Is versatility dead as a concept?

I'm new to PoE, and I'm chronically allergic to the idea of using a 3-rd party build.
Farthest I can go with that is studying other people's builds to get the general idea of what's going on in the game. (Specifically I don't like the idea of using other people's ideas and solutions, learning from their experience on the other hand is something I'd gladly do.)

The point is - the above set me on a path of thinking up a build and from my own wiki studying as well as from what little I've seen from other people's builds I'm coming to conclusion that PoE build-making is rather... narrow.

Seeing how there are "hybrid" classes in game, and even some clearly hybrid passives such as instruments of virtue, and also knowing the fact that games like this one likes throwing a "type immune" at late stage I was trying to come up with something that could effectively use skills of different damage types and sources.

From what I've gathered it'd probably be viable to make a build that could handle multiple sources with the same type, or multiple types from the same source, but not a build that could switch both type AND source.

Let's take a look at our potential damage-building material.

A "stack" of +x% increased damage,
combined with casting speed/attack speed,
combined with critical,
and sprinkled with some "more" damage.
(Did I miss anything?)

And most of those are rather... specific.

The easiest sources of increased damage it would seem are "type"-specific (increased physical, increased elemental, increased fire etc).
You could theoretically fill-in here with some generic "increased damage" but that doesn't exactly grow on trees does it?

Next comes the speed. There are some passives that provide speed to both spells and skills, but generally those are different stats which further divide the damage options.

The critical behaves in somewhat similar manner. While the general critical is quite general, there are specific options and when it comes to critical you go big or go home, so that's probably not something where you can skip specifics either.

And then there's "more" damage, I'm probably not even going to go deep into it because when it comes to "more" you get all you can get your hands on, you don't get to be picky here AT ALL.

The result of all of the above is ... demoralising.

(Pretty please) Correct me if I'm wrong but the above boils down to a simple fact - your best bet for dealing adequate damage is sticking to a simple attacking pattern.

There's SOME wiggle space I guess, but in general you pick something like "spells with cold damage" and all your wiggling is limited to which spell with cold damage you want. Or which of the attack skills you DW-ed daggers can support.

My own idea of bypassing those limits was to stick to a critical build. Seeing how it applies to both spells and attacks so long as I don't go for DoTs it should in theory apply to a whole "arsenal". In practice, I don't think I can rack up enough critical without touching something like "critical with spells" or "critical with daggers" (which by extension means critical with attacks with daggers).

On top of it, even if I DO manage to stack up enough general critical, can I also pair it up with enough "Increased damage" without limiting my arsenal to a single source or type? Something tells me that no, I will not.

And then there's "speed" and "more" components nailing it all down even further.

Personally, I find the idea of focusing all one's effort on a single skill repulsively boring, but every time you skip an opportunity to specialise you're harming your own efficiency and it it would seem that PoE consists almost entirely of various specialisations.

I wouldn't pick something like "increased trap damage" because I don't like the idea of being limited to traps only. I even wouldn't pick something like "increased melee damage" or "increased spell damage" because I don't like the idea of either sticking to just melee or in reverse locking myself out of melee. I'm not exactly a fan of sticking to a single damage type, but I wouldn't be averse to that either IF that didn't force me to run for the hills the moment I meet something like "immune to physical damage". I'd gladly stick to a single weapon, but weapons themselves aren't exactly universal in what they offer. You could get some versatility out of the serpent stance, but that's about it. The rest of weapon passives and, from what I've seen so far, the rest of the weapons themselves aren't geared for both spell use and skill use.

And yet, the fact that there are mixed passives like instruments of virtue, serpent stance, or even coordination don't quite let me rest my case yet.

Normally I'd go make my own mistakes and trials and/or cherry-pick the forums for information, but with my lack of PoE experience neither is going to get me anywhere. The feeling that skipping specialisation would kill my supposed "build" is mostly a gut feeling so far, I could come up with workarounds that could work in theory, but I've no idea if they'd get me anywhere in practice. And I don't even have enough practice to know which exact practice to read up on to get a better idea of where those possible moves would work and where they would fail. Running my own experiment probably isn't going to end up too good either. On top of my lacking game knowledge I don't exactly have a window for running said experiment blindly - I've got friends playing. They aren't experts themselves but since they don't have any qualms about using 3-rd party builds and have already played enough during breach league I don't think they are likely to run themselves into a dead end. My experiment on the other hand is more than likely to end badly and the perspective to re-level while they are going forward is not exactly appealing. I've got time to throw around until legacy, but I don't think that'd be enough time for a newbie like myself to properly test a supposedly crazy build.

So, here are some questions:
- Is it possible to make a decent hybrid melee/spellcasing build that wouldn't require a "second life's worth of looting" to run it? (or should I forget about it and go pick something more "streamlined")
- If so, what kind of offensive stats can it be based on? Does it have to focus on a single damage type to get anywhere? And if so how can it handle type immunes? (I THINK I can handle an experiment with that much information. So long as I know what stats to base it on, even if I mess up the build I don't think It'd turn into an unsalvageable mess.)

Yeah, sadly, depending on which stats you're combining, hybrid in this game is quite inoptimal, or perhaps just very expensive at best. If you want a strong build, you probably at least have to settle on just Attack damage or just Spell damage, and building for 2 specific elements is generally not efficient unless you go full conversion of 1 to the other.

I mean if you set your standards lower (i.e. endgame target: farm dried lake, white-tier maps, maybe yellow-tier maps occasionally) then you can probably put together a viable hybrid build however you want to.

Unlike Diablo 2, this game doesn't have any damage-type immunities. The closest you get is Immortal Call on bosses, which is a timed buff for immunity to physical. If you're a physical build you can just wait it out and kill them real quick in between buffs. There's just status ailment resistance, and on some bosses status ailment immunity.

Single damage type hybrid is probably your best bet if you want to go Attack/Spell Hybrid. I'm currently running a dumb inefficient (high cost, low power) Starforge Shadow that takes unspecified physical damage bonuses at shadow start. You have to be careful with physical because when it says "attack" it won't apply to physical spells.



This is a good item for Attack/Spell hybrids, it'll let your spell increases apply to melee

EDIT: BTW, "getting to endgame" aka completing story mode doesn't really require much optimisation nowadays due to power creep, especially if you trade. Just some basic principles (all or most of your bonuses are allowed to apply to your main damage skill; get Life and Resistances for a beginner, or ES and Resistances for advanced) will take you a long way. You can really build anything if your only concern is completing story mode.

Getting good damage is all about stacking more multipliers as high as you can and the easiest way to do that is to be highly specialized into one damage type (note: if that type is phys, stuff like hatred and added fire damage support are good more multipliers even though they give you elemental damage because all your phys modifiers still apply to the bonus damage).

Immunities aren't as build stopping as people make them out to be(they only apply to DoTs and status ailments) and if you're new to the game and rolling your own builds, you won't reach those bosses anyway. Don't worry about them.

This is a BF - CwC - BF Scourge Pathfinder build that was played to level 100 in BHC. Scaled with flasks, frenzy charges, %chaos damage, %minion damage and %area damage.

Personally I've been thinking about making a Cyclone - CoC - BV Assassin with Hegemony's staff. Scaled with the %phys/chaos nodes in Shadow start and global crit (staff nodes also have this, as you noted), and all power charges.

Another similar option is Cyclone - CoMK - BV with Ngamahu's flame and Avatar of Fire conversion, scaled with Elemental Overload, %fire, %elemental and %area. But this would probably be limited to fast map clearing and unable to deal with tanky bosses due to the CoMK mechanic. If GGG ever changes Cyclone into a channeling skill, the option opens up to play this with CwC.

As for builds that truly alternate spells and attacks - well that's a lot trickier. Alternating skills is very rarely worth it to begin with. But you can insert Vaal RF or Molten Shell, into a fire based attack build for example, for big ignites vs bosses.

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adghar wrote:

This is a good item for Attack/Spell hybrids, it'll let your spell increases apply to melee

And this is what I dislike about PoE the most. IMHO the whole idea of "build-enabling" items is beyond wrong. It's one thing to train yourself to only fight with a sword, it's a completely different thing to train yourself to only fight with THE sword. First is a professional specialisation, second is an emergency short-cut and generally would be seen as lack of training IRL.

Seeing how they got hybrids written all over their passive tree I think this kind of feature should have been made into a keystone passive (several of them to be exact), instead we get weird things like point blank or avatar of fire sitting there and have to adapt some builds to items instead of just preferring some types of items with some builds.

Same thing with unarmed builds (which are only viable if you have the right gloves) and who knows what else.

Ok, enough rant.

So you're saying that even a single-type hybrid-source builds will run into trouble on high-end?

Are there ways to cover both ranged and melee combat with one source then?

Like melee (read: short range high damage) spells (doesn't look like it) or worthwhile distant attacks that work with melee weapons (seen some, but no idea if they work well enough)?

And if hybrids "don't fly" then what the peep are the serpent stance and blunt trauma for? (avoiding melee with pure spell casters?) And what's the Inquisitor all about then?

"

...and if you're new to the game and rolling your own builds, you won't reach those bosses anyway. Don't worry about them.

Ouch, that hurt. Even though it's most likely true.

Speaking of which, just how bad of an idea is it for a newbie to make one's own build in PoE?
Am I doing something completely pointless or excessively futile/unrewarding? Should I really just bite the lip and go mimic someone else (like my friends did) until I'm good enough to walk on my own?

"

Zed_ wrote:

As for builds that truly alternate spells and attacks - well that's a lot trickier. Alternating skills is very rarely worth it to begin with. But you can insert Vaal RF or Molten Shell, into a fire based attack build for example, for big ignites vs bosses.

Well the initial "draft" assumed that there'd be at least SOME specific difference between enemies that by itself would cover the inconvenience with difference in efficiency.

For example switching to a trap or a dot to avoid reflected damage doesn't seem like such a bad idea if the skill in question doesn't break out of a lot of your chosen damage mods.

Is that not worth switching a skill for?

Also, wouldn't alternate weapon set be a convenient way of switching skills?
Or is the added cost of an extra weapon and the extra gems in it too much of a burden?

I sometimes get the feeling that GGG attempts to encourage Attack/Spell hybrids, but due to path of least resistance and all that, specialization always ends up being stronger. Jack of all trades makes you master of none, and apparently, mastery is important in this game, if the top level players have shown us anything.

"

Reianor wrote:

Are there ways to cover both ranged and melee combat with one source then?

Like melee (read: short range high damage) spells (doesn't look like it) or worthwhile distant attacks that work with melee weapons (seen some, but no idea if they work well enough)?

If you mean something like bow+sword or bow+dagger, that's very unlikely. However, there are a couple of Attack skills that use a Melee Weapon to fire a Projectile - the most prominent of these that come to mind are Lightning Strike and Spectral Throw.

There are plenty of short-ranged Spells or Spells that you can make into short-ranged. Blade Vortex, unmodified, is rather melee-range.

"

And if hybrids "don't fly" then what the peep are the serpent stance and blunt trauma for? (avoiding melee with pure spell casters?) And what's the Inquisitor all about then?

Serpent Stance could be used for an Attack build or a Spell build, and their Attack or Spell would gain full benefit from the crit. "with X" is always Attack, never Spell, so Blunt Trauma is Attack builds only. Inquisitor's main draw is ignore elemental resistance on critical strike, so that encourages elemental, but focused elemental (ele Attack or ele Spell, but not both) still ends up being stronger because more of the bonus is concentrated into your main damage skill. Instruments of Virtue looks like a spellblade passive at first, but then you realize that you can just activate it using movement skills for low-cost benefit to your one main concentration (for example, Whirling Blades on a dagger Spell build, or Flame Dash for an Attack build. I manual cast curses, so that gives me the huge Attack boost without having to invest in spell damage).

"

"

...and if you're new to the game and rolling your own builds, you won't reach those bosses anyway. Don't worry about them.

Ouch, that hurt. Even though it's most likely true.

Aye, there's a very wide range of content available in this game; not all players are expected to reach all content. If you've played Final Fantasy, I'd say The Guardians + The Shaper are something like the Dark Aeons or Yiazmat or some of the Omega Weapons out there. And just like with Final Fantasy you have to build in a particular way to beat these ultra secret power bosses. However, just about anyone can finish story mode, and there are a wide range of builds available to clear the vast majority of endgame content (like sidequests in Final Fantasy).

"

Speaking of which, just how bad of an idea is it for a newbie to make one's own build in PoE?
Am I doing something completely pointless or excessively futile/unrewarding? Should I really just bite the lip and go mimic someone else (like my friends did) until I'm good enough to walk on my own?

No way, I fully support the choice of new players to make builds for themselves. It's very probable that means your first characters will be quite weak, but you will learn faster and get more satisfaction from the learning (more power growth), which will make you stronger over all. When I started this game I did not write any build guides. My first character was garbage. Now, I've had a character reach level 90 in Hardcore and I'm running red-tier Maps with no issue.

"

Well the initial "draft" assumed that there'd be at least SOME specific difference between enemies that by itself would cover the inconvenience with difference in efficiency.

This was probably true 3-4 years ago, but since then, there's a lot of homogenization, you just see yellow and roll over them, or the differences are purely tactical and not in stats like Volatile Xbloods, where you just want to be far away from the enemy when it dies, no amount of versatile offense would help you there.

"

For example switching to a trap or a dot to avoid reflected damage doesn't seem like such a bad idea if the skill in question doesn't break out of a lot of your chosen damage mods.

Is that not worth switching a skill for?

This used to be a very effective tactic 3 years ago or so, now people just reroll Maps to skip reflect, or flask through singular reflect monsters, or take anti-reflect nodes like with Slayer and Elementalist.

"

Also, wouldn't alternate weapon set be a convenient way of switching skills?
Or is the added cost of an extra weapon and the extra gems in it too much of a burden?

Alternating weapon is a bit slow and clunky to prevent attack speed loophole shenanigans, and the main thing is that there's not much economic benefit to switching skills. Most of the time you can't have two main damage skills going at once, and if you do you usually have plenty of room to make it work with 1 weapon setup.

Ive never followed build guides. I started playing this game on the first day of open beta, there were not really build guides to follow and I had no desire to do so anyway. Its fine, if you are open to learning your way through making mistakes ull work it all out yourself.


As has been said, theres no real immunities, wouldnt worry about that.


you can hybrid your offense, but some level of specialization will be required. There are not a bunch of generic "% all damage% nodes and items that just work with everything.

you can take spell damage, elemental damage, cast speed and crit, then use any combo of ele spells. you can major into % elemental damage and global crit and then use ele attacks + ele spells, you can swap the ele damage for phys damage and use phys spells and attacks instead. If you want to go into attack speed you can use an attack to proc spells via cast when channeling, cast on crit, cast on melee kill etc to get around needing to also invest in cast speed or not having ur attack speed contribute to your spells.


you can choose to go for elemental melee attacks combined with physical projectile attacks, and you could even do that without specialising in 1 particular weapon type like daggers or swords, but you probably have to decide if you are using 1h weapons or 2h weapons. You could leave it open to 1h or 2h, but that would probably mean picking a specific base like swords or axes.


thing with hybrid, and its true for offense and defense, it works but its more complex, its gonna take more game knowledge to see the synergies open to you.

the game is about specialisation to some extent, you cant completely shurg off that aspect otherwise all the passives and items become slightly pointless. If you could make a build that can use any form of defense, any skill, any damage type, any weapon type and be as efficient as any build that has some kind of specialization why would u ever specialize? why have different weapons and different skills when this 1 completely optimal build allows you to just bypass all choices without any drawbacks?

A game like D3 you can grab a 2h axe and its exactly what you want to give you damage for a barbarian making huge attacks, and for a monk doing kung fu, and for a wizard casting spells, and for a witch dr summoning minions, and you can find a 1h sword thats exactly the same deal, just works for everyone doing anything they want. The result is a pretty poor game, and the only way they get away with it is by attaching so much power to specific uniques and set items, where anyone can just use an axe for any spell, attack, summon, whatever, but you need this specific axe to really function the way you want to, thats what makes 1 build different from another. As you point out thats not ideal either, thats pretty bad in its own way.

Im not against build enabling items but theyre not needed in poe, theyre side options, they open interesting doors here and there but pick any skill, you can make a build around that with rare gear and smash up the game just fine. BiS rares are the most expensive, powerful, hard to come by items in the game, always have been.

... I wish it was possible to do like

Bow + Sword, switch em out whenever you feel like, with the weapon swap

dont think thats reasonable in this game, is it

you could do explosive arrow switched with oros melee as an elementalist or something of this sort.

"

Reianor wrote:

"

...and if you're new to the game and rolling your own builds, you won't reach those bosses anyway. Don't worry about them.

Ouch, that hurt. Even though it's most likely true.

Speaking of which, just how bad of an idea is it for a newbie to make one's own build in PoE?
Am I doing something completely pointless or excessively futile/unrewarding? Should I really just bite the lip and go mimic someone else (like my friends did) until I'm good enough to walk on my own?

I wouldn't say so. I've never followed anyone's guides. If you're looking for immediate success it's not the best approach but I think it's a lot more satisfying to make your own builds.

You should also keep in mind that a new league is starting next Friday so if you brick a character or two in the meantime it doesn't really matter.