6000 hours of Melee Scientific Expert Tells You the Truth- Melee changes ACTUALLY 100% suck

There's a few things I can say for sure when entering this league.

* I have no idea what the monsters will do to me due to having lower attack speed than usual and less distractions. I can mitigate some, but not all threats.
* I have no idea what the crowd control will do to the monsters due to having less attack speed. Crowd control is a big problem when you hit slowly.
* I have some clue that what I build will work, but there's no guarantee it'll take me to t16 or boss. There's a high probability that I won't have enough stun or cc, which will require rethinking.

The outcome isn't certain, but I can almost guarantee the damage for my particular builds and setups is higher. Damage being the least of my concerns, and being a 2h weapon user by default I'll be doing quite a bit of experimenting and deduction before I make any assessments as to whether what I build is successful or not.

THAT is science. In this case I'm using layered deduction to determine the outcome of the potentials, using practical application and rationalization.

I wouldnt run vaal pact with overleech. Read the slayer node.

The way i understand it, instant leech has a time of 0. Overleech requires you to have t>0 for it to do anything.

Since it says cannot "recover" life other than leech, maybe regen works now with vaal pact but i'm not a slayer enjoyer and i dont use vaal pact outside of mahuxotls.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

I wouldnt run vaal pact with overleech. Read the slayer node.

My apologies, I posted the wrong build. I have appended the link. The 100% max total increased per second is the reason I get brutal fervour.

Think it's a bad idea?

I was under the impression that instant leech still went by the 1 second rule.

I'll do some experimentation during the league. If the pact doesn't play well with brutal fervor I'll spec it out and switch to impact.

The goal is to get a ton of frenzy charges, so we'll see how it goes. Fervor is just a side thing.

I may spec further into banner or warcry if necessary, but I think being angry-boi should be enough for a good first test.

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funplayer wrote:

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

I wouldnt run vaal pact with overleech. Read the slayer node.

My apologies, I posted the wrong one. The 100% max total increased per second is the reason I get brutal fervour.

Think it's a bad idea?

I was under the impression that instant leech still went by the 1 second rule.

I'll do some experimentation during the league. If the pact doesn't work I'll switch to impact.

The goal is to get a ton of frenzy charges, so we'll see how it goes.

You can probably just hang around carns chat and he probably knows.

I just asked, hes playing vaal pact with brutal fervor with lightning strike because the projectiles will give you overleech and the melee portion will give you instant leech. seems insane tbh.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

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funplayer wrote:

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

I wouldnt run vaal pact with overleech. Read the slayer node.

My apologies, I posted the wrong one. The 100% max total increased per second is the reason I get brutal fervour.

Think it's a bad idea?

I was under the impression that instant leech still went by the 1 second rule.

I'll do some experimentation during the league. If the pact doesn't work I'll switch to impact.

The goal is to get a ton of frenzy charges, so we'll see how it goes.

You can probably just hang around carns chat and he probably knows.

I just asked, hes playing vaal pact with brutal fervor with lightning strike because the projectiles will give you overleech and the melee portion will give you instant leech. seems insane tbh.

I'm partially done with my chieftain strike build, so I'll get back to you with a link in a bit.

Okay maybe not chieftain. It got reworked apparently. I was just messing with marauder. Lets go with berserker shall we.

My testing was that rage was too many points to invest into vs using clusters. If you invest into rage I don't know how you fit clusters.
If there are mistakes in the config they will be rectified when rage is actually in pob correctly.

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SerialF wrote:

Well while mapping you barely drop any totems meaning any threshold you need is almost halved almost always, and most of the time casting 2 totems will be overkill. At minimum any threshold for mapping early on you have will be significantly cut. So unless you consider dmg for mapping is irrelevant, this is a huge boost early on.

That doesn't matter because if you have enough damage to kill the boss with totems, you have enough damage to kill the 30x weaker mobs without totems.

Killing a white mob with 1,000,000 overkill damage vs 2,000,000 overkill damage means nothing.

Most of the issues for melee, especially early game is the fact that bosses take a long time to kill if you have a skill which isn't a slog to clear the map with.

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SerialF wrote:

Well you re using 3.25 tree so it s part of the buff , it s to the crédit of the update. And glad can get akmost 90% spell attack block with almost no investment and versatile combattant for almost all content besides very hard hitting stuff. (Lucky block as you are aware) It warrant a bit more than what you did to disregard glad

Why would I not use the 3.25 tree if we're talking about the 3.25 gladiator? It seems like you're just unable to accept that you're wrong.

But you can show us how to get 90% spell block with "almost no investment".

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

My testing was that rage was too many points to invest into vs using clusters. If you invest into rage I don't know how you fit clusters.
If there are mistakes in the config they will be rectified when rage is actually in pob correctly.

I can't wait to actually get to real practical testing, speccing based on the gameplay, and the outcome of action in the times and clear rates. It'll be a lot of fun testing and re-testing everything. I might need to take some PTO.

I'm only learning how banners work now. There could be something really powerful there that I'm unaware of. I'm used to just smacking totems down everywhere and completely ignoring my banner, so throwing down banners is a natural replacement for it I think. There could be some fun gameplay there.

Darn there isn't much there for banners. That's a bit disappointing. The new banners all seem useful with Awe and Terror at least, and could have some practical application. They could be theoretically useful for farming condensed area league mechanics with champion.

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Kiss_Me_Quick wrote:

But you can show us how to get 90% spell block with "almost no investment".

I want this. That sounds really useful if I'm going to have no damage mitigation other than my own body.

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funplayer wrote:

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

My testing was that rage was too many points to invest into vs using clusters. If you invest into rage I don't know how you fit clusters.
If there are mistakes in the config they will be rectified when rage is actually in pob correctly.

I can't wait to actually get to real practical testing, speccing based on the gameplay, and the outcome of action in the times and clear rates. It'll be a lot of fun testing and re-testing everything. I might need to take some PTO.

I'm only learning how banners work now. There could be something really powerful there that I'm unaware of. I'm used to just smacking totems down everywhere and completely ignoring my banner, so throwing down banners is a natural replacement for it I think. There could be some fun gameplay there.

Darn there isn't much there for banners. That's disappointing.

go read up on banners: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3532184

tl;dr: the bonuses are good, the uptime is problematic, there is NO bossing