A question about survivability (dual totem)

Hi,

Here's my basic dual spork templar, I'm lvl 69, crappy gear, nothing really special. :)





I'm just starting to farm my first 66 maps, it's basically fine, but I'm such a glass cannon. I just place my two totems, run back, and pray not to get hit. If an elite archer or caster mob hits me 2-3 times, I'm dead. Also if I happen to meet a flicker strike pack, I just die patheticly.

So my question is : What's the best choice of survival for a dual totem templay ?

As you can see, I chose energy shield, and I use an offensive spirit shield in my off-hand. Of course, my gear is really crappy, so I don't have much energy shield (1600 es + 900 life), but my problem is, using energy shield makes me take 100% of the damage. There's no armor to reduce it. But if I chose armor + energy shield, I'll have way less energy shield. So what did you guys choose ? What do you think is the best way to stay alive while my totems clear up the room ?

Also I'd be glad to have any suggestions, it's my first char, don't know if I'm doing it right, or going a completely wrong way. :) I have like 20 respec points in stock, so I'm ready to respec if I need to.

Well Totem builds naturally do not require as much survivability as other builds do simply because the totems don't just serve as a damage source but also as a "shield" tanking a few hits.

But even for a totem build your suriviability is incredibly low to be honest I'm actually surprised you made it this far.
You've got a severe lack of resistance nodes relying on resists purely gotten from items and you barely have any health nodes taken making you extremely vulnerable to any form of chaos damage.

It's okay to base your character purely on health/es without evasion or armor in fact many builds do it but well that still requires resistances and a decent pool...

You basically got 2 options right now.

Since you've barely got health anyways you could make this a CI charakter your Equipment however is too bad to do this right away (especially these blues, get rid of these blue items dude) so this would require quite a lot of crafting and/or farming for you.

The second option is to take some refund points and grab more health nodes to make your glass cannon at least survive spike damage as well as some pressure in maps.

For the higher lvl maps you need an effective health pool (energy shield+health) of AT LEAST 3k and that taken you've got capped resists which i highly doubt.
The way your build is at the moment you won't be able to do any lvl70+ maps.



You've picked up a lot of these raw damage nodes but actually spork builds don't even scale that well with those nodes, taking some crit chance would be a much better investment. Especially since you've already taken crit multiplier nodes which aren't quite good without a decent crit chance...

Thanks for the answer.

So I should refund some "+ x% spell damage" nodes, and put them on life and crit chance / damage nodes ? I have 14 refund points, can you please give me a little more help, which nodes exactly should I remove ? :) All the spell damage can go, and only cast speed + crit + lightning damage should stay ? The number of refund points required is no problem, I am willing to buy 40 regrets if I need to.

And I have a question too : What's a CI character ? :)

And an other one : I tried to put as many points on "+ x% energy shield" as I can. Is that a good idea, or should I stick with health, and pick armor + ES items instead of pure ES ? If I'm correct, my resistances and armor will reduce the damage done to my health, but not to my energy shield. Is that correct ? If that's the case, armor + es is way better than pure es, right ? But to use those items, I need strength... :D So should I pick up some strength nodes as well ?

Well i'm just going to show you my dual spork templar build, you could take that as a rough guideline on which nodes are worth taking:



Thats how my build looks at the moment it's purely based on ES and Life when it comes to survivability (with enough resistances of course).
As you can see i actually spend most of my points on survivability avoided most of the raw damage nodes and grabbed as much crit chance/multipier as i could.

I'm also a huge fan of the hex keystones but these are personal preference, my templar is lvl 77 now and I'm doing maps pretty much without problems.
You should actually be fine with something around 15 respec points, just remove this stuff in the witch area of the tree and reallocate them mainly in survivability and then grab crit chance in the next few lvls.


CI = Is short for the Chaos Innoculation keystone and well a CI build is simply a character purely based on energy shield.

The problem with energy shield is that chaos damage bypasses it you can focus on ES as primary defense but you still need a decent health pool to survive chaos damage spikes.
I'm personally running my build with mainly pure ES gear I'm just not a fan of how armor works in this game and prefer a huge health pool over the physical damage reduction.

Both armor and resistances reduce the damage inflicted to your ES it works exactly the same as with health.

Wow, thanks.

I haven't even changed my gear yet, just my passives, and it's already a huge improvement. I don't feel any difference in my dps, but I could do 3 maps without dying a single time (usually I died like 4 times in any map before). I still need to buy some regrets, but it's not a big deal at all.



Thanks for the advice, I was really going the wrong way. :)