Armor is bad, and it should feel bad.

Actually, I believe melee are at a strong advantage over any ranged/caster class, just like nearly every game out there.

buffing armor is not the way to balance survivability between ranged and melee..

Since ranged has just as much armor as melee due to iron reflexes which they all take.


They just need to buff shields. If you are going 2h marauder u are sacrifising survivability for the 2hand dmg. Im running a shield marauder and if i run into a bear or a golem somewhere they take 80% of my hp in 1 hit. I cannot tank it with my regen even though i have all the generic % hp passives and hp ones and im running vitality aura.

It is just not good enough, i agree it is supposed to be tough, i completely agree. But being 1 shot by a mob forcing me to go ranged, really just nullifies the whole build and class that is melee marauder

I think the problem is resistance not armor..
im a pure eva, dual wield dagger shadow 58, been soloing everything and now im in merciless act 2. Be honest with :
- 6.2k evasion
- blind
- enfeeble
- arrow dodging
- acrobat
I have no problem 1 v 1 against boss, physical mobs or archer in merciless, but casters on the other hand they could kill me easily.. at cruel i was able to reach around 70 % resist on all element ( except chaos )
and once i got to merciless the 60 % reduction kills it for me. I don't think i hit a wall because i can get some resistance gear or respec my point to get some resistance, and that is a big downside that melee class get.

Melee are forced to take more life and resistance points or gears while casters can get dps gears and nodes.

Back before i started playing POE i was planning to make a dual wielding dps dagger rogue with good enough survivability, now all i making is dual wield dagger rogue tank wannabe...but well i survive act 2 merciless so i guess its good enough.

ITT NOOBS DISCUSSING CLASS BALANCE WITHOUT AVAILABLE ENDGAME EQUIP

"

StarlightGamer wrote:

My tank-built Dualist (Build: Current | Planned) is currently having a tough time surviving in Cruel Act 2. Here are my stats: pitiful offense and should-be-awesome defense.

I have to agree that it's physical damage mobs that are always the biggest threat. I think the problem is this mechanic where heavy hits diminish the effectiveness of armor. I'm not sure how that works exactly, but I think "heavy hitter" describes about 90% of the physical damage enemies in this game. I just got done killing Great White Beast in Cruel and he was capable of taking off 30-50% of my HP even with that physical damage resistance and an additional 15% from 3 Endurance Charges. So like 87% physical damage reduction. And it was close, I almost ran out of potions. I have some nice gear with a lot of evasion (which gets turned into armor) coming up in a couple of levels, but how big of a difference could it make if I already have so much damage reduction and it's not doing it for me?

Edit: Yeah, and Cruel Brutus and Merveil weren't tankable for me. I threw fire traps under them (my main source of AoE damage, usually I sit in the fire while tanking groups) and then I'd repeatedly dodge their ranged attacks and immediately shield bash them and back off hit-and-run-style. Hardly melee, but it gets the job done and I take very little damage doing it. Same method I have to use to take down Vaal Oversoul and that stupidly overpowered Brutus clone in Lunaris.

Edit: Another problem is Leech, which seems to be ridiculously ineffective compared to Life on Hit and especially Regen.

Life leech is better than flat life on hit when you get damage on your abilities over 1k. I used life on hit and life leech until i was high enough in gear and level and swapped life on hit to physical damage percent increase with life leech. It is disgusting how much health you get back on a heavy strike that has a 6% life leech and 2138 dps. Even AoE abilities i use like sweep, ground slam, leap slam or strike all do 900 dps and the amount is enough to keep me capped on health in merciless. also warlords mark=fapfapfap

Just fix Enduring Cry timer so we can have some fun in the game and it does require me to spam it every 5 sec or so. I have a level 59 Marauder with 2H mace and I can solo act2 merciless just fine as long as I keep my 5 charges up. 10 sec is stupid though and I don't like it, I will keep making posts about this until GGG takes notice of that and lets players have fun instead of working the keyboard.

I took passives for it too so it's up to like 14sec and guess what, it's still too short.

"

fortispectus wrote:

I think the problem is resistance not armor..
im a pure eva, dual wield dagger shadow 58, been soloing everything and now im in merciless act 2. Be honest with :
- 6.2k evasion
- blind
- enfeeble
- arrow dodging
- acrobat
I have no problem 1 v 1 against boss, physical mobs or archer in merciless, but casters on the other hand they could kill me easily.. at cruel i was able to reach around 70 % resist on all element ( except chaos )
and once i got to merciless the 60 % reduction kills it for me. I don't think i hit a wall because i can get some resistance gear or respec my point to get some resistance, and that is a big downside that melee class get.

Melee are forced to take more life and resistance points or gears while casters can get dps gears and nodes.

Back before i started playing POE i was planning to make a dual wielding dps dagger rogue with good enough survivability, now all i making is dual wield dagger rogue tank wannabe...but well i survive act 2 merciless so i guess its good enough.

Check out the streams mate, even ranged take all the defensive points. Problem is you dont need any offensive passives to do good dmg. And if you go offensive passives you end up 1 shotting yourself on reflect, which means defensive is the only realistic way to go.

Besides you saying you have no problem against physi is all good and everything but you saying you cannot take magic is BS nothing short of BS you have taken to many offensive stats and not even %regen and not even %hp passives and havent gotten enough resistance.

Magic dmg is not the problem, physical is, since the only counter to that is armor or evasion and most people take Armor over evasion. And it simply doesnt do enough.

There needs to be some flat % physical reduction that ranged cannot get or something along those lines.

That is the only way to make melee as good as ranged.

And ground slam, lightning strike, EK are not melee abilities they are ranged abilities, so basicly marauders are ranging it ATM due to the lack of tankability.

As i said add some %physical reduction when shield is equipped passives..

"

test01 wrote:

ITT NOOBS DISCUSSING CLASS BALANCE WITHOUT AVAILABLE ENDGAME EQUIP

CAN'T GET ENDGAME EQUIP BECAUSE CAN'T GET TO ENDGAME WITH MY MELEE CHARS BUT WITH MY RANGED CHARS OMFG!!!!

"

Helen_Keller wrote:

Life leech is better than flat life on hit when you get damage on your abilities over 1k. I used life on hit and life leech until i was high enough in gear and level and swapped life on hit to physical damage percent increase with life leech. It is disgusting how much health you get back on a heavy strike that has a 6% life leech and 2138 dps. Even AoE abilities i use like sweep, ground slam, leap slam or strike all do 900 dps and the amount is enough to keep me capped on health in merciless. also warlords mark=fapfapfap

I've been leveling a Warlord's Mark gem, but not using it because the leech hasn't been noticeable. I also haven't been using a damage skill other than the occasional Fire Trap because my mana pool with Grace and Determination active is 60 with very little mana leech and regen (so yeah, normal attack most of the time). Though I have been leveling some skill gems just in case they came in handy. I guess it's possible, though unlikely, that I might be able to leech back enough mana with Warlord's Mark to gain back enough mana to support spamming Heavy Strike and keeping the Mark up. And then I'd get some life leech back from it too. But I doubt it because I don't have much in the way of physical damage because I didn't put many passives into damage nodes. Because I have no weapon specialty and very little in the way of weapon damage passives in general, I just use whatever one-handed weapon is the best at the moment. Right now, it's one of these:



Since my build uses a shield a lot for defenses, I didn't really want to ditch it for a while, but if I have to, I could use something like this:



Which should get me a considerable amount of leech going on. But I doubt it would increase my survivability enough to offset the loss of the resistances and attack and spell block chances coming from my shield and passives:



(Before anybody points it out, I'm just leveling the lightning damage gem - there's a reason it's not supporting anything) I guess I could try keeping the maul on switch for physical mobs.

"

Just fix Enduring Cry timer so we can have some fun in the game and it does require me to spam it every 5 sec or so. I have a level 59 Marauder with 2H mace and I can solo act2 merciless just fine as long as I keep my 5 charges up. 10 sec is stupid though and I don't like it, I will keep making posts about this until GGG takes notice of that and lets players have fun instead of working the keyboard.

I took passives for it too so it's up to like 14sec and guess what, it's still too short.

Yes. I've been making some posts about it too.

Agreed.

Even if the armor mechanic was well thought out in design, in practice it certainly fails to deliver the "fun factor" it is intended too, it does quite the opposite. This thread is a re-occurring theme from closed, when everyone asked them to fix armor ... so they nerfed CI instead, not really the "armor" fix we were looking for.