Hardcore Humility

CoC is a fun and interesting style to explore. It's difficult to assemble and a bit slow to kick off but it feels rewarding when it does and could be extremely strong if built right. Just a word of caution, some of the popular CoC builds you'll see out there are quite subpar.

I think I may just stick with the spirit of learning and figure it out myself. The guides, most of them, are so wordy that I end up getting confused anyway. I've read through a bunch and think I get the idea as it is. Also just found your big post on farming efficiency. That helps a lot. I've got a lot to learn still, it seems HC just isn't the way to go.. unfortunately. Not yet at least.

Again, thanks for all the help and for giving me something to think about while waiting for work to do.

You're welcome. Have fun and good luck :)

Hey guys... I just wanted to post after my generally awesome experience this weekend. I went against what I had previous said here, and made one more HC character since I realized they don't get deleted. That I would not be at a loss after death and could continue to play.

I noticed I had never tried a duelist and just jumped into game, making up a build as I went along. Now, though I say that, it wasn't a horrible mess at all and it ended up being the strongest character I've made yet. The duelist skill tree area was way, way better than I had expected and turned out to be my favorite so far for melee.

I think I did really well on the build. It included a ton of armor/evasion/life nodes with a focus on one handed melee damage with shields and shield block chance.

My passive tree:


I was using sunder for quite a while and absolutely loved it, it rocked.. but I didn't quite understand the tooltip on it. It didn't say what type of damage it was so I was unsure how to maximize it's potential. Finally, I had found Ice Crash and that seemed to work quite well to leap into a group and aoe them down. For single target, I had Lightning Strike. My tooltip DPS on Ice Crash was ~1800 last I had checked. There were no problems killing things.

My shield block was ~46% and my resistances capped and I was even able to complete normal Labyrinth for the first time to go Gladiator.

So. I ended up dying to Cruel Dominus after absolutely crushing everything in Cruel. I was running, so fast. It's the fastest I had done everything and I wasn't even taking damage. I just could not stand up to his lightning ghost beam attack thing. Don't get me wrong. I'm not that horrible, I wasn't just standing there taking it and my flasks were pretty decent I think. I just find mobility difficult for some reason. There are times my character will stand and just hit them with a club instead of moving around the NPC and my leap slam is super slow.

I'm not heartbroken pissed or upset, just looking for some insight as to what I may have done wrong or could have done better. I found some really interesting unique items and look forward to my next venture, though this character will be my new main in standard. He is really fun.

I'd like to link my gear but I'm not quite sure. I have a feeling I may have geared wrong.. somehow, because my skills/passives seemed pretty decent.

Thanks for reading. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I'm going to keep on with starting my characters in HC to see how far I can go, then I'll keep and play the ones I like when they inevitably die and are moved to standard. With that being said, I did find some uniques that make me want to maybe try a projectile class. I just haven't figured out what that might be, I only know I do not necessarily want to use a bow.





Do these spark any ideas?

Ok - so I see when you die in HC you go to standard. So I am just playing in the standard Prophecy so I can experience that.

I apologize if I'm spamming the forum with nonsensical things, I just like to post where I stand in case anyone wants to butt in and give any advice since when I ask a question in game they either snark the hell out of me or just respond with poe.wiki. I spend every day reading the forums while I'm at work. It's a lot to learn, I'm trying.

Anyway.

I wanted to try a really high damage character, so I made a shadow yesterday with a few ideas in mind. It worked well and I breezed through Normal but I assume that is no indication of how good a character can or will be.

I took all physical damage and crit nodes, with a few life nodes on the way. I have to curse monsters and use a crit potion to crit consistently. Even with dual daggers with high crit. Man, you must need a ridiculous amount of crit, it's insane. So, he's not doing as well as I thought in the crit camp. However. His damage is fine enough for Cruel and he can even take down rare monsters a lot quicker than I'm used to.

My inexperience really hurt my idea though. I was using Ethereal Knives with a bunch of ice/freeze supports and herald of ice, getting frenzy charges from frozen kills and power charges from my curse. My plan was to use EK with Cast on Crit and link it with other ice skills like the breath or cascade. Well, apparently EK can't trigger COC. Now I'm stuck, and have to figure out how to trigger COC or completely get rid of EK. Was thinking of maybe switching to a bow since I don't have anything weapon specific at the moment.

Not sure. It's kind of disappointing. I tried using Frost Blades to trigger COC - EK but my tooltip dps with Frost Blades is like 300 instead of the 1000 with EK, so I really get hurt unless I crit and as I said earlier, crit is struggling.

Back to the drawing board I guess.

Took the EK character up to level 67 this weekend. I've got his crit chance around 60% and his crit multiplyer around 250%. The tooltip for EK, I believe, sits around 7000-8000 dps which obviously goes up a decent amount when I have my frenzy and power charges.

I gave up on making him Cast on Crit at the moment, just trying to get him to be able to do maps so I can get some currency and actually buy some gear. I also tried making him CI since my survivability was so bad, and that was even worse.

His damage is really great, but if I get hit once I'm shaken and twice kills me. Luckily, at the moment, most things are frozen when I hit them once and shatter when I hit them a second time.

Though nobody seems to care, I'll just continue to document while I pass time at work in case anyone wants to put in their two cents.

My passive tree:


I know it is a mess and probably made horribly, but it was just to get a feel for a character with crit to see how much you need to make crit work. I'm still on the fence. I also removed the little life nodes I had in exchange for energy shield nodes because I had tried CI. Now I am simply out of reset points to fully fix it.

I'm likely better off making a new character, it just takes me so damn long to complete the first two difficulties that I'm getting tired of starting over and just want to play in maps. This character is severely week at the moment though and I feel like he is pretty well finished unless I somehow figured out how to fix him.

Some notes on CoC mechanics:
CoC is used with Attacks to automatically cast Spells when you deal a crit. EK is a spell, Frost Blades is an attack both need to be linked to CoC if you want to proc EK automatically. In this case tooltip dps for Frost Blades is irrelevant (only chance to hit and crit chance matter), cause it doesn't take into account EK damage from CoC procs.
In most cases, you can check whether gem is a spell or an attack by looking at it's tags.

Some notes on your character:
Your daggers need to have "increased crit chance for spells" mod, it can go up to ~100% and is one of the most important mods for crit caster along with "increased crit multiplier". As it is they do very little for you damage-wise.

One of the main problem, besides general lack of focus on your tree, is your gem setup.
For crit EK you might wanna try following four link setup:
EK + Inc. Crit Chance + Inc. Crit Multi + Echo

I personally don't like Echo that much and would use Faster Casting instead.
Added Fire Damage is also a very nice damage support for EK.

You never want to use mana leech on your main damage spell, especially on a 4L. There are ways to solve your mana issues through passives (look for %mana regen and %mana) or gear (look for %mana regen and +flat mana). You would want both flat/%mana and %mana regen for maximum payoff.

Your Cast when damage taken setup is no good. Doesn't deal any damage, gives little survivability.
You can try one of the following:
CWDT + Arctic Breath + Greater Multiple Proj + Summon Skeletons
CWDT + Immortal Call + Increased Duration + Enduring Cry (you'll need to use Enduring Cry manually)

Your Curse on Hit setup does nothing, it needs to be linked to a skill that hits to have any effect, and usually it's not worth it to use CoH if you use only one curse. Selfcasting (with Faster Casting linked) is much more convenient in that case.

Link your Flame Dash with Faster Casting, it'll increase your mobility a decent amount.

Finally, as far as your passive tree goes, it's a bit of a mess. You need way-way more life nodes for life based character and you need way-way-way-way-way better gear for CI. It's, in general, not a very good idea to swap from life to CI, if you didn't plan for it beforehand and don't have necessary gear already (and good ES gear can get very expensive). My advice would be to start a new char and focus on life only, forget that ES exists, for starters.
(Also Pain Attunement and Vaal Pact do nothing for you, first cause you're not a Low Life build, second cause you have no leech for your spells, only for your attacks and they do pretty much no damage)

You can try something like this tree. It's by no means perfect, and it doesn't have nearly enough life for hardcore, but it's good enough to get you to mid tier maps in softcore and let you farm a bit/learn the game.

Thanks for the advice man. The few nodes I have that do nothing for me, were just nodes that I tried when I was screwing around with CI and could no longer afford to spec out of.

Something I'd love if you could clear up for me, because it's the main thing that has had me boggled about CoC once I realized you couldn't use a spell to trigger it... is that you said the dps from the skill (frost blades) would be irrelevant.

Do you just use the skill to trigger the spell? If that is the case.. wouldn't it be easier to just use the spell without cast on crit? I'm failing to realize why CoC would be useful, unless it is no good unless you link multiple things to trigger.

Also - love the tree suggestion, thank you.

The reason to use CoC is to get a lot of casts in a small amount of time for basically zero mana cost. Attacks like Molten Strike or Cyclone generate a huge amount of hits quickly which with CoC turns you into a sort of a freaky spell machinegun. I imagine there are other reasons as well, but I'm not a big fan of the CoC builds myself, so can't really give more insight into the matter :).