Acrobatics Ranger 1 Week Resistance Test Feedback

Hello, I'm Waves, I'm making this post to share my experience with the one week resistance test event and give some feedback.

This week I played as an Acrobatics Ranger named Varressa and ended in 10th place (I stopped playing at 11th place, but someone died in the last 2 hours that I was gone for).

I made a similar thread for the previous one week event found Here

General notes: I never did waterfall cave level 1, always got a friend to give me the waypoint. Never did Vaal alone. Got rushed through ruthless to act 2 Merciless where I farmed ledge and then Fellshrine until lvl 56. On normal --> cruel though I could kill everything I came across, except for the Chamber of Sins boss, fid-something. I HAD TO KITE HIS ASS so hard, he CHUNKS HP.

Alright, so, I'm a bit new to playing something that wasn't a summoner and surviving. I understood what keystones I wanted, but, I didn't have any set goals of WHEN to get them, so I just went with the flow.

I do recall tho...

First 30 Points

At level 10, I went and bought a

and used it until like lvl 62 like an IDIOT because I thought 'herp derp lets stack the chance to block/dodge spells!" even though I was using a bow like 90% of the time past normal difficulty. Always thought, "I got a shield offhand, lets keep it just incase I need it!"

Merivel in normal / cruel was simply poison arrow + Puncture and slowly kill her.

50 Points Spent

At 50 points, I had a single point in acrobatics, a 75% chance to avoid being shocked, a 55% chance to avoid being frozen/chilled, and no one cares about avoiding being ignited because regeneration completely negates it. I had also dipped down into doubling my chance to evade projectiles.

Oh, and by the way, even with a 75% to evade being shocked, VAAL STILL SHOCKED ME WITH HIS FIRST LAZER, what a troll.

Let me say this, DOUBLE THE CHANCE TO EVADE PROJECTILES IS SO GOD DAMN AMAZING! Spitters, skellies, vaal shooters, w.e, DODGE ALL THE MISSILES! Well, not all, but a lot of them.

70 Points Spent
I refunded a large portion of avoid status ailments and BUM RUSHED over to the marauders start area + picked up blood magic.

About half of my problems disappeared doing that. No more 'mana issues', higher resists, and MOAR HEALTH REGEN. Because, at this point, everything is starting to ROCK MY LIFE when I get hit, so I needed to burn potions a lot to heal. Changing 3 mana potions (yeah, heavy mana issues) to 3 more health potions helped a lot.

The Final Build

The final build picked up the rest of the marauder's HP/Regen + the regen around Golem's Blood. I picked up ALL the increased Life Flask % nodes I could, netting a hefty +65% healed and 30% faster recovery rate.

I also note that I have phase acrobatics here, but I think I might have actually gotten it earlier than the final 17 points, I just don't remember when.

I started not knowing what to do with my points after that and put em into gem stuff (intelligence) and Lava Lash/Blood Drinker.

I also did a major change near the end of the race on a friends suggestion. I changed 2 of my points into Seething Flasks instead of 5 saturated flasks.

Oh my god, WHAT A FUCKING DIFFERENCE IT MADE in my survivability. With the +65% to my 20% quality seething flasks, I was healing 646.8 per flask usage. Quickly using 3 flask usages nets me 1940.4 hp, instantly. I could kill at a decent enough rate to almost permanently rely on seething flasks, even in a group. That's fucking insane.

My End gear was:



Its... kind of sad to be honest. I was GIVEN a lot of my gear in the map portion of the race by friends. My drops were just so shitty before that. The only really GOOD item I had prior was that point was the linked shield above that I traded for. Everything else I got from friends or from doing maps with them.

ANYWAY, I got Poison arrow as early as I could + found or got fire/bear trap as rewards, don't remember which.

I used puncture and frenzy early on, but I stopped using them after finishing cruel. I actually stopped using melee almost entirely while running maps with friends... kind of made me sad to not consider the melee risk worthwhile...

Poison Arrow + Fire Trap = excellent AOE to make up for MY SHITTY other damage sources. Seriously, burning arrow and double strike were all else I really had, it was horrible....

Double Strike had blind attached to it early game for when I did switch to melee to duel some rare mobs.

I used Enfeeble as my curse. Enfeebles accuracy lowering + blind + all my dodge/block shenanigans is pure silly. EVEN THOUGH with how evasion works I would still take hits through all of that from time to time.

Used skelly totem (Okay, I still had SOME summoner skills, but cmon, skelly totem is sooooo goooooodddd)

I started using Wrath and Anger alongside Grace after receiving comments on my crappy DPS, so that helped boost me a few hundred DPS while giving my allies some more juice.

As I said earlier, I switched from Burning Arrow to Ice Shot earlier (at a friends request since my DPS was kinda shitty (1k dps compared to his 4k) to give some utility.

In that Ice Shot change, I changed around some gems to attach blind to it. Its SERIOUSLY good utility. Some crowd control with chill + ice patches and it can blind them! Plus... the AOE resulted in more damage than Burning arrow >.< even with switching to blind.

Up until the final few hours (like the last 2) did I really feel comfortable with the build. So, thats almost 1 entire week of pure stress, as up until those last 2 hours where I did the potion change + gems change, every time I was hit, it was pretty much a life and death situation.

Seriously, the guys in mumble were CONSTANTLY saying "Watch it Waves!" because I would be at half health or less from 1-2 hits. I had MANY near death experiences with 400 hp or less where I got out by the skin of my teeth. I also had many 'I know I would have died' moments where a rare mob hits me for half of my health and then misses the next attack or so that would have killed me.

Rhoa of doom charging me? OH GOD THERE WENT 2/3 OF MY HP RUN FOR MY LIFE! Flicker Strikers? Kill or be killed, can't kite them.

It was pure chaos, although, I did only alt-f4 once in the entire race, because flicker strike mobs + rhoas is fucking nuts in one of the few times I did a solo map in the crematorium so I couldn't kite as they closed in around both sides as I went down a floor.

Dysnc: Holy crap, after playing a summoner so long, playing something that can be severely affected by Dysnc was TERRIFYING.

I would cast my bear/fire trap and see them cast from somewhere that my character wasn't standing at all. I would randomly teleport a few spaces on occasion, sometimes enemies wouldn't trigger my traps even running across them, being hit when the enemy isn't directly on me, having enemies run at me then teleport several paces back, ect...

Map drops: Still sucks, although I see this sexy patch 9.12.o patch might change that! :D

Springs map had an odd crash rate where the guy I was doing a map with crashed followed by me crashing right after him.

Spider Forest: Still has laggy/crash issues.

Drops and Walls Still had some mobs not drop any items when near walls.

Ice Shot: Is a little laggy, might want to look into it.

Auras and Equipment Change: You can actually slowly kill yourself by switching back and forth between equipment while auras are activated. It takes about a hundred or so hp (for me at least) per switch. I could spam X and start to lose HP at a higher rate then I could regen. It was kind of funny.

Vaults: I got the unique map, it was crappy, only line it deserves.

Shock and Horror Map boss: Stands around derping almost 80% of the time. Fires a few sparks the other 20%.

So yeah... this build REALLY didn't feel comfortable to play.

Early on it was fine, mid-game I KNEW it would have been hard if I hadn't been rushed to merciless ledge/fellshrine to poison arrow/fire trap farm. I was STILL feeling very weak instead of just regular weak until I got all the regen + blood magic, and that was just defenses, my damage was atrocious. Its frustrating to play with others and see their insane 4k dps and superior survivability with a full defense build as well while I'm slowly plunking things away.

I'll end this thread by saying: If I hadn't had the help of my buds, I doubt I wouldn have ended top 20, if I would have survived at all. I kinda don't even think I deserved the demi-god I got, but w/e, It's a demigod after all!