And again - will melee dexterity based builds be forgotten?

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

Spoiler

ok heres the thing, in my experience evasion is super super strong for melee, but like armour its not enough alone. I would never wear a chest like carcass jack for melee, tbh theres not many builds Id wear it for at all, maybe like casters or trappers who stay well out of harms way.

Thank you! Very solid post indeed. What do you think about MOM and EB for melee? My problem is not physical damage, but Life pool(or EHP) against magic burst in doors, strongboxes.

"

Damac0101 wrote:

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

Spoiler

ok heres the thing, in my experience evasion is super super strong for melee, but like armour its not enough alone. I would never wear a chest like carcass jack for melee, tbh theres not many builds Id wear it for at all, maybe like casters or trappers who stay well out of harms way.

Thank you! Very solid post indeed. What do you think about MOM and EB for melee? My problem is not physical damage, but Life pool(or EHP) against magic burst in doors, strongboxes.

Problem with MoM and EB on a melee is that you need to travel the entire tree to get those two keynodes alone, unless your aiming to utilize CoD.

And even then, you are sacrificing static defenses for non-static buffers.

What i mean with this is you cant utilize aura's effectively. And these are a main source for melee damage and/or defenses.

Not to mention MoM is pretty much designed around avoidance and ranged play-style, to allow the buffer regeneration time before the next encounter. Being in the "fray of the fight" constantly (melee) your buffer is under constant punishment, until it runs out and you gain no benefit at all from the key-stone allocation.

This last point, also pretty much forces a melee user into using blood magic, since no mana means no attacks without it, putting your entire build/character to a stand still after a heavy critical hit on the mana buffer.

It stops functioning at times when you need it the most.

Peace,

-Boem-

dont worry to much about all of them being red, acording to them they will introduce over 12 gems

"Path of Exile: The Awakening introduces more than a dozen new gems to use against the denizens of Wraeclast, including two new categories of skills".

odds are they are releasing 1 color at a time, next 5 could be blue and then 5 greens.

ya Im not convinced about mom eb for melee either, for reasons boem said. I havent tried it, I have multiple mom eb AA casters so I know what that sort of defense is like to play with, I have chars in the mid 90s using it and it works for them, but knowing how little damage they can tank compared to my melee chars with armour/coil + evasion Ive never felt the need to actually try it with melee. Maybe Im wrong, can never say for sure till you try a specific build out but my experience of mom is that its great on my casters purely because theyre top of tree and cant get good defenses from the bottom, if my arc witch could spec the same defenses as my melees and still be a viable spell caster I wouldnt be wearing a cloak on her.



for spell damage, I dunno, I just never find it that scary. I deal with boxes using lightning warp cast before I open the box if its in a map where the mobs might actually be a significant threat or the box has mods on it. normal spells I just deal with using life regen for the most, if you are bottom of the tree where all the melee goodies are you can get pretty significant life regen and life pool. Some spell damage bosses can hurt, like if piety crits with a lightning storm that can be bad news, Crema boss is just retarded if you dont have like 83%+ fire res and then pop a ruby flask on top of it, Palace Dom... that dude, damage is out of control, but thats about it rly. Since they nuked max res on the tree and rebalanced the ele damage mobs do Ive yet to really be bothered at all by spell mobs outside of select map bosses so I dunno what to advise tbh.



Ive never streamed before, but I thought Id record a quick video of a hybrid armour + evasion melee char, because people often think im talking crap about it being pretty tanky. Usual logic I hear is get pure ev or pure armour, so this is basically for people who doubt how strong evasion is for melee and always grab iron reflexes or doubt how good armour is with endu charges and think someone like koles gonna 1 shot you even if you have armour. Just running around merciless lunaris, standing around letting mobs hit me to see if anything can kill me, kole, spincrack, piety etc. My game was uber laggy while streaming, pretty hard to actually control, had to turn my game settings and stream settings right down to stop poe from crashing, so sry for bad quality and semi hard to control play.

http://www.twitch.tv/64521xw2/b/650915891

thats 10,000 evasion, 8,500 armour, ondars, 6 endu charges and 400 life per sec regen. i take out immortal call and I dont pop any flasks apart from a quicksilver throughout. In my experience, outside of max block which isnt really an option for a build that spends a ton of points on everything else after the nerf, Ive never had a pure armour or pure evasion character feel this safe standing still taking hits from these sort of mobs/bosses.


Its not pure dex melee, its a ranger but its hybrid dex/str melee. When people used to say armour was op, iron reflexes was essential and evasion sucked the complaint was phys mitigation. When asked about this chris said "we expect evasion chars to find other methods of mitigating physical damage". so despite the meta going from "get pure armour" to "get pure evasion" im not sure GGG have ever been looking at those as THE options, and looking back Im not sure theyve ever been the best choices, its just our group logic thats been enforcing those mindsets. I think dex melee is fine you just need a bit of str to go with it, and honestly my feelings are the same is true in reverse.

You cna still do pure dex melee and just use the vorici 2 red socket bench craft to get your 3 red 2 green or whatever it is ur after on a pure ev chest, but Id question if its rly worth it when you can just use a coil or go hybrid with armour.

Heh snorkle, I ought to show you my EV/AR build from torment when I get out of work. 15k armor, 10k evasion (with ondars), 42% block, 6 endurance charges, and 6.6k life without kaoms. 16k cyclone deeps, which is nothing special at all but it certainly does the job when you're indestructible. Wish I could record videos but I can barely even run the game on my crap PC.

Those shield defense nodes are ridiculous with a super high armor shield.

that build sounds pretty gg Jah, Id love to see the tree etc, I have a build that sounds very similar be interesting to see where it differs etc.

that shield, that shield, holy shit man. I got the baby version on my 1h + shield hybrid



I got robbed on the base item :D

kind of amusing how similar they are all the same. Even the lightning bench, like wtf? lol.

2 Snorkle_uk
Thanks for twitch. It looks really strong. could you be so kind to post your gear with gem setup.

Well, 2-3 years ago I have an option to create melee in ranger, shadow passive tree. But right now, after crit nerf, with all those new skills: multistrike, Molten, Static,life leech, bloodmagic, etc and all incoming red gems - says by itself - melee - only strength part of passive tree, armor is MUST!

well heres the build for that Ranger in the video

2H Hybrid Ar+Ev Cyclone Ranger




I wouldnt pay too much attention to the fact that some of that gear may look op, well, is op I guess. All that matters when it comes to taking damage like that is the armour values, 1450 armour on chest you cna get for 1 chaos, Devotos hat you can get for 1 chaos, boots and gloves have no special amount of armour thats hard to get. Sure getting ones that also have tri resist and high life will be more expensive but as long as you can cap resists, its not really making a difference, its purely the armour and evasion values that are providing that kind of defense.






but if you want to build Ranger to Shadow style things that can still be done, heres 2 other builds i play that take that approach and spec from the duelist area in the middle right up to the shadow, avoiding the pure strength marauder zone entirely.




Crit Dagger Coil Evasion Melee Ranger





Dual Wield Hybrid Ar+Ev Melee Duelist




these absolutely work too, one is a hybrid ev + armour like the axe ranger from the vid and the other is a lightning coil evasion build build. The whole Armour part of those builds can simply be replaced by lightning coil, and then you build full evasion with acrobatics etc same way youd build a normal evasion melee.

So its not str only, I think Dex is still the most important part of a melee build, I either build dex + str hybrid with armour and evasion or I build pure dex with a lightning coil, I would never build pure strength, evasion and ondars cant be replaced, lightning coil can replace armour.

You can still go full dex with full evasion gear but yeah, the socket colours hurt to get, youre going to need to use the vorici bench to force 2 or 3 red sockets and hope to randomly roll another red on the remaining ones. The alternative is using a hybrid armour + evasion chest and at that point, might as well spec armour and evaison together because thats a stronger defense anyway.

All this is just my opinion, there will be people who disagree.