Hardcore = Solo Self-Found?

"

DoubleU wrote:

Go to your profile and un-hide your characters, it is much easier to help you that way.

"

TemjinGold wrote:

The main problem I see with your guy is that you have no damage and a small amount of tankiness. The issue here is that if you are playing totems to hide while your totems kill, you want to go much heavier on the damage side. The idea is to kill them quickly so you don't have to hide so long because the harder fights don't provide much in the way of places to hide.

I didn't realize you were doing this in standard and with legacy gear. The new Nycta's for example is significantly stronger than this one.

What you are doing works fairly well for the areas you are hanging out in (mid-campaign). The problem is, if you are hoping to also snag all 4 labs in HC for that achievement, building this way will make it impossible to proceed after a certain point. That's because on mostly SSF/cheap gear you cannot get tanky enough for the defensive part to matter on this tree and you will also have no damage.

I've played a lot of glass cannon totems in the past (one almost every league) and this league I wanted to do something different by seeing what a tanky totem guy would play like. While he has some gear you can only get in trade league (I made most of the rares with Rog), he was super tanky for me way before all this stuff (just stuff I picked up from the ground) and does good damage (built right, non-crit WAY outpaces crit for damage early on, the drawback is just a very low ceiling on that damage). Non-crit is significantly less investment (points-wise) for a given amount of damage. All those points I banked went into being beefy. Feel free to look through him if you like to get some idea of how to build better all around.

"

TemjinGold wrote:

I think the best way to answer this and help you is to give you my general league start approach. I threw together a pob with 4 trees so you can see the step by step progression:

https://pobb.in/-KKHkb-28mdE (use the dropdown to see all 4)

After you pass the point in my last tree, where you go is up to you. Since you are HC, this is a good time to now grab all the life you are passing through, all the mana you are passing through, and Mind Over Matter (once you have a decent amount of mana). Your 2nd lab should be Divine Guidance (this plus all the mana you grabbed and Mind Over Matter will make you WAY more tanky than what you did on your build).

In the first couple of Acts, SC or HC, you don't really need life on the tree (and getting life gives you very little at that point because of how low level you are). Totem is also not very good until you have first lab and also Ancestral Bond. Before that, use something else (I generally do Explosive Trap or Splitting Steel but you can do anything you are comfortable with).

For weapons, you don't need more than the vendor recipes for the whole campaign if you build right. On league start, I aim for 1 L8 sceptre by Brutus (I don't do wand or dagger because sceptre allows me to Leap Slam but if you are pushing through HC, that matters less since you don't care about rushing forward). Obviously since you have resources, you can just make 2 of them. By level 20, I aim to make 2 L20 sceptres (Quartz Sceptre base if you can, Act 2 vendor sells them). Once you get to areas where item level 33 or above weapons can drop, start checking rare sceptres/daggers/wands (L20 weapons make T6 flat damage to spells and weapons need to be L33 minimum to roll T5).

You can pick any spell with this tree (tho you want Lightning) but from my experimenting, Ball Lightning seems to work best (Spark can work too but I don't like it myself). Ball Lightning - Spell Totem - Multi Totem - Slower Proj - Lightning Pen - Added Lightning. Those links are listed in order from best to worst. If you go for Ball Lightning, you will want to invest in all the AoE you see on the tree (look at my guy from this league for reference). Whatever you do though, do NOT play Arc. Arc has great mechanics but is literally a quarter of the damage.