Tone down merciless Argus

"

pajingtonn wrote:

I could get him down fast with my chaos assassin.
I could stay alive with my flicker slayer.
I could facetank him with my champion.

Where is your problem? :-)

Try less FotM builds, and especially those that are at a level where Merciless lab actually gives EXP.[/quote]

Chaos assassin is self made build I posted on forums with 45c+-budget
Flicker was lvl 72 also self made build with gear +-5 ex (yes, you have to invest; that's the fuckin' miracle)
Champion was lvl 72 ...(Gear from Slayer)


If meelee - try fortify+end.charges investment in tree+warlord's mark+life leech
If ranged - try bear traps with increased duration, puncture
If maged - try to kit, frost wall...

I don't say it's easy but I don't think it is as hard as someone could say if you treat your character in right way.

A few things about Argus:
1) He only attacks the closest target to him. I've seen him wacking away at golems multiple times when I've killed him as a ranged character.

2) As melee, some kind of physical mitigation combined with good regen/leech makes him very easy. I did the merc lab at level 70 with my second char in Perandus and had no issues (20K armor and warlords on blasphemy).

The key to beating Argus is to understand his mechanics (point 1) and not mindlessly try to facetank him without physical mitigation and life recovery that doesn't come from flasks.

you can dodge most of his attacks when you just get behind him with a movement skill.
if you stop attacking him very now and than his enrage will go down making him slower + lower dmg

"

ACGIFT wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

Leveling so quickly that i had some trash items from normal, goldrim and pair of movement speed boots that helped me cap resists (barely)
and please - Parendus league is a Charity League so most probably your 'normal' Perandus char had easier access to uniques than me.

You've not even touched Perandus, so what would you know? All you hear is the typical bitching from others that ALWAYS comes up. Just like "Waaah, Tempest is infinite 6Ls all day!" "Waaah, flashback league rains uniques and rares!" etc., etc.

Truth is, the supply of stuff on Perandus isn't actually that much greater. Only notable difference is that Maligaro's are easy to come by, but I think part of that is ALSO a lot of salt over their nerf.

The build I've been using isn't unique-based; the only unique they make use of is a Searing Touch. (they also have a Wyrmsign, simply because I've not found ANY rare gloves that best it, and that's pretty sad)

I had to pay a lot to get a chest that got me >2k armour.

actually i did PHC, got me
that i ripped to standard.
uniques are dirt cheap - poe.trade doesnt lie.

"

"

sidtherat wrote:

thats why ive said 'proper defences'. armour alone does nothing vs him. armour vs big hits is pretty useless with these values (11k? granite is 6k alone). i had mix of ev, ar and block + proper flasks and it was a breeze

Translation: "It's only doable to specific builds, and others can go get fucked."

Also, that was the PERMANENT armour rating, not the flasked one. Since the fight goes on way too long, I can't just have granite+basalt up for the whole thing. (And since Incinerate doesn't crit, Surgeon's flasks are out of the question)

that means that PROPER defences setup will manage. armour alone is a noob trap. the only rating new players can easily understand and the most misleading rating at that. diminishing returns, nothing vs ele, very frequent hits because everything connects.. 100% AR build were always traps for me, will never play them again.

"

"

sidtherat wrote:

i know youll chalk it on '10ex twink gear' but still - proper build has little trouble vs him. one dimensional ones - might struggle. you had unwavering stance?

Of course you go US with a full-armour build. Without it, those hits would've been guaranteed stun, allowing him to connect a second hit and effectively one-shot you.

And if you're gonna say "well, you should take evasion instead," you're admitting that a core part of the game's content is explicitly undoable for a large portion of the builds.

noone asks you to play evasion - pure evasion is also risky. but taking US is like 'hey, id like to shoot myself in the foot'. this keystone is BAD. really bad. but you think it is good - so go for it

proper defences make most of the game trivial without resorting to ToH, LC or instant leech.

BTW - so Argus is now a 'core content'?

"

sidtherat wrote:

actually i did PHC, got me

that i ripped to standard.

Then you didn't get far, since you'd have a "1" if you even finished normal.

"

sidtherat wrote:

uniques are dirt cheap - poe.trade doesnt lie.

But people claiming to cite poe.trade can lie about having even bothered to check.

Do a quick search for a Lightning Coil on Perandus. It should be dirt-cheap because of Cadiro, right?

No, it's 50c there... Which is about the same price it had (actually slightly higher!) than around this point in Talisman.

Similarly, other uniques which are not any cheaper than they were versus Talisman at 3 weeks: Voltaxic, Tabula, Carcass Jack, Shav's, and hell, even Taste of Hate is still a 1.5-2ex item in SPITE of being badly nerfed, and Basalt Flasks doing their main job better!

Some of them are lower vs. Standard, purely because Standard happens to have a LOT more orbs; prices are inflated, after all. This happened with Talisman, as well as Warbands/Tempest: earlier on, a lot of uniques were CHEAPER, simply because of orbs being more precious; the prices slid over time.

The only notable cases I saw of lower prices have been for Drillneck, (which has been plummeting for months, realistically; this is because it's unnecessary with the new Voltaxic meta replacing the old Infractem & Harbinger meta) and Maligaro's. (which has a lot of people salty because of the hard nerf it received)

"

sidtherat wrote:

that means that PROPER defences setup will manage. armour alone is a noob trap. the only rating new players can easily understand and the most misleading rating at that. diminishing returns, nothing vs ele, very frequent hits because everything connects.. 100% AR build were always traps for me, will never play them again.

Then you played them poorly, and need to Git Gud™.

Also, armour rating, contrary to popular belief, does NOT have diminishing returns; every extra point of armour will add exactly the same bonus to ypur eHP that the point before it did, without any end.

And once you stack on extra flat bonuses from Soul of Steel, and endurance charges, and periodic basalt flasks? It's pretty easy to get it so that, say, using a Taste of Hate makes you take MORE damage.

"

sidtherat wrote:

noone asks you to play evasion - pure evasion is also risky. but taking US is like 'hey, id like to shoot myself in the foot'. this keystone is BAD. really bad. but you think it is good - so go for it

Clearly you've not tried good pure evasion, either. My archer (Raider) runs with about 18k evasion, and once you figure in dodge + spell dodge + phasing... She just literally never gets hit more than once in any 30-second span. And with so much sunk into maximizing her damage output... Even with non-instant leech she invariably recovers all her health before another hit can land.

"

sidtherat wrote:

proper defences make most of the game trivial without resorting to ToH, LC or instant leech.

Then you've clearly got a good deal to learn. ToH (even the legacy ones) now provide so little mitigation it's hilarious. And instaleech is so pre-2.0.

Once you get to endgame level, a pure armour build can eschew tertiary mitigation methods like using damage type conversion (the real noob trap) and just facetank anything and everything.

sure buddy sure

pure armour can easily facetank a map with extra damage as fire + extra damage as lightning + monsters deal more damage. surely, easily

armour + US is a death sentence in such map

ill leave you with that thought and move on

"

sidtherat wrote:

sure buddy sure

pure armour can easily facetank a map with extra damage as fire + extra damage as lightning + monsters deal more damage. surely, easily

armour + US is a death sentence in such map

ill leave you with that thought and move on

...I do those maps regularly. (Tiers 10-15, limited only by sustain) :S

They sting a little more than usual, sure, but I clear them fine and don't die. If you don't, then how am I supposed to be the one that needs to Git Gud™?

"

ACGIFT wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

sure buddy sure

pure armour can easily facetank a map with extra damage as fire + extra damage as lightning + monsters deal more damage. surely, easily

armour + US is a death sentence in such map

ill leave you with that thought and move on

...I do those maps regularly. (Tiers 10-15, limited only by sustain) :S

They sting a little more than usual, sure, but I clear them fine and don't die. If you don't, then how am I supposed to be the one that needs to Git Gud™?

You're hopeless.

"

Raudram wrote:

Considering that I have picked every single HP node I possibly can (over +100% increased HP) and have HP on all pieces of gear I possibly can, as well as using jewels with HP, four endurance charges, arctic armor and two-use basalt flask

in fairness that sounds pretty glass. Not saying its unusual to have a character with those defenses in act3 merciless, been there myself many times. But you have to expect a character like that to face severe challenges. Unless by over 100% hp you mean about 220%, Im going on the presumption here were talking more like 120%.

"

ACGIFT wrote:

And before any other objections... Make sure you're actually comparing this with a character who is NOT level 90, has NOT gotten their mericless ascendancy points, has NOT been fed multi-exalt gear by another character... And in general, actually is akin to what would be expected had you played the game normally.

surely thats not who should be killing argus? Thats the sort of player who should be running away screaming trying to lose the agro and get out of that zone alive. Thats the sort of player who should be using the mechanics of the boss fights to avoid getting extra keys that way too. That player is supposed to go in, face a challenge, get their passives, done.

Argus and the keys are for players who farm that zone. LvL90 characters in multi exalt gear are basically immortal against him, he cant even damage them. Theres a huge part of the spectrum where hes a challenging but fair fight between lvl90 high end characters and someone who cannot defeat him at all. Hes got a lot of life but Ive not had an issue with him so far. He killed one of my characters who had awful defenses and was too low level to deal with him, and rightly so.

I think you have to see him as another trap in a way, something deadly to be avoided that also doubles up as a boss you can farm as you get stronger.

"

ACGIFT wrote:

The trouble I had was going in at low-70s, having only 4k life, 11k armour, around 500/sec regen, with about 6->15k DPS with leech. He STILL cleaves through about 2-3k life per hit through that armour + endurance charges + soul of steel, and basically that becomes a "run away after each hit, wait to regen for get in a little bit more damage each time."

honestly if you are talking about a melee character it sounds like you have unwavering and/or iron reflexes. Generally speaking those nodes will get you killed in exactly the manner you are describing by harsh, relentless physical attack mobs like argus, jungle weaver, colonnade kole, general large magic skele mobs of various sorts in high maps etc etc. Theres obviously builds where its a thing, an Aegis max block armour tank maybe takes both those nodes because they make sense for that niche build area.

You either want block or evasion as a melee, maybe both. Imo of course. You want armour too, more armour than evasion but a bit of evasion with cwdt enfeeble is going to force him to miss every other attack consistently and thats the time you need to leech/regen/pot back your life while maintaining dps on the target by standing your ground. Block is rng based and you cant rely on a consistent hit/miss pattern like evasion but it does a good job if you stack it.

"

ACGIFT wrote:

Then you played them poorly, and need to Git Gud™.

youre the one whos having issues with an easy bosses, dont try and turn it around and start acting like your armour chars can do this and your evasion chars can do that and youre some expert, everyone else needs to get good.... sry you are posting that you are struggling with a lvl68 boss which should be a cakewalk for a properly built melee character. No shame in that at all, hes an ugly boss, but you cant say that AND be mr pro player know it all, thats not gonna fly.