2h melee needs to be revisited...

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funplayer wrote:

I really tried for the past few leagues to work something out end-game worthy in the tectonic slam Chieftain realm without resorting to strength stacking.

Using the standard nodes will not work unless you crit. If you disable crit you can't get very far end-game without some real exalt juice for weapons and gear. If you go jewel clusters you'll get stuck trying to fight end game bosses until you mega-juice or switch to crit or strength stack.

The standard method of building a fire damage and stun based chieftain simply doesn't work with a tidebreaker and simple support gems currently. You are REQUIRED to use alternate quality gems and awakened gems just to deal enough damage as a STANDARD STRENGTH budget build, if you are using tidebreaker, while you suffer with lacking mobility and overall damage scaling problems that never seem to mitigate enough damage to stun anything crucial save for a random unique boss. I've built this chieftain 3 leagues in a row hoping to have some sort of breakthrough and I still haven't made it past t16.

I build poverty strength stacker and I'm basically end-game by level 75 with little resistance from bosses like Shaper.

The MAIN PROBLEM with tectonic slam is the windup. If it had a quicker windup, it would be considerably easier to clear content with it. I don't mind using protector to help with the windup, but it's not enough. You still spend a decent amount of time starting your attack, which you will often interrupt early due to threats, unless you juice attack speed and use protector on top. Even that isn't enough to keep you from getting randomly blasted by something and dying occasionally due to your attack windup. You're stuck in place for a considerable amount of time before that hammer goes down and the attack starts, so you often leap into a position only to have to leap again during your startup due to threats. This can happen over and over in sequence due to the quick nature of attacks and the slow startup of the slam.

There also doesn't seem to be any way to speed up the tendrils. I've tried a few things but not too many. Shockwave is core to this, and still doesn't do much. You can stack damage on damage on damage and get nothing end-game. Everything simple and damage-specific is just too weak gem-wise to be a real threat to tier 13+. You need to get really creative to get past that point with simple gems.