Defense > Offense

A lot of the most successful builds in the game are highly defensive. They don't waste many passive points in offense.

Support Gems and base stats on most gear are good enough that you can build purely defensive and do comparatively better, compared to someone who builds purely offensive or gets a moderate amount of offense and defense.

Do people agree with this assessment? Do they disagree?

I overall feel like there aren't enough offensive trade-offs - as in, support gems, active skills and passive skills, that reward players significantly for playing offensive.

Pain Attunement and Righteous Fire seem to be the only 'trade defense for offense' kind of skills in the game, so far. I'd love to see more.

An example of what I'm talking about can be seen with my CI Leap Slam witch build.

More Melee Physical Damage + More Melee Physical Damage While On Low Life = 1.3*1.3 = 1.7. 70% more physical damage for unleveled support gems.

How hard is it to get 70% increased physical damage as a Marauder? You might say "9 8% physical damage nodes." And you'd be right. But how hard is it to get 9 8% physical damage nodes? It's not that easy.

As a witch, it's basically impossible. As a Marauder, it's do-able, though, wouldn't you rather have 9 8% life nodes? And sure, you might say, "But Marauders can't have "full life on a blood magic marauder" You'd be right, but you can substitute "more melee damage on full life" as "added fire damage" - which adds a similar amount of "free" damage.

My basic point is, that we need more sources for damage increases - especially as spell casters. Right now, end-game spell casters are getting most of their dps from high crit multipliers and support gems (correct me if I'm wrong) and not from raw increases to their spells from items or passive skills.

Support Gems basically only make skills cost more mana, so getting better offensively just means getting more mana. In a Marauder's case, it just means getting more life, which is what they do anyway.

There should be more support gems that increase damage significantly, but at a cost other than mana. There should be more passive skills like pain attunement. That's mostly what I'm trying to say here. Ways to increase our offense while sacrificing our defense. This can be as simple as introducing more melee-range skills (as being in melee means you're sacirificing safety).

I was thinking about this yesterday and I think your conclusions are not exactly right Actually maybe they are. (Complaining about witch being worse at dealing melee physical damage than marauders aside.)

You can deal enough damage without any offensive passives but you can't build enough defence without any defensive passives. The harder the game gets the more useless the offensive passives are. Introducing more damage support gems wouldn't solve this imbalance imo.

Edit: I forgot one thing - about the melee style I agree. I'm probably annoying people with this in my every other post but melee needs more attention, there is like no real advantage of playing melee compared to ranged character at this moment.

While I see your points, I do have some thoughts to consider..

Melee vs Range

I play a Tempest Shield Templar, which obviously means, I play melee.

Molten Shell + Tempest Shield + Shield block nodes = advantage for being melee. You're probably right about the defense > offense thing, because I do mainly aim for defensive nodes and just having molten shell + support gems is enough for me to be offensive as well (however I suffer in boss fights due to my low dps). Idk, I think you guys took two different angles at the issue so I'm not sure if you're saying range is better than melee, or defense is better than offense. As of this next patch, I think offense will be better in terms of PvP, but having things like Flicker strike mean that melee is still a viable option. In the same vain, I still don't think range is better than melee because I love watching rangers get eaten up by flicker strike, meanwhile I LOVE flicker strike because they make my molten shell soo much more enjoyable to use =)

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Complaining about witch being worse at dealing melee physical damage than marauders aside

I wasn't complaining. My leap slam witch has 1.5k dps with leap slam and that's with a 4L, poor gear, and a sub-optimal weapon. I think my melee witch is just as optimal as your average marauder for similar styled gear. My witch has no increased physical damage from passive skills. The only offensive thing my witch has is +52% aoe (from passive tree) and a large mana pool/mana regen. 4k dps with 4L double strike

With a 5L item I could probably push my dps up 50%. And with a good weapon, I could potentially double it.

I'm saying that defensive specialization is really good right now, while offensive specialization feels, seems and maybe is not so good. Comparatively, what's better - 30% increased cold damage or 30% increased energy shield?

I think PVP will help illuminate the issue of offense, where players will have difficulty killing each other without a high critical multiplier and a string of diamond flasks to pop. As a Marauder, even after the regen nerfs, it's still easy to max out resists, get high armor/evasion, high life, and good life regen. Meanwhile, it's not nearly as easy to get physical damage from your passive/active skills. Support gems are providing most of your damage increments.

Pure defensive builds work wonderfully, but the moment you take away points from defense to build up your offense, your build just seems weaker. That's what I'm trying to say here. Righteous Fire is the only active skill right now that lets you risk yourself for more damage, but for the most part, people are just building purely defensively to utilizie it. They aren't even using it for the spellpower bonus, but for the % life as fire damage component.

Also, I forgot blood rage in my initial post, but that's the only other active skill that lets you sacrifice defense for offense. I think it does a decent job of it, better than RF (as demonstrated by that latest bulid of the week).

It's quite simple why these builds are generally superior. Defensive stats are simply higher in terms of digit value as well as percentage value.

If I had to give an example, a sword does 100 damage and a shield blocks 50% of all attacks. Most traits in the passive tree only give around 10% more damage, so your sword now does 110 with one trait. Shields on the other hand, (haha see that pun?) block ALL damage 50% of the time, with that being said, the closer you reach 100% block the closer you are to being god like.

However traits offensively only increment from the base value of your sword, which generally isn't very high meaning you get less "bang for your buck" when it comes to point distribution

I get the majority of my defense from gear. And the entire skill tree is pretty much offense. The defense from the tree comes from ES% reduction nodes and INT nodes.

I used to be mainly defensive tree, until I got great gear, than I used regrets and slowly made the tree more offensive until it was almost entirely so.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

I get the majority of my defense from gear. And the entire skill tree is pretty much offense. The defense from the tree comes from ES% reduction nodes and INT nodes.

I used to be mainly defensive tree, until I got great gear, than I used regrets and slowly made the tree more offensive until it was almost entirely so.

Yes, though I think you're an extreme case, with your crazy good ES items.

What I'm trying to suggest, at the very least, is that if you're playing a pure melee character (none of that silly ground slam stuff, I'm talkin' cleave and sweep), you cannot really justify points in offense most of the time. And it sort of works out fine. Sure, you can't grind XP/loot as fast, but you're super safe and you clear content fine. On the flip side, playing a balanced or offense-leaning character is simply frustrating, because you don't actually do significantly more damage and you can easily get mobbed and die.

I have a 2h 1.6k life level 50 shadow with heavy offense specialization and trying to use cleave is such a laugh, get surrounded by a few archers or snakes and you're in pain's viile.

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Altnaharra wrote:

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wiggin wrote:

there is like no real advantage of playing melee compared to ranged character at this moment.

Viper Strike.

Now you mentioned a skill that deals damage over time letting you leave melee range while dealing damage which is a thing that ranged characters do naturally without the need of approaching the enemy to the melee range and hitting him first.

I hope anubite won't feel like I'm trying to hijack this thread with my melee vs. ranged rant but I think the real problem is there - as a melee you have to have good enough defence in order to deal damage (hence defence > offence). As a ranged character you can sacrifice significant amount of defence and still be able to deal damage. And even more damage since you don't spend the resources on defence.

But look, anubite, if you make the offensive means more powerful you buff them for everyone I guess. As a result characters who can afford to sacrifice defences will become comparatively more powerful than those who can't (real melee).

Edit: as always

Edit2: Oops I forgot about tomthecat's comment. Yes, this is actually a good point about the molten shell and flicker strike. More things like this would restore balance. But block nodes are only good when you accept the fact that you sacrificed range for block chance which is exactly only useful when fighting mobs like rhoa or with flicker strike and you have to spend points on it while range comes naturally or from runspeed boots. On the other hand molten shell can be effectively used on ranged characters in those cases just as on melee ones - if it was a shield skill it would make much more sense but as a spell it doesn't really provide an advantage for melee over ranged style, it just mitigates its weakness slightly.

The same thing has dawned on me but I feel as though I only realized it just recently. Almost all of my builds have as few damage passives as possible now and the thought of making a critical build just makes me cringe.

I was working on a righteous fire caster before the legacy transfer was announced and you want to know how many damage passives I was going to take? Two. Two damage passives and they were both shock chance not direct damage.

I'm honestly not even sure how to fix the situation. Even when using a ability that is absolutely 100% about being offensive and doing it as quickly as possible, my passives still revolve around nothing but defense.

Maybe the solution is to add more defensive skill gems besides auras? So you can spend your passives on offense and then get your survivability from skills or the other way around.

Immortal call for example. It's a bit situational but when you do have it up, it grants an excellent defensive benefit. I believe gems like that, except less powerful and also less situational, would help bring the variety back.

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grogor wrote:

Maybe the solution is to add more defensive skill gems besides auras? So you can spend your passives on offense and then get your survivability from skills or the other way around.

Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head.