Quote (Cuzzy @ Jan 12 2022 06:28am)
Which one is better and why?
Your damage output will always be higher with a grief, because you get 340-400 additional damage on your shield. Just like holy shields adds some damage onto it (grief gives you way more).
However, people don't build lw for the damage, but for the crushing blow, chance for static field, chance for life tap and the chance to cast fade.
You don't really benefit from the might aura on a smiter. It gives you an additional +200% enhanced damage on your smite, but the problem here is that you also get tons of other +% enhanced damage.
Let's say you got level 20 smite (+300%ed) and level 20 fanatism aura (+373%ed). Ur now sitting on +673% ed to your smite damage. Another 200% would make it 873, which is some nice dmg boost - however, if you use grief to boost your base damage, you profit a lot more from the 673% ed that your skills give u.
(500 base dmg with 673% ed >>> 150 base dmg with 873% ed )
Last wish gives you the cb and lifetap that you need for ubers, which means that you can go for some other shield than exile and other gloves than draculs, just in case you want to experiment. A 4 x umed pala shield sounds stupid, but it's a cheap way of maxing out your resistances.
The 60-70 % cb is enough for ubers, but you can easily pump these numbers up with a helmet (gulli always nice), boots or cb gloves (wouldn't recommend to use a cb armor).
tl;dr: LW is super expensive and doesn't really make sense if you go for a typical uber smiter. You could build multiple budget smiters for that price.
Also, there is a good chance that you will feel like me when i rolled my first lw: totally disappointed.
Phaseblade base is nice because of its base attackspeed. You hit the highest breakpoint on smite with +65% ias. Lw doesn't give you any ias, so you have to make sure to get to this number in some other way. Fanatism aura is a good start, but u will need more.
Grief has a minimum of 30% ias on it. Level 20 Fana has +35% ias. You hit your desired breakpoint without any additional ias on your gear, even with the worst grief pb. You do not gain anything by having more than 65% ias, unless you are slowed by holy freeze or decrepify ( Uber duriel has a lvl 6 holy freeze aura ). In that case additional ias would help to reach the desired breakpoint even while slowed down. It's not really worth it IMO, because you will have more problems with lilith and Ubertrist if you focus on items that help you to kill uber duriel faster.