blue_myriddn wrote:
There are a few things to keep in mind. On paper, rabies is a VERY low DPS skill compared to Fury. This is difficult for people to understand because it involves math skills.
Take the 200k dmg that a rabies druid does and realize it is over a 7 second time span. In those 7 seconds, even a crappy 4 frame attack druid will have struck the boss about 43 times (6.25 attacks per second x 7 seconds). So if that fury druid is doing 10k dmg, in the same amount of time it took for the rabies druid to deliver 200,000 dmg the fury druid is doing 430,000 damage.
To put it another way, a 200k rabies druid does about 29k damage per second. The 10k fury druid is doing 62.5 damage per second.
Now toss in 75% deadly strike and that druid is able to add an additional 47k dps for a whopping 109k dps. With Amp being the previous curse of choice, physical resists weren't a problem. That is why threads like this:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=205 declared Rabies to be a failure build.
You're not taking into consideration Rabies and other poison builds can get around -100 passive pierce end-game in addition to Lower Resists.
You're also not taking into account that most act bosses have a relatively high blocking chance, effectively cutting your physical damage in half.
Elemental damage will pierce much more than physical damage thanks to passive pierce and how much physical resistance is actually on an act boss.
The fact that bosses don't have poison "absorb" makes poison damage much less mitigated than other types of damage.
You're taking the math at face value, which isn't how damage works in this game. So on paper with accurate mathematics that factor in necessary mitigations, Rabies will still beat Fury.
EDIT: Just for an example I'll use your original numbers of 29k DPS on Rabies, and 109k DPS (Note: This type of Deadly Strike is no longer obtainable) on a Fury Druid.
Let's assume the boss we are speaking of has 90% physical resistance and 90% poison resists. I think we can both agree these aren't unrealistic numbers when talking about Hell Act bosses. Let's also assume the boss has 50% chance to block.
Furthermore, to make it even, we'll compare physical damage assuming a level 20 Amplify Damage curse is active and for poison we'll assume a level 20 Lower Resist curse is active.
We'll assume Rabies has -75 passive poison pierce, a very easy number to obtain. I choose this number as it's simple to obtain through a combination of crafted Elemental Armor, Elemental Belt, a 4 MS Emerald Weapon, and Radament's Sphere Shield. All of these items are relatively easy to acquire in Hell (or NM for that matter).
From the get go, a Fury Druid will miss 50% of his attacks thanks to block. This already cuts his DPS to 54.5k. Amplify Damage will reduce the bosses physical resistance to 40%, this leaves you doing roughly 32.7k DPS.
For further effect, let's take your original 62.5k damage, since Deadly Strike is now incredibly scarce for Druids. With Block and physical resistance, it leaves with you roughly 18.75k DPS.
Now for Rabies, who with Lower Resists & passive pierce has -125 poison pierce. With the bosses aforementioned 90% poison resistance, Rabies is doing roughly 39.15k. This is approximately twice the damage that your Fury Druid with no Deadly Strike will be dealing. The DPS would be even higher if you were to have more pierce, which there is a lot of room for.
It's also fun to note that Rabies will provide much less counters than a Fury Druid and doesn't have to be geared to take face to face hits from a boss.
Of course, this is all mathematical theory craft, which in my opinion isn't a very good way to measure builds. I have however seen what Rabies can do this patch compared to a melee character, and that anecdotal evidence leads me to believe Rabies blows melee out of the water.