Difficulties with "Shield Block" build. Survival issues.

Hi everyone!
I'm trying hard to doing with my Tempest-Shield-Arc-Witch build and can't figure out where i'm go wrong...
So, first things first:

1. The idea was to obtain 72-75% block chance (both for attacks and spells)
This can be achieved using this items:
Rathpith Globe
Stone of Lazhwar

And this passives: My Passive Tree

It's my current passive tree
(Yes, yes, I know it's kinda freaky)
2. Obtaining a sufficiently large damage and cast rate with Arc (yes, it's kinda freaky too, Arc is underpowered in the form in which it is now)

While I'm trying to figure out what is wrong I respeced the cast rate (near "Mana on killing blow" and "Soul Syphon") for shield block chance (Shadow branch) but it had little effect...

I have about 1000 dps and about 0.45 cast rate for Arc at my level 58 before respec, that was good from the point of killing fast, but at cruel barracks I was dying of all that passed through my shield...

At the moment I do not have Rathpith Globe, so my block chance for spells is equal to 40% (64% for attacks)
Mana regen: 94
Total mana: 770 / 1674 (free / total)
Discipline, Clarity, Tempest Shield
(Discipline is here because of mana regen which depends on total mana, Tempest Shield for another +4% block chance)

Arc + Faster Casting + Lightning Penetration = 874 dps (and +31% from lightning penetration)

When I buy/find Rathpith Globe my block chance would be 70% for attacks and spells. But something tells me that's not enough.

I'm planning to get another +2 shield block chance from passives near "Additional Minions" and "Inner force", for a 72% total, but that's not enough too...

I have no problem with mana, but my HP and resists are really really low:
-10% Fire
-28% Cold
22% Lightning
-52% Chaos

760 HP

Now a little about block recovery:
For now I have 50% increased block recovery and can obtain another +90% from passives.
It's worth it?
If dps is enough then I rarely be hit. But for now much of attacks that passed through block chance hit me for 70%+ of my HP... :(

I understand that my build is in many ways a very strange, but may be among you there ready to correct my mistakes and advise me where to go from now.

P.S. Please forgive me my confusion and my English :)

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBAuMHYwelCPQOSBGWHRQegR8CKMUsnC0fNj02xUSrSbJLjUw1UWBVrlcrY0Nmnm0ZeQN_xoIQgh6Ia4t6jRmPRo-moqOnCKcrqZXAVMHzwuzYJNsL3Yze9t-w4BLjhOZM5oHndPLh87760v8cNukkqhmF42rQ0M9lVcYWb0yzBAcxiCepWm0kPKdcSVHw2Uk7cn4Z1xzc45_UGbyfoi6kkVBCjDYTnlVLbXsmlejWmyYyAbIZz3ph63pTuJMMfRB_xp6boWe9wBqQVaeEGjjsOFfiMol35QSzFE3wHwJxogBh4u5v9OlHBtvnqnwnL7Sj

Shield passives are really useless..you are much much better off stacking health nodes. This passive tree is obviously not obtainable since it uses all 120 points, but look at it for options to work towards. It includes a TON more health nodes that will increase your survivability more than shield nodes.

Also, to increase your dps (Which is severely lacking) you're definitely going to want to take Arcing Blows and Static Blows. Since you took Eldritch Battery, you're going to definitely want inner force to bolster all the auras you can support.

Shield Block is one of the most effective defenses, but it is only a secondary defense.
Life or ES will always be the primary defense for every build!

You simply need life and some sort of healing (leech or regen or LoH or LoK) before you go block.

Get rid of the mana and ES nodes you wont need both with EB and some decent gear. Also get rid of some (smaller unimportant) block nodes; a 60+ % block chance is OK with lvl 70+.

you also should consider taking Crest of Perandus over any other shield imho 10% block > whole Rathpith Globe (crap shield anyway imho)

You also should remove some lightning dmg nodes. crit chance and shock chance is much better then more "increased" modifiers.

Put the new points into Life, Life regen shock chance and crit chance...


But anyway I would prefer spark and/or Lightning nova over



@Ellerean:
I cannot agree at all... I suggest trying shield block.
Shield block is way better than armor or evasion or endurance charges or minions (as defensive concept) or decoy totem

I wasn't comparing Shield block to any of those Az. I said exactly what you did : Life is way more important. You will never be fully capable of blocking 100% of attacks, projectiles and spells, so you want to make sure that when attacks do connect, you can survive them.

I still left a few shield block passives on the tree, just the major ones. The tiny 2% block chance are insignificant when you can get +8% life nodes.

Thanks for replies

"

you also should consider taking Crest of Perandus over any other shield imho 10% block > whole Rathpith Globe (crap shield anyway imho)

Rathpith gives another 50% "block chance applied to spells", i thought it worth it because of all that damage comes from spells (especially Arc-casters at barracks)

How to deal with spells with such low resists as I have?

"

Arcing Blows

"

30% increased Lightning Damage with Weapons

Is this applied to spells?
The same for Catalyse...

"

Get rid of the mana and ES nodes you wont need both with EB and some decent gear. Also get rid of some (smaller unimportant) block nodes; a 60+ % block chance is OK with lvl 70+.

you also should consider taking Crest of Perandus over any other shield imho 10% block > whole Rathpith Globe (crap shield anyway imho)

You also should remove some lightning dmg nodes. crit chance and shock chance is much better then more "increased" modifiers.

Put the new points into Life, Life regen shock chance and crit chance...

I thought about it, but it needs a lot of orbs of regret.
If I completely remove all that "XX% increased Lightning Damage" for cast speed, life and chance to shock (without crit chance) will it work?

For example: Passive Tree

Big changes to the tree are too expensive, easier to start a new character, so I would like to bring this idea to its max. If this possible...

With Crest of Perandus damage will be so small that I could not kill anything at all. :(

And one more question: cast speed vs. damage - which is better?

I am not going to tell you "you are doing it wrong" as I think it's fun to fiddle with whatever build you want.

However....

What I have read and seen on the forums suggests a few things to me when looking at your build. You are basically building a tank mage. Tank mages work the best when you put all points into needed areas.

Needed passive areas as I see them. You need to pick up the other links in your shield areas that dramatically increase your energy shield. Forget about Eldritch battery and pick up Zealots Oath and additional energy and intel nodes. From there stack armor nodes and some extra health nodes. Also use molten shell and tempest shield together. The idea in this build is to make the damage they do far less to you while it hurts them alot. Just have to know when to pick your batttles. Getting swarmed can hurt alot with this build. Good luck. Also Temporal Chains is another useful skill in slowing mobs down a bit.

if you are going to start a new character are you absolutely SET on witch?

here is the link to my shield block templar spellcaster modified a bit. This is for incinerate so i neglected crit and took fire damage nodes. You could modify this to lightning pretty easy. Also I added a few more block and shield defense nodes if you really want to focus on that.


you could remove a few of the block nodes and get more damage if you wanted



At level 54, with a similar build (not exact but close) i have:
1.7k life
1.5k ES
~40% block
80% all resists on merciless (84% with purity)

and I absolutely melt enemies in seconds with incinerate... I am kind of squishy but my armor is low because i have crappy gear right now, once i get better gear i'll be a lot less squishy.

my exact build: (made for tri-element status effect stacking with incinerate)



my shield alone gives me 46% to all my resistances when i put it on (16% innate kite shield, +30% from nodes)

the MOST important things for you though right now are HP and resists. just to show you, on an elemental hit you are getting hit for around 8 times more damage then me, and i have almost 4 times as much total HP+ES pool that the mobs have to burn through, and i STILL can get killed pretty easily by an elemental boss like piety.

75% block does you no good if you die instantly 25% of the time when you don't block

I really don't know why you didn't go for the two 15% elemental resist Shield node on the far left. Those two nodes will take a lot of stress out of your build.

Personally I wouldn't even brother with arc. Replace it with molten shell. Get your two items. Get more health and resist. Activate tempest shield and molten shell. Herd the mob into a larger mob. Stand still and let tempest shield and molten shell kill them all. Repeat.

"

Unrecked wrote:

"

Arcing Blows

"

30% increased Lightning Damage with Weapons

Is this applied to spells?
The same for Catalyse...


I thought about it, but it needs a lot of orbs of regret.
If I completely remove all that "XX% increased Lightning Damage" for cast speed, life and chance to shock (without crit chance) will it work?


Big changes to the tree are too expensive, easier to start a new character, so I would like to bring this idea to its max. If this possible...

With Crest of Perandus damage will be so small that I could not kill anything at all. :(

And one more question: cast speed vs. damage - which is better?

Arcing Blows doesnt work with spells

-----------------

I really recommend crit.
Crits do A LOT of dmg and they shock wich means A LOT more dmg again.
You could do most of your dmg with crit and shock. Both things multiply your dmg, they dont add dmg like "increased" mods. Thats what makes it so important.

--------------

Rathpith Globe is only good if you do a ES build imho.
My EK (no block) Witch wears a lvl 35 shield with 53% spell dmg, 70 Life, 14% all res, 28% cold res wich is way better for a life build even though 70 life is pretty low (70 life > 10% life).


The spell block mod isnt bad, but if you compare perandus with Rathpith, Perandus is much better for a block build.

(perandus+lazhwar vs. Rathpith+lazhwar / both with 12% spell block passive):

perandus+lazhwar: 64% block means about 40% spell block
Rathpith+lazhwar: 54% block means about 58% spell block

We wont have so much armor as caster Witch or caster templar.. lets say about 40% phys dmg reduction.
But we definately will have at least 75% resist.

So with perandus we get:
- a pretty nice spell block anyway
- more Life
- life regeneration
- same amount of resists
- a higher chance to block the attacks we are most vulnerable to (phys dmg, especially archers, flickers, snakes, tentacles...).

Rathpith gives:
- more block for something we dont care that much anyway (most spells arent a big thread with 40% block, 80% resist and nice life regen)
- some additional mana (converted ES, nice but not the most important thing)
- and some "increased" modifier (nice, but you should get 200++% "incresed" modifiers anyway by wand, iron will and passives sooo...)


-------------------

This was the build I wanted to do with my spark templar in CB (but I stopped at lvl 74 a couple of weeks before OB)

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgUBBVuLjOFz7SBG113G3fNgbRRNogAEswJxgW-ePE3YjHY62Ow4GjinhJBVwBpmnqmVUWAaMilPgpvkIo5k96a2-lnzrKon7fPdGS7Uj7nd8i_vDudSVElfP_rSHRRMNSjF876PRoFJsjhmT9DQz2VVxpuhZ72nCNgkNsUfAn6vdhEEB0yzLR9tGcHzgh7bC4hC8h38q52jEZYOSHDVcFJd8tlhVw37qqC09kiMz1BQWGPG2O5vf8bxdiepFVC1BDbp42qiLqKjWm0kPKdcSVF-M6SR8wbmfA==

I'd prefer a new char over a big respec too if the char is lower than 7x.
and I recommend Templar for a lightning block build.



-------------------

@deadlylag:

the 15% res shield nodes are nice, but you dont need em later on with high end equip.
I'd remove the points later on for more block e.g.

Yeah I dont like arc that much as main spell too.
I mean you could get a pretty nice shock chance even without crit (qual arc, qual added lightning and the passives) but nova has chance to shock too and does more dmg.
Spark does more dmg too but doesnt has a chance that high (but more hits) and the shocks are shorter because of lower dmg per hit.

Molten shell+Tempest shield build doesnt have a good killspeed imho (and you definately need a lot of AoE passives if you rely on Molten Shell and really 75% block chance for max tempest shield dmg and tempest shield shocks)

I prefer using molten shell and tempest shield as addition but main should be tanking/kiting with spark/lightning nova (but nova also needs AoE passives imho)

Well I have characters in Merciless. Getting and finding high end gears is hard. The price between default and HC is night and day. HC prices is 2 to 6 times more than their default counterpart. So yeah you need those 15% resist, at the very least the OP do.

It's all about herding.

This is what I would do. Herd the mobs into a larger mob. Using a curse (offensive or defensive) on the mob. Let Molten Shell and Tempest Shield do it job. Use detonate dead to kill the rest. You can cast an offensive totem to clean whatever are left.

You can use trap to increase the DPS. Bear trap is great against yellow boss. I would not recommend this build on HC tho. Too risky and you probably need help against act bosses.

Flask wise: Granite, health that provide armor, and probably one quicksilver.

Maybe leap slam for aggroing all the mobs?

There is a new melee support gem coming out next week. It make all melee gem do splash damage. So Shield Charge, Tempest Shield, Melee slash damage support gem, and molten shell should work well.