Spear / Huntress is the worst levelling experience I've had in poe 1 or 2

Yea, i gave huntress a fair shot, but it's time to throw in the towel. A huge part of it is that lack of crafting currency and rare item drops through the earlier stages of the campaign. You get stuck running the same zone to level very slowly just to gain an extra level so the boss cause you don't have the gear to do it. it's garbage.

Unpopular opinion apparently, but I've had more fun with huntress than any other class until now, she's really fun to play and has lots of cool skills you can mix and match. It's my favourite class at the moment.

huntress is mega op and levels so fast.

my first huntress (in ssf) i ran the whirling slash and tornado spam build, with frozen locus into frostbolt for chilled ground to empower tornado. it aoe cleared 1.5 screens away (esp in confined spaces) starting at level 7.

in hc ssf, i went for a full strength stacking rake+stomp with shield-bash and herald of ash build and cleared act 1 in 2h33m. rake+stomp, if you commit to strength stacking in the passive tree, is absolutely obscene damage, and oneshots every non boss and trivializes boss fights. Plus, you can keep running a low level spear and level 3 rake skill, because stomp dmg comes entirely from strength, not your spear or rake level. This means damage from your spear skills really falls off hard, so if you want utilty or ranged abilities, pick them up with strength weapons like mace or crossbow.

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KuroSF#6521 wrote:

huntress is mega op and levels so fast.

my first huntress (in ssf) i ran the whirling slash and tornado spam build, with frozen locus into frostbolt for chilled ground to empower tornado. it aoe cleared 1.5 screens away (esp in confined spaces) starting at level 7.

in hc ssf, i went for a full strength stacking rake+stomp with shield-bash and herald of ash build and cleared act 1 in 2h33m. rake+stomp, if you commit to strength stacking in the passive tree, is absolutely obscene damage, and oneshots every non boss and trivializes boss fights. Plus, you can keep running a low level spear and level 3 rake skill, because stomp dmg comes entirely from strength, not your spear or rake level. This means damage from your spear skills really falls off hard, so if you want utilty or ranged abilities, pick them up with strength weapons like mace or crossbow.

the rake build problem is that around act 3 your new gear starts to ask so much dexterity that you need to curp on your str stacking

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Urza_Mechwalker#7393 wrote:

the rake build problem is that around act 3 your new gear starts to ask so much dexterity that you need to curp on your str stacking

Why would you be equipping dex gear on a strength stacking build?

Equip strength gear. Most of my gear is armor/evasion, with some straight armor pieces.

The thing im not so clear on is when and how this rake/stomp falls off. I'm told around Act 5/6, but im in act 4 on this character. (it was honestly a bit of an experiment, so im shocked it worked this far)

Also, keep in mind that strength stacking has diminishing returns like everything else... When you have 10 str, the +5str is 50% more dmg, but when you have 100 str, +5str is 5% more dmg...

This means after about 50/60 str, it pays to go into increased dmg nodes (but not melee or attack, as stomp doesn't count either of this as it's an AOE hit instead, so go for increases to damage that are aoe/physical/hits) and also go into attack speed (which you can get from dex to attack speed conversion near the big dex cluster)

Also, if you can get the unique poison spear, it will provide another axis to buff rakestomp dmg.

hmm. explo spear is good imo. there's a support gem that almost halves the duration, then +1 limit, now you can throw two and the first will detonate the second, double damage, throw a storm rod after, it will get detonated as well, now you have 3 things blowing up at 1 time, two types of elemental damage, can scale this very well with "projectiles gain damage from recent melee" and use disengange with +30% AoE to proc that bonus... dunno. you might just be playing wrong.

old post I guess, takes a bit to find the playstyle that works, way too quick to decide it is the worst leveling experience