Hybrid builds: Do they have merit?

If you haven't seen the last few pages of the "How can we fix Hierophant" thread, the discussion slightly veered off into hybrid builds. This is part of what I stated in the other thread.

Take note I do not consider low-life as a hybrid build. Low life are simply ES builds that do not take CI.



I'm of the opinion that Hybrid builds have glaring weaknesses compared to standard pure life or pure ES builds. I think that these drawbacks are far too detrimental to play for minimal gains in Effective Hit Points (eHP) compared to other builds.

Multiple Attribute Dependency: Whether its Life+ES, Life+MoM, Life+ES+MoM, Life+ES+MoM+EB, all of them require picking up several stats instead of concentrating in a particular version. This is to say, rather than only worrying about life nodes or ES nodes in pure builds, you're now juggling multiple stats, attempting to reach decent levels of eHP.

The ES variants are notorious for necessitating the use of life regen for conversion via Zealot's Oath, or Ghost Reaver and vaal pact. Either option leaves life to only be regenerated through life pots or non-leech life regen mechanics.

The Life+MoM builds are far easier to accomplish further on the left side of the tree due to Warlord's mark leech, and the ample life+mana nodes on that section.

Less Effective Recovery: Taking huge spike damage or near 1 shots place hybrid builds at higher disadvantages than pure builds.

Life+MoM builds suffer as mana pots are incredibly slow or provide little recovery in the instant variants. You can attempt to juggle some "Damage taken gained as Mana", but due to its rarity, you risk bricking your gear and is not a true recovery option.

Life+ES builds either have to focus on life or ES recovery in terms of leech. If ES leech, life can only be recovered via health pots. If life leech, you're forced to wait out ES recharge to reach full eHP again. This, by the way, must be done without taking ANY damage unless you happen to go Occultist. You could always go Zealot's Oath, but you need need a lot of Life regen and max ES to make effective use of it.

Life+EB+MoM builds are the same as Life+ES builds in this regard while also not being able to cast any spells. Spell costs interrupt ES recharge.

Life+ES+MoM suffer the same as both Life+MoM and Life+ES builds.

Huge Opportunity Cost: This ties in to everything above. Juggling the multiple needed stats? You now have less to allocate to other desired stats such as damage, movement, Armor/eva, etc. The passive tree only has so many options.

Need particular flasks for recovery? You now lose those utility/damage flasks. This in some cases can hurt further as some classes rely on having that Granite or Basalt flask to avoid physical damage.

Going MoM? You cannot be stacking auras, that mana needs to be unreserved so you don't die.

Going EB? Standard ES recharge applies to spell costs.

Questionable Higher eHP Take my Hierophant in this example. 4800 Life, 1200 ES, 2200 unreserved mana (3k max, I built extra for an aura). All in total, 8200 eHP. This is attempting as high max life rolls as possible with +mana on my gear. (funny considering I was called an idiot for building additional mana).

My Inquisitor has 7700 Life. For a gain of 500 eHP and less armor, and all the drawbacks of going hybrid, I can get an additional 500 eHP.

Any other opinions?

Edit: 28/04/2017 With 3.0 Beta around the corner, maybe we can drum up some more discussion on the matter. MoM did receive some considerable buffs with 2.6, but have they been enough?

I think Shadow is more well-suited to hybrid buffer than Templar, not least of which is due to proximity to the hybrid clusters that ES builds usually just convert

My melee Poison Trickster is still one of the strongest characters I've made. The 60% increased recovery rate is really nice for hybrid buffer builds, more than compensates for the Less Effective Recovery point you made. That node plus Leech being OP allows me to stay 2800/2800 ES with pretty solid uptime (over 3800/3800 Life).

Well EB is more of Block/armor build with aeges aurora or Occultist.
Templar dont realy use mach of EB it use ES directly i imagine, its more effective when its directly ower life becouse they usualy invest in damage taken gained as mana.
Shadow is mostly on hibrid ES/EV side, it have option of Leeching ES and using Claws with Life on Hit for life, focused on block/evasion or IR/Aegis.
Tho shadow can use MoM on hibrid build its not that common choice i imagine.

Curent state of EB/MoM is not briliant considering one need besicly 2 key stone and then invest heavy to make it reality, compered to other key stones its realy lacking iniciative to be seriosly considered for defences in curent min/max meta.

MoM, EB and ES are strong mechanics when used to full potencial but its also realy pricy and narow way to that goal.

"

adghar wrote:

I think Shadow is more well-suited to hybrid buffer than Templar, not least of which is due to proximity to the hybrid clusters that ES builds usually just convert

My melee Poison Trickster is still one of the strongest characters I've made. The 60% increased recovery rate is really nice for hybrid buffer builds, more than compensates for the Less Effective Recovery point you made. That node plus Leech being OP allows me to stay 2800/2800 ES with pretty solid uptime (over 3800/3800 Life).

A really good point. Much of the Trickster tree does seem to overcome a lot of the drawbacks to life+ES hybrids, along with proximity to enhanced leech nodes.

Yeah I might agree with you overall though, I've tried a handful of other hybrid buffer builds and they all felt pretty weak, not sure if I just haven't given them enough love.

Conceptually at least I'm totally fine with builds that only work with lots of tweaking, adjusting, careful consideration of multiple stats, i.e. the "juggling" you were referring to

Currently my impression is that hybrid buffer is underrated (i.e. generally stronger than it looks) because there is one other player who has been singing the praises of hybrid defense, sidtherat I believe, but two peoples' experiences hardly make up a comprehensive analysis of game balance :)

"

adghar wrote:

Yeah I might agree with you overall though, I've tried a handful of other hybrid buffer builds and they all felt pretty weak, not sure if I just haven't given them enough love.

Conceptually at least I'm totally fine with builds that only work with lots of tweaking, adjusting, careful consideration of multiple stats, i.e. the "juggling" you were referring to

Currently my impression is that hybrid buffer is underrated (i.e. generally stronger than it looks) because there is one other player who has been singing the praises of hybrid defense, sidtherat I believe, but two peoples' experiences hardly make up a comprehensive analysis of game balance :)

I'm familiar with his concepts. His focus is more stacking block/evasion with some type of HP. You can still easily pick those up in pure life or es builds to great effect.

I don't think it's possible to pick up all those nodes while also getting enough eHP in these types of hybrid builds. One missed block/evade/dodge can mean death without enough eHP. It's pretty much why there's such a focus on pure max eHP builds like CI.

And I don't think one man's perspective is representative of game balance either.

"

Tsokushin wrote:

Multiple Attribute Dependency:

You mean, multiple attributes are good for you? That's a good thing :)

"

Less Effective Recovery

Well, lesser than Vaal Pact with imba gear for sure. But that's broken. Hybridding allows you to combine recovery from different sources, if you have any. MoM can recover life as it normally would, add mana regen and mana pot (they are really good, not sure why you belittle them) and it works. ES + HP can treat ES as its main buffer and assigne life leech to it, while treating HP as emergency buffer with potions.

"

Huge Opportunity Cost:

Rather huge oppurtunitiy possibilities. You don;'t have to go full on life or ES, you can combine whatever is near you or exists on your uniques or ascendancies or whatever and find out your EHP buffer is more than sufficient. That's a good thing.

"

Questionable Higher eHP

Hybrid has more EHP than pure life. That's a no-brainer. The only questionable thing is its comparison with pure ES which has insane scaling with huge investment and engame gear.

"

Take my Hierophant in this example.

It has garbage ES. I can't imagine it having any sensible use for you. If you want life + es, invest more than just 2 ascendancy points in it. Proper hybrids would probably go for ghost reaver and ES gear, as well as picking few ES notables (you can sacrifcie some of your life nodes for this). This way your ES would be closer (ideally - much higher) to what your life is, your buffer would be almost always full thanks to leech and you would have emergency heal in form of instant flasks when things go wrong. Opportunity cost woudl only mean less life, which is not high considering you trade it for both EHP buffer and EHP recovery.

i find this interesting .. why is the op comparing hybrid to ci?

hybrid is the intelligence version of armor and evasion. and when you frame it in that context .. hybrid is pretty fucking good

so long as you have about 40% chaos res(that is at-least -20 chaos res in merci) and 4k hp you should not die to anything chaos related .

and realistically the only pieces of gear in which es gets substantially more hit points over life is the chest helm and shield

in many cases you can get a 200 hitpoint hybrid gloves a 200 hitpoint hybrid boots a 200 hitpoint hybrid belt and rings and ammys actually give more hp when rolled for a hybrid

and while you can argue that investing into two hit point pools is inefficent.. you could also argue that it is at-least nice to have the option

life on spell casters tends to cap out around 5.5k and that is with around 180 - 190% life on the tree .. that is not a small amount of life when you consider how bad some of the life nodes in the witch/ shadow area are.

conversely it is very easy to get to around 250% es by just taking the easy es notables on the way to things and utilizing your intelligence stat.



so optimally what you do is you make your shield helm and chest pure es and the rest hybrid doing it this way almost always results in an effective hp pool higher than ci.

i had a 11k ehp hybrid that had no shield. the ci version was only 10k

useability is also an issue.. as i see hybrid as a good gate way to ci.. not everyone takes the transition from using flasks as a panic hp buffer to using flasks as a preventative measure


having 6k es and then having 4k life to fall back on with life flasks is an excellent training tool

"

Turbodevil wrote:

You mean, multiple attributes are good for you? That's a good thing :)

I'm saying it requires a high values of a higher number of distinctive stats to make viable.

"

Well, lesser than Vaal Pact with imba gear for sure. But that's broken. Hybridding allows you to combine recovery from different sources, if you have any. MoM can recover life as it normally would, add mana regen and mana pot (they are really good, not sure why you belittle them) and it works. ES + HP can treat ES as its main buffer and assigne life leech to it, while treating HP as emergency buffer with potions.

Again, different recovery sources mean slower and multiple steps to full recovery. Mana pots are slow.

"

Rather huge oppurtunitiy possibilities. You don;'t have to go full on life or ES, you can combine whatever is near you or exists on your uniques or ascendancies or whatever and find out your EHP buffer is more than sufficient. That's a good thing.

But your build will be significantly weaker than pure life or pure ES in Damage potential, recovery, and flask usage.

"

Hybrid has more EHP than pure life. That's a no-brainer. The only questionable thing is its comparison with pure ES which has insane scaling with huge investment and engame gear.

I've seen pure life builds with upwards of 9.5k, 8.5k without kaoms, and decent life regeneration to boot. That's far more tanky and recoverable than most hybrid builds.

"

It has garbage ES. I can't imagine it having any sensible use for you. If you want life + es, invest more than just 2 ascendancy points in it. Proper hybrids would probably go for ghost reaver and ES gear, as well as picking few ES notables (you can sacrifcie some of your life nodes for this). This way your ES would be closer (ideally - much higher) to what your life is, your buffer would be almost always full thanks to leech and you would have emergency heal in form of instant flasks when things go wrong. Opportunity cost woudl only mean less life, which is not high considering you trade it for both EHP buffer and EHP recovery.

The only reason it has ES is due to sanctuary of Thought. I've already lobbied for Sanctuary of Thought to be a mana->life conversion. The focus for my Hierophant was more a Life+MoM Hybrid.

Due to the mechanics of leech rate, if my eHP doesn't turn out to be more in ES than life in my current build, it would result in even more risk.

But, there's also an opportunity cost to high ES gear, even those with high life rolls: CI and dedicated ES builds are also attempting purchase. They are not cheap.

First off, my current character in Breach is a 'Hybrid' character as you describe here: Life + MoM.

Currently has 7.2k life and 1.8k unreserved mana at lvl 88. I use the Anger aura on an Essence Worm so I can have no reserved mana and use a Clear Mind jewel.

There's a huge Labyrinth Enchantment for boots that really enables a build like this:

Note that this is only the Merc lab version (Uber is 2%).
Here's the thing though: this regen is scaled by all your increased mana regen nodes from the tree.
Base mana regen is 1% of your pool/s. This mod multiplies your mana regen rate by 2.5, or by 3 if you have the uber version. Combine this with already very high life regeneration and life and mana leech from Warlord's Mark and I have an extremely tanky character.

The big issue that other versions of hybrid builds (gonna talk life + ES here) have is that it's difficult to recover both of your pools at the same time efficiently. (A good hybrid build for efficiency will typically invest in either mostly ES nodes or mostly life nodes). For myself, here's some combinations I've found effective:
1. Life + ES + MoM: Specifically, investment into life nodes and not grabbing any ES nodes that aren't pathing or also contain life. Usually on a high INT char with a fair amount of ES from gear. Usually uses Warlord's Mark.
->This works by using your ES pool and your mana pool as an additional HP buffer against big hits. Between packs your ES can recharge. I played this as a Trickster and it was very effective.

2. Life + ES + Ghost Reaver + Vaal Pact: Invest into ES nodes and only take life nodes that are pathing or contain ES. Carry a life flask for dealing with Chaos dmg.
->This is how a lot of builds are pre-CI, and it can work quite well. Your life pool is a buffer against large non chaos hits. This kind of build usually needs some chaos resistance to work well if you don't go CI.

Here's the biggest issue I have ATM: I feel Eldritch Battery isn't really very useful at all, unless you have some kind of full energy shield mechanics and want to use a self degen skill like Bloodrage or Righteous Fire. Those are pretty much edge cases though. There's also things like that you could do with Mjolner, Voll's Devotion, Kingsguard, and Ghost reaver that used to be pretty good with EB back when Mjolner was useful.

That's my 2 cents on the whole thing.

-Savage