Viable builds that aren't boring

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raics wrote:

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FarmerTed wrote:

I have an elemetal equilibrium build that alternates fireball and ball lightning for range and uses flame totem and freezing pulse when swarmed. I use lightning warp for movement and an elemental weakness curse.

Your clear speed can't be bad with EE, if you did it properly, however...
If you're alternating them manually, ball lighting isn't a wise choice, it's a multihit skill so only the first hit will get EE bonus (unless flame totem is up). And I hope you aren't using multiprojectiles on fireball because that's either low bonus, no bonus or loss, depending on how many balls hit.

I fire a bunch of fire balls off to try and alternate with the ball lightning hits. Most of my damage is from the Freezing Pulse/Flame Totem combo, although Ball lightning crits wipe a fair number of mobs. My build is probably ok, but I play mainly self found. This character got a gear boost because my friends were going to beat me if I didn't take their upgrades. I found a Shavronnes and was going to try pain attunement, but ended up letting someone borrow it. I'll try it later. I am not a really good player and not especially good at managing flasks, and my ES regen is a little slow. I use ghost leech, but it only does a so so job. I have problems with some rogue exiles, or when I get surrounded by too many mobs with no safe time to regen ES. But it is fun, and sometimes I do well.

Edit: and chaos sux a lot. This is a lot more viable than my Death's Oath build. Still looking for gear to make that survivable.

Yeah, thought so, lay off the EE and you will probably have better clear speed, with your setup it only hinders you.

You know, it's funny, but for all the (not totally unjustified) criticism Diablo 3 gets for being a dumbed down ARPG, it actually has significantly more involved skill combat mechanisms than PoE. You have a ton of situational skills and conditional attacks. With PoE's heavy emphasis on single attack spam, your non-spam attacks seem to be pretty solidly limited to an optional mobility skill, an optional charge builder and a curse, in most cases. And a lot of the rotations that use a little more than that still boil down to doing the same thing in a strict 1-2-3, 1-2-3 pattern.

Elemental Equilibrium is a nice idea for rewarding you for not using the same skill twice in a row. But it doesn't go far enough (1-1-1-1 becomes 1-2, 1-2), and it's not enough to counterbalance the spam all by itself, even if it did. An equivalent keystone for non-elemental builds would be a good start. Something that rewards you for weapon switching, instead of just penalizing you for it, might also be nice.

I'm not really sure what kind of utility skills that could be added without taking away from utility flasks, is the big thing. Short term buffs are basically out, and pets are so weak baseline that they require dedicated builds. So that leaves... not much, besides summonable walls or non-curse debuffs, off the top of my head.

Titan Quest, incidentally, did an interesting thing with situational spells that only worked versus certain enemy types, like undead. While you didn't use those skills a lot, they tended to be really, really good when you could use them. But I'm not sure if PoE classifies its monsters strongly enough to put in that kind of skill support.

Im having super fun with my fast moving evasion crit bower. Basically very twitchy gameplay (but still high survivability, you can't just stand where some super kole decides to smash).

2 attacks

Single target: frenzy or puncture

Aoe: Tornado shot or split arrow

Some people use ice shot as well, haven't tried that (neds more mana-regen it would seem).

Also, you use vaal grace and a jade flask.

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Saltygames wrote:

Im having super fun with my fast moving evasion crit bower.

2 attacks

And that's helpful in a thread asking for a build using multiple > 2 skills?
Everybody is playing Tornado Shot, I was one of the first Rangers in this league to go full TS build, it's nothing special anymore.

Oh since you are bored of it, everyone else must be too XD

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Karkadinn wrote:

You know, it's funny, but for all the (not totally unjustified) criticism Diablo 3 gets for being a dumbed down ARPG, it actually has significantly more involved skill combat mechanisms than PoE. You have a ton of situational skills and conditional attacks.

PoE's problem is the limitation of gem slots.
You're better off to use your 6L attack against anything.
You could swap your lightning strike for infernal blow against lightning resistant monsters, but in the end, the difference is just 1-2 more attacks, so why should you?
You could swap your Melee Splash for Added Fire against bosses, but why? It takes 2 seconds to swap gems, and 2 seconds longer to kill the boss with the splash gem.

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Titan Quest, incidentally, did an interesting thing with situational spells that only worked versus certain enemy types, like undead. While you didn't use those skills a lot, they tended to be really, really good when you could use them. But I'm not sure if PoE classifies its monsters strongly enough to put in that kind of skill support.

In PoE, this doesn't exist.
The only thing that comes close is monsters resistant against certain damage.

i dunno, d3 came down to the same sort of thing when I was playing it. You had WW which was spaming a few skills together but ultimately it was just one thing you attacked everything with. Hota, sometimes you have to bash to kick the fury off, then spam hota endlessly. Archon was... archon, you press archon then laser down everything, permafreeze you just mashed 3 keys over and over and over mindlessly. It just ended up the same, if you play min max u basically have one thing you spam.


You can set up all the same stuff in poe, you can use a weaker attack with mana leech to charge mana then spend it on a costly, high deeps skill if you wanted to. All the same functionality is there but it comes down to if you can just spam 1 thing thats probably quicker and in both games thats what a lot of people ended up doing. Perm tornado sprint ww, perm archon, perm hota, perm freeze, perm strafe, the hype was drawn to using one thing infinitely because its so min/max. Vault Trail Of Cinders, you just Vaulted to move and to kill, they had to keep trying to nerf stuff out of the game to encourage more multiskill play and then people would instantly find a way to chain one method of attack again. Maybe you had beastly bombs or something that you would use now and then on a hard fight which is like Vaal Spark trap, Vaal Reave etc etc.

Diablo definitely envisioned a more versitile combat thing, and maybe with all the changes there people actually play it like that now for all I know, but I do think people will try and find a spam regardless. I think PoE tries to give the opportunity for it, stuff like flame surge working on ignites etc but its hard. With D3 early on it was like there was 'no builds' if that makes sense. Thats how it felt because compared to WW, anything that was just a combo of skills that didnt work together to produce a single spam felt so lackluster and lacking in synergy that compared to the few permaspam setups it was hard pushed to see it as a build in its own right, not just an inefficient collection of random abilities.

One area where I think it had some power over PoE was using stuns and controls, things like that ground stomp thing that could suck enemies in, stuff like that was interesting and dynamic to play with. Its one of those things with online arpgs though, in PoE with desync the way it is those sort of skills would be a nightmare and not reliable at all. In D3, they sort of work but everything can hit you from so far that if you are near enemies, you will take damage, the ability to kite all damage was removed to hide that desync. So while you had the means to control mobs more in one sense, the game was balanced and built around you not being able to control combat like you can in PoE so it lost a lot of what potentially made it great anyway.

Sad to say, the online nature of these games now, I feel, prevents a lot of more detailed microcombat being a viable thing to design your game around. Thats how we build characters in PoE, to survive not being in control of every detailed move, and in D3 the damage levels are super tuned for the same thing, you find either you have the gear for a situation or not, you will take damage no matter how you play. Id argue in D3 it was actually worse in some of respects, PoE you can survive and kite with a glass cannon then die to desync eventually, where in D3 you just got obliterated right off the bat if you dont have the required survivability because damage becomes more like a normalised sheet of degen that happens when you are around mobs than something you can outplay. You can outplay damage in PoE up to the point where a moment of unfortunate desync removes your control of the situation then youre fucked.