Armor is bad, and it should feel bad.

2 points of curiosity:

1. At what point are we looking at having too many skills.

2 for attacks
1 for endurance charge
2 for auras (grace/determination)
1 for a curse of your choice

(Maybe at this point it's worth having weapons on swap with alternate skill gems for bosses?)

can we think of any more to stack on the player?
Talk about mana issues, or the NEED for blood magic gems.
The pressure on melee to have good gear AND the right slots is a bit much.

2. Does twinking EVER negate the need for taking all the life passives?
Honestly, I've built a bunch of marauders in both OB and DB, always had to take all the life nodes.

Got to maelstrom, still got steamrolled, had to farm for too long for me to be interested in continuing.

Rerolled instead.

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McNuggetz wrote:

2 points of curiosity:

1. At what point are we looking at having too many skills.

2 for attacks
1 for endurance charge
2 for auras (grace/determination)
1 for a curse of your choice

You can turn on an aura, then swap the skill to something else. They don't really take up action bar slots unless you need the ability to turn them on and off frequently.

"

2. Does twinking EVER negate the need for taking all the life passives?

No. Because of the way life scales and armor doesn't, you're literally never safe. It isn't unrealistic in Merciless to take a 4-5k regular physical hit, if that attack crits, and is now hitting 6-7.5k, you are going to take at least half of that in damage, regardless of your mitigation. This means you need to have enough life to ideally survive two such hits.


Also, I'm talking about hardcore mode. On default, getting 1 shot 0.1% of the time is no big deal.

I think my character's progress may come to an end soon. I almost couldn't kill Black Death, the unique spider in the Chambers of Sin because she came dangerously close to one-shotting me even with 3 endurance charges. And even if I could survive the hits, she also has Venom Strike, which does crazy damage. I managed to kill her by cheesing the fight by hit and run shield charging tactics. Naturally, she didn't even give me a rare for the trouble. Seriously screwed up risk vs. reward. I tanked Fedelitas, who did surprisingly little damage.

I don't think I'll be able to take The Weaver, though I plan on having 6 max endurance charges by the time I get to her.

Do you know what the worst part of it all is? I have yet to see a response by GGG in any of these threads (though I may have missed it).

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StarlightGamer wrote:

Do you know what the worst part of it all is? I have yet to see a response by GGG in any of these threads (though I may have missed it).

Honestly, I'm kind of in the same boat. I'd appreciate a statement on whether or not they have any intention of doing anything about armor, because if they're not, I'm going to roll a summon witch and be done with it. Hopefully that isn't boring, or I'm likely done with the game.

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grant_m wrote:

FascetiousTomato, if I were to plan a new Marauder build with the way armor works currently, should I grab life passives and forget about armor all together, or maybe just minimal armor nodes at the most?

My build focuses exclusively on life and resists because I don't find armor to be terribly effective. I think I have the 18% armor talent right near the start, but I would trade it for another 3% movement speed in a heartbeat.

Armor is awesome against small hits though. In normal mode and even some cruel, armor is just the bees knees. The problem is that from normal to merciless, your armor goes from ~1k to ~6k, but the armor required to maintain the same damage reduction increases way faster.

Well, beat the Weaver. It was close and there's no way I could have done it without 6 endurance charges. 6 charges is hax and I was pretty much immune to all normal mobs except chaos damage mobs. Even standing in the middle of a bunch of apes and some rare archers all with 3 frenzy charges wasn't doing much. The Weaver still hit me for half my health regularly with 6 charges though. Then again, she has chaos damage. She also dropped crap.

I guess I'm gonna have to get used to running around like a dope to get charges. I'm even letting the last enemies in groups live so they can follow me around and let me bum charges off of them in the middle of groups so I don't have to recharge every fight. Which is stupid. I can't wait to see how uber 9 charges is though.

Would be nice if they'd shift some of the power away from endurance charges, because they're undoubtedly mandatory at this point.

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FacetiousTomato wrote:

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Incompetent wrote:

How many Endurance charges do you fight with? Are you drinking Granites whenever you try to tank a strong melee monster?

As of now, I usually have 3 endurance charges up, and use a +100% armor granite flask against anything physical whenever possible.

My problem is that if you're taking a big hit, say 6000 damage, you can reduce that to 1200 damage through magic resists. To even reduce it to 3000, you need to have like 20k armor, which isn't (am I wrong?) possible.

Determination is a massive armor boost. Unfortunately you can't use it when you're blood magic, for the most part.

"

Kerchunk wrote:

The ladder seems to indicate that melee are not at a disadvantage.

Yeah I'm sure those Marauder don't either use bows, wands or groundslam to stay alive...

The thread is about melee not ranged just to remind you...