Survivability

I have two characters that died at around 50-60 (I only play Hardcore), and I was wondering - how do you survive? How do you get better items? What kind of armor do you use? One of them used Evasion+Armor armors, it was a two-handed sword Duelist. The other one was a Witch, which used Energy Shield armors. The latter seemingly had no protection whatsoever, whereas the first one had plenty of HP, but seemingly that wasn't enough (which was over 3,000). By that level I usually have around 60-100% HP increment in my skill tree, and except a few damage nodes, the rest goes on the connecting nodes, which is mostly +10 of Dexterity/Strength/Intelligence.

To be honest, I'm out of ideas of how to survive. I'm always overleveled by ~3-5 levels, always have 70-75% resistance to everything except Chaos, and my DPS is around 2,000-3,000 with area skills, even though I only choose a couple of passives for that (5 maybe?).

Well, it's like this, playing 2H in HC just isn't recommended unless you use a ranged skill like ground slam or spectral throw.

Other than that, stacking a primary defense of choice and life just isn't enough. You also want as much secondary defenses as you can stack up, ones like block, spell block, dodge, spell dodge, stacked endurance charges, immortal call, mind over matter, arctic armor, physical damage converters like lightning coil...

And you also may want to make heavy use of blind-inflicting skills and enfeeble or temp chains curses, depending on setup and situation.

Decoy skills like conversion trap and decoy totem can also go a long way in keeping you alive.

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raics wrote:

Well, it's like this, playing 2H in HC just isn't recommended unless you use a ranged skill like ground slam or spectral throw.

Other than that, stacking a primary defense of choice and life just isn't enough. You also want as much secondary defenses as you can stack up, ones like block, spell block, dodge, spell dodge, stacked endurance charges, immortal call, mind over matter, arctic armor, physical damage converters like lightning coil...

And you also may want to make heavy use of blind-inflicting skills and enfeeble or temp chains curses, depending on setup and situation.

Decoy skills like conversion trap and decoy totem can also go a long way in keeping you alive.

I was using Ground Slam. I'm curious, why isn't it recommended, though?

Hmm. Could you provide more information on stacking? I think that's my problem, as I usually just use one kind of defense all the way. Though block, spell block seems to work only for a shield build, whereas dodging - I've only seen a few skill tree spots far away from say Witch build. SO I suppose evasion or armor would be something I should be using if I play with a Witch. Anyway, could you elaborate on this?

in second half of act2 Merciless difficulty goes up rapidly, the same in second half of act3.

According to your description, you never got there. I would suggest you to finish A3 merciless in SC, just to know what you can expect and to gain experience on how to counter different threats. It is close to impossible to learn from mistakes effectively when every mistake costs you many hours of releveling

2H melee builds do not have too many secondary defence options. The one raics did not mention is my favourite - 2H mace stunlock

I can.

If you play 2H you're giving up on block and spell block.
If you also chose Mara or Templar for their proximity to good 2H nodes (and because it makes sense to build 2H build on left side of the tree) you're also pretty much giving up on dodge and spell dodge.
If you chose mara or duelist, eldritch battery (needed for arctic armor) is pretty far.
If you aren't using eldritch battery, going mind over matter requires a huge amount of free mana on armor builds, evasion works better because your mana pool has more time to recover between hits.

So you pretty much got only incoming damage conversion, endurance charge stacking and immortal call readily available for a left-side 2H build. I can tell you from experience neither works exactly stellar by itself so you need all three in addition to a decent armor score to get some returns. And you will still get gangraped by strong casters.

What you could try is use duelist and go full evasion with lightning coil, acrobatics and ondar. Also make two CwDT setups, a low level one with enduring cry and a high level one with immortal call and enfeeble curse.

Or you could just go sword&board like every sane HC player does.

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Ludvator wrote:

The one raics did not mention is my favourite - 2H mace stunlock

Yeah, I've seen it working wonders, but it requires a fairly specific setup and some experience to pull off properly. Besides, I don't really consider it a passive defense method, more of a tactical approach, just like making a really wide cyclone that enables you to move and attack at the same time. It works while you're doing it :)

In my experience block life damage is the order of importance......

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Benalishhero wrote:

In my experience block life damage is the order of importance......

No, hit points always come first. However there is a point where hit points are far less valuable than a defense to cover them.

For instance, all it takes is a tiny amount of damage to get past your 75% block chance to kill you if you don't have hit points. But 50% block is incredible if you have 8k hit points.

I will play on standard, I do wanna know how it feels past that.

I'm feeling up for retrying with another Witch. I'll read more about the suggestions and try to figure out what I can do.

Appreciate the advice.