I still don't see Duelist's identity

So, I've thought about the topic "dual wield block chance" as duelist identity; it's not bad as explanation.
I've came up with several builds(all of them with too many points);
Pretty standard, focus on dual wield, attack speed, damage while dual wield, life, and eldrich battery as cherry on the cake to finish the build.

US+IR to avoid the block animation, and IR since we get US.
We could go hybrid armor/eva, but I don't like it.
We could go full evasion, but at this point a shadow or ranger would be better imho.

We could blend my 'critical strike multiplier sword mara' with this duelist, to gain this
critical damage-block-us+ir duelist but I don't really feel it.


Note; I have not selected fencing and such because we can use wands too if we want, we only need to get iron grip. A Wand shadow would be better with the first eldribattery build, since we go in line with the +50% wand physical damage node; with the other buids I suggest taking fencing and repartee, especially with the crit multiplier one, where is better to use a rapier.

I was just strolling around http://poestatistics.com to see how my exp on my new toon was the last few days. Got some fun numbers that drive my point home.

These numbers are based on the top 2000 characters in each league
Default - 8.55% are duelist
HC - 12.25% are duelist

Lowest played toon in each league.

The recent changes to what was formerly considered the worse class, shadow have bumped it from 5.75% in legacy default to 16.55% and in HC from 4.8% to 17.35%.

My general observation have been backed up by math, amen.

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Moosifer wrote:

The recent changes to what was formerly considered the worse class, shadow have bumped it from 5.75% in legacy default to 16.55% and in HC from 4.8% to 17.35%.

Shadow was last introduced and had to be discovered first, so other classes had an advantage in ingame experience. Then, the shadow offers a 3rd build option the duelist did not: witch/caster route is much better/more viable than playing a mace/marauder duelist... The starting area of the duelist shows his real duality: beside going ranged, you (would) need partial nodes of both pathes... leaving with more chances to fail/take too much risk.

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flab wrote:

These statistics don't necessarily mean much, even though I agree that the duelist seems the least appealing of all the classes to me these days.

http://www.poestatistics.com/events/1-week-turbo-hc/

Only 66 templars, 5 of them in the Top 10.

Actually your point means less when you look beyond the numbers. Hillbert has made an extremely tanky summoner temp and week races don't have much competition. In a turbo HC race it's the safest way into the top 10.

Week race top 10s tend to be filled with GSers from gaining an early lead and summoners who are untouchable late game.

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Moosifer wrote:

Week race top 10s tend to be filled with GSers from gaining an early lead and summoners who are untouchable late game.

Add Double Totems to that list.

I figured I would post some feedback on my old level 79 HC Duelist.

Goal starting out:
Fast, tanky dual-wield character with a huge life pool and high armour.

Result:
Fast-moving, somewhat tanky character with high life, decent armour (which I discovered to be underwhelming later on), annoyingly low dps when playing solo, mediocre AoE.

Build:
Primary attack: Cleave + mpd, afd, fa (2.7k dps)
Single target: Dual Strike + mpd, iiq (2.5k dps)
Curses: Warlord's Mark until Blood Magic (~level 65), Temporal Chains + fc + id for maps
Support: Enduring Cry + aoe, Phase Run + id + fc for mobility as well as melee damage if needed

Auras: Grace + rmc for ~3k armour

mpd = melee physical damage
afd = added fire damage
fa = faster attacks
iiq = increased item quantity
aoe = increased area of effect
fc = faster casting
id = increased duration
rmc = reduced mana cost

Playstyle:
Run through maps casting Temporal Chains on groups and Cleaving everything. Only exception being rares/bosses, which are ususally Dual Strike.

short clip of a map run soon (edit: maybe?)

Screenshots:
Ladder screenshot one map before Calzone died: http://i.imgur.com/uOHSV.png
Defence stats page + Cleave damage: http://i.imgur.com/Vu2Bl.jpg

Gear:


Passive skill tree:
edit: updated tree http://tinyurl.com/bx3z94g
This is not the exact skill tree that I used, as the Duelist's starting area got a few more life nodes, but it is within a few points of what I had before.

General thoughts, feedback:
5k life is definitely unnecessary for almost everything in the game, but my goal was to have as much as possible. With 250% increased life from skill points, I had 5k life without ridiculous amounts of life on my gear.

9k armour works well enough for regular mobs, but it seems completely worthless against higher level bosses that do tons of damage. I took three granite flasks for situations like this, where my base armour and life was not enough to keep me alive. Granite flasks are too important for melee builds in my opinion. Armour should be reworked - you can go from having too much armour against white mobs to having basically none against a boss a few seconds later. High-armour builds with a ton of mitigation paired with low-life with life leech would be interesting if they actually worked.

Resistances are not too hard to cap out, so I didn't have any problems with the new resistance penalties. It seems like they do what they were intended to do.

Temporal Chains was definitely unbalanced when I used it. It almost seemed mandatory for a melee build running higher level maps. I'd like to see newer curses added in the future.

Duelist feedback:
Most of the weapon damage passives are worthless. They either take too many skill points to reach the notables, or emphasize Accuracy Rating. Accuracy is important, of course, but in an area with so many options for Dexterity nodes they felt pretty underwhelming. As a primarily strengh-based Duelist, I still had nearly 250 dex. My chance to hit was 85% or so, and I don't remember missing very much at all. Blade Master is probably the best weapon damage wheel in the area, but it still has a mediocre third node.

I'd like to see more Claw wheels, and maybe even give them their own AoE skill. Right now they don't have access to the basic melee skills, which means they're useless for this kind of character.

On that note, more melee abilities would definitely be nice. The three main AoE ones now are fine, but there's not much available other than that. I think the Duelist should get some kind of ability suited for attack speed rather than the slower Ground Slam and Sweep. Cleave is faster, but its AoE seems quite poor compared to the other two.

I feel like there should be some notable attack speed nodes, considering the Duelist seems to be based around speed. Why, then, does the Shadow get a free 12% attack speed node at the start and another one next to it if dual-wielding? At least one more node like Acceleration or even Berserking should be right at the starting area. Maybe even up the 6% starting node to 8-12% as well. Ambidexterity looks like a decent option now if you're already going for Iron Reflexes, but it's not an early skill point at all.

Armour nodes seem like they could use a buff. Maybe move them farther from the starting area and increase their +% a bit. Really, picking up the +52% armour at the start is pretty worthless at level 8-9 when compared to the life wheel to the right.

Armour/evasion nodes. The Leather and Steel wheel right by Unwavering Stance costs a lot of skill points without giving you anything too impressive. Back when armour/evasion stacked with IR, it might have been worth getting, but five 8% armour passives consecutively doesn't seem worth it to me.

Open beta plans:
I have a build in mind similar to this one but with a 2h axe. I plan on using Double Strike + Cleave, but with more AoE than before. I'll probably run a Templar/Witch through Ruthless to pick up Increased AoE, then build toward the AoE passives near the Templar's starting area. Survivability is going to be based on life again.

If I decide to go with Blood Magic again, I'll probably pick it up around level 30-40 instead of 60-70. Mana management was extremely tedious without it, especially when playing in groups. I didn't have particularly good weapons for a while, so my damage was much lower than just about everyone else in the party. Unless I last-hit a mob I couldn't get any mana charges back, which was a big problem when spamming Dual Strike or Cleave. Maybe players could be rewarded charge 'assists' if they take more than 30-40% of the mob's life but don't kill it.

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All in all, I'm still really enjoying PoE and I'll be playing it for quite some time. Thanks, GGG, for all of your awesome work.

The issue boils down to how mitigation happens. Duelist is meant to be, from my perspective, to be a tanky, yet decent dps crit class, whose survivability comes from stacking armor or evasion, instead of life/armor. Seeing as how armor is basically worthless for anyone past 6k armor, and evasion does not work at the moment, to any measurable potency, without major investment AND acrobatics. The duelist concept of defense-through-mitigation simply isn't viable. Meaning it will always be more efficient to run a mara, whose entire premise revolves around lolhp.

I noticed the 1h nodes of the shadow gives 8% and the duelist gives 6%.... wat...