Counter attack gems are useless

In their current form, reckoning, riposte and vengeance are of very little use. Barely anyone includes them in their builds, given how many skills have been added to melee builds as utility, they are incredibly awkward and unrewarding to build around, and mediocre at best for utility.

What is the point of keeping them as they are?

A reduction to their cooldown might come in handy, since against bosses the requirement of getting hit makes a good damage return well earned, and against packs of enemies, you have to take a large amount of hits, and a gameplay that involves getting in the way of danger should be a fair bit more rewarding (cough cough strike skills succ).

Their damage is good, but cant be triggered often enough to be used as utility skills, and its depressing how most endgame bosses barely give you chances to trigger them at all. What is the fear of making the cooldowns competitive with cast on crit? It's always gonna be an inferior way to play in terms of boss killing for obvious reasons, and clear speed since it requires you to not only get in range (and danger) of enemy packs, but also wait for them to hit you.

Make them great again. Or once.

stop buffing things, please

My Gladiator disagrees with the OP :D

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xjjanie wrote:

My Gladiator disagrees with the OP :D

+1

Slap Melee Splash on them and they're crazy useful.

If you are interested in seeing how much fun a character using these above mentioned gems can be: A guide for duelists by Wrecker of Days.

they are useless.

they do some damage (a lot with Facebreaker but that works with just one out of three CA skills), they are hassle free and cost no mana. but thats that

right now, POE's damage dealing can be tiered with 'steps required to deal damage'

0-step: minions, RF/degen auras, Mirage Archer, pre-nerf Winter Orb, large AOE cyclone. aka skills that deal damage while moving or autotriggers like self-damage+CWDT etc

1-step: all direct attacks and spells, traps (some), mines (some) etc

and the dreaded

2-step: ice nova + frostbolt, some trappers, some miners (depending on setup) AND COUNTER ATTACKS

by some miracle these tiers accurately describe what is or what can be 'meta' - with some exceptions. ice nova+frostbolt is the most notable one - it requires two actions and a slight delay to deal damage but that damage is BONKERS. thats the main selling point (or should be) of such setups


Counter attacks require you to:

- build for block/allow you to take hits
- find sockets to actually link your CA gems to deal something more than 3000 damage per activation
- play Gladiator (not a Con, just without it you are at 50% efficiency and your block is low - Necro can get higher block but still - 50% less damage)
- accept that you cannot rely on these. for thrash mobs you should not care about CA damage (esp if you are Facebreaker Cycloner..) and for bosses you quickly reach a threshold of 'this hit i cannot take' thus making entire CA investment wasted


it is a cool leveling setup and Vengeance works nicely with slow weapons but once you reach endgame and high attack speed (game is unplayable with no attack speed) you remove said gems and pick something more useful.


CA like all melee (real melee, not screen wide Lacerate) is garbage and should be simply removed from this game. they are unable and unwilling to fix it so why keep it?

Is there a way how to build self hitting character? To proc the counter attacks automatically, preferably on a range?

Only think comes to my mind is to running reflect maps and block the reflects intentionally. Does not help with bossing tho.

Maybe Hiltless counter attack build with something like Spectral Throw?

Yes its possible to build like that, works better with a cyclone to proc a bunch of self hits, but thats STRICTLY inferior to CoC or just simply cycloning, as it depends on having a good damaging weapon.

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Caligula_Exile wrote:

If you are interested in seeing how much fun a character using these above mentioned gems can be: A guide for duelists by Wrecker of Days.

Thanks for posting a bad guide for a bad build.

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DontKillTeal wrote:

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Caligula_Exile wrote:

If you are interested in seeing how much fun a character using these above mentioned gems can be: A guide for duelists by Wrecker of Days.

Thanks for posting a bad guide for a bad build.

Wrecker of Days (WoD) doesn't have any 'bad' builds. He has builds that work, and all built on the premise of item freedom. As such, they're uniquely accessible.

This of.c. means they're not as effective as (much) more expensive builds, but that doesn't make them 'bad'. They're in fact infinitely better than a 5EX guide... for the large number of players who hasn't have 5EX.