Why is the right side of the tree so devoid of life?
" Doesn't that highlight a problem with the game? In my eyes a character that really invest in evasion (20k+ at least) and maybe a little less in life (Lets say 5k total) should be completely viable in doing pretty much everything as long as he doesn't fuck up. if he cannot why should you ever play a evasion based character then? I find it pretty annoying that the games defences feels more designed around 'broken' defensive uniques, like Kaom's heart or a lightning coil, then the actually defensive stats. There is pretty much no reason to go armour/evasion over getting as large of an effective life pool with massive amounts of life and/or ES and MoM/Lightning coil. just look at the top 100 hc characters or pretty much every build in every class forum; How many of them are truly a armour or evasion build? Or even more rare, a hybrid defence build (I haven't seen one in years). | |
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I think this problem really highlights the problem with defenses (ES, EV, and AR), which is that they just suck (ok not blue life). I don't remember the last time that I played a build that stacked ES, or AR that felt like any of those points mattered much at all. Sure they're convenient to have but they never really felt like they were worth it over more life nodes. Part of the problem is also just that the good recovery methods scale with more life, the useful regeneration amounts scale with life, and leech scales with life more than it really scales with damage.
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" 5k is a bit toolow imo, 6k is easily achievable, I dont see a reason to presume players have less in deep endgame. It does highlight a problem with evasion, potentially. Im not 100% sold that its a problem, it very well could be though. It comes down to if one presumes that a single defence method should never be enough. Very few endgame builds i make or that Ive seen stretch to 2 class starts, most go to 3 of the class starting areas. When is the last time you saw a ranger build for example stay within the ranger area, not crossing over to duelist or shadow? Its not even viable for endgame to stick in 1 little area. So you go to the shadow, an es class area, or you go to the duelist, an armour class area, you probably go to both, you pretty much have to go to 2 other class areas. So should we presume that not using some of the defences there is supposed to be viable? Raw life is shit compared to stacked defences imo. Hybrid defence builds are probably the strongest defences in the game, so far beyond a life stacker or a single defence type like pure es, ev or ar. How often do you see them? Well I play them all the time, see them elsewhere? Not often, people usually play like mathil type setups now, get 5k life and all the damage, die every other day and either accept it or come to the forums to bitch about how the game is full of 1 shots. I dont think hc ladder is a very good place to judge things tbh, youre talking early league budget ladder pushing by players who often dont really take time to experiment with stuff, they do whats cheap and what they know, what they know is simple and its enough to mostly work. You get some people in hc who actually study and experiment with the wider game, ppl like nugi, if you ask him if evasion stacked with energy shield is good Im fairly sure he will tell you that it is. Truth is though how many people in the hc top 100 have ever even tried doing it? Id honestly be surprised if you could find 10 of them that had ever even attempted it. build guide forums? Its just a place to post the biggest dps number u could conjur in pob now for the most isnt it? Armour and evasion on their own are terrible, I certainly wouldnt play them on a serious character. Together as a hybrid theyre amazing, and probably less than 2% of people who play this game truly know that because less than 2% have probably ever tried it enough to do it right. Thing is most people are either happy enough just stacking enough life to usually survive and then dpsing down the entire game before it can kill them because power creep is so out of control the games a total joke at this point or theyre following a build guide by someone whos happy doing that, failing, dying, and then bitching about it on the forum. Theres no real defence meta because for the most its not needed, its been reduced to what the minimum you can get away with is while you stack so much damage that you just press a button and everything is instantly dead then you pick up the items. As much as project pt was an insufferable creature at times he was right when he said all the monsters in the game, including almost all the bosses are just walking chests, just loot boxes that move around and you open by pulling the trigger on your 1 million dps spell. Thats why you dont see defences, thats why most people are absolutely clueless on how to actually stack them effectively, no ones ever shown them, no ones needed to, theres no call to show them because for 20 chaos orbs you can do so much damage so many different ways that the entire game just becomes a pathetic orgy of 1 click loot explosions that are so obscene we cant even play now without filters to hide 90% of it. |
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" My low life righteous fire afk guardians tanker says otherwise. Check out a few vids my friend made with the same build (i adjusted it going scorching ray for more deeps) Minotaur afk kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln2-LIM6_p4 Hydra afk kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfW0f6x_LLw Phoenix afk kill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5LGF79inEQ No AR/Evasion build could EVER get even remotely close to that level of tankiness. And yeah zero armour involved. Edit: excluding aegis cheese of course thats on the same level of immortality atleast for small hits. My own with less ES and regen but more deeps focused: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Ag2Lwe07U Last edited by zzang on Feb 5, 2018, 2:51:36 PM
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" I think you'll find that the main reason people spread out like that is to grab more life nodes. Put it this way: if it was possible to get +200% life from the ranger area alone, would you still spend all those points to path to other areas? Or would you just grab the DPS nodes that you're already right next to? " Sure, but the point is that no matter what mix of defenses you intend to use, you need a solid eHP pool at the base. You could stack block, dodge and evasion as high as you want, if you only have a 4k life pool and no other mitigation, then you can and will get your fuck smashed in red maps by random mobs. It may take a while, but eventually it will happen. Conversely, if you have a massive life pool, you don't need to have a lot of other defenses to survive, because even if you start taking heavy damage, your life pool gives you enough time to instalog and be perfectly safe. Instant logout makes irrelevant everything that happens after your reaction time: if monsters can't kill you in the first 2 seconds, then they can't kill you period. |
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" but if you also had evasion ud be even more tanky. An ar/ev build could stand in a guardians face attacking until it was dead, probably getting less close to death than that did against minotaur at one point and without using legacy gear. Like it gets down to 3k es, and its wearing legacy es gear that isnt even in the game now, legacy shield with way more es than u can get and a 20% legacy leo dot craft, legacy beast fur, legacy es hat, legacy ring es% craft, 3 legacy energy from within jewels, legacy boots, legacy shavs ring... low life build with 80 life and no shavs so this setup that we see even with all this legacy gear cant even run a t1 map safely and would have to change to a shavs chest which even with a max roll has 350 es now. How much es would this build have with current es gear and using a shavs chest so it could actually run a map? An amount that would have died trying to do whats in those videos. I could make an es build using legacy gear with close to the same amount of regen and almost the same amount of es but also having 15k evasion that gets hit less than half as much as that build and it would be a more tanky build, because its a hybrid. You could make a ar/ev hybrid crit attacker with legacy acuity instant leech that would easily facetank those encounters wihtout losing 4/5 of its hp pool at any point. Life stackers with a legacy kaoms are pretty legit, but its a legacy item, thats not current game balance. I will grant you though that a guardian regen tank is one of the few, if not the only hp stacking build in the game that actually does compete with hybrid defence methods, and can exceed the capabilities of a lot of them. A guardian aegis block tank is a hybrid of es, armour and block, and can also just afk the shit out of these bosses, and doesnt need any legacy gear to survive doing it. In standard the es regen tanks of old can still have their fun with their legacy gear, but rly in truth they need to revert a lot of these nerfs to es and then nerf the shit out of guardian to counterbalance it because es in a league outside of a guardian is too often a shitshow, but thats another discussion.... " youd need to spread for the better damage nodes too. Its irrelevant, you do spread out, its expected that you spread out. Why is not whats important, its that you are expected to, you need to, and that when you do you are in a position to mix defences, so is it necessarily wrong for the game to expect you to mix defences? I dont think it necessarily is, the case can be made for it being wrong, but I think thats an opinion and not an absolute thing. Once when asked about why evasion has this massive hole when it comes to phys mitigation that people claim makes it unplayable chris said that they expect evasion characters to find other means of getting physical damage reduction, and they can, its right there in many forms. So is evasion broken or is the idea that it should be enough on its own simply a flawed perspective? Thats the question Im posing. " well, that wasnt the point, Im not sure what relevence it has either. Why would u have 4k hp? Of course you need solid life, that doesnt impact your ability to also get defences at all. " Ive run around with 11k hp builds that have been instantly gibbed by pathetic monsters that could barely touch a build with defences, were talking dead in a split second. Logging out is also not safe, at all, Ive seen countless deaths to logging out, and Ive seen builds with as much life as you can possibly stack (life, not es) die far quicker than they could log out because their actual ehp was about 1/8 of a build with actual defences. HP + logout is far from perfectly safe, I know you want to bring everything back to that agenda but what ur saying simply isnt true. |
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" You totally missed my own build then it is using a shavs. Ofc with Aegis stuff getting more out of hand even in league environment. " I know i also got 2 of those (minus the armour and evasion part) but its tank by action (instant leech) not tank by pure raw tankiness. Last edited by zzang on Feb 5, 2018, 3:55:18 PM
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" How is hybrid defences better then raw life or focused on one defence? Evasion/armour both got the problem that it isn't very effective against large hits, as evasion doesn't reduce hit damage taken (just the number of hits you take), and armour becomes less effective the larger the hit is (and doesn't do anything against elemental hits). Combining them is on paper the worst thing you can do at the moment; sure you will be pretty much immune to smaller hits, but against large hits you are a lot worse off then a pure armour or a pure evasion/dodge character. You are more likely to get hit then a pure evasion/dodge char, and you will take more damage from the hit as a pure armour guy. I have never personally tested it, as everyone tells how bad it is, but on paper you will need a very high amount of evasion and armour to make it work. ES/armour or ES/evasion are properly the strongest defence build, but requires a lot more point investment then a pure ES/Life build. I had a ED trickster myself a league or two ago, that had 5k health 4.5k ES and around 15k Evasion, and he for sure was tanky. But I had to invest in so much points on the tree to get to this, that my damage really started to hurt in later stages (SSF so far from optimal gear and no strong uniques). " The hc ladder is the best place to look, end especially early on in the leage, as they heavily invest in defences compared to most ordinaire builds. If ybrid defences is as strong as you suggested, the whole ladder should be full of them, as I'm sure most of them know the game better then me or you. They theorycraft/try things out a lot more then you think they do. Taken Nugi as example (The guy I watch the most as well :p), all his builds I have seen this league so far have been life based with high leech/regen builds; sure some of them got some evasion/dodge or armour to support the life pool, but the core defence of every build is life and regen stacking. " if every build needs a solid amount of Life (and alright 4k is to low, but 5K/5.5k is pretty reasonable), even if they heavily invest in other defences, then defences are just not working. Somebody with 75% block change, 20k armour, and 20k evasion, but only 5k Life should be able to survive as much as a 8-9k Life/ES build with just a granite running. And currently that is just not case, as a granite on it's own is enough to absorb smaller hits, while all the stacked defences won't help you against a large hit when it goes trough. " If you die with 11k HP out of nowhere you made a mistake. And from own experience and seeing streamers die you most likely didn't had a granite flask running, as most high health builds barely got any armour without it active. Or they had a nasty debuff on, or a boss got Detonated on them (always fun). Anyway If defences still require a large life pool behind it (6k+ as you said yourself, which is 200%+ life on the tree without a kaoms/belly), then something is wrong with defences. A build that really stack defences, but only has 5K life (170-180% Life) should be completely viable in my opinion. Last edited by Tortunga on Feb 5, 2018, 5:17:08 PM
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I was thinking the other day how long it's been since my last 'Evasion needs a rework' rant. Years, I'd say.
I'm going to leave it that way. Let some other sap pick up that spluttering torch. But I will say this: Evasion as a core defensive stat was a mistake. It's clunky and useless against far too many damage types. Dodge is the mechanic GGG should have used to simulate evading enemies. And even then we now have so many 'new' types of damage that neither evasion nor dodge can handle, stuff that is neither traditional attack nor traditional spell. Stacked defences are fine but we of the East don't really get offered that. EV/ES is less stacked defence forming a rigorous survival basis than it is two sources of supplementary defence smooshed together. Without high life or CI, you're missing that crucial angle that handles shit like non-spell sources of damage (chaos and physical DoTs being the big pains) and big hits. Which is right now GGG's answer to the West side of the Skilldrasil's durability. Sucks to be us. *shrug* Warhammer 40k Inquisitor: where shotgunning is not only not nerfed, it is deeply encouraged.
Dogma > Souls, but they're masterworks all. You can't go wrong. I was right about PoE2 needing to be a separate, new game. It was really obvious. |
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