What it means to have good defenses as melee
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I have a level 78 dagger + sheild shadow. His gear is worth less than 2 exalts. I have no issues surviving in maps. I have 10k armor, 43% block, 3.7k hp, and 12k double strike/melee splash. The build is far from done, I plan to get US, Leather and steel, and moar deeps, possibly EB if I find the gear.
Melee isn't frustrating for me, it is quite fun actually. I think you are just doing something wrong. Maybe go the mara forums and ask for help with your mara build, or anyone you can find who doesn't think melee is trash and has made it work! |
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" ye, i felt trolled by another thread of yours. you may have a point here, but as CI shadow i dont know much about life based builds. happy discussing :) |
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doublepost, again. GGG fix your forum, you also broke the [URL] tag. ;D
well then i can try to contribute here... im 78, started this melee toon a few days before. 6k armour (+ EV & AR granite = 21k) 4,4k es 79,84,79,100 resists 27k flicker AOE dps 36% block so far which replenishes my ES 1 life. the next 10 levels this build will get a huge def/offense boost. i allready feel tanky. as i mentioned in another thread you should try CI dude. :-) Last edited by NomadFX#0730 on Jul 29, 2013, 12:02:13 PM
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I don't like CI :D
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" First of all try Chrome for the online passives ;) Yes, I know 120 point is not realistic but it is what I need to get the defense I'm looking for. I don't think I took mana regen, did I? Anyway I've been playing life based before and am familiar with reserving all mana for auras, that is why I took 1 or 2 notable mana/int nodes together with Inner Force. I typically use Reduced Mana support gems for those auras but yes the passives are also nice. Now about the spells: I will never use them as primary attack, I am the kind of playing that only plays with melee skills in general. Losing RT as Templar or Marauder is not done for me, if I wanted to go for accuracy I would definitely play as Duelist or Ranger instead and use a completely different build. You are right about Enduring Cry, it is probably the best buff for armor. Charges are just not my thing, actually I don't like temporary stuff in general. I just wish I could depend on permanent things like auras but that's just a dream. You question about shield is quite interesting. I think a shield can drastically reduce incoming damage with max block, and the nice thing about shield block is that it takes away all damage (not mitigate). Also do 12% block applies to spells is very nice. What I have been looking into, but was unable to get rights, is a life and armor build that also uses evasion and a shield. I would ideally want 12% block chance applies to spells AND Ondar's Guile which doubles the chance to evade projectile AND Heart of Oak which give 30% chance to avoid stuns. Unfortunately this is probably almost impossible looking at the positions of the nodes and the defensive requirements for melee. Last edited by Startkabels#3733 on Jul 29, 2013, 12:38:16 PM
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" Agree. I am absolutely facerolling endgame as melee right now. Having significant lifeleech and regen is very important. Build In Wraeclast, if someone tries to kill you... you just kill them right back.
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"Thanks for sharing, guys. But I have a question itching me - do any of you play hardcore? I am not here to make random assumptions, so I'll just ask directly. How could you, guys, possibly value your builds' worst-case scenario survival? I mean any time an RNG-based check is made (like 99% dodge against Vaal Smash incoming) please assume it is auto-failed. This is what really matters the most for me. I usually roughly measure the viability of the build I am making very easy - the longer the amount of time I can go totally AFK in the middle of a low to medium sized monster pack of common monsters and still survive - the more viable the build I am making. The threshold of playability for me is about 3-4 seconds of total AFK time in the middle of the pack. "I have just installed Chrome, but found it is unable to set a proxy server I am using into its local options. I am prohibited to set global proxy (through IE) for my work computer due to security reasons. That's just laughable really. So, using that piece of Warning, wall of text inc. As for an evasion heavy build - it's actually really a tough question for me. For me comparing a mitigation based build to an avoidance based one comes down to whether or not the game allows incoming hits for more than a certain percentage of health (ES) pool or not. Let's say, if every hit I take was guaranteed to never exceed, say, 20% of my pool, an evasion build would be clearly a winner for me. Worst case is 5 successive hits to die from but with additional chance to avoid some attacks in between. Having as low as 2% or 5% of avoidance would be already awesome in this case. No entropy is ever needed as well. But when the damage of non avoided hit is not capped to any percentage of your pool (like in PoE) AND combined with the possibility of getting very brutal attack (like Vaal Smash or Kole's wave attack) the situation becomes critical unless you are able to get hard 100% of dodge. Having any less amount of dodge against an attack that you know will potentially one-shot you is neither fun nor viable to me. Knowing that specific attacks are visible and can be reacted to with additional survival measures like using a granite flask etc is heavily countered at the moment by desync. Yes, things will definitely improve greatly when that is fixed, but what do we have now? How can you be sure of avoiding an attack you've never seen in the first place having any less dodge than a full immunity of 100%? You just never realistically achieve that, because I realize this is totally overpowered and should not be allowed. But you can try mitigating the damage of the hit you take, but how? Always be under the granite flask? Employ a heavy crit-build in order to recharge them more quickly? Use CI/ES to have more slots for granite flasks? There are more questions rising every time you try answering a previous one. You most certainly give up some of passive defenses you need so much in order to have better forms of active defenses available to you when you really need them etc. etc. But what does avoidance really offer? You realistically never achieve full 100% avoidance against any serious threat like a boss level monster that most probably has the power to one-shot you if caught unprepared. What are you expected to do? You don't have a flask to use and have 100% dodge, but you have one to mitigate the damage! But as long as you are now starting to think about mitigating the damage, and not rely completely on avoidance - you really start to loose on the avoidance part, as you are always trading evasion for armor on items and vice versa. Total item level of your gear allocates some amount of defenses for you - let's say it's 10000 rating. That could be 10000 evasion rating, or 10000 armor rating, or 5000/5000 or 7000/3000 combined evasion/armor rating. But your sum never exceeds that actually, you can never choose between 10000 armor and 8000/5000 armor/evasion. Just a quick glance on PoE armor items shows, that hybrid gear's evasion+armor rating is at about the same as either pure evasion or pure armor gear. Note, energy shield is special, and it's value is at about 2.5-3.5 times more than of armor or evasion, but armor and evasion are pretty close to compare as 1:1. While an evasion is just an extra cool bonus to get less overall damage avoiding some attacks (while some of them could potentially one-shot you), armor is what anyways required to survive those big hits that came through your evasion. That's exactly why Iron Reflexes are so sweet to take. You basically trade just a minor bonus for a real efficiency stat (just like with Magic Find going to maps especially favoring efficiency). Armor is much more predictable to rely your survivability on. And while it is being very often said that armor becomes garbage against heavy blows, it is actually unbeatable against weak hits! Combined with regen, puncture is so less potent, it could be almost ignored at some point (I had only 1 situation of dangerous puncture on my HC Mara 88 - it was on 71 map with 3 stacked pure damage rolls combined with weakness curse). Furthermore, if considering only armor's drawback - what is exactly the difference between still being one-shot through all of your armor and failing to evade this hit? I'll repeat it once again, how is it even possible to ever rely on a defense mechanic that doesn't guarantee you worst-case survival when playing in a league that guarantees you are out of it in the worst case e.g. when you die? So having, say a grand total of 10000 defense rating, you are so much better off having 10000 armor rating over evasion or any mix other options being equal. With armor you take predictably less damage (though the harder the hit, the less the portion you mitigate is - but it's still predictable). With evasion you just skip some hits. Evasion entropy guarantees you will be hit sooner or later no matter how high your dodge percentage is (unless it's pure 100%). Evasion could potentially be very exciting when you suddenly dodge that one shot - just like crafting that perfect affixes on your 6L. Armor is boring, but efficient and predictable - exactly what you need playing hardcore as you have no room for mistake. Armor synergizes with health regeneration greatly. mitigates weak hits almost completely, and adding even weak constant health regeneration and you are virtually not taking any damage anymore. Armor lowers damage taken without spiking it (like evasion would do), allowing for your health regen to heal you most of the time while you are taking damage. Evasion offers none of great synergies. I can only think of energy shield replenish mechanics, so if you could completely dodge all attacks for periods of time greater than Energy Shield Recovery Cooldown, your ES could start replenishing while you are still in combat. But what is the chance of you dodge everything for like 6 seconds? Not that much. Even having a mechanic that dodging starts ES recovery immediately, or instantly reduce time left to start ES replenish by 50-75% could change the playground. I am eager playing as a melee myself. I don't have prejudice against evasion, and would love to use the mechanic if I could get some basic guarantees from it.
This is how an evasion should work
 If speaking directly from a melee perspective, the only way to stay alive in melee range is to have a rather silly amount of life leech. Considering three originally not connected facts
So, what about traditional Warrior archetype? Big bad Marauder hiding after a skele-bros totem - making him effectively a summoner? Forced to do abysmal dps with tons of health just to not blow himself up when faced against reflects - making him effectively a tank, not so berserk anymore? Larger physical hits are far more effective, but far more dangerous when reflected - two in one - both because of how armor works - and no support gem to boost physical damage of a single attack, but plenty (almost all) of them to reduce it? Or may be forced to do elemental damage, because elemental resists provide linear defense against elemental reflect - making a character more a Shaman, not Warrior? The game is very well rounded in the end, making it several heads above any possible ARPG around here, that was ever developed or is being developed now. Yet, some game mechanics are very arguable, and are right now leading to visible drawbacks. I personally feel this doesn't necessarily mean the chosen GGG way is bad. It could just need some work to really shine. |
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If you want to tank some crazy melee dude who hits for 6k or whatever, just make sure you have two or three Enduring Cries and one Immortal Call with Increased Duration in your skillbar (+ideally some duration passives). Job done, no need for crazy armour-stacking. You can remap skills/swap gems afterwards when you fight mobs that can't one-shot you (i.e. all of them except a handful of 'untankables' over the entire game, assuming you have a decent amount of life).
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What if you don't want to, but just encounter it - think of a rogue exile?
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get 7k es and you are set
IGN: UgaBugaMajkaFaja
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