Defense > Offense

Every other game I've played I always try to get the right balance of EHP/DPS. I tend to enjoy melee more than ranged so I want enough EHP to survive the toughest battle but high enough DPS to get through those battles quickly.

So far my builds have been 100% defensive base (life/armor/life regen/resists) until 60, at which point I usually have 2-3k life, 50% DR and max resists then I start getting offensive nodes. Like you said, with my skills even only linked to two support gems, the offensive nodes do almost nothing and after 60 levels don't just pile up. I tend to go to lvl 70-75 so that's 10-15 offense nodes, not including traveling to them.

I've said it many times so far, I don't think the solution to surviviblity is adding more EHP related nodes, it's adding more weight to the stats so people can get the numbers they are currently at with less passive points allowing them to get something else.

I prefer balanced builds rather than tank or glass cannon but as the tree stands right now, unless you have good gear waiting, melee is forced to go purely defensive on tree and use gems for all their damage needs.

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flab wrote:

I think for the most part, melee builds (especially marauder builds, disregarding the recent GS popularity) are simply inferior in this game.

I'm also going to bring up a couple of points that I've posted about before/tried to get across with very little success so far.

Imo, the reason we end up going super defensive is simply because we can ALWAYS do enough damage. I'm not joking when I say I cleared a 66 map (the master of the blade boss one) with a 64 sword and board marauder with mostly defensive mf gear that does 700-800 base dps on his main attack, doubled with a couple of auras (yes, LOL) and had all of 3 offensive nodes (catalyze) which I had to go through to get to some life anyway. The sad part about this, my character still felt stronger offensively than it did defensively.

This brings me to my second point, granite flasks, just one of these and I never ever care about armour, stupid item, but without it I'd feel pretty gimped. I would also say it benefits life melee builds the least.

Another point I'd like to make is the imo woeful costs/damage with 1 hand + shield usage. You're paying the same price for your skills to get way way less damage, can't get 5-6 links. What you get is some block chance and unless you design almost entirely around that, just isn't very good.

So basically what I'm trying to say here again, almost everything (including monsters) does too much damage, non-melee players especially.

(Edit: I lied/forgot about spending only 3 points in offense, have Resolute Technique aswell).

While it brings me great pain to say it, I think that 1h/2h damage is one thing D3 did a pretty good job with. The difference wasn't huge so you didn't feel gimped wearing a shield but a 2h with some IAS destroyed S&B and even DW.

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flab wrote:

Yeah some of these issues have left me at odds with the game. To the point that I feel like *I* have no options in builds, I can't play summons or ranged due to preference, and melee for the most part is just really weak.

I'm trying out different builds with duelist but my passive tree doesn't change much. I really feel with the majority of melee duelist builds the options are go north to the life regen nodes and life wheel in the middle or go to the mara starting area. Most I've gone north because it feels dumb going to mara starting area when I could have just made a mara in the first place.

I hope there's a big overhaul to the duelist tree in 9.13 but they haven't mentioned much, well I actually haven't seen any mention of it. As duelist is probably the best of the hybrids right now I'm assuming the other ones need big changes as well.

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flab wrote:

The life/defense situation is exactly why I keep on rolling marauders, eventhough I spent most of my points outside of the marauder area (how ironic), save for the circle of life, which is hard to call strictly marauder area.

Also, IMO, templar is hugely underrated.

I don't feel templar has anything to call it's own. It's either a weak mara (because it has to travel to the mara stuff and his isn't as good) or he's a tanky witch. Even then, I hear alot of templar players getting CI so he basically becomes a old male witch rather than the usual homeless hoe.

Early/mid game I enjoyed Templar. Late game I couldn't get my defense up to really facetank everything (resist penalty 1 week race) and I didn't have the damage that the mara I was partying with had. I felt like a weak clone of his.

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Moosifer wrote:

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flab wrote:

The life/defense situation is exactly why I keep on rolling marauders, eventhough I spent most of my points outside of the marauder area (how ironic), save for the circle of life, which is hard to call strictly marauder area.

Also, IMO, templar is hugely underrated.

I don't feel templar has anything to call it's own. It's either a weak mara (because it has to travel to the mara stuff and his isn't as good) or he's a tanky witch. Even then, I hear alot of templar players getting CI so he basically becomes a old male witch rather than the usual homeless hoe.

Early/mid game I enjoyed Templar. Late game I couldn't get my defense up to really facetank everything (resist penalty 1 week race) and I didn't have the damage that the mara I was partying with had. I felt like a weak clone of his.

The removal of Avatar of Fire ended the usefulness of the templar class.
Or at least when I played before every templar was AoF, and now there are hardly any templars... so it's hard not to draw that conclusion :P

Glass canon characters in this game work, but mistake of glass canon character means certain death. It is like this in pretty much any other game. However, you can invest purely in offense, (take critical strike wand witch from build of the week as an example).

Pure defense is very easy and effective so it's just more popular. However, it is not the most effective way to play either.

I'm not sure if "defense > offense". Maybe base damage of weapons should be a bit lower and damage nodes made a bit higher. Then investing purely in defense would be a bit less attractive option while building balanced builds would give same result. But, this would in turn buff melee dps characters, and they are really not bad (flicker strike with blood rage can kill enemies incredibly fast)

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Moosifer wrote:

Early/mid game I enjoyed Templar. Late game I couldn't get my defense up to really facetank everything (resist penalty 1 week race) and I didn't have the damage that the mara I was partying with had. I felt like a weak clone of his.

I played caster templar in resistance penalty race and I felt really good on both offense and defense. I had AOE and elemental damage from templar starting point, defense from templar and marauder starting points, AOE from witch starting point. This was my best character so far, able to deal with anything and I don't think it was in any way worse than ground slam marauder.

My gear left a lot of room for improvement (if you consider mara with 500 dps mault I could have 2 100% spell damage wands as well) but I could kill most white mobs in 2-3 ice novas which probably worked better with increased AOE than ground slams of comparable melee marauder. I am pretty sure hitting 3 fireballs in point-blank range did more damage to single target with low fire resistance than heavy strike (and fireball had pretty nice AOE too). At the same time I had range advantage.

I could have played marauder and have almost the same character with very bad damage in beginning (desired skills were more available for templar however), I could have played witch and have almost the same character with very bad defense in beginning. If you think in this way no character has anything of their own, they just have their starting points, skill rewards and art assets. I could probably make simialr character with ranger or shadow but just with some points spent differently.

Mara has easier access to melee damage and life - reasonable. Witch has easier access to mana and spell damage - reasonable.
Templar has something in between and is fine as it is. It's a perfect character for tanky spellcaster and for double totems.
Only problems I currently see with templar is bad combination of armor+es gear (you need to use pure armor or pure ES to be effective) and forcing mana regeneration as first node (useless if you want blood magic, but I don't like it anyway :P)

If you tried to copy maul marauder as templar, it is not strange you felt like a weak clone of one.