[HC] Imbalance between class and statistics ?

Let's talk about HC characters viability as self-found or new league. After playing lot of class I found out that some of these are not viable in HC, I talk mainly about shadow and ranger especially if they are bow user, I never tried a one handed shadow or ranger with shield as it seems that marauder just do better in this aspect.

On the other side I found out marauder a bit broken in HC, after few char failed in 1mhc I ran a marauder and just ran threw every boss/rogues with ease face tanking them mostly, I even face tanked vaal big smash in cruel(two in a row) and normal because I was a noob at this time.


My point is that these classes have not enough survability overall and/or dammage to compensate their lack of survability.

Looking at HC ladder I see only 2 ranger in the first 50 chars.


1. Dexterity provide useless offensive and defensive bonus. Dexterity won't help you to reach moving target as a bow user, so you need projectile speed and/or using ability with aoe like gmp or lmp so you can be sure to have one of your arrow landing on the taget.
Dexterity +1% evasion per 5dex is not only to low but alo useless, as the highest lvl you are the less the bonus will works against monsters, basically the efficiency bonus decrease late game.

Life bonus and es from strength/intel are just way better as they scale late game.


2. There isn't any strong enough life nodes on the skill tree, or even elemental resist.


2.Evasion do not help you to evade physical spells (leap slam...). Hence evasion is useless without armor and if you try to get evasion+armor you won't have enough life anyway. Even with full evasion character you will evade most attacks and just get one shoted by the attack who get through.


3.Bow have overall low dammage so not only you need a quiver with mainly offensive ability to reach the dammage of other classes, but also you have to take crit nodes who won't help you to survive in HC anyway (and they put a lot of crit nodes to compensate this).


4.You must kite way more than other classes with these char to survive so movement speed is nice but there is too much monster who will directly spawn at your face and 2 shot you no matter what at one point of the game. And movement speed don't help against desync even a 1 sec desync.

5.When you have a char that has enough DPS to kill monsters from range before they reach you some random rare monsters with reflect mod will get you killed. Sometimes you just don't have the time to read every monsters mod.

6. Acrobatics/phase should reduce 30% of attacks and spell dammages, there is no point to avoid 80% of hits and get one shot by the one who get through you. This is basically a nodes that say 1/3 of the time you won't die but others time you just wasted passive points.

7.Trap are goods and may compensate some of these weakness but you should be able to throw them without cooldown in case one monster didn't get on the traps(still 3 max).


So end of the build you have a char with low life, low armor, spend your time kiting or dying, who will die to reflect anyway even wit vaal pact.


Now if I'm wrong i'll be pleased that someone can teach me how to build a viable HC ranger self-found, without using cwdt set up and brigandine coil armor as I think both get nerfed in 2.0 anyway.


Maybe a fix to evasion being uselss would be a keystone instead of phase acrobatis that would make you reduce dammage via your evasion rating but remove your elemental res something a bit like CI, or something that make him avoid fatal blow. Or making dexteriy increase attack speed ?

On a rolepay view it would make sense that a char with high mobility and agility would be able to move to reduce the dammage of the hits, i.e taking a sword hit on your shoulder instead of your neck, move speed is there to make him dodge attacks but how can he stand and evade hits when he's surounded by groups of monsters anyway.

well youve probably missed that evasion/ondars/ocro is now the most popular type of defense. Many people say (though I disagree) its superior to Armour these days. Also lot of people think that ranged is now superior to melee


1) dexterity is not useless for bow builds. Acuuracy increases your damage in most cases (unless you use RT/Lionseys bow or Vagans mod) and is very important for crit builds, because chance to hit is being checked for the second time to confirm crits. Increased evasion is increased evasion, its alwyays good to have higher evasion when playing evasion build right? :) I dont understand your reasoning, perhaps you are confused from tooltip chance to evade? (Its only estimate based on AVERAGE evasion of monsters of YOUR level)

2)

"

There isn't any strong enough life nodes on the skill tree, or even elemental resist.

perhaps.. but resists from tree are not that much relevant

"

Evasion do not help you to evade physical spells (leap slam...).

first, leap slam is an attack and can indeed be evaded. Theres only handful of phys spells (EK, vaal construct projectile (chaos/phys), evangelist AoE, glacial cascade (phys/cold))

"

Hence evasion is useless without armor and if you try to get evasion+armor you won't have enough life anyway. Even with full evasion character you will evade most attacks and just get one shoted by the attack who get through.

It would be hard to find someone to agree with this. Actually, only little builds focus on both armour and evasion.

Evasion builds need indeed high HP to survive occasional big hit. Btw, Having some armour would not help you agains big hits anyways due to how Armour formula works.

3)

"

Bow have overall low dammage...

Compared to what? Again, would be very hard to find someone who would agree

4)

"

You must kite way more than other classes with these char to survive so movement speed is nice but there is too much monster who will directly spawn at your face and 2 shot you no matter what at one point of the game. And movement speed don't help against desync even a 1 sec desync.

well you know, ranged have to kite. Its always been like that in any aRPG. movement speed helps a lot and, I say it again, evasion builds need high HP to survive occasional big hit

5)
tell that to players playing 50k dps+ crit bow buids in HC. Reflect mobs are easily noticable

6)
maybe.. but dodge is dodge.. again, you should have enough HP

7)
really?

conclusion:

Are you sure there everything fine with your tree? gem setups? etc? looks like you have low HP and/or Evasion (Grace aura?), or missing Ondars... or doing something wrong

I checked your profile and see you have only one char marauder and on standard how can you be more biased than this.

I give you 100$ when you make a self found ranger bow user on hc on next league killing dominus around lvl 64-65. Which is finger in the nose with a marauder.



I'm sorry accuracy bonus from dexterity is useless, I don't have that much high acuracy and I tried to see how an aditional accuracy gem would help me to improve my dps on different skills, so I used a +800gem, this is way higher that what the dexterity bonus will give you and my dps on most skills increased from 4%. It is way lower that what any other gem would have give me or strength bonus give to melee character.
And you can have 100% chance to hit and still miss 80% of your shot because your projectile speed is too low.


Yes some people on standard with only one or two character think range is stronger as they fail with their build with zero life and armor nodes and cleave gem.
Facts are only two players out of 50 are rangers in hc top 50, and the one I checked used brigandine armor.


2) With very low armor any hits are big hits, any minions or strong rare will two shot you when they land. Of course little build focus on evasion +armor it is what I said evasion is useless.

You can't evade physical dammage from leap slam or maybe they have special mod, just watch some video with guys with 99%evasion taking every physical dammage from differents physical spells.


Did you read my post ? I'm not talking about any of my current build as most of my bow character are in standard and so build to be in.

And btw show us you do you get enough life nodes as a shadow, i'm not even talking about the difference in life regen of these builds.

me wanted to help you
you obviously not interested

you dont even know the basic mechanics.. and obviously have no idea how to make a good build (the 100usd lol thingy proves that)

I suggest switching to SC, there you can learn stuff faster. and btw surviving is not league-specific

and btw, I have around 2500 total combined levels on my undeleted chars, but thats not important

e: In case this thread is a typical rant, it should be moved to feedback section

OP doesn't even make a difference between physical attacks (Leap Slam, Cleave, Shield Charge) and physical spells (Etheral Knives, Evangelists attacks, Bear Trap).
Physical attacks are very much evadeable with evasion.

I would argue the strongest builds atm are crit bow based rangers/shadows, given how well they scale and how they can trivialize all of the game content. Crit archers dominate the game imo, their puncture traps 1 shot most bosses and their tornado shot / split arrow can clear monsters even 1 screen away.
My windripper char is the only char i have that can go to a 77-78 map with godknows what kind of mods with noncapped or even negative resists and still not die a single time because the tornado shot crits freeze the whole screen or outright kill the enemies.

Dexterity bonuses are fine, extra accuracy helps with crit builds and makes gearing easier (don't have to search for +300 accuracy on every single piece). Since you get some inherent %evasion and it doesn't scale up great past a point, you can spend points you would spend on evasion nodes elsewhere.

Only point i will agree with you on is:

"

There isn't any strong enough life nodes on the skill tree

All builds struggle with life if they cant reach the scion life wheel, which is sad.

If you think bow chars got it bad with survival, try playing a 2h melee char in endgame content.

^ agree, but cant resist a little mechanics "nitpick" :)

Bear Trap does not deal spell damage, it is secondary damage ;)

"

Mannoth wrote:

My windripper char is the only char i have that can go to a 77-78 map with godknows what kind of mods with noncapped or even negative resists and still not die a single time because the tornado shot crits freeze the whole screen or outright kill the enemies.
If you think bow chars got it bad with survival, try playing a 2h melee char in endgame content.

All builds struggle with life if they cant reach the scion life wheel, which is sad.

I have a 2h melee chars in hardcore doing 66 maps being under lvl and self found, I don't have a bow one in hardcore.

Where is your traper on hardcore we don't see him on ur page, could you screen to prove what you says.

All I see is that you are a softcore player, talking without any experiences of HC, even less self-found HC.


You mean all build but templar,whitch,scion and marauder Am I right ?

Yes i don't play hardcore, that doesn't mean i don't play self found from time to time.
Don't assume all my builds are glass cannons because of that, i will start playing hardcore once lockstep rolls out, i have no intention of playing it while desync plagues the game.

That being said i do not see why are you mentioning traps, unless you mean the puncture trap which literally any crit bow char can put on a 4L and wreck bosses. The argument was made regarding crit archer builds, i do not think anyone but you are actually complaining about them being too weak.

Also i wouldn't call 66 maps endgame content for a 2h char, i would call atziri and stuff like poorjoys asylum endgame. My point was that range chars got it way easier compared to 2h melee chars survival wise, maybe you got less total hitpoints but the fact you don't have to go melee makes a lot of stuff easier to survive.

Not to mention bow chars get a quiver, the amount of unique quivers and mods that can roll on them is amazing, allowing for customization 2h melee chars can only dream off. Not to mention it can make capping resists / getting more life / getting more dps a lot easier.

And i won't even mention the magnitude of crit nodes for bows compared to melee 2h chars. Good luck playing any crit 2h weapon that isn't a staff atm.


If you want to play a self found char in HC, yes i will agree 2h melee has it easier at start because it is easier to get a stronger 2h melee weapon than it is to get both a quiver and a bow. However nothing stops you from farming docks or archives or a zone and getting alterations to roll a decent harbinger.

I talked about trap because it's one of possible build of shadow charaters, it can be spell trap or physical trap, also can be use in a defensive way. It is some nodes that most char won't be able to get hence it is supposed to be one of shadow or ranger advantage the issue is if you run out of trap and some monsters just avoid it or you miss your spell you have to wait 3seconds to land an other, quite long in some situation.

Quiver don't make caping resist more easily, on left side there is free +15 elemental resist passive, and +3%block chance,+10elem. Elementalist is +12resist,+12elemdmg,5%to freeze,shock,ignit.
It is 27%elem resist with two passives.

On ranger side you need three passive to get +14%elem,+eveasion ratings. Also any shield on this game give higher resists than quiver.

It may be easier to run atziri with high dps low life ranger, except you won't get there on the first place with a ranger on HC because you will die before. As you know desync can happend and ranger just don't handle desync at all, I don't even want to use this as an arguement as I feel it is a separate issue.

I'm not talking about 2h being easy or not I find that 1h+shield is way more easy, even blue shield will do the trick, you can have a perfect quiver if your bow sucks you won't have dps, at least with good shield you have strong defense.

Well i can't speak about trappers because my trappers always felt like paper so i never played a lot of them.

No passive is actually free, you have to spend points to get them, you can cap resists without any resist passive on the tree much easier with a quiver than with a 2h melee weapon, which was my original point.
I won't make an argument for elemental resist nodes, there are only a handful good ones on the tree, i am aware of that, but you respec out of them once you get decent gear.

Running atziri as a archer is a lot easier than running anything else. Puncture traps demolish every boss there. You can just throw a trap and run around dodging stuff.

Yes desync is a big issue when playing a evasion/dodge based character. Block and armor/endurance charges work better when you factor in desync as a thing, however lockstep should make it a lot better.

Thing is, the defense mechanism are split for a reason, some are harder to stack and obtain than others, some are mutually exclusive even. I understand this can be frustrating as the right side of the tree literally screams evasion/dodge which do not play well with desync in the game.

However it is as it is, 2.0 will probably change a lot of how we build our defense and until then i dunno what else to tell you.

You can't really count on a Lightning Coil dropping as self found, nor cloak of defiance, belly or kaom so the defense you can stack is limited in your case.