General thoughts on Bandit rewards?

Do you think, generally speaking, that if one of the rewards is something you would use, that it's better than the +1 skill point?

I feel like +10% resistances is basically always the choice. And if you use the Charges, then that is as well. But would you also say 5% cast speed is worth it? The other two are pretty straight-forward; you won't ever get to spend 1 skill point and get more than +1 X Charge, and 1 skill point for +10% resists without a bunch of prerequisite skills is also very obvious.

But I can't put a finger on the cast speed one... It's kind of in-between the reasoning of the other two. You can get 6% cast speed, plus other effects, from a lot of other nodes. But those nodes come with less-efficient prerequisites. Makes me really think about it.

And here I am, on Cruel A2 :X

10% resistances is pretty obvious to me my builds tend to grab all the easily available resistance nodes and getting another would cost more than one point. Cruel is less obvious. Most of my builds are casters so I tend to go for the cast speed on cruel. Never really bothered to math it out. In one instance (bladefall totems) I think I went with the physical damage instead. I mostly don't use charges so merciless tends to be the passive point. The bladefall totem build does use endurance charges so he took the charge.

Wow. No. Never resists. Never ever resists. WTF.

+10% Resistances is NEVER the proper choice. NEVER. Well, okay, MAYBE Whispering Ice builds can use it, if they are using an all uniques-setup. Resistances are FAR too easy to cap with gear only to ever waste points on the tree on them (which is essentially what the bandit rewards are weighted as). For Normal difficulty, if you are life based you ALWAYS take Oak for the 40 life. If not life based, you take the skill point. For Cruel, there are some builds that benefit a lot from 5% cast speed, or attack speed... otherwise, take the point. For Merciless, if your build generates/uses any kind of charge, taking the appropriate charge is almost ALWAYS the better option. If your build doesn't generate or use charges, then take the point obviously.

Seriously though. NEVER the resists (unless like I said, you are playing a build like WI that will use too many uniques to cap resists with gear alone).

Honestly, Normal Kraityn has been somewhat of a double- or triple-agent. For the longest time, it was regarded as a noob trap, and rightly so, for precisely the reasons Docpb87 enumerated. However, as the game has evolved and changed over time, there have been a number of changes which has actually turned Oak into the amateur trap, in my opinion.

The two biggest changes would be:
1. Much more Unique Items worth using. Lightning Coil was unheard-of when Oak was the undisputed best Normal bandit award. Now - How much resistance does Heretic's Veil give you? Shavronne's Revelation? Grip of the Council (ok, that one has 1/3 the resist of an "expected rare")? Winds of Change? Not a whole frickin' lot, that's for sure.

2. Max Life per Level was literally doubled between October 2013 and now. This has probably contributed to "expected Life inflation" along with greater availability of strong rare items (through master-crafting, league mechanics adding currency drop rate, etc.) Back when Piety and Dominus were the final bosses, my average character completed Merciless difficulty with no more than 2,000 max Life. The average player I talked to at that time had similar thresholds; 3,000 maximum Life was considered very tanky. Now, the community generally agrees that 4,000 is a "minimum" for mapping, and considered glassy for melee.

With these two changes combined, there's honestly a good choice dynamic going on here. Poorer players are more likely to benefit from Kraityn, while the most intense power-players (Less than 135% total resist on a rare item? Vendor trash...), and Righteous Fire builds, will be more likely to benefit from Oak.

Make the differential yourself. The highest max Life bonuses from tree I've heard of is 250% increased, although I might be misremembering and 350% is the max for builds going ham on max Life. Myself, I tend to hover around 100% to 150% because I'm a DPS addict. So, +40 max life will give around:

+80 net max Life minimum. Not really all that powerful when you consider a "proper" build has 5000 to 6000 Life, so that's less than a 2% difference.

+120 net max Life for the "average" build (200% increased maximum Life). Fairly strong, but is that really going to save you from a one-shot? Maybe.

+160 net max Life on builds going ham on Life (300% increased maximum Life). This is... borderline, IMO.

...

Meanwile, +10% resists can close the gap on you and resist cap (or overcap if you're HC and/or worried about resist-lowering Curses), possibly enabling you to equip a certain overpowered Unique item. How much power does this give? It's hard to say. It depends on the item.

Why thank you for so eloquently calling me a noob and disparaging all of my builds. It always feels so nice to know just how little others think of me. Clearly my builds must be trash tier because I've only made it to level 93 and 16 maps. I mean, I'm not level 100 nor can I clear guardian maps in three minutes flat. I've never even fought Shaper or Über Atziri, so what do I know of making builds.

Curiously enough my WI build is the only one to not have the resists because she's an older character from a time where my philosophy was passive point = more versatility.

Also, I play self-found. These are some of my all-time best items:

I know they're probably all vendor trash for you, except maybe the Vaal Regalia and the Crystal Belt. Those were rather lucky rolls. But given that I can't count on getting the perfect items with triple resists for every slot, the resistance reward from bandits removes some gearing pressure and allows me to get some other stats as well.

omg databeaver you're another hybrid life/es builder? How did I not notice this before?

What do you use for life recovery and what do you use for ES recovery?

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databeaver wrote:

Why thank you for so eloquently calling me a noob and disparaging all of my builds. It always feels so nice to know just how little others think of me. Clearly my builds must be trash tier because I've only made it to level 93 and 16 maps. I mean, I'm not level 100 nor can I clear guardian maps in three minutes flat. I've never even fought Shaper or Über Atziri, so what do I know of making builds.

Oh give me a break. Boo hoo. No one was "disparaging" your builds or picking on you. Yes, I can be a bit of a dickhead in how I express myself here, but come on...


Adghar you make some really good points, but I also would take into consideration that while the flat life may not amount to much when you are at 5-6K total, when you are at 1K total in late Normal difficulty, it really does make a difference. Getting capped resists in normal difficulty, or at least close to it isn't that far fetched (you don't really need 75%, just need... enough), nor is it really as necessary or useful IMO as a larger life pool. You can also always re-spec bandit rewards later if you go low-life or CI once you are in end-game content. Also, a player for which 10% All res vs. 40 flat life is a big decision in terms of where their character will end up (meaning whatever they consider "finished", "end-game" whether it be Merc dried lake, or low tier maps, etc.), will I guess have very different priorities than I will, which I guess I sometimes overlook/forget. As a player, I can always assume I will be able to overcap resists by late merciless/early end-game with gear alone. Not everyone can make that assumption, depending on where they are in their PoE journey, or if they trade/play SSF, etc.

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Docbp87 wrote:

Oh give me a break. Boo hoo. No one was "disparaging" your builds or picking on you. Yes, I can be a bit of a dickhead in how I express myself here, but come on...

Well, you did say "never ever resists", i.e. not under any circumstances, not even mine. My hyperbole was provoked by that absolute.

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Docbp87 wrote:

Adghar you make some really good points, but I also would take into consideration that while the flat life may not amount to much when you are at 5-6K total, when you are at 1K total in late Normal difficulty, it really does make a difference.

I haven't really had any problems surviving on normal despite lacking that 40 base life. I don't play melee so maybe that's why. Hell, my CI build in Essence didn't take any life nodes and prioritized other stats over life on gear, so she barely had over 1k life in merciless (and around 4-5k ES if I recall). I wouldn't do that on hardcore since chaos damage was extremely dangerous at that point, but on softcore it was a viable strategy and saved me the trouble of designing two trees and spending refund points.

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adghar wrote:

omg databeaver you're another hybrid life/es builder? How did I not notice this before?

What do you use for life recovery and what do you use for ES recovery?

I dunno. You even contributed to my thread about the WI build in which I made life/ES calculations in the initial post.

I currently have life leech socketed in WI and also use Warlord's Mark. With Ghost Reaver, Vaal Pact and 6.9k ES that allows me to tank pretty much anything that doesn't deal chaos damage. I have the reflect damage reduction node from elementalist ascendancy so I'm pretty much immune to reflect rares too. I haven't tried a reflect map with this setup yet.

For life recovery I have a single instant recovery life flask, which is mostly used to deal with chaos damage. If my ES is gone I really should be running away. To help with the running away part I have a quartz flask rolled with freeze removal and a quicksilver with extra movement speed. In a sticky situation I pretty much mash 1-2-3 (quartz + life + quicksilver) and make my escape.

Sadly it's not possible to have both life and ES leech (AFAIK), so I chose ES leech because ES represents the top two thirds of my effective health pool. With life leech I would be too vulnerable to big single hits that could one-shot my 2.8k life. Not taking CI results in a larger effective health pool because my shield and helmet slots are taken up by non-ES gear (WI and black sun).

Bandits have always worked as a gap filler for something you ought to need but wouldn't normally have access to due to different reasons - long travel,not accessible,not planed on your pathing.
The resists are not the most obvious and common thing to pick unless you plan to go CI,resists can always be capped easy enough,if you are going any sort of life build,be it hybrid or not,you will most likely pick oak simply because you can never have too much life.

TL/DR: there is no best pick,it all comes down to your build.

normal alira: trash, maybe 50 ES would be a good choice, but ES is very good anyways
normal kraityn: not too good, but sometimes ok choice
normal oak: you need it, if you dont go LL or CI, but should be a bit higher

the cruel ones are good IMO, and merciless is obvious if you use any charge