(Nov 14) One-week Turbo Hardcore Race
" As someone who's donated about a dozen witches to this number, let me say, spot on observation. I don't play HC, so i'd say about 1/2 of those were derp losses due to my impatience, another three I vividly recall were from server lag/dysnc, and I had three seriously ass kickings which I can only attribute to straight out getting owned. The irony is none of them were to bosses. My three serious deaths where all in situations where i was quite frankly out gunned / burned down by an assortment of rare mobs which just over whelmed me. You are 100% correct that witches are a pain when starting out. After said dozen attempts, I've had two that passed lvl 20. At this point my greatest challenge is grinding through the starting zones again, as the tediousness of it leads to the aforementioned impatience, and therefore more stupid deaths. The biggest challenge to witches in HC turbo that I've seen is the lack of a dependable primary attack early on. Yes we have some good quest skills, but each has a severe limitation, which turbo seems to exploit. Archers out ranging frost wave, swarms blowing through spark, or everything side stepping fireball just puts a spot light on how squishy witches really are early on. Overall, I'm loving turbo mode though. I tried playing normal after getting frustrated and giving up on the event, and I just can't do it. Turbo just has that added edge that makes it a lot more fun imo. |
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Played a necro died at lvl49 top20 I think, going up Ruthless pyramid, walked into a very open room that's kind of a like a mini pyramid nothing in it to block projectiles(you guys probably know the layout) and got shredded by constructs with LMP and blue skele-mages. I think in hindsight running discipline all my zombies were probably half dead which equalled insta-army-gone and a dead skele-totem pretty much all my fault no real lag/desync involved.
Necro felt pretty strong, but leveling until you can use spell totem and have enough minion passives is a major bore and difficult at a few times (AoE monsters). I rushed for minion instability, kited Brutus with fire trap (wasn't too hard) but Merveil I had to overlevel for so she didn't 1shot all my minions with a single AoE, Oak was basically the same problem had to overlevel until his AoE didn't kill everything with 1 attack other than that all the other bosses were easy. It was fun playing Turbo for a change, but I don't think I'd participate in a long Turbo event again. To me with faster mobs the only response is just play slower, clear most things because turbo mobs are too much of a desync risk. Didn't really make the game more difficult just made the play slower, which I don't personally think many people would view as an improvement. IMO the current skills and passive tree don't really provide interesting tools to adapt to the Turbo league parameters, just play slower and temporal chains or a build with alot of range. Anyone else playing necro near the top? I think I may work on a discussion over the next few days for the Witch forum about which auras, minion support gems and where to take the passive tree after getting all the minion passives. Looking to fine tune it for the fastest killing potential to MF. |
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" dammit grind! looks like we shouldn't solo in turbo HC races in the future. we need each other to watch our backs haha Build of the Week 14
The first Righteous Fire/Non-Shavronne's/Shavronne's HC Shameless self-proclaimed theory-crafting extraordinaire and forum crusader |
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" Welcome to Turbo (and HC in general). It makes default just not have that edge! I was really just looking for a new way to say Witches still lead the death count when I spotted that, but after doing 10 Top20 death messages and noticing that witches weren't figuring I dug further. It was then I noticed that the vast majority of witch deaths are low level. I'm hoping GGG is looking at data like this and seeing the same thing (poestatistics.com is really an awesome site for digging, but I'm sure GGG also has their own stats) I see the same problem as you do with witches in HC turbo, but I think it comes from a different place. Instead of being an offensive problem, I feel its really a defensive one. Even from just normal HC, and from trying to create my CI shadow what I've really found is that ES is just completely sub par in all ways early on. The minimal amounts found on starter gear wont keep you alive and you are much better off wearing +armor early. Fortunately its fairly easy to find armor gear at the start with correct socket colors (links don't matter early). In turbo this is even more the case as you WILL get hit with increased npc speed/attacks. Evasion struggles a bit for the same reasons. Getting hit will happen, you need to be able to mitigate it rather than avoid it, particularly with low hp pools. Last edited by Vondum#0370 on Nov 16, 2012, 5:20:54 PM
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My duelist died at level 49 fighting ruthless Vaal. I thought this fight to be just a pratice run for merciless Vaal. I didn't even bother to cap lightning resist, but I used a topaz flask instead. The battle felt easy, lazer and rocks didn't deal much damage, but Vaal got me with his melee attack and oneshot me. He had about 10% health left. I assumed I could take a melee hit with my high hp and high damage reduction character, but guess I was wrong. I had full health at the time, 1939 hp, over 5k armor, and 75% fire resist. I think I accidently targeted a summoned mob, which changed my direction of movement while I was running in circles around Vaal. That lead to me take the hit.
I had a very defensive 2h sword (or axe, as I hadn't taken any sword specific nodes yet) build with mostly hp and armor nodes with Iron reflexes and Unwavering stance of course. I thought about changing to 1h sword and shield build at the end, but never made the decision. I stacked a lot of armor to reach high damage reduction. I comfortably facetanked cruel and ruthless Brutus using grace, enfeeble, endurance charges and +armor/evasion potions. I was able to reach over 8k buffed armor at ruthless Brutus while using a 2h weapon. I started to struggle a bit in ruthless act 2. Western forest felt especially difficult with chaos dealing mobs, but strangely I didn't have that much problems with full chaos damage mobs. I also had mana problems when reaching high attack speeds. When you reach over 3 attacks/second attack speed becomes annoying, I have to say. Last edited by myapeli#0877 on Nov 17, 2012, 12:48:44 AM
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Died to ruthless oversoul at lvl 47 and rank 23 on the ladder. 2.2k life, 6k armor, 70 fire res, 60 lit res. Took a bolt while firing at him, got shocked, drank flask, started kiting, ran into a falling block, got stunned, took a second bolt and was triple shocked at 10 life with flasks empty. One of his construct minions landed the finishing snipe before i could save out. I had him enfeebled as well but theres a good chance it wore off between 1st and 2nd bolts. First death (race practice runs aside) ive had that wasnt to desync, netcode issues or crashes so this time i (finally) have only myself to blame.
My build proved to be an awful choice for a 1 week event with low active player count (eldritch battery + iron reflexes tri-elemtnal caster ranger with es/evade hybrid gear/spec and 5 auras) as i was heading into merciless with a semi-functional cold link, a non-functional fire link and a lit link that i never got to use as i could never manage to trade for spell totem. I also could only run 3/5 auras due to bad gear and the resulting mana issues and my overall dps, reliant as it was on decent weapons and faster casting gems that i never aquired, was terrible. Elemental weakness randomly becoming drop only without any mention in the patch notes didnt help either as it was my dps curse (this build was also dual curse spec, or would have been if it had made it to 55 or so), though i did eventually manage to trade for one around level 40. Turbo feedback: The modes exciting for short races but the amount of extra bugs and desync issues that pile up over a longer event, along with most of the monsters being unkitable even with 40% movement due to their increased speed + latency (the attacks regularly hitting whether im near them or not) makes it feel more annoying than fun. Overall i just dont think pure wall of numbers difficulty would make for a compelling long term league. General feedback: - I rolled an armor-stacking build for this event and wouldnt do so again. The current implimentation that offers tons of mitigation when its unneeded then becomes next to useless when its needed most would be better off replaced with a flat reduction % system with exponential diminishing returns. More reliable, more intuitive, more reason to roll one of those low life + high armor + leech builds people are always complaining about dying with on the forums. - Gem rewards are pretty poor atm, too many duplicates where there could be interesting off-color choices in ruthless/merciless. Also, it needs to be mentioned in the patch notes when gems get moved to drop-only status. - Resistance penalties havent done anything toward creating interesting choices (carrying generic white rings to swap out for a couple areas early in events can hardly be considered interesting), and elemental damage is still completely ignorable for a solid build with maxed resists. Rebalancing monster elemental damage and capping resists at 50% (or something similar that doesnt require balancing around huge increasing returns) would be much better at promoting node/gear tension and build diversity, and also wouldnt punish the player for advancing through the difficulties or reward them with elemental immortality for maxing out their resists. - Insert [netcode / desync / zone transfer / targeting] issues complaint here. Wouldnt be proper KoTao feedback without it! And thats it. Good luck to those still in the race! IGN: KoTao
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Dead (49) with my party member (46) to disconnect (shared connection) in river crossings, on the way to ruthless vaal ruins, of all places. Over-leveling by a few levels apparently wasn't enough for the timeout.
Turbo mode is really fun, first time I've tried it, I never get to participate in shorter races. Had no real issues with difficulty overall though, even with the horrible connection. Don't think I spotted any issues other people haven't mentioned, desyncs didn't seem significantly worse when the connection was reasonable though. I would say that desync, transition and specifically DC deaths are far more likely to happen in Turbo. Considering my connection, I seriously doubt I could bother with turbo unless there's adjustable timeout, at the very least. Don't think I can go back to non-turbo after this either. Good luck to everyone still going. |
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died as a global rank 4, class rank 1 witch lvl 66 today in a 20% reflect physical dmg dry peninsula map.
accidentaly clicked on a monster when i was walking around keeping my zombies up (one monster split up and got under my cursor). there was a pack of creeps behind it. i instantly exploded. the build i was creating was life + eldritch battery + (future) acrobatics, with main spell ethereal knives. i was making this up on the run and i was really disappointed by the ethereal knives animation. it could really use some work. the delay it has between casts is infuriating, especially without high casting speed. it also doesnt have as high range as it looks like (i dont do damage at longer range even though i see the forking animation upon connecting the projectile [with fork support gem]). i must admit the damage i was doing was not bad (magic ghouls in shrine in two hits). all in all, unless im missing something, phys reflect pretty much rendered my build useless because i couldnt do anything about it. probably should have sticked to ele spells since they have normal animation and there are resistances to tame reflect a bit. im no expert in the game mechanics but armor and phys reduction seem really messed up. i almost died 2 minutes earlier when i threw knives once to test it with granite and almost popped right there. about turbo - i have mixed feelings. the difficulty increase it creates has a massive range, from none to exponential. desync has much stronger effects. brutus is even more glitchy than usually. vaal goes from manageable on normal to insane on merciless just because the earthquake damage grows too much for armor to keep up and adding 10k of it doesnt seem to help much. what im saying is, the difficulty it creates is coming mainly from issues that are already bad and that get multiplied by the turbo modificator. the fact that things are faster is not really that big of a deal itself (except for bosses). on the other hand, it motivates people to group, and for me personally it was the first time i actually ran maps with a full group and it was great and i had a lot of fun. good luck to the survivors. |
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Died L40 Templar using mace/shield and grabbed a lot of life nodes. Should have died several times before this, almost invariably trying to take on too much too fast. That was the reason for my demise as well. I'm not exactly sure what happened but I had 2 rares in Broken Bridge, an archer and a golem. Had readily cleaned up the white mobs and was demolishing the golem when I went from full health to dead in an instant. I think what happened was I got critted by the archer and the golem simultaneously. Rerolled but died a desynch death to Brutus so packed it in for this race.
I really like the short turbo races, not sure about this week long event. The tension wss not as high as it was with the shorter races as the risk reward benefit differs. I found myself taking a more cautious approach thinking slow and steady and being alive at the end was better than trying to rush the content as I would in a 3 hour event. As one who has to deal with desync a lot I didn't find Turbo was desynching more - just the consequences were more severe. GL to all those still participating. Last edited by Falan2#3075 on Nov 17, 2012, 10:46:31 AM
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Kill Vaal
Game crashes for me and my brother Come back through new pyramyd Vaal is around 10% pv Finish him, can't access forest encampment ... New pyramyd New vaal Rocks, <2% hp MY EMOTIONS.gif I waited a lot to do vaal but it was mostly because I couldn't see projectiles in pyramid, unable to hit mob 90% of the time and bad resistance rolls on my gear. |
