State of Armor/life builds

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Why wouldn't you play ES if it is so OP?

Doh no Shav. Let me find a shavs. Wouldn't play anything else but LL ES like those who do own them.

LL wanders
LL melee like reave/flicker
LL ST
LL caster
LL everything

Vaal pack + LL solves sustain for those too poor for acuity. throw Warlords mark on tough boss.

Need no armor because phys doesnt hit hard in this game... usually 4-5K max unless talking bout vaals.

Run like 7-10 auras with max res and dps.

No brainer.

I had a shavs, made a nice skin on my cloak of defiance.

Give me a coil or a saintly any day tbh. after a while tooltip is just numbers on the screen, 50k, 100k, 500k... when you were one shotting everything at 50k who cares?

Uber Atziri doesnt even get a spell off with these LL Shav builds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVt5tYw-x-g&feature=youtu.be

Therefore offense = defense. You'll never do that with 50K.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

For GGG, new has to mean better. That's the problem. They recently worked on the witch/shadow area of the tree, so it was made better. It's been a long time since they worked on the marauder area, so it's worse by comparison.
.....

WTH? Please don't tell them to rework the red side again. I started playing in cb and EVERY time they reworked the red side it gets worse. Even when they tell us that they have buffed us they nerfed us in another way. I remember one time when they really buffed the red side, it was a nice buff for a few weeks but shortly after that they "balanced" these buffs again. The nerf was so hard that in the end it was much worse than before the buff. lol
Please in gods name don't make them look again into the red side. Yes the red side has the short stick but when they balance us again we sure don't even have a stick at all anymore!

So, what changed in 1.3?

- 1H/shield: block chances and spell block as a consequence reduced, and high block is now only really efficient to go for if you are melee. Spell block is the only choice if you want elemental spell mitigation, being placed on caster/ES items requires heavy investment with less return now.

- 2H: with zero access to maximum resists that other builds don't have (that used to be placed in this area of the passive tree), 2H is completely defenseless against both elemental attacks and spells (other than the small block chance provided by staves). This also means if you want to use an elemental skill you will likely kill yourself to reflect.

While EV/life with Acro offers balanced mitigation of both attacks and spells, elemental and physical, armor remains a gimmick physical counter and a suboptimal endgame choice in my opinion.

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LSN wrote:

Nothing new about this. Dagger/es builds are the best melee tanks and damage dealers at the same time on purpose.

Their dps is op and surgeon flasks makes them tankier than they should be. Calling es op though is a bit of a stretch. Literally every attack and spell in the game immediately applies a status effect just because you are es.

Armor sucks because lightning coil and immortal call exist. How do you balance around that? You can't. Before you could calculate moderate investment into armor, endurance charges and enfeeble. Now anything that would be hard hitting for that would be a joke for someone with lightning coil or immortal call. Its why most of the new content released does high elemental damage. GGG realized their mistake. You will never see a hard hitting physical boss added to the game until this is resolved.


Why invest into armor when very little to nothing in the game requires its investment?