Armor is bad, and it should feel bad.

"

StarlightGamer wrote:

Okay, so a comparison between no endurance charges, 3 endurance charges, 5 endurance charges, and 8 endurance charges:

If I run around with none, I mitigate 1 point of damage per 37.03 points of armor.
3, and I mitigate 1 point of damage per 12.34 points of armor.
5, and 1 per 7.64
8, and 1 per 4.11

So my armor would be tripled in effectiveness by running around with 3 endurance charges, 5x as effective with 5, and 9 times as effective with 8 charges. I guess I should tweak my build and then prepare for a lifetime of spamming Enduring Cry every few seconds for eternity? Still too many uncertainties.

For the most part yes as armour is practically completely useless without endurance charges as of now (probably the biggest issue).

The other thread shows how armour should theoretically benefit as you increase it, however for boss-monster style melee hits this is just not the case as the required base armour to tank the kind of hits those dish out in merci/maps is far beyond what is currently possible.

"

VoxelSquid wrote:

As a melee Acrobatics Ranger player, I am enjoying reading this thread. Can't wait for someone to start an Evasion OP thread.

Yea I recently tried to run a acrobatics cleave shadow build and it definitely feels safer than my marauder of similar level, granted yes they're both only lvl 30ish. But an evasion build using a quality enfeeble is pretty dam good imho.

Enfeeble should also help armor users a fair amount, since it reduces the damage the enemy does, thus making armor be more effective similar to endurance charges.

i found that temp chain is more effective in reducing dmg in two ways.
First, that´s simple, decreased attack speed resulting in less dps
Second, if the dmg is incoming in a more stretched time your health regen and leech get more time to compensate for the dmg.

Also adding the survival note of general movement crowd control.

"

MoonYu wrote:

I was going to stay out of this thread, but Enfeeble was brought up. I used it on my level 70 Marauder (CB) when going up against stronger opponents. It does help a lot. Never got around to trying Temporal Chains. But I thought about it.

Enfeeble sounds like something worth investing in. My issue still is that when taking large chunks of damage at a time, armor doesn't offer any mitigation and armor based characters are forced to rely on an INT curse and endurance charges, with armor being insignificant.

Warlords mark isnt a bad advantage if you want to skip enduring cry for str characters. Maxed out with 59% to get an endurance mark on kill and a bunch of leech.

As far as damage mitigation enfeeble is way ahead of temporal. That same dps reduction can be said on enfeeble giving you more time to regen while enfeeble reduces further by reducing crits and accuracy. The big advantage temporal has is the debuff length on other things (for certain builds, like say an ignite doing 8/3ds of the hit that procced it) and the movespeed, things have harder time getting into melee range to hit you also reduces damage in a way. Duration on temporal is kinda eh though...

Molten shell seems like a no brainer to cast for str characters before running into a pack, even if you dont cast it again for the fight.

Well I have four choices right now:

1. Continue on my Duelist and don't change my build for more endurance charges. I'll take a lot more damage, but at least I won't have to deal with refreshing the charges.

2. Continue on my Duelist and change my build to get more endurance charges. I'll use endurance charges for everything, which means having to keep up with refreshing the charges, which is a HUGE pain in the ass, turning the game into a chore and forcing me into a faster pace than I'm comfortable with in order to maintain the charges (which is why I avoid charges in general).

3. Switch to a ranged character and shelve yet another character.

I've been trying to make a character that could actually survive in melee and this will be the 4th or 5th character I've shelved if I abandon him. In fact, I'm seriously considering quitting altogether because I've wasted entirely too much time trying to come up with viable defense-based melee builds that have failed.

Hopefully they find a way to revamp their armor system, because it seems to be a running theme in ARPGs that defense doesn't cut it. Even Torchlight has a terrible armor system. It negates a flat amount of damage, which is fine normally, but when an enemy crits, you can die instantly because everything over that flat damage negation is completely unmitigated.

There are some things they could change to make it more palatable.
A. Increase the base expiration time on endurance charges so we don't have to keep up with it so much and don't have to continue to rush from monster pack to monster pack to ensure that our charges don't expire.

and/or

B. Increase the amount of extra duration the passive nodes on the skill tree give. It's currently at 18% and there's two nodes. You could add more nodes or improve the ones we have. But at least turn the 18% to something like 20%, because 18% gives 1.8 extra seconds, which probably rounds down to 1.

and/or

C. Give additional ways to obtain endurance charges. Warlord's Mark is unreliable, doesn't last long enough, and costs too much to be a viable way to get and maintain endurance charges for my build. Basically, I don't kill fast enough on this character. Enduring Cry takes too many enemies to build endurance charges. It starts at one charge per 10 enemies and seems to end up at 1 charge per 4 enemies or so. At max level, it would probably be sufficient. I'd suggest changing Enduring Cry to something like: +1 Endurance Charge per 3-5 enemies around you and +3-5x% Endurance Charge Duration, where X is the level of the gem.

I don't know if increasing the endurance charge's duration is possible using that method, but I really like that idea.

Additionally, maybe they need to remove the parts in the stat menu where it tells you that Endurance Charges give 5% damage reduction and 5% resists and the part where it tells you the percentage of damage your armor reduces. If these stats aren't true and don't come close to explaining the real interaction between endurance charges and armor, maybe they don't need to be there.

Well so far I've had great success with my duelist.

Str, 2h axe, tons of armor maxed out resist except for chaos and fire. Fire is at 55% and chaos is -20% sadly lol.

Anyway I usually throw up a healing totem infront of me monsters aggro to it I leap slam in enduring cry get 3 to 4 charges, warlords mark (totem help keeps me up). Then sweep with 34 hp per hit with really fast atk speed. I'll finish off solo guys with heavy strike with 13% leech.

So far it works wonders I have a armor flash with 4000+ to armor along with my determination aura with charges, plus I get another I believe 29% in armor from that armor flask cause I upgraded it. Then my other flask are hybrids with +armor percentage or plus resistance % on them to boost that fire to max out when I need it.

In the end I rarely if ever die on the end parts of act 3 cruel and usually just watch everyone around me die even when I'll pulling all the aggro lol. Those lightning arcs on the battle front etc lol to funny.

Anyway more then happy with my character he laughs in the face of death and brings destruction.

That might change after act 3 cruel but I watch my guy carefully and change up my skill tree plan for what I feel is lacking and what needs to be addressed and it's worked wonders so far for me.

The thing I fear the most is trying to get my hands on some chaos resist. Feel it's really lacking and hard to find.

Btw I'm not a dex build duelist either pure str.

"

Kerchunk wrote:

"

There is no true melee in the top 20 of the ladder.

Ground Slam doesn't count, EK doesn't count, Lightning Strike doesn't count.

So what counts? Heavy Strike spam? What a silly thread.