My Marauder. Looking for a critique or two, gearing up for maps.

Well, Here I am at the end of A2 Merc, and I'm pretty pleased with my Marauder, outside of a few times when my gear really showed it's "age" so to speak, in between upgrades.

Goal of the build:
Pretty Standard, 2h'd Heavy Strike, Leap Slam, Sweep Build with Auras, stacking Armor.

My Build I'm pretty pleased with my build right now.

From here, I'll be cruising through the Templar Area, for more armor, Life, The Resist node, and then from there... I'm a little torn. This, Is where i end up torn. At this point, I should be done with A3 Merc (as it is currently, pre-release), and have the last 2 "Goody" points from Piety. I figure, about level 69. I could continue down, and pick up some DPS nodes. That wouldn't be "terrible", but I'm not sure if I need the DPS, or if I need more survivabilty. Without some major point investments, I'll have run out of "easily obtainable" Life Nodes. There are a couple of "close" armor clusters I could go after, one sporting a little resist with it, but I'm just not sure.

As far as What I'm wearing, and where I'm at currently.

Gear


I think I look rather decent heading into Vaal. I'm at ~5k DPS (Heavy Strike) with Hatred Running, and I'm up to ~2500/2600 HP, and ~3200 Armor. Not Amazing numbers, but all gear considered, not terrible either.

Am I off base on this? Am I geared poorly? Is Merc Vaal going to take my soul? This is my first Melee to get this far in the game. My previous Mapping Chars are a Summoner (73), and a ranger (66), so while I have a good grasp on the game, I'm not going to say I'm a pro from a Melee perspective, and a few (constructive) pointers would be appreciated.

Couple of things to mention after quickly skimming through your build and post

GEAR:

upgrade your helm asap, all armor based or evasion/armor


SKILLS/BUILD:

do you not find Sweep a little dangerous at times since you have to get in close or does Leap Slam stun mobs long enough? have you tried Ground Slam? gives you some ranged safety....just a thought

you need more armor. I would highly recommend dropping any of those 3 cluster armor nodes you got a spending the points towards Iron Reflexes and running the Grace aura. You will get a huge bump in armor.

you could reclaim the 2 damage nodes by the start of the duelist tree and get Bone Smasher and the node before it. Its right below that cluster of 3 life nodes you got by the templar tree. You will get 40% more physical damage vs. 27% and +12 to max life if you need more dps.

eventually you could also drop some of those single resist type nodes and invest the points in something else down the road when you get better gear

"

thewretched wrote:

Couple of things to mention after quickly skimming through your build and post

GEAR:

upgrade your helm asap, all armor based or evasion/armor


SKILLS/BUILD:

do you not find Sweep a little dangerous at times since you have to get in close or does Leap Slam stun mobs long enough? have you tried Ground Slam? gives you some ranged safety....just a thought

you need more armor. I would highly recommend dropping any of those 3 cluster armor nodes you got a spending the points towards Iron Reflexes and running the Grace aura. You will get a huge bump in armor.

you could reclaim the 2 damage nodes by the start of the duelist tree and get Bone Smasher and the node before it. Its right below that cluster of 3 life nodes you got by the templar tree. You will get 40% more physical damage vs. 27% and +12 to max life if you need more dps.

eventually you could also drop some of those single resist type nodes and invest the points in something else down the road when you get better gear

Thanks for taking the time to answer, I appreciate it.

helm
Problem on the helm is the resists. It's really hard to get something to upgrade the reisists. I have

Sitting in the stash, but I don't have anything to make up the resists.


Sweep
I love it. I've never felt that I needed something else, and I HATE ground slam. You couldn't pay me to run it. It's uni-directional. At this point in the game, I leap Slam into the middle of packs, and Sweep away.

grace
What would I drop running for Grace? At this point, I just don't have enough mana to run it without Reduced mana, and while I'm not opposed to running it, the only thing I could do at this point is not run another aura.

Bone Smasher
I had been aversed to taking weapon specific talents, but I went ahead and swapped these like you suggested. Wow. Big difference. Thanks for that. Hopefully, I'm able to keep finding maces (who am I kidding, I'll probably only see one more mace upgrade)

Resists
Yeah, as I get better gear, those nodes will get changed over to better things. At this point, I'm just stuck trying to piece mail my way through, until I get better gear.