I still don't see Duelist's identity

Dualists should get passives that increase their damage against isolated tragets when using one handed melee weapons and no shield and that increase their defense against mobs of enemies when dual wielding melee weapons

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Moosifer wrote:

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.

Different classes matching instead of clearly beating is the nature of any high level build, since with that many points it's more efficient to run around the tree and cherry pick hyperefficient areas (exemplified by the fact that a Marauder can run the exact same build because ceto is cherry picking his defensive nodes). Duelists are hardly unique in this, it's an issue for class identity in general at high levels. So it would take a pretty large restructuring of the tree to make any class at all substantially better at something than the classes next to it on the tree.

(Just for reference, my attempt at a similarly effective duelist start for that build http://tinyurl.com/cpmk9cp. Lose a bit of HP, get 1% more regen, gain a bit of DMG%, gain a nice chuck of IAS, gain a nice chuck of block, lose some accuracy and the CRD node.)

aimless I know what you are saying but it doesn't address my point, even if you see DW has a general build that anyone can do there's nothing "duelist" about it. Ceto's physical damage DW ranger is the best I've seen and petrov tested a elemental DW duelist on his 76 ranger on legacy which had huge DPS (100k crits). After petrov went over the tree he theorized mara would be the best starting area and he's doing his build right now.

Yes, many builds can be done equally as good from different starting areas. I've heard of sweep witches and some dude is talking about his CI duelist. But the problem is that while everyone considers dw best for duelist it just isn't. There's nothing about duelist that screams the best build is dw as most of the damage nodes in his area are related to certain weapons.

Let's just look at how other trees work out. GS is a mara skill, can't really argue with that. To go along with it there's a bunch of mace and 2h passives. Straight from their starting area and south of it there's nodes that lower stun threshhold all of these work together with GS and it's stun. But there's also alot of life, armor and some shield stuff. It's clear that this class's purpose is to tank (alot of life, resists and armor), melee related CC and use a mace. It lays out a cookie cutter build w/o having to guess it.

Duelist, starts with 4 different type of damage nodes, has some armor, has some life, then some mana, then a ton of different weapon specialization nodes. He doesn't start with the same life as mara so there's no sense he's a tank. There's two armor nodes but one is L&S so right away you have to decide one or the other (newbie looking at it), hybrid or pure armor (so from the start pure eva doesn't seem to be an option). You have mana close (one of the best mana nodes I've been told) but also have life regen which is a little bit away from BM. If you go with L&S you are heading the direction of IR which is confusing because why are you boosting eva if it's going to be turned into armor.

So a new player is stuck trying to figure out what weapon they are going to use. What type of gear he is going to use. Whether or not to use mana or BM. When I started I thought BM was awful but was torn because I could never figure out how to get mana to work. So a newbie starting on duelist is going to be infuriated by mana issues (especially if he goes bow) but scared of BM because he doesn't understand how life regen works. I was there and my buddy was there. Once I explained to him what to do he loved using BM. My shadow is my first character since I learned how to use BM that doesn't have it.

What I mean by duelist doesn't have an identity isn't that he can't have a very good or viable builds. What I mean is when you look at the tree you have no fucking clue what you are suppose to do with him.

Well, I can't argue with that, since I havn't looked at the duelist class with fresh eyes since the old old tree that gave you stats with each node.

Looking at it right now though, the area screams physical dual wield to me though. The area is blanketed in DW passives and 1 handed passives. I guess that's a bit of a trap though since apparently you have to ignore most of those and go to the marauder start for HP? (havn't played non-CI melee since Oct. 2011 so I have no idea). So the 'identity' of "massive physical dual DPS with swords or axes" just doesn't work because that's not a viable melee identity due to HP reqs?

To keep going off topic...

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Moosifer wrote:

and some dude is talking about his CI duelist.

He's a smart man then. DW CI Crit Elemental has the highest potential out of any DW build because it brings you up to all those sweet crit nodes and the OPness of ES/CI means you don't have to dump such stupid amounts of points into HP nodes and worry so much about HP gear (just need a good ES chest and one good other ES piece and Disc aura). The area increasing passives are the cherry on top. Though it doesn't make much of a case for duelist since even starting there you don't get many points in the duelist area, the big draws being Twin Terrors and Dervish before GTFO-ing.

Well the problem with the tree being covered in physical damage like you said is melee is stuck putting 80-90% of their passives into EHP, specifically life. It could be 1000 amazing damage nodes but I'm still forced to pick up all those 8% lifes just to survive as the only two good DW AoEs are LS and cleave. LS you are basically ranged so if you went actually melee with cleave you need at least 3k HP to deal with all the incoming damage, and life is much more useful than a few 8% IPD nodes.

With a CI duelist you are stuck going from US to CI and there's aren't many good non-damage nodes in duelist area for CI so it's alot of crap nodes if you wanted to go cleave DW. This is also a build you'd never be able to run while leveling so you'd have to completely respec into it later meaning you'll have to find gear for a normal life build also worry about mana then get a bunch of regrets to change into a completely different set of gear later on. The build sounds like too much of a hassle just to get US to save your ammy spot. Hell just do a shadow get all the nodes you spoke of and use LS. It could be an effective build but it seems more like a build to say "look I have a CI duelist" for the novelty of it.

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Moosifer wrote:

CI duelist

Like this?
Or how?

Passive skill tree build

this is something similar to cetos ranger, though with a bit more leveling you can also get dual terrors, or by sacrificing some life or phys dmg nodes.And i think that would be better to be honest, though im not here to try and make something better than ceto, just trying to show that duelists can have identity.

I do agree with the fact that there are not many builds a duelist can do better than other classes, but there are enough of them that are unique and neat.

And im curios if any devs have seen this thread, pretty much everyone says that the duelists area could get a bit more nice, its a bit dull at the moment.

To go completely off topic into the CI duelist thing...

Optimal CI Elemental Duelist http://tinyurl.com/ccy3ec7 at lvl 90 (planned for open beta).

If you're not getting all the crit nodes you're wasting your time, that's the reason it's efficient to go up to CI, because you hit the entire crit highway (and crit is the best way to scale your dps at high levels).

Don't really see needing US, I didn't need it when I built a CI DW ranger a while back. It isn't too hard to cleave from outside melee range if there's a pack of things that hit way too hard. I might have to try it out before OB hits just to see if that's still the case.

Going for physical damage is ultimately inferior, elemental and dual wield leverages so absurdly well (since every bit of flat ele dmg applies twice on cleave and dualstrike), it's much better to accumulate as much IAS, crit and crit damage as possible (this is optimal because you can get 100% or more increased elemental damage from gear, taking care of the %dmg need that is usually filled by passives).

Also not a fan of IR for CI, you run granites for armor and you don't get that much EV anyways (hybrid gear is decent once you have enough EHP though).

And yes you're correct that leveling this character is tricky, at least it was for the CI DW ranger from about lvl 40 to the mid fifties. Not something you'd do as a first character after a reset. So if your standards for what is good is based on 2week races or whatever, its a bad idea, it's more a 'best character you can build in default or another long term league'.

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aimlessgun wrote:

To go completely off topic into the CI duelist thing...

Optimal CI Elemental Duelist http://tinyurl.com/ccy3ec7 at lvl 90 (planned for open beta).

If you're not getting all the crit nodes you're wasting your time, that's the reason it's efficient to go up to CI, because you hit the entire crit highway (and crit is the best way to scale your dps at high levels).

Don't really see needing US, I didn't need it when I built a CI DW ranger a while back. It isn't too hard to cleave from outside melee range if there's a pack of things that hit way too hard. I might have to try it out before OB hits just to see if that's still the case.

Going for physical damage is ultimately inferior, elemental and dual wield leverages so absurdly well (since every bit of flat ele dmg applies twice on cleave and dualstrike), it's much better to accumulate as much IAS, crit and crit damage as possible (this is optimal because you can get 100% or more increased elemental damage from gear, taking care of the %dmg need that is usually filled by passives).

Also not a fan of IR for CI, you run granites for armor and you don't get that much EV anyways (hybrid gear is decent once you have enough EHP though).

And yes you're correct that leveling this character is tricky, at least it was for the CI DW ranger from about lvl 40 to the mid fifties. Not something you'd do as a first character after a reset. So if your standards for what is good is based on 2week races or whatever, its a bad idea, it's more a 'best character you can build in default or another long term league'.

1. Thats level 87(assuming you wont get any rewards)
2.If you dont take US or use a chayula with a ci melee, you are completely nobbed, i have a ci melee dw shadow. without chayula even at 11.4k es you will still get raped by stuns.It is imperative you get either US or chayula if you want to have a good time. you can even get stunned by crabs.
3.That passive tree is not very good.. no rez nodes, you pciked up 2 10% multi and a bunch of useless 15% crit chance, 4% icreased area. you can get more es, more mana and more ele with those points.