Are DPS builds not a thing? Does POE empasize with defensive passives too much? Life % nodes?

I'm not a lategamer yet, but from reading forums. People are telling others to take up to 160 - 200% of life for their trees. wth.

That limits build diversity so much. Why does this game make defense passives have to be hoarded so much, limiting the variety of builds you can be building? That sounds ridiculous.

" Every build needs 150 - 200% life " which is what I had to read on a old reddit thread. How many % life passives do I need, " All of them " people replied.

Yeah I get it, trying to not be 1 shotted at endgame, sure, whatever. That still doesn't help the point; which is, that grabbing that much life is half your points. Plus 1/4th of points already going to dex str or int nodes. Plus you need some jewels. So that leaves less than 1/4th? Only to play with dps?

Getting above 100% life, is so generic, what every build has to grab the life wheel in middle? It just seems the fun of the skill tree is restricted, by making the game (atleast by forum standards) overly too much about defense.

& That's just life taking up half your points, haven't even gotten into armour, es, evasion, endurance, block yet.

Without getting into the 1 shot mechanics of endgame, but just by working on the POB tree for many days.. I can honestly say; that the fun of making your own unique build on the skill tree is ruined if your forced to grab more than 110% life nodes. (& personally I want to grab less than that with most builds, like a flat 100% or less, but know I can't).

Which apparently you are forced to, by redditer standards. Meaning the skill tree won't be fun to work with, until they scale defenses differently. Until 110% life nodes, is the top answer players give, not 180% for freak sake. So limiting. We need build diversity, not strict auto-apply defense rulings.

What builds do good with 80% to 140% life passives or less? Is what I want to know.

"

PrairieTutanka wrote:

What builds do good with 80% to 140% life passives or less? Is what I want to know.

Mind over Matter builds. However you´d basically just trade some life nodes for mana nodes to survive with the added bonus, that either the Hierophant Ascendancy or Crown of the Inward Eye helmet can turn investment into mana into dps as well.

Having said that: Life isnt just there to avoid 1shots.
Whenever you take elemental dmg you might also end up being affected by elemental ailments like shock, chill or freeze and the probability as well as severity depends on how much dmg the hit deals compared to your total life pool.
Same goes for stun and getting stun locked.

So if your lifepool is low, pretty much every hit dealing lightning dmg will shock you and thus increase the dmg taken by the next hits up to 50% and that will kill you for sure.
Same goes for chill or freeze and all of that stuff.


You can try to avoid stacking that much life by using items like the above mentioned Crown of the Inward Eye (up 21% life), Belly of the Beast chest (up to 40% life) or Kaoms Heart chest (500 flat life) and ofc using jewels providing either %life or flat life.
You will still need a lot of life - at least until you reached your softcap when it comes to leveling. From that point onwards you just need enough survivability to complete a map in 6 portals, allowing you to spec out of defense and go fullblown glasscanon instead.

A good answer.
I'll try some mana, & reminder for jewels.


Also; is a Low life Melee build, viable? (without mind of matter, nor gear specific, & without es)
" unique melee build ".

Maybe would have to be block, tho that answer is too easy too.

Lowlife melee is possible, if you are talking about the technical term "lowlife" as in reserving ~50% of your life for auras. You´d still have to invest into enough life nodes to get some 5-6k life and then reserve half of it plus Petrified Blood alongside a good chunk of regen/leech.

The idea is to go Champion and abuse the Adrenaline buff from the "First to Strike, Last to Fall" Ascendancy permanently.


However if you simply meant "not investing into life or any other form of defense" the answer is NOPE ;)

There are plenty of passives available for damage nodes after grabbing life ones. You just have to learn how to path through them efficiently. The vast majority of builds does not need to take the Scion life wheel, and there are plenty of life nodes closer to damage nodes.

With enough gear, people are reaching dozens of millions of dps despite having over 5k life.

If you want to go for pure dps with absolutely no investment into defence, you can look into zHP deep delve builds. They are based around freezing and killing everything before it can reach you, but they are not particularly great at doing any other content than Delve.

Builds are about balancing offence and defence. That doesn't mean 50/50, you can go 90 / 10 and provided you have sufficient dps, cc (freeze, chill, explode, hinder or totems, minions etc.) you can get away with it. I pushed two bladevortex builds to 100 with arctic armour and phase acro. I pushed a deadeye this league to 97 with 3k life (104% inc.) phase acro / wind dancer. I can typically push other builds like raider TR and sab miners to 97 and 98 without going super defence oriented.

1. Reddit is not a good place to learn the game

Unfortunately there aren't many good resources. This forum is hit or miss, the main sub is god fucking awful. There are a couple streamers that really know their stuff, e.g. ruetoo, jungroan, elesshar, but its difficult to find specific guides or information for players that aren't completely new and want to learn more.

You can either play the build and tinker with it or speak to other knowledgable players - which can be hard to find. If I am playing a new build and none of my friends or guild mates are playing it, I will just reach out to someone on poe.ninja to discuss.

2. How much DPS is enough?

You don't actually need a great deal of DPS to take on most content in the game. You can clear trash mobs in red maps with like 400k dps. There are only three types of builds that have this low DPS, a HC build probably sitting at 50k+ EHP without guard skill, some DoT builds like Vortex which or poorly built characters.

The point here is that once you hit a certain point, its often not a terrible idea to invest further into defence or QoL such as ailment immunity, phasing on kill, ms%.

3. What builds do good with 80% to 140% life passives or less?

Nearly every single build falls into this category? HC players often take more but its not required to make a build that doesn't die every few maps. That doesn't mean they aren't investing in other defensive layers though. If you have 7k life with no block, dodge/evade or damage mitigation, you will be squishier than a 4k life phase acro shadow/ranger build or max block gladiator.

This has to be a troll thread. This game is all about DPS and sadly ignores almost all the defence stuff. For example if you see people that farm 15.000 depth in delve those chars don't have any life or defence nodes at all they go 100% full BOOOOM!

"

666lol666 wrote:

This has to be a troll thread. This game is all about DPS and sadly ignores almost all the defence stuff. For example if you see people that farm 15.000 depth in delve those chars don't have any life or defence nodes at all they go 100% full BOOOOM!

This is no troll thread, my dear fellow fanboi.
The game utterly suffers from being confusing, abstrusing and intransparent.

1. If you die, nothing will tell you why and how. An info about this is needed to learn the game. GGG does not provide anything like that.
2. You slice through hoards of enemies just to get one-shotted by any random opponent. Yeah. This is fun.
3. Crafting? Yeah. What an ugly mess. This is the most unintuitive and intransparent game providing crafting. Any infos about how to craft anything? Get confused anywhere in the net and you won't understand anything after that.
4. GGG does not care about people's time tables. They made a game for Youtubers/Twitchers only who sink whole weeks into this game, anybody else just stands before a gated community door. The amount of recklesness regarding people's time is nothing GGG cares about. Other companies do.

Regarding all this, people are desperately fighting to get progress in the game. Spicing up life seems the only way that works. It's a huge design misconception. But there are a lot of people who handle Chris/GGG like some sort of Steve Jobs. Even if he delivers pure cr4p, the hardcore community will praise his name. As long as it will be like that, all of the 4 points above won't change. And they HAVE to to get the game repaired.

"

AngryGekko wrote:

This is no troll thread, my dear fellow fanboi.
The game utterly suffers from being confusing, abstrusing and intransparent.

1. If you die, nothing will tell you why and how. An info about this is needed to learn the game. GGG does not provide anything like that.
2. You slice through hoards of enemies just to get one-shotted by any random opponent. Yeah. This is fun.
3. Crafting? Yeah. What an ugly mess. This is the most unintuitive and intransparent game providing crafting. Any infos about how to craft anything? Get confused anywhere in the net and you won't understand anything after that.
4. GGG does not care about people's time tables. They made a game for Youtubers/Twitchers only who sink whole weeks into this game, anybody else just stands before a gated community door. The amount of recklesness regarding people's time is nothing GGG cares about. Other companies do.

Regarding all this, people are desperately fighting to get progress in the game. Spicing up life seems the only way that works. It's a huge design misconception. But there are a lot of people who handle Chris/GGG like some sort of Steve Jobs. Even if he delivers pure cr4p, the hardcore community will praise his name. As long as it will be like that, all of the 4 points above won't change. And they HAVE to to get the game repaired.

1. The benefit of death logs are not worth the extreme server cost overhead they require to be generated. This has been discussed fairly thoroughly.

2. This is fairly rare on good builds with good defences, especially if you do not rush headfirst into groups of enemies without killing or freezing them instantly.

3. I would appreciate if the game had resources like poedb and Craft of Exile available ingame. I agree that it is nearly impossible to craft something without knowing that data. GGG like to claim that since community resources like this exist, they do not have to do anything to address the problem themselves.

4. It is perfectly possible to reach whatever goals you have within the three month length of a league. Some grinds take too long, which is what they will actually be addressing in 3.16. GGG is addressing community concerns like this slowly, but it is not as if they are ignoring them entirely. But otherwise, if you cannot achieve your goals within three months because you only play an hour per week, there is always standard where you do not lose your progress.

All of that has nothing to do with the fact that defence is part of the game and not being able to ignore that part entirely is good design.

High life/es is certainly not mandatory. If you have decent move speed and your dps can kill stuff fast enough, you need very little survivability.