Ancient items were supposed to provide roughly between a 20-30% increase in stats. In truth though, not all stats are affected by this increase so the real impact falls upon main stats, vitality, damage, and a few defensive stats. Stats like Critical Hit, elemental damage and elite damage have not been affected and still abide by the usual wall. That said I wanted to talk a bit about my own experience with the way Ancients has improved my game play in this post.
At the moment, I primarily play a pretty well geared Demon Hunter with excellent BiS items. Thus far, I’ve only managed to accumulate a few ancients for him, including a well rolled Calamity, a crafted Reapers Wrap’s and Marauder’s Gloves. The thing that put me over the edge outside of my main gear has been the Ancient Calamity. The base damage is around 3.3k. Add the +20% debuff from Mark of Death and my total elemental elite damage hits around 3.1 million according to diabloprogress.com.
Recently, I switched back to a pretty well rolled Bombadier’s Rucksack and switched back to Evasive Fire. So far using Multishot with Arsenal, I see myself hitting for around 200 million in critical hits with all five sentries up at once. In T6 settings, I frequently am the one destroying everything (unless there’s someone else who is equally geared), making T6 feel like normal back in the day. But the real test is in Greater Rifts.
I managed to start hitting 36-37 solo and find it around the difficulty of 32-33 prior to the change in the Marauder’s set bonuses. I might take a death or two if I’m careless or unlucky, but I never find myself hard pressed. Since the real item that matters is your weapon when it comes to Ancients, I definitely can feel the efficacy of the damage increase. Also, with my other two items, I have received a reasonable health increase, where I hover near 800k life. I still am vulnerable in high level Greater Rifts and can one shot with a mortar solo while using double Unity. But generally, my survivability is pretty decent as long as I have enough space to vault away from danger.
My wizard is someone else I’ve tried to push. I managed to find a Witching Hour (which was poorly rolled but still decent) and crafted an Ancient Devastator. Also, I found a decent Firebird legs and the offhand which were pretty nice improvements over my previous ones. So far, T6 melts away and diabloprogress.com says that I’m hitting around 3.3 million elemental elite damage, making me one of the better ranked players in America when it comes to that type of damage (not top 50, but still top 2k which isn’t bad all things considered). I still need to do a few greater rifts but I’ve mostly been focused on my Demon Hunter for those.
Everything still is a work in progress. But it’s pretty clear that the weapon and primary stat increase do help a tremendous amount. I’m hoping that in securing maxed out ancients in most slots, the overall effect will be +30% higher greater rifts.