Hardcore Humility

Hi everyone.

I just wanted to stop in and say greetings. I haven't played in a long time and even when I did, it wasn't for all too long. I'm attempting to make it through HC for the first time. You don't have to tell me I'll die or I'm stupid for doing so, I know already, but have fun nonetheless.

This weekend after I reinstalled, I made a shadow just to get the controls back under my fingers. I didn't follow a build, just jumped in to get a feel for the game back and see how it ran on my computer. Everything was great and I got to level 40 a lot faster than I imagined. I had assumed I'd be dead after some finger-twisting mistake much earlier. So, I was near the end of Normal with a character that honestly was just a mess. It seemed difficult to get a decent amount of life nodes and I had a lot of chaos damage/resist nodes to try out some chaos skills I had never tried before. They weren't working too well so I threw on lightning arrow with GMP and CoC. I've never screwed around with CoC either, so I didn't know how it worked. Put on ice spear (iirc) which was pretty cool, but I soon realized I wasn't hitting a lot of crits. Anyway, I ended up dying to Piety in the bowels, or whatever it was of A4 where she spins around with the bloody beam. I was portal-ing out to heal up and take a breath and probably had her to around 5% when she got me. There were just way too many little worms out at that point. It was a surprising run for just screwing around.

So, I won't drop a noob post as I always do when I come back.. just curious if Cast on Crit is hard to use - as I've never made a character that had crit nodes or gear and if it was an okay idea for HC.

Thanks for reading, excited to be back and hope to meet some people in game this time around! I'm off to find a build! Any suggestions or tips for hardcore are welcome.

I've played a bunch of CoC builds and a bunch of HC builds and even attempted CoC in HC a number of times. I'm not the best HC player out there by any means, I usually get bored and sloppy when I hit 90-ish and die, but I've hit 90 in HC a number of times so I can at least say I have some basic proficiency and experience. What I lack in patience and concentration, I make up for in game knowledge and I can also claim I make reasonably good builds and have some basic knowledge of the popular builds at any time.

In my experience, CoC is one of the most hardcore-unfriendly builds out there apart from a defensively built cyclone CoC, which will still be difficult and super expensive to pull off.

I would most definitely recommend to stay away from CoC in HC until you really know what you're doing.

Issues with CoC in HC:

- it will be difficult to level, you have to start off doing one build and then switch to CoC at some later point, and your character will be very vulnerable when you switch. CoC generally becomes strong after level 80 and it is quite vulnerable early on
- despite what some people will tell you, CoC builds need solid gear to start working well. You either need a good Vagan weapon or you have to think about accuracy. You have to juggle with a bunch of stats: you want stuff attack-based builds want, like attack speed and weapon crit, but you also want caster stuff like spell damage, spell crit and spell crit multi. This puts a lot of stress on your gear.
- the only way to make a reasonably tanky CoC build is to compromise its damage to the point where it gets out-dpsed by other builds or to have insanely good gear. Everyone is crying about CoC discharge (op, blah blah) but they are somewhat silent about the cost of gearing it to the point where it becomes strong. I would go as far as saying it's completely impossible and will be highly frustrating for a first timer in HC.

Man thanks for the heads up before I looked into it further. I kind of had a feeling it wasn't great, assuming you had to take too many crit nodes to make it work. As much as I really want to make it to level 75-80 in HC, I really don't want to do the marauder - totem builds everyone hypes in general chat when I brought it up. It just sounds horribly boring.

The thing about CoC is that you want
- a high chance to hit (Vagan weapon or high accuracy)
- a high chance to crit (i.e. high base crit + many skill points into crit)
- a fast weapon
- many links

This combination makes it a fairly unfriendly levelling build. You can pull it off at lower levels if you use

but that is Perandus league-specific and might be hard to obtain. In all other cases, the suggestion is to spec into CoC only at level 70+.

"

frenzul wrote:

Man thanks for the heads up before I looked into it further. I kind of had a feeling it wasn't great, assuming you had to take too many crit nodes to make it work. As much as I really want to make it to level 75-80 in HC, I really don't want to do the marauder - totem builds everyone hypes in general chat when I brought it up. It just sounds horribly boring.

You reminded me of another problem with CoC which makes it highly unreliable for HC: you rely on killing stuff quickly and leeching, but your damage isn't instant. You might be out of power charges, you might get blinded/enfeebled and just miss or not crit, the CoC gem itself is percentage-based: sometimes you won't immediately proc your CoC spells and, even if it's just for a second, it's not a good place to be in.

As for the totem builds - no one is saying you should only play totems. IMO almost any build and playstyle can be made to work in HC, CoC is probably just the most difficult one.

About trypanon: IMHO a crap item, I can't really see the point of playing a CoC build if your damage output is pitiful.

Oh no, I just mean I've asked for suggestions in chat while I was running that shadow around getting reacquainted and that was the only thing, marauder totems, across the board that people said I need to do for first time. Other than, obviously the ones that just gave me a link to the wiki.

Really appreciate the help dudes. Think I may look into some sort of caster; I'm not sure I understand melee mechanics enough. It would be cool to freeze stuff, I'd imagine.

IMO hardcore is the mode you go to when you know so much about the game, builds and so on that it bores you in softcore. It's the 'challenge accepted' mode, not the 'I want to try stuff and learn' mode. I mean, you could still explore the game there and learn stuff, it will just be short-lived and not very effective as you'll die all the time and not be able to progress.

My last suggestion here will be to just play the game a lot in softcore first, go for builds which you really like, explore it and have fun. If you eventually get bored and want to try your hand at HC, that's fair enough. I just don't think it's a good experience for first-timers or players returning to the game after a long hiatus.

Don't like totems? Want to play CoC? Knock yourself out in softcore :) It's actually a more fun game mode in 90% in the cases.

Not to mention that the game in its current iteration is very HC-unfriendly. I've played the last three temp leagues starting in softcore and then transitioning to HC when I get bored but I'm not going to touch HC this league for the first time. There are a lot of technical issues, crashes, lag spikes and the uber trials and lab are absolutely atrocious for HC.

You do bring up a good point, I just know that last time I played was a shield block templar and it was so easy I did get bored. I guess I could just go try some builds out in SC, there is a lot I don't understand when it comes to gear and how to build up your damage.

It's also a case of me being at work and having nothing to do, so I wanted to chat with some folks about it.

If it was a shield block templar, I'm guessing it was, what, at least two years ago? The Tanky Pally build or something like that, it was popular back then? The game's completely different now, you could have a lot of fun exploring it. Especially if you go for a more offensive build to enjoy the contrast.

I am getting more and more convinced you would be doing yourself a disservice if you don't fool around in softcore.

Man I funking love the rush of HC but I'm afraid you might be right. I'm unsure the last time I played, but it was a Lazy Pally build, I know that for sure. I had built that character in HC and lost him to a stupid trap in Labyrinth, but had kept playing him in SC anyway. The only other character I ever made was an Arc build, which was similarly easy only because everything died and that gear was really easy to figure out.

Thank you so much. I think I am going to go for a SC cast on crit if nothing else, to figure out how it works at least.