TEMPLARS ~ Will you favour magic or melee?

TEMPLARS ~ Will you favour magic or melee? If you will play the Templar will you be a pure hybrid or will you favour a style over another?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The hybrid role I like most for the templar is dealing elemental melee damage - benefiting both from elemental damage increases in int and melee increases in str, and using attacks like infernal blow and glacial hammer, as well as having access to lots of spells for support rather than as a primary damage source, such as curses and cold snap. It's fun, and is a niche specific to the templar that no other class fills so well as he does.

Dealing damage with both spells and melee can be quite doable if you focus on one element - a fire templar getting all the fire passives is increasing both infernal blow and fireball. But it's harder to do this for all the elements at once, as you can't keep as many of your increases applying to all your offensive options, and I prefer to go multi-elemental, so stick with the elemental melee builds.

Yeah I can imagine how ineffective it would be to branch into all the other elements, the skill web (from PoE Lets Plays) is massive and quite intimidating but detailed enough to not be overwhelming.

I am quite interested on seeing what the last hybrid class will be (dexterity/intelligence), but for now the Templar is for me. Seems sturdy enough to take a pounding and dish it out as well. Mind if I ask why you chose Templar for the "strength/intelligence" class?

I've grown fond of Melee only, although it's not necessarily been anything advantageous.

With regards to effectiveness, caster templars have always done very well, and it's no exception so far for 0.93. They don't have the best access to the right side increased critical multiplier and critical chance passives, but they can get a lot of it from the overpowered mods that appear on items, as well as some passives in the witches and templar's main area.

I think hybrid templars are still at a disadvantage, although they've improved significantly since the past.


Not completely on topic, but:
I still avoid int-str armor whenever I can, because of the two issues I have with it:
1. can't "tank" with energy shield, essentially half as much power. Also can't take big temporary hits then run away as well, because the ES is lower also (and the benefit of the armor is not nearly as good as if it was ES instead, especially with larger amounts of damage)

2. 90% of the time, armors are improved by increased armor/ES/evasion by percentage, as opposed to the +x ones. When such values exist on hybrid armor (like str-int) they are half as effective, and hence a very less effective type of gear overall compared to non-hybrid.

Thankfully, you can go only int or only str armor — however, you might not be able to do so if you want to use a staff or scepter (in the future, not the present), because staffs require both int AND str, potentially making it difficult to get the best pure int or pure str armor.

EDIT: I responded to Xapti but didn't even really post my opinion of the subject: I like to play melee but with a significant amount of elemental damage on my melee attacks. Right by the starting area in the passive tree you can pretty much double elemental damage off the bat, which synergizes well with a few different melee-elemental abilities.

However, I don't really focus onto a spell tree along with it (by this I mean, if I get Glacial Hammer I don't really delve into the cold passives, as the elemental weapon passive cluster seems to do the job well by itself). Instead, I then work on my melee passives.

I would love to see some kind of lightning melee attack, only because I WOULD probably pick a passive elemental spec if I could put lightning warp and a melee attack in the same element.

Anyway, here's my original post here: (/EDIT)

I have a feeling the lacking effectiveness of int/str armor is part of the reason why int/str shields have so much natural resist and why staves have an innate block chance.

It's a somewhat messy fix, but I do think it help alleviate the (in)effectiveness of the armor/energy shield combo.

One suggestion that may be worth considering: perhaps some special (keystone) passive allowing energy shield to regenerate at a reduced rate after being attacked before it ramps back up to full regeneration would make this gear more viable for a class that is more than likely to be up close and attacking. There are a fairly large amount of easy to grab passives near the marauder and duelist that add a bunch of health regen, if a templar had a way to regenerate energy shield even near the rate that the marauder or duelist can regenerate health from passives it would probably be a large boost in that respect.

i prefer melle phis damager/tank

also some creatures have huge resistance to p.dmg
so anyone temp must have good glacial strike and ground slam IMOO

I like the physical Templar a lot better. I only use magic for curses, summons, and support gems. I focus heavily on +elemental damage to boost my Infernal Blow. I use runes that provide +elemental damage and add them to my Ground Slam, which gives me a high power melee based AOE.

This AOE isn't anywhere near as strong as some of the pure witch ones, but the fact that its base damage deals physical lets me have a lot of life leech when using it.