faith mat vs. faith gmb

[:1]So basically, I've been trying to decide whether to go for a faith matriarchal bow or a faith grand matron bow (multi-zon, not strafer). I've asked a few people here and there, and I get about half of them that say to go with mat and half that say gmb is better.

As far as I understand:

GMB has better base damage, while requiring 95% IAS or so to get to the 7fpa breakpoint (depending on what lvl fanaticism your faith has).

Matriarchal bow has weaker base damage, while only requiring about 50% IAS to get to 7 fpa.

If your GMB faith rolls with lvl 12 fanaticism, it basically becomes impossible for you to reach 7fpa unless you use some weaker armor with IAS on it just to make that breakpoint.

If you use a GMB and plan to stack enough IAS to get to 7fpa, your gear is going to be low on resists, which you'll have to make up for by stacking a lot of +resist charms.



Currently all of these things are making me lean towards faith matriarchal and using +min/max charms to put its damage on par with a GMB. However, some people I ask tell me that GMB is definitely the best way to go in the end.

Any opinions on this?|||I like shadow bow faith as kind of a middle ground, but it depends on what you're looking to get out of your build and if it's for pvm or pvp.|||Quote:








I like shadow bow faith as kind of a middle ground, but it depends on what you're looking to get out of your build and if it's for pvm or pvp.




Purely PvM, and what i'm looking to get out of my build is as much dps as possible without sacrificing survivability.

Just looked up shadow bow. Not a bad alternative I guess, but I'd miss out on the +bow skills, and since it takes 70% ias or so to reach the final breakpoint, it's still in roughly the same camp as GMB as far as gear goes (you have to stack IAS on everything except armor, leaving little room for +resists etc). At least it's not a dealbreaker if it rolls lvl 12 fanat though.|||For Pvm i think i would rather have the Mat that would open gear up more for Mf options resist options etc.|||go for the gmb and stay on the 8 fpa breakpoint. u�ll still have a higher dps

if u have gear that is good enough, switch to 7 fpa

don�t worry to much about resists as getting hit is not what this char is about. let ur valk decoy and merc take the hits, while u mow everything down out of the second row|||Quote:








go for the gmb and stay on the 8 fpa breakpoint. u�ll still have a higher dps




couldn't you just stack +max charms with the matriarchal and end up with dmg equal to a gmb while still having 7fpa? that's kinda what my plan was. would that not work as well?

edit: nevermind, apparently that wouldn't work, since +max charms don't add in as weapon damage. even with a lot of +max stuff the grand matron bow would still do a lot more damage.|||I seen many topics about "faith gmb vs. faith mat". My answer is gmb for pvm because you can max out ias easy with gmb plus gmb does more average damage. If its pvp then go mat faith because pubs use slow at times.|||I asked the exact same question here. Maybe the answers there can help you decide.

Basically, I see it a as a coin toss, choose by which playstyle suits you more. Some people want the most dmg on screen, some can't sleep if theyre not shooting at the fastest bp.

One thing to consider though, is re-sell value. GMB is easy to sell when you're done with the build. Mat, not nearly as much.|||Yeah. The thing that ultimately swayed me to GMB was seeing the actual damage calculations on GMB versus mat, and also finding out that max damage charms and such are applied at a later phase of the calculation than weapon damage. There's a pretty big damage difference. The speed of mat would've allowed me a lot of flexibility in gear choice, but I decided that there really isn't all that much good gear for a bowazon to be using anyway, unless I was going to try to run a 200-300% mf setup. I can always make another char for MFing, though.

As it is, my GMB faith rolled with 12 fanaticism, which means I'm stuck at 8fpa for the time being. Honestly, it's not that big a deal to me; I'll reroll it when I get the means.

Thanks for the link, though, Madness, the discussion was interesting, even though I've already made the bow so the question wasn't really up for discussion anymore in my case. I think there's a lot of variance here and room for different playstyles and preferences, like multi vs. strafe, and how some place a huge degree of importance on the amp proc you get with atma's and witchy.