Man, duelist sucks

I'm a 41 duelist at the moment, so you can take what i'm about to say with a grain of salt, however, I wanted to address a few things that I've noticed.

One of the major factors of this game that a lot of people take for granted is the importance of pre-planning. If you just made a character without any prior notion of what you were going to be doing with that character before-hand, you should rethink your strategy a little. Now when I say "pre-planning", I don't mean making a build on the site dusting your hands off and saying "that looks good". I mean, actually looking at the pathing you're taking through all of the keystones and making sure that the nodes you're picking up are reflective of what you'll be needing around those levels. You should be asking yourselves a lot of questions as you're leveling your character. Am I taking a lot of damage from melee right now? Do I deal enough damage? Is my gear in need of some rearrangement for more beneficial stats? Are these skills the best set-up for what it is that I'm trying to do? Make sure that each level you obtain is accented by a passive skill point that is allocated perfectly for what it is that you feel your character is lacking. Make every level eventful so you're always getting something useful. Path your build out so that you might have to bypass certain survival points at the beginning levels where that not needed as much and focus on damage, and then double back and place those defensive points into your character once you've reached those higher difficulties.

This plays an immense role for me in the ease of play through higher levels. I have a 60 ranger with literally 0 defenses. Completely offensive, yet I still manage to make it work because of my pre-planning and skill choices. Granted, the inherent issue there is that Rangers are ranged, and Duelists are not. That is an obvious issue that every game has issues with. Range is at less of a disadvantage than melee in any circumstance presented in the game, with the exception of creatures that close distance immensely quickly and deal high burst damage when doing so (Roa and Flicker Strikers, I'm looking at you.)

That being said, if you've done all these things as a melee character and still find yourself running into the issue of dieing and ultimately wasting your time, a few things could be deduced by this.

1) Armor is without a doubt, one of the weakest defenses in this game. It is only powerful when coupled with another type of defense. Armor + Energy shield, amazing. Armor + Evasion, effective, but not quite as good. Armor + HP regen or life leach. Armor + Shield Block. when you start stacking armor with something else, you notice the fruits of your allocated points. Just taking armor alone never seems substantial for me. Mobs hit too hard to stack one thing and expect it to hold.

2) Your build idea might just not be very effective. You might be trying to do something that just doesn't work very well in conjunction with the other variables in place. Cleave spamming to victory with life leach not working? Well, perhaps cleave isn't the best way to go about dealing with the creatures you're fighting. Try building a flexible character that has a lot of options. One thing that I've noticed with my duelist thus far is the importance of mobility. If you don't have ways to get out of bad situations, you're going to die. Leap Slam or Flicker strike are great for this. Caster or ranged creatures lighting you up? Flick strike or leap slam to them and deal with them as you see fit first before fighting the melee horde.

3) Don't discount the importance of a healthy replenishment of your resource pool, whether its health being used by blood magic, or just a standard mana build. A lot of times you find yourselves running headlong into a group of creatures while having no mobility and limited resources and just getting dominated by that pack because you weren't prepared for it. It sounds silly, but I bet its happened to you.

Now I'm not claiming that all of these things i'm suggesting are always going to work, but a good majority of people just jumping into this game without doing any research and planning are bound to fail miserably on their first characters.

Things I do agree with so far in this thread though:
-Dual wielding duelist is under powered solely because of the skill choices at their disposal for aoe.
-Armor sucks by itself and should probably get looked into for a buff
-Melee don't have enough options for mobility and distance closing. The biggest difference between melee and range is the fact that range can engage without being engaged in return. Melee needs a similar mechanic in my opinion.
-Ranged DPS support gems have way more synergy with Ranged Spells and Skills than Melee DPS support gems have to theirs. GMP and LMP make projectiles from range far too powerful and melee can just simply not come close to them in that department.

The risk of being in melee range + the problem of closing that distance to begin with + the lack of effectiveness of armor vs. No risk of damage at range + never having to close distance and just being able to aim and shoot at anything you want on the screen + the lack of necessity for really high defenses on a ranged class seem a bit imbalanced as you creep closer and closer to end game.

I don't claim to be someone that can solve these problems through suggesting something better. I'm just simply logging what i've experienced personally from a rational point of view by the nature of each of my character's effectiveness.

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Delpira wrote:

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I think that a lot of people that read this thread and are level 60+ on Deulist actuly do know what they doing or otherwise i don't think they would get that far.

I like to play my duelist, but i started to level a Renger as to help my sister level up her second charcter (she messed up her build on first ranger).

Let me tell you something. In the current build there is no incentive to play melee class (and by melee i mean toons that use melee skills and not Lightning srtike or one like this). My usual rutine while fighting monster packs is:

Temoral Chians/Enfeenable on mobs, Endurance Cry, Totem, Frenzy till full stack, Endurance Cry (to get 5 stacks), Cleave few times, Temoral Chians/Enfeenable refresh, Endurance Cry refresh, Totem, Frenzy refresh.

If you look at how many ofensive actions i am doing during this fight then you know there is something not right.

As an Renger (low level - 36 but already know what its going to be like later):

See something move on the screen (be it party memeber or mob) LIghting Arrow (with LMP+LoH+FA) and if it is still moving i just keep that button pressed in. As I use Blood Magic i don't even have to worry about using mana flasks. More mobs on the screen ?? LOVELEY - more life gained on hit :) Thanks to all those life nodes i have 1600 health at level 36 and can tank better then my Duelist thanks to Lighting Arror+LMP+LoH and how crazy it heals me.

Now if they would add support gem to Cleave that casues your each hit on monster (whitin that one swing) hit 3 nearby monsters, all with on hit effects so you proc even more Life on Hit, we would be in a same place as Rengers. Rengers get 9 ticks of LoH of one LS cast if there are 3 mobs in the area. We get 3 as Deulists.

Give us Lesser Blade Splah gem and i might think it is getting better for us :)

Lesser Blade Splash - your attack splash to 3 nearby opponents each dealing 40% of initial damage

Why not just make a melee counter part to fork and GMP/LMP to where they both have similar functionality. Rather than setting a cap of only 3 additional targets getting hit, just make it so that whatever those support gems are socketed into deal less damage, like GMP or LMP, but strike a wider and longer radius in front of you. The Fork counterpart could be a lightning based support gem exclusively to melee attacks that converts physical to lightning and chains like arc in front of you on up to 3 or 4 mobs, getting weaker with each chain. Both of those combined I think would sum up a plethora of the prior mentioned problems on this board. It's not overpowered because of the damage reduction, but its strong because it allows more damage to a wider group of "in melee range" mobs that you weren't able to do before, and allows you to use it on abilities that weren't used as aoe before. It's diversity for your characters build, but synergy with the concept of melee.

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Golfik wrote:

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Delpira wrote:

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Let me tell you something. In the current build there is no incentive to play melee class (and by melee i mean toons that use melee skills and not Lightning srtike or one like this). My usual rutine while fighting monster packs is:

Temoral Chians/Enfeenable on mobs, Endurance Cry, Totem, Frenzy till full stack, Endurance Cry (to get 5 stacks), Cleave few times, Temoral Chians/Enfeenable refresh, Endurance Cry refresh, Totem, Frenzy refresh.

If you look at how many ofensive actions i am doing during this fight then you know there is something not right.

I actually started playing Duelist since its more fun. I find ranger boring. Few actions.
Playing duelist at least I dont fell asleep :P .

Fo' real.

I dont want 1 button mash.

Duelist need some improvement. But I dont want them to rely on only one skill. As most ranged do.
Then there is no diversity through the game.

My duelist is my first character, and the problem I'm having is that I need to significantly outlevel content to not get destroyed. I haven't had much luck with drops, and that's far harsher on melee characters than ranged.

This is feeling far too much like the melee-only brick wall that was inferno diablo on may 18th. Having to spec/gear completely defensively just so that other people can carry me through content is not fun/interesting.

Well I've got a level 70 DW duelist and I have no trouble with anything MOSTLY. I 100% agree that ranged IS stronger than melee but at the same time I don't feel like my DPS is any worse or anything. I've also got an 80 shadow, point being that I have experience with all levels of play in PoE and am not just theorycrafting about ability to handle maps etc.

The biggest issue with melee vs ranged is that mobs are strong as balls in PoE. You can max armor and hp and still get instagibbed by pretty much any boss. Also, even trash mobs can eventually kill you; even like 20k armor and 6k hp with 500 hp/sec regen doesn't let you live indefinitely vs a big group of trash hobos in Merciless act 1 if you were to just sit there and let them hit you. I'm not advocating new balance allowing for faceroll/facetanking, just pointing out that the scaling is somewhat off because you'd expect to be able to just sit and tank some trash 30 levels under you forever.

Obviously, ranged heros don't get hit anywhere near as often, and many of the strongest biggest damage dealers don't get in range of ranged heros, like firedogs, or brutus-boss-slam, etc.

My DW duelist does 7k DPS with dual-wield cleave, has 3.5k hp, maxed resistances, about 6k armor. Another thing about PoE is that armor/evasion suck regardless of which you think is better because HP is king and mobs do huge damage no matter what defense stat you go. So while it's certainly possible and actually quite easy to get 20k+ armor (I get 40k if I pop a granite + molten shell on my shadow due to huge dexterity bonus + Iron Reflexes + Grace aura, even without wearing great gear), it's pointless. After 5-6k armor there's no reason to increase it cause the returns don't scale well enough. Same for evasion. All that matters is a base-line 5-6k evasion/armor and then TONS of HP to survive whatever damage comes through. And obviously, for melee, that damage is >>> what ranged heros take.

Anyways the point was that I can just run up with cleave and sit in the middle of big mobs of 70+ monsters and hold down my cleave button + lifegain on hit, enfeeble the monsters, and just sit there til everything dies. But it's a razor's edge margin of survivability -- the moment I stop hitting, I'll die INSTANTLY. 3.5k hp and 6k armor doesn't even buy me the luxury of 1 second of tanking 10 trash mobs. This makes the lag and desync I experience almost all the time infinitely more deadly. Ranged heros don't deal with that to the same extent.

My duelist is way more fun than my shadow. I get frenzy charges, whirling blades around, use my totem, flickerstrike all over the place, lay traps, etc. My shadow just sits and shoots things. But my shadow is way stronger, just cause he's ranged. My duelist has double my shadow's hp and double my shadows DPS and is way worse than my shadow at killing things. That's obviously an issue. And as I mentioned, desyncs absolutely RUIN mobile builds, which many melee builds are.

suck what... dick? sure he dresses well but still u think he's gay?

My lvl 70 mara got canned until melee get buffed(4.8k hp, 280hp\sec regen....45%dmg reduction from armor... 80% all resist... 7.2k Double strike dps... 3.8k cleave dps).... cause with all them nice stats u die in 3-4 seconds if u try to face-tank lvl 66 map mobs... I have 3 granites on him and the only way to go is perma-granite myself, otherwise -15% xp in seconds... and that's only from phys dmg... there is no cure against mage mobs, they just rape with 2k ctits.. and don't even get me started on "sparkling mage" mobs.

made myself bow shadow to farm maps with mage friend... just lol... summon skele totem->elemental weakness->pew pew, pew pew pew... easy.... farming maps and waiting for melee to get buffed.

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HonkHonkBeep wrote:

Anyways the point was that I can just run up with cleave and sit in the middle of big mobs of 70+ monsters and hold down my cleave button + lifegain on hit, enfeeble the monsters, and just sit there til everything dies. But it's a razor's edge margin of survivability -- the moment I stop hitting, I'll die INSTANTLY. 3.5k hp and 6k armor doesn't even buy me the luxury of 1 second of tanking 10 trash mobs. This makes the lag and desync I experience almost all the time infinitely more deadly. Ranged heros don't deal with that to the same extent.

same here. thats why now Im leveling shield block templar, just to see for myself how far I can get in defense. still playing melee though, though templar forum plagued with elemental build

It's not about melee being underpowered, the problem is about the core game design.

As much as I like this game, only sense of difficulty in this game = mobs hit harder (to the point of doing ridiculous amounts of damage)

Taking hits is simply dumb in this game, in this state. Everything in this game tells you to get attacked as rarely as possible and do damage at a safe distance.