I still don't see Duelist's identity

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VictorDoom wrote:

why not try to make a DW duelist better than cetos ranger? im sure it can be done, you can get more survavbility and quite a lot of physical damage via the blade passives.

You dont need crit to make a good dual weild build.. look at my RT shadow.

edit: well thats maybe why you dont see the duelists identity, because you went for the most common marauder build, GS mara, only you're doing it on a duelist.
Kind of hard to see the identity of a class when you're doing the build another class is doing.

He's not a GS duelist. He uses a mace. Mace does not, automatically, mean GS.

The issue is optimization. Your shadow, no offense, has nothing on ceto's ranger. Ceto's ranger, is quite frankly, simply scary in how well it has leveraged itself. I have played the mathcraft on the tree. he simply has the BEST mathematically possible build.

The tree is nothing more then a number game. In this case, the weapons the duelist finds himself favoring, along with the armor, are simply not up to par. Meaning, while his passive tree IS up to par, it means nothing when you consider the passive is upgrading under-par equipment into "par" equipment. Rather then what moos did, and go from "par equipment" to slightly-under-above-par equipment.

Duelists are simply, in all matters, jacks of all trade. Until GGG decides what they want to make swords do, specifically, and give duelists more traction in said direction, duelists are simply in the colateral damage area of gimp.

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VictorDoom wrote:

why not try to make a DW duelist better than cetos ranger? im sure it can be done, you can get more survavbility and quite a lot of physical damage via the blade passives.

You dont need crit to make a good dual weild build.. look at my RT shadow.

edit: well thats maybe why you dont see the duelists identity, because you went for the most common marauder build, GS mara, only you're doing it on a duelist.
Kind of hard to see the identity of a class when you're doing the build another class is doing.

I can probably make ceto's DW ranger using a duelist but it won't be better by any means. He has 4k life, 8-9k armor and 16k DPS on cleave. Even if I got better gear (which is hard when I think he still has the two best rapiers in default) I might be able to get 1-5% better at best.

Dude I've mulled over duelist alot and the best build options for it are mara builds or ranger builds. There's nothing uniquely duelist, some nodes, yes but no full builds.

I see where you are coming from but it seems like you are just playing devil's advocate. I can't think of a single build that would be better to play as a duelist than as another class. Duelist only has minor improvements or rather differences from popular builds of other classes.

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EpsiIon wrote:

He's not a GS duelist. He uses a mace. Mace does not, automatically, mean GS.

in all fairness I did make a GS duelist in my first week race. Got sick of dying (first time playing HC in any game ever) and refuse (still) to play mara. So just ripped their build and made it faster.

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VictorDoom wrote:

why not try to make a DW duelist better than cetos ranger?

Good luck with that! I wish I had known about this thread earlier, what with all the talk of my ranger in it!

My first 2 chars were duelists, then I did a templar, and when the shadow came out, I simply found in the shadow all I tought about the duelist.
While templar isnt as powerful as other 'classes', it does have the personality that the duelist does not.
Those 2 classes need some work, I have some ideas but I feel like is useless to talk about, since I feel like GGG is only working around the trouble since we are close to OB and major changing would require too much at this point.
Just see all the "omg melee sux qq" threads without not even charan(and he's alwais everywhere - no offense my love) commenting.

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kadrek91 wrote:

My first 2 chars were duelists, then I did a templar, and when the shadow came out, I simply found in the shadow all I tought about the duelist.
While templar isnt as powerful as other 'classes', it does have the personality that the duelist does not.
Those 2 classes need some work, I have some ideas but I feel like is useless to talk about, since I feel like GGG is only working around the trouble since we are close to OB and major changing would require too much at this point.
Just see all the "omg melee sux qq" threads without not even charan(and he's alwais everywhere - no offense my love) commenting.

I know it seems like a QQ but duelist couldn't make a better caster or bow build so it's not even just about melee.

TBH you could remove duelist as a class, move all the passives to the middle and it would feel like nothing much had changed. Except temps and melee shadows (melee witches too I guess) would get a nice buff.

So, you havn't tried dual wielding out of all those duelists?!

I went through and spreadsheeted builds for dual wield today, and Duelist ended up being the most optimal start place for a lvl 90 DW build (101 points). Admittedly Ranger and Shadow are only like 2 points off, but hey.*

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Moosifer wrote:

Reg (ceto on forums) showed me that DW is best for ranger due to crit which duelist doesn't have.

Mathematically, once you get to high levels with lots of passive points, crit is best for every single build ever. I suppose DW is slightly special because of the incredibly efficient Twin Terrors cluster maybe?

That's because balancing all offensive stats is optimal, those stats being %damage, IAS, crit and critdamage. If you ignore half those stats by not getting crit/critdmg, you're going to end up with suboptimal DPS (again, assuming you have enough passives to get to balanced state, and then leverage crit/critdmg sufficiently, since they scale better by feeding off each other).


*I'm going to spend some more time messing with Headhorr's tree calc and the spreadsheets just to make sure though ;p EDIT: Really comes down to how much you value defense, the Dervish cluster is mindblowingly efficient block that I don't think is worth giving up to run more optimal DPS setups out of Ranger or Shadow.

Duelist is my first character and I agree.

I started this character with the thought of going dual wield. Since then I have switched to a 2 hand cleave/sweep spec.......and now that I am 45+ I have gone sword and board.

It feels like this class doesn't know what it wants to be. To stay alive I have to dump all my points into defensive nodes....+life, leather and steel, IR, even though I see a ton of offensive nodes I just can't afford to take them.

Not sure what to do with this class!

Ok, I still have the feeling no one has looked up ceto's DW ranger yet still thinks a duelist can match it.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/55050/page/2

3rd post down. Has his build, gear and a video. I can speak from personal experience as we ran together from high 60s to 80, while mine guy could handle much crazy situations as a sweep duelist, his guy was 80% as tanky (most of the time I had about 1k more life than him and 2-3x his leech using BR and WM along with gear) and did 3-4x my DPS the entire time, even after I had major upgrades.

No duelist is beating him, only matching.

If they being lazy here's the link to it.

I tought about this alot today.
The issue is; defense.
templar is the es+armor+block guy, witch es, shadow es+eva, rangers eva, mara hp... and duelist what?armor/eva?the LAMEST DEFENSE EVER.
and thats not only that; you can stack really poor amount of it, and it isnt even enough; there are TOO MANY OFFENSIVE NODES, when you need really lesser; if you want you couldnt even spec into full offensive because you would get stomped, so you only need to get 1 or 2 and then stop and stack hp, and thats not onl that; is really easier to simply stack hp, a 1-2 +18% with 1h/2h, and then the support gems/skills do all the work, since you can't have defensive supports/skills as much as you have defensive passive skills.
It's useless to have 10 +15% sword damage if with 1 support gem I can boost 50% of my damage, better just stack defense.


Basically, Duelist sucks because the Defense/Offense ( and defense mechanics in general ) lack of some big work on various mechanics.

Something good would be enemies unable to target you off screen, so you can flicker asap you see them and cleave them to that; you could try that with a really offensive build but since they ice sear you off screen is not possible.

There are several more issues but is 3:00 a.m and I hope you get what I wanted to say.

Needlessy to say, I'm saying this because I know GGG is worth having all the feedback possible, I never feedbacked in any game because it was useless but I do know, if there is a company wich should get feedback(if it's needed to) is GGG.