Yeah there are a lot of layers.

I used to ZvZ in a past life and had fun. I’m sure I’ve forgotten almost everything I thought I knew at the time. In hindsight the dueling was probably pretty dumb but I had a lot of fun when I did it. I think it was mostly due to the puzzle solving aspect of trying to craft a “better” build using different item combo’s.

It’s also why I hated and would never compete in the “life tap” ZvZ tournies. Those were basically just exercises in who could proc tap life tap first wins which felt like it invalidated pretty much everything else.

very same here, i dabbled in melee duels early LOD due to 350ms dial up ping. it requires no mechanical skill but puzzle solving aspect can be fun/challenging, esp when you are doing so on a budget.

and yes tap is just a huge rng fest

DS > OW or CB. Most melee duels don’t last long enough for OW to do enough damage. Hence why you will almost never see Guillaumes Face in Melee vs Melee. It’s high defense/Viso helms or COA.

Attack Rating is important enough for most Zealots to give up Amulet slot plus both ring slots to wear Angelics, purely for AR boost. Otherwise Highlords is most used amulet.

This post was edited by Tarisus on Oct 13 2023 08:10am

DS is obviously super important, but it's not totally mutually exclusive with cb/ow. can't get ds on glove, belt, or armor slot for example.

there is still a place for OW esp in barb conc vs conc matchups. generally when hp/def is very high and dmg output is low, OW will be useful. hence why eth upp'd toothrow is a thing.

Yep, OW is good vs some match ups.

Zerker grief - average damage = 454
Rare weapon - average damage = 309

Rare weapon has extra 20% DS which can be calculated as a simple 20% increase in damage

Therefore, rare weapon has average damage of 370.8

So the real question is, does 83.2 more average weapon damage beat the extra AR of 1633 - 3 (where 3 = superior bonus on grief zerk and 1633 is max ar from fools). Not to mention grief zerkers 1 longer range adder and 10wsm faster base, making you able to use less 40/15 jewels in favor of 30/60/9/9ish jewels.


All you need to know is your opponents defense amount, or realativr defense amount to calculate this.

The issue with these duels in particular is that they are using different gear setups with different budgets and have extremely low sample size given all the variables and damage spread that is happening in a melee duel.

While I don’t blanket say grief > all, it’s very likely that grief is better than this in most circumstances

Given the popularity of both players, they definitely know the difference in setup, especially if the US one is highly ranked in melee Ladder.

As far as AR goes, one doesn’t really need to calculate it as the way the formula works, it can be estimated that 11k extra AR is amazing vs naturally high Defense characters like Zealot, along with its naturally lower attack rating boost.

If this was Fury vs Fury, Grief would beat Eth Rare for sure. But Fools is strong in high Defense matches.

First off. This duel wasn’t to compare the weapons in a vacuum. Of course in an off weapon damage comparison, grief wins hands down.

However, The duel was to simulate entire BIS builds, specifically built around the respective weapons. This accurately reflects how we duel using zpk rulesets. You cannot simply swap weapons on the builds because they wouldn’t come close to working. The biggest differentiator is the ammy and rings that are used for each weapon. Highlords+fools and Angleics+grief.

Mopalmo is a highly ranked/experienced level 99 Korean player. He needs to use angleics set to use grief effectively. His build is standard with little room for improvement except for his helm. ( I believe it was approx 150 def from perfect ) high def Visio is a good counter to fools weapons and pairs will with SA fortitude+gelics.
He was using near perf fort/gores/dungo/gelics/rends/high def Visio.
Using grief and angleics, you cap out at 35 DS

With Highlords, Casino’s build reaches 92DS

454 * 1.35 = 612
309* 1.92 = 593

Off weapon damage + DS , grief is still winning here by 3%
Range for a zerk will influence the win rate by about 0.35% against an Ettin.

Now factor in + 1 skills from HL, +2 skills from diadem, much higher life from diadem stats, phoenix, and CB gloves. And it’s a very close and interesting matchup.

I was surprised myself. Going into this, I expected Grief to win. Especially in ZPK because we don’t clear Chilling Armor anymore.

However it was ran back 2 other times in FT10 and grief didn’t come
close to winning.

It’s not to say grief is definitively beat by this weapon, it is indeed a small sample size. But the results are interesting and encouraging.

In a more recent broadcasted test. The top 1OS erep zerk in game ( 40ias/291ed ) also came extremely close to beating grief. ( lost by 1 pt )

This post was edited by Leicalized on Oct 13 2023 10:17am

Grief betta

I’m guessing you are Casino player in the video. Well, just duel another Grief guy 100 more times and let us know the results.