 hits (which can animate entirely in 8 tenths of a second) in the time your brain perceives two.

However, the rest is actually fairly easy to work through.

Koston was kind enough to provide some stats so...

Build #1 with rare pelt - 5083.5 average damage screen, 44513 AR, 9310 life

Build #2 with Cerebus - 4981 avg damage screen, 43276 AR, 9090 life

Now I built a calculator to do all of this for me, and I will show some results and also discuss the assumptions of the calc and the results it's spitting out.

First off, it's an averaging calculator. Average number of hits to kill X amount of HP. Takes all of the damage modifiers (ds,cb,ow) into account. Also takes into account 75% block and defense so we can gauge approximately how long a duel will last in seconds, and converts that into number of seconds to kill. That's how we can can get an average win percentage against our opponent. More than happy to share my excel formulas if needed.

So with the rare pelt vs a paladin that someone plugged into my calc, it looks like this:



And with the Cerebus instead it looks like this:



The Rare pelt is clearly better on average. It offers more life, ar, damage.

But the Cerebus isn't that far behind.

And a note on open winds triggering. Cerebus setup has a 43% chance to trigger OW. So my calc averages that amount of damage into the total.

If Cerebus triggers the open wounds on the first hit, it looks like this:



So can Cerebus be better sometimes? Yes, it can.

But only sometimes. Only if you get lucky.

At the top level of melee dueling, you're going to be dueling some of the other same people at the top a ton. A couple extra percent of average wins can be the difference between top 3 and merely top 10.

Can the Cerebus user break the top 3? Yes. Will they stay there as consistently as the rare pelt user? No.

So there's your answer. You are both somewhat right and somewhat wrong, but Koston is more right than Ukon on the merits.

Thanks. The only thing I'd like to add to this is that I never said my pelt is better than a Cerebus that will always 100% trigger OW on the first hit. Of course that would be much better than, well, what Cerebus actually is (33% OW). But, as I've already stated numerous times, Cerebus rarely triggers on the first hit, and it is pretty well established at this point that the "average" duel sort of goes like: wolf druid hits, doesn't trigger OW on the first hit, wolf druid hits again, maybe triggers OW but maybe not, then the duel ends 1-2 seconds after (read: not 8 seconds). But I think this is clearly being taken into account in your formulas and the win rates reflect that (in the first/second screenshot, obviously). A good high life pelt is better than Cerebus for reasons beyond FHR in both LOD and D2R and I'm quite happy with my item and the way it's been performing vs. Cerebus, which I've been using since day 1 of D2R (so its not like I don't like it, but finally got a rare pelt that edges it out). I am well aware that a Cerebus with a 100% chance to trigger OW in duels that last a MINIMUM of 8 seconds would edge out my pelt, but that's not the reality of things.

This post was edited by Koston on Feb 19 2024 08:02pm

Yep, if you wanna be the top you gotta tweak the crap out of your build, because it's all going to be sweaty duels. Rare is pretty much always going to have the capacity to be tweaked beyond a unique. The exceptions are things like Stormshield and Goreriders which don't really have viable substitutes on Fury.

The duels where the rare setup hits max rolls three times in a row and ends the duels in 3 seconds are going to be just about as common as the Cerebus landing OW on the first hit. Plus the other advantages. There's really nothing else to discuss.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Feb 19 2024 08:12pm

Let me try this

Cerb > this

if ow first hit.

t4t.

yes, you win the prize

This post was edited by Koston on Feb 19 2024 08:53pm

Thanks for "bring some math and sanity to this entirely far too long opinion war." bro 10/10

9/10

thats unsocketed cerb?