I still don't see Duelist's identity

you miss both repartee and fencing-dafuq bro? 42% 1hD+3% ias for 4 points..
and seriusly the 10% crit nodes are horrible, if you don't plan running 5 granites I don't see why you shouldnt use some diamond flask; since you will be using at least 3 auras(hatred anger wrath) you will not have that much mana to recover with pots; might aswell use clarity and only use that little mp you need to use skills and then recharge it automatically

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VictorDoom wrote:

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.

Build doesn't touch his DPS, I think he said last night broke 20k on cleave after I gave him a ring with mana leech which allowed him to drop the gem and get concentrated effect, which was lvl 1 so if he keeps leveling he could probably get 30k DPS on cleave. I've never heard of those numbers outside of ranged builds. Your build sacrifices life so won't have the same EHP. This build is viable but not even remotely close to his.

Again the point isn't this class can't make a good DW, or any good build. My 2h axe build is fucking amazing (although rough starting hence why my toon name ends with HC and I'm in default) but it's amazing for a duelist, not compared to other cookie cutter builds.

I keep crying out for duelist improvements because I fell in love with the class but after playing shadow I realized there's just nothing there. I think I could do better versions of all my builds on shadow, have better survivability and much much higher DPS.

Like I said in another thread, my EK CI shadow is already as tanky (with 5/75/-25 resists btw. I've only died to sparklers -25 resist will do that and criting 3 EK chain shots into a full crowd of physical reflect, basically 120 hits 40-80 of which were crits) and does just about as much dps at 61 (67 now and I think it might do more DPS because of how chain works) as my highly geared lvl 81 duelist.

I'll go out on a limb and say that Duelist appears so be another kind of Mara, only because Maras are easier to build, and therefore more popular, and therefore inherently have more players experimenting with them. I would also say that many of those Maras are trying to do what Duelist does better; due to popularity and subsequent experimentation, the Duelist has yet to be realized and come into its own.

Duelists, no matter which way you spin them, seem to focus on combining a few elements. 1) Insane ias nodes: they can grab quite a bit of ias without extensive speccing. Not meant to be a pure focus, but instead offer its benefit without spending a metric fucktonne (an honest to God measurement) of skill points. This leaves more points to spend on 2) Insane defenses: 3.3% passive regen and a few really big +% life nodes, all in close proximity to some very big hybrid +AR/ER nodes. Again, all without requiring extensive speccing. Again, leaving more points to spend on 3) a metric fucktonne (again: an honest to God measurement) of points left pver to spend on raw physical weapon damage and accuracy. There's seriously a LOT more of this around the Duelist, and none of it sacrifices the occasional crit (which benefits from ias without a single +% crit chance passive spent).

The Duelist is like playing rock, paper, scissors, and every round being able to play rockpaperscissor with one gesture. FTW. Again, I'll go out on a limb but say differently: Maras are only more popular because its much easier to say "my rock is so much bigger than your paper; you cannot win."

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VictorDoom wrote:

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.

I'll keep that in mind. ES doesn't affect your stun threshold, it's based on your pre-CI HP (unless they changed it?). Like I said, wasn't a big problem last I played CI melee, but its been a while.

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VictorDoom wrote:

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.

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kadrek91 wrote:

you miss both repartee and fencing-dafuq bro? 42% 1hD+3% ias for 4 points..
and seriusly the 10% crit nodes are horrible, if you don't plan running 5 granites I don't see why you shouldnt use some diamond flask;

10% crit damage and 15% crit nodes are actually quite good :D That's what you find when you actually spreadsheet things out. I plugged in your suggestion of Fencing and Repartee, dumping 45% crit and 10% crit damage to get 42% IPD and 3% IAS. Guess what: I lost 1000 DPS. Some of the relevant simulated gear stats: 200 avg eledmg from gear, 100% ele dmg, 160 avg phys dmg per wep, 2 spd weps. It's an elemental build, so because the crit nodes affect all the damage and the phys nodes only affect the weapons, the crit nodes come out on top. Given a different gear profile you might see a different result. But a 160 avg 2spd wep is a really really good phys wep (used them in the modeling to give phys a chance).

To victor, area increases are incredible for Cleave, IMO. If you wanted to drop offense for more mana and ES, sure. Sadly there's no worthwhile ele dmg points around that would beat the crit nodes for dps.

As for diamonds, the build would run some granites, and once you're down to only a couple diamonds the uptime is just not very good. Also, I frankly expect some sort of diamond nerf, so I don't like planning around them.

These same points keep coming up and I keep saying it's not the way you guys see it so I guess I'll explain in detail. Not meant to be a personal attack you canhaspants but you're like the 4th or 5th person to bring up these points and I disagree with every one.

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CanHasPants wrote:

1) Insane ias nodes: they can grab quite a bit of ias without extensive speccing. Not meant to be a pure focus, but instead offer its benefit without spending a metric fucktonne (an honest to God measurement) of skill points.

Duelist isn't the speed class, shadow is. A DW shadow gets 30% IAS in his first 8 nodes which lead to a path of life, ES/EVA nodes, frenzy charges and crit. Duelist starts with 22% IAS over 9 nodes which are on two separate paths (one specifically DW, other 1h weapons) which one side leans towards pure tank/armor/life build other leans towards armor/eva and mana. Two conflicting routes to get 8% less IAS with 1 extra node.

Shadow has similar weapon speciality IAS nodes (3 IAS away from center, both are actually between that class and ranger). Duelist's only mild advantage here is the 3 IAS nodes in the middle which aren't hard to get to for shadow and probably are meant to be shared with ranger anyways. I don't think you can put any middle nodes directly to any one class.

When you look at weapon choices, daggers, claws, swords and rapiers each have at least 6 models with 1.5 a/s or higher. Duelist doesn't get the int to use daggers or claws without traveling. Rapiers are usually the favorite option but with a lack of crit multipler on duelist tree there's not much for them to build off so the implicit mod is fairly worthless. Shadow can easily use all 4, swords being the only issue at the lvl 66 1.6 sword requires 104 str but would only require the shadow to grab the 2 might nodes and two fitness nodes for 100 str. Duelist either can't use 2 of the fast weapons and the implicit mod on one doesn't sync with any of his other passives leaving swords which implicit gives accuracy which is pretty useless to a character that has easy access to high dex and has many sword nodes that add accuracy % as well. Crit chance, crit multi and LL all work very well for shadow.

Tree IAS and weapon selection goes to shadow. On top of shadows starting with more IAS they even get MS in their opening string. Shadow is the IAS class but everyone just pigeon holed duelist as that because they don't know what else to do with the guy (point of this thread)

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This leaves more points to spend on 2) Insane defenses: 3.3% passive regen and a few really big +% life nodes, all in close proximity to some very big hybrid +AR/ER nodes. Again, all without requiring extensive speccing.

LR is meaningless w/o a large amount of life and there's very few nodes that give more than 8% life. Not being a pure str class we rely more on % nodes than we do stacking str with less %. To be exact, there's thick skin for 18%, a 12% above golem's blood then maybe you can count the 2 12%s between mara and duelist but I think that more "belongs to mara."

As for "very big ar/ev nodes" everyone is pretty much agreeing armor sucks and even if you got them all you'd still need endurance charges and granite flasks. So why not ignore them and just get charges and flasks?

So duelist needs more life nodes because they don't have the high str a mara does or the high % nodes a mara does requiring more travel to get more small % nodes. The armor isn't required but if you did get it that's more nodes down the drain into EHP. I'd argue that duelist on average put more into EHP than maras to get the same or less EHP.

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Again, leaving more points to spend on 3) a metric fucktonne (again: an honest to God measurement) of points left pver to spend on raw physical weapon damage and accuracy. There's seriously a LOT more of this around the Duelist, and none of it sacrifices the occasional crit (which benefits from ias without a single +% crit chance passive spent).

Everyone who has done this has walked away saying duelist sucks or they can't do any maps with him. Reason being is they have 2k life, no armor or charges and they are using cleave as their main skill meaning they need high EHP to be in that close to attack.

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The Duelist is like playing rock, paper, scissors, and every round being able to play rockpaperscissor with one gesture. FTW. Again, I'll go out on a limb but say differently: Maras are only more popular because its much easier to say "my rock is so much bigger than your paper; you cannot win."

maras are way more popular because the build is laid out in front of the player and is easy to follow. Duelist, as I explained in a previous post, is confusion each step of the way because you are never sure which you want to take over another thing so a new player just guesses his way through until the toon becomes unplayable.

The class area has two things exceptional about it: Life regeneration and weapon block. He gets +16% dual wield block, with 6% more in between him and the ranger. Compare it to the Ranger's 7% (which she has to go into her back field to max, which is full of useless poop), Jack's 6%, Shadow's 4%, and everyone else's zeroty percent.

(The Templar can get +19% blocking with staves, getting ~37% block by default. This is the only comparable build really.)

That's what he's good at. Wielding two weapons at once while being a brick at the same time. If you don't dual wield or you're not getting the regen, you have no reason to go there.

I think it would be cool if we could be discussing the merits of the weapon nodes, but let's be serious here. The Sword and Axe nodes are garbage on the whole. "Blow 5 skill points!" For: +Physical damage? +Accuracy? Bleaugh.

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Moosifer wrote:

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CanHasPants wrote:

1) Insane ias nodes: they can grab quite a bit of ias without extensive speccing. Not meant to be a pure focus, but instead offer its benefit without spending a metric fucktonne (an honest to God measurement) of skill points.

Duelist isn't the speed class, shadow is.

To be honest, I stopped reading right about here, skimmed the rest, because:

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CanHasPants wrote:

Not meant to be a pure focus, but instead offer its benefit without spending a metric fucktonne (an honest to God measurement) of skill points.

It seemed to me that this was enough to set the tone for the rest of the reply. I don't much care who gets more ias, or who is better as an ias build. So Shadow is better at building pure scissors, and Marauder is better at building pure rock; so what? My point was that Duelist get these benefits without even trying. There's huge ias nodes, huge life nodes, huge regen nodes, and huge ar/er nodes, all confined to this tiny little space within the skill tree. The Duelist can grab them all without even trying... They're all just right there, next to every other weapon specific node they could possibly ever want to grab. You questioned Duelist's identity; I said their identity is a blend of many things.

For example, ias can be as much a defensive stat as it can be offensive. It's most obvious benefit is as a pseudo "more" damage multiplier for attacks. But because of the Duelist's blend of attributes, it can be considered defensive for them, as it facilitates single quick strikes that land before an enemy's, allowing them to hit and move before an enemy can return the favor. Something pure ias builds lack in such a degree due to the more extensive speccing required for pure ias builds; they require multiple (or critical (for good odds, see also: multiple)) hits to achieve the same damage as a duelist can achieve with just one. Used in this manner, ias lands in the Duelist's favor, because it is a supplementary ability that they grab naturally (point-efficiently) while building otherwise.

To counter this, you might say that Shadows can achieve much the same with daggers. To which I'd say Duelists have access to higher base dps weapons, and therefore (again) require fewer passive points spent, and therefore (again again) more points to spend on a diversity of defenses.

So, again (again again), the Duelist's identity is rockpaperscissor, where it might be easier (but not always better) to identify with pure rock, paper, or scissor.

Edit: Im not saying the Duelist class is perfectly balanced yet, I'm just saying they definitely do have an identity. I can certainly agree that some mechanics might be lackluster, but do not fool yourself into believing that Duelists have nothing going for them.

Edit 2: Autocorrect errors (seriously, why the fuck would autocorrect tell me I meant "quirk" over "quick" ???). There's more but it's a pain to edit on a tablet so you'll just have to deal with them ^-^

I don't see the point in playing the duelist when the mara is superior, and always will be

The only identity I can give the duelist when I was tinkering with builds, was a mana using, IR Marauder. The fact you are using mana does make a big difference though, as you can stack things that would normally be death for a marauder.... think the Armour aura (+40% for 40% of you mana pool).

Overall the identity IS a marauder though. Tank + melee + armour. For the weapon, you'd probably go with a 2h, I found that I was't as effective DW. 2h let me OHKO or at least stun everything I hit. In the same time I might have landed 2 DW attacks, but neither stunned, and I may have been hit in the meantime.

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laycast wrote:

I don't see the point in playing the duelist when the mara is superior, and always will be

THIS! My entire point is wrapped up in this simple statement. If you want a tank why play duelist over mara? If you want a archer why play duelist over ranger? If you want a speed demon why play duelist over shadow? If you want an elemental user why play duelist over templar?

So what he can do all of it, he doesn't do all of it as well as other classes do. Why have entire class that is devoted to mediocrity, a jack of all trades, king of none?

Make him the fastest class and allow shadow to be the crit class.

Make armor/eva a powerful combo by raising the base values and making + base eva and armor one roll rather than two. Remove IR so people just don't get super armor. Change L&S to give a bigger EVA bonus with the same armor bonus as unless you go nutty with hybrid armors they won't be able to have 1.5k armor and 2k eva like pure gear.

Give swords an implicit IAS mod

Put axe damage 10 dps higher than maces. Stun is a great implicit and stacks with all their skills and passives, if axes are duelist main weapon give us a real reason to use them over just getting a mace and sub-par stun.

If duelist is going to be the speed class, we should be the life tanks while maras are the armor tanks. Make it so we can get more life in fewer nodes to counteract having 6-9 a/s (9 is wishful thinking I know)

I see potential for this class but right now it does nothing better and is just an area rangers and maras go for extra passives. I'm begging you, don't listen to this "they are good enough" shit, saying they are 90% of what a mara or ranger is doesn't mean they are worthy of being a class.