What do you do when you hit a brick wall?

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Elhazzared wrote:

Snorkle - I've thought about a million times of doing a bownado build. And as always I reach the same conclusion I did when I tried doing one for the first time.

Bownado works on crit builds only. Crit builds are expensive. Also you cannot get away without at very least a 5L very good bow which is very expensive.

I literally play them self found in hc or in sc temp leagues. The sc ones thats mfing with a 5 link, so my 5th gem is item rarity, essentially im playing with a 4 link aoe and a 3 link single target in terms of dps gems. In hc Im not mfing, im playing properly, but I only play strictly solo self found in hc so I dont need to mf and trade whore the way I do in sc.


I dont really buy gear when Im mfing, point is to make currency not spend it, maybe Ill buy a ring and a belt or something, spend like 5-10 chaos total and just use items I find for the rest. Youd be surprised how much you can make mfing low to mid tier maps and running a very active shop while wearing gear that is pretty shabby.

Getting a 5L bow can be hard though I suppose you can get a 5L in a chest. Still any bownados builds I've seen always require really good crit bows, preferably a windriper but if not, something really close and being a critical hit you need increased criticals and increased critical damage gem. Add the skill gems and that's 3 sockets. Add rarity and that's 4. You haven't even used anything to add any damage at all. You still need projectile damage and faster attacks or projectile speed thoguh faster attacks would probably be better... It's my problem with crit builds. It requires so much investment into critical and high links that I just avoid it entirely. It's damage is entirely dependent on landing critical after critical.

Uhm, snorkle is sort of implying you play a game of hit and run with the pinata's we call mobs.

A windripper for a crit nado build? Seriously '-.-

I played such a build in the 1 week solo self found, without any issue's. worked my way up, played 77 maps with a 150dps crit harbinger...(this was before 78+maps where introduced btw)

You find an "okaish" harbinger and you craft either crit chance or phys% on it depending on what its missing.

And this was a pure phys build, not stacking elemental aura's for dps etc....

No clue why anybody would need a windripper to simply play the content.

TS + increased crit + PPaD + whatever, i used PcoC and crit multy + faster attacks since i found a tabula and had my 6-link.
Swapped crit multy to phys to lightning for reflect maps etc...and PcoC is just a fluff gem, you can easily cast assasins mark instead in a 5-link.

And i was running top content with 3200hp or so. Kiting, like a ranger should. Totally feasible with mf gear.

Peace,

-Boem-

edit : holly smack it's been a long time since i played nado shot :), i totally forgot about my gmp.

hmmmfss i play to many builds.

I literally use tornado, phys proj, gmp, faster attacks, then item rarity for the 5th. Alternative would be split, chain, phys proj, faster attacks.

I can link you my old hardcore items because I think the shop is still up despite everything being sold. I sell off my old hc gear and rip the currency to sc, I play purely self found in hc and every now and then I just sell everything worth selling, vendor everything else in my stash and start again because self found stops being fun and different when u have too many toys built up from previous characters. I think I leveled 3 chars to the mid 80s in hc and this was what my bow ranger was using at the point I got bored and stopped...





this was the shop where I sold the bits in my stash worth selling from that period





that sort of gear is fine, was probably using one of those evasion chests until I found the coil. You dont rly need a better bow than that, Im sure I had more that wasnt a 1 off find, these are others still in my stash awaiting the vendor when I next go back to regular hardcore for some self found play...




Any of those bows would be passable, Id happily run maps with those. I did in fact run maps with those exact bows.

If I made a build guide for my bow ranger in standard this is what the gear linked in the thread would look like...





because thats the gear my bow ranger wears in softcore, but u dont need stupid gear like that, I use exactly the same tree I would use with the self found hc gear, and the hc gear is pretty much exactly what the self found sc temp league gear I wear is, except Id drop a dps gem for rarity and probably wouldnt even bother 5 linking the bow, just a 4 link puncture single target. Even that 6 link maelstrom volley bow is self found, I think I found that first week of rampage and it randomly 6 linked by accident, I just use it for a weapon swap puncture in standard because... why not, i guess? Frenzy is mad strong right now but sometimes you just want that puncture goodness for problematic creatures in nightmare maps.


People who make guides probably know builds really well, people who know builds really well know what items are worth, people who know what items are worth tend to make a lot of orbs, people who make a lot of orbs end up with stupid level gear... hence build guides tend to be full of 6 links etc. But you dont need that stuff just to run an average tornado shot or reave type build, you can absolutely run them self found with shabby gear and do fine. Good enough to mf the crap out of low-mid maps and make a shitload of orbs at the start of a league. Thats how you get to a point where you can afford to 6 link a bunch of items, running around with vendor trash gear mfing at the start of temp leagues, by 1 month in you can afford to 6 link multiple things and buy gg stuff.

Ice crash sucks (from my perspective) because the skill has too long of a wind-up, severely limiting clear speed. It's not a mechanically fun skill, DPS completely aside (most any skill can have reasonable to great DPS).

However, it's clear now that when you say fun what you really mean is 'hugely insane DPS and best in slot performance'. Again, the issue seems mostly to be your perspective in that you feel a skill can't be fun without having the aforesaid. You could try out some crit totems with a romira and cast incinerate for charges, for example, and feel just as powerful, except you'd probably have 7 charges and less spell damage than if you used voids. Somehow, I suspect you won't.

You inferred that I was talking in a timeframe of days when I talked about 'since I last responded to these same concerns' (to paraphrase). Nope. I'm talking about months. If you want to login and play for a day and get a 6-link (as I've said to you before, i.e. months ago) it's not going to happen, and it doesn't happen to anyone, other than those who spend that entire day flipping currency and items like madmen.

That's the thing though, you have the exact same concerns you had back then, yet you clearly, as evidenced by my experience, could have had at least one super-awesome 6-link by now if you'd put in some hours. It's pretty clear you don't want to do the work and want to shortcut the process, but as everyone else has said, if you don't do the work you don't get the rewards.

I actually think it's easier (read cheaper) to gear for an ele crit ranged build. You can get plenty of mileage out of Storm Cloud. Two 5-links, TS + Blood Magic + Life Leech + WED + Added Lightning Dmg for AOE, and Frenzy + TS + Blood Magic + Life Leech + WED + FA for single target. No mana issues right there. A Starkonja's Head, two diamond rings, efficient use of the tree, Ass Mark and an Ice Golem should net you a healthy amount of crit.

Bow drops like this aren't uncommon

Play a different class, different style, and put mf gear on from time to time running low lvl alch'd maps. 4 links are plenty for those maps. If u get mods u can't run stash it until u can or make a char that can..

Later good luck have fun

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Depends entirely on the wall.

Not all walls are equal.

...but in most cases you just splat.

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davidnn5 wrote:

Ice crash sucks (from my perspective) because the skill has too long of a wind-up, severely limiting clear speed. It's not a mechanically fun skill, DPS completely aside (most any skill can have reasonable to great DPS).

However, it's clear now that when you say fun what you really mean is 'hugely insane DPS and best in slot performance'. Again, the issue seems mostly to be your perspective in that you feel a skill can't be fun without having the aforesaid. You could try out some crit totems with a romira and cast incinerate for charges, for example, and feel just as powerful, except you'd probably have 7 charges and less spell damage than if you used voids. Somehow, I suspect you won't.

You inferred that I was talking in a timeframe of days when I talked about 'since I last responded to these same concerns' (to paraphrase). Nope. I'm talking about months. If you want to login and play for a day and get a 6-link (as I've said to you before, i.e. months ago) it's not going to happen, and it doesn't happen to anyone, other than those who spend that entire day flipping currency and items like madmen.

That's the thing though, you have the exact same concerns you had back then, yet you clearly, as evidenced by my experience, could have had at least one super-awesome 6-link by now if you'd put in some hours. It's pretty clear you don't want to do the work and want to shortcut the process, but as everyone else has said, if you don't do the work you don't get the rewards.

You are taking one example and spining it to your own liking. I've explained that what makes builds fun are synergies. In that specific case (and because I'm not sharing details on the planned chronomancer) it isn't simply an incinerate build. You are creating synergies between uniques to archieve something that you do not archieve in any other way. Why? Because of the uniqueness of incinerate being unable (safe for poachers mark) to crit. You create a situation where not only you can get the power charges going on every single hit, but largely beneficting from it... Yes, the DPS of the spell becomes huge, but that's only half the point, the other half being that you are using uniques and/or different skills with enough links to create an effective build.

If you want another example you can use the cast on critical builds which throw one attack and suddenly there is an explosion of spells going through the screen from the crit. It only works on 6Ls though.

Now I don't expect 6L to drop like candy. While I believe them to be part of character development and by no means shouldn't be hard to get because they are part of character development (because as much as you want to call skills, gems that you put in weapons, skills are your character progression at the end of the day), I know GGG is not going to change that. What I ask is that new uniques with high drop rates and interesting abillities be created because right now there is only 2 extremes.

The extremely poor who cannot do anything but the most basic, non synergy, non fun builds and the extremely rich who can do all the fun builds.

You can say there is people who lie in the middle and yeah, there is but they are still limited to the same builds that the extrmely poor have. You need a few stacks of exaults before you can even think about actually creating a fun build and stacks of exaults don't drop from the sky.

About all the comments on bow builds. I've read them and I've tried to investigate it more but they really don't strike me as something that would work well with meh equipment. The only thing that seems like it could work well is poison arrow and I did want to try one such build for a long time, my problem there is that Poison arrow is not good until later levels when you have at least a 5L +1 or +2 bow and have enough extra damage to make the poison arrow do it's work.

Sorry, I meant to address the poison arrow comment.

A matter of weeks ago I xped a character to 85 on a 4-link +2 poison arrow bow (you'll find a few if you just look for them, they're quite a common drop although a +3 is much more rare).

I could have easily xped that to 90 though I decided, mostly because I got sick of tempest graphics, to rip that character and bought a +3 bow after in a small spending spree.

I xped that character on poison arrow from level 4 or so (breaking the eggs quest), initially on any old bow, then a +1 bow then a +2 at around level 57? It's not a skill that requires lots of links. Heck, if you look at what scales the damage after 5 links it's hard to find anything useful. Faster projectiles sure isn't terribly helpful.

It seems like what is fun to you is the synergies you can create with various uniques and skills. That is what is fun to you. But guess what, creating synergies with low values uniques are more fun and challenging. Everyone can create synergies with rare and expensive uniques but only the most creative can do so with cheap uniques.

The way you reply, it seems like you are not willing to think out of the box and make do with low value uniques. If you are willing to give these "worthless" uniques a second look, I am sure you will find them just as interesting in creating synergies as those super rare and expensive uniques.